[*]

Hah, it's been an age and a half since my last post on here, but we've been slowly plodding forward!

I've just implemented the player being able to close and open the base's* entrances as they wish, which dynamically increases the difficulty of the game. While it's not yet balanced, it's pretty exciting to be able to open up all four entrances and watch it go crazy

After a certain amount of damage from the enemies the entrances "break" (and close) - if they all break, your grid powers down for a few seconds and the world goes black. Next up, figuring out how players will go about "fixing" broken entrances** and playing the game a bit with each possible entrance configuration to see how it feels!

I've also implemented an... interesting score structure. Will possibly ask for feedback on it from you guys, as there are a couple of ways to go about it. More on that soon



* That's the big white structure in the screenshot in my previous post
** Although I've already got an "autofix" for when they all break - at least one of them comes back online after your grid powers back up.

this is art i guess, but what does it mean?!
i just don't get it.

Oh, I got it!

Agh, how did I miss that

My choices! (in order)

• Dragon Age: Origins (360,PC,PS3)
• Batman: Arkham Asylum (360,PC,PS3)
• Demon's Souls (PS3)
• Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (PS3)
• Brütal Legend (360,PS3)
• Grand Theft Auto IV: Episodes from Liberty City (360)
• Resident Evil 5 (360,PC,PS3)
• Left 4 Dead 2 (360,PC)
• Street Fighter IV (360,PC,PS3)
• Trials HD (360*)
• Empire: Total War (PC)
• Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box (DS)

On my personal list (which counts games released last year but played this year), Valkyria Chronicles is at spot 3, and Spelunky at 4

I dunno if I have bad taste or something but I thought that scene was really powerful. It's also the only time in the game control is taken completely out of your hands (save for the intro and outro cutscenes).

Nope, you're right - it's awesome I think much of the criticism of that scene (and of Bioshock's general flow) were less "this game is crap" criticisms and more explorations of how that scene (and the subsequent... changes) affect the flow of the story, and whether they enhance or ultimately undermine the overarching themes of the game.

This whole discussion kind of hits home for me because the only reason I have gotten around to logging onto the internet and scouring its awful recesses is because I think that video games will make for excellent tools to communicate stories, but I just lack the coding acumen to, you know, code. 

Money, meet Mouth. Mouth, Money. I'd like you two to get acquainted.

I took the test back in high school when I wanted to be a writer and was doing a lot of writing, and got INFP. Now that I've been programming for a few years and haven't been writing as much, I'm getting INFJ

Introverted (I) 71%   Extraverted (E) 29%
Intuitive (N) 64%   Sensing (S) 36%
Feeling (F) 75%   Thinking (T) 25%
Judging (J) 64%   Perceiving (P) 36%

I've always thought that as we get older we start to focus more on judging and less on perceiving. When I was younger it was something that I wanted to avoid. Now that I am older and do judge more, I'm not so sure.

Thanks for the link Derek

[The Spine Surfs Alone]

I just got The Spine Surfs Alone... Skullivan is awesome

Zombies and aliens are too real!

Well, I guess what I'm saying is that you can follow a fairly short logical path from our real world to a situation where zombies, aliens or robots are both real and out to get us (ie. it's very likely there are aliens out there somewhere, and who knows what they would do if our paths crossed).

Whereas, if I have a baby with tanks for legs, all sense of the "what if" feel goes out of the window. There's a fine line that zombies, aliens and robots seem to straddle, but not much else - people can believe that this situation has the possibility to happen sometime in the future, and so are willing to explore their own emotions a bit more as relates to the "what if" situation that they're presented with.

If you're going for something set in the real world, you've got fairly limited options:

Enemy Soldiers
Zombies
Aliens

I completely disagree with this. This is not limiting at all.
Every single unit in the first Command & Conquer games were, basically, soldiers and their vehicles and every single thing that might kill you in Left 4 Dead are, basically, "zombies".

Yeah, but they're still "zombies" and "enemy solders" I'm not saying that you can't have a lot of variation within those archetypes (something that both those games you mentioned do well), but your example still proves my point.

Kikaru, I forgot Robots! Mutants/zombies kind of go hand in hand, and I had thought of giant animals, but it didn't seem as interesting. Unless they're giant alien animals in which case, aliens

I end up making a lot of creepy monochrome artwork because monochrome is super easy to work with, and it's creepy because shadows make things creepy. That, and maybe my mind is twisted.

Wow, that's cool

When the core mechanics "aren't fun" isn't that more to do with the skill of the designer than just having the wrong mechanics?

Nah, some combinations of mechanics cannot be polished into a fun game. A valuable skill for a designer is the ability and willingness to identify these scenarios before burning polish time on a turd. Many a bad game is the result of designers insisting that their work is flawless and the implementation is at fault.

I guess an advantage of being designer/programmer is that you're responsible for both implementation and design... however, the disadvantage is that you're that much more invested in the idea, having done double the work for it.

I think that it is possible to throw things away that might have worked with some more time... however, if you throw something that might work away and replace it with something rock solid, that doesn't really matter.

I need to learn to prototype earlier and throw more things away, I think. I've been fairly lucky so far with the stuff that I've kept, but you don't stay lucky forever

Recently, when having to think up the reason for the enemies to exist in Shadow Field, I ran into issues trying to not make them so generic that they were a reason not to play the game. Unfortunately, tower defense games (and a lot of other types of games) often require an intercourse-ton of enemies by design, and thinking of a believable (within the player's suspension-of-disbelief) yet still interesting and unique thing that the enemies can be is pretty hard to do.

If you're going for something set in the real world, you've got fairly limited options:

• Enemy Soldiers
• Zombies
• Aliens

Or other forms of "monster", that will probably still end up being monsters. We now have something that we're fairly happy with, but what do you guys think about this disconnect between games and reality? What makes say, zombies acceptable in one game and "tired and cliche" in another? Is it an unreasonable wish for gamers to expect enemies to be something that they haven't seen before?

[Darkness Falls]

We finally got off our butts and submitted to IGF Mobile, which meant that we needed to make a few important choices – the first being, what should we name the game?

While initially we were all pretty happy with Darkness Falls, over the last couple of months it hasn’t sat well with our evolving ideas of what the game’s about. Shadow Field is a bit more abstract and relates less to the literal nature of what’s going on and more to the general feel and ambiance of the game. A big shout out to Rachel Wu (our number one fan) for thinking up the new name!

As regards the URL of the blog, we’ll probably keep it as http://dfgame.wordpress.com until we think of something better – at some point in the future we’ll probably grab a domain name for it and migrate this blog to that new site.

Yesterday was spent on getting updated art assets in the game – here’s a quick vid of the latest build:

.

We've also addressed the font issue in our new title screen:

Also did some cleaning up on the first post, where you'll find the above image.

Let us know what you think!

Were the awful clichés and one liners her idea or did she have to rescue a piece of garbage written by game designers?

Sigh... Trying to pin a group of people with the blame for why video game stories are bad is a useless thing to do. I know from experience that even if people on the development side of games (programmers, designers, etc) may not know how to write, they at least can tell the difference between good and bad writing.

The issue is context. Mirror's Edge's story told in a different context in a different game would have fit a lot better and worked a lot better. Mirror's Edge's gameplay would have benefited from a story that suited it more. But because of inexperience in how to apply good storytelling to games from everyone in the development process, that didn't happen - the story was compromised haphazardly in order to fit the gameplay, and the gameplay was most probably limited by the story.

All we need to learn is how to make the pieces of the puzzle align.

Definitely agree with the topic in general. There are a few standout examples for me personally - namely Bioshock, which I'd say is up there with a great book. However, the majority of games, even if I think the dialogue is fairly well done, are nowhere near a decent book, or a good film/TV series.

Why is this so? Some people have mentioned ludonarrative dissonance - a disconnect between what you're doing and what the story of the game is, which is definitely an issue. Another is inexperience with the medium.

This is why it puzzles me when people on mainstream gaming sites like IGN or Gamespot get all upset when a game doesn't have a plot or doesn't emphasize it (enough) or when they say things like "I only play games for the story". I mean, in all seriousness, if you think like that you've chosen the wrong medium.

I'd agree that if you only play games for the story you've chosen the wrong medium to be a journalist in. But if your primary focus in creating games is story, that doesn't mean that you should just go make a film or whatever. There are limitations to storytelling in games, sure, but there are also opportunities and avenues to be explored story-wise that are simply inaccessible in other mediums - and just as writers can be suited to writing for film, or TV, or novels, so too can they be suited to writing for games. The majority of writers just aren't at the moment. Not yet

Doesn't look too hard to make..

Nothing's hard to make, but everything's hard to make Both from a programming and design perspective, what Derek's managed to do with Spelunky is pretty impressive

That quote doesn't say anything about the quality of the language it's referencing, he's more just saying that languages will be criticized no matter what, which is fair enough to me. Just because he apparently stole your baby doesn't mean everything he says is pure evil

I liked Babbage's quote myself :D

Haha, love the running commentary in the new video :D

I'm still to see Lost Highway, so I'll reserve judgement. To the rest of what you say, Pssh!

(And yes, Rushmore is uber awesome )

[ou]

To pick a favourite from each of my favourite directors:

- Raging Bull
- A Clockwork Orange
- Fargo
- Twelve Monkeys
- Mulholland Drive
- Rushmore
- The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly


And some more random ones:
- Gattaca
- Office Space
- Magnolia
- The Fifth Element
- The Deer Hunter
- Chinatown

And of course, The (original) Matrix, LOTR trilogy, The Dark Knight, Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, blah blah blah