"A Closed World" and thoughts on gay video games.

This is part of a series that will review the MIT-Gambit Summer 2011 game prototypes, whether I thought they worked and why, etc.

SPOILER ALERT! First, take all of 10 minutes to play "A Closed World," if you wish. Review and analysis is after the jump...

Super Friendship Club's "Mysticism" pageant, Sept. 1st - 30th

Make a game about "mysticism" by September 30th.

If you haven't made games before, and aren't sure where to start on the technical side of things, just ask: there're plenty of people here who can give guidance.

Try it once.

The real art of Deus Ex: Human Revolution is the fact that non-lethal players always inevitably start another playthrough as a bloodthirsty maniac. The weaknesses quickly become apparent in a combat AI optimized for stealth gameplay instead of your sociopathic gorelust. Cops and punks patrolling the city hubs suddenly become puzzles you must solve -- and there's never enough ammo. For bonus points: hack only when necessary, never use vents and play in a foreign language.

Just be careful: the civilians' "hide from murderer" AI is very sneaky.

DX:HR photo safari.

Here are some out-of-order, non-spoilery screenshots of details that I liked in Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I'm no Dead End Thrills, so these are all un-antialiased, not gamma-corrected in Photoshop, and they're all low-res crops of in-game screenshots. Enjoy.

God, her hair piece is just so fucking awesome, you know? So... so crispy.

Ludum Dare #21: FuhFuhFire!

For Ludum Dare #21 ("Escape"), I made "FuhFuhFire," a short Unity-powered web FPS where you set fire to a building and then rescue people from it. Do you try to rescue everyone but leave others behind?... or do you just escape alone? Dynamic fire propagation / level destruction, physics thingies and 8 different endings. Wow!

WASD to walk, SPACE to jump, MOUSE to look, LEFT-CLICK to do stuff.

C'mon, just give it five (5!) minutes of your time and play it in your browser here. Project source in all its hacky glory is here too.

"It belongs in a museum!"

It was all tucked-away in a half-hidden nook on the lobby level of the Museum of the Moving Image: games.

Several kiosks running Space Channel 5, Katamari Damacy and other critical darlings that represented an uncharacteristically decent sample from commercial canon. Aha, perhaps the curator was a fellow gamer! And far, in the very back of the exhibit was a dim chamber housing a lone pedestal, a keyboard, a mouse and a projection of Half-Life 2 on the wall.

The game was still stuck in the train station, the part where the guy mutters, "Don't drink the water," as if you could. So at least one person (probably more) tried playing the beginning of this era-defining computer game and stopped after the first few minutes.

I was angry. This was art and no one was appreciating it!

I've killed my darling.

It's taken me two years to accept it -- that I'd have to kill my darling.

My darling was a 3000 brush submarine with a non-linear, multi-floor layout and a dynamic life support system, done in a non-photorealistic art style. I kept thinking Design could save it and so I plugged away for months on a bloated concept. Always just one better tutorial, one better puzzle, one better detail prop away from being good. Add more scripting! More complexity, more depth! Always more... Then one month became two and two became twenty-four.

The level was so difficult I couldn't complete it without resorting to cheats -- and I designed the damn thing. So I started stripping things away, digging through the debris and the cancer to rescue the concept. Delete mechanics, close-off rooms, simplify. Get to the bottom in time, quickly.

But it was already dead.

 I've never thrown away so much work before. I'm sure it'd feel even worse to work in an industry that regularly de-funds entire studios and projects, or to spend a decade of your life on a space probe that plows straight into the Martian surface from a minor conversion error.

Still, this is the first time (in a long while) that I've made some real progress. This is what Radiator 1-3 looks like right now:

I hope it's better for it.

And to my darling: I'm sorry. I'm so so sorry.

So close, and yet...

Even after given a generous extra week, we weren't able to finish our game in-time for the Super Friendship Club's "Justice" pageant -- we hit a showstopping, completely bewildering bug in Unity3D that corrupts texture memory or something, but only when we build out to a web player or standalone deployment. It's very frustrating. Hopefully we'll get this sorted out and released within the next two weeks.