A Poignant Realization

(from a presentation Erik Svedang gave at the recent Assembly '09, entitled "The Creation of Blueberry Garden – how to get away with bad design choices (sort of)" - The above image is one of the more insightful moments from the talk, in which Svedang talks about the intentional "bad" design choices he made when designing Blueberry Garden. I think he sells himself and his game a little short, myself. You can download the presentation from this link, watch a video of Blueberry Garden here, or purchase the game itself on Steam.)

BeatBlox: The game I keep forgetting to talk about

BeatBlox is an Xbox Live Indie Game from former IIDX forum moderator and all-around nice guy Aaron Ramsey, which attempts to mix Tetris Attack-ish tile matching with rhythm game elements. The two ingredients don't blend together too well, but it's totally playable, only costs a dollar, and oh my gosh guys check out this song I contributed to it:
Pretty simple premise, really. There's a big ol' randomly generated grid of colored tiles, which you can slide around with the face buttons on your xbox controller. Every once in a while, these grey "Beat Blocks" (now mysteriously spelled correctly) will drop onto the grid in time with the music. Beat Blocks count down and eventually explode, destroying all the tiles connected to it.

There's also this lifebar thing, which constantly drains away to nothing; the only way to stay alive is to constantly make huge explosions. The problem is that the bar is always draining, while the Beat Blocks only explode occasionally. This results in a lot of extremely frustrating situations where the lifebar is near death, a Beat Block is about to explode and refill the lifebar, but... the bar drains before the block explodes, and now you're just dead. It's a pretty unfortunate situation to put the player in, and it happens a lot.

Still, it's better than most of the other games I've played on the service. Crescendo Symphony, for example. Don't buy that game, okay? I've seen too many people make that mistake already.

ROM CHECK FAIL

oh my god what

Rom Check Fail is a relentlessly clever little Windows game developed by the fine Video Gentlemen (or gentleman?) of farbs.org, who have proven more than capable in the past of taking an odd idea and developing a really interesting small game out of it. What's the odd idea, in this case? Farbs provides a brief synopsis:

Some games are born great.
Other games have greatness thrust upon them.
ROM CHECK FAIL takes great games and thrusts them upon each other.

When you first start a game of Rom Check Fail, everything looks like the first level of Super Mario Bros. - Mario is on the left, goombas are on the right, there's a cute general midi version of the game's theme music playing in the background, and nothing seems especially remiss about the situation. The goal is simple: hop on top of the goombas and you clear the stage. Simple enough.

After a few seconds, though, the sound effects shriek and distort, the graphics shift menacingly, and in the next moment, the goombas are now space invaders, Mario is now the car from Spy Hunter, and the whole level looks like a Pac-Man maze. The game continues like this, changing everything up every five seconds or so. It's totally great, and the ramifications of each change are startling. That it also manages to play on my innate love of old arcade games is emotionally irresistible.

Some of the randomly generated combinations can be a little unfair, as you suddenly find yourself transformed into the space invaders ship, unable to move up and down. Even better is when the graphics start to garble and stay that way, instead of transitioning normally. Strangely, the full-bore insanity of the game's premise and presentation makes this work in its favor, somehow!

It's also pretty forgiving - you get an extra life at the end of each stage if you have less than the 3-life maximum, and it's short: finishing a game doesn't take more than about 10 minutes. I won't spoil the ending, outside of saying that it fits the theme of the rest of the game!

Farbs developed the game for a competition hosted over at The Independent Gaming Forums, which required contestants to use "The Video Game Name Generator!" to come up with absurd new game ideas and develop accordingly. "Rom Check Fail" didn't actually come up in the name generator:

(from Rom Check Fail's TIGForum thread)
Originally this game was going to use player and enemy types inspired by the [Video Game Name Generator]. The idea was that the game would spit out games with names that can be generated by VGNG. Unfortunately the artist I wanted to work with couldn't commit the time, but instead he suggested using existing games for all the components. I think it made the game a little less VGNG but a lot more awesome.

Proof that good ideas can arise from imperfect circumstances.

BDSM Meets MBJ

Mighty Jill Off is an adorable little game from dessgeega which answers the question of "why do the protagonists of 8-bit video games seem so eager to go through a relentless barrage of bodily and mental harm" with a head-smackingly obvious answer: "because they're masochists, duh!"

Indeed, the game is most easily described as a BDSM-infused homage to Mighty Bomb Jack (from pre-Itagaki Tecmo) and its ilk.

BDSM? Mmm hmmm. The game's story concerns Jill, who is probably the first submissive character to demand the creation of some kind of plush toy. She's in a real boot-licker of a relationship with The Queen, who lives at the top of a spooky, trap filled tower. Of course, after getting booted down to the very bottom, Jill must leap all the way to the top in order to meet her Queen's welcome demands.

This is all conveyed to the player through a few charming stills at the beginning and end of the game, courtesy of aspiring artist James Harvey. The music, courtesy of Andrew Toups, was produced using a Moog Rogue synthesizer. It's the kind of music you can really twirl your mustache to, if you have one.

So, hey, that's all great, but what's it play like? Dessgeega herself stated over at the game's development thread (hosted at The Gamer's Quarter forum) that:

"for a while i've been complaining about the lack of adequate exploration of vertical space in platformers. so it's natural that my first platform game be pretty high-minded (despite its mind being in the gutter). "

On a basic level, Jill controls a lot like Bomb Jack - pressing the Z button results in a really ridiculously high jump, but you can tap the Z button at any time during that jump to immediately cue a descent. Once Jill starts falling, you can tap the Z button rapidly to slow her fall according to the situation.

There's a really wonderful focus of design evident throughout - the screen scrolls up the whole time, there's only one type of enemy, and two kinds of blocks: those that are dangerous and those that aren't. Dessgeega explores this limited design space thoroughly, however, and takes care not to overstay her welcome. I finished the entire game in about 12 minutes the first time through (the game displays your time for posterity after you finish), but the included readme file challenges you to finish in under 8.

Fun fact: the game was developed over a period of 7 weeks in Dessgeega's spare time - she's currently enrolled as a student at The Guildhall at SMU, a game design school more interested in teaching students how to be cogs in a huge machine than independent thinkers and artists. Of course, that just ended up fostering an even greater urge to create something unique:

(again from The Gamer's Quarter forum)
" i've been working on mighty jill off for the past two months in between my classes and classwork. this is as good as any a place to point out that this game was created entirely without input or resources from my school. i just sit through lectures about 200-person game teams and it makes me want to go and make a game with three people. "

Now that's indie! I've already linked to the game's homepage twice, but three ain't gonna kill me: download the game from here, it was made in Game Maker, and have a nice day.

Indie Ethics

Boy, those indiependent games have just been taking off, lately! Jonathan Mak's (depicted above) Everyday Shooter got picked up for distribution on Sony's Playstation Network service last year, 2D Boy's World of Goo is apparently getting distribution via Nintendo's upcoming Wiiware service, and millions of people have played Desktop Tower Defense - I count two people in Morgan Library playing it right now! Come on, guys. Don't you have papers to write or something? Geez.

Alex Pham of the LA Times wrote a piece about the recent success of indie game developers, entitled "Indies start to make their mark" - it compares development frameworks like Microsoft XNA to ding-dang youtube, which is gutsy, I'd say.

Much as YouTube is giving unknown video auteurs a chance to find audiences, the video-game industry is opening its doors to upstart developers. Major companies including Microsoft and Sony Corp. are starting to snap up and promote games by amateurs and indie developers as an antidote to the soaring budgets of mainstream games.

Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo Co. have built online stores where millions of players can buy and download games via Internet-connected consoles, bypassing traditional retailers that refuse to stock anything but blockbuster titles.

Those new distribution methods, like Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade, strike me as being especially promising for future independent development, especially when games like Metanet Software's N+ ended up as the #1 game on the service last week. Heeere's hopin'!

Jonathan Mak gives sound advice

In a wonderfully tangential turn of events, 1up's got a pretty neat series of interviews with Jonathan Mak and a few other independent developers. I was goofing around with Game Maker on Tuesday night, and there's a lot of good advice in there for aspiring game designers (possible alternate term: "game goofballs"):

"If you have a turd and you try to add stuff on top of a turd, it's still going to be a turd," says Mak. First, focus on the initial interaction and what makes it cool. "If you look at [Metanet Software's ninja-themed puzzler] N, just moving the ninja around, just doing the wall jumps, is already fun. It's not fun to the point where you're like, "Aw, I can't wait to move the ninja,' but it's already really interesting."

My favorite piece of advice ties back to my earlier experience with the Game Maker tutorial, something I'll get to in a minute:

1UP: You have this inspiration for a game, for a core interaction. What is your process for taking it from this "may be fun" to the prototype stage, and how does this develop into a full-fledged idea?

JM:Before I answer this question, I want to append something to the first question. I don't exactly remember what it was, but don't make a design doc. Forget the design docing. Whatever the way Ubisoft does it, don't do it. Just don't do it. There's no need to do that. They need to do it because they have to make money, or else people lose jobs. You don't have to that. You always have a job. You employ yourself.

Right, so I was working through the initial Game Maker tutorial, and the first thing it has you do is write some design documents. You know those banner ads that implore you to "SHOOT OSAMA BIN LADEN TO WIN A FREE IPOD!" or all manner of similar objectives? This game they want you to write a design document for is pretty much that game.

(From the Game Maker tutorial) The second step in creating a game is to write a more precise design document. You are recommended to always do this before making your game, even if it is very simple. Here is our design document for Catch the Clown.

Catch the Clown design document
Game objects: There will be just two game objects: the clown and the wall. The wall object has a square like image. The wall surrounding the playing area is made out of these objects. The wall object does nothing. It just sits there to stop the clown from moving out of the area. The clown object has the image of a clown face. It moves with a fixed speed. Whenever it hits a wall object it bounces. When the player clicks on the clown with the mouse the score is raised with 10 points. The clown jumps to a random place and the speed is increased with a small amount.

This is... probably how genocidal dictatorships get started, on some level. Some guy unquestioningly writes the design document for the Final Solution and awayyyy they go! So, yes. Good advice, Mak. Eschew that corporate jibba-jabba. Mmmm hmmm.

The most complex game ever made

On the opposite end of the indie games spectrum is Dwarf Fortress (see image), an independent game developed by two guys, Tarn and Zach Adams, who now depend on donations to make a living (they're developing the game full-time). It helps that they have a cult following - Dwarf Fortress is probably the most complicated game ever made, and it runs entirely in textmode! No actual graphics to speak of!

Gamasutra has an interview with the Adams', and they do a pretty good job of summing up the game's staggering scope in the first couple of paragraphs:

The scope of the game defies belief: it contains an extensive world generator, a three-dimensional cellular automata system for simulating fluids, naming languages for all major races, an economics simulation, and even a complete Adventure Mode in which the player can explore abandoned fortresses. It's so detailed that large web communities have sprung up around the game, both on the developer's forums and Something Awful, where players trade stories about what happened in their games. Some of these stories have even become popular outside the game's community.

Most of the interview consists of elaboration on the game's technical side, but the Adams' make sure to discuss their basic inspiration for the game's "generic fantasy setting":

Tarn Adams: What's left to answer is why'd we be so into doing a fantasy game. That's probably the same as everybody else: Tolkien, D&D, myths, and of course, the movie Beastmaster. (We like the part where the evil priest is like, "You'll be sacrificed to 'The God of AAaa,'" like they didn't even bother thinking of a name, just powering through on the power of their badassedness.)

Awesome.

I think that's about it for now. Have a good weekend!

Getting the b-ball rolling.

Last Tuesday saw the release of Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, an absurd, mock-heroic send-up of Japanese role-playing games starring former NBA superstar Charles Barkley in the role of postcyberpocalyptic world savior. It was developed by four members of the Gaming World Forums going by the collective name "Tales of Game's Studios," (incorrect punctuation intended) and if it isn't clear yet, you should not be taking this game seriously.

The first, unfinished version of Gaiden was released nearly a year ago, and was developed with RPGMaker, the favorite game development tool for high-school kids with too much time on their hands. At the time, I thought it would never be completed - part of the joke was how often these games spiraled out of control as their creators piled more and more ideas and ambition into a project they would never finish. Also, RPGMaker kind of sucks, and no matter how much work you put into subverting its limitations, you're probably going to end up with a game that's still a chore to play. This was the case with the first demo, which wasn't really fun to play, despite having such a fantastic premise. I forgot about the game, figuring it was nothing more than an elaborate joke, but every once in a while I would think back and ask "what if?"

When I saw that the game had been finished, I nearly spewed a mouthful of Mrs. T's Pierogies all over the computer screen. Not only was the game finished, but it had been rebuilt from the ground up using Game Maker - rebuilt from the ground up to not suck. The battle system is now a fun little riff on Paper Mario's schtick, and the dialogue, which was easily the best thing about the demo, maintains its tone of hilarious bathos through the full game.

Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden is one of the most entertaining games I've played in a long time, independently developed or not. It's also free and readily available to download from the Tales of Game's Studios homepage. It requires Windows, but I imagine most computers made in the past ten years should be able to run it just fine.