Regulars to The Art of Game might have, well, become bored with the static content over the last while during the unannounced (and admittedly, unintended) hiatus. Between a number of great new projects and opportunities, my little game design blog got lost in the dust stirred in all that chaos.
I have a number of things I’d like to write on, and a number of maintenance items to do around here, but if you’re looking for signs of life — here they are! Regular posting is planned to resume shortly! (Hurray!)
And specifically, to the regulars, thanks for sticking with us; to those just stumbling on here, stay a while!
I was up a little early this morning, reading some new entries over at the IndieGames Blog (specifically “Freeware Game Pick: Trapdoor Below (Telchar)“) when I saw a line that surprised me quite a bit. In describing this roguelike, the following was written: “…and the usual random dungeon generator that ensures every new adventure plays differently from the last.” (Emphasis is mine.)
Whoa! That’s not it at all! Now, I know I’m playing semantics here, but I’ve got a gut feeling that a lot of people don’t quite realize how contrary this statement is, and that might prevent you from appreciating the importance of procedural generation. Read the rest of this entry »
I recently had the opportunity to play though Mirror’s Edge for the first time — it’s a game I’d had my eye on for a while. After playing it to the end and playing around with it a little, I had mixed feelings of the whole product. Rather than review the game, however, I’d rather just go over what I felt really worked and really didn’t.
For those of you who aren’t familiar, Mirror’s Edge is a First Person Action game that is based heavily across the ideas of Parkour. Players control Faith, a ‘runner’ (someone who transports items under the radar of the Big-Brother society in the game) who ends up in the midst of a murder-conspiracy which is fingering her sister Kate. Players use Faith’s skills of martial arts and parkour to try and uncover the truth and save Kate. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m pleased to say that The Art of Game has been doing pretty well since I began writing it a few months ago, and I’m slowly approaching 100 posts; an exciting, arbitrary milestone. I hope in this time that people have been enjoying my writings and insights. On that note, I have two requests I thought I’d throw out in to the public.
First: I’m curious as to what you all think about the blog on the whole. What do you guys like or dislike? What would you like to see more or less of? Do you think I’m a crackpot, or am I on the money? I’d love to know what YOU think!
Second: Game ideas are second nature to me, and I’d like to make more of those ideas in to products. I’m not exactly a talented programmer, however, and I’d love to work with some people who are. Are you interested in helping to produce a game, but find yourself short of ideas or direction? Do you have an existing project that you’d like my critique on? Then let’s work together!
Feel free to drop your responses in to the comments. If you want a more private conversation, feel free to email me at gdbeaton@gmail.com. I look forward to hearing from you!
As readers of this blog are sure to know, one of the things I value most in games is choice. In most games, however, there’s only one way to finish a game. Even take games with multiple endings, like BioShock or the historical Chrono Trigger — both have multiple endings, but both require you to accomplish the same task to get there. While Chrono Trigger lets you reach this ending point in several different ways, there isn’t any ending that doesn’t involve defeating Lavos, the game’s end boss.
So, here’s something to consider. Why not have multiple game-ending scenarios? While Chrono Trigger has multiple endings, it only has the one game ending scenario — defeat Lavos. But what if there were others, like evacuate the planet, or prevent his arrival, or somehow peacefully resolve the Lavos problem? Read the rest of this entry »
So, a little while back I came across an awesome little indie flash game called Queens, from noonat, made for one of the Ludum Dare competitions. It’s a short, stylish platformer that revolves around a king who tests his wife by putting her inside a crazy little dungeon — if she dies, he can replace her. Read the rest of this entry »
Huzzah! The remainder of the TOJam 4 games have been released, the last 9. Admittedly, I’ve been a little slow of the draw to post my reviews, but here we go anyhow.
What kind of world could we generate from your hard drive?
So I’ve had a few days to think about how I’d like to see a modern realization of Operation: Inner Space’s disk drive world work — and of course, I thought I’d share it here. (I’d also be very interested to hear other takes on it, if anyone’s interested in sharing in the comments!)
Inner Space didn’t do a lot, probably for the sake of speed. It looked at your directories, determined the number of icons it could find in each file (at least one, but sometimes more) and then threw a theme on to that folder — like virus infected, race track, or asteroid field or what have you.
I’d rather think of the disk itself as a single large place, which brings me to one of the first problems to undertake — in order to comprehensively generate a landscape from the contents of a disk, I imagine a fairly intensive process would have to be run in order to analyze the disk, so this would be done once at the start of a game, and then either updated each subsequent play, or never if the update process takes too long (perhaps the player can be given an option). Read the rest of this entry »
I was up a little early this morning, reading some new entries over at the 
Hello readers!
As readers of this blog are sure to know, one of the things I value most in games is choice. In most games, however, there’s only one way to finish a game. Even take games with multiple endings, like BioShock or the historical Chrono Trigger — both have multiple endings, but both require you to accomplish the same task to get there. While Chrono Trigger lets you reach this ending point in several different ways, there isn’t any ending that doesn’t involve defeating Lavos, the game’s end boss.
