Best indie “art” games…
Just stumble upon this – some real gems
1 comment August 12th, 2007
Archive for August 12th, 2007
The Death of Fun…
A couple of people have lamented to me that indie game jamming wasn’t any FUN any more…
I kinda agreed, but couldn’t pinpoint the reason. How could indie game jamming not be fun? It was all about goofing off and making games, right? Well, I’ve been finding writing novels the same type of dreary work – it’s simple no fun.
“Fun is primarily about practicing and learning, not about exercising mastery, ” says Raph Koster (yep, still using his book excerpt)
At a certain point, when you stop treating the task at hand as a learning exercise it ceases to be fun. With novel writing, I’m beyond the experimentation phase and treat it as a mastery exercise so it’s no longer fun but now work.
Events like NaNoWriMo are still fun to me because I know the finished novels are just crap… It’s a total blast because everybody else also agrees yet happily shares them with others. It’s fun!
If writing 50,000 words in a month is your idea of fun, you’re nuts – but it is… and reason behind is that nobody judges the output and everybody uses the experience to learn from.
I can see why similar game programming / creation events peter out… (i.e the original Indie Game Jam) when the original intention turns from experimentation to mastery this kills the joy. By sampling the games on Jayisgames.com I can see the fun these developers had in making their games. Many of the games showcased have huge warts and could have used some mentoring or extra effort, but game development is difficult already, why make it boring?
Viva La Fun!
Add comment August 12th, 2007
Games are not stories
I’ve already believed this… even when the novelist inside me didn’t want me to believe this. Games are different, but I could never explicitly say why until I read Raph Koster’s “Theory of Fun” article.
- Games tend to be experiential teaching. Stories teach vicariously.
- Games are good at objectification. Stories are good at empathy.
- Games tend to quantize, reduce, and classify. Stories tend to blur, deepen, and make subtle distinctions.
- Games are external – they are about people’s actions. Stories (good ones, anyway) are internal – they are about people’s emotions and thoughts.
While I agree with all of the points – the empathy reason is HUGE in my opinion.
It’s very difficult to achieve empathy through external conflict / action alone without tapping into the emotions + thoughts of characters. Games rely on external conflict (action) vs. internal conflict (mental illness, depression, insanity, lack of confidence).
Films have the same issue too (everything has to be externalized) and have partially solved it through good acting, sharp dialogue, and relevant topics. Often the novel a film is based on is deeper and more emotional. Rarely does a film make you laugh, cry, sing, dance, angry, etc…. The emotional range of a film is pretty limited to one or two of those.
Another major problem a game has over film is that the main character tends to have a neutral personality as the player has to be able to imagine him or her as this character. In film, and especially in novels, the main character often very well defined personality trait.
At the core, we can sugarcoat games to provide empathy and emotional response but it’s battle. Like film, it’s probably best to focus on one or two of the emotional responses – laugh and angry are the most common.
P.S Another reason to read the book excerpt:
“By and large, people don’t play games because of the stories. The stories that wrap the games are usually side dishes for the brain. For one thing, it’s damn rare to see a game story written by an actual writer. As a result, they are usually around the high-school level of literary sophistication at best.”
So true. So true.
Add comment August 12th, 2007
I still suck as a game designer…
But am slowly learning. My initial goal was to create a demo and simultaneously a game design document around 20-30 pages long. The end result is that I had to cut cut cut features that were outside the scope of my game and yet my GDD is 40+ pages and still unfinished.
The demo is a much easier task than the GDD – which, I’ve learnt, is akin to writing a novel. Everything is in the details. When I say that, I mean thousands upon thousands of little issues need to be explicitly resolved and written down – like all the possible combination of joystick + button presses and their actions.
- The art style
- The environment
- The characters
- The gameplay – including NPC behaviors, scoring, spells, power-ups, progression, weapons, players interaction with environment, time limits, level walkthroughs, etc.
- Control scheme
- Camera
- Music
- Sound
- Technology
- Tools
So much for “just winging it.”
Add comment August 12th, 2007
As I slowly become hardcore again…
Sony has open sourced their vector math library!
For those doing math intensive apps (almost all 3D games) this is good news as writing your own is a pain in the arse.
I wish EA would open source their STL implementation. Y’know as part of forgiveness for shit-canning RenderWare when they promised not to.
Add comment August 12th, 2007