Tech feature: Script Overview #2

Second part of the scripting overview.


Make sure to watch in HD: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmQjO1C_Q90?hd=1

"My Favorite Game Console is a Table and Chairs" at Connecticon

Joshua Newman wore the My Favorite Game Console is a Table and Chairs shirt at Connecticon and shares this great story:

"Someone came up and told me that was exactly how they felt. They had this whole story about how they're not very good at video games. They were so happy they could actually tell someone sympathetic. I didn't tell her that I love video games but love my friends more. She just needed a shoulder to cry on."

D'aww. Yay!

» Photo by Robert Bohl

Amnesia Post-Mortem

A post-mortem for Amnesia is now up on The Escapist. You can read the whole thing here:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/features/9011-The-Terrifying-Tale-of-Amnesia

While not short, the article is a bit edited and does not go into details on all events. Still it should give a pretty good overview of how Amnesia came about.

Thousand Year Game Design Challenge - June Update

It was another fruitful month for the challenge, with a very special guest now in the running. But first, some news: The deadline for entry is extended to August 31st. Hope to see you at GenCon and I look forward to showing off some of the entries so far.

Take-Back-Toe by James Ernest
Veteran game designer James Ernest submits this entry that actually doesn't have much in common with tic tac toe. It's more like a dice-driven mancala, with an elegant tension of constrained choices. The game suggests using poker chips on a mouse board, but you can play this with rocks or via forum post.

Antipode by Shane Hendrickson
Much like the classic game Hex, your goal is to connect two sides of the board. The twist is that the tiles are double-sided, as in Reversi/Othello. If your pawn passes over an opponent's tile, it flips to your color. Interesting mix of two well-loved abstract games. Usually those mashups don't fare well, but I think this one has strong potential.

Charing Cross by Mike C
In the tradition of many great games, Mike enters a chess variant that's actually a little more like Chinese Checkers. Each player has two pairs of chess pieces starting from two sides of a chess board, trying to reach their opposing side. I can immediately see the tension here. Interesting!

Saaguan by Andrew Cooke
With touches of Robo Rally, this game offers some more complex gameplay than the average 2p abstract. Robots move about the field, blasting each other with beams. Check out his automated and animated demo, too. Very cool.

Mint by Graham Walmsley
Graham actually withdrew this entry after some people told him they played a very similar game in school, but I'm putting it up here as sort of an honorable mention. With a bit of hacking and tweaking, the basic mechanics can still be used to create an interesting new game and I hope Graham submits a revised entry. Get on it, Graham! :)

Past Entries:
» January
» February
» March: (No entries)
» April
» May

Happy Birthday, Robot! - Nominated for Four Ennie Awards!

Holy crap! The Ennie 2011 nominees were just announced and Happy Birthday, Robot! is nominated in four categories!

Best Game
* Happy Birthday, Robot! (Evil Hat Productions)
* Icons Superpowered Roleplaying (Adamant Entertainment/Cubicle 7)
* Legends of Anglerre (Cubicle 7)
* Mutants & Masterminds Hero’s Handbook (Green Ronin Publishing)
* The Dresden Files RPG (Evil Hat Productions )
* Honorable Mention: The Laundry (Cubicle 7)

Best New Game
* A Taste for Murder (Graham Walmsley)
* Happy Birthday, Robot! (Evil Hat Productions)
* Icons Superpowered Roleplaying (Adamant Entertainment/Cubicle 7)
* The Dresden Files RPG (Evil Hat Productions )
* The Laundry (Cubicle 7)
* Honorable Mention: Stars Without Number (Sine Nominee Publishing)

Best Production Values
* Gatecrashing (Posthuman Studios)
* Happy Birthday, Robot! (Evil Hat Productions)
* Legend of the Five Rings, Fourth Edition (Alderac Entertainment Group)
* Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Bestiary 2 (Paizo Publishing)
* The Dresden Files RPG (Evil Hat Productions )

Product of the Year
* A Song of Ice and Fire Campaign Guide (Green Ronin Publishing)
* DC Adventures Hero’s Handbook (Green Ronin Publishing)
* D&D Gamma World Roleplaying Game (Wizards of the Coast)
* Gatecrashing (Posthuman Studios)
* Happy Birthday, Robot! (Evil Hat Productions)
* Legend of the Five Rings, Fourth Edition (Alderac Entertainment Group)
* Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Advanced Player’s Guide (Paizo Publishing)
* Pathfinder Campaign Setting: Inner Sea World Guide (Paizo Publishing)
* The Dresden Files RPG (Evil Hat Productions )
* The Stork (DreamPunk Productions)
* Honorable Mention:Legends of Anglerre (Cubicle 7)

That's some tough and varied competition, but I'm still thrilled to be included in the company of Dresden Files and Gamma World. Yowza.

A game inspired by the Borrowers, Arrietty and the Littles?

The new trailer for Studio Ghibli's Arrietty has me thinking about the potential for a game inspired by that general premise: Hidden elflike people hide in our walls. Here are a couple quick ideas:

Your story is set inside the home in which you play the game.
Any pets in the home are hazards for your characters.
Character art is drawn at actual size. (About an inch or so.)

So what's the compelling situation? What is the common thread each time you play the game? What is different each time you play? Hm!

Tech feature: Script Overview #1

I just recorded a little clip about how scripting works in HPL3. In this film I just talk about the very basic elements of scripting and will follow up with another movie were I talk about some more complex features:



Make sure to watch in in HD: http://youtu.be/5OKFik2IEZU?hd=1

Final Assignment the redo

I added a lighting effect and also keyed in a flatline effect overlay into the center graphic. FYI, if anyone is looking for the lighting filters, like I was, they will not show unless cs5 is in native 32 bit. If you are running 64 bit you must switch it. I used ps in the past and was disapointed in this version that it did not have these filters but stupid me, I figured it out in the end of the semester!

Final Assignment

For our last assignment I chose to design a poster reflecting on the illegal street racing dilemna that plaques the streets of nearly every city in America. I chose the 3 photos to represent the during, after and well unfortunate end that could occur with this dangerous problem. I used several filters on the images to keep the warmness matching as well as to accomplish the hue I was after. The background image was achieved with stacking a few layers and again using film filter as well as overlays. The text is a cool font that my son actually found for a movie we are working on that I thought fit in the dynamic of the design.

It's real! Product Photos of Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple

Here are some product shots of Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple. An advance copy arrived on my doorstep. It looks gorgeous. (The game, not the doorstep.) Click any of the images to embiggen. We're on schedule to debut at GenCon!

Upcoming Interview on With Special Guest

I'll be on With Special Guest on July 3rd at 8p Eastern. We'll talk about the Thousand-Year Game Design Challenge and a bunch of other stuff. Past episodes' guests have included Jonathan Coulton, MC Frontalot, and Wendee Lee. Good company! Check out the show Sunday night.

» With Special Guest
» With Special Guest

Doh: Something of the Something Something

A gift from John Harper

Happy Birthday, Robot! at the Tower's All-Weekend Gaming Event

Alexander Williams shares his experience running several sessions of Happy Birthday, Robot!

"I ended up running three games of HBR in a day, twice with an eleven year old and a fourteen year old and once with an all adult group. The big take-away from that? I should never play with children because they're too violent and nasty. Also, they never needed an explanation of what a complete sentence was; adults? It took them a while to figure out that complete sentences were."

» Read the stories on his blog
» Photo: CC BY Alexander Williams

Time Between Kickstarters [Twitter]

So what do you think is an appropriate time between Kickstarters? Any of the above tweets close to the mark? Speak your mind in the comments!

Space Invaders accidentally invents difficulty curves

When someone says "retro arcade game", there's a pretty good chance that a picture of one of these little blocky aliens pops into your head. 

1978's Space invaders was so influential that even Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Nintendo's cornerstone franchises, has pointed to it as the game that "revolutionized the industry". 


Like all retro games, the key is that it's effortless to start playing, and next to impossible to master. At the beginning, the alien ships are just lined stupidly in front of you in rows. You just have to pick them off with your laser, right? ah, but as you decimate their numbers, something happens: They go faster. 


It made for an absolute perfect difficulty curve. success was rewarded with greater challenge. The more aliens you killed, the harder it got. And when you got down to those last few aliens, you had to have lightning reflexes. 

The thing is, the scaling difficulty was totally unintentional. The entire game was programmed and built by one man: Tomohiro Nishikado. And by built, I mean that he spent an entire year custom developing the hardware for the game because the hardware available in japan at the time wasn't powerful enough to run it. It was like the Crysis 2 of 1978. 

And when it was all finished, Nishikado discovered that the hardware still wasn't powerful enough to run the game how he intended it. He programmed the game to move all the liens at what he thought would be a pretty steady rate, but while play testing it, he found the aliens to be quite a bit slower than he wanted. There were simply too many on the screen for the hardware to handle, so it bogged down. 


As he played on, however, he discovered that the game sped up as he brought swift laser-justice to those invading alien bastards, fewer characters for the processor to keep track of meant it could finally move them at their correct speed. He liked the effect so much, he decided to keep it, saying it "added more thrills to the game"


Actually, you could argue it added the only reason to keep playing the game at all. It was the first game that actually got more difficult as you progressed. Before that point, games were pretty much the same all the way through (often repeating the same screens over and over), and it was basically a matter of waiting for your hands to get tired. 


This combined with the fact that it was the first game to implement a high score system meant that dedicated people put a lot of quarters into space invaders - it actually created a yen shortage in Japan. 


Read other modern gaming trends created by glitches at this link.

Deadline Extended for the Thousand-Year Game Design Challenge [RELEASE]

[FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE]

The Thousand-Year Game Design Challenge deadline for entry is now extended by one month, to August 31st. The reason? Challenge founder Daniel Solis will speak as a guest of honor at Gen Con!

Solis will devote an hour to discussing the Challenge and its current entrants. The deadline for entries is extended to allow Gen Con attendees just learning about the challenge to develop and submit their game.

Look for SEM1128728 in the events listings. Bring your prototypes and pitches!

The Thousand-Year Game Design Challenge offers a $1,000 reward to a game designer who can create a game that will still be played by people a thousand years from now. For more information, visit www.ThousandYearGame.com

Gen Con: The Best Four Days in Gaming! is a consumer and trade experience dedicated to gaming culture and community. For more information, visit www.gencon.com or register at www.genconreg.com

Is the player an artist? - Redux

In case you did not follow the comments on the last blog post with my views on the player as an artist, you might have missed that James Portnow from Extra Credits responded and he and I had a brief exchange. This discussion is now up on the Escapist in case anyone is interested in checking it out:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/misc/8976-Extra-Credits-Addendum-Discussing-the-Role-of-the-Player

The articles has lot of interesting responses from the readers. I think I have already said what I have to say, so I will not discuss it further here. However, do feel free to continue the discussion in the comments!

He says "She says…"

Becky Chambers' recent article "A Few Good Chells" is an honest, refreshing perspective on third- and first-person gaming. Specifically, the importance of protagonists' gender and how that importance is diminished or enhanced depending on third- or first-person interface. It's a great read.

Of particular note is her childhood experience of choosing female video game characters even though they didn't fit her preferred style of gameplay. The best parts are when she's trying to explain video games to her mom and why this all means so much to her. Mom sums it up wisely: “It’s not so much about wanting to be female as it is about wanting to be you. And you are female.”

In general, I try not to start big, serious internet discussions about race or gender in gaming. The subject draws a lot of heat, but little gets produced. Many of my friends dive vigorously into those discussions, but I'm content to sit out. I find it much more satisfying to just make my own games and let them speak for themselves. Still, in light of the article, I couldn't help but reflect on my two published games. I made some deliberate choices in each that must be saying something, yeah?

Both Happy Birthday, Robot! and Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple could be considered something like a third-person game. Most role-playing games assume a first-person perspective, wherein players to some extent inhabit their characters as they engage the fictional world. Heck, you could say that's what defines a role-playing game. (Though that's a whole other discussion, to be sure.) But no, in my games I put you, the player, outside of the protagonist in the story. You are you. The protagonist is the protagonist. Call it a holdover from years of abstract board game design.

In Happy Birthday, Robot!, you and the other players share control over a story about Robot's birthday. I specifically chose "Robot" as the central character because Robot is gender-neutral. I wanted a girl or boy to both be able to bond with Robot equally. I do find it odd how often players assume Robot is male, though. Perhaps I was a little naive? Well, either way, that was why the game was called Happy Birthday, Robot! and not Happy Birthday, Princess! (Also, the combination of "happy birthday" and "robot" had very good SEO opportunity.)

In Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple, each player gets to control his or her own character in the story. So now if you want your hero to be male or female (or a robot), that's up to you. Still, in the game instructions I chose to use the female pronoun in all general contexts. I wasn't trying to make a profound political statement. I just thought, "Why not?" Interesting to note that the only comment I ever got on that choice was one player reading a playtest document. He saw the consistent use of "she," and asked whether all pilgrims were female. "Nope," I said. And that was the last peep I heard on the subject.

I guess that "Why not?" impulse also influences my decisions when it comes to art direction and cover design. Why is the cover character on Greg Stolze's REIGN a woman? Why not? Why a woman on the cover of J.R. Blackwell's Shelter in Place? Why not? Okay, I do have more substantial reasons behind those design choices, but mainly I try to break out of default assumptions about game protagonists. If for nothing else, it makes honest marketing sense: Cool characters in compelling contexts will draw fans of all stripes. (Just ask the adult male fans of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.)

Soooo, yeah. Just some idle thoughts, I guess. No cohesive commentary. If you want to read more on this subject, check out "Intro to GLaDOS 101," about a professor assigning Portal on his class's reading list. Turns out many didn't even notice that the character they inhabited was female. "It came as a surprise to a couple of the guys--'What, what? A chick?'"

» Photo CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Danny Duarte

Cel Shading the Cover of Do: The Book of Letters

I recorded my cel shading process for the cover of Do: The Book of Letters. As you can probably tell, it takes a LONG time to do each character. This figure alone is about three and a half hours.

Music:
Troublemakers - Matt Wilson
As sete mulheres do Minho - De Outra Margem - CC-BY
Departures - Mattias Westlund - CC-BY

Father's Day Edition of Happy Birthday, Robot!

Charles Starrett had only one wish for Father's Day: To play Happy Birthday, Robot! with the family. He posted his family's Father's Day-themed story on his blog and kindly allowed me to repost it here:

Happy Papa’s Day!
Papa walked downstairs and opened the cabinet doors to find chocolate.
Papa saw J there and she promptly ate the cake batter!
S scolded J and J bit S’s butt fiercely but silently.
S turned and made Papa punish bad J but Papa refused.
He wouldn’t dare hurt J because she’s awesome and he had received J’s bribe previously!
S protested hysterically and Mama whined but sent J to bed.
Papa made J serve him his dinner but she ate his dessert.
Papa asked, “What happened?” and ate J’s dessert but apologized.
Papa launched a world-scale invasion while riding on S’s back.
J backed down immediately.
Papa apologized and paid S’s medical bill.
Papa won anyway.

» Charles Starrett's Blog
» More about Happy Birthday, Robot!