Ludogenesis

Because I am such a generous person I am going to share with you a game idea that you can take to the bank (and you don’t even have to sign an NDA!).

Goal based games rely on being able to condense the myriad variables of a situation into a single value judgement- either a single bit (losing or winning a game) or an amount of progress. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, of course- the actions leading up to winning a game can be judged in quality and individual wins can build up into an overarching progress mechanic. This compression can be likened to a perspective projection- many points in 3d space can be compressed into 2d space by establishing a perspective, and by establishing a criteria for “winningness” you project the variables of the game into a comprehensible space.

My idea, then, is to create a game wherein the player is presented with a relatively small number of factors, from which they can extract more information than what is presented. It would be like seeing a painting that is painted using perspective techniques- the information hitting your eyes is all 2d, from which your mind extracts a perceived 3d space.

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Screenshot from MFA Prep Course

The long anticipated web release of the “smoking coffee and drinking cigarettes” game is finally online for all to play! It was made by me and the indomitable John Bruneau!

Click here to play it!

Assorted thoughts on the game follow.

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A dog wearing sunglasses

Here are some of the cool flash projects I did in art101b:

“Portrait of a Terrible Conversation”

“Do you wnat toseeywkmr?o”

“Google Image Portrait Generator“

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The GDC went to GDC today. After the event a few of us went to hang out with the fine folks from Ludum Dare at an incredibly rad venue called Noisebridge (a hacker eden and community space), which makes me incredibly sad to live so far from San Francisco. I had a bit of deja vu when, just like last year when we met the Glorious Trainwrecks people at that diner, there wasn’t enough room for us at the big table and we were relegated to a side space.

The overabundant technology of GDC left me feeling blown out and eschatological, so I made interactive art on paper.

Apple Puzzle

Bite into the apple and spit out the pieces again and again until only the core is left.
Solve pieces.

Orange Puzzle

Peel and eat orange.
Solve rind.

Spinning

This is a searching game.
Find the spinningest object in the room.
High score board.

Critique a Toy

Find a toy and critique it. These subjects are off-limits:
-its uselessness
-its isolating nature
-its creativity stifling
-its disconnect from reality
-its gender policing
-its reinforcement of the status quo
-its class exclusivity

Think like a child and only answer the following question: Is It Fun?

Other thoughts, thanks to the wise old man who mutilated games and received computer hardware advice from his dead friends in visions and talked to me but I selfishly pretended to ignore because I wanted to make art:

-The game .exe is a self contained program that does not stretch beyond its own walls.
-Machine code is like route directions- what is the equivalent as a map? (this I tried, unsuccessfully, to turn into a game, but I have not given up)

Lessons Learned at GDC: If someone has made art that you never would have considered to make, it means they have ideas that you have never thought of, and it is your duty, as a person who values ideas, to learn them, even if at first they don’t seem worth your time.

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a cat making a funny tongue motion

I finally participated in Klik of the Month again.  Here are the fruits of my labor.

As I usually do when I don’t have any ideas coming into a game jam, I grabbed random assets from the internet (space ghetto is my go to place) and program whatever comes to mind. I suppose it’s an attempt to get some kind of equivalent to “automatic writing” for digital game creation. It’s still a very conscious and logical process (for programming it might have to be?) but the results end up seeming somewhat subconscious, even if it’s largely a hoax.

I divided my time into two, one hour for gathering non-interactive resources, and the second hour for making the interactions.

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Kelsey’s Games

It should go without saying that these games look much, much better when they’re actually in motion, and better even still when you’re playing them. They lose a lot of their charm when they’re in a static form like this. If it’s at all possible you should play them, at least the ones that look most interesting, to get a complete feel for the game (especially Kelsey’s “Other People”- it looks very unimpressive from the screenshot, but playing it is really a trip- it was one of the first games he made for the game dev club and I totally forgot about how striking it was until I played it again just now).

Also, time scale is important here. Many of these games were made in the span of 48 hours (Emagtra, Your House Is Wet), or 2-4 hours (I Love you But You Kiss Like a Girl, A Normal RPG, You Decide, Lick the Pinapple), so naturally they aren’t going to be as polished as games that have been in development for months to years.

When we focus exclusively on making novel interactions at breakneck speed, and have a bit of a framework built up to help us out, we should see some pretty startling results.

Playable Versions:

Cygnus the Cutie (flash)

Apocalypse Snow (flash)

I Love You But You Kiss Like A Girl (Game Maker- requires windows)

A Normal RPG (requires windows)

You Decide (Game Maker- requires windows)

Time Snipers (Windows)

Time Snipers (Mac (untested- I don’t own a mac, so if this doesn’t work I’m sorry :X))

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Today I presented what I have done so far in the budget crisis game.  I’ve been working on the interface, mostly, because I had a cool idea for how to manage the inventory, and that worked so well that it spun out into a philosophy for the entire user interface.   (more…)

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Very minor update today, since I spent most of my time working on homework. I used a bunch of the code from the editor to update the game itself, now it’s an actual playable kind of thing!

The source code so far (.zip)

The playable game

The game grid is on the left, the selection bar is on the right.  Hit Space to switch between the two selection modes.  When the bar says “p” you are choosing a problem to work on, when it says “i” you are choosing a shape to use as a brush. Click on the down arrow at the bottom of the selection bar to make the list appear / scroll in the list (I don’t know why it doesn’t show them automatically, this is one of those little quirks that you can get used to if you’re the only one using it, but obviously I’ll have to fix it before I send it out ) The number in the upper right is your “score” for the problem.  You get points by putting shapes inside the goal area, and you lose points by putting shapes outside the goal area.

Playing it, I was a little surprised with how plays.  I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect in regards to difficulty.  I found that a lot of the problems were way to easy, but a few of them were surprisingly hard. They’re very prone to me remembering how I made them, since they’re just a collection of stamps, but one or two I legitimately had to think about, so I think the game has some potential as an actually compelling activity.

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The game development club has started doing monthly meetups for the Glorious Trainwrecks Klik of the Month, which I went to today.

Klik of the Month is a monthly game jam where you try to get a game finished in 2 hours using any tools possible.  The games tend to range from experimental to weird to parody to shitty.  Our club tends to focus on that last one when advertising the event- to a lot of people the main draw is seeing who can make the most terrible game.  These events are also one of the only way that we can get anyone to make games.

I won the last game development competition by default, and the trend has been for a declining number of games for the competitions.  The Tower Defense challenge had a solid 7 entries, then the Collaborative Challenge had only 4, and the Facebook challenge had only 2.  The Collaborative and Facebook challenges were at least a bit difficult for people to make games for- the former required the participants to partner up with students from Cogswell and the latter required a game on Facebook.  The most recent competition, however, had no restraints of form, just a few words as themes.

I would imagine people are intimidated by the prospect of developing a game.  Many don’t have any previous experience, and no one sane wants to pile any more work onto their plate for an extracurricular that isn’t worth any credit.  The prospect of being able to make a game with no pretension of quality and only a 2 hour, one day commitment is understandably alluring. I want to assuage people’s fears of game development- to tell them that it isn’t beyond their work potential, but truth be told making reasonable quality games is, in fact, a lot of work! And I don’t want to bring down the quality of games by encouraging people to submit their trainwrecks games.  Trainwrecks are better than nothing, but I know that we’re capable of better. Maybe if we use klik of the month type events for prototyping and encourage people to continue building on the games that they make during that.

I’m going to be the president of the game development club next semester. I think this lack of participation is one of the most heinous problems of the club as it stands, but I have no idea how to solve it.  I’ve heard that some artists have been having problems getting into groups with programmers, so making more social networking events will help. We’ve done icebreakers in the past, and I always thought they were dorky but they might actually serve a purpose.  Especially if we get some experienced game designers working on them.

P.S. this is the game I made for Klik of the Month.  I didn’t have any ideas going into it (I had one but I forgot it :/) so I grabbed some images from spaceghetto and started making a shooter.  But since regular shooters are lame I experimented with different ramifications for getting hit. Procedural art has fantastic potential for beauty, I really should experiment with it more seriously (protip: keep your initial gun, zoom out evenly by hitting both the beer enemies and the superman enemies, then click and drag around in the empty area below the enemies).

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Pretty much finished with the editor and I am quite happy with it! There are a few more things that I might end up adding to it, such as which topics will go into which books, and how the classes will be laid out.  I might just do those in plain text XML, since they’re not as complex or visual, but of course I’ll need to revisit the editor when I make the representational part of the game.

I made up about 20 “levels” using the tool, and a handful of shapes- it’s not without it’s flaws, but when you’re making a tool just for your own personal use you can spare some of the bits of polish and learning curve to save some time (a very precious commodity- the game is due on the 26th!)

I’m afraid I don’t have much to talk about today! I’m trying to avoid making completely content-less posts, which is why I’ve skipped a day or two. Today would have been content-less if I hadn’t hit a pretty good milestone on the editor.  Tomorrow I should be getting back into the game proper- the good stuff, so to speak, and then maybe I’ll have something of substance to talk about.

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