make love to the judges with your eyes

So there is a brief article over at Den of Geek about the potential for literary games. It involves Suda 51 so it is automatically exciting. The first step to creating games with real intent is to understand ways to leverage the medium to create a range of experience. Adapting already existing works may be the best way to tackle the technical challenges of designing such a game before we go out and try to create a truely original work.

Just to flesh this out some more, there is also a post over at MTV calling for more "arty" looking games rather than more realistic ones. The arguement is that a game on Wii or PS2 can look better than Ps3 games if they just make it look cool rather than real. I assume that everyone already knows this around here, but the industry in general certainly doesn't.

Also, isn't it really strange that MTV actually has good coverage of games and is backing Rock Band etc? Thinking of MTV as a legitimate source of anything post mid-90's is just so strange.

I was fool, couldn't let myself to go

Today I will be running down a list of backlogged items that never made it to the internet over the last week. Before I get going though, I have to note that today's title is not a typo, and not from this Beck, but this one. That video sucks but it is the best I cound find.

Anyway to business! I watched Run Lola Run the other day (Again) and still really like that movie. What I think is really awesome is that they work the world into one preset, fixed state and then run though three possible outcomes that could come from that starting point. Each time they establish that the pre-conditions are the same and then show how the different actions of Lola change the world around here. Everything else is constant but Lola, she causes ripples that not only determine the post-conditions of her story but the side characters as well. At the beginning of the movie fred noted that it seemed like something based on a game. I laughed at him and was like 'HO HO HO Fred, no there is no Run Lola Run video game." When I watched the movie though, I kept thinking how it was just like one of my Authored Worlds for interactive fiction. A game that consisted of a few city blocks all preset that the player could then interact with in interesting ways and also see what happens to NPCs dude to his/her actions would be pretty awesome. I had more to say when I started this but I have forgotten since. Damn it.


My next idea was for a program/plugin that would add tags to a book manuscript for each scene and for characters and such. It would provide a way to see when characters first appear, show all their scenes and let you reorder them like clips in a movie or something. The best way to do this would be a plugin for Word or something but I am not sure if it is possible. The key would be allowing the addition of tags without having to write markup in the actual document. I suppose it could be stripped out later, but I would not want it here changing my page counts and stuff. Anyway, it seemed like a cool idea so I wrote it down and now have posted it.

Somewhere in there I had a dream where Johnguydude was the leader of a church that met in an old railroad station from the 1800's and he wore a bowler hat and suspenders. I don't know what part of the larger dream narrative it served, but I made sure to rememeber that little bit.

Finally, I have been addicted to reading Questionable Content since last monday. This is where the image above comes from. The first comics have sad art, but it gets way better every few hundred.

Like a breeze blowing deep beneath my skin

Game Design Class With Jimson:

daplaya667: zelda is rpg
gravis31: no stats =  no RPG
daplaya667: but there's a role to be played
daplaya667: so it's a role playing game
daplaya667: ^^
gravis31: then every game is a RPG
gravis31: even pacman
daplaya667: yeah, pacman is a great rpg

Go read about Ednaswap now. The font is strange because I posted in Linux
and have no real fonts installed.

turn this all around behind us

These are just some thoughts I scribbled in a notebook a few months ago. I was thinking about how one would define an interactive story and the various elements of such a narrative.

Fate is the natural flow of events, the way the future from if the player moves forward on the simple/easiest path through the story.
Facts are creator authored elements of the story.
Static facts are the past, before the player began interacting with the world.
Once a player begins a game they become the creator, adding Dynamic Facts to the truth of the story. The facts are dynamic not because they themselves change, but because they are defined by the dynamic actions of the player.
Static Facts are absolute and will be true in any players game world.
Dynamic Facts are the results of personal player choice.
The combination of these will define the narrative of a players experience.

Dream of the Day:

A game about learning language. Initially the player can't understand anything the characters are saying. Over time the player can understand more and more of what they are saying, while also understanding more of the story. This parallel developement culminates in some revelation. Here the narrative is not dynamic but the learning process forms the interaction.

*Update* Also it seems there was a piece by Kieron Gillen about words in gaming over at Rock Paper Shotgun a long time ago that I missed. OK now I have had about enough of the computer for today.

Come on, Dover! Move your bloomin' arse!

So each day I try to come up with a basic game design idea before I truly begin the day. This normally results in me standing in the shower mumbling to myself and finally giving up because someone already made Thief, and it is the F------- GREATEST THING EVER.

Right…

Anyway, so today I had an idea that I actually like. I first began thinking about how the number of verbs you can use in controlling Gordon Freeman is less than the number you have with most action figures. Especially with ones with pull-strings and voice-boxes. This lead me to thinking about creating a decision tree for an entire level of Half-Life or something and declaring to the world that we can do better. I can see this is going to take a while so, in the interest of actually making a point, let’s fast-forward to the point where I start trying to make My Fair Lady into a video game.

Now at first I envisioned a game where the goal was to take a low level Eliza and upgrade her to a status where she can be passed off as a duchess as the ball. I am not sure if the time limit would be enforced, but there would be a series of activities she could perform at the players direction, leading to various mini-games that would result in a certain improvement. The feedback could be given to the player by taking her out on test runs to various tea parties and such. This makes it so the player has to look more deeply at the game to figure out their status, not just look at a stat screen and be like, today we need to grind this ability etc.

This game is all well and good but is basically is a pretty mini-game collection and I hate that crap. I just don’t know where the long run interest would come so I tried to move on, with the same idea of creating a game about social climbing in British society, but without the constraint of the My Fair Lady setting. I was now reminded of DOA: Xtreme Beach Volleyball. Now you may laugh, but I really like some parts of that game, and it is not because of the blasted boob physics. The core of DOA:XBV* is all about learning the various girls tastes and hobbies, thus allowing you to gift them items they will enjoy in order to win their favor. This will let you build a stronger team over time for the action part of the game. The gifting section is supported by other little mini-games which earn the player money to buy more extravagant gifts. Now in the case of DOA they give you all of the information about characters via the manual, but in my social climbing game you would deduce it from conversation with various characters and the surroundings of their homes.

Before I go too far let me flesh out the game a little more. You would begin the game by selecting a main character and their companion. It could be any mix of male/female and the relationship could be either they are family, friends or lovers. This would change the game a little as the experience of 2 young women trying to climb London’s social ladder would be different from, say, a young couple. You have a friend come along because I needed someone for you to practice dancing with and generally to provide advice and stuff. The main character could, of course, be new to London and staying at a rich relatives house, with the relative providing that role, but I thought letting the player set things up would be more fun.

Now you would start with an invitation to one tea party somewhere. This would be a very easy event and it would be here that you begin to make contacts. The process of making contacts goes something like: engage a character in conversation, find out about them, raise their favor meter until they invite you to visit them sometime. Then they would be added to the players list of contacts and when at home the player would have the option of sending them telegrams, gifts or inviting them to events. Initially the player would face sympathetic companions, but later characters would initially not favor the player and thus they would have to learn how to impress the hostile person through information gathered from other people via gossip. Parties could be arranged, with the player having to select where to have the event, who to invite (invite 2 people that hate each other would be a bad bad thing).

I am not sure if adding monetary concerns to the game would make it too complex, I really want to focus on social interactions in the game, but doing that all the time might be too much. Perhaps the player would receive an amount of money based on their overall favor level from friends, with the option to play cards or go to the races or something to potentially earn more. I would also like to add some factors dependent on sex to the game, so a female player would get different reactions from young men (potential suitors). You would have to have the option of getting married, but overall the game would be much like Pirates!, in that you would simply be racing to become as famous and popular as possible before you have to “retire”. When one game is complete the player could start again with the children of their last character. Actual time in the world probably couldn’t pass, so there would be an endless stream of people living in the early 1900’s I guess. Well, it is a game after all. No one would ever make this game, but I wish they would because Hellgate London is boring me to death right now.

*I just had to add that I might be the only one who played that game because they thought the favor manipulation system was fun, but it really was pretty awesome. The second game is horrible though, they upped the boobs to the point where you just can't ignore it and I refuse to play that crap.