I once made a game about the death penalty. This is my kind of thing. A couple years ago I dropped out of video games, both playing and designing, to focus on other interests and finishing a degree in philosophy. With university behind me and a games development course on the horizon, I am catching up on experiences I have missed in that time. Naturally one of the first games I lined up was The...
It can be found here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=22819 Comments thusfar have included: "Beautiful, beautiful game!" "Great dialogue that keeps you wanting to play. Perfect!" "Wow, I played it like if I was sitting on that chair oO" "I wish I could skip through the intro." "the pacing was slow to the point of frustrating." "Who killed Chuck D? Excellent game...
My takeaway from GDC this year was that I've been focusing too much on learning game development and not enough on designing compelling games. As such, I've decided to experiment with some "found item games". Basically that means I look at the objects on a table and try to make a game out of them. This is my second attempt (the first one requires a big stack of buisness cards). If somebody were...
It would mean something to me if you cranked up the volume and listened to the songs that I've posted below. I'm not feeling great right now, and it would make for some kind of therapy-like thing. Maybe. I'm not sure about perfection. If asked, most people would say that perfection is inherently good. Perfect is all the good right? I don't think that's really true though. Imagine a perfect circ...
You may or may not have noticed that I've been rather absent since September. I have 3 pages of Quicklooks to watch. Months of Bombcasts. I haven't played half of the GOTY contenders. But there is a reason. A very good reason. I've been making a game. I'm a philosophy student at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. Because of my previous exploits, I was permitted to join the fourth year compute...
Yesterday I finished playing Earthbound for the first time. I wanted to share a few of my most memorable moments in the game. I also included some text that you can read while you listen to them. Jeff's Journey It's not that running away from boarding school seems all that big of a deal. I mean, I know people who did. Sure, you don't usually have to fight bears and cavemen, and you don't usuall...
There was a time when making a game as simple as the Atari 2600 classic Combat required 6 months of constant work not simply by professionals, but by the people who developed the hardware that the game was running on. We could not have come further from that point today, and right now anybody with a computer, a little bit of time and enough dedication can make a fully playable game that far sur...
Every year at my university there is an event called Frag 4 Cancer. It's pretty much what it sounds like. this year, I am supplying a ton of retro gaming stuff. In preparation, I've done up some posters about the histories of the consoles that I'm bringing (there will be other information out there, but this is the bulk of it). I thought that some of you might be interested to see these, and yo...
//Every fiber of me wants to post this without a spoiler warning, but I’m not actually capable of being that much of a dick. Spoilers ahead// You may have heard that Spec Ops: The Line is an interesting game, and it is. You may be considering playing it. You may even have bought it. I am here to save you, and the whole of Dubai from that reckless action. You must not Play Spec Ops: The Line. I...
The other day I was talking to a software programmer who mostly does outsourcing work for game developers. He told me that video games are the only place where there are interesting problems to be solved in computer science; everything else is either an engineering exercise (networking, multimedia software) or completely out of our reach (artificial intelligence). This explains why somebody lik...
Anybody who has been following the video game industry in recent years knows that the growth of the indie game scene has led to an explosion of news ideas and niche mechanics that we haven’t seen since the early days of the Commodore 64, and bedroom coders. It also seems pretty obvious why: large scale production is expensive, and publishers need to know that games getting a lot of funding will...
Eight years ago we moved into this house...and I was 13. I was very happy to have a TV with a Gamecube hooked up to it, but the TV was about 20 years old and had...issues. Lot's of them. I'm telling you this, because I want to put what you are about to see in context. Last night I finished the month-long process of completely reorganizing my room. It is no longer a bedroom: It's the best damned...
I finished Mass Effect 3 yesterday, and I got a big important paper done today, so I was sitting about deciding what to do with my afternoon. I just did a complete reorganization of my living space, and playing all my consoles had become a lot easier, so I decided to break out my Atari 2600 and work through the massive pile of games that I had for it. I recently read the book Racing The Beam, w...
I just ordered a new motherboard and i5 2500k to replace my aging Q6600. "so what?" you might be thinking. Normally I would be right there with you, but this is different. I think that the Q6600 is going to be ranked one rung below the Motorola 6800 in the pantheon of computing hardware. For those who don't know, the Q6600 is a quad-core Intel processor in their "Core 2" line which included bot...
This is the version of my game that I brought with me. Even if you've played it when I posted it previously, this has a bunch of improvements and additions. I’m sitting on the last leg of my plane trip home after GDC, and I figured there was no better place to write out a nice little summary of my experience this year. This was my second year, and it could not have been more different than the...
With GDC coming up in a few days all of my time is spent on either schoolwork or my big portfolio piece Horizonticality. However, I have a couple of extremely awesome things that I'll be doing by the end of the month and I wanted to jot down a quick record of them before I take off for San Francisco. A: The Large-Audience D&D Session 50% of my Philosophy of Art grade is wrapped up in a group pr...
EDIT: The link in the text is now outdated. Here is a build with about 20 more hours of work in it. So for the last couple months I've been hinting at a project that I've been working on in my spare time. I kept thinking "just one more feature, then I'll show it off" Well, better late then never. Here is an alpha build of Horizonticality . It is a two-player game that is played with 360 control...
I have only ever liked one textbook cover and this isn't it As many of you know, I am attempting to break into the field of professional game design. I have done, and am actively doing, many things in service of that goal. One of them is reading Jesse Schell’s “The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses.” It sat in a place of prominence for months before I was finally presented with large section...
As somebody who is determined to enter the video game industry from the design side, I spend a great deal of my life thinking and talking about games. The conclusion that I have reached, which I think is a relatively common one, is that there is little agreement about what video games are. When the medium was born, it was fairly clear. A video game was a challenge completed by interaction betwe...
In which I watch as high-agency games and gameplay/story mixing get into a little fight. (As a little aside, after further thought I actually think that conditioned moments occur over two PIPPs: One for the player to perceive and react to the trained stimuli and one for them to realize what they have done and become excited by it. That isn't really relevant to this post, but I thought it was wo...
EDIT: It has come to my attention that my definition of Ludonarrative was wrong. Ludonarrative is the relationship between events in a cutscene and events in the game. My points are still valid, but when I say Ludonarrative dissonance I am reffering to a disparity between a player's motivations and their actions. (This article was a little more timely when I wrote it, but due to a change in cir...
In which I keyword the idea of making people do cool things in-game.
In which I invent acronyms and try to finding a practical unit for measuring our experience of time.
In which I debate the merits of regenerating and static health /start.math D = Damage Per Attack S = Seconds between attacks T = Total Player Health C = Cooldown On Health Regeneration In order for an enemy to kill the player: D > T * (S - C) /end.math
In which I discuss Okami's unique approach to game difficulty and failure.
In which I ponder the narrative impact of the fail state further, and a few methods to improve it.
In which I discuss how the fail state impacts different types of players, and what the ultimate effect is on the player experience. Direct Link
http://hallmonitor.ca/wp-content/uploads/Prelude.mp3 Or in embedded form. (This one is only about a minute, future posts will be much longer)
I have a love/hate relationship with Halo. Halo: CE is horrible, Halo 2 fixed all the problems that I had with CE, Halo 3, ODST and Reach were just too much of the same to feel special. I will acknowledge that every Halo game is an improvement over the previous ones, but I think that the series has been getting steadily worse since Halo 2. The reason for this, I think is that Halo suffers from...
As many of you know, I want to be a game writer/narrative designer. To this end, I have a project planned out this summer. It's sort of like a very complicated choose-your-own-adventure novel in which you run for election (think Alpha Protocol but bigger and without the action game attached). I told a friend in Computer Science about this, and he convinced his group to do something vaguely like...
I wrote a blog post! But it has images! And I don't want to reformat them! So here is a link! Its about SWERY's talk at GDC. I wish I could have covered more stuff, but I don't want people TL;DRing it. Oh yes, I totally just verbed an acronym. Feel free to ask questions about any aspect of the talk here or on the original post. I also have some more pictures of slides, but they don't really mak...
A repost from my website Yes it's long, so are books. I would make it shorter if I could, but I've already refrained from talking about a ton of stuff as it is. Over the last 2 years or so I have been making a concerted effort to actually create something of value. Its been an arduous process and has produced little. Having had special reason to dwell on this process recently, I have become dee...
I'm taking a new tack to my "prep for GDC" thing. I'm just going to ask: What do you think of this? (Please note that is an UNFINISHED website. The structure is there, but its not organized with content yet) Today's role was to take a game that isn't terribly narrative heavy and add to it, trying to fit into the existing themes and game mechanics. The thing that I realized when starting this ex...
In an attempt to motivate myself, I'll be reposting from my website (unfinished) about the portfolio work that I'm doing every day this week. Narrative design and writing are my thing, so most of what I post here is in the form of "Valve Playthroughs"...but you can find out what that is (along with my schedule) here . In the meantime, below are the things I wrote today: Train Charlie Go here fo...
So some of you may know that I am going to GDC. Great fun it shall be, but I also have to make sure that it is productive and that I leave a good impression. This means that my task for the next week (a week which I conveniently have off from school) is to take all the portfolio work that I've done, and the ideas that I have yet to put down in writing, and polish them to a mirror shine. But I n...
So because I'm too tired to do any of the mountain of work that I should be doing, I thought I might take stock of the various games that I've put some thought into. I'd like some feedback on anything that interests you. Some of these are just ideas, others I've done some serious design work on. Headers are just working titles. Onward This is one of the games that I'm working on right now, whic...
These are two unrelated things. Firstly: Get to your local Gamestop/EB Games NOW my friends. Lets get this scourge to gaming off shelves and into our homes so that we may never open it. Second: Here is the definition of a double edged sword. I finally found a copy of Alan Wake for a reasonable price on the internet (for some reason this game costs twice as much in Canada as it does in the state...
Worth The Pixels? Episode 1 Welcome to my fancy new blog segment. In Worth the Pixels? I take a look at older games, both popular and obscure, and talk about why they are or aren’t worth playing in this day and age. For our first episode, I’m going to talk about two biggies, Wolfenstein 3D and Doom . As anybody who is reading this will be aware, these are the games that defined the First Person...