25th Hour Projects: The Game of Waltzing

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Games about movement are everywhere: most wargames, vehicle racing games, arguably even games like Pandemic. Their success makes it all the more surprising that we haven’t made more games about other kinds of movement. For example, wouldn’t a game about waltzing be neat?

Think about it. You have to act in coordination with your partner, but you’re not allowed to talk (we’re in a competition, after all!). Right there, the theme provides a strong justification for a co-op without the risk of a dominant player.

Furthermore, the actions being taken are tense moment-to-moment. Each step has to be perfect, or disaster could strike. As in Pandemic, no one can afford a wasted move.

Dance is a universal human activity, yet–like so many universal human activities–games have yet to explore it in any serious way. I hope we see that rectified soon. Maybe I’ve even got an iron in the fire along these lines . . . .

 

Design-Adjacent

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I’ve learned that part of being a professional (or at least, student approaching professional) game designer is putting the word out about your games. If no one’s aware of your game, after all, it’s probably not doing the intended work.

As a result, I’ve been following up on updating the portfolio here at Law of Game Design with building out my student page on the Game Center’s website. While that’s not nearly as fun on working on thesis prototypes, it’s a job that needs doing.

Feel free to take a look at the page–but more importantly, click around! There are a lot of amazing people making great games. Some of them are playable through the site; others are downloadable from personal webpages; some are available on digital marketplaces. See what inspires you!

Portfolio Update: Nosedive

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I’m happy to be able to add Nosedive, one of the games I contributed to here at the Game Center, to my portfolio. Nosedive is among the designs I’m proudest to have been involved with; I’ve been playing tactical maneuver games for a long time, and I feel that this is very much a worthy addition to the genre.

Promoting Pawns 3

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Some further improvements, both to playability and to the clarity of the rules. Unfortunately, the end game is still pretty grim. 😉 The lack of uncertainty in this abstract game causes players to circle around each other, waiting for a moment of unintended weakness that isn’t coming.

Promoting Pawns 5-29-16

Promoting Pawns 2

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As I work on this prototype I can hear Eric Zimmerman, one of my professors, commenting that the game feels “too tight.” That’s almost certainly the case, and I’m pretty sure that the endgame is awful. However, interesting dynamics can emerge whereby one player will back up to let the other progress, which makes this game feel less like a weird chess variant and more like some kind of honorable duel.

There’s something interesting here, if I can find it . . . .

Promoting Pawns 5-26-16

Unity: Static Batching Timing

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An interesting, undocumented aspect of static batching in Unity: static batching occurs between Awake and Start. Objects in the hierarchy at that point will batch; anything created later will not.

This is true even when loading scenes additively. If as the additional scene is loaded in Awake(), and the additional scene contains a script instantiating objects in its Awake(), those objects will undergo static batching if they’re otherwise eligible. If the scene is loaded in Start(), or the instantiation occurs after Awake(), they won’t. There are lots of weird timing issues with additive scene management, but this, at least, seems to work as expected.

I hope that this saves someone out there the hour or so it took us to figure out when we needed to be instantiating environmental objects. 😉

It Begins

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The End-of-Year Show’s closing means the opening of a new process: thesis! I’ve already started prototyping, and I expect that process to continue throughout the summer.

The latest concept–as yet nameless–is an abstract game loosely inspired by NBA Jam. Its rules fit easily on two pages, and you can play with the checkers set you probably have lying around. 😉

Promoting Pawns

End-of-Year Show Wrap-Up

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Thanks to everyone who came out to the NYU Game Center’s End-of-Year Show! I was proud to have the opportunity to show off Nosedive and Peregrine. Nosedive was very well received. Peregrine–which I like to describe as a survival game where you’re probably going to survive, or as a game that explores the space between Banished and Panoramical–has always been for a specific audience, and people looking for a meditative experience really enjoyed it.

I am now thoroughly exhausted from the big end-of-semester push (which lasted more or less the entire duration of the semester 😉 ). Fortunately, I’m definitely in the right career: I’m looking to relax by making some games!

Unity: Shaders and Static Batching

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I’ve learned a lot about static batching in Unity today–not least that it has more requirements than appear in the documentation. 😉 Does anyone out there know of good resources on how batching and shaders work (or don’t work) together? Gameobjects in a project I’m working on aren’t batching, and it’s definitely because of the shader.

And then There Were Three

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. . . Days left in the semester, that is.

As a reminder, the NYU Game Center’s End-of-Year Show is this coming Thursday. It has left me with sadly little time to contemplate design theory; I’ve had to pour all my energies into bug-fixing and polishing. Still, it’s all in a good cause, and the event will be great. Stop on by!