Time for a little experiment. Here’s the deal: most of my free time on weekends has been going to Purity, as I’m trying to get something decent to submit for the IGF deadline in November. This is well and good, but the casualty is you folks - my miniscule readership. Rarely do I feel I can justify the time it’d take to write an entry for this blog. So the experiment is this: I’m going to post some summaries for longer-form blog entries I want to write, you people tell me which sounds most interesting, and I’ll do that one next. I make no promises for the quality of the final post, even if you thought it sounded really exciting at the time… just like game development!
Mob Roulette2008.August.4
Abstraction2008.July.4
Last weekend we saw Pixar’s latest animated feature, Wall-E. The film’s relative merits and flaws aside, I was reminded just how potent stylized characters can be, and how underused and ill-understood a tool abstraction is in game design today.
Call to Arms 2008: Sellout2008.May.25
A coworker of mine has issued a Call to Arms of sorts on his blog, in which designers are encouraged to create designs that evoke a feeling or conflict not typically expressed in existing games. I’m strongly supportive of this sort of thing - in general violent conflict is a rut designers can fall into and we benefit greatly from spreading our wings outside of that occasionally, regardless of whether the result is marketable. So here’s my take on the conflict between Pragmatism and Romanticism: a game called Sellout.
Sellout is played with the Guitar Hero / Rock Band guitar controller - you could extend the concept to include an entire band, but I wanted to keep the focus small and personal.
Sellout puts you in the role of a busker on a populated street corner. Over the course of a session, different people will pass by who value very different qualities in the music you play. The core loop of the game is about choosing what sort of audience impulses you cater to.
Expressivity2008.May.11
The neighborhood where my wife and I live has a good mix of small town, forest and mountains within close proximity, and we like to go for nice long walks exploring it - we’re still relatively new to the area, and it’s decent exercise.
One of my many strange and obsessive pastimes is to, upon returning home, trace out the walk’s exact route in Google Earth. Here’s a zoomed out view of various excursions from March and April of this year:
(I suppose if I had a few hundred dollars to spare, I could just buy a GPS to automate the process… hmm.)
Apart from a general interest in maps, exploration and the like, I think part of the enjoyment I get from this is that it visualizes a fairly subjective, semi-tangible experience in a way that has its own simple beauty. Each of the colored route lines are a fingerprint of our path through the world, and through life, on a specific date. It is a microexpression of individuality.
Purity: on progress updates2008.April.13
I’m still mulling over how best to unveil Purity to the outside world. Right now I’m busy just getting the game to a limping state - it’s buggy, ugly and not much fun, but so are most games this early in development. So it may be a while before you see any screenshots or links to playable builds.
There are definitely some posts I want to make that explain and illustrate the ideas behind the game. They wouldn’t be essential to enjoying or “getting” it, they’d simply provide some context for people who care about things like the process and intent - the sort of thing for which I created this site, really.
On the other hand, I really don’t want to fall into that classic game development trap of promising big early on, speaking in tantalizing abstractions, only to disappoint with a mediocre or ineffectively communicative final result.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained?