Click screenshot to play

Gregory from Ludus Novus made a vignette Game called I Fell in Love With the Majesty of Colors. It’s a dramatization (or should I say gamification) of a dream he had, and so it has that oniric taste that I think is severely underexplored in games.

You control a cthulhu-esque tentacle in the bottom of Gregory’s unconscious sea and you can grab stuff in an attempt to discover every ending that you can reach, like Moon does. And that similarity in format made some people treat him a little scornfully, and that’s why I’m writing this.

Not only I feel personally very flattered by Gregory’s open acceptance of the influence of Moon, but I am also surprised by the game he came up with. It made me consider exploring dreams a bit more, and I think he took the vignette concept a little further. Also, controlling a huge tentacle to grab things is a very clever and effective idea.

I am not trying to build a trademark. I’m trying to make games that affect people. And if something I make inspires something new that I myself find surprising, there’s no media award that could match that success. So thanks for your work, Gregory.

Since I wanted to be a contender in this year’s IGF, I worked a bit on I wish I were the Moon and submitted it.

This new version has more endings, some tweaks and fixes all over the place, and a secret ending. You can play it in Kongregate.

I will link to the most beautiful video walkthrough I get, so if you make one, let me know!

On other news:

• There is a video for my presentation at Japan’s Sense of Wonder Night
• EVA, the argentinian GDC is on this weekend. I’ll be presenting CODEAR, our indie contest, including the Banner Games Contest, Single Screen RPG and the results of Project 2008!

I’m on my way back home from Japan, after one of the best trips in my life. I left the writeup until now since I’ve been travelling like crazy the last 15 days:

The Tokyo Game Show is a huge circus of lights, noise, screaming, booth babes and cosplayers, but I didn’t find anything inspiring at all. Most of it was about Tekken 7, Biohazard 5, Monster Hunter 3 and Final Fantasy (14?). There were hidden gems every now and then, but the whole show tired me up and didn’t really feel like hunting for gold.

The Sense of Wonder Night was a completely different experience. We were all gathered in a restaurant showroom while each of us showed our games in front of an audience that was set in the mood by being giving free alcohol and food. They were given a toy that makes noise when you wave it, with the instructions of using it when a game evoked a sense of wonder. I think that concept made it very fun both for us presenters and the audience. Ian’s The Unfinished Swan and Gomibako really excited everybody.

I severely cut down my presentation when they told us that the translation would not be simultaneous but intertwined. So I only said three things: I wanted to make a game about people and not objects, small and short in scope and gametime, and not using text or movies to propel the game forward.

I enjoyed presenting despite being a little anxious of standing in front of an audience completely alien to me. I was relieved when the reaction was enthusiastic.

My only complaint was that I wish we presenters had some sort of private meeting afterwards or before… since half of us were westerns and the other japanese, there were not much opportunity for bonding across the language barrier in the middle of the event. But being the first edition of this event, I think it was great. If you are a creative game developer looking for an excuse to spend the money to visit Japan, go for SOWN next year!

If there is anything you want to ask about SOWN, TGS or Japan, I’ll happily answer here.

I have a crappy clip of the intro.

Recently I uploaded I wish I were the Moon and Storyteller to Kongregate.

My goal was to figure out if it’s a good platform to publish my work, since Ludomancy is very limited on the people it’s reaching now.

I figured that the people of Kongregate would be accustomed to Armor Games-sponsored Tower Defense, Stick Games and casual RPGs, so I expected Moon and Storyteller to rate very low and only get comments like “gay” and “wtf not a game 1/5″.

So I was really surprised by the reaction… Moon got a high rating, plenty of positive comments, and it survived on the homepage of Kongregate as a “Hot New Game” for at least a couple days. This was truly heartwarming for me, and I appreciate the open heart of the Kongregate community.

As for Kongregate itself, I think it needs more work on the developer relations… the developer forum is not searchable, the documentation insufficient to explain badges, and there are almost no statistics. But the bigger problem is the business model… I personally despise ads, and I would love to see other options for making money, or disconnecting ads completely. If you were wondering, after 66,000 gameplays, Moon made… 45 bucks (it can be increased by implementing the Kongregate API and sigining exclusively, but still).

Having said that, I will probably release every game I make on Kongregate because you always learn something from feedback when you are trying something new.

Update: it got around 90,000+ gameplays now.
Update2: made it to the front page of newgrounds too.
Update3: it got around 97,700+ gameplays and 92 US dollars now. In a couple of weeks, I’ll be implementing the Kongregate API to enable badges and see what happens with the comments, the rate and the gameplays. I had the numbers I wanted from the “pure” release anyway.

Moon Stories, a collection of my latest three experiments, got selected to be presented at the Tokyo Game Show during the Sense of Wonder Night, the japanese version of the Experimental Gameplay Sessions.

Besides giving me the perfect excuse to spend the obscene amount of money it’s going to take me to make the trip to Tokyo from Argentina, it makes me really happy to be able to show my work in person in such an unusual situation!

You can play the experiments here:
Storyteller
I wish I were the Moon
The Trials

If you plan on attending the Tokyo Game Show and want to meet me there, please tell me so in the mail I have on the sidebar…

This is the third and last prototype I submitted for the experimental gameplay sessions at SOWN.

You are presented with a timeline, split into vignettes. It’s an interactive story about three characters and their choices in life in the context of a fairy tale. You can move them around in their vignettes to change their roles and what they do about it.

The interesting thing about this experiment is the immediate causality: you can see instantly how the choices you make affect the future, so the cost of experimenting with the story is almost zero. Some of the endings you can get are funny and not hardcoded into the game logic.

Hint: knights can kill wizards if they are overlapped.

This is the second prototype I submitted for SOWN.

It sort of follows I Wish I Were the Moon in both aesthetics and camera interface, but the mechanics are slightly different: instead of moving objects around, you actually duplicate them.

This prototype is a small attempt to play around with duplication, and features three different challenges using it. The solutions are a mix of self-cooperation, timing and re-interpreting a symbol that means different things depending on the context it’s placed on.

I like this one better than I Wish I Were the Moon because the mechanic is more interesting, and the camera makes a little more sense.

The first trial can be solved in many different ways… what was your solution?

I haven’t been posting anything lately for two reasons: I didn’t feel like doing so, and I was busy working on my prototypes to submit for the Tokyo Game Show Sense of Wonder Nights.

During these last weeks, I came up with three prototypes that I think are interesting enough, though I’m not 100% satisfied with the results.

This is the first one, called “I wish I were the Moon“. It’s inspired on The Distance of the Moon by Italo Calvino, and it’s about a weird love triangle.

I tried to make it about the exploration of an emotional situation instead of a physical space, without using any text. I tacked in the goal of finding the endings at the last minute, but it’s just a gimmick.

My conclusion on this prototype is that the camera mechanic is underused, the situation is a bit complex to understand if you didn’t read The Distance of the Moon, and ultimately the exploration experience is not very enjoyable. Maybe it’s because the options are not emergent, but pretty much hardcoded, and there’s only a few of them.

This prototype is the precursor point of the other two:
Storyteller
The Trials

Credits:
Italo Calvino as inspiration
Harp Sample: Lamento di Tristano and La Rotta by Cheryl Ann Fulton.

Update: lightsun13 made a YouTube walkthrough.
Update2: Updated to the new version!

My tolerance to text reading in games is extremely low. I always skim & skip in text-heavy games, which makes the Interactive Fiction genre unbearable to me. I never ever finished a text game in my life, and I thought I would never do even if I had its walkthrough printed in large fonts beside me. So I classified the genre as “tedious shit”…

Until I tried Gun Mute.

Gun Mute is a text-only adventure, but it doesn’t have much text. And you’ll have fun. There are only a few verbs, there is no spatial navigation (this is a winner), there is almost no dialog, and in my head, this game has colors. It never happened to me that I remembered a text game as having colors. Which talks wonders of the writing of Pacian, its author.

If you, like me, despise text games, try Gun Mute.

Disclaimer: Please refrain from pointing out that I didn’t play text game X, Y or Z that did I, J, K before Gun Mute. Providence gave me Gun Mute and that’s it.

We launched a new contest at the argentine game developers association (ADVA) for indie and hobbist game developers.

The rules:

• It must run on a single screen: you can’t scroll, you can’t zoom, you can’t have levels in a conceptual sense. From start to end, everything must go on in the same place.
• It must have at least some RPG element

The deadline is August 15, and anybody from anywhere can compete.

Some people asked me why is it genre-oriented, which restricts the games a bit. The answer is: because so many people have the fantasy of making an RPG, I wanted to give them a chance to make it happen on a small scale.

You can see the rules in spanish and english.