Ludomancy

This game is my submission for TIG Source Interactive Fiction Challenge.

Update: It came up fourth! With no less than 10 votes!

My intention was to reduce the spatial navigation and move into a “mood” axis instead. In this game, your character gets into a situation in which he cannot know where he is or where he is going. He can’t even use his tactile sense.

The character is actually moving in a space, but the options available to him are governed by his state of mind (calm, desperate, out of control).

This is a hacked-up experiment, so it’s far from perfect. And I don’t have a cat.

Here is the link.

Credits from Flickr:
Manouevres - Colinette Jitterbug
arclients - Cat in the sky
ginsnob - Happy Holidays!
antmoose - danger balcony

Credit for the basic story:
Julio Cortázar - “No se culpe a nadie”

May these holidays be short on you.

Last november we had our 5th edition of the argentine GDC: EVA.

The quality of the lectures was the best in all of the editions, boasted international speakers, and we had many companies interested in sponsoring the event to get exposure.

My talk this year was about “The New Gameplay”. Even though I was unsure at the moment of the call for presentations what I meant to talk about, I discovered during my lecture that I was trying to touch the heart of the argentine developer to push it away from the rotting dream of making huge blockbusters or Monkey Island. I don’t think I was able to bring down that ghost, but based on the feedback of my talk I can say that most people felt that I stirred something inside. I’m happy.

Another event we have during EVA is a gamedev contest called CODEAR (click for the games), which I’ve been helping organize since its inception four years ago. It’s meant to be a showcase for hobbyists and startups, as a way of giving them the motivation to finish what they are doing.
The contest sparks a very warm feeling on me as the participants talk about their games and show the audience how they play for a bit. I think it’s love.

My conclusion for this EVA is that we are finally starting to mature as an industry, after many years of stumbling in the dark.

All we need now is to lure more people into joining us so we can solve our urgent need of talented professionals and reach critical-mass, so we can jump to the next level…

I know we will.

Everybody seems to be posting about their scariest moments in gaming because there’s something called Halloween in the north in which people do cosplay and beg around for candies and stuff, all of which I find pretty scary, culturally speaking, because we don’t have anything like that here in Argentina.

So some of my scariest moments:

Elvira: The Game
Featuring a big-breasted character I didn’t know before I played the game. It also featured extraordinary loading times and diskette switching (Amiga platform). And death. Sudden, unexpected death. Trial-and-error death. I was horrified each time I tried to get a sequence right. Then I had to insert disk 3 and then 4 to try again.

System Shock 2
While being near the end of the game, one of the scariest things ever happened. My quicksave got screwed up. Now I’m not going to keep savings like an accountant, I assume the games are going to take care of the backups. Well the save slot got broken, and when I realized that I was not going to get it back, I saw my whole System Shock-life passing through my eyes…not again!

I lost 80% of my bank account during the 2001 crisis in Argentina
I had my savings of three years of work on Bank Boston. Naively, I accepted the suggestion of my twisted Account Advisor to put them on a low-risk investment fund. Big mistake. The crisis kicked in and I was unable to withdraw money for two years, and afterwards it was worth less than 20% of my initial deposit.

Conclusion: saving and fear go hand in hand…

What’s the difference between literature and philosophy?

At the core, philosophical works have a truth value. It is true, or false, or something in between. This core value can be measured and proven to be false. Literature, on the other hand, can be measured by its truth, but it’s not its core value.

Researching psychology in the hopes of creating a simplified model for Shrink, I discovered myself building wacky theories on how the human psyche may work that would make Freud come back to life so he can die again. If he measured their truth value, that is.

Games are not valued by their truth (in fact, most people still believe they should be measured by how “fun” they are). But like in literature, you may find a grain of truth in them.

This, I believe, is the ultimate goal to games: to make other realities in which you can find yourself.

A very simple puzzle-tactics game prototype. Use the mouse to drag your ships around (the ones in the left are yours) and build a defence. Click on the screenshot to start playing.

It’s a pretty conventional game at its core, but I was longing for the feeling of making something that works and can be played with. I’m having a hard time finding the mindshare needed to get the rest of the prototypes to make sense, so here I crafted this little game.

The initial intent was for it to be a strategy game in the vein of Advance Wars, but without the ability to move the units. After simplification after simplification (lots of iterations!), it ended up being a puzzle version of Desktop Defender.

Doing interesting levels for this thing is not trivial, and the ones right there are more samples than challenges right now, though non logic-centered people find them challenging anyway.

The graphics of the game are modified versions of Tyrian sprites that Danc, from Lost Garden, released a while ago.

I’m going to keep updating it every now and then. You can find the sources (Java) in Starwave’s Google SVN

…and into the lab:

Right now, Starwave (picture above) is the one currently giving me game design headaches. It’ll be done when I get sick of it.

Stuff to do afterwards:

• A bomb-disarming game. I have to think how NOT to make it too logic based
• An emotional prediction game. I hope it’s not as tough to crack as Shrink
• A Marriage-esque game about life choices. This one is already started and looking promising
• Single Screen RPG. The evolution of Hunter RPG

If you had to pick one of the above to do next…which one would you choose?

So little time, so much to do. Is there someone out there willing to pay me to do this crap full time?

I thought so.

I’ll spend next week in Barcelona, Spain, to attend Gameloft’s Annual Production Meeting. I’ve spent already two years working there since the inception of the studio, and more than one as the studio programming lead.

During the peaks and valleys produced by the happenings at work, it’s lately been a peak and tons of work have been coming my way which leaves my with few energy left to devote to Selbst, the experiment I am working right now, and Ludomancy.

I had a day job in programming all my life, and so far I’ve enjoyed those jobs even during the tough times. But I never felt satisfied by doing only that, and managed to work on other stuff during my spare time. Ludomancy and experimental games are an example.

But as time passes, having these spare time jobs gets harder and harder, and it’s not just because my body is getting older, but my will to put up the extra work wanes too. I’m starting to feel my hobbies as a grind instead of enjoying them. I think I might be going through a classic “identity crisis” (Being almost 30 is helping).

Whenever I find myself getting stuck I start looking for a change in some aspect of my life. Lately I’ve been feeling that I should get more in touch with art and artists outside the gamedev industry, and that’s what I’ve started doing since…this week.

This trip to Barcelona might give me something new too.

I’ll eventually be able to find out where my playful attitude has gone lately. And when I change, expect Ludomancy to resound with those changes too.

This post is about what I think of the negative backlash (check the comments) that some well-known experiments usually produce…

The problem with the word prototype is that it compels common sense to imply that prototypes are an antechamber for a production-class version of a game. Most of the time this is the case, but not all prototypes have to be this way.

What if the intent is just to put a small idea to test? Do you need to go through the grind of developing a well-rounded game just to prove that the idea was worthwhile?

That’s why there are proof-of-concept prototypes. Those are meant to try out an idea that might not even be a complete game mechanic, and it doesn’t matter if they are successful or not. Their purpose is to give something new to think about, which is quite an achievement even if only other designers find it useful.

It’s very bad that we usually think all prototypes are just shitty precursors of a sellable game, or worse yet, obliged to entertain gamers. Because we need more of these proof-of-concept prototypes and respect them for what they are for: creating new worlds out of wacky ideas.

Maybe we should stop calling these “prototypes”? Can you think up a better term?

This is the second article about the demons that plague the path to successful experimental gameplay. This time we’ll be dissecting the behavior of a creature even more dangerous than the Programming Succubus:

The feature gremlins offer small mechanics that pile up over the core gameplay while not being an integral part to it. Usually these features are known (non-experimental) mechanics, proven to work in other games. The misconception about them is that they just add richness to the gameplay and can be easily removed, making them harmless. But this is bullshit.

Features will add kipple to your game making it heavier and unwieldy in the best of cases. But in the worst case, they can take over the core gameplay, eating it until the experimentality is expelled as a peripheral feature itself.

As an example, while I was trying to work up something with Shrink, I considered adding session time to limit the amount of guessing you could do. But fortunately I realized that most of the time, the game would be about resource management (time), which is nothing like what I intend of Shrink.
That feature could have transformed Shrink into a time racer instead of a psychotherapy game.

Some signs of the Feature Gremlins:

• “The game consists of a bunch of minigames…”
• “It’s dull because it’s too easy: let’s make it harder by resource-limiting options”
• “Maybe if we put powerups…”

Telling apart useful features from dangerous ones is too hard to risk it. The experimental is on the core gameplay. When in doubt, skip the “standard” features or your game might end up buried in a pile of Feature Gremlins.

During GDC, Rod Humble presented The Marriage, a game about the dynamics of a married couple and the evolution (or breakage) of their relationship.

This experimental attempt has an unusual approach that I liked a lot: It’s a non-representational experiential game.

Representational elements and verbs are those that resemble real-life objects and actions. A character is representational even if it is cartoonish, alien or abstract. Headbanging bricks to make them pop mushrooms might be wacky, but the action is still representational. The Marriage’s entities are concepts like commitment, sacrifice and cuddling. The visuals are made up of squares, circles and flat colors since there’s no much room for graphical improvement.

Unlike puzzles, there are no objectives, scores or tutorials. You are supposed to feel the game, and I did during Jonathan Blow’s Nuances of Design session, where I spaced out and started empathizing with my own experiences until I started feeling that something was missing, and that’s why I asked Humble if he’s been married only once, which he was, which tells that I somehow resonated with something from the underlying experience. Which is enviable for a quickly made experiment.

Despite other flaws that are easily corrected, there is something I didn’t like about Marriage that is deeply embedded into the interface: the spatial juggling. To keep the relationship going, I had to influence the “egos” to hit or avoid random events in the screen, so the entities became physical objects in my mind for me to be able to predict and control the collisions, forgetting about the experience in the process. In the end, I decided not to influence the spouses to hit them and let randomness drive to take the spotlight from physical movement back into the core experience. I wonder how Marriage would be without this mechanic.

In any case, the best part is that Rod did all this on purpose, so it puts intention of expression behind the game, which I understand is necessary and sufficient for something to be considered art. But whether it’s art or not is not my personal battle.

Purists won’t consider it a game for the lack of goals, and indoctrinated gamers will think it’s crap. But that’s irrelevant, since this proof of concept open new paths for exploration and (self)discovery. Which is the point of experimental gameplay.