This mod, by the G3 community, is old news, but I finally gave Planescape a whirl in it.
This is in 1920×1200.
Images speak louder than words here, I’d say.
The lack of a text and menu UI mod to match a resolution this high was somewhat unfortunate but didn’t hinder the experience so much. Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, next…
The announcement of Love is exciting to me on many levels.
A game that is as freeform and open to personal innovation as Dwarf fortress that takes place in a dynamic public place shared with friends and strangers is very compelling. You would have the ability to work with friends to test the limits of the toolset and your imagination while simultaneously being able to be inspired by other citizen’s creations and their alternative methods.
The fact that Love is the brainchild of a single person is equally inspiring and leads me to appreciate the product even more.
However, what I want to reflect on right now is the art style and how it resonates with an ever growing personal desire for videogames and their art direction.
Love is a world built out of very simplistic 3d shapes and structures. However, by using tricks that involved complicated uses of “edge polygons” and alpha textures, the game distorts these simple shapes to be slightly more fluid and dynamic in their appearance. There are no hard edges only skewed lines and somewhat blurry intersections.
This effect in practice creates a very painterly landscape where the colors and shapes themselves are alive. As you move through the land it feels as if you are progressing through a 2d image or painting: the painting is changing as you move, rather than you are moving around a static, sterile 3d space.
This somewhat new representation of a 3d space in a videogame sparked abstract discussions about the goals developers can have now that our technology has progressed to a sufficient level. For example, can we try and recreate how we view the world, rather than simply creating digital representations of objects existing in the world?
I’m going to muse a bit about this topic in my next post, part 2.
Just wanted to quickly mention one of my favorite recent indie webgames – Pixeljam’s Dino Run.
The concept of Dino Run is extremely simple – control a dinosaur running for its life from the effects of a nearby asteroid impact.
The presentation is intentionally outdated as a stylistic decision: pre-8-bit era styled pixel graphics and ambient sound effects, with a few flourishes. Overall a very nice retro/minimalist aesthetic of prehistoric fauna and increasingly desolate environments; forests, waterfalls, tar pits, caves, volcanoes, etc. Some of the level art has a nice depth to it despite the color and resolution simplicity, and crashing meteorites are suitably dramatic.
Gameplay is mostly minimal as well with some nice touches if the player wants to delve deeper – in RPG-esque features, items, speedruns, multiplayer, boulder rides/doomsurfing(!) and so on.
The game understands and does a few things particularly well, in my opinion, gameplay-related, atmospherically, and thematically.
FLIGHT (DEFINITELY): Running for your life is a classic gameplay technique when supplemented with the appropriate atmosphere. That is, with the proper treatment, something as straightforward as a set time limit to gameplay becomes something frantic. This kind of gameplay, when done well, can invoke some of the most primal of instincts, fight or flight. Narrowly escaping when it seemed the wave of destruction would overtake you can trigger euphoria, despite the simplicity of the presentation. In my opinion, Dino Run joins the ranks of other lofty examples of this idea done well – Metroid, Half Life 2, Mirror’s Edge… among others. Finally, the fact that your little dino manages to indulge his insatiable appetite while running from certain death adds an amusingly morbid dimension to the experience.
LEVEL DESIGN: Game design which does not allow the player to do or see everything in a typical playthrough invariably adds to the believability, specifically verisimilitude, of the game world (see 20 Mysterious Games on Gamasutra). This is only a good thing if the game is already well designed at its core. For games with a strong atmosphere, not being able to see the limitations and boundaries of the game world and the fiction of the experience in striking clarity only adds to the immersion a player can feel. Dino Run is not perhaps the best example of this quality but the combination of the simple gameplay and multi-path level design (including some hidden paths) work well together to encourage the player to wonder “what if I had gone the other way?” Games which allow the player to see the ends of all roads, metaphorically speaking, and all possibilities lose some of that quality of immersion.
EXTINCTION?: Finally, as an extension of the first point, there’s something compelling about playing a game in which the goal is to survive, but not only for the sake of surviving – rather that of staving off extinction. The game intentionally uses those particular terms – extinct and doomed – and the finality those words evoke tended make me consider humanity’s existential crisis and the ultimate (perhaps?) destination point of all things, oblivion. The player’s actions in the game seem to not only represent the struggle of a single creature to survive, but also symbolizing all life’s universal fight to outpace extinction. The presence of your fellow dinosaurs and mammals running through the stage heightens this feeling. Although the player actually can succeed in guiding his dinosaur to safety – ostensibly at least – the feeling of grim inevitability runs consistently throughout the experience. Pretty deep for a little browser game, huh?
Some things I would have had on my wish list if I was on the dev team:
- higher danger from other creatures (being trampled, eaten, etc.)
- a better feeling of acceleration and momentum
- being able to select or unlock different species of dinosaurs (and mammals?) with different starting stats and access to certain areas of the map – i.e. higher starting strength vs. lower starting speed, small tunnels, etc.
This indie title, Eversion, is fantastically deceptive and spooky.
This should of course be incredibly obvious upon spotting a screenshot of the game…er…maybe not?
Despite the fact that this image is downright adorable… the point seems to be that the game design capitalizes on the player’s preconceptions of what such a cute-looking indie 8-bit style platformer should seemingly be like. However while music and visuals and simple gameplay initially points in that direction, the game ultimately leads to a quite different experience from the player’s expectations.
It manages to make a smoothly gradual transition into unease, menace and beyond while simultaneously shocking me at least a few times. The sound and music were great, but the control and level design certainly could have been expanded on. However the effect the game aimed to create was certainly not hurt at all by these minor shortcomings.
Very worth the few minutes it takes for a playthrough.
Just returned from GDC in San Francisco. It was incredibly beautiful out there, and I got to spend some quality time with family as well.
Made me think: why did I move to the east coast again?
Highlights from the conference itself:
– making new and meeting old friends/contacts
– booth crawl (free beer!),
– the Harmonix Rock Band bar night (open bar!)
I suppose it is worth noting that two of three involved free alcohol.
The conference itself was exhausting though and less fun, mostly because with my Expo pass I wasn’t attending any fun talks. I wouldn’t have had time to anyway though as I was fairly busy discovering the true core of GDC, behind all the fervor… networking and schmoozing.
Not that those are bad things. Just a little tiring. Hopefully I will have some rad talks to outline from future GDCs.
