in sonic xl, the gold rings that sonic collects are fried and collecting them causes the hedgehog to get fatter, slower, and heavier – to become less and less capable of obeying the player’s commands – until all he can do is sit and wait for the heart attack that kills him. this hack, apart from being impressive (the authors have created lots of new animations for sonic at varying levels of belly), is interesting for a few reasons.
thematically, sonic xl is interesting because it points out how institutionalized consumption is in digital game design. sonic collects hundreds of rings over the course of an adventure – they’re everywhere, almost unavoidable. which is why the hack is interesting in play as well: what were liberally-scattered bonus items have become hazards, and the player has to carefully balance scarfing rings with running off the weight (the authors have also added instant-slim boxes to make things more reasonable). it doesn’t help that sonic’s fox companion is a feeder, grabbing rings to make sonic’s belly grow.
i.r.p. (apparently for “imagination reality paradice”) attempts, like lsd, the game that inspires it, to approximate the transitory experience of a dream through the use of frequent, often jarring, and at least partially random transitions. i.r.p. is an hour-long collage of sounds, images, and also interactions. the interactions are trivial, in that the players’ actions in them has no real effect on the state of the game, but add so much to the experience of the game regardless (in particular, they bring the game closer to the experience of trying to control a dream). it makes me wonder why cutscenes still exist in videogames when designers have the capability of constraining the player’s ability to interact with the game so totally.
i was also impressed in that despite the scenes of the game being presented in a randomized order, there were enough recurring themes and images that i felt pretty strongly, the first time i played through the game, the presence of an underlying narrative. i see videogames, because of their natural capability for randomness, as having enormous potential for the use of chance in narrative.
oh, and i made this game last week for klik of the month. i’m really fascinated by the phenomenon of pokewalker cheating: it’s a device that exists in order to give game-playing nerds game-like motivations to leave the house and walk around, but lots of people have spent lots of creativity coming up with complicated solutions to trick the pokewalker and avoid having to do some walking.
maybe unnecessarily, i wanted to make a game that encourages the same kind of solutions. the player’s scored on how much the mouse moves, but isn’t allowed to touch it. because it’s distance travelled that’s scored, the obvious solution of using chopsticks or something to prod the mouse around is inefficient, and i decided that was good enough.
i also like that it gives the player some of the responsibility for keeping the rules. i was talking to one of the authors of button (chicanery with pushups) this past week about how our reliance on the program as ruleskeeper is holding us back from making more interesting social games. (“how does the computer know you’re not cheating?” that’s not the point!)
the haunted mouse was a bit too complicated for klik & play, so i had to use game maker. but i wanted to make a klik & play game too, so i used the second hour to make a game about getting shot by amazons.
i made this font for the message bar in my new game, something in the vein of midway / vid kidz arcade games. but as always you, my dears, are welcome to use it for whatever purposes you like. it’s a small, blocky font with tiny cut-outs.
increpare introduced me to transformice, a kind of lemmings in which each lemming is a human player. at least one of the players is a shaman, who has the power to change the game landscape by introducing platforms, counter-weights and by nailing things together. each level of the game contains a mound of cheese and a mouse hole (maybe more than one mouse hole if there’s more than one shaman). the mice’s goal is to get to the cheese, take a chunk, and bring it back to the hole. the shaman’s goal is to make that possible when it otherwise isn’t.
naturally, the game has more interesting decisions for the player who is the shaman. but i like the idea of a game where there are no trivial actors: where every role in the game is played by a human player. what’s also interesting is the way these player mice function as a measure of the shaman’s success: the shaman’s score is the number of mice who successfully return to the hole with cheese. in the case of a two-mousehole level, the mice are voting with their feet for which shaman is better: the better solution will bring more mice to that hole.
increpare’s pointed out that for all that it’s become easier for amateurs to create little games, the one thing that still seems unduly hard for a hobbyist to surmount is online play, which seems to require a lot of byzantine network knowledge. there’s no easy solution to online play. it’s a shame, because i’d like to see more simple multiplayer games like five minute mmorpg.
tom sennett has been running an online game he calls tom’s crown affair. it’s not running at the moment, but he’s promised to update his twitter when it is. i got the chance to play it (mostly i watched slut play), and i found it pretty interesting, a form of red-light-green-light: one player wears a crown, and uses the mouse to search for the other players and zap them – but only if they’re moving. those players are trying to get to the king and take the crown for themselves.
the only decisions the players who aren’t the king have is when to move (by mashing keyboard keys) and when to stay still, but it’s an interesting decision because a player’s strategy often depends on the other players’ positions: you need people to distract the king while you make a grab for the crown, so the peasantry has to cooperate to dethrone the tyrant, but only one of them can take the crown and become the new despot. it’s a rich dynamic.
and while i’m mostly interested in the kinds of dynamics that build between players who are in the same space, i think the anonymity of online play emphasizes that dynamic in an interesting way. the only means of interaction these players have is through the rules of the game – there’s no voice chat, no means of reaching over and punching the player next to you – so the players are simply their roles in the game’s heirarchy: either the king or the peasantry. and i think that’s an interesting quality for online games to explore, which is why i wish they were easier to experiment with.
two hour knytt stories! for mine, i stole the tileset out of a walk at night, one of my favorite knytt stories, and attempted to create a story about urban structures as mazes. weave is really good too.
while i’m recommending knytt stories, allow me to mention a day at the beach and shipwrecked, which were both created for a recent competition (they seem to have been the only entries, in fact) and are the most charming knytt stories i’ve played in a while.
on thursday night we made games inspired by pokemon: games about the ideas and structure of pokemon, for the most part, rather than the characters. i made a game about the rich strategy of pokemon’s rock-paper-scissors brand of combat, a game about pikachu, and a game about having sex with a pokemon.
roshambon box is probably the best game about pokemon we made, and nitty gritty is the best shooting-game take on tanaka’s friendly adventure (the best game about pokemon we didn’t make).
i downloaded the magnavox odyssey 2 romset yesterday and was really pleased with some of the games. in particular i was impressed by the odyssey 2 take on pachinko, which, while being only very superficially similiar to actual pachinko, still creates a really interesting experience for two players. each player moves a little person with a pong paddle around the screen, trying to direct the two bouncing balls into scoring pockets. hitting a ball also changes it to that player’s color, and when a ball goes into a pocket the points go to the player whose color matches the ball.
for klik of this month, i decided to make a klik & play version of odyssey 2 pachinko. play it online thanks to radix. the first player to a thousand points wins.
klik of the month is getting so good that i can’t pick favorites anymore. play them all, they’re brilliant. (though if i was forced to pick my favorite, it would be between this and this.)
