A high-minded goal like “expand the boundaries of the medium” doesn’t always mean forging ahead in crazy new unknown directions. Sometimes it means examining lost evolutionary lines in game design – picking up ideas that were abandoned long ago and seeing if there’s any new life in them. The game I keep coming back to in this regard is Doom. Not the 2004 reboot, but “Classic Doom”: Doom 1 and 2, Final Doom, the Master Levels – and its vast universe of user-made content. What can it teach us today?

In 1993, the message Doom sent to the videogame world was something like “use cutting edge technology to make something dark, edgy and violent”. The world has changed so much around Doom since then that very little of that original impact comes through to players today – though the industry has inarguably gone on to master the techno-fueled ultra-violence thing! Here’s what I’ve found after many years of enjoying the game and digging ever deeper into its design:

Doom feels more like 1st person Robotron than a modern FPS

When you play Doom today, it doesn’t feel much like you’re controlling a human or moving through real spaces. Try this though: press the TAB key, type IDDT twice and pretend you’re playing Geometry Wars, and the moving triangles are your enemies. This is what Doom’s designers were working from in 1993 – back then, the idea of a first person shooter was barely established, and their closest models for many mechanics were from 2D shooters like Robotron, Berserk and Tempest. This approach echoes throughout Doom’s design. The notion of realism in FPS design wouldn’t appear for another few years, and many decisions were made simply on the basis of being good for abstract shooter gameplay.

Partly thanks to this, many parts of Doom’s “game feel” still compare favorably with modern twitch games. Enemy speeds and patterns are very finely tuned, weapon design is strongly orthogonal, player movement has a nice friction to it and level design elucidates all of this. Quake 3 is still considered the pinnacle of arcadey FPS movement and feel, and that lineage starts with Doom – some of the code is even similar.

Doom is about “maneuverability as defense”

In almost every modern FPS, the player moves fairly slowly and a huge proportion of enemies are equipped with instant hit attacks – pistols, machine guns, sniper rifles. This usually puts the player in the role of “damage sponge” – they’re intended to soak up a certain amount of damage from mostly unavoidable enemy attacks, then seek cover and heal up. Halo’s recharging shield makes this mechanic quite explicit – by default, you’re exposed to damage and will die, while seeking cover halts that and completes the basic cycle of any combat.

Contrast all this with Doom Guy, who runs at about 50 scale miles per hour – nonsensically fast by modern standards. Most of Doom’s enemies don’t have instant-hit projectile attacks, and most of the ones that do are quite weak – the lowly trooper and sergeant. Every other enemy projectile takes time to reach its target, and would look comical in a more realistic visual presentation.

So because the player moves so quickly in Doom, and because most enemy attacks are dodgeable, the player can avoid a significant amount of damage simply by moving. A skilled player can often deal with large numbers of enemies sustaining hardly a scratch. This creates a feeling that’s quite rare in modern FPS: that you are powerful because you are agile, not because you’re a tank. This frees up Doom’s encounters to feature huge numbers of enemies, to vary scenarios by mixing in different proportions of threats, and to have huge, sprawling, often non-linear spaces that the player can traverse easily. There’s nothing quite like it today.

Doom has a more varied bestiary than most modern FPSes

In many modern FPSes, the design of every enemy the player faces is sampled from a fairly narrow tactical spectrum – soldier with machine gun, soldier with shotgun, zombie with melee attack. Doom, on the other hand, has a huge range of monster sizes, speeds, strengths and movement/attack patterns. Former humans and imps are slow moving ranged fodder. Hell Barons are large, tank-like threats. Flying enemies range from the small charging Lost Soul to the tough, fireball-belching Cacodemon. Revenants and Mancubi launch homing and spread-fire projectiles respectively, and the three boss-class monsters are each very dangerous in different ways. Some enemies can be stunned by weapon fire more easily than others.

Such diversity creates a large but simple to understand toolset that level design can combine with architecture to create a huge variety of combat setups. One tough guy with a lot of fodder means the player has to do crowd control while focusing on the real threat. Lots of flying enemies make the player seek low cover and choke points. Enemies with strong melee in tight spaces make the player dance and really exploit the stun properties of their weapons. This versatility of the core design makes life easier and more fun for the level designer, and thus the player.

Doom was abstract in ways that empowered its level design

While some of Doom’s levels have a very thin fiction via their title (eg “Hangar”) and general texturing theme, if you actually explore them you find they only resemble real locations in the loosest sense possible. This is precisely what allowed Doom’s level design to present a wide variety of interesting tactical setups. Level designers didn’t have to worry about whether a change made something look less like a hangar or a barracks, just whether it was better for gameplay. This was especially critical for a style of game that was just finding its feet in 1993.

As the march of technology has allowed ever-higher graphical fidelity, virtually every FPS since Doom has attempted greater and greater representationalism with its environments. While games like System Shock began to show that a real sense of place can be a huge draw in itself, designers of such games will always have to manage the tension between compelling fiction and optimal function, unless you are willing to go all out and have the kind of weird, abstract spaces Doom has. I would love to see more modern games break with this conventional wisdom and see where it leads, if only in an indie or experimental context.

Doom enabled a revolution in player-generated content

Though advanced for its day, Doom’s technology was still simple enough, and its content low-fidelity enough, that a huge mod community coalesced around it to produce an unparalleled number of levels, mods, total conversions and other addons. This, combined with the fact that the player base was so focused on a single game, means we’ll probably never see something like it again. The lesson for future games might be this: make your technology extremely simple, easy to modify, ship it with a diverse enough pool of content that people can extend it to create a variety of settings and styles, and promote the sharing of this content as a way to add value to your game.

Many PC games have gotten all that right but failed to attract a huge community because of the content fidelity issue. The barriers to entry facing someone who wants to make a mod for Unreal Tournament 3 today are vastly higher than those facing a Doom modder. You can rough out a Doom map in a few hours and finish it in a few days, while that same amount of time might produce a single texture for a modern game. Again, this is something we could branch out from if we lose our fixation on technology and high fidelity visuals uber alles.

Another unique side effect of Doom’s simplicity is that its design principles can be synthesized and expressed procedurally. Level generators for more modern games have been attempted and abandoned, while the Oblige random level generator creates a decent Doom level with proper combat and resource balance, key gating and architectural themes.

Doom is one of many classics whose less obvious qualities are seldom revisited

Doom’s impact has faded, and its precise recipe for success is unlikely to be replicated; nevertheless, the game industry has become quite adept at mimicking its superficial qualities. However we as creators and critics owe it to ourselves to look at Doom, and other classics of comparable depth – M.U.L.E., Ultima IV and Star Control II are a few examples I would offer – and trace less-traveled paths of analysis in search of deeper truths.

Sometimes we must look to the past for guidance. Other times we must strive to forget it entirely. In the balance of both, we will find much to learn about making the games of tomorrow.

Addendum: Not sure if he even remembers it, but Nathan McKenzie made some observations on Doom about 7 years ago now(!) that set my wheels turning on this post, so I’d like to thank him for those initial insights.

Of course, I had to do something very silly with some of this time. So I did a remake of a BioShock level for… wait for it… Doom 2.

Inspired partly by TIGSource’s amazing Bootleg Demakes Competition, I used a modern Doom level editor called SLADE to recreate Arcadia and the Farmer’s Market, the sections of BioShock on which I was the primary designer. It’s a monster of a level, crammed full of weird little BioShock-to-Doom transmutations and symbolism. If you’re a fan of either game, I hope you enjoy it.

Download the map from here. Inside the ZIP are a standard format Doom WAD readme, instructions on how to get it running on modern systems, and some designer commentary on both the construction of the original map and the Doom demake.

To complement this release, I’ve also posted a design analysis of classic Doom, just as I threatened to a while back. Read it here:

Coelacanth: Lessons from Doom

Now: resting up, rolling on to a cool new project. Making a DOOM map on the weekends.

Stay tuned. In the meantime, read some words Bruce Sterling spoke almost 20 years ago:

The Wonderful Power of Storytelling

This isn’t a standard “old fogey remembers classic game fondly” post though. Ultima IV’s tremendous influence and importance aside, I think for players looking back on it from today, it now exemplifies a value that is quite rare in most modern games: encouragement of the player to engage by using their imagination.

What does this mean though? What does a game that fosters “imaginative engagement” look, sound and play like in 2009?

I feel this question is worth asking simply because the sort of engagement we might give players by embracing this lost art could be powerful, richly subjective and, in a word, personal. Your mental image of a game’s world or a character’s voice might be different from mine [2]. You invite the game into your own mind, to an extent, rather than being enveloped entirely by the imagination of the author. In a word, you participate in a way that complements the actual interactivity.

The dominance of literal images in our culture notwithstanding, this value is actually far from alien to art/entertainment media: just remember what happens every time you read a book. You have to call every person, place and event into being in your mind. The experience depends entirely upon your engagement and interpretation – your brain is the minimum system requirement.

In fact, this value isn’t even alien to games of the electronic kind. Interactive fiction is an established medium whose potential is reasonably well-explored, and whose overlap with written fiction is obvious. Further down the continuum towards conventional videogames, we have games with primitive, but more importantly stylized or symbolic graphics. The best of these still have an effect closer to that of a well-written novel than a film – they evoke images and ideas that are quite grand compared to the simple stuff of which they’re made.

Low Fidelity

In the bad old days, hardware was so limited that games couldn’t muster much for audiovisual feedback. Creators had no choice but to stylize and abstract – to communicate as best they could within the limited fidelity of their format.

It’s also true that compared to today, fewer games tried to create a sense of a fiction or world. Games like Tetris still hold up today largely on the strength of their rules, their integrity as formal systems, and for such games the clarity and aesthetic attractiveness of these abstractions were all that mattered.

Early computer role playing games had quite a different lineage, extending most directly from pen and paper RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons. Games like Temple of Apshai, which augmented its modest 8-bit graphics with a manual full of written descriptions of each room in its dungeons, are the missing link between D&D and later RPGs like Ultima IV onward.

Even with more arcadey games, it’s clear that box art of the era played a big part in providing a starting point for imaginative engagement – check out all the crazy stuff on the cover painting of Missile Command for the Atari 2600:

You see only a basic semblance of this in-game, but its intent was to call into being a world richer than what was represented. Creators of such games and their related artifacts were in effect building a bridge, from their own creative intent to that of their players – or, if you don’t believe in “player creativity”, at least their willingness to engage creatively.

Of course, today technological oneupsmanship drives most of big budget game development towards ever-higher fidelity audiovisuals, in part because that’s the easiest way to show off the power of new hardware. The aesthetics of many modern games have in turn adapted to embrace this – as Epic’s lead designer Cliff Bleszinski recently pointed out, there are lots of bald space marines with intricate, scuffed metal armor in games today because current graphics hardware is really good at that. Are we really okay with this being the driving force of our medium, though?

Clearly, the limitations that once forced creators to work with low fidelity and wield the power of suggestion have all but slipped away completely. Paradoxically, in many art forms this kind of event is exactly the point at which some artists begin to explore how that limitation can be wielded intentionally, as a fruitful restraint, a challenge to inspiration, a means to broaden the scope of what is thought possible.

Sparse Matrices / the Art of “Not Showing”

To paraphrase some wisdom I’ve heard from horror filmmakers, “the monster in the audiences’ heads is scarier than any monster you can put on screen.”

Numerous technical problems with the animatronic shark during the filming of Jaws forced Steven Spielberg to adopt a cinematographic style that was more about implication, the menace of things offscreen or barely seen, or built up through the soundtrack. It had quite an effect on viewers and revolutionized how films like it were made.

Audio can indeed be a powerful aid to this – it’s spatial, subjective and suggestive where visuals fail to be. The two older games that have best retained their ability to frighten and immerse me are Thief and System Shock 2, and they do it largely because of their masterful audio, and in spite of their primitive graphics.

Whether you’re hiding information to scare people, or paring it away to help someone paint a picture in their own heads, the mechanism is the same.

In mathematics and programming, there’s something called a sparse matrix. Unlike a normal array where every value is filled in with a number, like the 1:1 grid of pixels on the display you’re reading this on, a sparse matrix is only filled in where there’s a non-zero number.

It’s a glancing blow of a metaphor, but I think human imagination and memory work kind of like this. Whatever isn’t filled in becomes breathing room. What we as creators don’t show the player creates a space they can fill themselves and inhabit mentally in the larger context of what we do show.

Allow Players to Imagine

However, if you’re a creator it takes some discipline to choose to not fill something in with marvelous detail, and some craft to know exactly when and when not to apply this principle for effect – as an intentional feat of simplification, rather than an omission.

Now that technology can do so many things for us, the default approach today has become “spell everything out as explicitly as possible”. This is changing, however.

So the original question stands: what games would we make if we embraced this fully?

In the last five to ten years, the idea of games with highly stylized visuals has gone from fringe to wide acceptance. Beyond simply looking beautiful or distinctive, stylized / abstracted art plays on the visual side of our cognition and imagination.

Chapter 2 of Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics” describes this as “Amplification Through Simplification” – that by removal of well-chosen details from a representation of something, an artist can clarify it, focus its intent, broaden or twist its meaning.

I don’t think this is a purely visual phenomenon, though. In games, we represent the world and its rules to players via interactions. The sense we give players of its possibility space early on, through training and fiction, can create a space players will inhabit with their imagination.

Remember your first hour with Shadow of the Colossus, when you’d only fought maybe one of the beasts? The sparse loneliness of world seems to continue forever. What’s out there? What are you trying to accomplish? What are the limits?

Hours later, you’ve mastered the world and know how it works; you know what to expect. You know what isn’t in the game… earlier possibilities have faded.

However, the mystery of the place stays with you. If players participate imaginatively even for a short time, that ripples outward to enrich the rest of their experience.

That’s another reason I used Ultima IV as an example to start with – the vastness of its world, combined with the simple art and feeling of freedom to explore, create a similar experience despite the radical difference in fidelity.

Other games have a story that stands out much more clearly from their gameplay dynamics. Even in these, there can be vectors that lead us to imagine – stories that are driven by mystery invite us to speculate, to dream up alternate possibilities – who is the G-Man? What happened to Rapture? We invite more of the game into our creative consciousness – we imagine. Even in games with completely traditional linear storytelling models, this is powerful stuff.

Conclusion

In the future I’d like to see more games wield this power intentionally and explore what’s possible with it. I’d like to see designers stylize or not show something by choice rather than, as Ultima IV did, as a technological compromise. I want to make games that people want to invite into their imaginations. If it sounds like I’ve cast a wide net in searching for examples and potential directions, that’s because there are so many avenues… which is very inspiring.

Steve Jobs once claimed that computers are “a bicycle for the mind”. Videogames could be a bicycle for the imagination, if we have the will to broaden our medium in this direction.

[1] I wrote a bit of code to create this animated screenshot. You can download the program here. Instructions are included.

[2] To be clear, even the most imagination-friendly videogame is still rule-bounded in ways that truly freeform, imaginative play – think kids in a schoolyard playing cops and robbers – is not. The value of the former would not be to replace the latter, but to populate what is currently the vast empty gulf between the two.

• Make games, using proven mechanics from the last 20 years, that sell millions of copies.
• Give people a broad range of experiences that affect them as powerfully as those found in other forms of art.

Visual aids are nice so here’s one for each of those:

(Ignore the kid yammering over the video, until about 1:10 in, for the quicktime event sequence.) [2]

We can debate whether encompassing a broader range of human experience is indeed a goal of importance, but if even a God of War game feels the need to have a scene like the one shown above, you might at least concede that it’s something many developers seem interested in furthering.

To cut right to the heart of the conflict I see here, I don’t think we as developers can continue holding our breath and waiting for games that revolve around shooting, driving, running and jumping to someday make a great leap into expressing all kinds of things they were heretofore incapable of.

The problem is that the better versed you are in game conventions, the easier it is to separate the core mechanics of a game from its fiction and theme, and thus say that a game like BioShock is a meditation on free will, the dangers of ideological extremes, and whatever else… despite the fact that you spend about 90% of it shooting people in the face.

On top of simply being good satire, the Onion piece cuts to the heart of that, and reminds us that rest of the world can see this disparity more clearly, ironically by virtue of being less game-literate. For many among the gaming literate, that sort of insight hits pretty close to home.

For a perspective from the other end, I was struck by this comment on io9, a non-gamer blog, from this post about BioShock 2:

I can see how a first-person shooter would be interesting and entertaining, but I would have to fall short of “compelling” when you have to spend that much time, er, shooting.

This person wasn’t being an unreasonable jerk, or advocating the censorship of games. Shooting lots of insane people in a dark, weird place probably just isn’t their idea of a good time.

The common response to this from developers has been things like, “We just need to hire better writers”, “We need better technology”, “We need better artists”, “We need to spend more time planning out our stories”. However, we’ve been doing this for more than 10 years. Whereas if you look at the points where this medium has made the most progress, whenever the expressive capabilities of games have expanded significantly, it’s actually been because new mechanics, or significant developments upon existing ones [3], have emerged that enable new aesthetics. Those other things are quite important, but we seem to have them covered.

One problem is that, deep down, many designers view game mechanics more as structure (or “form”, if you prefer) than as content, when in fact they are both. If you treat them exclusively as structure when designing, you get all manner of unintended message and context… in a nutshell, ludonarrative dissonance. Which in 2009 means mashing the circle button to overcome an emotional inner conflict. Another designer’s analysis accepts this completely at face value, which if anything demonstrates that this issue transcends our usual valuations of craft and art. It’s almost invisible to us, but quite apparent to outsiders.

So as developers, we need to deal more honestly with the disparity between our reach and our grasp – which is to say, what we tell ourselves our games are about, versus what they are actually about. History will see this decade as the period when games struggled with their destiny in this way.

I’m optimistic though, both because of the progress we’ve made in the first three decades or so of our medium, and because the solutions are right under our noses, deep in the fabric of all games. We must search out, and in some cases rediscover, core mechanics that engender new types of experiences – rediscover, because many have already been done at the fringes, promising yet underexplored. Here are some examples I find especially interesting:

AI Companionship: Holding hands in Ico

You reach out to a non-player character and become connected to them. Suddenly you’re no longer a lone entity; you must account and take responsibility for an Other. Sometimes they’re a hindrance, sometimes a help. Whether or not you buy into the designers’ attempts to make you sympathize, you have a real connection to something that’s reinforced by strong kinesthetics. In Ico, there was plenty of platformy adventuring to go along with this, but it seems inevitable that someday a game will make this its primary emphasis.

Victory via Self-Enrichment: Culture in Civilization

Sometimes you can triumph over an adversary simply by being better than them. Rivals come to view your achievements as an example to be followed. Each accomplishment that enriches you internally affords you expansion and encroachment via indirect force. Tend to your own garden and you will become powerful and influential without firing a shot.

Social Reasoning: Diplomacy

The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Many wargames have a diplomacy component, which gets especially interesting when other humans are in the mix. However in a game where direct force isn’t possible, social standing would be its own capital. This is a large part of why character-driven TV shows are popular; humans enjoy exploring the workings and permutation spaces of social networks.

Hopefully this gives an idea of the breadth of directions available to us as designers. It’s equally fruitful to look to the past, at how certain ideas bubbled up from nowhere to expand the expressive range of games.

Circa 1997, before Thief and Metal Gear Solid, Stealth was one of those underexplored mechanics. Suddenly, as it caught on, there were new play sensations we’d never had before – being some combination of sneaky, clever, afraid, transgressive. It transformed players’ perspectives on familiar game environments. It even brought some new people into the medium.

These are basic changes that everyone feels deeply, from a jaded critic to someone completely new to games. They are interactively “true” in ways that a change in setting can only rarely be, no matter how beautifully realized.

As a medium, we’ve proven we can seek out novel settings, themes, art styles, characters and tropes. We have other media to learn from, after all. New mechanics, however, are uniquely difficult. The only inspiration we can find for them is human experience itself, and then comes the struggle of synthesizing, systematizing and iterating. This is the central challenge of working in this medium, and it’s never been more important that we embrace it.

[1] While some of this could be explained as the disparity between what game publishers want and what developers want, that might be giving too little credit to the former and too much to the latter. If there were more proven game mechanics and styles that enabled new experiences, publishers would probably sell them. Past a certain point, the burden of proof is on us.

[2] I want to make it clear that I’m not disparaging GoW:CoO, or speaking in any sense other than constructive criticism. I haven’t played it; in all likelihood it’s a great action game. I’m simply holding it up as an unwitting example of a much more existential crisis in game design today, much as other designers have held up stuff I’ve worked on in a similar light.

[3] Movement is something that gets re-discovered every so often; Mirror’s Edge being the recent example. Flaws in execution aside, players recognized there was something unique there.

Hi there. I’m sorry it took this long to construct an answer to your question and I hope you find this useful. It’s been interesting to write this – I find myself digging deep and thinking about what I would have told myself 10-15 years ago.

I think most of it comes down to these three things:

Know what you love

This sounds simple, but making something you actually want to play makes it much easier to get over the hump of getting started. Figure out what kind of games you’re most interested in and make something for that style of game. A few examples of games with publicly released editing tools – I’ll gladly name more if this doesn’t cover it for you:

Single player FPS – Make a Half-Life 2 or Doom 3 map that uses architecture, AIs and scripted sequences in interesting ways.

Multiplayer FPS – Make a map for Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead or Unreal Tournament 2004. Playtest it online with people and refine until it’s fun.

RPG – Make a quest or dungeon for Fallout 3 or Oblivion.

Understand the medium

Learn to deconstruct games. Think about game mechanics as separate from their presentation – eg “movement, shooting and resource management” versus “you are a space marine” – but also understand that the latter influences the former and that ultimately they are inextricable. Think about how the designers might have gone about developing those “core rules” and how the presentation shapes them.

Think about core rules as separate from level design – eg Halo’s weapons, monsters and shield recharge system, versus its levels which combine those in the right proportions to create interesting experiences – but again, understand how they’re woven together into a whole.

Understand how game mechanics and narrative can both complement and conflict with one another, and think about how to embrace that. Pro game designers are still very much struggling with this today.

Get technical. Game programming isn’t the same thing as game design, but all game systems ultimately break down into some kind of logic and math, and it helps immeasurably to know about those underpinnings.

Make something

This is the most important thing, far more so than the previous two. The only way to get skill in the first place is to start doing it, and the only way to hone that skill is to use it. Make a lot of levels and eventually you’ll surprise yourself.

Most editors have a simple “test level” exercise that will get you up and running with a basic series of rooms. Once you’ve got that down, think of something relatively small and doable, and try to make it. Scale down as needed – almost everyone picks an overambitious concept at the outset.

Don’t get too hung up on documentation. It’s good to have a plan up front, but most of the real problem-solving comes through iterating – playing your own stuff, making changes based on what you’re unhappy with, rinse lather repeat. Even better, get other people to play your stuff, and take careful notes – you’ll be amazed at what you were assuming was self-evident, too easy or unbreakable.

Work at it. It’s like learning to play an instrument; be prepared to claw your way up a steep cliff of failure before you get anything you’re remotely proud of. Don’t be afraid to throw away failed experiments. You never stop learning if you’re doing it right.

Other stuff

Cast a broad cultural net. Read a range of books, watch obscure films, expose yourself to weird art. Do everything you can to grow out of that game developer rut where the same three or four movies (Star Wars, Aliens, Blade Runner, etc) are all you ever draw inspiration from.

The other part of “knowing what you love” is being genuinely critical of games. Know what you don’t like as well and be able to articulate why. Develop a taste that’s unique compared to other gamers.

There’s no substitute for learning via making things, but some theory helps too for balance – there are only a few things written on game design that I would consider useful to someone just starting out. One of them is the “Mechanics / Dynamics / Aesthetics” framework, which you can read about on Marc LeBlanc’s site. Some of what I’ve been saying here, about how all parts of a game’s design are connected, goes back to that.

As far as formal education goes I’m from the era when there were no, or very few, schools teaching game or level design specifically, so I can’t comment directly on which schools if any are decent. I went to an art school, learned a lot of valuable things that were completely unrelated to game design, started making levels in my spare time and eventually got my first industry job right at the end of my senior year.

Other people start off in computer science, learn to program well and come into design that way. Still others come up from QA (Quality Assurance) testing, and succeed via their hands-on experience with what makes games compelling.

Lastly, I’ve touched mainly on level design here. If you’re more interested in general game design – the “core rules” kind of thing I mentioned – I might recommend a different path to building your skills. I’d be happy to go into that side of things if you’d like.

I hope that all this will prove useful to you. Best of luck!

http://www.idlethumbs.net/

Lots of boisterous nerdiness and interrupting of each other to talk about progressively more obscure old game music. If I meet any of you in real life, I promise not to interrupt you in the middle of a sentence. If I do, I am the ultimate jerk of the planet.

Maybe another new post coming soon.

Anyways, small is beautiful because lately it’s all I have time for. I’ve set up a project at Google Code to house some of the little prototypes I’ve been messing with during the past month… simple, 2D things where I get to dig around for interesting mechanics. It’s very gratifying to be able to get something new and potentially cool on-screen after only a few hours of work, and I recommend it. I’ll put up builds for download here for anything that pans out.

My current projects use PyGame, which integrates the Python language with SDL for graphics, sound and input – quite capable for this sort of work. There’s also LÖVE which does a similar thing with LUA, and of course the cool kids seem to be using GameMaker these days. Flash is as vibrant and viable as ever, and XNA seems to be getting good if you don’t mind being locked into certain platforms.

Hope everyone’s had a good 2008, and congrats to all the IGF finalists!

Sadly, the day job is now ramping up such that I can’t really justify spending any more time on Purity until the big project ships, sometime next year. As it was, Purity limped in over the deadline at about an alpha level of completeness and polish. I’m proud that I was able to do that in the time I could spare, but it’s really more of a gesture at what I’d like the game to grow into than anything.

All the same, I’d love to hear what people think of the game in its current state.

A brief teaser for the game I’m working on has found its way out into the world. Tantalizing. What could it mean? Wait and see!

Recently I was a guest on the weekly GameSpot podcast. I can’t remember saying anything particularly insightful, but if you like hearing me say “you know” a lot, this is right up your alley.

Oh, and thanks to Mr. Nowak for the recent mention!