Tom used to be a lawyer. Now he's a game designer. The two have more in common than you think.
I was reminded today that there’s a tumblr devoted to the NYU Game Center’s End-of-Year Show, with images and brief descriptions of some of the games that will be on display. I’ll be there with the teams that created Nosedive, an artgame/wargame, and Peregrine, an artgame/survival game.
There seems to have been a theme to my semester. 😉
Feel free to stop by. Tickets are free!
With the new Marvel movie just out, this is an especially propitious time to try out Embiggen. (Bonus points to those who get the reference.)
Embiggen is a game about being a protagonist. You are a character in a story. You have to face challenges that are tough, but not crushingly so, building up until you become strong enough to overcome your antagonist. Taking on overwhelming challenges will weaken you; so too will bullying opponents who aren’t at least your equal.
In game terms, you’ll play as one of two spheres, blue or yellow. Collecting red cubes that have a trail of your color causes you to grow. If you contact a sphere that doesn’t have such a trail, you’ll shrink. The game ends whenever the players come into contact; the larger player grows based on the size of the smaller, and that larger player wins.
You can get a high score simply by collecting as many red cubes as possible. To really scale up, though, you need to make your opponent gigantic as well. Every time you collect a red cube, it starts to rotate around you; not only can you use them for defense, you can also contact your opponent with them to increase your opponent’s scale. That way they’ll be more valuable when you ultimately collect them.
Embiggen is very much a prototype, and it shows in weird behaviors. For example, it’s entirely possible to grow, suddenly be in contact with something that shrinks you, and immediately become smaller than you were at the get go! In addition, Unity is a bit touchy when it comes to controllers, and while there are some debug controls it’s not currently possible to play the game fully with them.
Nevertheless, Embiggen has led to some very interesting gameplay. I hope you’ll give it a try, and let me know what you think.
Embiggen is for Mac, and requires two PS4 controllers.
If you’re in the New York City area, drop by the NYU Game Center’s End-of-Year show!
You can grab tickets (which are free) here. Two teams I’m on will have games there; one of the games is an experiential journey that mixes Panoramical with Banished, while the other is an artistic wargame. I’m extremely proud to have been involved with both–and that’s just a fraction of what will be on display.
You’ll find a sport played on an infinite field, a competitive heist game, and a family-friendly puzzler. There’s a game that zooms in on the moment-by-moment of a MOBA teamfight, an adventure game in which you decipher mysterious glyphs, a game that shows you the world through the eyes of animals and insects . . . I could go on and on, and not do any of the projects justice. Come and see for yourself!
Sumer held a tournament this evening, which is expected to be up on Youtube shortly. I was eliminated in the semifinals, and never made it onto the stream; that’s bad for me, but it means you’ll not have to watch my “statues at all costs” gameplan. That approach can be effective but it’s not, perhaps, dynamic. 😉
At the risk of outstaying my welcome on this topic, Sumer is on Kickstarter now, and it’s great. I don’t have any financial stake in the game; I just like worker-placement games, and think Agricola-meets-Galaxy Trucker is fun. If that sounds good to you as well, I’d encourage you to give them a look.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t root for the home team by mentioning that Sumer is on Kickstarter. Sumer, which started life as a thesis project at the NYU Game Center, takes on the question of what happens when you take a worker-placement game and play it in real time on a computer. It turns out that if you put in the enormous amount of work the Sumer team has, the answer is “you get a really excellent game.”
The Kickstarter page talks about Sumer in some detail, so I’ll just say that it’s inspired by the classic M.U.L.E., has undergone intense playtesting (it’s already seen tournament play!), and is a ton of fun. Give the Kickstarter a look; this game’s worth your time.
Another one-week prototype. This one is playing around with a notion that I’m interested in pursuing further: games that encourage players to continue taking risks throughout the game, rather than seeking to exert control over the situation.
Up the Ante is for two players, and requires two PS4 controllers.
Do me a quick favor?
If you’ve got a Mac, play Ultimate Staff Warrior. You will see a certain lose screen–you’ll know it when you run into it.
Is that screen funny, or irksome? Something else entirely?
Unity’s Transform.RotateAround lays bare the complexity of having multiple axes of rotation in 3D space. In other words, it’s possible to get things to rotate in unexpected ways, and it’s not trivial to keep rotating objects under control. 😉
Ultimate Staff Warrior takes advantage of Transform.RotateAround’s oddities. Click your “body” (the large capsule) to reverse the direction in which your hands are rotating around your body; click your “hands” (the sphere holding the staff) to reverse the staff’s spin. Try to defeat the Red Block Army . . . and especially try not to whack yourself with your staff. 😉
Fire Helicopter was my first run at procedural generation. It’s a simple game: move the firefighting helicopter (represented by a block) as it tries to put out spreading fires (also represented by blocks) using water (yep, blocks). The trick is that the fire spreads quickly; if you’re not fast, your best efforts will be inadequate to contain the blazes.
Although procedural generation seems to offer lots of content without the need to hand-make everything, in practice getting it right is tremendously challenging and a burden all its own. Beyond the debugging required of any digital project lies the issue of fine-tuning the rules behind the generative process. That second step is, if anything, even more taxing; seemingly trivial misjudgments or logic errors can cause the system to run amok.
Procedural generation is not, then, a panacea. It’s an interesting topic to explore, however, and this small testbed was a nice way to ease into it before taking on more substantial games using the technique over the course of this semester.
I really enjoy games in which the player’s actions somehow evoke the in-fiction actions they’re associated with. For flight simulators and driving games, that’s easy to accomplish: just get a flight stick or a wheel, and the challenge is well on the way to being met. Genres that don’t have dedicated controllers on the market are trickier.
Missives from the Front is a quick stab at a fiction-compliant controller for the strategy genre. It simulates something of the experience of a general from the Napoleonic era: great billowing clouds of smoke obscure your vision of the battlefield, and so you are reliant on messages you receive from your subordinates to figure out what is going on. Similarly, you communicate your orders only indirectly by telling those same subordinates what to do.
The underlying simulation in Missives from the Front is a painfully simple rock-paper-scissors relationship; the opponent plays randomly, so there isn’t much in the way of strategy to be employed. Furthermore, typing into a text file doesn’t give quite the feeling of writing a letter. A better version of the game might employ some kind of OCR to read hand-drafted orders–and would be quite out of scope. 😉
For all its limits, though, I’m pleased with how Missives from the Front turned out. I feel that it did exactly what a one-week prototype ought to do: help me learn some new technical skills while also allowing me to explore a wacky concept.
Note: Since Missives from the Front requires going into the game’s file structure, I’ve uploaded it here as a ZIP file. You’ll need Unity to run it.
The Law of Game Design 