Evolution Live!

The Hug Initiation Protocol

2011-11-24T20:36:00.000-08:00

When I read Steve Pavlina's blog post Just Frakkin Hug Me, I was inspired. I like hugs! Why couldn't I just hug people more often instead of being all shy and inhibited?

Well, for one, I'm shy and inhibited. Also, hugs are unusual, at least among guys, and so people might read more into my actions than I really intend. But mostly, I just don't know how to go about it in the first place. How do you give someone a hug, especially if they're not used to it?

So naturally, I did some research, and put together this handy Hug Initiation Protocol that breaks the process down into clear, concrete steps. You might think that this is a bit much, but socially awkward nerds like me need all the help we can get. I'm sure I'm not alone in this. ;) You tell me.

Hug Initiation Protocol

1. Make eye contact with your intended hug recipient.

2. Stand still. Do not rush at your intended hug recipient.

3. Hold your arms out, in front or to the side, palms open and up, in an inviting gesture that clearly signals your intent to hug.

4. Keep a neutral or positive facial expression. Do not scowl at your intended hug recipient, unless you are a little kid who looks particularly cute and huggable while scowling.

5. If your intended hug recipient does not respond, you may either abort your hug attempt or verbally offer a hug in case your intended hug recipient did not recognize your intent to hug.

6. If your intended hug recipient responds by hugging you, then congratulations! You have successfully initiated a hug.

7. Attempt to sustain the hug for at least one full inhalation and exhalation of breath. A quick hug indicates that you are hugging out of a sense of obligation rather than a sincere desire to connect.

8. But if your hug recipient attempts to disengage, you must respond with immediate disengagement as well.

9. While hugging, do not rub or pat your hug recipient on the back. Patting is a sign of insecurity, and rubbing is just awkward. Don't do it.

10. That's it!

Yes, I know I'm silly. :p

Have fun putting it into practice. And I hope you have a happy Thanksgiving today! :)

Revising Flydrill

2011-09-11T00:14:00.000-07:00

After a year and a half, I finally updated my game Flydrill. Yay.

You just added achievements!

Ever since releasing Flydrill in March of 2010, I've been dissatisfied with the game, and embarrassed to show it to people. It wasn't a bad game - in fact it has been my best so far, but there were just so many problems I saw in it, so many things I wanted to change.

In particular, I thought that they key ingredient the game lacked was logistical gameplay. Later on, I realized that this was just one of many shortcomings, and that the core of the game and the overall structure of it could stand to be improved as well.

So what I've done this past week is improve the core gameplay.

First of all, the arbitrary dream-logic rule that you could only drill to the right is gone, and now you can drill in all four directions. This opens up a lot more possibilities for burrowing and evading through tiles, slipping out of danger through narrow gaps which you can widen into caverns as in the screen shot above. It's also a lot less confusing for new players. Why can I sometimes drill and sometimes not? That question doesn't come up anymore.

Next, I got rid of the extra lives. Now it's one hit and you're dead. Why so cruel, you ask? One answer is that this is inherently a very hardcore game, requiring the coordinated use of many skills and actions, under significant time pressure. I'd originally tried to make it more casual, and weakened the game as a result. Now, I embrace its hardcore nature. Having a single life sharpens the focus of the entire experience. You stop paying attention and you die.

Getting rid of the extra lives also means that you can no longer feel the despair of being down to your last life, with no hope of recovery. The complacency associated with having two extra lives safely tucked into your back pocket is no longer an option. No false sense of security.

And it's much less confusing. Before, I noticed that many people would lose a life and not realize it, never learning the lesson that running into a swarmer is hazardous to your health. Now, there's no question. When you touch a swarmer, you know something bad happened. And because you've learned something, you decide to try again, armed with your new knowledge. Clarity is more important than coddling.

Finally, having a single life makes it much easier for me to balance the game. I've increased the frequency of invincibility halos and decreased the frequency of portals, so that the experience alternates between frantically dashing through clouds of enemies long enough to find a halo and racing to get the most out of your halo while it lasts, maybe taking out an enemy or two just because you can. Halos are not rare experiences anymore. This alternating rhythm is now the core of the game. If you had more than one life, it wouldn't work as well because the game would drag on and on, and the extreme focus of the halo-less portions would be dulled by a false sense of security.

Along those lines, I've also greatly improved the pacing of the game. In Flydrill's very first release, the game started out very slow, and to many players, boring. In response, I crudely ramped up the pace, throwing everything at the player right away. This was not optimal. But I figured that overwhelming the player was at least better than boring them. Now, however, I think I've succeeded in making the game interesting from the very beginning, while also gradually introducing new enemies to the experience to keep it feeling fresh.

The first thing I did was increase the speed of the swarmers. Back when the game gave you multiple lives, the swarmers would start out really slow, and very gradually get faster as you progressed, slowing down whenever you lost a life. Like Pac-Man CE. However, with three lives, this meant that the swarmers started out so slow as to be totally harmless, and eventually got ridiculously fast, neither of which were fun situations.

So I made them speed up much more quickly. To compensate, I made them slow down every time a swarmer dies, whether by colliding with another enemy or with your halo of death. This creates a nice feedback loop - the swarmers get fast, but once they reach the point where they're so fast that they're running into each other, they slow down. And it means that if you can dodge the swarmers long enough, they'll slow down so you can escape safely. But as soon as you travel out of range, they'll have gotten fast enough to catch up with you again and the cycle repeats. This alternating cycle nests nicely with the larger cycle of halo having and not-having, and makes the core gameplay much more enjoyable.

The next pacing improvement I made was to space out the introduction of enemies. Now that the game was interesting just with swarmers, I could wait to introduce the other enemies, without fear of boring the player in the beginning of the game. Puffers come in shortly after swarmers, teaching you to watch where you're going as you dash madly away from danger, and then later the gunners, teaching you to use walls for cover instead of hanging around in the open, and then finally the diggers, teaching you that sometimes a cozy little burrow can be the worst possible place to hide.

Lastly, I made big solid walls appear every so often, to provide some milestones in your rightward journey, and throw in some opportunities for serious drilling. At first I'd assumed that these walls would be very dangerous places, where you are stuck frantically drilling as your enemies nip at your heels, so to speak. But as it turned out, with the four-way drilling now available, these walls became safe havens that I'd look forward to - places where I could burrow safely, feeling through the gaps in the tiles that my enemies could not fit into, where I could be pretty sure to find a halo or two in the safety of the solid wall. Unless a digger stopped by for a visit. But that made it all the more exciting. :)

And the portals, those bubble things that change the background color and clear all enemies from the screen, now have a more pronounced effect on what type of enemy you are likely to find. The colors have stronger associations - red for gunners, green for diggers, and blue for puffers - and the difficulty does not go down so much when you enter a portal. So it's not always something you want to go for, especially if you see a green portal in a nice, safe blue zone. You have to make a choice. And that makes it more interesting.

Also the portals now have big halos around them to make them easier to hit. New players often have trouble with the timing-sensitive flapping controls, and hitting a portal shouldn't be a challenge in itself. But the portals also don't appear as early to tempt these new players either, since the color changes and corresponding enemy distribution changes would totally throw off the gradual pacing I have set up.

The last change was to add a persistent high-score display, inspired by iPhone game Bit Pilot, to replace the now-useless extra lives in the upper-left corner. This game is entirely about pushing your score a bit further than last time, and I decided that I'd give this goal the attention it deserved by making your best score constantly visible as you play.

The other last change, the last last change, was to add achievement notifications.

"Achievements?" you gasp, "How crude!"

Yeah, that's what I thought at first too. But wait, there's more to this than you might at first think. I didn't go with the typical trophy-style achievements, where there is a list of things to achieve, and then you achieve them, and you are told that your achievements have been "unlocked" and now you can see them shining magnificently in your list. I mean, that would require a whole new interface to design and implement! No way!

Instead, I went with the second option.
From Chris Hecker's Achievements Considered Harmful?:

For interesting tasks,
Tangible, expected, contingent rewards reduce free-choice intrinsic motivation, and
Verbal, unexpected, informational feedback, increases free-choice and self-reported intrinsic motivation.

There's no list. When you do something cool, like travel 1000mm, or kill 10 enemies, or hold a halo for 20 seconds, the game tells you. When you do something even more cool, like travel 2000mm, or even 3000mm, or kill 20 enemies, or hold a halo for 40 seconds, the game tells you again. And that's it.

Short of adding coins everywhere, it's one of the few things I can do to make the player actually feel good about what they're doing in the game, instead of just making them frantic and terrified or temporarily relieved at having escaped with their single life for a few precious seconds of respite inside the safety of a wall.

The only shortcoming is that this feedback is not entirely unexpected, since the pattern is pretty easy to pick up on, and it tells you every time. I might experiment with the game only telling you the first time you do something, making its announcements much more rare and precious. But for now I think the system works pretty well.

And I didn't even have to design a new interface for it. That's the best part. ;)

The changes I'm considering next are more drastic, like adding baby fliers to guide for upgrade points and adding upgrades to spend those points on. Logistical gameplay. But I'm not sure how it will all turn out.

For the moment, I'm just glad that Flydrill is finally, at its core, a solid game. I'm not embarrassed to tell people about it anymore. :)

So try it out and tell me - what do you think?

Space Isn't

2011-05-10T07:14:00.000-07:00

Experimental Gameplay Project: ZOOM in May

Step 1. Inspiration
(from Less Talk More Rock)

brontosaurus wrote:

skydome

zoom in and out

galaxies

nebula

dawn

brontosaurus wrote:

super nova

black holes

intelligence

from this distant vantage point,
adrift in an ocean of space and time....

axcho wrote:

When I came to the word "dawn", the image of it brought a smile to my lips like the last line of a haiku. Thank you.

brontosaurus wrote:

axcho wrote:

Space Isn't, by SineRider

axcho wrote:

Zoom into a star that you see.
Watch it get bigger, reveal itself to be a flaming ball of gas.
Planets?
Pan to empty blackness.
Zoom into the blackness, more blackness, more...
Then a faint hint of something on the left, a speck, a smudge.
Center on it, zoom in, don't lose it...
See it resolve, grow brighter, more defined.
It is an entire galaxy.
Zoom out so it is again small.
Double-tap to name it.

This is like exploring a fractal.
This is like Jason Rohrer's Inside a Star-Filled Sky.
But without the shooting gameplay.
It is like Eric Svedang's Kometen.
But without the orbiting mechanic.
It is like The Scale of the Universe.

Is there a story? Characters to know?
Only the story of your fellow observers.
Read the names of stars, competing names.
Touch one to lend it your support.
You can name one star every day.
One name to add, like one cow to click.
A name grows with every click, until it is tweeted.
As your names are favored by your peers, you grow in influence.

Step 3. Rock

Active Sketch 05 - Planets

2011-04-17T08:14:00.000-07:00

It's been more than a year since the last one. Time for a new Active Sketch.

I made this to test out an idea my coworker suggested for indirect control through gravity wells.

In this little physics prototype, you can click to add planets and drag them around, and your little face person will zoom around, orbiting them according to Newton's laws of gravity.

Can you imagine playing with this on a touch screen?

Active Sketch 05 - Planets

Nothing fancy. Just a little experiment. Turns out that gravity among all these planets is a chaotic system, where it's almost impossible to predict where the orbiting face will go next. That might make this a little too confusing for a game, though who knows - maybe if you slow it down and draw motion trails showing the future paths of all the objects, it might be pretty interesting.

Still, I think springs might make a better physics-based mechanic than gravity, at least for a real-time action game.

So this Active Sketch was pretty quick to make - maybe an hour to get the basic mechanic working, and another hour to polish it up for release. This is encouraging, because it means I might be able to make more of these, even in the limited time I have now that I have a job as a game programmer.

I don't want to make any promises, but with any luck hopefully you'll be seeing a lot more of these little prototypes from me in the near future. I'm looking forward to it. :)

Interview with a Game Programmer

2011-03-06T22:19:00.000-08:00

One of my cousins asked to interview me for a school project, since I'm a real game programmer now! I went all-out on these questions and thought I'd share them here, so if you know anyone who's considering a career in games or programming, feel free to send them over for a bit of behind-the-scenes with a recent college grad who has just broken into the game industry.

Needless to say, the views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Fugazo, Inc.

What is your name and job title?

My name is Alex Cho Snyder and I work as a Game Programmer at the casual game development studio Fugazo, Inc.

How long have you had this job?

I started this job on August 9th, 2010, so I've been working at Fugazo for about six months.

Please explain what a typical day of work is like for you.

I have breakfast at home, pack a lunch, and take the bus downtown to the office. I usually get there around 9:30am, but time is pretty flexible there, so it's no problem if you get there a bit late. I go to my desk - all our desks are together in the same big open-studio-style room - turn on my computer and wait for it to start up so I can check my work email, download the latest images and files that my teammates have added to the project from the SVN repository, and start up Visual Studio, which is kind of like Microsoft Word for programming code. I also look through my work notebook to refresh my memory about what exactly I've been working on and what I was thinking about the day before.

I work on a team of about three or four other people, making Fugazo's next hidden-object adventure game. There are about two other such teams at Fugazo, each working on a different game. Each time has one designer, one programmer, and two or three artists. I'm a programmer. I like to think of it in comparison to building houses. The designer is the architect, who draws the plans for the house and manages the overall process. The artists are the ones who prepare the pieces of the house - boards, doors, roofs, siding, etc. And the programmer - me - is the contractor putting the pieces together and actually building a functional house. I like building things, so it works out. But I really don't like remodels, where I'm taking an old building that someone else made and have to tear out old parts of the building and fix it up and add new rooms and features. You never know if one wall or pillar is okay to take out or if the whole building will collapse when you do. That's the annoying part.

In more specific terms, my designer will come to me with a feature or puzzle or something that he wants me to add to the game, and describe exactly what he wants while I ask questions until I feel like I understand completely. I usually like to write out the details of the task in my notebook by hand, because it helps me wrap my brain around the problem. Then I'll either start writing ideas for possible solutions, or look through the existing code of the game to get a better understanding of how the solution will have to fit in. Then I start actually writing code, and testing it out. Most of my time is spent going back and forth between thinking about the problem, reading code, and writing code. If I get stuck I'll ask the designer for clarification, or talk to our lead programmer to ask how he would recommend solving the problem. Once I've got something actually working on screen, I'll show the designer and ask him for feedback. Either he'll suggest more things to change, or he'll give me the next feature he wants me to build.

At noon we have an hour for lunch, and I often walk down to a nearby alternative school to volunteer-teach game programming to some middle-school kids. After that I'm back to work, until around 5:30pm when everyone leaves and I take the bus home or to martial arts practice for exercise.

What have you enjoyed most about your occupation?

That is a hard question for me to answer. I love thinking of ideas for games, and hashing out designs with teammates, but as a programmer that is something I am rarely involved in directly. In my role as a programmer, my enjoyment comes from exercising my near-magical ability to create imaginary worlds that live inside a computer screen. When I have gained enough understanding and familiarity with my tools that this process is no longer a confusing struggle but a mildly stimulating problem to solve, I find this very enjoyable. This usually happens when I am asked to create a smaller puzzle within a larger adventure game, where I can visualize the end result I want and then figure out how to actually build it with computer code. When things are going smoothly, I can go from start to finish in this process within a day or two.

I like seeing the fruits of my labor up on the computer screen - the quicker and more immediate, the better. I like to take something that works, that I can see and play around with, and tweak it and adjust it until it's just right. It is very rewarding to me to see and appreciate and savor this thing I have created, and when I am deprived of that gratification for too long I can easily become frustrated. I'm quite stubborn, so I don't give up when things take a long time to sort out. That doesn't mean I have to like it, though! :p

Do you believe most of your fellow colleagues or workers enjoy their work? Why?

I think they do. But not necessarily in the way you might assume. Many people mistakenly conflate the fun of playing games with the hard work of making them. I like to compare the process of game development to cooking or baking. Most people love to eat pastries and cookies and donuts, just like most people enjoy playing games. But not everyone likes to bake those cookies, and not everyone likes to make games. If you want to become a baker, it certainly helps to like eating pastries. But it's not enough.

Some game companies are more like donut factories. They are not fun places to work. Fugazo, where I work, is more like a successful neighborhood bakery. The work isn't amazingly fun, but it's usually interesting, and the people are nice, and it's not a bad place to be all day. And at the end of a project, after a few months, you have a finished game that's pretty cool and you can feel proud of it and show your friends and family and all that. And you get to think about games all the time.

If you could change anything about your occupation what would it be?

If I could make games without ever having to sit at a desk and stare at a computer screen, I would. If I could run around in a virtual forest, climb inheritance trees and swing from conditional branches, build towers with blocks of code, and just use my physical body and my stereoscopic vision and my musical ears and my agile primate fingers, I would be so much happier. I love plants; I love being outside. I also love the ability to create virtual worlds that other people can experience, through computers. But every minute that I spend in front of a computer screen is a sacrifice that I make in exchange for this power to shape (virtual) reality.

More realistically, if I never had to renovate another programmer's poorly encapsulated user interface code, that would be awesome. Most frustrating part of my job right there. Also, if I had more teamwork throughout the day, I think I would enjoy that. I love collaboration, and I get just enough of it to avoid feeling unbearably lonely throughout the day, but I really get very little. There's something called pair programming where two people share a computer and take turns writing code and observing, and I've done that a few times in school and I think I'd very much like to do that again. However, it's obviously not as feasible in a small company like Fugazo where each game has only a single programmer to work on it.

Have you gone back for more educational training since you began the job?

Nope. For me, working at this job is all the educational training I need! It has been at least as educational as an equivalent time at school was, in the six months I've been at Fugazo. In computer programming, school can be essential to getting started, but once you're actually working, you should be learning a lot as you gain experience and your company starts branching out to new technologies and platforms. At the least, you can learn a lot from your own side projects as well.

What educational background do you have?

I graduated from the University of Washington with a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science. It took me a little less than five years at the UW to decide on my major, take all my required classes, and graduate. Throughout college, however, I had a summer internship or two working as a programmer and also made quite a few of my own games on the side, which is crucial if you're trying to get a job after graduating. Just a Computer Science degree doesn't cut it. You need to have experience working at a programming job, at least as an intern, and show that you have the passion, skill, and discipline to make your own games in your free time.

If you won the lottery and did not have to work, would you? Explain.

For a while, at least. ;) I decided to look for a job last summer so I could earn money, spend my days working on a team instead of by myself, and get experience learning from people who know what they're doing instead of fumbling around on my own. The lottery would only take care of one of those things. My life's work is to change the world through games. The most important thing I can do right now is to hone my skill at designing and programming games, and become fluent in all other aspects of the process as well. I will work at a company for as long as I need to until I'm ready to strike out on my own and form my own team, and I can't imagine finding a better place for that than Fugazo right now. A lot of game companies are not fun places to work. Fugazo is a notable exception.

What kind of strategies do you use when your job gets stressful?

Programming is often frustrating and can easily get stressful if you are not careful. I find it important to take breaks whenever I am really stuck or not thinking clearly, and I find that taking a walk right before lunch is very helpful in clearing my head. I also have started giving myself permission - with my boss's encouragement - to take short naps when I feel sleepy, especially in the afternoon. When it comes to jobs like programming that consist almost entirely of difficult problem-solving, it is often much more efficient to take a twenty-minute nap and come back refreshed than to fight back sleep deprivation for three hours without getting anything done. As with any sort of activity that involves sitting at a computer and staring at a screen all day, I've also found it very helpful to take a few minutes every so often to get up and move around, do some handstands, stretch, get my blood flowing, and help loosen whatever mental rut I might have gotten into while hunched over at my desk.

In your career field, is it difficult to balance work with home/family or personal life?

The game industry is one of the most notorious when it comes to poor work-life balance. This is a problem that is slowly improving, but it is definitely a real concern. Many companies, because of poor scheduling, can have months of forced "crunch time" at the end of a project, where people are working evenings, even weekends, continuously until the game is finished. Obviously, this is a very bad thing and it is arguably counter-productive in the long run, but many companies still do it. Even at Fugazo, where I work now, there may be a week or two of crunch at the end of a project, where I stay late in the evenings, but I've never worked weekends. Even then, no one is forcing me to stay late - I choose to keep working because I have a long list of things I want to get done, and I tend to be a perfectionist about these things. And I'll usually be the only one working late on most occasions, since no one is forced to crunch.

Outside of extreme circumstances like crunch time, I do often struggle to balance work and personal life. I wouldn't necessarily attribute this to the game industry itself. I think this has more to do with my inexperience (I've been working full-time for less than a year) and my tendency to cram way more things into my life than I could reasonably have time for. Though maybe the game industry tends to attract people like me anyway, so who knows!

What was it like when you went to high school? What kind of career planning did you have in high school?

I started high school about eight years ago. Back then, I wasn't thinking about jobs at all, but I knew that I wanted to do something with games. At the time I was doing a lot of programming on the graphing calculators we used in math class, making little games and releasing them online. I was also starting to read about using games for education and social change and became inspired to make that my life's work. As it turns out, those were the perfect things to be doing if I later wanted to start a career in game development!

What do you feel is most important when choosing a career?

There are a lot of ways to think about this question. One approach that I like is to think of something that you could see yourself getting really good at, if you spent the next ten or twenty years doing it for a living. That doesn't mean something you are already good at, necessarily, but something that you could see yourself learning to get really good at. I started learning to make games about ten years ago. The reason I choose to make games for a living now is not that I'm particularly good at it now, but I could see myself becoming really good at designing and making games over the next ten years. And that has less to do than the skills I currently have, and more to do with my passion and what I'm excited about and what I enjoy doing and learning and thinking about in my free time.

If you really love to do something, chances are that you could get really good at it - that if you kept doing it for a living over the next ten years, you wouldn't get bored and drop out - you'd keep learning and exploring and getting better and better as time goes on. I wouldn't suggest that you think about money right away. The jobs that tend to make a good amount of money are the jobs where you can keep getting better and better, where someone who is really good, with a lot of experience, can be worth ten or a hundred times what someone might be worth when they're just starting out. Like programming. Or game design. And you're going to have a hard time getting better and better unless you really love doing what you're trying to do. So try a bunch of things, find out what you love to do, and then ask yourself, "Which of these things could I really become good at, if I did this for a living for the next ten years?" Start there.

What advice do you have for me as I think about my future education and career plans?

Explore! Try lots of things, read about lots of things, ask lots of people about the things they do, and follow your curiosity when something attracts your interest. I was in fourth grade when I first learned that it was possible to make your own computer games. Before that, I guess I just assumed they spontaneously materialized in the store, fully formed, like action figures or LEGO sets. But once my eyes were opened to this possibility, I started reading every book I could find about how to make games, buying educational software, signing up for programming classes. At the time I had no idea what I was doing so my efforts were surprisingly ineffective, but I was persistent. I just wouldn't give up. And this interest gradually grew from a drip and a trickle here and there into a full-fledged flood of obsession that has significantly shaped my life and taken me to where I am right now.

But game development was not the only field that caught my interest. In high school, for example, I read tons of books on biology, philosophy, and how the mind works, just because I was so fascinated by these subjects. I thought I'd end up studying evolutionary biology or psychology or neuroscience in college, even though I ended up in computer science. And there's nothing wrong with that. In middle school I was big into music, and I started learning to make bamboo flutes in high school. Throughout the last several years I've been doing a lot of martial arts practice. And I'm still working as a programmer. But the key is to keep exploring. Be curious. There are so many things you could do with your life. Your life's work and passion may turn out to be something you've never even heard of yet. Before fourth grade, I'd certainly had no idea that I could make a living making games. If I hadn't been willing to explore, I would never have found this path.

And, if you want to get a job in the game industry, the best thing you can do right now is start making games. I made my first computer game in sixth grade. It wasn't a great game, but it was something, and I learned a lot in making it. And more importantly, after that I made another one. And another one. And another one. If you don't know how to make computer games, go and find out how. Look online, read books, take classes - whatever you can find. There are so many more resources out there now than there were ten years ago when I was starting out. Download a free tool like Game Maker to get started - you don't even need to learn programming. Or make board games, and test them out with your friends - no programming required. Just make games, and keep making games, and by the time you are actually trying to convince someone to hire you, you will be able say, "Look at this. I made this. And this, and this, and this."

If you want to make games, make games.

Lucid Sight Dreaming

2011-01-12T16:24:00.000-08:00

I had two lucid dreams this morning. The last lucid dream I had before that was less than a month ago. A year before that I had another. And my first one, more than a year before that. I like to think that the process is accelerating, that this reflects some underlying spiritual or psychological growth that is just beginning to manifest itself in the form of these dreams.

Perhaps.

Lucid dreams are those dreams where you realize that you are dreaming, and "wake up" within the world of the dream. Often this means that you can then control the dream, or at least influence the course of it. I've never had much success with trying to control my dreams, though. It's something that takes a lighter touch - you make something happen by expecting it do so, not by concentrating really hard and commanding it to happen - and I've had little opportunity to practice such controlled expectations in my dreams so far.

However, there is one thing that I have experienced in every lucid dream I've had. That is, a particular clarity and sharpness to the visual details of the dream world. Everything looks so much more real when I'm lucid, much more than the vague and muddled state of my ordinary dreaming. And the more lucid I am, the more calm and aware I am in my mental state, the more my sight improves. It's like putting on glasses.

To illustrate, I'll tell the story of my lucid dream last month:

2010/12/26
This morning I had a lucid dream after going back to sleep. It was my longest and most calm lucid segment yet. I was telling someone that I was dreaming, then decided to try to become lucid and started writing on a piece of paper, "I am dreaming." I saw the letters change as I read them, as they do in dreams, and continued to write on the paper and watch how my writing changed. Then I walked around, and I found that the level of my lucidity would correspond to the brightness of the space around me. I would start to lose it in dark areas, then become more aware again in bright areas with their windows open to the light and visual details outside.

That's it. The dream was notable in not feeling rushed or frantic at all. I was able to maintain my lucidity for a long time, relatively, with a calm and open mental state. It was like my mind was a net, holding everything together, and I was able to keep it from collapsing without much effort as long as I stayed in the light.

The key here was the light, and the visual details that went with it. But it wasn't until my dreams this morning that I realized the significance of this factor.

2011/01/12
I had a lucid dream. It started when I went outside to the backyard, in my dream. The openness and brightness and visual detail opened my eyes, and I became lucid. I collected my mind and did some breathing checks to confirm that I was dreaming - I found I could still breathe, even while pinching my nose shut. However, it must not have lasted too long, since I can't remember what I did after that other than walk around in the grass.

I had another lucid dream. I fell asleep again after writing about the first one, and dreamt that I came across some of the guys from Novel that I used to work with after graduating. I started walking along with them, near the university, and some others were with us too, talking about balance issues with the new MMO they are working on. There were a lot of students around, walking, too, on the sidewalks and street.

And then I opened my eyes and became lucid. Again, everything sharpened, the visual details popped out, and I realized I was in a dream.

But I found that I couldn't control the dream. I couldn't even walk anymore. When I tried to move my feet in the dream, focusing in on the feel of them pressing against the ground, I just felt my own feet in my bed, faintly but stronger and stronger the more I tried. And I realized it must be after 9am, and I must have fallen asleep again accidentally after writing in my notebook. So I allowed myself to come into my own body fully and woke up.

The interesting thing about these dreams is that they seemed to happen spontaneously, triggered not by some dream check or verbal reminder but just by the act of opening my eyes.

But with the experience of these last few lucid dreams so fresh in my memory now, I have realized that there is a particular trigger behind the lucidity I experienced, and that it is actually much easier to practice than a more conventional check like pinching my nose and trying to breathe.

What came first, the lucidity or the enhanced sight? Neither. It was the act of looking, wide-eyed, out and up, in awe, holding my entire visual field in perception, like this, that did it. The lucidity and the visual detail came together, in response.

Stepping outside in my first dream this morning triggered this act of looking. Looking outside, into the light, strengthened it in my dream from last month. And somehow, looking out at all the people, walking in sunlight, triggered it in my second dream this morning.

What this experience has told me is that the way to inspire more lucid dreams in the future is to practice this "wide-eyed" mental state often in daily waking life, rather than obsessively doing weird dream checks throughout the day that I can never seem to remember while asleep.

Because this state of mind - as well as the correspondingly muddled state of non-lucid dreaming - is one I recognize from my waking life as well. It's the same in both waking and dreaming, and I know it well. Having experienced the contrast so recently and often, relatively, I am now able to see this.

Just look up, open your eyes, let the details emerge, and become lucid. Not a bad habit to have, even while awake. Especially while awake.

Yugen and Games

2011-01-01T11:38:00.000-08:00

"As the taillights of that last ride grow small and wink out, the horizon gathers itself to your singular perspective. There is no grandeur to bait expectation, no promise to invite distraction, only the quiet of ditch and litter and grass and self; without preconceptions you begin to see your place in a different way, from the ground up. You warm to how consummate this place is in its becoming: the perfect pattern of stones along the shoulder; the fast food wrappers, their logos clinging just so to the sage; there at long rest in the shadows, that old trilobite of the highway, the fallen muffler. And so you become consummate yourself; instead of a face lost in an embarrassed crowd, you become unique and necessary to that moment, your perspective creating, for better or worse, this one place in the world. It is a time to whistle."

That was a quote by John Landretti, from his essay "On Waste Lonely Places" in the book The Future of Nature. I had written it down by hand in my notebook close to a year ago; looking back through my notes of the past year in reflection, I found it again and decided to share it.

It reminded me of this blog post, which I had just come across earlier this week. The author describes playing the small art game The Graveyard, then the bigger and decidedly-non-art game GTA IV, and how both of these games created in him an experience he called yugen, "the sudden perception of something mysterious and strange, hinting at an unknown never to be discovered."

Playing it, I found an odd thing. I found my head starting to clear. It wasn’t so much that I was sensing the emptiness around me - rather I was the emptiness. My thoughts were coming and going on their own - frothing up then melting away again - and slowly the oceans of my mind began to fall calm.

There was nothing mystical or arcane about it, merely an experience of being right here, right now. It was very ordinary.

To me it sounds like the experience of meditation, or at least the kind of meditation that I am familiar with.

And it sounds like a fruitful area of experience for notgames to explore, since this is something you are left with when you strip the "game" from "games", letting only the interaction and immersion remain.

The feeling of yugen hovers in the background of many games - filling me with the desire to explore those green hills behind Super Mario World’s flat levels, say - but it usually only breaks through fully when the mechanics of narrative and threat have been removed. My mind can’t empty in Another World - despite the barren, evocative landscapes - because it is so focused on avoiding death and finding a way home. It is when the designers take a step back from filling our time with obstacles and rewards, and allow us just to experience the realms they have created, that the subtler emotions like yugen are given room to manifest.

Still, I think there is something missing, something that we will have to identify before we can really make compelling yugen-ish experiences that are not games. When you strip the distracting goals and challenges from conventional games, what you get is rarely worth writing blog posts about. If nothing else, such "gamification" is good at getting people to care about what goes on in a virtual world, and the other ways of creating engagement and involvement with a story and characters common in movies and books and such tend to be more difficult in interactive media. But I think we just don't know enough.

I suspect that there are ways to direct this experience more subtly, still from a game designer's perspective, but not so heavy-handed with goals or points or typical game-y things. More toward Knytt, perhaps, but further. Much further.

I don't know. I guess I'll just have to try it sometime.

Happy New Year.

"Offering your attention to a waste place is like finding a book in a library, a book nobody reads. Or perhaps a book harboring a single due date, one purple smudge thirty years old. And there it is in your hand by the effortless design of coincidence. You look over its pages and before is effort and presence; whether the contents have appeal is another matter, but the book does exist and is open before you, full of its telling. And so it is with these shelves and sheaves of world that daily surround us: every rock, blade, and bottle, every leaf, an invitation to an understanding."

- John Landretti, "On Waste Lonely Places", The Future of Nature

My First Time

2010-12-05T17:59:00.000-08:00

I killed Starshine. I slit her throat.

I held her a long time before that, feeling the pulse at her throat, the warmth of her body, the movement of her breathing. Chickens can sit very calm if you hold them the right way - crouching over her, hand around her neck gently, fingers in the soft feathers of her belly.

Then upside down by the feet, similarly calm. Tied her up on the pear tree right above where my last treefrog was buried. Bright red blood dripping down through the decaying leaf litter. Phil held her wings as she convulsed in death, like a person violently vomiting, blood from a gash in the neck. I hope that she did not suffer; I fear that she did. Three times, deepening the cut. How terrible, how incompetent...

I was barefoot. My toes were painfully cold, I realized once the blood had stopped dripping and her eyes had closed. Sitting on a beach towel on the bathroom floor, drying my feet, I cried to myself, partly in pain, partly from nausea, and partly out of guilt and horror over what I had done. Maybe not long enough, but it was something. I didn't skin the body, though I helped pull some feathers out. I watched Phil do it and held the pan for the organs and meat.

Crouching there, with my knife to her throat, feeling her pulse with my hand - it was like standing on the edge of a high-dive, looking down at the water far below. We're all waiting for you. How could I do this? How could I let anyone else do this instead? But oh, it was far too easy to take that plunge. I'm sorry. And thank you.

I don't want to write about this anymore.

Midnight, Starshine, and Princess Buttercup in their early adolescent years. Year.

Origami Zergling and Hydralisk Tutorial Videos Complete

2010-11-25T09:35:00.000-08:00

Earlier this year, I released three videos of me folding my origami hydralisk, hoping that this would help the people who got stuck trying to follow my step-by-step diagrams.

Sadly, it did not. Many people replied, asking for more clarification on the infamous Step 11.

YouTube is a great place to practice NVC...

So, being the generous and understanding origami teaching person that I am, I decided to try again, with a much slower video where I narrate each step of the way in detail, as if guiding a complete beginner.

And it seemed to work. Yay.

I love how you go so slow, other just go through things so fast.

Thnx for posting this, I menaged to fold one while watching! Good tempo and very instructive!!

Most of the time people go too fast and you miss a step, but there is NO possible way you can miss a step in this. Awesome! You must be a genius o.O

thank you u are one of da best origami narrator :D

And, the classic...

god thank u after 2 years i did step 11

Yeah, after seven years I finally have created some instructions that other people can follow. :p

It's very slow, so it's a long video. Slow but good. :) In eight parts on YouTube. Here's the first:

And the rest:

Also, I made a similarly slow, narrated tutorial video for my origami zergling as well. In ten parts. Here's the first:

And the rest:

And again, the acclaim:

Thanks that was the best series of explanation videos ever.

this is a very noob friendly vid. nice. you don't see origami videos this well made that often.

sir, you have my respect and the [SF] Official Seal of Approval

The best part is knowing that I have improved people's lives in real, tangible ways. I give people the power to fold origami aliens. Now that's what I call real value. :)

After 2 and a half hours of testing my persistence and determination I have completed this project. Thank you axcho, because of you, I am now the epitome of cool, the envy among my peers and I have a freakin' paper zergling.

Thank you, axcho, for these fantastic videos! I've finished my (hot pink) zergling! It can join the esteemed company of my origami hydralisks (also thanks to you)!

Thanks for the videos! I just finished my zergling, and I knew almost nothing about origami before. :D

Seriously, that's amazing. Several people who have never done origami before have commented saying that they were able to follow these instructions and make an origami zergling as their first model.

Okay, now you can start bugging me about an origami ultralisk. Maybe I'll actually make one in a few more years. ;)

Why Avatar Is Important

2010-10-24T21:09:00.000-07:00

I wrote this back in January, and somehow never got around to posting it until now. Well, here it is. Better late than never, right?

There was this other movie that everyone seems to be talking about. I saw that one, in IMAX 3D. I shamelessly add it to my list of favorite movies, along with The Matrix and Lilo & Stitch and other such gems of cinema. I may be excessively indie when it comes to games, but no one can accuse me of being a film snob.

Whatever people are saying about it, what I appreciated in that movie was that it clearly showed what people left behind when they took up agriculture and industrialization and the trend toward global corporate hegemony - I said "hegemony" haha! - that is, the fun. Not moral superiority, not environmental friendliness, not utopian peace and happiness, but a life that, despite the dangers, the high mortality rate, the lack of iPhones or toilet paper or whatever else you want to measure, a life that is richly fulfilling, challenging, rewarding, interesting, in a way that the human mind and body craves and thrives on - in a word, fun.

This pressure gradient between the two societies, the fun and the unfun, is what drove the progression of this story. And this movie drove this difference home in the way no other medium could - except for games, of course - and for that reason, it is important. That's it.

And lots of people feel it. They feel this gradient pushing them away from their own lives and into the imaginary fun of the movie, which is no place to be if you are in fact a real person. But this fun place is real, it's just out of sight, in the past, or in those pockets of the world where the fun has yet to be sucked out and converted into GDP.

But no one's talking about it like that, because the usual sides to pick, the usual ways to debate these kinds of things are so readily available. Yes, kind of sad. But it gives me hope. If you show people what they're missing, they will feel it, and they will desperately seek it out, even if they believe it to be imaginary.

So, hope for the world. I must remember my mission. This is why I chose games. Light the fire, make the spark. Don't crack the whip. Whips don't work very well on rockets anyway.

Teaching Flixel

2010-10-13T23:55:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, I started teaching some kids how to make games with Flixel and other free tools. I'm offering my time up as a volunteer, at a progressive school I came across through this inspiring blog. Here is an email I just wrote to my students:

Hi class,

I'm really tired right now. I should be sleeping. But I'm writing these instructions to you now because of something that is more urgent to me than sleep. River sent me an email asking me again to explain how to finish the animation and change where the bullet shoots from. He apparently wanted to figure this out enough that he bothered to remind me about it. He didn't have to do that. I don't have to do anything for you guys. But he wanted to. And because he wanted to, I will do whatever it takes to help him get there, even though I'm really busy, even though I'm tired. Because this is the whole reason that I decided to try teaching a class at PSCS. I came here on the chance that I might be able to help someone get somewhere they really want to go but can't get to by themselves. I'm not an expert in most things, but this opportunity to share what I can with people who want it is very motivating for me.

And I've been waiting for this. And now I see the beginnings of it.

I'm not attached to you wanting to learn game programming, or game design, or whatever. You love playing games, and I think there is a chance that you may come to love creating games as well, once you get more of a taste of it. It is an acquired taste. It might not be your thing. Which is fine with me. I don't really care personally either way. But if it is, and if there is a chance that it might be, I will do whatever I can to catch that spark in you, and help you kindle it into a steady flame, if you so choose. Just let me know.

Yeah. So, those instructions...

You added some code in the beginning of update() that said this:

var moved:Boolean = false;

Then you added code to each if-statement for the arrow keys, to changed moved to true, if you press an arrow key during the update.

moved = true;

So you have a virtual bucket, sitting in your computer's memory, which you call moved, in which you can put either true or false. But it doesn't do anything by itself. It just sits there.

However, it is useful. Because you can look at it. If it has true inside it, you know that an arrow key was pressed, because you put true in it whenever an arrow key is pressed. Right? If it has false inside it, you know that no arrow key was pressed.

Say you wanted to do something only if an arrow key was pressed, and another thing if no arrow key was pressed. Like play a walk animation, or play an idle animation. If you wanted to do that, then it might be helpful to look into this moved bucket, and see what's inside.

You could say...

If moved has true inside of it, then play the walk animation.
Otherwise (if it is false), play the idle animation.

And you could translate that into actual AS3 code, like this:

if (moved)
{
_box.play("walk");
}
else
{
_box.play("idle");
}

And you would put that code in update(), after all the arrow keys and such have been checked.

Some notes:

if (moved) is the same as if (moved == true) - because what you put between the parentheses in an if-statement is checked to see if it is equal to true. If it is equal to true, the code in the curly braces is run. Otherwise, it runs the code for else.

Why does if (FlxG.keys.LEFT) work to see if the left arrow key is pressed? Because FlxG.keys.LEFT is a virtual bucket that holds true if the left arrow key is pressed and false otherwise. Get it?

Also, there is no way to just stop an animation. You must have another animation to replace it. For example, you could create an animation, with _box.addAnimation(), that is called "idle" and that has only one frame in its list of frames. Then when you play that animation, the _box would stay on that one frame forever, unless you play a different animation later on.

You might also wonder whether telling the _box to play an animation, telling it again and again every frame, might make it start over from the beginning every frame and not get anywhere. There is a way to do that. But fortunately, Flixel will not restart the animation if it's already playing. So this works.

There you have it - the instructions for how to make an animation only play while moving. It will take a bit of work, a bit of thought, a bit of failure and frustration and trial-and-error in order to get it to work in your particular program. But this is the price we pay.

I do not demand success from you. But I do demand that you try, or I cannot help you. And I suggest that you try more than once, even if you fail at first. You have unlimited lives, when it comes to programming. Remember that.

Next.

Making bullets shoot from somewhere other than the top left corner of the box sprite.

This is easier.

Find the code where you first create the bullet. It looks something like this:

var bullet:FlxSprite = new FlxSprite(_box.x, _box.y);

Remember? That creates a new FlxSprite, and gives it the name bullet, and puts it at a certain spot on the screen. That certain spot on the screen happens to be the upper left corner of the _box sprite.

If the box sprite has its corner at the coordinates (5, 10) and it is 50 pixels wide and 50 pixels high, then where is its center?

I'll tell you the answer. Its center is at the coordinates (5 + 50 / 2, 10 + 50 / 2), which is the same as (5 + 25, 10 + 25), which is (30, 35).

To put it more generally, the box's center is at (_box.x + 25, _box.y + 25). Just add an offset of (25, 25) and you get the center. Right?

What if you wanted to put the bullet at the center of the box?

var bullet:FlxSprite = new FlxSprite(_box.x + 25, _box.y + 25);

Would that work? I suggest you try it out and see.

What if you want it to appear somewhere other than the center? Well, try using some other numbers, instead of 25.

Once you get that working (which I'm sure you will), try making an animation for the bullet. Can you do it?

Show me on Monday.

If you have any questions, let me know before the weekend.

Good luck.

How Artists Want to Make Games

2010-09-19T15:29:00.000-07:00

On the notgames forum, Michaël Samyn posted this thread:

Programming in code is counter-productive for people with art-sided brains. The solution to this problem exists: graphical programming. But the people who need to implement this solution happen to be its worst enemies. Because to engineers, code-based programming beats everything.

Until somebody somewhere starts believing artists when they say they want to program in a visual language, or starts realizing that giving access to artists is the best way for a creative technology to continue evolving, I find myself settling with inferior designs. Because I cannot express myself adequately in code, I need to change my ideas, I need to talk about simpler things in a simple way.

It's like someone is forcing me to write poetry in French. French is a great language. And people who are familiar with it can write beautiful poetry. But I speak Dutch. My Dutch poems are subtle and sublime. In French, however, all I can write are nursery rhymes.

So I've been thinking about this a lot over the last several days. Actually I've been obsessively thinking about it non-stop and reading everything I can on related topics online.

I tend to do that for a different thing every week. This week, it's been this.

So there are a few pieces I've been focusing on, that seem most crucial to the success of a programming or game development tool for artists. There are probably others, but I thought I'd share what I've been thinking about so far.

One is readability through R-mode perception.

First of all, a disclaimer: When I say "R-mode" versus "L-mode", as in "Right brain" or "Relational" or "Rtistic" versus "Left brain" or "Logical" or "Linear", I don't mean to suggest that the brain is really divided into strict differences between its physical right and left halves. That is an outdated belief. But I find the terminology to be a useful shorthand.

Thinking on Michael's comments about visual flowcharts being easier for him to read than linguistic code, and looking back on my own experience, I think there really is something significant about how the code is presented and perceived, even when the underlying logic is the same.

When I am reading code (or a book!) I am usually using what I call "L-mode" perception - going through in a linear, linguistic way, and building up my mental model one step, one line of code at a time, following the logic that is expressed symbolically, in sequences like that.

However, sometimes my mind is in an "R-mode" of all-at-once, spatial perception like you'd use for looking at a painting or trying to find a certain LEGO piece in a big box of pieces. When I am in that state of mind, and I look at code (or to a lesser extent, written language) I see all the words at once and perceive the spatial relationships between them, and the underlying logic of the code is utterly incomprehensible to me. Obviously not the "right" way to read code.

But maybe it could be.

Ha, that would be a good tagline. "The right way to code." :P

The thing about R-mode perception is that it's a lot easier to be creative when you're in it. The other thing about R-mode perception is that artists are usually a lot more skilled at functioning in R-mode than they are in L-mode.

Therefore, if you had a tool that let you do programming while in R-mode rather than L-mode, it might be slightly easier to do creative things with it. At the least, there would be less inefficiency caused by switching between R-mode and L-mode whenever you think about what you want to change and then have to dive into the code to actually change it.

However, this may not even be possible.

All the visual programming editors I've seen, all the examples that have been posted here, require an uncomfortable mix of L-mode and R-mode perception in order to use. What I tend to see is a bunch of visually identical boxes connected by lines, and differentiated by text.

What you see in R-mode is the set of relationships between the boxes. But you can't tell what each of the boxes does. To do that, you must read the text and think symbolically, in L-mode. Really, very little information is conveyed through spatial relationships, through R-mode. Most of it is still sequential and symbolic.

For that reason, I find that pure written code, all L-mode, is much easier for me to deal with, since I don't need to switch around multiple times a second just to figure out what everything means. However, I suspect that there may be a way to create a pure R-mode method of programming too. But I'm not confident that it's actually possible. Just intrigued enough to try.

There are some programmers who hate the idea of visual programming, and say that it's a waste of time to use spatial relationships to convey the meaning of code. If you are one of those people and you use syntax coloring or indentation, you are a hypocrite.

So there's one aspect. Make sure your tool is R-mode accessible, if you want artists to be able to use it.

The second thing is building with functional pieces in real (or almost real) time.

Artists tend to appreciate tools where "what you see is what you get" - you're manipulating the end result, so you can immediately see the results of your actions. The process becomes more like sculpting.

Programmers tend to discount such tools as nice but unnecessary. They are used to typing in code for an hour, hitting a button, and waiting a minute for everything to compile and show up on the screen.

These are two fundamentally different mindsets, as different as a slideshow and an animation.

When you operate in the slow, "slideshow" approach, development and creativity tends to happen in an architected, "top-down" way. You have a plan, which is in your head, and then you put in a bunch of time and hard work to mold reality into the shape of that plan.

There is a fundamental shift that occurs as you decrease the time between action and result. It's as real as the shift that occurs when you hit 24 frames per second - from slideshow to animation. To your brain, it's alive, it's moving.

When you operate in the immediate, "animation" way, development tends to operate in a more exploratory, "bottom-up" process. You don't have to have an entire plan in your head. You see the results of your actions immediately, and if they are surprising or unexpected, you can adjust your plan. You can try random things and follow them if they prove to be interesting.

In the area of game design, innovation is much more likely to come out of an exploratory process than an architected one. As Jonathan Blow said earlier. It's hard to do things that haven't been done before if you have to plan it all out in your head first.

So we want a tool that allows us to sculpt the end result, with immediate feedback.

Part of this is that everything you can make should work. It may not work in the way you desire or expect, but it should still do something.

If you are painting with pixels in an art program, no matter how you put those pixels down on the screen, it will always be a functional, viewable image. It might not be pretty, but you can still see it. You are never going to run into a error message that says, "Invalid pixels at position 55, 46. Image cannot be displayed."

But if you are writing the code for a program, this sort of thing happens all the time. Most of the things you can type won't work at all. They won't turn into a program, even a broken one. There are right ways to write code, and wrong ways to write it.

I would say that this also makes a big difference. Perhaps the biggest difference is that writing code has a much higher barrier to entry, more learning how to do things at all before you can start learning how to do them well. But it also makes experimentation so much more difficult. You can't throw a bunch of random stuff together just to see what happens. Because what happens is nothing. It just won't do anything at all.

So if you can build only with pieces that work, and immediately see what changes, this would make truly artistic interactive art much easier to create.

The last thing is expressing general logic through specific examples.

This is probably the most impossible and most revolutionary but least important of the three. If you just had a tool that you'd use in R-mode, that let you shape the end results with immediate feedback, that could be awesome, and probably enough to make a huge difference.

But at the same time I am intrigued by this further vision I have of providing specific examples, which the system will extrapolate to create possible general rules for creating those examples, which you will then provide feedback on and refine in order to guide the system's hypotheses toward the end you have in mind.

Because I don't see how to actually avoid symbols when describing logic, or how to directly manipulate end results in a general way. Because games are systems, and the end results happen when you take the rules that you have set up and run them through their paces.

So maybe this is the only way to achieve those first two goals in their entirety.

What am I talking about?

You know how you draw diagrams and mockups for different things that happen in different situations in a game? Like this. It's a pretty common way to organize your thoughts when you're designing. The thing about those is they're all organized around specific examples, not general rules. So you might draw a diagram with a guy hitting a wall, showing how he bounces off or breaks through it or whatever. It's not completely specific, as you might have an abstract line standing in for any kind of wall, and a stick figure representing any kind of guy, but at the same time it's very concrete. And you can add general connotations by writing in little notes, to explain the rules behind the example more clearly.

The reason that we don't just stop there is that our game development tools require everything to be spelled out exactly - they cannot extrapolate from these examples, because there is so much ambiguity. It could mean this or it could mean that.

However, we run into a similar problem when trying to communicate our ideas to other people who are helping us make them into a reality. Especially if we are designers and we are telling programmers what to do. How do we solve this problem with other people?

Part of this is by clarifying with more examples when an area is unclear. Kind of starting at the highest level and breaking it down into more specific situations when necessary. Another part is through conversation, asking "It sounds like you're describing this... Is that right?" and responding "Yes, exactly!" or "No, I was thinking something more like this..."

Both of these could be accomplished with a special computer program instead of a human programmer. Maybe not as well, especially in terms of accuracy of translation, but in some ways better - particularly, in the time between your description of a design and seeing something on the screen. And this increase in speed could make up for the lack of accuracy, since you can adjust and correct much more quickly. And as a result, make use of exploratory design instead of architecture.

Break dynamics down into stories instead of rules. A playthrough of the entire game could be an example story, and you could create example stories of successively smaller and smaller pieces of the game until you have specified it completely. Or completely enough.

The tool generates possible rules that could create the situations you specify, and presents several for you to try out. Most likely none of them work the way you want. Pick the one that's closest, and let it generate more possibilities based on that. It's an evolutionary search. Like Biomorphs.

And stories don't always have to be specific stories about specific instances. They can be more or less abstract and universal. Like Raven, with a capital "R", who is both the character Raven and all ravens and all tricksters at once. Or the princess in the tower, or the wise old man, or the dragon in the cave. Or the stick figure on the crosswalk sign who represents all pedestrians who could ever walk this way. There is a continuum between the specific and the symbol.

I am particularly inspired by the concept of the Dreamtime. The translation of this name is misleading, as it does not refer to a time in history. It is like a parallel slice of the world running alongside and underneath the specific, physical world, where the gods and heroes walk, creating and personifying the dynamics and processes that underlie everything we see in reality.

I want a tool where I can not only shape the world as a level designer, but also shift into the Dreamtime and shape the dynamics of that world as concretely I would shape the placement of coins and mushrooms.

When this happens, we will get our interactive art.

Walk or Die and other games that are notgames

2010-09-10T23:42:00.001-07:00

I don't spend a lot of time playing games these days. Portal sits in my computer, unfinished. A borrowed copy of Psychonauts lies unopened by a dusty PS2. I have accumulated a list of more than a hundred web games yet to try, and I haven't even checked the Jay is Games archives in several months.

So, it may come as a surprise to you that today, in a bout of either procrastination or perhaps a newly strengthened determination to make a dent in my overwhelming backlog of unplayed games, I have, in fact, gone ahead and played a handful of games. Well, technically speaking, notgames.

Not sure if I've mentioned notgames yet on my blog. Officially, they do not exist. There are no notgames, nor is there a "notgames" movement. But there is a forum. :p And a blog.

One is called Hummingbird Mind. I found it very immersive, despite - or because of? - being mostly text. Immersive like a novel. Or like I Fell in Love with the Majesty of Colors, maybe.

Perhaps it helped that I found myself in a similar mental state to the protagonist. If only I could allow myself to take a nap as I did in that game. Or notgame?

Another is Looming. Same guy who made The Majesty of Colors. The black and white pixel art brought me back to my Mac SE and calculator days. I'd like to make a game in such a style sometime.

It's a good example of distributed or embedded narrative. In fact, that's all it is, really. You are an archaeologist. Piece together clues about the past in a ruined world. Like Where We Remain. I'd like to do something similar for my own game Flydrill, eventually.

And then there is Freedom Bridge, whose author even refers to it as a notgame. Not quite Passage, but I found it very effective, particularly considering how absolutely minimal it is. I do wonder whether making the graphics more detailed would improve or detract from the experience. I'm not sure, but I'd be curious to find out. I'll be thinking about what inspiration I might take from this.

And lastly, Walk or Die, by the same author. It was this notgame, perhaps the least impressive of the four, that inspired me to write this blog post and overcome many months of non-blogging inertia in doing so.

...or die

By the way, once you try these games, you should head over to the Game Trekking website for the chance to support the author of Freedom Bridge and Walk or Die in making more experimental notgames as he travels across Asia. Less than three weeks to go if we want to get this off the ground. I've pledged one hundred dollars.

Anyway.

Here's why I wanted to write this blog post in the first place. After playing Walk or Die, I wrote this post on the notgames forum, which I am now reposting here, on my blog:

Finally got around to playing your notgames. ;)

I played it for at least ten minutes, while walking on my treadmill. :) I liked it quite a bit.

Actually, I really like it. I stimulated my creativity almost like a real walk would... though it helped that my real legs were moving at the same time. :D

I really like the day/night transition. I've been wanting to make a game with a five-minute day with the changing light and sounds and creatures - I've even commissioned a song for it, with morning, day, evening, and night, and I love the song but I haven't made the game for it yet. :p

One suggestion to try which might go against what you were originally exploring is requiring a steady relaxing pattern to be maintained at about the pace of an average slow walk, rather than holding the space bar.

I was thinking the same thing! Press to step, control speed, and all that. Maybe even more interesting terrain to walk on, as opposed to a completely flat surface. And I could see that being interesting, focusing on the feeling of accidentally stumbling and the fear of death.

And also I wanted to see more elaboration on the "death" part of the experience, because you can still observe, and maybe see the one spot grow and change over time though you are not going anywhere, you are transforming.

"Oh, this looks like a nice place to die. I will stop here." I thought.

And maybe combined with something like We the Giants, leaving traces for other people, seeing other people's traces. Reminds me of an idea I had about a game where you walk along a pebble beach, and you can arrange pebbles and driftwood in configurations that other people can see, or you could entropy-ishly knock over a tower someone made. And close to the waves, structures are knocked over and smoothed over naturally by the water and wind, while further, toward the cliffs, footprints and structures last longer.

Not sure how that would apply here, exactly, but it's got me thinking... :)

This is like the notgame equivalent of the game Linear RPG! :D

Now I really want to take this concept and have brontosaurus make some really nice pixel art for it! And nice sounds... No music, just high quality environmental recordings.

Procedural. I've been reading about how Left 4 Dead's AI Director works (fascinating stuff!) and I wonder now about applying it to other ends. Specifically, instead of measuring "emotional intensity" and modulating stress levels, how about modulating "boredom" or "joy" or "confusion" or "interest"? The system is really not that complex. I'm reading about it because I'm trying to do something similar for my game Flydrill.

I've wanted to make a game that feels like walking in a forest. So far The Path is the closest thing I've found. And now this.

Mind if I elaborate on this concept with a real (not)game? :)

Hum. By the way, I finished two new narrated video tutorials for my origami zergling and hydralisk. They are slow, and for the first time people are actually getting all the way through to the end! I'll post about them soon...

Origami Hydralisk Tutorial Video and StarCraft II Released!

2010-07-28T19:30:00.000-07:00

Update:
I just posted two slow, narrated tutorial videos for origami beginners - one for the zergling, and another for the hydralisk. Check them out. ;)

In case you haven't heard, StarCraft II is finally out! :D

Conveniently, Blizzard has been kind enough to time their release to coincide with the even more exciting release of my own epic, three-part TUTORIAL VIDEO for my original origami hydralisk design! ;)

A long-awaited release, most assuredly.

Rather than try to describe it to you, I'll just embed the videos right here on this blog and you can experience their amazing splendor firsthand. Just try not to let your head explode.

FOR THE SWARM! :D

It's been three years since people first started bugging me with incessant demands for a tutorial video. But now I can rest in peace, because the tutorial video is complete! :D Or not, because now they're asking when I'll be posting the instructions for my origami zergling. Oops. :p

If you want to be the first to know when I post my zergling tutorial video, go ahead and subscribe to my YouTube channel. :)

instructions coming 'soon'...

Game Idea Giveaway - City Basher

2010-06-10T22:23:00.000-07:00

Last year, I wrote up this game idea giveaway for Emanuele Feronato to post on his popular Flash game development blog. But after waiting for many months without a reply from him, I decided to post it here so I can finally share it with all of you!

Be warned, this giveaway is epically long. My longest yet.

...continued from The Game Idea Giveaway Thread

Request by triqui:

what sort of game idea you're looking for
intriguing but difficult-to-implement ideas will do

what your goals are in making this game
I would like to make a post about gameplay ideas

The idea: City Basher

In short, City Basher is a physics-based multiplayer artillery game combined with a trading card game (like Magic: The Gathering). It's a competitive game where you try to knock over your opponent's buildings, and it is designed to work very well with microtransactions.

This game is founded on the wide appeal of vanquishing strangers over the Internet and the primal joy of toppling carefully built towers of blocks, without the bother of having to actually build them in the first place. For that reason, the game is primarily a quick deathmatch experience, like most online multiplayer games aimed at bloodthirsty teenage males. Though there is also the option for team play and casual matches between friends.

Like other multiplayer artillery games, most notably Worms, each play session is short, measured in minutes, and involves only a handful of players. But as a game supported by microtransactions, players maintain a persistent identity across play sessions, retaining their avatar, items, resources, and statistics. This is the approach taken by Gunbound, a multiplayer artillery game that was one of the earliest successful microtransaction-based games to establish itself with Western audiences. Gunbound made its money by selling avatar decorations. City Basher will do that, and more. Much more. [cue dramatic music]

Each play session takes place in a 2D arena, seen from the side. The arena is full of buildings, structures of physically-modeled blocks, some solidly stacked, some precarious. At first, the arena is a neutral territory, dominated by a huge monolith in the center. Players take their places in the arena, each one piloting a vehicle with a mounted cannon or two. The game begins, and players open fire on the buildings to convert them to their own color. When one player topples an enemy building, a new building rises up in its place, owned by the player who placed the final shot and color-coded accordingly. The session ends when the neutral monolith in the center is toppled, and players are awarded their final scores.

The play format is very flexible. The game is not zero-sum. Players play for points, not simply to defeat their opponents. If you destroy one of my buildings, you are rewarded and I am penalized, but your success does not depend on my failure. It merely happens to coincide with it. Players are never eliminated from the game, though they are free to leave at any time - their buildings are simply replaced by neutral ones. And most arenas would support a varying number of players depending on how many people are available. If there are slots open, new players can join an existing game. This is very important for a casual multiplayer game like City Basher.

Since this is a game supported by microtransactions, we want to make everything into an item that can be bought and used up. Not that players would necessarily have to pay real money for everything in the game, but it's nice to have that option. What this does is set up the expectation that things can be bought. If players get used to paying for items with virtual currency earned in the game, they'll be more open to paying real money for the really valuable items they might want later on. In City Basher, these items consist of vehicles, weapons, buildings, arenas, avatar decorations, and general enhancements.

Gameplay

An important part of most any game is the movement, how a player gets around in the world. In City Basher, vehicles encapsulate this piece of the gameplay. Every player starts with a basic vehicle that is like a slow-moving tank. But other vehicles could be bought. They might move faster, they might be smaller or larger or shaped differently, and some might even fly or hover or jump. However, movement isn't the focus of this game, so it should be kept fairly simple. As a result, each vehicle is controlled in more or less the same way - that is, with the arrow keys or with the mouse, following the mouse cursor. Also for simplicity and to minimize the effect of lag, vehicles would not be able to collide with other vehicles or knock over buildings. Instead, they would pass through other vehicles harmlessly and treat building blocks as immovable terrain.

The real fun of the game starts with the weapons. This is the part that puts the artillery in artillery games. As is typical in the genre, the basic weapon is a slow-firing cannon, which the player must aim by setting the angle and power of the shot with the mouse or keyboard. There are a lot of ways to set up the specific controls for this action, so I won't go into too much detail here. The easiest way I can imagine is just to click the mouse to set up an attack, move the cursor to set the angle and power, and click again to fire. This way, you could fire off a quick shot by double-clicking. Since attacking is a focus of the game, different weapons could even have different methods of control, as long as they support both the keyboard and the mouse.

For a game like this, there would be dozens, if not hundreds, of different weapons to buy. Some might be variations on the basic cannonball, maybe with extremely high mass for extra power on stable buildings, or a small but extremely bouncy ball that can ricochet off multiple blocks and quickly take out more delicate structures. Some weapons might shoot several balls at a time, or an explosive shell, or several balls chained together. Others might be a different kind of weapon altogether, like a rocket launcher or a block-melting death ray. There are a ton of possibilties here - just look at a game like Worms for example. Each weapon would have a certain reload rate, a waiting period of anything from a half a second to several minutes before they can fire again. This would help to give the game a more strategic, turn-based flavor, without the turns. For this reason, there could also be weapons that are weak but useful because of their rapid firing rate. Another part of the strategy would be in selecting your arsenal, since you can only bring a limited number of different weapons into each game.

The other focus of the game is on buildings. Weapons are what you use, and buildings are what you use them on. So naturally, you'd be paying a lot of attention to them. Just like there are different types of weapons, there are also different types of buildings, each one a particular configuration of blocks of various size, shapes, and masses. Some have special side effects too, that are active while the building is in play. For example, one building might increase the mass of all your other buildings while it is in play, making them harder to knock over. There could even be a building that increases the strength of gravity over the entire arena, or doubles your score from every hit. It's a lot like the way that different cards have rule-changing effects in games like Magic: The Gathering or Pokemon.

The similarities don't end there. City Basher handles buildings just like cards in a trading card game. You don't build buildings, you collect them. Each player has a bunch of building cards in their collection. Each of these cards represents a particular building type, though a player might own several copies of the same card. When you join a game, you choose a set of cards from your collection that will be available to you during the match, in the form of a deck of cards. Like any trading card game, there is a limit to the number of cards that you can include in a single deck, and a limit to the number of duplicates you can use of the same building card. This means that you have to put some thought into which ones you choose. Some players might even spend more time just designing their decks than they do in playing the actual game!

When you choose which deck you want to use for a play session, this determines the type of buildings you can get in the game. Whenever you are due to have one of your own buildings pop up in the arena - say, when you topple an opponent's building - a random card is taken from your deck, and placed in the arena as a new building. When that building is toppled, the corresponding card is returned to your deck. That means that if you have three copies of the Citadel of Awesomeness card in your deck, you can have up to three Citadel of Awesomeness buildings in play at any time. And if you have no more cards in your deck when you destroy an enemy building, that building is replaced by a neutral one instead. The most powerful buildings are designated as Legendary buildings, and can only sprout up in special Legendary building slots, of which there might only be one or two in any given arena. Legendary building cards are ignored when drawing for normal building slots. This helps keep the game balanced.

Finally, there are the arenas, where the games take place. These are not items owned by individual players, but the effect is similar, since players may have to spend points or money to access certain arenas. At its core, an arena is a 2D map of indestructible terrain with a bunch of building slots scattered around - areas on the ground where a building may sit. One of these areas is reserved for the monolith, the giant neutral building that ends that game when it is toppled. The arena defines what this monolith looks like, as well as the deck of possible neutral buildings that may pop up. Each arena also specifies how many players are allowed at a time and where they appear at the start of the game. Lastly, each arena defines its own physical properties like gravity, air resistance, and wind, as well as the background graphics and sounds that make up the feel of the place.

Monetization

In a typical microtransaction-based game, there are two types of virtual currency involved in the in-game economy. One is earned through playing the game, like experience points. The other is bought for real money, which is how the developers make a profit. City Basher is no exception. Players can exchange their real money for a virtual currency we'll call Coins, and they can also earn another virtual currency, Points, through gameplay. The names used here are just for convenience, by the way - in the actual game you'd probably want something a bit more glamorous.

Players can earn Points in a number of ways. The most common way to earn Points is to knock down an opponent's building. You don't have to knock it down completely to get points - you only have to reduce its height with your shot. Each type of building is worth a certain number of Points to topple, and you get a fraction of that for every fraction of the building's original height that you knock over. However, you only get to replace it with a building of your own if you deliver the final blow, one that topples the building completely. The advantage to having lots of your own buildings in the arena is that at the end of the game, when the monolith falls, you receive Points for each of your buildings according to their remaining height and Point value.

This results in a system where new players can join in the middle of an existing game without having any unfair advantages or disadvantages relative to the other players. It also encourages players to stick around for the whole session in order to earn bonus points at the end for their remaining buildings. At the same time, no one is bothered if they leave, since their buildings are replaced by neutral ones which yield Points just as readily as player buildings. And it works just as well for team games, since players on the same team simply share a single color, and don't earn any Points from toppling their teammates' buildings. On the whole, it is a scoring system designed to reward good players, without punishing the players who aren't as skilled. This keeps the game accessible to casual audiences. And that means more money for you.

So, let's talk a little more about money. Specifically, let's talk about what players spend it on, and why. First of all, let me emphasize that the game itself is free to play. Players are not spending money just to play the game, they are spending it to buy virtual items inside the game. This is what it means to have a game based on microtransactions. Second, it is important to understand why players would want to buy these imaginary items at all. Players will spend money not so much as an exchange but as an investment. It's not about exchanging value. Why would a player give you real money for nothing? It's about investment. A player gets some significant value through playing the game for free, and then they think that they could enjoy even greater value in the long run if they invest a little bit of their own money right now. They should feel like they're getting a great deal every time they spend money in your game. If you can keep this one principle in mind, all the rest of your monetization decisions should follow naturally.

Here's how it works in City Basher. All items are bought with either Points, Coins, or some combination of both. Some items are permanent, some get used up, and some last for a limited amount of time. Building cards and avatar decorations are permanent, as in a typical microtransaction-based game. But weapons and vehicles get used up - weapons are sold in the form of ammo, and vehicles can be used for a limited number of play sessions before they must be refueled. Only the starting weapon and vehicle last forever. This is like the rental approach to monetization. Lastly, membership cards to access special arenas and unlock special game enhancements are effective for a limited number of days before they expire, much like a subscription. Each of these items represents a different approach to microtransactions, in the hopes of appealing to as many different buying habits as possible and maximizing the revenue of the game.

Outside of the artillery game itself, there would be a sort of store interface where players could browse and shop for items. Building cards would be bought in random packs, from different editions, much like in an actual trading card game. Some editions could be bought only with Points, but the sets containing the more powerful cards must be bought with Coins. The idea is that players who really get into collecting cards are going to be the type to spend real money on the game. Avatar decorations are bought individually, mostly for Coins, though there might be some basic clothes and such that could be bought with Points instead.

Weapons are bought in bulk - that is, packs of ammunition - and for the most part can be bought with Points. For reasons of fairness, you want to be careful about charging real money for items that provide significant in-game advantages - like weapons - though it could be appropriate to charge Coins for some particularly strange or specialized types of weapons. Vehicles are similar, but since they have less of an effect on the fairness of the game, it is more appropriate to charge Coins for some of the vehicles, especially if their advantage is purely cosmetic or a matter of personal preference in the movement controls. Vehicles themselves do not get damaged or expire, but they do have a limited amount of fuel. Every time you enter a play session, you use up one unit of fuel in your chosen vehicle. The more powerful or expensive a vehicle, the more it costs to refuel it, though fuel should cost only Points since it is a recurring expense.

Arena access must be bought with Coins. Players buy membership cards, each of which provides access to several exclusive arenas for a certain amount of time. It might also be possible to include an arena editor that can be accessed in a similar way. This could be a nice place to incorporate player-created content, if you are so inclined. Other game enhancements can be bought individually with Coins, also for a limited amount of time. These may include advantages such as a larger maximum deck size, or extra weapon slots in each game. Most importantly, these enhancements would be the type of features that very dedicated players would appreciate and pay for, but that the average player would not find useful. This makes it acceptable to charge real money for such enhancements.

Permanent items - that is, building cards and avatar decorations as well as Coins and Points - can be traded freely between players. Temporary items like weapons and vehicles, however, may not. This is partly for simplicity, and partly because you want to use weapons and vehicles as a currency sink, a place where Coins and Points are removed from the game economy. And this role is undermined if players can just buy weapons from each other. In a real-world economy, this is not as important, but in a game where you can bring currency into circulation just by knocking over a few buildings, it's essential to drain that currency out of the system just as fast as it comes in, to avoid inflation. Since weapons and vehicles get used up over time, players must continually buy new ones, removing currency from circulation at a more or less constant rate. To keep the system running smoothly, you must continually balance item prices with the amount of Points that players can earn from each building type. Keep those Points flowing in and out at the same rate. No one said this would be easy!

Implementation

To actually make City Basher, you'd need a good rigid-body physics engine, like motor2 or Glaze, or even Box2D. This could also be a great project for use with the PushButton Engine, since it has built-in Box2D support and an optional networking component for making multiplayer games.

However, making any multiplayer game on this scale is always going to be a massive undertaking. Make sure that you know what you are doing before you start. If you've never made a physics-based game before, start by making a single-player prototype of the basic building-destroying gameplay. Then, if you're new to network programming, make a simple match-based multiplayer version of the game, without the special items or persistent avatars.

If you can do that, and make it fun, then you can think about taking the next step and making it massive. When you do succeed in making a massively multiplayer game, don't add in all the special items all at once. Start with the basic free game, and add items gradually, careful not to upset the balance of the game. Incremental development is the way to go.

Good luck.

References

Required reading for anyone who wants to make a game like this:

Since Emanuele Feronato never showed up to receive his idea, City Basher is open to anyone to use for free! Even you. ;)

Let me know if you decide to try making it. I'd be glad to help however I can. Post a comment!

Want an idea? Make a request on The Game Idea Giveaway Thread!

Flydrill and Logistical Gameplay

2010-03-10T07:40:00.000-08:00

Want to know why I haven't written a blog post in two months?

I've been making a game.

It's called Flydrill.

Explore an infinite dream world. Survive an endless nightmare. How far can you fly?

On the 23rd of October, in 2008, I had a dream where I was this little abstract flying thing like the flier from Flywrench. I was in a maze of square tiles, and I could drill to the right. Little swarming dots chased after me. When I woke up, I decided to turn it into a real game.

And so, more than a year later, I did - with a bit of help from some helpful people, an exceedingly helpful game engine, and some "inspiration" from Canabalt, Left 4 Dead, and Pac-Man Championship Edition. Though I've only ever played one of those games. I'll let you guess which one.

But I'm not here to go on and on about how I made this game. I've already done that, in this thread on the Flixel forums. And I'll probably be posting another blog post, soon, about how to get Flixel and Mochi Live Updates and the Newgrounds API all working nicely together. But this isn't it.

Every time I release a game, I discover new blind spots in my understanding of game design. This latest game is no exception. The feedback I've gotten on Newgrounds and Kongregate has led me to some interesting new hypotheses about the basic principles of Flash game design.

Here they are.

...but first, a screen shot!

I've become convinced that Logistical gameplay is the single most important factor in predicting a Flash game's eventual success or failure. Of secondary importance is the Tactical gameplay. Flydrill is the first game I've made where the Tactical gameplay is really solid - in fact, I think it's better than most Flash games in this regard - but it has no Logistical gameplay to speak of. And the player response shows it - great reviews, but a mediocre overall rating.

If my hypothesis is correct, then adding Logistical gameplay to Flydrill should make it a very successful game in terms of portal ratings and popularity.

So, what is "Logistical gameplay" anyway?

I first came across this term in the book 21st Century Game Design by Chris Bateman. Corresponding to the four personality types in the Keirsey Temperament Sorter, he identifies four categories of gameplay skills: Strategic, Diplomatic, Logistical, and Tactical. My own analysis is based on the research in the book. Read it if you want to learn more.

According to Wikipedia, "Logistics is the management of the flow of goods, information and other resources, including energy and people, between the point of origin and the point of consumption in order to meet the requirements of consumers."

What does this mean for games? When it comes to Flash games, at least, Logistical gameplay often means lots of upgrades and items and achievements to serve as the requirements for in-game resources, and various ways to convert player time and skill into these in-game resources, whether experience points or virtual cash.

But logistics isn't just about grinding for an achievement. All gameplay revolves around choices.

Logistical gameplay (read more) revolves around choosing how to allocate your resources - which upgrades to invest in, how much to spend, how much to save, and how to manage your time and effort effectively for the greatest payoff. The pleasure of Logistical gameplay is not in simply doing something, but in doing it well - optimizing it to perfection. This is why achievements are so important. They give the player a reason to excel, which creates Logistical gameplay.

There are many Flash games that focus on Logistical gameplay. But the best example that I've found is a little game called Toss the Turtle. Actually, it's not little at all, it's big - packed with items and upgrades to buy, achievements to earn, and tons of variables to tweak and improve on the way to the perfect turtle toss. You can see this formula repeated in many top-rated games, from Learn to Fly to Infectonator : World Dominator. Why? Logistics. Each of these games is heavily Logistical, with a bit of Tactics thrown in.

But what is Tactics?

Tactical gameplay (read more) is about the choices you make from moment to moment in the midst of action. This can be anything from dodging bullets to matching gems - in general, reading the situation of the moment and responding in the most appropriate way.

In Toss the Turtle, the Tactical gameplay consists of choosing when to shoot your turtle for extra height, and using the arrow keys to slightly adjust the turtle's trajectory. It's not much, but it gives players some non-Logistical skills to work on between trips to the upgrade shop.

But the purest example of Tactical gameplay that I've seen so far is the ingeniously simple Particles. All you do is avoid the bouncing balls for as long as you can - no upgrades, no story, no fancy graphics. But the gameplay it creates is very effective, and very Tactical - reading and responding to constantly shifting patterns of safety and danger.

There are other types of gameplay that tend to be less critical for success in the Flash game market - namely, Strategy and Diplomacy. But these can be very important for long-term success, because these are the deeper skills valued by hardcore players.

Strategic gameplay (read more) is about imagining solutions to complex problems, and this skill is most often catered to in Flash by puzzle games. Fantastic Contraption is the perfect example of this. Its commercial success may have something to do with the fact that it is based on Strategic rather than Logistical or Tactical gameplay - as I mentioned earlier, Strategic gameplay tends to be favored by more dedicated players, who are perhaps more willing to pay for the experience.

But also important to mention is that Fantastic Contraption also supports Logistical gameplay, because each puzzle is predefined, and the solution can be discovered by trial and error - in other words, Logistical optimization - if no ingenious Strategic insights come to mind. This means that all the players who prefer Logistical gameplay will still get some enjoyment of the game, rating it highly and sharing it with their friends, even if they don't like it enough to pay for it.

Diplomatic gameplay (read more) is about understanding and reconciling differences while preserving individuality, a skill that is rarely catered to by Flash games. We just don't know how to make Diplomatic games - not yet, at least. But there is one genre that begins to approach Diplomatic gameplay - in a very rough and rudimentary way, but still, it's Diplomatic more than anything else. Can you guess what it is?

No? I'm talking about spot-the-difference games. The gameplay in these games is not Strategic, Logistical, or Tactical. It's about finding the discrepancies between two different points of view, and resolving these differences. Diplomacy, abstracted. Difference games often support interesting artwork or involved storylines - see Dream or 4 Differences for example - which can provide players with a sort of imagined Diplomacy of conflicts to resolve and different characters to empathize with, even if it has nothing to do with the actual gameplay.

So that's some interesting background information. But why would I say that Logistical gameplay is the single most important factor in predicting a Flash game's eventual success or failure?

On page 91 of 21st Century Game Design, I came across a table citing this study on the distribution of the Myers-Briggs personality types across the general US population.

Here's what I found:

50% of the US population prefers Logistical skills (SJ)
25% of the US population prefers Tactical skills (SP)
15% of the US population prefers Diplomatic skills (NF)
10% of the US population prefers Strategic skills (NT)

No wonder Logistics is so essential!

If you make a game that focuses exclusively on Logistical and Tactical gameplay, you will automatically capture 75% of your potential market. If you focus exclusively on Tactical gameplay, as I did with Flydrill, you will capture only 25% of players. Oops.

Hmm, that explains a lot.

Tower defense games effectively combine Logistics and Tactics into a single package, which helps explain their popularity and continued success. Puzzle games combine Logistics and Strategy. And the only reason we don't see more Diplomatic games is that no one knows how to make them. Difference games are the closest we've come.

So there you have it. If you want to make a Flash game that appeals to the majority of players, you must be sure to include some excellent Logistical gameplay. How to do that, of course, is the subject for another blog post. ;)

Until next time...

awesome score yay! :D

Increasing Clarity

2009-12-31T15:00:00.000-08:00

Recently I wrote about motivation. Now I'm thinking about clarity. Clarity is the ability to see your goals and see what you need to do to accomplish them. Like Neo at the end of The Matrix. Motivation is the energy to actually accomplish your goals. But without clarity, it's hard to be motivated.

I've noticed that some things decrease my clarity, while others increase it. One of my resolutions for the new year is to do the things that increase my clarity and avoid the things that decrease it. Sounds simple, right? But it's easier said than done.

If I'm very low on clarity, it's hard for me to choose to do things that will increase my clarity again. It's like being drunk - it impairs your judgment so you think you're fine when you're actually not. So I'm coming up with a list of things I can do that will reliably increase my clarity. If I look at these things and get anxious, it probably means I'm low on clarity.

Here are a few activities that can help me increase my clarity:

yawning a lot (seriously!)
taking a nap
meditating
doing yoga
walking outside
running outside
practicing Aikido
practicing Persian ney flute
freewriting with my eyes closed
listening to music with my eyes closed

These are all things that help empty and clear my mind so I can see what is truly important. They relax me when I am tense or obsessive or when my mind is buzzing.

Things that fill my mind decrease my clarity. This includes browsing the web, checking email, or eating lots of carbohydrates. Sadly, I don't yet see a way to get rid of these entirely. Instead, I will do my best to balance them with clarity-enhancing activities.

Happy New Year! :)

Game Idea Giveaway - Freetrace

2009-12-29T15:30:00.000-08:00

...continued from The Game Idea Giveaway Thread

Request by Geekman:

what sort of game idea you're looking for
Puzzle, Adventure

what your goals are in making this game
To make it simple yet unique and fun

what games you've made already
No Popular games (yet)

your favorite Flash games
Fancy Pants, Dino Run, Wone, Sling, Roller Coaster Rush

your abilities in game design, programming, art, and sound
Game design-Ok, Programming-Intermediate, Art - Ok, Sound - Bad

your preferences in game design, programming, art, and sound
Programming

The weird idea: Databomb

The normal idea: Freetrace

In short, the idea is a puzzle game where you erase a drawing. It is inspired by the practice of walking a labyrinth - that is, following a winding, circular path for prayer or meditation. In this game, you trace the lines of an existing drawing with a virtual eraser by clicking and dragging, trying to do so as smoothly and efficiently as possible.

Each line is actually made up of many pixels, and like a typical drawing application, you can erase these pixels in an area around the mouse cursor. But to keep things a little more interesting, your eraser strength is inversely proportional to the speed at which you move it. That is, moving the eraser quickly will hardly affect the pixels underneath, while moving very slowly will erase them completely. This makes wild scribbling ineffective.

What's the challenge? I've recently discovered the joys of swarming enemies, and I think they'd work out great in this game. These swarmers would fly around the screen, chasing after your eraser - your mouse cursor. If one of them hits you, your health or perhaps a score multiplier would be reduced. But the swarmers wouldn't be able to pass through the lines of the drawing.

As you erase, you end up dismantling your own protection bit by bit. If you want to succeed, you must be careful to maximize your protection throughout instead of erasing haphazardly.

Some lines may create living eraser crumbs when you erase them. These crumbs destroy the swarming enemies on contact. So you can use them for defense. Some protective crumbs might stay where they are, while other types might move in defensive swarms themselves or chase after the enemy swarmers.

For an extra challenge, the eraser could be a limited resource that runs out the more you erase. This would encourage you to keep your eraser strokes efficient. Or the scoring system could reward efficient erasing by giving out more points for each pixel you erase, and less if you are trying to erase pixels that are already blank.

The game would be divided into levels, each one a unique drawing made up of curved or angular lines. When you erase the whole thing, you get your score and the next level is unlocked. There might also be an opportunity for randomly generated levels or an endurance mode with drawings that continually regenerate in interesting patterns.

You'll want to collaborate with an artist on this one, though this may be difficult since each drawing must take both gameplay and aesthetic considerations into account. For this reason, I would suggest starting with abstract patterns that make for fun gameplay and interesting puzzles to solve, and then enlist the help of an artist after that.

Implementation would be fairly straightforward - no fancy physics involved. All you'd need are basic bitmap manipulations and collisions, and some simple swarming behavior. Let me know if you want any help! Good luck. :)

Want an idea? Make a request on The Game Idea Giveaway Thread!

Active Sketch 04 - Pillars

2009-12-29T13:18:00.000-08:00

Update:
Critiqued and analyzed on the Critical-Gaming Network blog! :D

Finally, an actually fun prototype!

It's a test of some movement controls for a one-button flying game. Tap to flap your wings, hold to dive.

I've been working with the artist brontosaurus off and on for several months now to create a game, and this latest attempt seems like our most promising project yet. It started with a bit of concept art, a simple landscape of pillars - Pixel Skylines 01. Then I tried to imagine what sort of game, what sort of characters and actions might be fun in such a landscape. Obviously, the typical platformer approach would not make sense. But maybe if you could fly...

So I made this prototype, and yes, flying is fun. See for yourself.

Active Sketch 04 - Pillars

It helps that there's a flock of tiny fliers to keep you company. They give you something to do - something to attack or run away from.

In response to some prompting from brontosaurus, I've also released some experimental versions that allow you to turn in midair, either automatically or by double-tapping. And I've gotten some useful feedback about each of these.

But I think I'll stick with the simple original. This is the one that has gotten the most unanimously positive response, and I have found it to be much more accessible to non-gamers in my own informal playtests.

And I like the feel. It's like a soaring eagle.

So the next question is, how do we elaborate this into a full game? Maybe even something for the upcoming GAMMA IV one-button game competition?

This is where our organic process should be able to take off. In the past, brontosaurus and I made the mistake of trying to start creating cool things before we had a solid foundation of fun actions to build on. But now we have our fun actions.

I can see even this simple prototype turning into a game just by adding a score multiplier system and a time limit. But I would hate to waste its potential on something as trivial as that. I want to create a bigger game, with vast landscapes to explore and creatures to interact with - some dangerous, some friendly, some food.

I think the way to go, then, is to continue building a playground for this one-button flying creature, this eagle. I remember reading that this is how Super Mario 64 was built - first with a playground that made full use of Mario's abilities and acrobatics, and only then expanded into a world of castles and mountains and bosses and missions and such.

Well, we shall see where this takes us.

a cloud dragon...

Game Idea Giveaway - Prejudice

2009-12-10T17:40:00.000-08:00

...continued from The Game Idea Giveaway Thread

Request by kokosan:

what sort of game idea you're looking for
a game involving physics

what your goals are in making this game
Have fun developing it, and to get players to have fun playing it

The normal idea: Metastability

The weird idea: Prejudice

In short, the idea is Geometry Wars combined with Crayon Physics, with rules based on the dynamics of racial or cultural discrimination.

Like Geometry Wars, the game takes place in a field with a bunch of shapes in it. Everything in the game is a polygon, of varying shape, size, color, texture, and mass. Random shapes appear on different sides of the screen, proceeding past each other and disappearing off the opposite side, somewhat like Mondrian Provoked, or a large volume of pedestrian traffic. Unlike Geometry Wars, however, you cannot shoot. Instead, with deft strokes of the mouse, you ram into enemies with your sharp corners to do damage, while avoiding theirs.

Not every shape is an enemy, however. This is where the "prejudice" part comes in. At the top of the screen is a row of icons, each one depicting a particular shape. When the game begins, there is only one icon in this row - that is, the evil shape who has somehow wronged you in the past. Perhaps it killed your father. Anyway.

This evil shape, like all shapes, has several defined characteristics, such as area, number of edges, perimeter length, shortest distance across, longest distance across, color, and texture. Any shape that you encounter in the field is an enemy if it shares at least one of these traits with the evil shape. That's the prejudice part. The more traits it shares, there more points you get when you damage it and kill it. But if you attack a shape that does not share any of these traits, you lose points. Pretty simple.

There's more. You can add shapes to your "evil" list. How? If another shape happens to damage you, bumping into you with one of its sharp corners, then, naturally, it's evil. And it gets added to the row of icons at the top of your screen as a new evil shape. When your "evil" list is full - when it has more than, say, four icons in it - then the oldest shape is bumped off the list.

So any shape that shares a trait with any of the "evil" shapes in your list is an enemy that you can attack. These shapes are given a suspicious dark tint, for your discriminatory convenience. But in general, most shapes are content to mind their own business on their journey across the screen. Few shapes will attack you outright unless they are provoked, and some might even run away. This personality trait has nothing to do with a shape's "enemy" status - it's simply a way to modulate the difficulty of the game as you progress.

As if that's not complicated enough already, there's another twist to the idea. Not only can you have enemies, but you can have allies, too. This is where the Crayon Physics drawing engine comes into play.

When you have earned enough points from lynching enemy shapes, you can choose to spend some of those points to create allies. When you create an ally, you simply draw a shape in the mouse with the handy ally editor, and assign it a color and texture. Then, the ally gets added to a second row of icons at the bottom of the screen - your "good" list. There is always at least one shape in the "good" list - your own shape. The twist is that any shape in the field that shares a trait with any good shape - any ally - is not considered an enemy, even if it shares traits with an evil shape. So having allies reduces the number of shapes that you can legally attack.

But allies can be useful. Marked with a white tint, they swarm around you to shield you from aggressive shapes, and can also help you attack. When you hold down the mouse button, they swarm in tighter and flock with your velocity, so you can direct them in coordinated attacks. And if your very own shape is killed, then you can continue playing as the next ally in the list.

Like your "evil" list, your "good" list has a limited number of slots. If an ally is killed, its icon stays in the list. You wouldn't want to forget an ally killed in battle, would you? But if your list is full and you buy a new ally, the oldest icon is pushed off the list, though its corresponding ally remains in the field.

I want to explain the movement controls in a little more detail, as well. You move your shape with the mouse. One vertex of this polygon is the forward vertex, the point of a spike most easily used for attacking, and this vertex is made to follow the mouse cursor. This allows you to control both rotation and velocity with simple mouse movement. Allies swarm around you loosely, using a simple swarming algorithm. Just like your shape, they move from their forward vertices, which you would assign when you first draw them. When you hold down the mouse button, they try to swarm closer, and they also try to match your velocity and direction with a flocking algorithm, making their forward vertices point in the same direction as yours. This should allow you to direct their attacks.

That is all. Let me know what you think of the idea!

Want an idea? Make a request on The Game Idea Giveaway Thread!

Game Idea Giveaway - Metastability

2009-12-10T17:25:00.001-08:00

...continued from The Game Idea Giveaway Thread

Request by kokosan:

what sort of game idea you're looking for
a game involving physics

what your goals are in making this game
Have fun developing it, and to get players to have fun playing it

what games you've made already
Colorfill, a fill the screen type of game (Qix-like), SnakeBox, a snake game in 3D

your favorite Flash games
Bloons, Bejeweled, this kind of games easy to grasp and where you have fun instantly.

your abilities in game design, programming, art, and sound
mostly programming, game design OK, no artistic skills

your preferences in game design, programming, art, and sound
Programming, definitely.

The weird idea: Prejudice

The normal idea: Metastability

In short, the idea is Tower of Goo combined with Crayon Physics, with a little bit of Tetris on the side. I know I've expressed annoyance at the countless Crayon Physics clones out there that waste a powerful physics engine with narrow gameplay goals. This is my attempt to design an alternative, a game that makes use of Crayon Physics' full potential.

Like in Tower of Goo, your goal is to build a tower as tall as you can. The world consists of a large horizontal platform, an island in a sea of bottomless nothingness. Random polygonal shapes form a layer of rubble on this island, which you can drag around with the mouse to form structures or just to toss off the island, never to be seen again. You can also draw your own shapes as in Crayon Physics, and drag these shapes around as well. New shapes drop down from the sky every so often, providing you with new material as well as threatening the stability of your tower.

You use these shapes to build a tower, but crucially, they must alternate between drawn and found shapes. And the tower is only valid if no drawn shapes touch the ground, the island platform. Otherwise, you could just draw a really tall shape and use that as your tower. Alternating means that a drawn shape must not touch any other drawn shape, only found shapes, and vice versa. If two shapes of the same type touch, the tower is invalid, and the offending shapes are highlighted in a conspicuous manner. To make this easy to see, drawn shapes should be colored differently than found shapes, and perhaps a beam of light shines down from the heavens if the tower is valid.

The height of the tower, measured from the ground, translates into your score. While it may seem that you could just draw really tall shapes and cheat, this does not provide an advantage. Bigger shapes are less stable, and since mass would be proportional to area, they would be so heavy that they might simply crush the shapes beneath them.

The game could provide a special timed mode, though this is not necessary since the shapes raining down provide their own form of time pressure, and the width of the island limits the maximum height of the tower. There could also be modes for different island widths, and different amounts of rain. You could even include a mode where the player can build several towers on the same island, with their combined heights added up for the final score.

I think this game could be awesome. If I didn't have a ton of other projects already, I'd make it myself. So you'd better do a good job of it! ;) Please keep me involved if you go through with this, as I can help you playtest and polish the design to its full potential and connect you with some good artists who know how to awesome-ify a game like this. If it succeeds, who knows - I could see Metastability making the same transition as Tower of Goo, toward the full-blown, award-winning World of Goo. There's a lot you could do with it.

Want an idea? Make a request on The Game Idea Giveaway Thread!

Game Idea Giveaway - Tumblestack

2009-12-08T11:50:00.000-08:00

...continued from The Game Idea Giveaway Thread

Request by FullerGames:

what sort of game idea you're looking for
I am looking for the flash game gold: Simple, addicting. Perhaps a chain reaction game, a puzzle game, or similar. A "free-time" game that wouldn't be as complex or time consuming to make.

what your goals are in making this game
The feeling of lots of effect for little action is what had me in chain reaction. Players seem to enjoy those

The first idea: Collink

The second idea: Tumblestack

In short, the idea is a physics-based chain-reaction game, based on the combo chains of match-three games.

Each game starts out with a bunch of colored bricks filling the screen, stacked up and packed together randomly but in a tidy manner. Perhaps they slide around in rows and columns or fall from the sky or change colors randomly too. But they all freeze when the player clicks on the screen. Then an explosion is created at the mouse cursor, sending bricks flying with the resulting shockwave. This starts the chain reaction.

Whenever a moving brick touches another brick, their colors are compared. If the colors match, then just like a match-three (or a match-two in this case) all adjacent bricks of the same color explode, destroying said bricks and sending a shockwave through the surrounding bricks. And hopefully, more and more bricks explode, continuing the chain reaction. The player's goal is to destroy as many bricks as possible in a single click.

That's it. I don't know if it would work, but it might. You'd need a good rigid-body physics engine though, like motor2 or Glaze. Fortunately, they're free. :)

Want an idea? Make a request on The Game Idea Giveaway Thread!

Game Idea Giveaway - Collink

2009-12-08T11:32:00.000-08:00

...continued from The Game Idea Giveaway Thread

Request by FullerGames:

what sort of game idea you're looking for
I am looking for the flash game gold: Simple, addicting. Perhaps a chain reaction game, a puzzle game, or similar. A "free-time" game that wouldn't be as complex or time consuming to make.

what your goals are in making this game
The feeling of lots of effect for little action is what had me in chain reaction. Players seem to enjoy those

The second idea: Tumblestack

The first idea: Collink

In short, the idea is a physics-based chain-reaction game, based on the lattice structures of World of Goo.

Each game starts out with a bunch of variously sized circles bouncing around the screen, like in Particles. When the player clicks on the screen, everything stops moving, and each circle forms two links - two springs - between itself and the two circles closest to it. As a result, the whole playing field gels into a lattice structure, just like you might see in World of Goo. You could play around with the number of links that form - maybe three would be better, or four. You could also experiment with letting the circles continue their velocity instead of stopping.

So as soon as the circles have formed this lattice, an explosion is created where the player clicked, destroying all links within a certain radius of the mouse cursor. Maybe it could impart a bit of velocity to the circles nearby, as well, in a sort of shockwave. Once these first few links are destroyed, gravity kicks in, starting a chain reaction. Whenever a circle collides with a link, the link is destroyed, causing more circles to fall and further collapsing the structure. Circles are never destroyed - instead, they collide with each other, and move freely if all their links have been broken. The player's goal is to destroy as many links as possible in a single click.

That's it. You'll need a decent physics engine for this, but it should be very easy to set up. :)

Want an idea? Make a request on The Game Idea Giveaway Thread!

Game Idea Giveaway - Salmon Song

2009-12-07T14:30:00.000-08:00

...continued from The Game Idea Giveaway Thread

Request by IvyGames:

what sort of game idea you're looking for
I guess, can any of your ideas incorporate a floating jellyfish?
The jellyfish in itself isn't that important to me, what is important is the flowy feel one gets from sea-based games, and a jellyfish is for me the epitomy of that flow... very relaxing but intense at the same time, if you know what I mean.

what your goals are in making this game
Making a game that really flows together and is simple but beautiful.

The normal idea: Randori

The weird idea: Salmon Song

In short, the idea is a 3D version of the one-button helicopter game, combined with an eat-and-grow game like Fishy.

The key feature of this idea is that the game is split into two contrasting halves. The first half is a lonely, perilous race for survival, with a blue and gray color scheme, and the second half is a warm, triumphant journey of growth and abundance, with a deep red color scheme. The contrast is what makes this work, accentuating and enhancing the emotional impact of each half. Not only gameplay, but sound and color design play a big role in establishing the mood. I even picked out two specific music loops for the game, which I would be glad to hand over to you if you decide to make this game.

The idea is that in the first half, you are a flowing, snake-like creature traveling through a tunnel toward your ancestral spawning grounds, to lay your eggs and then die. Like a salmon. Your goal is to get there as fast as possible without getting eaten. In the second half, you take control of a hatchling, traveling back out of the very same tunnel you had gone entered in the first half. But here, enemies that you once had to avoid are now delicious food for you to consume, and grow bigger, and as you grow bigger, more enemies switch from dangerous to edible. That's the core concept.

The specifics of the controls and graphics are less important. I had in mind something minimal and 3D, based on the helicopter game where you control your movement with a single button, pressing it to rise against gravity. In the first half, you are constantly sinking. To rise up, you hold down the mouse button. But you are also moving forward constantly, through a tunnel in 3D. The camera is fixed ahead, never rotating, looking straight through the tunnel directly behind your snake-like body. To speed up, you put the mouse cursor in the top half of the screen, or in the lower half to slow down. You cannot move backwards, however. To steer left and right, you put the mouse cursor on the left or right of the screen. Basically like a joystick.

The interesting thing is that in the second half, you are constantly rising. You press the mouse button to sink against your own buoyancy, effectively reversing the controls for your vertical movement. The idea is that the first half should feel more like a struggle to stay afloat, while in the second half you should feel more liberated. This effect could be enhanced by placing bigger, more dangerous enemies lower in the space, in deeper waters. This gives a consistent association of safety to the upper region, which would increase the emotional impact of the reversed controls.

The tunnel would be rectangular in cross-section, varying randomly in width and height at discrete intervals, for simplicity. It would basically be a bunch of randomly sized boxes connected end-to-end, which should be fairly easy to generate and render in 3D, perhaps with an engine like Papervision3D. At some points it would be long and narrow, while at others it would be very wide and deep, like a vast aquarium tank. You never know what strange creatures you might find lurking in the bottom of one of those. This is the purpose of using 3D - it's good for conveying scale and the feel of wide and narrow spaces.

The tunnel would be populated with objects, sparsely at times, or densely. Some would be inert obstacles that obstruct your movement, while others would be enemies of various sizes that might try to chase you if you get too close. Though once you pass an enemy, it will not be able to follow you down the tunnel. And there could be speed-boosting gates, as well as areas to heal you if you rest inside. All of these objects could be represented by spheres - perhaps a circular sprite for each type, scaled based on distance rather than an actual 3D polygon mesh. Your own avatar, the sea snake, could be a simple chain of spheres, similarly to the creature in flOw.

The scoring system would be fairly simple. There would be two numbers to keep track of - health and energy. Health goes down when you touch an enemy, with more dangerous enemies taking away more health. If your health goes to zero, your snake dies and you lose the game. Energy starts high and decreases constantly over time, encouraging you to go fast. Energy is basically your score. When you reach the spawning ground, the end of the tunnel, in the first half, any remaining energy is carried over to your hatchling, while your health is simply reset. In the second half, as a hatchling, you can increase your energy by consuming the enemies that are smaller than you, which also makes you grow bigger. Your goal is to get back out of the tunnel with the most energy - the highest score - by consuming enemies without dying or going so slowly that you use up all your energy in the process.

Want an idea? Make a request on The Game Idea Giveaway Thread!

Game Idea Giveaway - Randori

2009-12-07T12:55:00.000-08:00

...continued from The Game Idea Giveaway Thread

Request by IvyGames:

what sort of game idea you're looking for
I guess, can any of your ideas incorporate a floating jellyfish?
The jellyfish in itself isn't that important to me, what is important is the flowy feel one gets from sea-based games, and a jellyfish is for me the epitomy of that flow... very relaxing but intense at the same time, if you know what I mean.

what your goals are in making this game
Making a game that really flows together and is simple but beautiful.

what games you've made already
Vertical scrolling shooter and a Three Word Story game.

your favorite Flash games
Dolphin Olympics & N The way of the Ninja.

your abilities in game design, programming, art, and sound
The first three for me are just a matter of taking it painstalkingly slow; I could program anything given enough time in the helpdocs and online guides... sound I expect to mix and edit from sources on the Internet.

your preferences in game design, programming, art, and sound
...

The weird idea: Salmon Song

The normal idea: Randori

In short, the idea is a mouse avoider like Particles, where instead of dying on contact, you only die if you get hit too hard.

You asked for a game with a flowing feel, that is intense but relaxed. What that means is there's a lot going on, but you continuously make small motions that blend with those around you, whether those are enemies, obstacles, the wave of the sea, or your own breath cycle. It's about being harmonious with yourself and your surroundings.

The small, flowing motions are important. If you're smashing things out of the way, the experience may be intense but it's not relaxed. Instead of opposing the movement around you, you blend with it. You match its velocity. That means you see how fast an object is going, and then you match that speed exactly so that when you touch it, there is no impact. You are not moving relative to each other. This is concept from Aikido, the nonviolent martial art. If someone punches at you, you can use your body to match the speed of their fist and then redirect the force.

So how do you make a game about that?

The simplest way I can imagine doing that is to make a game based on the randori practice of Aikido. In this exercise, you are in the middle while a bunch of other people rush in and attack you, either with an actual strike or a simple push or a grab, depending on your skill level. You must remain calm and in control, redirecting their attacks and keeping on the edge of the crowd so you don't get trapped in the middle. The basic response to an attack in this situation is to turn your body to match the speed of the attacker and redirect it around you at the same time, then push them away once they are past you so you can move on to the next attacker.

As a computer game, this could be very minimal. Everyone is now a circle. You move your own circle with the mouse - it follows the cursor more or less instantaneously. The other circles, your attackers, all swarm in toward you. If you get hit too hard - if the relative velocity is too high in a collision - you lose a life. To avoid that, you match an attacking circle's speed to reduce the impact, then push them off to the side so you have time to move and engage the next attacker. It could be a simple survival game, like Particles, where you try to last as long as possible before running out of lives. More attackers might appear at regular time intervals, increasing the difficulty as time goes on. Some attackers might not even attack you - they could just bounce off the walls and each other like the balls in Particles. Some might just be inert obstacles that clutter up the field and force you to move more carefully. There's a lot of complexity you could add to this concept.

And of course there's no need to give this an Aikido theme. It could easily be abstract, just circles and shapes, or even underwater, with jellyfish, if that's what you want. Jellyfish could be cool, too, because you could make the objects more than circles - they could be webs and strings of circles connected together with ragdoll physics. And you could add waving currents or fluid physics too. Just don't put it in space! That's overdone. ;) I might end up making a game like this with an Aikido theme anyway, so that's another reason to theme it differently. :)

Want an idea? Make a request on The Game Idea Giveaway Thread!

Game Idea Giveaway - Random Lulz

2009-12-04T10:40:00.000-08:00

...continued from The Game Idea Giveaway Thread

Request by TobiHeidi:

what sort of game idea you're looking for
strategy, action (often a problem in Multiplayer games cause of lag), open to anything

what your goals are in making this game
Create a Multiplayergame that creates a community, keeps players coming back, forces players to interact (attack, but also help each other).
I like to have the players to be able to upload s.th. (i.e. graphics) and autmatticaly intergrate them in the game as gfx / or maps

The normal idea: Gridslime

The weird idea: Random Lulz

In short, Random Lulz is a collaborative rhythm game based on the innovative Dark Room Sex Game, but with a more kid-friendly theme.

In Dark Room, each player has a button to press, which makes a particular sound. When you play, you are paired with one other player, slowly alternating button presses with each other. Your goal is to accelerate the rhythm of your button presses as quickly as possible to an exciting climax. This works best as a competitive team game, where two teams of two race to finish faster than the other team. The limitation is that you cannot press the button too soon after the other player - there is a minimum amount of time you must wait between presses. If you press too soon, you have to slow down again. This minimum time limit gets smaller as your rhythm accelerates.

With Random Lulz, the gameplay is similar but somewhat more complicated. You press a button to make a sound, a single laugh or chuckle. You are still trying to accelerate your rhythm as quickly as possible to reach full, hysterical laughter. But there are some extra limitations. There is a minimum time limit, but there is also a maximum time limit - you don't want to wait too long or the energy of the laughter will die away. And more interestingly, the time interval between your button press and the other player's last button press must be different than the previous time interval. In other words, the rhythm of the button presses must be random, because no one laughs like a metronome - that would just be awkward.

The requirements of this game are very minimal, assuming you have a basic multiplayer system set up. All you have to do is send a message with a timestamp every time a button is pressed, and lag isn't a big deal - it just makes things a bit more random. Graphics are completely optional, but if you want you could give players customizable avatars, or different arenas in which to laugh, or let them upload their own background images. Sounds can be recorded - just get a bunch of friends together late at night and loosen them up with some sugary or alcoholic beverages, and start having laugh contests. Record a range of sounds for each person - starting with low-energy grunts, chuckles, or giggles, and gradually moving up to knee-slapping guffaws or full tear-streaming, rolling-on-the-floor hysteria. Guffaw is a weird word. Anyway. The Dark Room team did something similar for their sounds.

The idea is pretty loose - there's a lot of ways you can take it. If it appeals to you, I'd encourage you to at least try it out, since it should be very easy to prototype. See if it's fun with simple beeps and no graphics, and then add in the recorded laughs and teams and scoring and all that. I'm looking forward to playing it. ;)

Want an idea? Make a request on The Game Idea Giveaway Thread!

Game Idea Giveaway - Gridslime

2009-12-01T12:55:00.000-08:00

...continued from The Game Idea Giveaway Thread

Request by TobiHeidi:

what sort of game idea you're looking for
strategy, action (often a problem in Multiplayer games cause of lag), open to anything

what your goals are in making this game
Create a Multiplayergame that creates a community, keeps players coming back, forces players to interact (attack, but also help each other).
I like to have the players to be able to upload s.th. (i.e. graphics) and autmatticaly intergrate them in the game as gfx / or maps

what games you've made already
All my games are Multiplayer, made a strategy and a soccer/pong game.

your favorite Flash games
many, not some special ones

your abilities in game design, programming, art, and sound
Game design = %60, Programming = %99, Art = , Sound = %30, in terms of how well I am with them

your preferences in game design, programming, art, and sound
I only make Multiplayer games.I am very bad when it comes to art...
I also would like to avoid strongly physics based games (doesnt work to synchronize in Multiplayer games), and games that have problems when there is more lag then about 200ms (ping).

The weird idea: Random Lulz

The normal idea: Gridslime

The idea is to take the minimal gameplay of Slime Volleyball, and expand it into a 3D multiplayer game of four square. It retains the fluctuating rules and interesting social dynamics of four square, while simplifying the physical aspect of the game into simple bouncing spheres.

You play as a sphere that can move and jump with the mouse. Your short-term goal is to hit the ball when it bounces into your square, your medium-term goal is to advance to the lead square in each game, and your long-term goal is to make your way up the global grid by challenging other players.

Four square is a popular playground game played on a grid of four squares with a bouncy rubber ball. It is simple to play, and features a compelling blend of physical action and political strategy. If you haven't played it before, there are a lot of websites and videos around that will introduce you. And plenty of player nostalgia to go along with it, too.

The idea is that each player has a square to defend. The squares are ranked, and your goal is to progress to the highest ranked square and stay there. If the ball bounces in your square, you have to hit it back to another player's square before it bounces again. If you don't hit the ball in time, or you hit it out of bounds instead of into another player's square, you're out of the game, and everyone in a lower ranked square moves up by one to take your place.

In the playground game, there's usually a line of people waiting to get in the game, since only four people can actually play at a time. In that case, you'd be sent to the end of the line. Otherwise, you're sent to the lowest ranking square to start over.

The interesting part about four square is that the leader, the player in the highest ranking square, gets to change the rules of the game. This is also the player who serves the ball at the start of each round, and before serving, this player can announce changes to the rules, such as allowing or disallowing certain moves or situations. There are tons of these weird rules and moves, often known by obscure names like "cherry bomb" or "bus stop", many of which can be found online. It's a phenomenon analogous to Pokemon or Magic: The Gathering. And as you may expect, it is ripe for adaptation into a game.

the rules of four square...

So how do we turn this into a computer game?

You may be familiar with Slime Volleyball and its many variants - these were Java games that were popular several years ago. Most of these games were simple 2D games analogous to Pong, where you move a "slime" that's like a circular paddle and try to bounce a ball to the your opponent's side of the court. Move left, move right and jump. There's a lot you can do with these simple controls. It's like playing table tennis with a basketball instead of a paddle.

It's easy enough to adapt this to four square. Just replace each human player with a sphere that can move around in its square and jump into the air. Aiming is accomplished by hitting the ball at the appropriate angle. On a computer, you might move with the mouse, and jump by pressing the mouse button. You can see a similar control scheme in Slime Volleyball 3D, except that the slime moves slowly toward the mouse cursor instead of moving instantly with it, which can be frustrating. I'd recommend making the movement instantaneous. And allow for a variable jump height, based on how long the mouse button is pressed.

But there's no reason to restrict the game to what is possible in Slime Volleyball or four square. You can take it further. In particular, you don't have to restrict the game to only four squares. You could have as many as you want, in any configuration. They don't even have to be square. Assuming that you keep the whole thing on a grid, you could make some squares neutral, some impassable, some into walls that bounce the ball, and change the size and shape of each player's area. You could even make them all shift around over time. This would be a great place for procedural and player-created content.

There are a lot of cool things you could do with the rule changes as well. Since this is a computer game, you can let players modify the physical properties of the ball or players, to change things like size, speed, bounciness, mass, or friction. Beyond that, you could even include ways for players to directly disrupt each other, with weapons or environmental hazards, kind of like the shells and banana peels of Mario Kart. Any of these might be special abilities bought by players with earned or purchased currency, or they might just randomly appear in the game to keep things interesting.

And of course, there are all the special rules of four square itself. These generally determine how you can hit the ball or who you can hit it to. Here are some common examples:

windmills - putting a lot of spin on the ball is allowed
cherry bombs - bouncing the ball really high is allowed
lemon drops - hitting the ball really low to a corner is allowed
chicken feet - hitting the ball at a player's feet is allowed
dictatorship - getting a player out with a serve is allowed

air ball - you can hit the ball before it bounces in your square
poaching - you can hit the ball no matter where it bounces
jump ball - you can only hit the ball while you are jumping
treetops - you can hit the ball up to two times in the air
bubbling - you can hit the ball any number of times in the air
holds - you can catch and hold the ball before passing it

tea party - two players may only pass to each other
friendship - two players may not get each other out
no passbacks - you may not pass the ball back to a player
around the world - you must pass the ball around (counter) clockwise until it has been passed to every player on the court
other variations - you may only pass the ball to players who are orthogonally adjacent, diagonally adjacent, wearing the same color, or whatever else you can think of

There are also rules that allow special situations to occur, often when a player catches the ball and shouts a certain word. The words and situations differ from game to game, but here are some examples:

pops - if you catch the ball before it lands in your square, then the player who last hit the ball is out
poison - if you catch the ball before it lands in your square and say "poison", the player who last hit the ball is out, but if that player says "poison" first, then you are out
mail man - if you catch the ball before it lands in your square and say "mail man", the last player to put their foot on the outermost corner of their square is out
bus stop - if you catch the ball before it lands in your square and say "bus stop", the last player to put their foot on the center intersection of the squares is out

As you can see, there's a lot to choose from. And they should be fairly easy to adapt to a computer game. What's most important is how they contribute to an interesting social dynamic without totally unbalancing the game. The powerful moves - like "cherry bombs" or "poison" - should also be risky moves that won't guarantee dominance.

In a game with four or more players, it's all right to let one player gain an advantage, since the other players will compensate by allying themselves against the offending player. Temporary alliances and betrayals are common in four square as players make deals to help each other get to the lead square, only to stab each other in the back when they are in power. But players who lie and betray others will find that their tricks stop working once players discover their true nature. It is a delicate balancing act, one which is at the core of most compelling multiplayer experiences. This is how you get a lot of gameplay for free in a multiplayer game.

In order to support this dynamic you must have abilities that benefit the lead player, as well as abilities that benefit all players. Obviously there must be benefits to being leader, so that players are motivated to reach the top spot. Perhaps they earn more points this way, which they can spend on special abilities, or maybe the ability to control the rules of the game is motivation enough. Either way, there must be advantages. But there must be ways for the leader to reward other players as well. That way, players can make campaign promises to each other to get their support: "Get me to the lead square and I'll use my Pay Day ability to increase your earnings for every round that I am in power!"

So far the game that I've described does not involve a long-term goal. Or even an end condition for each game. But don't worry, that's what I'm going to explain next.

grid slime?

There is a world map, a giant grid where each cell is a Gridslime court. At the bottom of the map are the newbie courts, where new players enter. At the top are the expert courts, where the stakes are higher - more points can be earned the higher you go. Players strive to reach the highest courts, both to prove their mastery and to enjoy the richer rewards.

As a new player, you start in the lowest courts. You can move freely left and right between courts, each of which might feature different terrain and configurations, but you must earn the right to go up to the next level. To move up, you must get to the lead square in your current court. Then you can choose to leave that game behind and join the court above - or wait in line to join it if the court is already full with players. Once you're up, you can move between courts left and right and below, but to go up again you must attain the lead square in one of the courts. If you come to an empty court, you can start a new game there, but you can't advance to a higher court unless you are the leader in a full game.

Alternatively, there might be a level requirement for each row, where players earn experience points through play that let them level up over time. The basic idea is to make sure players are matched with others of similar skill, to keep things fair and interesting. If it's not too unbalancing, you might also allow players to earn or buy free passes to get to the row above. You could also make some grid cells that are not courts - either completely impassable, or with free movement in any direction. You could even make movement cost a certain number of points, and make some grid cells cost more than others. This could help control the flow of players around the grid.

Enough of that. How about monetization and player-created content? First of all, you'll want to have some sort of virtual currency in the game. Actually, you'll want two - one that players can earn through playing, and one that players can buy with real money. And what will the players buy with this virtual currency? They will buy special abilities and avatar decorations.

The special abilities can be things like "cherry bombs" or "bus stops" that players can use when the leader allows them, or they can be rule-changes that players can use when they are in the lead square, like calling a "tea party" or allowing "poaching" for a round. They may also be physical changes like increased size or bounciness, or even weapons used to disrupt other players. For the most part, these will be bought in bulk with earned currency simply through playing the game, but rarer abilities may be purchased with real money. Because the leader has control over which abilities are allowed, there's less of an issue with players spending money for an unfair advantage.

Avatar decorations can be purely decorative, serving no in-game purpose. Or, if your engine supports it, players could customize their avatars beyond simple spheres, adding extra spheres or even other shapes in a ragdoll-ish way, or just adjusting and upgrading physical properties like stickiness and bounce. You can also incorporate player-created content here as well, allowing players to upload images as textures for their avatars, for a fee. They could even then go ahead and sell their images to other players, with you taking a transaction fee off the top. Since all players are spheres, you could just generate a circular cutout of the uploaded image and use that as the player sprite, maybe with a bit of shading tacked on for a more 3D feel.

The other place for player-created content would be in designing custom courts. One approach that might work is to let players form guilds or leagues (for a fee, of course) where members have access to special league-controlled courts as well as permanent abilities available in games within the league. And special hats, or something. This would be good if you want to keep player-created courts separate from those on the main grid. Or maybe you could find a way to combine the two. Could be cool.

I'm going to stop here. I've already gone on far too long. If you have questions, feel free to let me know. I'll leave you with this excellent article on design considerations for competitive multiplayer games, Testosterone and Competitive Play. Read it.

Want an idea? Make a request on The Game Idea Giveaway Thread!

A Briefly Lucid Dream

2009-11-30T12:31:00.000-08:00

You may be wondering what I've been up to. Or not. But I'll tell you anyway.

I've been working on my Flash physics engine, in particular, the collision detection and response. It's been a lot of fun. It's great to be solving interesting problems that I care about, being able to fix things and see them have an immediate affect, and build cool things that actually exist, instead of just being in my mind. The latest cool thing I've built with it is Engine Prototype 05, a ragdoll and a ball.

I expect to continue working on that for the next week or so.

I've also added a bunch of stuff to my deviantART gallery, like this weird painting of a scene from Ishmael, and a bunch of my nature photos from last year.

And I learned that yawning is the best thing ever, like yoga or meditation but easier, so I've been yawning constantly for the last few days. And I expect to continue doing so. *yawn*

Anyway, this morning I had a very brief period of lucidity while dreaming, falling asleep again after waking up early. All my lucid dreams so far have been wake-back-to-bed occurrences. I thought you might find it interesting.

2009/11/30
I was walking along a sidewalk, thinking somewhat abstractly about how I seemed to have just been dreaming. Then suddenly I realized that if that was true, then I was still dreaming. I immediately lay down on the grass and tried to see it up close, but all I could see was an indistinct blur. I couldn't see my hands either, so I knew that this was a dream.

Then the scene couldn't hold itself together any longer and it shifted somehow. I found myself talking with my parents about what had just happened, and I wasn't really sure if I was still dreaming or not. From there, I got carried away by the dream and lost my lucidity.

After writing that down, I happened to read the previous entry in my rarely-updated dream notebook, from earlier this year. I found it quite intriguing and poetic, and thought it would be worth sharing here.

2009/01/25
I was hiking a winding path in the snow along with many other people. They had lost hope. The majority had decided that the best way to go would be to nuke the whole place, with them in it. I didn't want to. But the missiles were coming.

I was terribly anxious. I could not bring myself to surrender to the situation and accept it. When the explosion came, I woke up. It may likely have been a false awakening.

I felt better about it then, that maybe death is just waking from a dream. I remember thinking, back in the snow, that I wanted to keep this identity and all its memories and attachments to people, that I couldn't be ready to merge with oblivion and leave it all behind.

My second dream was about these traveling people who were also sea creatures. As they imagined their future, they saw themselves falling into water, which they feared.

I pushed them into the water, and they suddenly realized that they were meant to be in the water, that they were already where they wanted to be, free.

What do you see when you imagine your future?

Optimizing the Mood Web

2009-11-17T10:30:00.000-08:00

food web? ...or mood web?

I've thought quite a bit about my goals, my motivations, what excites me in general. Which is good.

But I've never really tried to look at my motivation in terms of concrete, moment-to-moment experience. Recently, however, I've begun to notice some recurring patterns in my motivation. Doing certain things, experiencing certain things, will reliably get me excited about certain activities or projects to a significant extent. The effect is so strong, I'm amazed that I haven't noticed this before.

The list below is what I'm calling my "mood web" - as in food web - the description of all my triggers and what they get me excited about. Well, not all triggers, but the important ones, at least.

It's a slice of a mood web. You can see a few chains there - the way listening to songs that I've picked for my game ideas inspires me to flesh out the designs further, and then looking at the design sketches I've made inspires me to actually start making the games. But for the most part, these pieces are separate.

Still, they are useful. Have a look into my mind:

Walking outside to look at plants gets me excited about...

making a game in a procedural forest or garden

Walking outside in the rain at night gets me excited about...

making Environment Sketch 02 - Winter Rain

Walking by houses with nice bamboo gets me excited about...

making flutes out of bamboo

Practicing Aikido gets me excited about...

making Aikido games in Flash

Teaching Aikido gets me excited about...

designing a lesson plan to give people a taste of Aikido

Watching videos of other martial arts gets me excited about...

learning those martial arts

Reading about personal development gets me excited about...

improving my life and habits

Reading emails from people gets me excited about...

writing emails to those people

Reading through old idea notebooks gets me excited about...

writing up ideas for The Game Idea Giveaway Thread

Reading old calculator game ideas gets me excited about...

making games for the TI-83 Plus graphing calculator

Singing along to I'm on a Boat gets me excited about...

making an I'm Folding Proteins music video

Listening to songs I've picked for games gets me excited about...

designing those games

Looking at design sketches for my games gets me excited about...

making those games

Looking at design sketches for my physics engine gets me excited about...

making my physics engine

And let's not forget this one:

Eating corn chips gets me excited about...

eating more corn chips

Which can sometimes be a problem.

I hope that by understanding my own mood web I'll be able to more consciously choose how I spend my time. If I've decided that I should really be working on programming my physics engine, then I know that I should take the time to look through my design sketches and diagrams, as opposed to reading articles about Overcoming Procrastination or something like that. And if I don't have any inspiring design sketches, I should make some.

All of this may seem obvious, but it is something of a breakthrough for me. If I have not already locked onto a project, I often lack focus because so many different experiences trigger excitement in me, each of them directed toward different projects. And I had no idea how to deal with this.

But now that I've discovered how reliable these triggers are, I can really pay attention to what causes me to gain or lose interest in a project. The mood web is a framework that allows me to start making meaningful observations about myself. And I can now choose to activate or avoid specific triggers when I want to focus on specific projects instead of letting my mood get bounced around randomly.

Even further, I wonder if I can begin to modify my mood web, to nudge my response to certain situations and begin to associate them with different projects in order to build accelerating feedback loops. Perhaps a form of search engine optimization for the mind?

How about you? Do you also notice a reliable pattern to how your motivation changes? I'd be very curious to see what other people's mood webs look like. I imagine that they would be very different from person to person but I'm not sure how. Share yours in the comments and maybe we can find out! :)

Understanding Time

2009-11-13T13:58:00.000-08:00

I've been trying something new today.

I have a tendency to get stuck when I'm on the web - checking email, posting on Twitter, reading articles, replying to forum posts. It's like I start turning to stone, my mind gets stuck inside the computer screen. I think fifteen minutes have passed when an hour has gone by.

This is a problem. Not only do I end up spending more time than I want doing trivial tasks, I also neglect my basic needs and can easily go without eating lunch just because I suppress the physical pain I feel in order to focus on taking care of just a few more emails, a few more replies, a few more articles.

And now, I think I've found a solution.

The main problem is inertia. The longer I sit there in front of the computer, the more reluctant I am to get up. So I keep myself mobile - getting up and walking around every so often. But how could I make sure I do this?

It turn out that the answer is easier than I expected. As I found this morning, all I have to do is set a timer for five minutes, and put it in another room. When the timer goes off, I get up from the computer (that's the hard part) and walk over to the timer. I don't have to stop using the computer after that, I just restart the timer and go back to whatever I was doing. And then I do it all over again in five minutes. And five minutes after that. And so on.

I haven't had any trouble getting up for the timer - after all, I never let myself sit down for so long that I get completely stuck. After a while it becomes instinctive, Pavlovian, like waking up to an alarm clock. The hard part is making sure I get enough of a mental break that I can actually slow down and get some perspective before going back to the computer.

One thing that helps me is to put the timer in a different place every time. Hide it, even. This forces me to engage with the physical world, to acknowledge the third dimension, to get out of my head and get in touch with the place where my body lives, if only momentarily. Plus it's kind of fun. It helps me experience my ordinary surroundings in a new and refreshing way. And it's such a weird feeling to be looking for this timer, guided only by the sound of it beeping, with no recollection of where I put it just five minutes before.

What's strange is that already I find myself getting up naturally at five-minute intervals, right before the timer goes off. I get up for a drink of water (thanks to my newly instilled mobility) and then a few seconds later there goes the timer. Very interesting.

But the most striking thing about this whole exercise is how horribly skewed my perception of time is. I don't know if my timer's broken, but it feels like that thing is going off every two minutes, not every five. And I'm pretty sure the timer is working, because even my computer clock agrees. Yet almost every time I hear that timer go off, I'm thinking, "How has it been five minutes already? I just sat down!"

One thing that might help is to keep track of how many times the timer has gone off, writing down the current total every time I restart the time. I could write it in terms of minutes, even. Because it really feels like a lot less time has passed, and this might help me tie the feeling to the numbers.

Hopefully, using these timers will retrain my brain to perceive time more accurately. Who knows, maybe it will even help me in long-term planning. Though I might need another tool for that.

There are a lot of useful things you can do with timers and productivity - for example, the "48 minutes of flow" mentioned in this article. I've done something similar before, and it helps. It's just a matter of using your physical (or virtual) environment to reinforce your goals. It's like level design, applied to your own life. Why not?

You could even use this mechanic in an actual game. Put a timer in the game and give them a little reward for responding to it when it beeps, and the ability to put it somewhere else and start it again. Kind of like the Milano cookie effect in reverse. Could be useful.

Playtesting the Enemy

2009-11-08T15:42:00.000-08:00

You've probably heard that it's a good idea to playtest your game. If you haven't heard, well, I'm telling you now. It's a good idea.

But how about playtesting other people's games?

I was reading a book called Don't Make Me Think, a classic in web design and usability. At one point, the author suggested doing a usability test of a competitor's website before you start designing your own.

Why not apply it to game development?

If you're thinking of making a particular type of game, find an existing game that may have some relevant similarities, and do a playtest of it.

Find a random person, sit them down in front of the game, and observe. Watch for what they enjoy, what confuses them and where they get frustrated.

Then repeat with other random people and other games. Do it with both good games and poorly designed games. You will learn more by testing both than by only looking at one or the other. See where the bad games fail and what the good games do differently.

And then when you go to design your own game, you will know what mistakes to avoid.

Deconstructing Artificial Emotions

2009-11-06T14:10:00.000-08:00

A while ago, Daniel Cook wrote a game design article about how to provoke artificial emotions in players. His suggestion: give players a physiological nudge somehow, raising their heart rate, getting their adrenaline going, and then provide contextual cues about what emotion they should be experiencing at the time. And apparently, the players will be tricked into thinking they're actually experiencing the emotion you've set up.

Are all emotions are artificial?

I don't know, but I have noticed some interesting patterns through my own introspection.

Anger and sadness and frustration and despair, before they solidify into these emotions, start out as an indistinct feeling of tension inside. It is possible to focus on this tension before it is nudged - by my own assumptions and expectations - into one of these negative emotions.

The thing to remember is that the tension is all internal, in my own mind, and not somewhere outside in anyone else or any thing.

At the point where I notice this tension, before it becomes a full-blown, directed emotion, instead of reflexively reacting to it, fighting and getting defensive, I can listen to the motivations behind it. This is empathy. It's a lot like Aikido, except with emotions instead of physical attacks.

First of all, I can think of what expectation or fear or desire or need is causing this tension that I feel, and then, even further, I can think about what need or tension is behind the other person's actions or speech if another person is involved. Maybe this will help me resolve the tension or at least let it pass through me without escalating into something bigger.

One thing that sometimes helps me dissipate dangerous levels of tension safely is to listen to very fast, energetic music while lying down with my eyes closed. After a while, I can transition to more calm, repetitive music while I try to empty my mind of the assumptions and beliefs that are directing my tension outward.

Those who can maintain their composure and relaxed attitude even in difficult situations have probably mastered this ability to release internal tension before it manifests as emotion.

Concluding the Inaugural Experiment

2009-11-05T14:55:00.000-08:00

Earlier this year, I tried a little experiment.

I created a forum signature, attempting to start one of those chain letter-ish memes that seem so clever to the people who participate in them, and so utterly not for everyone else.

Mine:

I believe in Barack Obama as my personal savior. If you do too and aren't afraid to admit it, copy and paste this into your signature.

So what happened?

Apparently, nothing. No one got offended, and no one really got the joke or thought that it was all that funny or clever. It probably wasn't.

Well, one person copied it. But it didn't last long.

Oh well.

Time to try out a new signature! :)

How about this?

I believe that games will be as significant a new medium as the printed word ever was, and as powerful a force for change.

I am here to make that happen. Making life more fun

It's not a joke this time. It's sincere. Upon recommendation from books like Finding Your Own North Star and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, I've been trying to come up with a way to phrase my life goals, in a way that is inspiring yet specific enough to help guide my moment-to-moment decisions.

Because I need a reason to get on the computer and work instead of reading self-help books and stuffing my face with corn chips.

I'm still working on it. But this is a start, something short enough to put into a forum signature. I've been thinking about this for a while now, and I expect to keep adjusting it. I might even try brainstorming a list of possible life goals, as suggested here.

We'll see. :)

Books, Portals, Doorways in the Mind

2009-10-24T22:11:00.000-07:00

Continuing the discussion from my art museum notes, on books.

The cover of a book, a portal, is treated as a symbol by the brain. It stands for that which it contains.

And if there is some anxiety or aversion to the content beyond this gateway, the brain will find it easy to project its fears and assumptions onto this cover without ever opening it again to see what is really there. Symbols are whatever one projects through them - they will never talk back to refute one's ill-founded assumptions.

So if you want something to be seen or read that someone holds some reluctance towards, don't leave it out, closed, a symbol easy to dismiss. Instead, leave it open.

There are activities that are good, but are seen with apprehension or distaste by the mind, reducing the entire activity to a symbol, replacing the book with the cover. There are also cases in the reverse.

A better analogy might be doors - hints or suggestions thrown up by the mind, that seem appealing but lead to unfulfilling courses of action.

For example, I might think of a positive memory or feeling associated with deviantART. This is like a door - it then stands for all of deviantART in my mind. I am compelled to pass through the door and go onto the website.

But the experience I get there is not what I had hoped for, not what compelled me to go on in the first place. But of course by the time I am past the door enough to discover this, I can hardly find my way back.

I am very glad that I have been able to identify this behavior pattern, because now I can consciously choose not to open whatever doors look nicest, but to predict what will actually be a fulfilling course of action.

All those fairy tales and stories about the path that looks easiest, the path that's actually most treacherous - maybe they were actually about this.

Art Museum Notes

2009-10-22T17:36:00.000-07:00

The following is a fairly faithful transcription of the notes I made in my sketchbook at three art exhibits, several years ago. I hope you find them as interesting as I did.

The links were added after the fact, of course.

An-My Lê: Small Wars

(rehearsal)

these military tents, vehicles, etc.
just staked out in a featureless desert

really gives a feeling of makeshift,
arbitrary imposed structure
- culture, human actions and thoughts
would be a good setting for a game
- reminds me of IvoryDrive's Black

one of those soldiers there lying in the shade of the camouflage
reminds me of my dad when he was younger

setting up facades, models, in the desert
for simulated training environments

physical, not digital
- in the desert

The camouflage really does make them blend in.
It would be hard to see while driving through
the desert, eyes getting bored, skipping over things

hiding in the gaps of attention

(reenactment)

I like those bamboo and forest photos

Snipers - a lot of pictures of those
It's an interestingly different role
and way of approaching gun combat

hidden, but not really that much
- gaps of attention?
- desert vs. jungle

the Distant Flare photo is interesting

Kim Jones: A Retrospective

books and covers - paths, portals, symbols in the mind

living, organic, growing, moving book covers?
how does that change things?
- showing an instance of dynamics of the system
  that is described within

playing wargames on maps - Tufte
"work on it, get tired of it, work on it more"

long-term devotion to a creative construction,
a miniature garden - viki
- similar to Civ2 micromanagement and slow pace
  keeping higher levels of organization in mind,
  but individually controlling the smallest parts

I like those weird stick/clutter/adhesive costumes

good for ragdoll?
MMO customization?
- Katamari

"indeterminate form" "biomorphic forms" "hybrid creatures"

one must map out Jones' particular symbolic language,
his "personal idiom of figures, animals, and forms"
to understand possible or intended meanings
- connection to "homeless, camouflaged soldiers, peasants,
  or any number of mystic figures found in religions worldwide"
- Raven?

Installation art is a good source for miniature garden,
anthropomorphic, symbolically rich, minimal constructions

stick interweavings similar to jungle/forest

Bug aesthetic

war games become abstract, mathematical structures
when you zoom out, like cellular automata

particle trails connecting the elements of this installation,
depicting dynamics of their relationships,
and also in their individual operation

Dust in The Amber Spyglass

putting books, meaning-rich pictures
into crevices and hidden surfaces
in ordinary physical objects and landscapes

the objects without secret books all point to the special one
somehow, in their arrangement or orientation

Having to lie down, or crouch, or whatever
to engage with whatever material is hidden there,
can bring or force a particular physical context to the situation,
which is usually seen as uncontrollable
in the design of digital content

Shu: Reinventing Books in Contemporary Chinese Art

Gutters - in comics, in books - rooms in architecture

Books used to have a lot more different forms, before perhaps
economic processes pushed it to a local maximum?

When a new medium is invented, many forms emerge,
each as guesses of what might work
scroll (continuous) - no gutters?
pleated (accordion) - gutters partly there
pages (normal book) - gutters permanent between pages

Ink can make letters visible, or cover them up and distort them

distortion of discrete signals vs. continuous?

what happens when the interpreting rules, the context, changes?

What feelings are contained in the flow
and halting and reversing of line in written characters?

alternative to interpreting visually, it's kinesthetic.

Sketch books are another sort of book

Paper cutting (like with an X-acto blade)
could be a way to do Northwest Coast art

using the stacked pages of books as a blank substrate
on which the results of a process could be recorded

like burning patterns

letting ink build up beyond its use within the context of books,
and let it take on a life of its own

like the magic books in Discworld

putting the reading of an image in an explicitly sequential form
by putting parts of it on each page

Where does ink get its power?
Partly in the materials and processes used to manufacture it.

similarly with paper

"encyclopedic"

Different languages, different writing systems,
different cultural approaches to books, text

Silk worms, living letters

The book, "transmits knowledge but does not
guarantee its authenticity."

what would a book be like that does
guarantee its authenticity?

Tools, instruments, for writing and printing

specialness, valuableness, preciousness of objects
containing stories within? worlds? hints of them?

a chunk of stone forming interesting spaces and patterns,
held by a stand

stands, frames = important

Early Chinese characters were very rounded, lacking tension.
The modern characters are angular and hold much more discretely
understandable tension and flow, like traditional formline art

Sleeping books

as architectural ruins
active cultural objects, carriers of social messages,
eventually become dead relics
"vulnerability of memory and history"

How would this look anthropomorphized,
like in Discworld's Unseen University library?

What does it describe?

pathways in the universal possibility space,
ant trails formed but fading away

Where to Start with AS3, FlashDevelop and Flixel

2009-10-08T16:32:00.000-07:00

the free tools of the trade...

I've been working with Flash for a few years now. But I didn't switch over to programming with ActionScript 3.0 until earlier this summer. And I have to say, I've found AS3 to be so much easier to work with than AS2. I'm glad I switched.

Here's where to start if you want to make Flash games with AS3. If you do it this way, it's all free, and you don't need any prior experience with programming, or Flash.

If you forget everything else I'm about to tell you, just remember these two words:

FlashDevelop

(it turns code into programs)

Flixel

(it helps you make game code)

These two things, together, make up the path of least resistance for free Flash game development. You are not going to find an easier way to do it anywhere else. Believe me. I've tried.

So, where do you start?

Step 1: FlashDevelop

so shiny...

Start with the Making Games in ActionScript 3 using FlashDevelop tutorials! They'll tell you everything you need to download, how to install it and get it all set up, and walk you through all the basics of a typical Flash game.

Here they are:

They are very gentle, but I can imagine that someone who has never done any programming before may get confused somewhere along the way.

This tutorial will assume some basic familiarity with object oriented programming, a graphical tool of your choice and general computer literacy.

If you have any questions, you are welcome to post them here - I'll do my best to help. :)

But first, I'd recommend having a look through the Understanding Classes in AS3 tutorials!

If you’re stuck in an ActionScript 2 rut, or you’re new to ActionScript 3 and it’s blowing your mind, this should help ease you in a bit better.

Here they are:

If you already feel comfortable with classes and objects, you can skip these. They're optional. But they're worth reading if you haven't done much object-oriented programming before.

All right.

Have you gone through the Making Games in AS3 tutorials? Have you gotten FlashDevelop all set up, and maybe made a simple program or two?

If not, then go back and do it!

If yes, then you're ready to move on to the next step! :D

Step 2: Flixel

so pixelicious...

Don't bother making games from scratch. Make them with Flixel.

flixel is a completely free collection of ActionScript 3 files that helps organize, automate, and optimize Flash games; an object-oriented framework that lets anyone create original and complex games with thousands of objects on screen in just a few hours.

Oh yes.

It's the same game engine that was used to make Canabalt.

Start by downloading the latest version of Flixel, then follow these instructions to get a something showing up on the screen. If it works, download this example game and follow these quick instructions to run it:

Running Mode in FlashDevelop

If you can get the example game to work, you can move on to these two step-by-step tutorials on how to build a game from scratch using Flixel:

Then you can try this more in-depth tutorial on how to make a spaceship shooting game from scratch using Flixel:

Follow along, and by the end of it you should have three little action games and the knowledge to start building your own games with Flixel!

To help you in your journey, there is the Flixel documentation, the Flixel wiki, and the help forum where you can ask questions and find answers. Also, the Flash Game Dojo. And of course, Google is always helpful.

If you get tired of using Flixel, for some strange reason, and you want to build your own game engine, you can give this tutorial a try. For experts only!

Lastly, here are a few tools that may come in handy.

Unless you're making games for blind people (which is awesome) you'll probably need some way to make graphics and animations for your games. I'd highly recommend using the free image editor Paint.NET for this purpose. It's great for pixel art, and easy to use despite having a lot of nice features in it.

Similarly, you'll probably want to have sounds in your game. For general sound recording and editing, try the free sound editor Audacity. Again, it's easy to use and is capable enough for recording and modifying sounds. I use it mostly to clean up recordings or save sounds into different formats and file sizes.

If you're not interested in recording your own sound effects, you can generate them, with the amazing free tool called sfxr. Just click a button to get a randomized game sound, or change the settings manually to get the sound you want. It's perfect for games.

The creator of sfxr has also released a free tool for making game music, called musagi. I haven't tried it yet but I hear it's pretty good.

There are quite a lot of nice, free tools out there if you know where to look. Here's one list that you might find useful.

That's all I have for you! Now go make some awesome games with FlashDevelop and Flixel. And let me know how it goes. I'm here if you have any questions. :)

Good luck!

Active Sketch 03 - Words

2009-10-07T20:07:00.000-07:00

Update:
Reviewed by Gregory Weir, the author of Silent Conversation! :D

A new prototype.

It's an attempt to turn a text into an interesting environment for a game, along the lines of some of my earlier thoughts. I was never really satisfied by Silent Conversation's take on the whole "text as environment" thing, and I've been trying to extract some meaningful gameplay out of the words themselves.

So this is where I'm at so far.

Active Sketch 03 - Words

The goal is to match similar words. Use the arrow keys to move around. You can pick up a word by pressing x or c.

On the right is your score, and on the left is your score multiplier and the current word you are holding. If you match two words exactly, your multiplier goes up. If you pick up two words that have no letters in common, your multiplier is halved. Otherwise, you get points for each letter the two words have in common, multiplied by your score multiplier. I stole the multiplier system from Music Catch.

There is no time limit, and words reappear after they go off the screen, so you can get as many points as you have patience for. It's not a game. It's just a test.

The story is something I wrote over a year ago, a retelling of Where the Wild Things Are with the themes of Ishmael, in the style of a Haida myth. It still has a sappy Western ending, though.

The lines that end in "they say" are the canonical elements of the story - actually two stories, Where the Wild Things Are, and Genesis. That's based on a Haida mythtelling convention, more or less. The symbolism and structural harmony and such is woefully inadequate compared to the stories of the master mythtellers, but hey, it's my first try.

Anyway, the story doesn't matter. It's just filler text to test out the matching mechanics. :p

Try it out and let me know what you think.

they will eat you up...

Communicating with Prototypes

2009-09-28T11:15:00.000-07:00

For the last month, as I've detailed on this blog, I've been working on a project with the artist brontosaurus.

Both of us are very new at this whole indie game development thing, and we have made plenty of mistakes. And we will make plenty more. But we are learning.

I thought I'd share some of our latest mistakes, and what we've learned from them.

First of all, we've switched game ideas almost every week for the past several weeks. This in itself is not the problem. We change direction because we find problems with our old ideas that prompt us to start anew.

Here's a quick overview of the journey our ideas have taken:

We started with a game based on this picture.

Then we switched over to procedural aliens.

But we couldn't turn it into a game.
We tried to find a game here.

Then we decided to simplify.
We thought climbing would be easier.

But we couldn't make it fun.
So we switched over to suburbia.

And now, we're still in suburbia, but reconsidering.

Why have we had to switch ideas so frequently? What mistakes made it so difficult for us to just stick to one idea and finish it?

It has been a progression of mistakes. We started off trying to randomly doodle a game into a existence. Then we realized that we need to start with actions and gameplay before we start doodling interesting worlds and characters.

Now I'm beginning to see that our process for coming up with gameplay has been flawed.

My specialty is in game design, and programming. I choose to work with brontosaurus because his skills complement mine - his specialty is in world design, and art.

The way it usually works is that someone like me comes up with an idea for a game, and then finds an artist who is interested in making the art for that game idea. But we did it differently. Since I didn't have a particular idea in mind, and I like talking with brontosaurus about game design, we thought we'd just come up with an idea together.

This was not our mistake. The problem started because we were both communicating our ideas in words.

When I try to explain a game idea to brontosaurus, he has trouble understanding how it would look or feel. But the ideas I come up with usually have interesting game mechanics that I could prototype.

When brontosaurus explains a game idea to me, it's always very evocative and visually interesting, and he's ready to create all sorts of cool concept art for it. But I have no idea how to start prototyping it, since the mechanics are too vague.

Because I've been impatient to agree on an idea and get going, I always go with the ideas that brontosaurus comes up with, even though I don't know what the gameplay will look like. But sooner or later the vagueness of the design catches up to us, and we reluctantly decide to come up with a new, more feasible game idea. This is how the cycle continues.

Brainstorming may be fine in text. But when it comes to choosing ideas to work on, it's not really fair to evaluate our ideas until we have experienced them in either a visual or procedural form. I will express my ideas through prototypes, and brontosaurus will express his ideas through concept art.

If my prototypes inspire brontosaurus to come up with a world and an art style, then we can make them into full games. If brontosaurus' concept art inspires me to invent mechanics and gameplay, then we can turn those into games, too. But our starting point must be tangible. Words are not enough.

Let the game designers come up with gameplay, in the form of prototypes. Let the world designers come up with worlds, in the form of concept art. Don't force one to do the other's job.

It may take longer at first, but it's the only way we'll make something that we're both satisfied with.

Let's hope it will work in time for the contest. ;)

Update:
In other words, Less Talk More Rock.

Thoughts on the EXPLORE Contest

2009-09-27T16:08:00.000-07:00

I'm working on a project with brontosaurus.

We have seven days to submit a game for the EXPLORE contest at Jay is Games. I like our current idea, and I think we should keep going with it. But even if we can put it together in seven days, I'd want to take at least another seven days to playtest and polish it. In other words, I don't want to rush this for the contest.

We could take a break and make a short, quick game for the contest just for fun, not expecting to win anything. I had a few ideas for that. One is to use our conversation history as the game content, since we have plenty of it, and it's interesting. There are a number of ways we could use it, but one very simple way to do it would be combine it with the Linear RPG. Or the typography could be a physical space to traverse, like Silent Conversation, with emoticons as powerups or something.

I was thinking about the Stick Figures story in Tales from Outer Suburbia, and where the story is, or where you might find a game there. It seems to just describe a scene, a place, without turning it into a particular story. It's hard to identify the protagonist, antagonist, and conflict. Maybe the antagonist is actually the confusion felt by the townspeople, rather than an actual character. Who knows? But you can more easily see little stories inside of it, like a kid smashing a stick figure with a baseball bat and getting frustrated, and uncertainty turning to fear and anger.

I was thinking about games, and how you could have a persistent world that is experienced through short, repeated game sessions. Little stories inside a world. Imagine Canabalt if instead of starting over when you die, you start again in the same world, at the place where you left off, or on the ground where you landed, or as another character somewhere else. It is similar to Calamity Annie, the way the narrative progresses even as you play again, where the gameplay repeats, but the world is fleshed out as you continually revisit it.

I'm also thinking about Zero Punctuation. Our conversation history could take the role of the monologue that narrates the images in a Zero Punctuation review. The only difference is that it is a dialogue, in text and not in speech. But the communication is similar. It does not tell a story, it discusses and explains. However, if we were to do this, we'd need a way to automatically come up with the images based on the text since it is not feasible to generate so much content by hand.

Freedom of movement across an image, linear movement along a text. Text forms the goals, while images are the medium of action? One action per line of text, one visual change. How do you create images from text? How do you combine text and action to get an image? The image and text give rise to the feedback. And the text leads the progression.

I was thinking about Spirited Away, my favorite animated movie. If Canabalt is like The Matrix, what would be the equivalent for Spirited Away? For Canabalt, you take the decisions that are implied and make them explicit. Or rather, you make it explicit, since there is only one decision. What equivalent can be found in Spirited Away? What decision can be made with the press of a single button?

But Canabalt is a linear game. You decide nothing. You act, in order to experience. Can exploration be about anything other than freedom of movement? When does exploration feel linear? A map does not dictate a path. When does it feel linear? A maze might have only one path, though it looks like a map. A labyrinth, even more so. Look at the feet. They never change their rhythm, yet the landscape around them changes. Is that exploration? What if they do change their rhythm?

You could make a game where you press a button to turn and change direction. This could be freedom of movement. Is it linear? If your actions have bigger consequences later on, maybe it is not really linear. If you turn here, you got to the desert. If you turn here, you go to the ocean. In Canabalt, your actions now have their consequence now - they do not change your route for the future. Can you explore without changing your route?

I've been thinking about tension before it solidifies into an emotion. I've been able to notice this tension already several times today, and let it fade away without latching onto anything external and feeding off the imbalance that results. I imagine there could be something similar for positive emotions. It all reminds me very much of Daniel Cook's Constructing Artificial Emotions, and I am intrigued by the idea of incorporating this into a game.

Where will this take us? I don't know. We'll see.

Active Sketch 02 - Ledges

2009-09-20T17:45:00.000-07:00

Another sketch.

This time, a prototype. I made it to test out the movement controls for a climbing game.

In our effort to make a cool intriguing game, the artist brontosaurus and I have been coming up with concept art and procedural sketches that we could combine into something interesting. But we've realized that our approach is in need of a slight course correction.

Procedural trees and space invaders may be cool to look at, but that's not the same as a game that's fun to play. If you create a bunch of cool things, you don't automatically end up with an interesting interaction when you put them all together. But if you start by creating cool actions, things to do, then you're more likely to end up with something that's fun to play.

Daniel Cook put it this way, when asked for advice:

Typically what I'd suggest is working on a core mechanic and seeing if you can 'find the fun'. I see you focusing more on artwork...which is pretty, but doesn't find the fun.

Given this suggestion, I realized it might be more appropriate to spend less time creating procedural art and more time prototyping gameplay.

This doesn't mean that I shouldn't spend any time creating procedural art. It just means that before I come up with things, I need to come up with the actions first. If I have the gameplay down, the stuff you do, then I'll know what sort of things would go well with those actions, what would make them more fun or meaningful or interesting.

So this is our new doctrine: design the verbs first, then the nouns. Not the other way around.

Thus, this climbing prototype.

Active Sketch 02 - Ledges

It's simple. Use the arrow keys to move the climber around. You can press up to jump, or down to drop from a ledge. The interesting bit is that you can hang on ledges. Maybe not quite as interesting as jumping off walls, but hey, it's an experiment. :p

I used the Flixel engine to make it. Flixel is awesome. It's perfect for little games like this, especially if you like pixel-y graphics. I wholeheartedly recommend it. I'll write a blog post about it sometime.

However, brontosaurus and I probably won't be taking this climbing concept any further. We had thought it might be a good idea to start with a simple action like climbing, and build up from there. And we started creating some concept art for such a game, which you can see here.

But after trying out some movement controls in this prototype we decided that the gameplay wasn't strong enough to carry an entire game. And that's the whole point of a prototype - to tell you whether the game is worth making or not.

So we're back to the drawing board.

And with some inspiration from Shaun Tan and The Little Prince, hopefully we'll come up with something even better. I'll let you know how it goes. :)

Game Idea Giveaway - Garden Chomp

2009-09-15T12:00:00.000-07:00

...continued from The Game Idea Giveaway Thread

Request by freelanceflashgames:

what sort of game idea you're looking for
Something fairly simple and easy to code, yet fun. The game would probably feature achievements and upgrades, but it isn't required.

what your goals are in making this game
To make a good game that will be different from others and people will have fun playing.

The normal idea: Lava Land

The weird idea: Garden Chomp

In short, the idea is a simple arcade collection game where you try to balance your needs with those of the surrounding ecosystem. You are a little guy running around a garden, seen from above. There may be a few scattered rocks or plants as obstacles, but generally the playing area is unobstructed. Your goal is to survive as long as possible without getting eaten or starving to death.

You have an energy meter that constantly decreases. To increase your energy meter, you eat mushrooms. Just move around with the arrow keys or the mouse, and touch a mushroom to eat it. Like collecting gold in N, you have to eat these mushrooms often enough that your energy stays above zero. Otherwise, you die.

Where do mushrooms come from? To answer that question, we'll have to introduce you to your delightful companions in this little garden - the chompers. A chomper is basically a big mouth that can walk around - like Pac-Man with teeth and legs. Their entire function is to eat and produce manure. As luck would have it, chomper manure is the perfect fertilizer for mushrooms. As the chompers amble around the screen, they leave a trail of manure in their wake, which soon sprouts a delicious bouquet of mushrooms for your consumption.

To produce manure, chompers must eat. If they're especially hungry, they'll try and eat you. Don't let that happen - keep them well fed. Like an aphid, you produce honeydew, a sweet delicacy much enjoyed by the chompers. You can click the mouse or press the space bar to produce honeydew and toss it in the direction you are facing, preferably into a Chomper's perpetually open mouth. Producing honeydew subtracts from your energy meter though, so make sure you are eating plenty of mushrooms!

It's not that complicated. If you touch a mushroom, you eat it and increase your energy. If you touch a chomper, you get bitten and lose a large amount of energy. If you touch manure, you get kind of sticky and move slower for a while.

What?

You eat mushrooms and make honeydew.
Chompers eat honeydew and make manure.
Manure gradually sprouts into mushrooms.

It's a nice little cycle. And the timing and conversion rates will take a lot of balancing in order to feel right.

Even though the game is about surviving as long as possible, it might be a good idea to break it into levels. The first level might have one chomper, lots of mushrooms, and few obstacles. The next level could have two chompers, and maybe the next level has two chompers and a bunch of obstacles arranged in a sort of maze. To beat a level, maybe you have to fill up your energy meter all the way, where each level might require a different amount of energy. Or you could just make it about surviving for a certain amount of time, though I could see that being annoying in a level-based game.

And there are plenty of things you could do with random goodies and powerups, changing how fast you move, making mushrooms grow faster, giving you temporary invincibility, or just giving you extra energy. Aiming the honeydew could be made easy or difficult. I'd probably go far something fairly easy, where the honeydew travels in a straight line until it hits an obstacle or goes off the screen. If a chomper is facing you with its mouth open then you can toss some honeydew straight in without worrying too much about aiming skill.

There could even be different varieties of chompers - some completely harmless, some that get hungry quickly and will chase after you, some that move fast, some that move slow. If you want, you even could do some weird things with Langton's Ant and patterns of manure. Maybe the player could push the manure around to change how the chompers walk. But I'd suggest starting with simple random movement and going from there.

Good luck! :)

Want an idea? Make a request on The Game Idea Giveaway Thread!

The Invader Ecosystem

2009-09-12T14:22:00.001-07:00

Humans, invaders, and trees.

For my first project since going indie, I've been working with the artist brontosaurus on a little game. The specifics of this project change around a lot, since we're taking a loose, spontaneous sort of approach to developing it. Lately we've been heading in a space invaders-ish direction, and we've been trying to think of how we might extract some actual gameplay from the procedurally generated toys we've been playing with.

In order to focus in on something simple, we've decided to base the entire game off the feel of the concept art above, I Have You Now.

We thought that might mean creating a little ecosystem of invaders that the player, a human, could observe and mess around with. Like, the invaders eat each other, maybe reproduce a little bit, and maybe you can help some invaders fight off some other ones, maybe do a bit of genetic engineering, and it would be all cool and stuff.

But I'm realizing that it would not really be all cool, or stuff.

So...

In general, the full artificial life approach with procedural terrain, trees, and invaders is both too big and too bland. It's too big for us to finish quickly. And it doesn't have enough human interest. We've got to put the feeling in it, the fantasy, the thing that makes it worthwhile to participate in the experience.

It's too big in a lot of ways, but the main problem is artificial intelligence - how the invaders behave. Adopt an Invader is an elegant design because the core behavior of all the invaders is the same - a simple flying, shooting ship. Additional behaviors and personality, like dropping goodies or flying in a certain pattern, are manually added by the players. Computers do what they're good at, and the players do what they're good at. Everyone's happy.

The problem with this approach is technology. We can't make Adopt an Invader right now, since we don't have time or resources to set up a database-driven web site. But we could incorporate the core idea into a single player game. That is, take generic invaders and manually add personality to them through playing the game.

It's like Pokemon. But instead of collecting the creatures so you can fight better, you collect them so you can start building onto them. Not physically, but mentally, in terms of behavior. Each invader is like a base for your LEGO pieces.

Now you have a goal - find and acquire invaders to build on, as well as the raw materials with which to build. And now we can start turning this into an addictive loop. And so now we're getting somewhere, with this game design.

We'll see where this idea takes us. Both brontosaurus and I like creating things, so hopefully we can turn the process of creating itself into a game. Creating, as well as collecting things with which to create, that is. It's a lot like what we're doing right now - collecting inspiration art, trying to build on that to create a game. We'll see. :)

Any thoughts?

walking along...

Game Idea Giveaway - Lava Land

2009-09-10T11:04:00.000-07:00

...continued from The Game Idea Giveaway Thread

Request by freelanceflashgames:

what sort of game idea you're looking for
Something fairly simple and easy to code, yet fun. The game would probably feature achievements and upgrades, but it isn't required.

what your goals are in making this game
To make a good game that will be different from others and people will have fun playing.

what games you've made already
whack-a-mole, a sort of falling game, an unfinished platformer, unfinished climbing sort of game, and pong

your favorite Flash games
Onslaught 2, amorphous +, hedgehog launch, the last stand, bubble tanks 2, fancy pants, bowmaster prelude are just some that I could think of.

your abilities in game design, programming, art, and sound
Good game design, decent programming, pretty good art, and alright at finding sounds.

your preferences in game design, programming, art, and sound
I'd say most is art, then programming and game design. I can't make my own sounds, so I usually go looking for them.

The weird idea: Garden Chomp

The normal idea: Lava Land

In short, this idea is a simple arcade collection game (like Pac-Man) on a shifting field of lava. You are a little guy running around on the field of molten lava. Your goal is to collect the crystals that form as the lava cools, without getting burned by the rock-meltingly high temperatures underfoot.

It's basically an enhanced version of Acid Rain, a game I made several years ago for the TI-83 graphing calculator. It's what the game always wanted to be, freed from the limitations of the calculator's tiny screen and slow processor.

The focus of the game is on the environment, and how it changes. The entire map is a 2.5D isometric grid of tiles, and fits on one screen, without scrolling. Each tile has a height and a temperature. Cool temperatures mean that a tile is solid rock, safe to walk on, while hot temperatures mean molten lava.

Blobs of molten lava constantly rain down from the sky, as if spewed out by a nearby volcano. Each blob lands on a random tile, raising its height with the added material and raising its temperature to molten levels. Molten lava will quickly cool and harden to become rock, but you don't want to be standing on it while you wait for that to happen. Sometimes a blob will cool and turn into a crystal instead. When that happens, you can walk onto that tile to harvest the crystal.

The net effect of all these blobs raining down is to continually raise the height of the lava field, forming an interesting landscape of peaks and valleys. To compensate for this (we can't make things too easy) the whole field is also sinking at a constant rate. All tiles sink gradually, and when their height drops to the lowest level, they go permanently molten, submerged in lava. Of course, they can be raised up again if a new blob falls from the sky.

The fun of the game is in making your way through this shifting landscape, avoiding danger and plotting your path to the crystals that pop up. All you do is move, with the arrow keys or the mouse, and jump, with the space bar or the mouse button. To collect a crystal or a powerup, just move onto it. Your protective suit gets damaged when you touch a molten hot tile - the hotter it is, the more damage it does. If your suit gets damaged too much, you lose the game.

That's pretty much it. It's meant to be a simple game, like something you might find on Orisinal. There are a number of details you could add, like crystals of different types and rarity, shields that recharge, a time limit, powerups, upgrades, or achievements. But that's up to you. Attractive artwork and well-tweaked numbers will be important for this game, as well as making sure the controls are easy to use. I'd be glad to help advise on the design once you've gotten something going. Let me know. :)

Want an idea? Make a request on The Game Idea Giveaway Thread!

Active Sketch 01 - Invaders

2009-09-05T00:35:00.000-07:00

An update! :D

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm going indie.

And for my first project, I'm working with the artist brontosaurus to make a game showcasing his unique blend of pixel art and intriguing world design. In order to make the most effective use of his talents, we are trying to make developing a game as much as possible like doodling random pictures.

This means that we're creating little sketches in code, implementing one concept at a time in order to mix and match them into, hopefully, a cool game. We talk about our ideas, brontosaurus creates some concept art, and then I take the art and try to turn it into something procedural.

We're calling these procedural things Active Sketches, and I've just released my first one.

Active Sketch 01 - Invaders

This is just a tool to generate a bunch of random space invaders, based on the invader fractal. It's amazing what the human brain will do with bilateral symmetry. :p

It's fun though. You can find some nice pixelated images quickly with this thing. Need help creating sprites for your new graphing calculator game? Just set the dimensions to 8x8 and click Generate until you find some that you like.

Next up - fractal invaders, colored invaders, procedural trees...

Ahh, trees.

Going Indie

2009-09-01T20:18:00.000-07:00

I've graduated, left my old job, and now guess what...

I'm going indie! :D

I'll be making my own Flash games full-time, finally.

I'll be using this as an opportunity to experiment and learn - about design, about programming, about collaboration, and about monetization. And I'll be focusing on rapid development cycles, to learn as much as I can in a short period of time.

As the great Daniel Cook once said,

Experience comes from finishing multiple times. By doing shorter projects, you get more finishes under your belt.

Starting projects is easy. Getting into production is easy. Spending other people's money is easy.

It is only when you go beyond that to wrapping up a project and trying to make money does reality hit and strong lessons are learned.

This is really an opportunity to put many of my ideas to the test - not only game ideas, but ideas about process and how to do things. I'm especially eager to test some ideas about using micropayments and metrics in online games.

To start with, I'm working on a project with brontosaurus, a talented pixel artist and map designer. We're trying out a new process for "doodling" a game, one piece at a time. Every day, brontosaurus will come up with a new concept, like a procedural tree, or a movement animation, and the next day I try to implement it in code. We're hoping that this will allow us to organically build a game out of pieces, and quickly try out ideas, in a similar way to how you might create something spontaneously awesome by doodling.

You can expect to see updates soon. :D

Wish me luck! ;)

Notes on 21st Century Game Design

2009-08-30T17:34:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd post a quick summary of the player model presented in the book 21st Century Game Design, by Chris Bateman. He has since come out with a new player model, but the old one is still interesting to think about.

If you want to learn more about the book, you can read the review on Lost Garden.

In this model, the audience is grouped into four types of players:

Conquerors care about Challenge
Managers care about Mechanics
Wanderers care about Worlds
Participants care about People

The system is based on the Myers-Briggs personality types:

Purpose- where you get your energy
Introverted (I) - long sessions
Extroverted (E) - short sessions
Learning - how you process information
Intuitive (N) - hardcore
Sensate (S) - casual
Motivation - how you make decisions
Thinking (T) - competition
Feeling (F) - simulation
Structure - how you manage your time
Judging (J) - goals
Perceiving (P) - process

The four player types are defined in these terms:

Conqueror (TJ) - competition (T) and goals (J)
Manager (TP) - competition (T) and process (P)
Wanderer (FP) - simulation (F) and process (P)
Participant (FJ) - simulation (F) and goals (J)

There are also four types of skills:

Strategic (NT) - think ahead, invent, coordinate others
Diplomatic (NF) - resolve conflicts, find similarities
Logistical (SJ) - meet needs, organize, optimize
Tactical (SP) - read the situation, take action

The four player types prefer using certain skills:

Conqueror (TJ) - strategic (NT) and logistical (SJ)
Manager (TP) - strategic (NT) and tactical (SP)
Wanderer (FP) - diplomatic (NF) and tactical (SP)
Participant (FJ) - diplomatic (NF) and logistical (SJ)

Hardcore and casual players also prefer certain skills:

Hardcore (N) - strategic (NT) and diplomatic (NF)
Casual (S) - tactical (SP) and logistical (SJ)

I've been finding it interesting to analyze my own game ideas in terms of what play styles and skills they support.

For example, I came up with a way for Adopt an Invader to cater to all four player types in this model - conquerors, managers, wanderers, and participants. And in doing so, I realized that trying to appeal to all four types would make the design much too big and ambitious to actually create. So I decided to focus on the conquerors and participants, and make the experience as enjoyable as possible for those two types.

In case you're wondering, my favorite style of play is probably that of the Wanderer, which makes sense, given that I also tend to prefer Explorer and Seeker play. I tend to care more about the overall experience and fun than about competition and challenge, and I like to focus on the process instead of worrying too much about goals. But in real life, I am extremely goal-oriented. Which is interesting. :)

However, these player types are not clear-cut boundaries. They are fuzzy generalizations about the average behavior of large groups of people. As the book says, "The four play types are not mutually exclusive; one or more can be enjoyed by each individual player."

Just keep that in mind and you'll be fine. ;) I hope you have as much fun as I have digesting this new player model! :)

Quotes of Eastern Wisdom

2009-08-26T14:40:00.000-07:00

Doesn't that sound corny? Eastern wisdom? Almost as bad as saying Wisdom of the East. Horrible.

Anyway, last year I had one of those calendars where you get a quote every day, and it was called Wisdom of the East. Surprisingly enough, there were a few good quotes in there - which I saved so I could read them again every so often. I thought I'd share them with you here.

Who knows if you'll get anything out of them, but they are actually meaningful to me. Here we go!

"Praying is not about asking; it's about
listening... It is just opening your eyes to
see what was there all along."

- Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche

"If your desires do not accord with
your spirit, sacrifice them, and you will
come to the end of your journey."

- Attar

"Do not dwell in the past.
Do not dream of the future.
Concentrate the mind on the
present moment."

- Buddha

"Pleasure is a freedom song,
But it is not freedom.
It is the blossoming of your desires,
But it is not their fruit."

- Kahlil Gibran

"To get rid of your passions is not
nirvana - to look upon them as
no matter of yours, that is nirvana."

- Zen saying

"Whatever you want to be, start to
develop that pattern now. You can instill
any trend in your consciousness right
now, provided you inject a strong
thought in your mind; then your actions
and whole being will obey that thought."

- Paramahansa Yogananda

"You are unique as you are here and now.
You are never the same.
You will never be the same again.
You have never before been what
you are now. You will never be it again."

- Swami Prajnanpad

"The resistance to the unpleasant
situation is the root of suffering."

- Ram Dass

"...don't make any conjectures on good
and evil! Don't try to stop your thoughts
from coming. Ask yourself only this
question: 'Which is my own spirit?'"

- Bassui

"Man falls from the pursuit of the ideal of
plain living and high thinking the moment
he wants to multiply his daily wants.
Man's happiness really lies in contentment."

- Mahatma Gandhi

One at a time.

The Story of the Mountain Climber

2009-08-25T17:55:00.000-07:00

Over the past few weeks, I've realized that I enjoy working in the domain that I have become fluent in, but find it frustrating to untangle a new, unfamiliar system while simultaneously trying to build something with it. I like exploring permutations and connections, rather than untangling difficult puzzles. And I am able to focus much better and use my time more productively when I am doing something I like.

And all of this has helped me realize that I don't want to be a game programmer. I want to be a game designer.

I like to explain this in terms of the Explorer and the Achiever player type. I am an Explorer (or Seeker). Programming, or engineering in general, tends to be most rewarding for Achievers, not Explorers. Achievers feel a rush of pleasure and energy when they finally solve a difficult challenge. I, on the other hand, tend to feel relief rather than excitement. What I like is the part that comes afterward.

Here's a little story to help visualize the situation.

Imagine climbing a mountain. I'm part of a team of engineers, laboriously lugging a heavy load of code up the mountainside. It's hard going, and we have to keep our heads down, focus on keeping a solid footing, freeing our load from snags, climbing over or around the boulders in our way. All the while, we have to stay coordinated and make sure the whole team is making steady progress up the mountain. Our determination and caffeinated beverages keep us going.

But I tire of this more quickly than my companions, and often turn to look out, away from the rocks and mud and out to the valley below. Something about this valley excites me, in a way the challenges of the mountain never could. But I turn back, grudgingly, to my teammates who still depend on me to carry my share of the load.

Eventually, finally, we reach the summit. Cries of triumph can be heard from all around, and a jubilant energy fills the air. I, too, am excited - now, with all that hard work and preparation out of the way we can finally begin! I look out across the magnificent vista spreading before my eyes and the terrain comes alive with plans and possibilities. I see empires rise and fall, resources flow and networks grow.

Then, I turn back to see my fellow engineers putting the last load of code into place, heaped atop the mountain, waiting for the designers who will be arriving tomorrow morning. Time to head back down! We'd better be on our way if we want to reach the next mountain in time!

Wait a minute - we're leaving already? The fun part was just about to start. No - but the others have already started down the mountain, caffeinated beverages in hand. Can't wait to conquer the next challenge. I turn to follow, reluctantly, with one last wistful glance over the vista that had so captivated me earlier.

Just another day in the life of an engineer.

Achievers get a big rush of pleasure upon reaching the top of a mountain. The bigger and more difficult the mountain, the bigger the rush. Explorers, like myself, enjoy looking out from the top of a mountain onto the world below. Just drink it in. Getting to the top isn't pleasurable in itself, it just means that the fun can finally begin.

The more patterns, the more connections, the more fun. That's what being an Explorer is all about.

I guess that should give me an edge in the next Casual Gameplay Design Competition. The theme is EXPLORE! ;)

BrainHex - A New Player Model

2009-08-16T13:31:00.000-07:00

You know Richard Bartle's four player types - like Achiever, Explorer, Killer, and Socializer?

Well, I just found out about a new player model being tested right now, from Chris Bateman, author of 21st Century Game Design.

It's better, because it has seven player types instead of four! :p

But seriously, I like it. I think it has the right amount of detail to be descriptive, while also being simple enough to easily grasp and use. And it's supposed to be based on neurobiology, more or less.

Thus, it is called BrainHex. Yay! :D

What's it good for? One useful benefit is, if you're making a game with a team of other people, you can more easily anticipate arguments about the design if you know the type of each team member. You can predict what biases each person will have, and what sort of design decisions they'll be more inclined to support.

Even if you're working on your own, it can help you understand what sort of games you'll be better at designing. What sort of fun do you get out of games? That's probably the kind of fun you'll know how to make.

Plus it's fun to find out what type you are, in a silly kind of astrology way. You know.

You can take this really quick survey to find out your player type.

I'm a Seeker. A Seeker-Socialiser, to be precise. :)

"You like finding strange and wonderful things or finding familiar things as well as hanging around with people you trust and helping people."

That means I'm a cat and a dolphin. :)

That there's an iconic representation of my hippocampus and hypothalamus. Apparently my favorite parts of my brain. :) Endomorphin and oxytocin for the win! :D

I always knew I was the Explorer type. But I'm also very introverted, so until I took this test, I never seriously suspected that I could also be a Socializer. But I am. I derive great pleasure from cultivating connections and collaborating with talented awesome cool people. And realizing this is an eye-opener for me. I feel liberated at last! :D

When I first posted about this on the Mochi forum, I found that a lot of developers there are either Conquerors or Masterminds, or both. I wonder why that is.

What are you?

Find out and let us know! :D

Zero Punctuation Interactive

2009-08-06T01:03:00.000-07:00

I've been watching Zero Punctuation reviews. What are those? "A short experimental film in which I attempt to make a video using only recorded speech and static images." Like this.

I saw that a Zero Punctuation contest has been announced, with really poor terms - basically, they own everything you submit, and you get nothing, except maybe some publicity, if you happen to be the one winner.

However, I am inexplicably intrigued by Zero Punctuation, and would really like to come up with a way to combine its "static images" and "recorded speech" in an interactive format. Like a game. Recorded speech wouldn't make sense directly in a game, but the still images, as conceptual, pictographic communication kind of like comics, could have a lot of interesting potential.

I just don't know how. A game where you compose images for a review? A game where you are a character inside a review? How do you translate the experience from the linear format into something interactive? Magic crayons? Miniature gardens?

The recorded speech is what you create in your head, your train of thought, while interacting with the static images. Static images are to animation as what is to games? Animation is essentially many still images strung together in sequence, but Zero Punctuation slows it way down, down to the bare minimum. Hmm.

You put those images together in space, rather than time, and you have comics. Instead of recorded speech, you have text. But you also have the reader's mind filling in the gaps. You have the viewer filling in the gaps in Zero Punctuation, too. And the way the images play off the speech, and the way the mind bounces between them gives it a certain flavor that is very interesting. How do you describe that dynamic? How do you recreate it in a game?

Back to animation and static images. What are games made of, if animations are made of static images? Choices? "A series of interesting choices." But what happens if you slow those down - are we back to text adventures here? Whatever happened to information density?

But in Zero Punctuation, it's all about the timing. Comedy is about timing, animation is about timing, and Zero Punctuation is about comedy. The images in Zero Punctuation aren't slower versions of normal animations - in fact, they feel faster. They cut out the slow stuff, the stuff that makes things feel detailed and coherent, and it still feels good. It feels unique, it has its own style.

It suggests, connotes, implies detail like digital speedpainting. It does not elaborate. What is the equivalent for games? In terms of pace I'm thinking WarioWare or any number of Flash clones. But what would it look like to have these compressed choices, only the important or amusing stuff, maybe random and incoherent, but always contributing to the pace and feel if not the plot or the main goal?

What would it look like? How could you make a game like that?

Game Idea Giveaway Resurrected

2009-07-25T18:55:00.000-07:00

Remember The Game Idea Giveaway Thread from earlier this year? I'm about to start a new round of giveaways, in the hopes of filling all the remaining requests I missed on the first round.

So far, 13 developers have requested an idea.

There are 8 requests left to fill, with 15 ideas.

If each one takes 3 hours (an estimate based on my previous idea giveaways) that's a total of 45 hours I'll have to spend to fill all these requests. You better appreciate it! ;)

Status Summary

venomblood: Bubblebomb, Selexion
kcaz_rel: Monk Tactics, Paint Physics
Mini Chris: Swan Song, Bacon Frenzy
Oknavi: Drifter
Incrue: Pique
freelanceflashgames: Lava Land, Garden Chomp
TobiHeidi: Gridslime, Random Lulz
triqui: City Basher, Bonobeans
IvyGames: Randori, Salmon Song
FullerGames: Tumblestack, Collink
rudy_sudarto: City of Reeds
kokosan: Freetrace, Prejudice
Cam: Can Has Cake, Knives'n'Candy

Looking forward to getting this stuff done... Let's hope I don't get any more requests in the meantime! :p

Yet More Intriguing Ideas

2009-07-14T20:48:00.000-07:00

These will probably be the last new ideas I post for a while. Hope you enjoy them:

2009/07/14
A game where all magic is created by playing music. You have a flute that creates different magical effects depending on what note is playing as a drone in the background. Flutes in different keys would interact differently with the same drone. You can supply your own drone, but more powerful would be to use a drone that is already sounding in the background, like the electric hum of a generator, or the rushing sound of a waterfall. In a mechanical or steampunk world, droning sounds would be easy to find.

2009/03/30
A game about visual hierarchy, where you can create, modify, and arrange graphic elements in order to achieve certain goals about the way a viewer would look at the composition. Different elements might draw attention more strongly, or hold attention longer, or direct the flow of attention in different ways. It could make a good puzzle game. People could play it to learn graphic design.

2009/03/07
A game about software development, but abstracted, so you are building a system of interacting parts to accomplish some goal. You may add pieces to it, and you may factor out identical or similar components. These pieces would most likely be physical shapes that link together rather than actual code. You may also reorganize or refactor the system to make it possible to factor out more pieces. There is a tension between adding more, for short-term benefit, and refactoring, which is better in the long run.

2009/03/03
A game where you can snake around as if controlling one end of Noby Noby Boy. But you also want to come back to your center, your foundation, so that you can move your center instead of just getting caught up in your head and hands. There is a tension there between continuing to snake around and collect stuff and deal with stuff, and taking the time to come back to your center and move from there, to reset.

2009/03/01
A game where you are a small aquatic creature dwelling near the surface of a small pond, perhaps an artificial pond or pool in a garden.You spend your time close to the edges of the pond, as the open water in the center is more dangerous to you. The water is dark, but full not empty, and its depths are warm and reassuring. Sometimes it rains, rippling the surface and bringing colder water to the pond. It is always overcast. The surface colors are black and shiny gray, turning to orange and brown below and at the edges, the color of the soil and water. On land are the muted grays, browns, and greens of winter plants and stone.

Yay. Let me know if you have any thoughts to share about these ideas. :)

Several Intriguing Ideas

2009-07-12T17:59:00.000-07:00

More ideas? Yes, indeed! I'd like to share with you several intriguing gems I've recently unearthed from my idea notebook:

2009/07/12
A game about guerrilla gardening, where you collect seeds and construct seed bombs. You would go on bombing runs where you try to turn vacant lots into gardens or break open pavement by putting certain kinds of seeds in the cracks. Like a collectible card game, it would support a variety of play styles that would appeal to different kinds of people. But instead of collecting cards, you collect different types of seeds, and instead of building decks, you strategically construct seed balls, and instead of dueling, you go out and try to plant your 'bombs' without getting caught. The concept also makes use of a slowly evolving world that changes as the plants grow, much like a turn-based strategy game such as Civilization. I think it could really fun.

2009/07/02
Try making a physics-based strategy game that derives its gameplay and complexity from the basic physical rules rather than a complicated set of components and interactions. The purpose of this approach would be to make the game intuitive enough to pick up and play without a tutorial, which is very difficult for the typical RTS.

2009/05/26
A game to help you notice the weather and how it changes. In this game the weather would have a big impact on the gameplay. Your character could be warmed up by the sun, or rained on, or snowed on. There would be a sort of 2D map of clouds blown around by the wind, so if you look up into the sky and see which way the wind is blowing, you can predict what sort of weather will be coming your way.

2009/05/17
An art tool where you manipulate shapes or direct streams of particles, but instead of choosing options and colors with a toolbar, there are 'seeds' that appear. You can either ignore these seeds or cultivate them and use them as new colors or shapes in your drawing. There would be a sort of genetic algorithm at work, where new seeds would appear based on existing elements on the screen, while neglected seeds fade away. The idea is kind of similar to the way that new goo balls are actually crawling around on the structure itself in World of Goo, not in a menu.

Like the sound of these? Let me know what you think! :)

I especially like the first one, about guerrilla gardening, and I'll probably try to make it into a real game some day. Let me know if you want to help.

A Few More Interesting Ideas

2009-07-10T11:22:00.000-07:00

Did you like the ideas from last time? Here are a few more ideas from my idea notebook:

2009/06/19
A game where you are a janitor at a big, explorable place with interesting characters. Cleaning would be made into a fun, satisfying activity, so you go around doing your job and end up seeing a lot of different places and characters. As you explore, you encounter all these different stories that you can observe or ignore or interact with, that arise from the characters you encounter and the larger situation itself. Like in Spirited Away. Or a place like Hogwarts, or the hospital in Scrubs, even. I'd really like play a game like that.

2009/06/14
Web startups seem to be obsessed with metrics and analytics to direct their efforts. It's a lot like the feedback in games telling you what works and what doesn't. Why not make a Web 2.0 startup game based around developing a business around these metrics? Usually in a game the feedback tells you one specific thing, or leads you to some specific understanding, but what if instead each new game had different feedback rules, like a random map? Then you're not simply learning one particular model through the feedback, you're learning a general strategy for how to use metrics and listen and adapt to feedback.

2009/05/09
A game about eating your cake and having it too, where you must eat cake to survive, but your social status is based on how much cake you have accumulated. Then there could be a special powerup that lets you eat cake while having it too, for a limited amount of time.

2009/03/16
A game or environment sketch where some people are walking by, on a street perhaps or in a variety of environments. But you can only see them from the knees down, only the lower legs and feet. The challenge is to make the walkers as expressive as possible within this limited representation. One effective way to differentiate between characters could be size, like a parent and child. More interesting could be using differences in dress or gait to distinguish between the characters.

2009/03/07
A game where all each person is rendered as a single sketchy line, redrawn each frame or so to show the gesture and pose of the person without necessarily showing what they look like. The line would be more or less straight, not looping around, and usually tracing a path from the head to one toe.

Just a few random ideas. :p

What do you think? Let me know if you want to try making or collaborating on one of these ideas. I'd like to hear from you. :)

A Handful of Interesting Ideas

2009-07-07T22:01:00.000-07:00

I keep an idea notebook, which I make sure to write in every day. Sometimes I come up with some interesting ideas for games. Here are a few I thought I'd share:

2009/07/03
A story or game about someone who is used to living lightly and is very self-sufficient, who finds a child or animal and chooses to care for it. That could result in some interesting tensions, where one's way of living has been optimized for solitary life, and then must suddenly change to accommodate another. It could be interesting as a minimal game like Passage or Gravitation. Another interesting twist could occur when for some reason it is time to give up the child, and discover what it's like to go back to solitude, or create a new lifestyle.

2009/06/29
A game about freedom and proactivity and breaking out of the control of the game itself, based on the idea that you should "vote with your money." It could be a shooter where you can buy upgrades and such, but the money you spend goes to whatever faction that is selling the item. Different factions control and deploy enemy ships, and the more money they have, the more powerful they are and the more the other factions seek to imitate them. It could be a genetic algorithm influenced by your spending choices. When you first start the game, it seems that you have no choices, where one wrong move means instant death. But you can slowly expand your circle of influence by spending your money wisely.

2009/06/26
An iPhone game to promote basic visual awareness, where you choose a color for the day, and try to notice all occurrences of that color as you go about your activities. When you see the color, you show it to the iPhone's camera to have it counted toward your score. The more the better. Difficulty could be varied by changing the threshold for detecting equivalent colors. The more precise you have to be, the harder it is.

2009/06/22
An audio-only game where there are objects positioned along a horizontal line, whose positions can be determined by the stereo sounds they make. You could move a turret left and right and shoot, like Space Invaders. Your turret and all projectiles would make sounds also, so you can track where they are and get a feel for how the sound and input map to the virtual space. Distance could be represented by volume. Maybe even pitch and texture and other things could play a role, in the background. It could be a full shooter in sound, without graphics. Maybe it could be made musical, to be like music with meaning. And when you upgrade your weapons or your turret, they would sound cooler than before!

Any thoughts? I particularly like the "vote with your money" game and the audio-only shooter. Maybe I'll have a chance to make them sometime. Let me know if you want to use the ideas yourself - maybe we can collaborate!

More cool ideas on the way! :)

The Coming Revolution in Flash Games

2009-07-05T17:48:00.000-07:00

This will be our manifesto. Daniel Cook of Lost Garden has just posted the first installment of his epic Flash Love Letter, an attempt to provide an answer for why Flash game development, despite its amazing potential, fails to produce awesome, world-changing games. And of course, a plan to get Flash games back on track.

"I think that you, Flash game developers, are some of the most talented and inspirational people working today in game development. Your passion for building games burns so incredibly brightly. Your ability to quickly make and distribute games is second to none. You hold immense potential to transform the future of games."

The first part is about making money with Flash games. A popular subject these days. When developers can't make a living making Flash games, there's going to be a lot fewer people making games, and a lot fewer good games out there. So, why don't Flash games make much money, and how can we change that?

"There is one obvious fact: the entire flash ecosystem is driven by low quality advertising. Piddling amounts of ad money flows into the developer's pocket through a variety of obfuscated middlemen."

Daniel Cook is definitely in favor of just asking players for money, instead of getting them to click on ads. It's easier than you'd think! And it pays a lot better than ads. You might even be able to make a living off of it.

"When game developers ask for money, they are usually pleasantly surprised. Their customers give them money; in some cases, substantial amounts."

"Many Flash developers insist on giving away everything for free. Stop devaluing your work and start creating a premium offer."

"We live in a capitalist society so people understand the concept of buying something. Don't ask for a donation. Don't ask players to 'give you what they feel like giving.' People will think you are a charity case and in my experience your revenues will drop by 90% or more. Give the offer a specific price, be it $10 or 200 gold in your favorite virtual currency."

So how do you actually get the money? On the subject of payment providers and portals, Daniel Cook has some advice, and some excellently developer-centric opinions...

"A payment provider should be a reliable commodity service, not a major business partner."

"The ideal payment service is one with low margins, low switching costs, no branding and APIs that let you cheaply and easily tie into generic, developer controlled login and storage services."

"The market is highly fragmented (30,000 portals!) and no portal owns more than 5% of the players. At this point in the market, developers have the ability to walk away from the greedy minority. Suggest reasonable terms where portal keep their existing ad revenue and you keep all in game revenue. If they balk, leave the bastards to rot."

Oh snap! Take that, portals! ;)

The most important takeaway from Part 1 is this:

"If you make a great game played for hours on end by millions of people, you deserve to be paid. Stop worrying about how people 'might' react. Ask a fair price for the value that you provide."

Can't wait for Part 2. :D