Could you recommend a game that you feel as the right balance of physics, so that I may get an idea of what you like?

I don't play a lot of platformers, so I'm a bad person to ask for specific examples.  I felt that Braid handled pretty well.  I think that it's the amount of time that the character spends in the air and how far he jumps that makes it feel floaty.

Maybe someone who's developed a platformer can comment in a more informed fashion.  I've never tried to tune gravity and friction in one.

Yes, I didn't mention that, since you said not to focus on the art.  I feel that if it's brushed up a bit it could be an interesting art style.

[P.S.]

Hi monoRAIL,

It's pretty hard to comment on the game itself, since it's a pretty standard hand-eye coordination game.  Given that this is the case, I'll talk about the role that games can potentially play in political discourse.

Games have been used as a medium for political messages for quite a while now.  Ian Bogost has a good overview and discussion about this in his book "Persuasive Games" (ISBN 0-262-02614-7).  The conventional approach is to take an existing game (like space invaders) and to re-skin it to fit the political agenda of its maker.  This is the approach that's taken by your work.

Unfortunately, I feel that this approach does a disservice to the medium.  The strength of interactive media is that they involve the user and allow the audience to learn through direct experience of whatever the author is presenting.  By putting forth the censorship debate as a skill and action game, you fail to explore the nuances of the issues that are involved.

Why has the Australian government taken this stance?  What are the possible outcomes of their actions?  How can the citizens of Australia oppose it?  None of these questions are addressed by your work.  An alternate approach, for example, is to place the player in charge of the censorship office and to examine the implications of their actions, in a Sim City fashion.  One possible outcome of universal censorship is a chilling effect in Australian media.  Why not explore the consequences of censorship more deeply?

In any case, you didn't set out to make a government simulator, so let's look at the work at hand.  What does it accomplish?

• It paints the efforts of the govenment in a satirical and mocking fashion.
• It communicates a few tidbits of information to the audience via the end screen.
• It conveys the impossibility of censoring everything - some things inevitably get past the filter.  In other words, censoring art is like juggling multiple balls at once.

I feel that number 3 is a good use of the medium, because it communicates the message through the metaphor of rules.  Other elements in this work could have been done through a non-interactive medium, like a cartoon.  I doubt that it will convince anyone who's undecided about the issue, so at best it's a way to gather publicity.  It's not any worse than other political games out there, but it falls short of the great potential that interactive works have in influencing the political discourse.  If you're interested in a more in-depth analysis, I suggest that you read Persuasive Games.

P.S. I just noticed that the animals on the coat of arms are blindfolded.  Clever.

[Edit:]

Hi Droqen,

I tried playing the game, but found it too hard.  Pehaps a greater being with a larger brain can imagine how the blocks stack up once they hit the bottom, but I just couldn't visualize it.

Edit: Stealth edit, becuase I can't distinguish between g and q

Hi medi!  

Firstly, you should introduce yourself in this thread.

You should also post a screenshot and short description of your game, so that people know what it's about.  It's hard to get people interested without pictures.

Now to the game itself, I tried to run it, but it crashed.  After some tinkering, I installed XNA Redistributable and it ran fine.  It would be nice to have it exit gracefully instead of crashing.

The game involves trying to draw line shapes inside a physics game.  You click on a particular part of an object in the game, and it traces a path as it moves.  The goal is to match the path trace with the one requested by the game.

• First of all, good job on coming up with an interesting idea.  I think that you could use it as a foundation for a compelling puzzle game.
• The art style is minimalistic and effective.  I thought that it fit the game well, though you might want to consider colour choice.  Right now it appears somewhat random.
• You should tell the player that SPACE restarts the current level.  It's boring to wait for the current level to complete each time you want to see what happens.
• I had trouble getting some of the paths recognized by the game.  Sometimes my path was close, but not quite the same.  It was tedious to hunt around for the right spot to click after I essentially solved the puzzle.
• I thought that the game was too easy.  A good puzzle looks hard, but gives the player an "aha!" feeling when they see the solution.  In this game, I felt like I was just hunting for the right spot to click.  The challenge was observation more than thinking.
• I think the biggest issue with the game is that it's not really interactive.  The player has one choice that they make: where they click.  The rest of the game is watching the consequences of that choice.  This doesn't really use the capabilities of the medium - you should give the player something to do while the physics is happening or tighten the interaction loop somehow.  For one thing, you could give the player the ability to affect the physics simulation.  That would definitely spice things up.

You didn't say what you were trying to accomplish with this game, design wise (presumably, you were just learning game maker).  Without knowing what you were trying to accomplish, it's hard to critique effectively.  I'm just going to mention a couple of things that stood out for me.

• I wasn't sure what the deal was with the birds in the start.  I tried shooting them, but that just caused more and more of them to appear.  They also seemed to disappear at random moments.
• In platformers, how your character handles is pretty important.  I thought that the jumping was a bit too floaty for my liking.
• Connected to the above, world physics only has a rough correspondence to the graphics.  For example, you can't see the floor at all, just the painted backgrounds.  This caused frustrating moments like being killed by one of the spike things when I was barely touching it.
• Without a health indicator, I wan't sure what things presented a lethal danger and which ones just hurt me a bit.  It seemed that I could take acouple of shots from the bat creatures, but then other things seemed to instakill me.
• I guess the biggest issue is that the game seems to lack a coherent design behind it.  I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do or why.

$100 isn't too expensive at all.  Think about how long a competent composer would spend on one track and how much he'd be getting per hour.  Magnatune charges a couple of thousands for a non-excusive track license.  That seems kind of crazy to me, but that seems to be the market rate.

Someone should make a game called TIGfortress using these.

I get a 404 error for Song 2.  Did you post the link correctly?

That's quite good.  For some reason I'm thinking "Star Control".

Yup, those are really good.  I especially like the hulking dude with the eyes.

This is a pretty awesome idea for a compo.  I'm a bit busy polishing off my latest game right now, but maybe I can get it done it time to participate.

Either way, I'm looking forward to what people come up with.

Edit:  Derek, I have 4 suggestions for the rules:

1.  If you contribute to Part 1, you're not allowed to use your own work in Part 2.  That would defeat the spirit of the competition.

2.  Excessive use of procedural art in Part 2 is discouraged.  I guess particle systems and stuff would be ok, but you can build a whole game with randomly generated art if you wanted and we already had a procedural compo.

3. I presume that we can't start work on Part 2 until it's greenlit?  Can I prototype design ideas?

4. Converting between formats should be allowed, I think, as long as the core work remains unchanged.

Dwarf Fortress is the best story generator ever made. Sure it doesn't print it out in pretty words, that is still up to the player but the stories are interesting and completely different each time you play.

I agree that some interesting stories have resulted from DF, but are they the creation of the player or the game?  Perhaps DF provides a rich space in which the players can make stories, but that's not identical to Crawford's ideas.

One difference, for example, is that if the player is the primary creative force behind the stories, it's hard to communicate meaning through the game.  Just like a child playing with a set of toy blocks, the blocks may be fantastic tools for fostering imagination, but they do not carry an artistic payload in of themselves.

Also it lacked mention of Dwarf Fortress as the only example that does Interactive Fiction right.

What do you mean by this?  Dwarf Fortress is a cross between the Sims and Dungeon Keeper.  It doesn't really get into IF (not that it's a bad thing; not everything can be IF).

Very interesting documentary.  Makes me want to drop the iPhone nonsense that I'm working on and do something amazing.

And thats just one template. I guess this also makes it more obvious, why previously i portrayed the availablity of a searchable database as so important.

That's very similar to a random recursive templated insult system that I was thinking about recently.  You'd have all these different templates for NPCs taunting you; they would mention various attributes and history bits about you to add colour.

Other than solving the natural language problem and making NPCs understand grammar, I feel that the above approach is a decent first step towards natural expression by actors.  Others like Crawford have proposed exposing the underlying data structures and showing them to the player instead of natural language (Deikto in Storytron).  I remain skeptical of that approach, however.  It might be a necesary sacrifice to roll out a first prototype, but it destroys immersion.

In addition, that's only one piece of the puzzle, and probably the easier one.  We need the listening and thinking parts too.

A finely-tuned action game is like a dance; it has rhythm and motion. Personally, my games always start with a vague notion of flow and movement; a balance of forces. That is the heart of my intent and my expression. Games will not be fully accepted as an art form until people are able to appreciate the aesthetic beauty of their essentially abstract mechanics. Music is abstract. Dance is abstract. Painting and sculpture are sometimes abstract. And so it is with games. Who cares if Roger Ebert can't see it?

Isn't it odd that we've started chomping on the abstract slice of the artistic pie first?  If this was painting, nobody would be able to paint a portrait and we'd be all arguing about the emotional content of red squares versus blue circles.  I think it's great that Rohrer and Humble are exploring that side of the spectrum, but it's pretty damn weird that we're stuck in the abstract corner.

This is not a voluntary choice on our part, but is due to our inablility to illustrate meaningful situations in a straightforward, representational manner.  We need games where the verbs are social and personal instead of spacial.  Once we have mastered that corner of design space, we can be comfortable in exploring the abstract side.  Otherwise, we're just hiding from the hard problems.

By the way, I think that this article by Jason Rohrer has relevance.  It's almost a year old, so you might have seen it already.  If not, you should check it out.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_155/4987-The-Game-Design-of-Art

On interaction damaging storytelling, I don't think so. Any good narration that's important in a game is merged with the gameplay.

The big problem is that we have developed narration and gameplay to different levels.  We've had thousands of years to develop our narrative skill.  We've only had 30 years or so to develop procedural expression.

The topics that we can express best procedurally are resource management and power projection through space.  These are the subjects that we've spent the most energy on.  So, if you have a narrative about the pain of losing a loved one and the gameplay is about shooting monsters in corridors, is it any surprise that the result is schizophrenic?

If you want to have the two merge together, we need to be able to talk about meaningful topics procedurally.

Let me explain this with my favorite target (as in "i like to bash them for the problem, because it is so ridicously trivial in their case") - quests in roguelikes. A roguelike has all its items and npcs nicely tagged and classified in all kinds of ways, and it has sophisticated means to generate those. Correct me if i'm wrong, but to me this practically means that the developer - practically (not necessarily technically) - has a SEARCHABLE DATABASE of modular game content right there in front of him. Often, even all important entities in the gameworld are accessible regardless of the player location. The developer also already knows how to create meaningful items and npcs via placeholder variables. The way how this works, is that a content-entity template has no static definition. Rather, parts of it consist of variables which define *selective randomization*. It works like a fill-in-the-blanks puzzle.

Do you mean something like the following?

Let's say we have five types of creatures in the game, 4 roles and 3 types of objects:

Creatures: Human, yeti, orc, elf and demon
Roles: Pirate, king, warrior and mage
Objects: Sword, ring and chest

Then, if you wanted to generate a quest, you'd do something like this:

Hi wanderer.  A terrible thing happened recently!  A <role> of the <race> has recently stolen our only magic <object>.  If you return it to us, we will be very grateful.

Maybe once you did the quest, the questgiver would like you more and give you different quests.  The guys that you killed would like you less.

Do I have the right idea, or were you thinking about something else?