there have been a few interesting game design competitions recently (i participated in one of them), and they have produced a few interesting games. before i mention which of those games are the interesting ones, a word on zip files:

if you (and this goes for all of you) distribute your game in a zip archive, zip up a folder containing all the game files, not just the game files themselves. it’s inconsiderate to expect your player to take the time to create and name a folder on her disk to dump your files into. it’s sloppy, too. make the folder yourself, so all the player has to do to install your game is drag the folder from the zip to a place of her choosing.

the competition in which i competed was ludum dare 13 – a triannual two-day game design competition: this one’s theme is “roads.” which, i was disappointed to discover, most participants interpreted as “driving.” two roads is a nice exception. inspired by the robert frost poem, two roads is a point-and-click adventure narrated (by the author) in rhyming verse. what’s neat is that player decisions come in the middle of couplets, and both branches rhyme.

only forwards does a good job of quickening pac-man by replacing “collect all these things” with a flicky-like “collect this handful of things and hold on to them.” lucid state dreaming is (if the title doesn’t give it away) a dreamy game in the style of lsd or yume nikki, but without the layer of consistency that allows the player to buy into their anti-logic: the game is too random. bulldozer blitz is a kind of simcity with the higher-level management stripped out. and rara racer, to avoid spoiling the game, does a perfect job of resembling what it’s trying to resemble.

a longer competition was the independent gaming source’s halloween commonplace book competition, which required entrants to design games around excerpts from writer h.p. lovecraft’s commonplace book, a journal of unfinished story sketches. (not the first of this type of project, either.) unfortunately, few of the resulting games are very unnerving, a missed opportunity given the ways the videogame medium is suited to being abstract and dissonant. (i mentioned yume nikki above.)

the lake alone is subtle enough to achieve the suspense of disbelief that characterizes lovecraft’s work and allows it to be as effective as it is. i also like the transformation eversion undergoes and how the player is forced to participate in it, though i would have liked to see the glitch-as-horror motif taken farther. and dark matter planet and planets form’d do genuinely nerve-wracking things with the lovecraft scrawl that is probably best-suited to being a videogame – “planets form’d of invisible matter” – but the invisible enemies in both games were so stressful that they ultimately caused me to quit.

and then there’s the longest of these competitions, the annual retro remakes comp. what are far more interesting among this year’s entries aren’t the word-for-word facsimiles of games that already exist, but the “games that never were” – pastiches of games and game design trends that have come and gone and probably continue to inform contemporary design more than we realize.

revenge of the punched tape (there don’t seem to be links that aren’t direct downloads, so you’ll have to dig around yourself) is a fast-moving one-on-one (or two-on-one) maze chase game, with the chaser being a snake that grows longer each time it gobbles up one of the tokens you’re after. i think the stages go on a bit too long, and when the maze turns invisible (when the tape nabs a not-so-rare mystery item) is a little too devestating.

there are a number of “mash-ups,” including blast passage (bomberman and gauntlet) and snakoban dash (sokoban and nibbler), but the one that interests me the most is tetroid: tetris and and metroid. it explores the idea of weapons-as-platforms that the original metroid flirts with in its ice beam (freeze an enemy, then jump on it to get higher). as you collect more tetrads, you can build taller structures and explore more of the world. oh, and then there’s sigue sigue sputnik.