This game is a relatively older one, as far as I can tell it came out back in April. Created by Daneil Benmergui with music by Hernan Rozenwasser, Today I Die is another art game. Again, not a bad thing, as the feelings the game tries to evoke in the player is part of the enjoyment.

Today I Die defies normal video game genres and conventions. If I had to liken it to something I;d call it a descendant of point and click adventure games. Your mouse pointer is your only means of interaction. You are given no instructions beyond “Click Here to Start.” The only words are the shot three line poem that takes up part of the screen. It’s a puzzle game that embraces its simplicity, in both mechanics and art design.

Design wise it runs with the idea of giving you no instructions and instead allows you to explore and with a few simple aesthetic choices is able to guide you to what you are suppose to do. It’s not long and can be finished in under five minutes, but that would be missing the point. It’s a game not so much about beating it as experiencing it.

After playing it, you can follow the link to where you can download it for free or donate some money. You need Flash and can play it in your broswer here: http://www.ludomancy.com/games/today.php

Small Worlds is an indie entrant into the Causal Gameplay design 6th challenge, going on right now. The competition’s deadline was October 18th and it has been up since then. The compition’s  parameters are as follows:

Design a game that incorporates our theme (see below). It doesn’t have to be complex nor large in scope. Since you will have just 6 weeks to complete your design, simple ideas are probably the best way to go. You may use any browser-based technology platformyou are comfortable with (Flash, Unity, Shockwave, Javascript, etc.). If we can embed your finished game file on our competition page, you may use that platform to design and develop your game.

For the 6th Casual Gameplay Design Competition, we are asking for entries designed to incorporate this theme: EXPLORE. You are free to interpret that any way you choose; however, the extent to which your game embodies the theme is left up to the competition judges to decide. Use your imagination and be creative. We will select the best entries submitted to represent the competition just like we have done before. Impress us with your game design and production skills.

With that in mind David Shute created a game that emphasises the theme perfectly and with an increabaly atmophereic resonance. Small Worlds is a platformer that utilizes very old school pixel art design that creates a canvus almost as much as it creates a level. The game did have some issues with the jump button that that the creator did apologize for, saying:

“I’m really sorry the jumping control is so screwy – In an ill-fated attempt to streamline the movement code, I changed the order in which key presses are processed, which had an unintended side effect: ‘Jump’ gets ignored if you’re moving sideways off a ledge or walking down a slope.

I’d really love to be able to upload the fixed version right now, but a deadline’s a deadline – and for better or worse, this is the version I submitted.

As soon as the competition’s over I’ll send Jay the improved version though – It’ll give me a chance to fix some other (minor, cosmetic) problems that slipped through the net too.”

He and all the other contestants were allowed to upload updated versions. Another note, Small Worlds proudly wears the Art Game label, whether or not it was intentional. I don’t wish to spoil anything, but it is an expirience well worth having. The game is work safe. Try and play it in an eviornment where you wont be bothered. The music, by Kevin MacLeod is that good.

I am amazed that Small Worlds took only 6 weeks to make, not because it is brimming with compexity in its code or visual, but rather its concept. The design is subtle and intricate that it is able to draw you in with a few colored blocks and slowly reveal itself . It is so basic and succedes at being art better than most AAA PC and console titles published today. Don’t take that as a negative, art is not the direct opposite of fun or engaging; the two words have nothing to do with each other. The best works are those that are engaging and consumable as well as deep and meaningful. This is one of those games.

David Shute’s Small Worlds

Rather than repost all the thoughts here I’d rather just link you.

http://wordsonplay.wordpress.com/2009/10/12/the-big-triangle/

In the wake of The Beatles: Rock Band coming out a few weeks ago, No Fun Games Studio created a very different sort of rhythm game. Norwegian Wood, named after the early Beatles song of the same name, it is less a game about following the music of a game, but avoiding it.

It is a simple game, with only one song, which due to licencing regulations you have to supply the mp3 for yourself. You don’t need the music and can play it in silence, but it is a bit dull to do so. There are four instruments in the corner of the screen that when that instrument is played it launches a spray of notes for each time a string is plucked. You play as the disembodied head of the late John Lennon controlled with the arrow keys as you try to avoid all the flying notes. You rack up points for not getting hit and after some time you gain multipliers. Should you be hit you lose the multipliers and 100 points per hit. There is an online scoreboard and frankly I don’t know how some of these people got such scores.

It’s simple, it’s fun and each try wont take any longer than the song that inspired it. Quick warning, it is incredibly addictive. My top 30 score has since been erased from the leaderboards. Give it a go.

You can download the game and check the high scores here: http://norwegianwood.gangles.ca/

They aren’t as in depth as say Valve’s Source Engine or the ability to create levels like Little Big Planet, but Uncharted 2: Among Thieves offers a set of Machinima tools in a “Cinema Mode.” You can take recorded video footage from matches and change camera angles or alter things and upload the edited recording. But probably most impressive is a green screen mode that allows you to take the characters from the game and put them into any setting the game can offer and move them around as you will. It even allow you to use the blue-tooth headset to record dialogue that the game with lip-sync the character’s lips too.

I’m not sure how indepth the movie creation aspect of the game will be or if it will allow you to drop in you’re own features, but as a basic concept it is an interesting new look into the possibilities of user generated content.

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves comes out October 13th for PS3 at $59.99.

This is a five minute video demo, no sound, of a new set of algorithms by Marco Corbetta and Miragoli Gianluca that creates buildings with complete destructible interiors. The video itself also has word overs explaining details of the system.

Following the link are two other quick demo videos showing the behind the scenes architecture of the program. With game systems and PC’s pushing the limits of what the next technically impressive thing, here are two people who do something much more impressive and remove another stopgap to the uncanny valley of game worlds using less than state of the art tech. That deserves a look, no?

Link: http://createdigitalmotion.com/2009/06/18/ever-woke-up-in-a-procedurally-generated-city/

I quickly explained the controls, all two of them, started him on the opening level and then watched him play. It took a little while, but he was enjoying flying all over the place.

While the overall experience was pleasant for him, if I wasn’t there to nudge him in the right direction when asked he might not have gotten as much out of the experience as a normal gamer would have. For starters the game doesn’t explain the controls explicitly. If you are paying attention throughout the start up screens and the room you might figure out that it works by tilting the controller. Then you’d only have the problem of pushing a button to move forward. But on your own you would have had this problem in trying to understand what the buttons do.Through experimentation you’d learn that X would send you forward, but it might cause problems if the player didn’t realize that all the buttons do the same thing as they try to figure out any differences.

At one point my dad asked me, “what am I supposed to do now?” This was before he hit his first flower. As an environment he thought it was pretty, but it needed a purpose and that purpose wasn’t obvious. Once he got the hang of it he began looking for the halos that surrounded the colored flowers, but to find them he often went to get an areal view, because he couldn’t find his way or where the next one was. Many of the visual clues that gamer’s take for granted escaped him. In the first level he didn’t connect yellow grass with where the flowers would be based on the earlier experience at the beginning of the level. he often ignored the few seconds where the game took the camera away from him and kept trying to play. This was a problem, because he then found he didn’t know where to go next.

The problem may come from the total immersion style that Flower goes for. Most games have a definitive break between gameplay and cutscenes or in game indications to signify them as such. Flower just moves the camera. There is no switch in the engine or even a cut in camera angles to signify a change. The simple shift in the camera in the same manner that the petals flow doesn’t signify stop laying and pay attention to this. A person who plays games even only occasionally would be able to pick up on this, but a non-gamer might not be able to understand some of the language games have crafted for themselves. Flower is using the basic language of games, but is doing it far more subtly than nearly ever other game out there. The break between the parts are nearly unnoticeable.

Finally there is the last section to the design.  The end of the level. To end the level you simply enter the swirling vortex at the end. This wasn’t understood at first by my dad. At first he took no notice of it and was looking for more flowers despite having bloomed them all. He then saw it, but just saw the swirls as wind and nothing special. I eventually gave up hoping he would figure it out and just told him.

The design choices for Flower seem a bit divided. On the one hand they are creating an environment to be experienced, but also they are creating a symbolic narrative. The first requires a quick rundown of the controls and what some basic interactions, but the latter needs a non-intrusive interface. The designers did a good job in trying to meld the two together, but I think that it only ended up  going against one of the things they were shooting for. The choice to rely on game language to convey the game requires the player to be a gamer or at least subconsciously aware of it. However, this is not the case with non-gamers that Flower is trying to be open towards.

That was a look at the design of the game, now you can follow the link to the game’s aesthetic effect on the experience.

http://www.thegamecritique.com/recent-posts/flower-a-dads-expirience-aesthetic/205/

Either way its a good read over at gamasutra. Read it here.

Putting the Game Before the Book What would your favorite piece of literature look like if it had been created as a game first? In a time when bits of Dante’s Divine Comedy are being carved out and turned into a hack-n-slash game, I find myself longing for intelligently designed games–games with a strong literary component–not merely literary backdrops. So rather than challenge you to imagine the conversion of your favorite literature into games, I challenge you to supersede the source literature and imagine a game that might have tried to communicate the same themes, the same message, to its audience.

Feel free to ignore the technical constraints of the era in which the book was written. In fact, feel free to ignore the technical constraints (within reason) of today and push the envelop a bit. Also notice that I didn’t specify video game. Feel free to imagine a board game, card game, RPG, or sport, that could have been created during the same time period as the book in question. Be as vague, or as detailed, about the design particulars as you like. Work together with another blogger, or work alone.

I look forward to seeing what you come up with!

Well many blogs contributed their design concepts, including yours truly. It was an interesting game design challenge and will be further continued in February:

Turning Over a New Leaf: (We’re trying something new with the topic this month, so please read carefully.) February’s BoRT invites you take a game design suggested by another blogger in last month’s Round Table and build upon it. You should ignore the literary source of the original design, but attempt to communicate the same themes and/or convey the same mood as the proposed game. This means you can alter the game genre, change the setting, and add new layers to the game mechanics. This is not an opportunity to critique a previous design, but to honor it by striving to reach the same goals, while adding your own personal touch.

After the January challenge concluded at the end of the month, Corvus held the first ever Round Table podcast. He drafted in three guests to talk about their favorite entry and why it was their favorite. They also get into some of the design aspects of the ideas. It’s a good listen and only around 30 minutes long.

You can listen/download here:

http://blog.pjsattic.com/corvus/2009/02/bortcast-january-2009/

Uncharted is a year old, but I recently got my platinum trophy and I feel that enough time has passed that I can take an unhindered look at the game.

First the basics, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune is about Nathan Drake, a supposed descendant of Sir Francis Drake in the search of a lost Spanish treasure they later find out is El Dorado. He has an elder partner Sullivan and female journalist/documentarian, Elena, following him around/chasing him with a camera. Unfortunately Sully couldn’t keep his mouth shut and told Gabriel Roman, a man who he owed money to and who put a contract out on his life. He brought along a bunch of pirates and mercenaries to help in getting the treasure. This leads everyone to an uncharted island in the middle of the Pacific, thanks to a WWII Nazi map. Just run with it, it makes less sense explaining it than it does in game. I wont bother with a full plot summery, because one, that would be boring and two, I’m expecting that you have already played the game or have read it elsewhere.

If you read other articles of mine you may have noticed me gushing over this game a little. It is a phenomenal, well executed, tightly designed game. I mentioned it before in relation to how it merges story elements with its gameplay ones. Because of this, to look at Uncharted one has to look at the term cinematic gaming. Uncharted is the very definition of well-executed cinematic gaming.

I would rate the architecture of the game was one of the best I’ve seen in the last few generations let alone years. I played through the game numerous times and never once hit a glitch. The loading screen that happens during gameplay where I am warned not to turn off my machine during appears only once: at the beginning of the game. It is seamless throughout. I checked the game data next; this is where the disc downloads data from the disc to facilitate load times. The other great games of the PS3 have any where to half a gig of data to MGS4 incredible 4.5 gigs of downloaded data, which gets replaced after ever chapter. Uncharted has none. Everything runs off the disc. The 13megs are for when it was updated with trophy support.

On the gameplay aspects, everything within the game has been refined to a mirror shine and I don’t just mean the graphics. Few games respond like Uncharted do. The cover system works as well as it possible can and the shooting has certain nuances that I didn’t know about or take advantage of until I played through on high difficulties. The collision detection is far better than I’ve ever seen. Objects are recognized perfectly and there is no clipping between the models. Finally the platforming has been called reminiscent of Tomb Raider, but it flows much better so I would liken it more to Prince of Persia, minus the ability to wall run.

Graphically it is one of the best looking games in the present generation. The environments are vibrant and realistic and a wonderful change from the browns and grays of modern gaming. The animations are top notch as the development team put extra effort into facial animations and character movements. What’s even more amazing is the detail that goes into differentiating the enemy characters. Each one is different. Roman is sophisticated and calculated in his movements. Navarro is very hard and deliberated. Eddie Raja is like a man unhinged, flailing wildly all over the place. The mercenaries are very professional in the firefights and are tougher opponents because of it. The pirate characters on the other hand are more ambitious in their attacks. They take more risks than the mercenaries. One of the animations has the character jump out fast and fire wildly around. This makes them an easy target, but infuses a lot of personality into them. Another type of pirate will advance steadily and take hit time with his shots with a very powerful gun.

The heroes also have their own animations that personify them beyond just polygonal avatars. For instance, Drake is not a superhuman, he is a real person, a highly skilled person, being an adventurer, but among us mere mortals and his animations display this in the subtle small movements. Up until chapter 4 I was convinced Nathan was just another video game character Mary-Sue persona that can get up from just about anything (until the player takes control of course). Then the intro cutscene to chapter 4 has Nathan acting all heroic, making Elena get out first and he tried to take control of the plane, for like 2 seconds, after which he exclaims, “What am I doing?” and then proceeds to leap out of the plane, count at a rapid pace, of which I am almost positive he skips a number and pulls the cord a little too late and get caught on a statue. This reminds me of the good Indiana Jones movies where he would survive by the skin of his teeth. In the platforming sections where the grips Nathan is holding on are crumbling, you’ll hear him pleading “oh, no, no, no.” Which brings me to my next item, the voice acting.

The voice acting is top notch. In the first chapter, when the pirates are seen in the distance, Drake gives Elena a gun and asks her if she know how to use one. She nervously replies, “Yeah, sure. Just like a camera. You point and shoot.” The delivery is perfect with a nervous waver in her inflection. We know that this person can use a gun, but is rather nervous, if not frightened for what is about to happen. Sullivan gets his own little moment that separates him from being just another stock character. After the first firefight is over and the boat blows up, Sullivan is introduced and helps the Elena in and complete ignores Drake’s hand. It happens with such a sense of panache that it presents Sullivan’s character perfectly and the game continues with it every time he shows up.

The story is told though a variety of ways. Cutscenes are the most obvious means, but the game also uses in-game conversations, environmental and quick button clues that shift the camera to look at certain points. Even the animations in the gameplay are telling about the characters. And none of these elements are really intrusive on the experience. The cutscenes are short. The longest one couldn’t have been more than a minute or two long. The conversations take place during lulls in the fighting or other action-oriented sequences, like travel time or puzzle elements of the game so you aren’t distracted. There are a few points when the game will flash the R2 button in the corner. If you hit it Drake will look to the point of interest, but it isn’t necessary to push it, but if you do, it adds to the experience. The time that sticks out the most was during the complex hiding the treasure. In the second section, before opening the gate the R2 icon will appear. If hit, it will make Drake look into the corner and see a figure scamper away on a different stairway in the distance. This is foreshadowing to a future plot development. After you hear Drake comment, “What was that?” you move on. It isn’t necessary, but is fun and remakes a useful literary device into the language of video games.

I’ve heard the allegation that the story is cliché and that its filled with stock characters and a lot of the story falls flat. I don’t think that’s true. Does the story have elements from over half a dozen different movies and adventure serials? Can the characters be boiled down into archetypes? Yes on both counts, there is no way to deny it, but there are enough nuances in the story and the characters that it doesn’t matter. The characters feel alive and the story compels you to want to continue with the adventure, not just for the gold. There is a good section of the game where they give up on that in favor of getting out alive, until they realize all the boats are with the bad guys…who are looking for the gold.

Uncharted has been likened to the Indiana Jones movies, but those in turn were based off of the old adventure serials of the 1930s. The pacing of the story follows that model instead of a movie and it shows. That model is much more suited to the medium of a video game. Games that are based off of movies always seem to have the need to add levels or stretch out certain plot points just so it will be a worthwhile gameplay experience. That is all well and good from the gameplay side of things, but it suffers in the story telling department. However, serials are much more suited to this type of medium. There are set backs, new twists or rather further developments whose scope is not limited to a two-hour time frame.

The game is tight in every sense of the word. Not once did the game hiccup on a glitch or bug. The story elements all mesh together. You may think I will put far too much thought into the game in the next segment, that I am reading too much into it, but I think of it more as a natural occurrence of great design with a compelling story all polished to a mirror shine. When a great design team brings on a writer at the start, one who has credentials on previous games something wonderful comes out of it. The following is a result from the compilation of all the quality work I detail above.

A major theme running through Uncharted is greed. I’m sure that seem pretty obvious given that the characters are searching for El Dorado and I was willing to leave it at that, until I thought about it a little further. The story revolves around El Dorado and everyone wants some piece of it, but each character’s motivations as to why they are after it are different.

The bad guys are almost uniformly motivated by greed. They want their stake in the treasure. Navarro is slightly more nuance in wanting the dangerous, mystical dust inside the golden statue. The good guys are also after the gold, with Elena more interested in the story of finding it than the material worth itself, but you cannot really call them greedy. They don’t throw away everything else for their avarice. In fact it’s this difference that makes them more relatable and puts you on their side despite the fact you are killing legions of human beings.

The true display of greed for the characters comes in what the characters are willing to give up and how far they are willing to go in their search of El Dorado. (I’m sure there is a Heart of Darkness reference I could make here.) Eddie Raja and his men sacrifice their lives for the gold in the face of their fears and common sense of what has been happening to them the entire time they were on the island. The one time Eddie wants to abandon the search, he is threatened to be cut out. Navarro sacrifices everything, his men, any semblance of honor, and the life of his employer; he holds the price of his ‘weapon’ above all else. Gabriel Roman is behind all the bad guys and is financing the whole thing, but he’s only going so far so that he’ll get a sizable return. Money is his only objective and foolishly sacrifices his life and literally humanity for it. The Spaniards are the ultimate representation of greed consuming them. Much like as described in Dante’s Inferno, they have succumbed to their sin and have become the embodiment of that sin. They are slavering humanoids only interested in killing and feasting on their prey. They consume others in a metaphorical fashion of how greed had consumed them. The entire island itself is a further display of the effects of greed in its almost angel of vengeance like repercussions, from the crumbling fortress, to the sunken city, to unholy cathedral.

On the other side of the fence are the three ‘heroes.’ Let’s go with protagonists. They all start out with aspirations to get the treasure before the other guy, though Elena is more interested in the search itself. They do not remain solely focused on El Dorado as other factor change their priorities. Drake wants to save his skin, valuing his own life over the gold and later the lives of Elena and Sully, once he learns he is still alive. Elena’s moment comes at the rickety bridge, when she fall through the wood and is clutching the camera with one hand and Drake with the other, in a situation more than slightly reminiscent of the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Elena makes the better choice in those two situations. Finally, Sully, like Drake, just wants to get out of this alive. The treasure becomes secondary and they are only still hinting it because their ride off the cursed island are still hunting the treasure and later is revealed that the treasure is a danger to the whole world and so they act altruistically for the last chapter and half of the game.

Maybe I did over think a game that’s aspiration was to be like the old adventure serials of the 30s and 40s and only provide a source of entertainment. Maybe I did, but what is also evident is that my analysis of the game holds up when you think about it. Was it the designer’s intent to have thematic resonance in the game? I don’t know, but I doubt that much literary thought was put into it. It just occurred naturally as the team tightened up every other aspect of the game.

If on the other hand you like this type of analysis applied to video game you can check out my new site dedicated to this sort of thing. See it at www.thegamecritique.com. I will continue to give design related analysis, for what its worth, here on Creative Fluff.