Man mag’s kaum glauben, aber diese epischen fünfeinhalb Minuten Indie-Verfilmung des Half-Life-Stoffes hatten ein Budget von nur 500$. Meiner Meinung nach schafft der Film es ziemlich gut, Klaustrophobie und Paranoia einzufangen, die vor allem der Anfang von Half-Life 2 in City 17 geprägt haben. Verantwortlich sind die kanadischen Purchase Brothers (Seite ist gerade offline), der Film soll Auftakt einer Serie sein. Und wer sich nicht vorstellen kann, dass Videospiele eine gute Vorlage für die große Leinwand sind, sollte seine Meinung überdenken. Hollywood, ick hör dir trappsen.
“White Butterfly” is an excellent shooter, that (at least in my opinion) did not got the attention yet, that it would deserve. It’s an brilliant designed game, made by Linley Henzell.
The game is unbelievable hard, even the first level makes you struggle, unless you play punishment-hard shooters on a daily basis. Each element in the game is well balanced, making the game fun and addictive like hell. You can choose of five ships, each equipped with three different weapon systems. Even if you fail each time at stage one, trying out different ships and weapon systems is a pure pleasure. Linley invented funny things here. You will end up try and try out new strategies to beat the enemies with different cannons. Inside the game each weapon will get stronger and stronger, the more enemies you beat with it… So even inside the game, you can every time change your strategy and focus on a weapon of your choice. Beautiful.
It’s been a long time that I seen an indie-game, that was so well-balanced with all details, even the colors, the sounds, the music are a perfect fit, underlining the whole game-experience. I would go so far to say, that this game is somehow a secret masterpiece! Don’t let it go without trying.
I will be doing a presentation of my Excit Post-Mortem at the Casual Connect Europe conference in Hamburg at the 12. February. If you are going to attend, feel free to visit me!
The funding for the institute I helped establishing has been confirmed. The Cologne Game Lab will happen. Our first task is to offer some amazing Workshops for the upcoming GamesCom. Later, we will also offer a Masters Course in Game Design and Research. Keep an eye out, it will be awesome! Website coming up very soon...
In other news, I'm did some major work on Illucinated. I've finally got the concept and the story in a row. The feedback from my... em... casual gamer representative wasn't as encouraging as I hoped but I decided to push forward anyway. If there is one thing I've learned from Fruchtplan, it is that sometimes you have to dare to do something that's not immediately understandable. It's more important that I can live with it and that it represents my beliefs and values. The new always appears strange at first. I'm currently setting up everything with incredibly crude placeholders. The 4 levels are in place along with the major "puzzles". Next, I will be working on "sub-quests" and bonus items. Still to do: writing the script, recoding the voices, doing the animation and setting up everything so it can be played over the Internet. But I feel like I'm over the hump now. Design is the hardest part.
And more personal:
Finished LEGO Star Wars with all achievements. Spent 50 hours on it. Looking back, I think went too far. Will write a review on that.
I finished Gears of War on casual and continuing on hardcore. The game is much better on cooperative mode, even with strangers.
Finally finished Area 5 on REZ. I like the bonus features. Will play it some more - it seems like a game that one should know better.
Got Eternal Sonata (only 10€ in Germany) - should have been called "Eternal Cutscenes". The Graphics are so bright and sweet, I don't know if I'm supposed to drool or puke. Also, I don't like how they handled the subject of the iconic Polish national hero that is Frédéric Chopin. The game is way to ignorant to Polish culture. On a positive note, the combat system is nice. Very action-oriented with a tactic twist and some lucid, polished information design. Made my JRPG-brain-cells wake up from a long period of starvation.
February 6, 2009 http://digitaltools.node3000.com/blog/377-nanosmiles-shooter-with-the-dash-originality
Lately I fell into an (unfortunately) small, but interesting sort-of shooter game. Nanosmiles, developed by Dong, an Indie-developer from Japan, is a shooter with a dash of originality. Not only the setting of this game is a somehow organic micro-biological nature, but also the game mechanics are in some way. The “ship” you control, is not able to shoot, but you must collect and activate “drones” that do the job for you an enemies you point at. If one of your drones is hit, you if turns black, and you have to reactive it by touching it. So while the action is at hand, you do not focus on targeting the enemies, but on caring, collecting and re-activating of your drones, while setting the focus for them. Nanosmiles does this all in such a pleasant fluid way, that I missed the game after I went through all the levels.
The soundtrack of the game is completely available on my favourite netlabel ii-music. It is solid, not euphoric and released on the PLUS-section of the ii-netlabel. In PLUS ii-music they focuses on music and soundtracks for indie-games. A really good idea! I think Doug not only made the game, but the soundtrack, too.
Nanosmiles: Gameplay-Video
Note: This week I got addicted to another shooter, called the White Butterfly. Hard and addictive like hell.
Lars Sobiraj von gulli.com hat ein interview mit mir gemacht. dieses ist jetzt zusammen mit dem zuvor erschienen artikel auf gulli.com zu finden. vielen dank an Lars für die investierte zeit und mühe.
wird wohl zeit, dass ich die nächste collage angehen.
Die Überschrift sagt eigentlich alles. Auf desktopgaming.com findet man als Zocker mit Nostalgiefaible Hintergrundbilder für den Desktop — eines schöner als das andere. Auch eigene Uploads sind gern gesehen.
I'm in a bad mood but this one cheered me up a bit. I already wrote about the awesome font creation tool Fontstruct before. I checked them out again and guess what: they FINALLY added features for letter spacing making the toolset pretty much complete. This is a free, simple, sexy and incredibly powerful tool for creating and manipulating fonts. A must-bookmark! I updated my 3 fonts a bit and with the new features I might be inclined to even complete a 4th one which I abandoned back then due to lack of spacing features. Here are they:
This one is a clone of the Link's Awakening font. I adjusted the word spacing so it is more legible now. Note that you will have LOTS of foreign characters with this one. Them italics need room!
This is a clone of Arial in 9pt. It includes a few of a bit screwed up characters but sticks faithfully to the original. I made this because Arial sometimes messes up the spacing at this small size even if the letters stay legible. Great if you use Flash and want to ensure that your Arial stays crisp and legibe at this small size. Also it will look the same on pc and mac. This one also includes a ton of foreign characters.
This one is an adjustment of the excellent 04b03 font which I think is the smallest you can go with a pixel font. I know they are smaller ones but those are clearly beneath the legibility threshold, especially in longer texts. Reading text with this one may not be comfortable but reasonably possible. My only alteration was making the 1 equally spaced as the other numbers so you can print number in columns. Useful if you need to output a lot of numeric data in little space and still want to keep things legible.
Hier ist der Deal: Ihr abonniert den monatlichen Newsletter von Telltale Games und bekommt als Geschenk die erste Episode der zweiten Staffel der 3D-Neuauflage des Point-and-Click-Klassikers Sam & Max.
Interessiert? Dann klickt auf diesen Link, gebt eine valide E-Mail-Adresse an, akzeptiert die ToS und wählt auf der nächsten Seite “Sam & Max: Ice Station Santa” als 105-MB-Gratis-Download aus.
Die Aktion läuft bis zum 28. Februar; bis dahin sollten es auch Besitzer eines 56K-Modems geschafft haben den Download zu beenden.
Der Newsletter von Telltale Games ist problemlos abbestellbar. Das Abo funktioniert auch mit einer Wegwerf-Adresse von temporaryinbox.com.
2D-Boy, the man best known for his game “World of Goo” gives us some neat hints, on how to make a good game withing 48 hours. It was because of, yeah, the Global Game Jam. Many thanks!!
I would also like to use this post to discuss this month's BORT in more details: First of all, the sheer amount of the entries is just amazing! It's very exciting to see BORT getting so big. But not only that: The quality of the entries is astonishing as well. I tried to comment on every post and I think I missed only the very recent entries. I would like to thank you everybody for participating and I hope we will be able to keep up this spirit. BORT might develop into one of the most important places on the tubes to discuss and share game design ideas, who knows!
The final question of the BORTcast was if games will evolve past the notion of being "fun" and start creating experiences with the emotional spectrum and depth comparable to literature. My answer to this question might seem to miss the point so I would like to clarify: I do agree with my fellow BORTcasters. I also think that it will be the independent games to introduce those new experiences.
However, looking at the entries, it struck me how difficult it would be to develop most of the ideas. From the perspective of a game developer, many of them would be considered AAA projects with multi-million dollar budgets and huge teams. This is especially true if there is some Massive-Multiplayer functionality planned or when the concepts starts with "It's Free-roaming sandbox game like GTA but...". Even some of the (excellent!) board game ideas would be difficult to pull of, like Corvus' Lot 49, which seems to be a collectible card game - a product reliant on a certain number of followers and therefore difficult to establish, especially on a tight budget. Sadly, my very own entry also relies on Massive-Multiplayer functionality and exhibits this quality.
What we mostly came up are not the indie games that we were talking about at the end of the podcast.
I chose Kylie Prymus' post because it deals with yet another recurring phenomenon: the (over?)reliance multiple endings and simple decisions. As I discussed in the podcast and in comments on Kylie's post, the novels don't have multiple endings. Should the games have them? The intention seems to be to make the decisions in the game appear more significant or to simply deliver a more dynamic, interactive experience. I don't think this is the way to go. Here are some things you might consider:
According to Barry Schwartz it is a common fallacy that more choice will improve the feeling of freedom and control. What happens instead is that choice will make the result feel less satisfying, even if it is objectively BETTER than the result in a scenario with no choice. The sheer presence of alternatives is unsettling. It is called "Paradox of Choice". The cure could be to make the alternatives you missed easily accessible so players don't have to give up content.
If the game is about choice, player would want to try out different decisions and their consequences. The game should be designed accordingly. Games rarely are. So there are 30+ hours JRPG's with 88 different endings. If you can't experience at least one choice and it's consequence during one play session (ca. 3 hours max), you might just as well drop multiple endings from the game entirely. That's why we mentioned the extremely short "The Majesty of Colors" as a GOOD example. I also liked "I wish I were the moon".
Consider also information theory. If the game has 4 endings and takes 10 hours, the player will spend 10 hours for what is essentially a 2 bit decision. That's 0.2 bits of information your game processes form the player PER HOUR. Don't fool yourself calling this "freedom" and "interactivity". A single message box with "The document is not saved, do you want save: yes, no, cancel" will process more information than that and message boxes are known for poor efficiency. 20 years ago, in a NES game, players used a 4-way d-pad and two buttons. That's 6 bit of information 30 times a second. That's 648.000 bits of information per hour. THIS is the kind of interactivity and freedom players are used to. If you want an interactive story, this should be the kind of information bandwidth you need to aim for. Again, making a very short game is one way to improve the information density. Another is to work procedurally to actually allow the 6.480.000 possible endings you should aim for in a 10 hours game.
Multiple endings are often used to explain the dilemmas in a book. However, we should realize that the demons that torment us when we have to decide are very different from the demons that torment us when we have to actually live with a decision. Check out Daniel Gilbert's "Stumbling on Happiness" (or simply the video of his TED Talk) - it contains some fascinating insights on this paradox. Consider that Games are mostly more about living with decisions than struggling to decide. Players have usually little problems with making decisions in games because it is mostly reversible and has little impact on them personally - it is just a game after all.
Some ideas also seem to focus very much on the particular story from the underlying novel, closely adapting the characters and the plot. For example, the Pride and Prejudice game concept is about Elizabeth Bennet meeting Mr. Darcy instead of simulating a social network of the late 18th century with variable character constellations. I think we missed some chances to capture the systems and relationships that the novels want to express. Linear media are bad at showing systems so the "stories" they show are often just crutches - linear slivers from the pie of possibilites to give you an idea of the whole pie. We limit ourselves by copying those crutches.
Finally, there is an inherent problem with creating unsettling experiences in games: while linear media are consumed passively, the content of games feeds back into how they are consumed. I noticed myself that if you stray away from simple "fun" and try more ambiguous and ambivalent feedback, you will run against a wall of not being able to move users to act in your game. This is not so much about "this is not fun", as it is about "what am I supposed to do here?". Literature has it easier are the author leads the reader through the story. Even if you have no clue going on, even if it is emotionally difficult - continuing to read is always self-explanatory and easy. I'm not saying that every game has to be fun but we need to explore carefully how to guide and motivate the player trough those alternative game experiences.
This is why I said that games might work different than literature and that we have a lot of work to do if we want to match literature in depth and variety.
BUT I think this month's BORT was a great step forward and I'm very excited to see what we come up with on the Feburary's topic. Thank you and keep up the amazing work!
February 2, 2009 http://gamedesignscrapbook.blogspot.com/2009/02/logic-of-space-battles.html
This is a dear topic for me. Some years ago, I was inspired by the Bad Astronomy website. It was a bit of a shock for me when I realized how pretty much every little detail about space Sci-Fi doesn't hold up to scientific scrutiny. I knew Sci-Fi was unrealistic but it was amazing how TERRIBLY AND UTTERLY unrealistic it is. So I sat down, ate some heavy books and now I believe I have a rudimentary understanding of Astronomy now. It has become of a hobby for me. That's why I sometimes torment you with my space geek stuff. Like I will today. If you want to know about the science and logic of epic Sci-Fi space battles, please continue... So back on track: people immediately responded to Cliffsky theorizing about mass, speed, armor, range or energy production of different sizes of theoretical space ships to rationalize and explain epic space battles. Basically, they tried to solve the problem with (dodgy) physics and engineering. It shows perfectly what I hinted at in my Solaris post: you won't get far with just science, you need the humanities too!
Here is a different approach: Why did epic space battles appear in Sci-Fi in the first place? You see, Space Opera came about during the Second Word War. Many war veterans came back home and started writing novels about epic battles like they witnessed themselves but in a more idealistic, heroic future. The perfect example is Gene Rodenbery, who invented Star Trek. He joined the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1941, aged 20, and flew many combat B-17 Flying Fortress missions in the Pacific Theatre.
So it is no wonder that epic space battles closely resemble naval battles from the Second World war - especially those from the pacific. That's why you will often see combinations of small, fast fighter spacecraft and large, slow carrier-type spacecraft engaged in combat in close proximity to each other. Hence, if you want to replicate that epic space battle feeling, it makes sense to take a closer look at the technical specs and tactical logic of those battles, instead of trying to theorize about dilithium crystals and matter-anti-matter drives.
Finally, you might want to realize that science is of no help if you want that kind of Sci-Fi as the likeliness of space battles happening in the future is pretty much ZERO. Not a chance in hell. Seriously. Get it out of your head! Here are some things you might consider:
Space is vast. Spacecraft move very fast (more than 30 000 km/h even today already). The requirements for two spacecraft to meet each other so that the pilots can see each other with bare eyes are enormous and require careful navigation and cooperation on both sides. Dogfights won't happen.
There is no air in space so changing direction is very difficult. Even a simple dogfight maneuver like making a 90° turn requires you to decelerate to zero and accelerate to you preferred speed in the new direction - twice the energy required to get to full speed in the first place. Remember those huge tanks and external boosters on the Space Shuttle? Yeah, we are talking about twice this energy for one single 90° turn. Again, dogfights won't happen.
There is no air in space. There are almost no obstacles in space to hide behind. There is nothing that prevents you to shoot at enormous distances and hit your targets precisely. There is no such thing as "range". There is no reason for spacecraft to get up close. You could probably shoot something on the other side of the solar system. They wouldn't even know what hit them. It would take years to travel that distance with a ship using today's technology. Why bother?
This in turn, makes space battles stupid anyway as instead of fighting ships, you can even easier attack the cities and outpost on the planets themselves. You can probably even shoot from cannons installed directly on surfaces of you home planets, without the need of getting into space. Remind me please: what do you need weapons on space ships for again?
So there you have it. Space Battles? Just some silly stuff old war veterans came up with to cope with their posttraumatic stress disorder. Won't happen.
Bonoboblogs is an agglomerated blog of people who are into game design or related art. We tend to be clever and open and have fresh views on computing games. We fill the gap between experimental gameplay, game design and theory. More about.
