Daniel Benmergui

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.

(click on the screenshot to play)

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?

(click on the screenshot to play)

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.