Games

I try out many more games than I finish – even when they’re short – from a combination of lack of attention span and lack of skill. So it stands out to me when I finish a game of more than trivial length. This weekend I played through the end of Lumino City and I can say with confidence that I would have finished this one off even without a snowstorm keeping me inside. The major selling point of Lumino City, which of itself is enough to make it worthwhile, is the artwork. The scenes in the game are entirely … Continue reading Beautiful Lumino City

IEEE’s prediction that 85% of the tasks in our daily life will include game elements by 2020 sounds to me like a prediction that requires thinking about game elements broadly enough, it might already be true. Considering this quote in particular, “by 2020, however many points you have at work will help determine the kind of raise you get or which office you sit in”, if you’ve ever had a performance review rating you on a number scale for different job functions, congratulations, your job is gamified! Does grocery shopping get you gas points? Your errands are gamified! Students, grades … Continue reading Sparkleponies for all

Weird Bug starts off for the first, say, 30 seconds looking like your standard puzzle-maze game, until you realize the first maze isn’t beatable, and that the real puzzle is how to go into the source code for the maze and fix it so the maze can be beat. The mazes are implemented in PuzzleScript, and the bulk of the game you’re in an IDE interface, changing the code, rebuilding, and playing your fixed level to get on to the next, broken level. If you’ve ever coded before, you’ll be able to figure out PuzzleScript in just a minute or … Continue reading Most fun you’ll have debugging all day

I’m pretty blown away by Nothing To Hide, a currently free, browser-based puzzle game with a great premise and one of the most interesting introductory “scenes” I’ve come across. You play a character who must ensure that they are being surveilled at all times while moving around the world (for reasons the opening will make clear). The web-version is actually a demo being used to raise funds for a full version, but it’s as polished and fleshed out as any number of full online games I’ve played. Even in its handful of levels, you get a taste of the variety … Continue reading Don’t leave the panopticon

The news that the landfill of Atari’s E.T. games is going to be excavated swept through the internet. This makes me doubly excited that I still have my copy and I’m considering using it an an anchor point for a “play bad games” day in my intro game design course in the fall. Particularly having also found this really cool review of the games flaws and fixes for them. It starts from the position that the game is actually fairly good, and even groundbreaking, except for a few flaws or misunderstandings about the game (such as, that it is an … Continue reading Of course they put E.T. in New Mexico

I don’t know if this weblog entry about bug hunting in large scale game development is more appropriate for my spring games course or my spring project management course. The stories are great for both directions. Team members with poorly defined roles! Frantic timelines leading to bugs! The reality of entire days lost to a bug that won’t be found, let alone fixed! Bugs explained in simple code a novice student can understand! I particularly enjoyed the explanation of why the live server compiler ran without debug capabilities, violating the ideal that the dev and live servers are identically configured, … Continue reading Sometimes you can blame the compiler. Sort of.

I’ve been reading a lot about games and game design over the past few months, and this recent blog post about when visual detail in games becomes overwhelming rung true for me. It’s responding to the difficulty that can emerge when trying to actually play the stunning, complex, 3D games that are coming out, when compared to less graphically “sophisticated” games. The idea of readability, and what makes a game readable, is nicely discussed. I liked the idea, hinted at, that if your game is only playable because you have added meta-labels that appear when you’ve successfully found or targeted … Continue reading Readability versus Realism