this week’s picks are so good, i was truly spoilt. many of these games moved me emotionally in one way or another. they are all great. to name a few:
erotica about being trapped inside Anne Hathaway’s mouth
a beautiful body image spin onThe Yellow Wallpaper
PROFANE BEAST SOLDIER THAT FUCKS AND EATS MEN
gatekeeping satire
glitched out matador game
Sailor Moon + cosmic horror + boardgame
I agree for the most part with what you’re saying. But the game isn’t just about horror of change, it’s horror of how the game treats us when we’ve changed—the most crucial example of this is gaining a percentage value of infection possibility per human limb. For instance, a human arm is 10%, a human hand is 4%. Those parts alone mean that every time you get hit by a Dirty enemy (this usually means an enemy using rust weapons, although some other enemies have that tag as well), you have a 14% chance of being infected.
Let’s look at what infection means in this game. Unlike a conventional RPG where status effects purely affect combat, being Infected has far-reaching ramifications. Most characters won’t talk to you. Some laugh at you, others act disgusted. The reason behind each reaction is interesting—humans think you’re gross and infectious, while robots treat it as a malfunction, you’re marked for the scrap heap, bad program. Either way, progressing becomes painful and discouraging.
In addition, many human zones are blocked off in various ways.
You can actually beat the game while infected.
Until I disgorge these games on some level, I will hurt. I need to show them. Months of struggling to learn things my brain was not accustomed to. Games that excite me but no longer stir praxis. Opiate dreams.
These are the wreckage of me learning how to make graphical games. Before I started making these, I only knew how to make text games. I wanted to be part of the world of color and motion, to rise from the antiseptic black and white maze of words. *tosses book over shoulder, lands in trash with basketball hoop sound*
“Failed” isn’t the right term–I learned a lot from making these.
I was very interested in each game as I began, but I grew to accept that you need sustained interest from beginning to end. One thing to envision a cool idea and do the first level, it’s another to actually finish the game.
Beyond mere inspiration, the components of the game make a huge difference in finishing it. Since I’m making the game by myself, adding a new feature represents the cost of making the art, the cost of coding the mechanics and connecting it to the rest of the code, and the cost of integrating it into the UI (monitor real estate, fonts, spacing, etc). I realized that to make a game, I had to work within a certain scope, both artistically and mechanically. I started learning how to represent things using just a few pixels. I didn’t want to sit down at the computer and be groaning and burbling and vomiting and puking at all the things I needed just to accomplish one simple thing. I wanted a low psychic cost. So now my code is cleaner, I use way more scripts, I draw simple, prototypable sprites, and I envision my scope carefully.
They range in length from vignette to a few seconds of clicking.
Everything by me except for music and part of the mouse gesture system.
2-player Alien Cyborg Wasp Duel (windows download, or laggy earlier uglier version in html5 if you’re a gross person)
Description: On purple platforms with stylized fringes, above a lake of toxic green goo, two alien cyborg wasps of opposing tribes fight it out.
Controls: WASD + Space for left player, arrow keys + Shift for right.
Playability: High–you can play a complete round with no problems. Jumping directly at a wall is “sticky” though, and there’s no respawning.
What I Like: Figuring out how to make eyes and goo bubbles randomly appear in the platforms and toxic lake. Shades of Sonic Spinball. The wasp design and the fringes under the platforms are cool too.
Begscape (windows download)
Description: You’re a beggar. Drag yourself around and fill your bowl with coins. I was pretty depressed when I made this. Also at all other times.
Controls: Arrow keys.
Playability: Medium–you want to crawl around on the dirt and be a crippled beggar and wait for coins to drop down? Go ahead. Just don’t touch the walls or the other beggar, they’re sticky. And the game has no end, you just crawl around that one screen forever. Realism in gaming.
What I Like: The premise. The aesthetic (shape, color, movement). The tide (no frames, the lapping effect is algorithmically generated). The fact that people avoid you just like in real life.
Shapes (html5)
Description: A game for inhuman sentient geometry.
Controls: Mouse driven.
Playability: Low–you can click on the first sequence of options to advance but it won’t do anything after that.
What I Like: Everything.
Star Wagon (windows download)
Description: Oregon Trail + King of Dragon Pass. Travel linearly in your ship, upgrading, recruiting, and responding to random cyoa events of varying complexity. Starports are safe havens where you refuel, improve your ship, and hire crew. Planets have limited amenities but each one has a gimmick–there’s a gambling planet (which utilizes the hidden luck stat), Sade the planet of pain where you can play the pain games, pitting one of your crew against the champion pain junky, and so on.
This was the most ambitious game I worked on. I got a lot done, tweaked tons of little things, but my will was broken–for now(!).
Controls: Mouse driven + press Space to start the ship at the beginning of the game.
Playability: High–You can hire crew, refuel, read the guide and encyclopedia (click the little question mark), and complete most events. You’ll find broken planets and events though, and a lot of other stuff is missing or glitchy.
What I Like: If a crew member dies their portrait turns blood red. The randomly generated bios and the different alien races I came up with. The character customization at the beginning, the evocative career options. Thinking about naming conventions for each race. The fact that each planet is a different gimmick. The star-mile counter rolling up as you zoom through space, the idea that you have to live or die by the choices you make as you careen in a straight line toward…whatever was at the end.
Darcula (html5)
Description: I wanted to make an avant-garde strategy/sim city game in a weird world instead of the usual capitalism-driven sim set in a boring, contemporary world. Bizarre alien advisors cheer you on or groan as you make decisions (why do so few games no longer have talking head advisors? those are so cool).
Controls: Mouse driven. Click on buildings to set workers (“Blargs”). Shift-click to remove them. Click on the middle tentacle on the left part of the screen to see my revolutionary tentacle-driven UI. The three orbs ostensibly save, load, and quit your game. Click on the mud mound to show a little temple icon then click on that to build the temple. Clicking on the temple will sacrifice one of your Glargs.
Playability: Low–you can assign workers and build a temple and see what the advisors say.
What I Like: The aesthetic. The tentacle-driven UI. The ADVISORS.
2-player Coop Game (windows download)
Description: Two players on the same screen, their world split in two by a wall. Will they ever be reunited? Beat the challenges together but beware–a misstep may mean doom for your partner, for each side has touch-activated platforms that fire missiles to the other half.
The middle sequence forces players to constantly reevaluate their path and choose between a fast path that’s dangerous for their partner, or a slow, difficult path that makes it easy on their partner. The idea is for players to pay attention not only to their own progress but that of their companion–to be empathic and aware of how much their partner can handle.
Controls: WASD for left player, 8456 numpad for right.
Playability: High-Low–you should be able to complete the three levels with a partner, but if you die you have to force quit the game for some reason (the second stage may be challenging to some). Also the second stage scrolls slowly sometimes so you may have to wait for the screen to catch up.
What I Like: I enjoy that each stage is a different kind of challenge. I like the need to analyze not only yourself but your partner’s skill level and progress. It would be cool to experiment more with that idea–coop where you’re not merely cooperating to solve brute puzzles, but feeling the other person and bearing some of their pain (inasmuch as pain can be represented in games–inconvenience being the usual substitute.)
Mouse Gesture Driven RPG Battle System (windows download)
Description: Use mouse gestures to fight an rpg battle. The mouse gesture recognition itself (i.e. returning whether the mouse traveled in a certain path) is from code I found on the Gamemaker forums.
Controls: Displayed ingame–drag and release right mouse button in the shape described by the icons. Turning your cursor into a heart will heal whatever you click on. Doing the screen flashy spell will damage the closest enemy to your cursor.
Playability: High–for what it is. The motions are really forgiving.
What I Like: The fluid ease and speed of a battle using this system. Less clicking through menus, more fighting. The magical blue-white spheres following the cursor are cool too. I…love them.
Tentacle RPG (windows download)
Description: I coded part of an rpg engine from scratch (basic combat, basic inventory, cool dialogue box that kind of bounces in and supports branching conversations) then lost interest. The excerpt you can download above lets you talk to two people, see a tree, and play a whack-a-tentacle game and see your high score at whacking tentacles. I was playing some obscure game called Chrono Trigger and after spending most of the game in the carnival playing the different minigames I realized I had way more fun playing those than the actual game. Especially the test-your-strength hammer slammer bell dinging game–such a satisfying, simple mechanic, with none of the annoying prep time of the other games. I don’t enjoy most RPG combat, I just enjoy being in the world.
Controls: Arrow keys to move, Shift to talk to people, numbers to choose dialogue options.
Playability: High–whack them tentacles.
What I Like: The subtly bouncing dialogue box that flies in from off screen. Designing the conversation system was my favorite part–making the dialogue type itself in (classic~) but also being able to speed it up, as well as supporting multiple conversational paths. The texture on the grass with its soft cool colors.
SUPER EAGLE: A game that hates the player with such deliberate hostility that you can’t help but laugh. I died by chasing after an alluring Nazi pyramid in the horizon, instead falling through vast blue space, plummeting outside the map past islands of level architecture. I saw them from a great distance and marveled at these distant levels. At first I thought this was part of the game, a logical continuance of the masochistic design. I still don’t know.
Grow!: A gentle relaxing game where you guide a vine through a maze of dirt. Occasionally it sprouts leaves. Truly the simple things of life…
Europa Concept: The first ten seconds of this game are the best. This is a FEELING–crawling from the wreckage of your ship, crash-landed on an alien planet, surveying remote vistas of austere splendor, sky full of an enormous red planet, ominous and foreboding. Gathering supplies from the wreckage to deal with–you have no idea. What’s that blue thing in the distance? I went and explored it. Big crystal sticking out of the ground. I shoot it. I try to pick it up. It’s just there. A crystal.
I build a buggy and ride it across the hills, heading toward the settlement my scanner’s picked up. Ruined, burnt buildings, nothing left but crumbling walls and stairways to nowhere. A single panel in front of an arch. I press the button. Monsters pour from the portal. I leap into my buggy and floor it back to the crash site. Aliens swarm across the plain after my lone speeding vehicle–this is a cinematic moment, but more importantly it is one I am creating. I could choose to stay and fight. I could climb one of the ruined buildings and make my last stand there. But I chose to head to the crash site because I had an explicit image in mind–me standing on top of the crashed rocket, pouring down machine gun fire from this destroyed, leaning pillar of human ambition. I wanted to create a specific image in this alien-killing sequence, and the game let me choose how to create that image. I want to see more games that integrate their cinematic elements into the playing field itself. Darshana Jayemanne wrote “Why not compare a videogame to an uncut film and players to editors?” Give players a richness of props, give them the sets of a cutscene, but refrain from making that cutscene yourself. That is the final act of continence in you, the gamemaker. As tempting as it is to move around the beautiful pieces you’ve made and make them act just right, it is even more satisfying to make the player the final catalyst for the aesthetic you’ve engineered.
Toward The Light: I love this game. This is a perfect game, succeeding at everything it sets out to do. Your flares illuminate the subterranean cavescape which isn’t like any cave you’ve ever seen–it is massive, full of hills, ravines, a Martian hellscape, glimpsed by hissing flarelight. As you walk through the darkness, pebbles dislodge from those hills and rattle down. Such a basic thing, fear of the dark, but so effectively orchestrated. I felt this was one of the few truly complete games of the competition.
Fabled Lands: Critically under-appreciated sandbox gamebook series in computerized form. Swim a river, cross the desert, and you’ve crossed the spine of another book. Fabled Lands is fantastic–it’s old-school fantasy but before it became hollow, joyless, reconstituted fodder. It’s just a shitload of fun–I have distinct, fond memories of so many of the quests, even the little ones that take 30 seconds to come to fruition. I remember the monster that walks backwards, the little flying creatures you can befriend (or be horrible to), the sarcastic door.
The setting draws you in. I felt genuinely lonely wandering the steppes near the Edge of the the World. Strange, deadly pyramids and ghostly fortresses. Chased by wolves. Kill one to wear its pelt, survive longer in the cold. The game succeeds at creating an emotional distance between the settled, bustling cities and the remote steppes, without having any spatial representation to speak of. There’s just so much of it, so many pages full of so many things, a whole world with more life and depth than Skyrim could ever pretend to.
Fabled Lands makes failure interesting. It has horrible deaths in abundance, but you’re more likely to wake up as a slave on an entirely different part of the world, or get turned into a mer-centaur, or get shipwrecked first. Don’t want to get eaten by the cannibal death cult? Join them.
Nemesis Macana: This is the best (and funniest) instance of breaking a butterfly on a wheel I’ve seen for a long time. I love the overblown purple prose. I love the impassioned, moralizing angst. The companion essay is brilliant. I wasn’t aware of the background for the game coming in, but it doesn’t take much imagination to grasp the idea of epically deconstructing an utterly broken little porn game.
A thought: it is not always a “good” game that should be posted, but sometimes a flawed game wrapped around a certain idea that deserves to be promulgated. Games I don’t think people will necessarily enjoy, but will make people want to create, or the idea should be simply be known.
May contain spoilers.
Nebulous Hero: Singapore-Mit GAMBIT Game Lab experimented in a similar concept with their game Afterland. The interesting thing about these games is that the designers don’t rely on altering the physical architecture of a level to progress the game, they only change what the player knows. This is a powerful, immersive technique when done correctly. How elegant to store the greater part of your game in the player’s mind, instead of anything so crude as material reconfiguration. Other things I liked: the massive teeth of the friends (a sly jab at player expectations), the music (fun, triumphant).
The Republia Times is a dystopian newspaper editing sim by dukope. Simple, addictive, clever. I love the Mac Classic look so, so much. Reminds me of an era when strategy was abstracted to a set of radio buttons and numbers, but strangely tense for all that. The days of Hamurabai and Dynasty. The spatial element brings the numbers to life though–you must strike a fine balance between entertaining the proles and inspiring loyalty. What do you do with a bin full of politicial disasters? The answer: squeeze them into a tiny column and slam up a big fat juicy headline about a celebrity wedding. I must stress that the satire cunningly emerges from the mechanics (as opposed to clumsy referential writing and thinly-veiled caricatures). The player alone is responsible for the bread and circuses, for the debasement of their journalistic integrity. You don’t have time to think about ideology, the clock is ticking and you need readers but you can’t piss off the Glorious Leader oh god oh god
Legend of Grimrock came out today, long-awaited nerd holy grail, a throwback to “old-school” rpg days of making maps with graph paper, the days of Wizardry and Ultima Underworld, etc, running around in first person through mazes getting loot and surviving the horrible monsters that live underground. And like anything with intense games culture focus, I wanted to see if the gameplay actually held up under the hype.
I like that the non-human races (minotaur, insectoid, lizardperson) are suitably inhuman. Monstrosity is good–fuck games with elves and dwarves. Also no anthropomorphic boobs, a nice lack of fanservice.
Zaga-33 is a quick, minimal roguelike with vomit-colored alien graphics. Each room presents itself as a puzzle–since there is no xp, enemies are to be avoided. All you care about is getting to the exit past the maze of mutated rocks and enemy movement patterns. Addictive, fast, no obstacle to restarting, just pure gameplay. I’ve gotten to level 12 so far.
Edit: Updated version released with actual ending, new shit, and phenomenal music: http://mightyvision.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/zaga-33.html
I adore the simplicity of this game.
I was reading this article on the sublime in Skyrim, the harkenings to a romantic period. I did feel those stirrings when I began the game–fresh, alpine air, melting snow feeding into pure rivers through which I waded, and always the cloud-crowned mountains challenging me to conquer their fearsome slopes. This is clearly a game with the possibility of romance, a possibility utterly ruined after any prolonged playthrough.
Why? How? Who did this? Who took such a beautiful game and shat on it? Well, shat is the wrong word, implying as it does something foul descending from above. This disease comes from the inside. The entire world is riddled on the monadic level with anti-romance mathy corruption. A good example is the alchemy system–see those vines hanging across the cave entrance that brush your face when you pass from the darkness into the light of a new world? Those bluebells rustling in the wind? That beautiful butterfly that catches the sun in its jeweled wings? You spend the game brutally tearing them from the environment to turn into shitty potions.
Rooms stinking with swamp gas that explodes on proximity to flame. Subterranean forests that limit vision. Light glimmering through cracks in the ceiling.
Beyond the beauty, Brogue is about math. Not in the pedantic, bloated way other games are, but in a simple, elegant way that could serve as gaming’s Elements of Style.
When you press shift + D you see this:
A list of every consumable item in the game, and whether or not you’ve discovered it. This plays into testing unidentified items.
Two potions are most desirable: healing and strength. Healing saves you from death, strength is the only way to wield stronger weapons and armor. You want to discover these as quickly as possible. Once you have, you’re in no particular rush to consume the rest. The risk-reward just doesn’t pay off as well. The same fluctuating ratio holds for scrolls, wands, and staffs. Need and acceptable risk are ever on your mind.
What wands and staffs and potions do you point or throw at others? Which do you target on yourself? You have an idea at any given time of the odds, and sooner or later you’ll be forced to experiment. This choice is particularly devilish when you’re at the mercy of a mob of raging monsters or at the edge of a wuthering chasm or in a room full of expanding, toxic purple gas. The key here is that the experimentation isn’t random, it’s calculated. A subtle distinction that transforms you from a pathological, suicidal omnivore into a dashing scientist.
In a recent game I was trapped in a burning room, up against the wall, moments away from being engulfed by the flames, with a single unidentified staff. I had discovered no prior staffs, so the odds were 1 in 11 that this staff would be the one to set me free: the staff of tunneling. Shrugging fatalistically, I aimed the staff at the wall and fired. The wall disintegrated into rubble and I fled the suffocating room, fire licking my trail.
There’s a delicious touch of Spelunky too, with random altars carrying keys that will unlock the door to a treasure vault somewhere on the level. I’ve found altars on islands in the midst of lava, trapped rooms that drop portcullises and release toxic gas, floors that begin to crumble under your feet, rooms that flood with water the instant your greedy fingers snatch the key. Some rooms contain keys that lead to more rooms, but you can only take one treasure from each room (a wonderful example of an interesting decision), so the game draws again on an element of gambling, giving the player more chances to win big or die by inches.
In my last game I robbed an altar and ran to the door as the ground fell away. Too late, I’m falling through the floor, landing with a bone-splintering crash on the level below. Taking it in stride, I drink a nearby potion to soothe my nerves. Screaming I fall another level down, for it was a potion of descent. The game permits little moments of irony, greed, foolishness.
Nothing is included haphazardly, which I think is a practice a lot of designers can easily fall into. Each item is a tool in your repertoire with layers of interconnected synergy, and the same thought goes into the monsters and environment. This is a game far, far from the bloat of previous roguelikes, with no desire to wad together loads of Dungeons and Dragons shit and injokes, a game about purity of design, clarity of decision-making, and tactical thinking.
Brogue is a new roguelike that retains ASCII, even as others embrace tilesets right out the gate. What you gotta realize though is that no one has made ASCII look as good as Brogue (and by good, I mean better than tilesets). The game design is minimal and full of impact. Brogue succeeds on both a visual and a design level, making it the first game I would recommend to someone needing an introduction to Roguelikes.
List of cool things in Brogue:
1) The visuals. Hot & cold palette, pretty screen effects, bursts of red light from arcane scrolls that flash across the map, pools of bubbling lava that give you sense of the heat emanating from their orange surface.
2) The interface. Commands are stripped down from the overwhelming bloat of most roguelikes and consolidated. For example, drinking, reading, zapping, eating, etc are all bound to “a” for activate. No fucking “quaff” to drink a potion, just the quiet acknowledgment that gameplay is what a roguelike should be about. Less memorization, more action.
3) Creeping purple lichen that spreads and spreads, poisoning whatever touches it.
4) Your gear is effectively your stats and class. Instead of skill points, you enchant your items.
5) Brogue tells you the numbers on everything. The exact odds of killing or being killed by any given monster, how good your weapon is, all that information is up front, letting you focus on meaningful decisions.
6) The environment. Let me tell you about the environment.
I blazed through the first few levels wreaking genocide on the inhabitants, a blatant example of the manifest destiny that pervades dungeon crawlers. So perhaps justice was calling when I bumped into a purple blob. I whacked the blob just like I’d whacked everyone else I’d met. It exploded and I moved on, the smug conqueror, barely noting its death. Caustic purple gas spread from its corpse. I thought, oh, I’ll just step away. That’s normal enough. Then it spread. And spread. Soon entire hallways and chambers filled with the gas. I was trapped inside a room where I’d run in a panic, backed into a corner at the very edge of the gas field. I’d never played this game before, I had no idea how long until the gas faded. So in my boredom I read all the scrolls I’d picked up along the way.
One scroll shattered the earth below, plummeting me into the depths. I wandered a rope bridge across a lightless chasm (atmosphere!) coming to a room full of grassy fungus and trees (dried and autumnal). I saw an altar in the corner and ran to it, greedy for treasure. The altar sank into the earth and a torch fell from the wall, lighting the grass on fire. Flames spread through the room, raging towards me. I could have saved myself by running through the fire and into the tunnels, but fear drove me back. Soon fire filled the entire room, save for the narrowest corner. In desperation I drank all my potions. One of them exploded into acid. Now the chamber was full of caustic acid and blazing fire. I had no choice but to sprint across this hellish swamp, burning with fire and acid every step of the way. Almost there…