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FIND LOST SOULS WITH YOUR EARS

Download Here

Lost in the underworld without a guide,
use your ears to find the lost souls
floating free in the river styx!

This audio game was made in 6 hours
for the RPI Game Jam March ’09
Theme: “Death is on Vacation”

by Benjamin Esposito & Manuel Pardo

Do make your decisions carefully!

Headroom is a new experimental game by Benjamin Esposito and Manuel Pardo. They are very excited to release it!

Check out the official page HERE

Greg Costikyan

Greg Costikyan is a Game Designer, huge fan of Chris Crawford (see previous know your sh*t), and a HUGE proponent of indie games. He has an impressive ludography and has written many game related articles that we would do well to read! His most well known article is probably I Have No Words and I Must Design,  a 33 page essay on developing a critical vocabulary for games. There’s a lot more to him than that article, though. I highly recommend reading Where Stories End and Games Begin. I thought the best bits were comparing a game to a song (they are not inherently storytelling mediums), and his critical look at leaders abandoning games for other mediums.

Greg is CEO of Man!festo Games and writes Playthisthing, focusing on nurturing indie games, channeling an indie aesthetic, and fertilizing the creative culture of games. Find out more about his work on his website, and use his resources for good!

Description: Guide Jumpman to the Exit

Check back this week for the group review! It’s like a book club but for games!

Chris Crawford

Chris Crawford is important for organizing the Game Developer’s Conference (in his living room in 1987), he was eventually kicked out. He is also important for his Journal of Computer Game Design, later renamed Interactive Entertainment Design (my kind of stuff). You can read his collection of articles from 1987-1996 on his website. Unless you are still developing for the Atari, the context will seem outdated–  but I find it unsettling how the best of the art of interactivity today are saying fundamentally the same thing Chris Crawford was saying twenty years ago.

Fellow youngsters, we can benefit from Mr. Crawford’s work on interactivity. I highly recommend the article Fundamentals of Interactivity for a butt kicking metaphor. Use his resources to super charge your lexicon!!

Found some diamond in the rough good bit of game history? Share it!

Too often do I find myself playing a game that hasn’t been thoroughly thought out. The whole experience, from the time I enter the game and see the main menu, through the main game, to the end screen, has no meaning or I can see the meaning the designer was going for fall flat in his execution. It leaves me empty. These are the types of game that, once you get through to the credits, will not be remembered. I will probably not share this game with anyone (other than to get some laughs), and the game will not be handed on to new players that could enjoy the experience. It is not memorable, it lacks a message.

I feel like it is very possible to play through many games in a certain genre, and have each one be a very different experience. Even though all these game have a common element (be it the perspective, style of play, etc), they all have a different meaning and the player gets a distinct feedback from them. I have played many, many (that was an understatement) side-scrollers, for example, but every time I pick up a Konjak game I know it will be a very different experience than if I was playing a Jonathan Blow game. Even though I am just pressing buttons to get my character to perform actions on the screen, the message (visual, audio and gameplay feedback) that the game gives back to me is very different: one I am trying to destroy all the enemies before they get to hurt my player, and in the other I am trying to bend time and solve a puzzle.

What marks the difference between these games? How can we quantify the feedback a game gives us? This is what I call the “message” of the game. The reason why we do things, the feedback the game gives and the way we are going to feel after we have taken an action. We recently attended a talk entitled “Games as Art and What to do About it” by Randy Smith at the Montreal International Game Summit, and apart from giving me a superb vision of how the industry is being limited and where we should lead our efforts to change it, I learned something very important:

© Randy Smith, MIGS 2008

The elements here are:

• Mechanics: describe the particular components of the game, at the level of data representation and algorithms.
• Dynamics: describe the run-time behavior of the mechanics acting on player inputs and each other’s outputs over time.
• Aesthetics: describes the desirable emotional responses evoked in the player, when she interacts with the game system.

What does this mean? Citing Randy Smith’s example: imagine you have a game where the player gets attacked by packs of enemies and each of these packs has a leader. One Mechanic could be that once the leader dies, the rest of the pack scatters. The Dynamic would be that the player tries to take out the leader first to disband the group. The resulting Aesthetic or meaning that the game gives is that the player feels like he is a calculating hunter trying to identify and take out the leader in a quick surgical strike.

However, what if we want to change this message, the aesthetic of the game, to reflect something else? Say we change the mechanic to be that the leader is not distinguishable from the rest of the pack. What would be the underlying aesthetic to the player? Since the player cannot recognize which one of the enemies is the leader, he might feel like he flails is desperation, and when he eliminates the leader, he feels a flood of relief.

This is a very simple example of how a well thought out mechanic can induce a particular dynamic to give the player a certain aesthetic.

Defining the MDA Process

This approach to game design, coined MDA (for “mechanic, dynamic and aesthetic”) was first introduced at the GDC as one of the Game Design and Tuning Workshops and is formally explained in the article entitled “MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research” by Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc, Robert Zubek. It is a great read for anybody interested in game design and how the designers can fine tune the player experience with this simple model.

From here on, when we design games, after we have had the chance to explore all our creativity and brought all the great game ideas to the table for a new game, I think it is a designer’s responsibility to ensure that the play experience he has imagined in his head gets properly transmitted to the game. If there is player death in your game, how is the player going to get punished for it and how will it affect the player’s feel for the game? If the game has enemies, what must the player feel when he sees them: does he feel scared because failing to defeat them would result in a huge loss (XP, gold, etc), or does he feel empowered because he gets to try his new weapons? All these experiences must be in the designer’s plan to create the interactive medium.

The MDA method for designing player experience, or aesthetics, is a very interesting approach to something so embedded in video games, and is something more developers should give thought to. I certainly try to tailor my gameplay experience to the message I want to give, and invite all readers to do the same.

by manuel pardo 2009

You are a sheep in a meadow. You get points for staring at the rock.
Design Challenge: Create a game with the lowest possible level of interaction.

Download: Box.net
YoYoGames

by ben esposito 2009

I was reading this article that inspired me to reflect on my “Life Metaphor” and it’s effect on me. A positive life metaphor like ‘life is a journey’ can help you expand as a person but a negative one like ‘life is a prison’ can limit you.

I am a firm believer that life is a garden, but I got to thinking about what the people around me identify with. From what I gather, everyone varies in their motivations and interests which (unashamedly) leads me to the question:

To what degree does your life metaphor reflect your preferences in the types of games you play?

If you look at your life as a race, are you more likely to play competitive games (even racing games)? If you look at life as a garden, are you more likely to enjoy resource management games? Adventure and exploration? This question applies to both digital and non-digital games. Perhaps the type of play you engage in can reflect your lifestyle!

Take a look at the article for ideas of different life metaphors. Do the kinds of games you enjoy tend to speak to your life metaphor?

-illustration and article by ben esposito

Perfect Stride Continuum

Perfect Stride Continuum is my first complete Half-Life 2 modification, it is a first person ‘momentum based puzzle-racing mod’

Read on to hear the full story of my experience and impressions with this syllable saturated game title!

What went right:

• Simple concept – There is no friction and you can skate around with the arrow keys and mouse. One mechanic made it a lot easier to stay focused. It was inspired by Jet Set Radio and Counter-Strike Surf Maps
• “Retro” style – I think the aesthetics make it look and feel unique. I did blatantly steal the color scheme for “Yamada’s Circle Square” from Sonic the Hedgehog

Perfect Arena – not a rip off

What went wrong:

• Really hard to learn – First, the movement is counter-intuitive. Momentum is based on turning the view with the mouse and strafing in an arc at the same time, which doesn’t make a lot of sense unless you’re a modder or half-life pro. There is no tutorial and you start in a pit that is hard to get out of. I want to challenge the notion of the tutorial level now mandatory in every game…but I think a lot of people quit before they figured out how to get out of the hole.. so lesson learned.
• Motion Sickness – I started the summer before I knew video games could make you sick. I have friends who can’t play this without getting simulation sickness (luckily they are still friends)
• Not enough maps – I hear the same thing from everyone who liked the game – it needs more levels to play on. It was a mistake to think that nobody would get as good as I was at it and be able to fly through the levels in less than 5 mins….

Spokesman Bash

What I learned:

• Stick to a plan - After some lazy days of grandiose game ideas it helped so much to solidify the features I could fit in the game without losing my mind. I finally had my moment to internalize ‘failing to plan is planning to fail.’ Sorry if this is painfully obvious to everyone, but it happens to each of us at different times!
• Know your limits – Before this project I was fixed on doing everything myself.. which most people know is very difficult (or make it look easy). I hit a few road blocks making the maps so I sucked it up and looked for the right places to get help. If I hadn’t, perfect stride continuum might not have ended well..

Thank you for reading!

Benjamin Esposito is a student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and aspiring creator / romancer of media. You can find more info, videos, and downloads for Perfect Stride Continuum at the Mod Database (including it’s 7/10 rating……)