Thursday, May 16, 2019
Capsule reviews, vol. 1
Capsule reviews are short critiques of games that I've been playing. In this post, I discuss Heaven's Vault, Virginia, Islanders, and Two Point Hospital. There's no specific story spoilers, but I do talk about how I think the games work.
Heaven's Vault. The dynamic branching and language system is great and impressive, and the Muslim-inflected sci-fi art direction feels fresh. It's basically a must-play for anyone interested in narrative design. (Maybe the main weakness is the less-than-relatable characters, who basically feel like vehicles to bring about plot beats. Which is probably how the narrative system works! Hmm.)
The game pacing feels awkward for much of the game. You get to do one fun archaeological linguistics detective scene every hour, but to get there, you have to sit through an uncomfortable water slide mini-game. It's meant to give a sense of journey and a bit of rest (as well as pad out the game length) but it's a bad sign when even the fast travel options here feel inconsistent and confusing; sometimes the game lets you go back to your ship cabin to ask for fast travel, and sometimes not.
But also just on a core minute-to-minute basis, the movement and camera never felt comfortable for me, and The Last Express styled character animation never stopped feeling like a crutch for scoping down production costs. It's interesting how this project made so much (very impressive) progress on "hard" game design problems like dynamic narrative or language simulation, but then tripped on what's considered relatively "easy" solved design problems like 3D character movement, game feel, or encounter pacing.
Again, though, I still think this is a must-play for anyone working in narrative. Just soldier through the less fluent parts.
Tuesday, April 30, 2019
We must cultivate our garden: games as personal history
This post is based on a talk I gave at A MAZE Berlin 2019, as part of the Dev.olution "Games as Gardening" summit, as part of my 2019 European Tour.
When I think about gardening, I think of Voltaire's 1759 novel Candide. (No, really. No joke. I did think this.)
It's about a teen named Candide who goes on an extremely painful journey of tragedy, loss, and struggle. The entire time, his mentor Dr. Pangloss keeps insisting that nonetheless they still live in "the best of all possible worlds." The video game equivalent would be indies lamenting how hard it is to make a living, and tone-deaf Steam reps and Epic Store reps claiming that "games are a meritocracy"
Voltaire asks, how can you witness all that pain and still insist that everything is fine? By the end of the book, Candide and his few surviving friends are barely scraping a meager existence on a desolate farm. And after suffering absurd hardship and misery, Pangloss still insists everything turned out for the best, to which Candide responds: "all that is very well, but let us cultivate our garden."
Monday, April 22, 2019
Lessons from Europe: fields reports from EGX Rezzed, Now Play This, and A MAZE Berlin
I just came back from a games event tour through London and Berlin, where I had a lovely time meeting new people and catching up with old friends.
I had never been to EGX Rezzed or Now Play This before, and this was my third time at A MAZE.
I went because I feel like much of the game industry is still focused on the US, but to me, the majority of the interesting games culture and arts events seemed to be happening in (Western) Europe. What are they doing over there, what's their magic sauce, and how can I bring some of that sensibility back to the US?
Here's some general thoughts and Wot I Think:
EGX Rezzed
EGX Rezzed is mainly a customer-facing fan expo branded by Eurogamer and Rock Paper Shotgun in the Tobacco Docks, a complex of open-air brick vaults ringed with balconies and breakout rooms that feel like giant people-sized aquariums. It's a fraction of the size of the main EGX London or bigger US fan expos like PAX, but still features the same tabletop gaming rooms, indie publisher megabooths, and merch stands. It was fine, but personally I'm just not very interested in fan expos.
I enjoyed the more eclectic Leftfield Collection room, curated by David Hayward each year. And I particularly enjoyed Doggerland Radio by Amy Godliman, a modded vintage radio that you can tune to pseudo-real BBC radio dramas and poetic shipping forecasts, while playing with bespoke "feelies" like an impossibly old novel made of other novels or old vintage-style maps. It's like a very British version of Calvino's Invisible Cities, a mobile art game installation that would make the most sense in the UK.
The local neighborhood feels awkward even for London -- you either have to walk 20 minutes east from the Tower of London tube station, or take a semi-incorporated public transit line called the DLR. Other than the event venue, there's approximately one McDonalds with a 100 personline queue streaming out the door, and exactly one decent pub that everyone slowly drifts towards at the end of each day. (For designers and devs, this informal pub afterparty is probably the highlight of the whole thing.)
I had never been to EGX Rezzed or Now Play This before, and this was my third time at A MAZE.
I went because I feel like much of the game industry is still focused on the US, but to me, the majority of the interesting games culture and arts events seemed to be happening in (Western) Europe. What are they doing over there, what's their magic sauce, and how can I bring some of that sensibility back to the US?
Here's some general thoughts and Wot I Think:
EGX Rezzed
EGX Rezzed is mainly a customer-facing fan expo branded by Eurogamer and Rock Paper Shotgun in the Tobacco Docks, a complex of open-air brick vaults ringed with balconies and breakout rooms that feel like giant people-sized aquariums. It's a fraction of the size of the main EGX London or bigger US fan expos like PAX, but still features the same tabletop gaming rooms, indie publisher megabooths, and merch stands. It was fine, but personally I'm just not very interested in fan expos.
I enjoyed the more eclectic Leftfield Collection room, curated by David Hayward each year. And I particularly enjoyed Doggerland Radio by Amy Godliman, a modded vintage radio that you can tune to pseudo-real BBC radio dramas and poetic shipping forecasts, while playing with bespoke "feelies" like an impossibly old novel made of other novels or old vintage-style maps. It's like a very British version of Calvino's Invisible Cities, a mobile art game installation that would make the most sense in the UK.
The local neighborhood feels awkward even for London -- you either have to walk 20 minutes east from the Tower of London tube station, or take a semi-incorporated public transit line called the DLR. Other than the event venue, there's approximately one McDonalds with a 100 person
Wednesday, March 27, 2019
Radiator European Tour 2019 (London, Berlin, Milan) + Level With Me hiatus until April 17
In April, I'm going to cram ~6 different events into a whirlwind week of travel through London and Berlin. What's wrong with me? Why did I sign up for all this? There's only one way to find out how much of a wreck I'm going to be...
I'm planning on covering a wide variety of events, both free / non-free, and for gays / gamers / insiders / general public alike, so take your pick:
LONDON, UK
- April 6: EGX Rezzed at Tobacco Docks, London
I've heard nice things about Rezzed and I've always meant to go, so now is the time of reckoning. My talk "Designing For Sex Games" will be a short teen-friendly PG-13 introduction to sex and intimacy in game design, aimed at the general gaming public, at around 4:30pm on the last day of the festival. - April 7: Now Play This at Somerset House, London
Now Play This is one of the jewels of the European game festival circuit, and I've always been meaning to go. I'll be presenting at their very very cleverly named mini-conference "A Series Of Interesting Decisions" on the design choices going into my next sex game Macho Cam.
Monday, March 25, 2019
new Unity tool: Bobbin
I wanted to be able to write game dialogue in Google Docs (from my phone or tablet, or to share with external collaborators) and then automatically send those changes into the Unity project on my laptop.
To help me do that, I made a free open source tool called Bobbin, which is a relatively simple Unity Editor plugin that can automatically download the data at URLs, and import that data as a file in your Unity project. Again, it's very simple: every X seconds, it opens a list of URLs (as if it were a web browser) and then it saves all the bytes as a .txt, .csv, .png -- or in-theory, whatever file type you want. Note that this is just an automated download manager, you will still need to write your own game code to actually import, process, and use these files in your game.
The main audience for this tool is narrative designers, writers, localizers / translators, and designers / developers who need something fast and lightweight for syncing files with external collaborators. I imagine it also pairs well with text-based narrative plugins like Yarn Spinner, where in-theory, you could collaboratively write Yarn scripts in a Google Doc and then use this tool to automatically bring the script into your game.
(But if you're making a game that's going to make heavy use of spreadsheets, you should probably use something more robust like Meta Sheets or CastleDB-Unity-Importer, which can import your spreadsheet data as C# types with Intellisense auto-completion in your IDE.)
Anyway, I'm planning on a few more feature updates, like runtime support and/or better Google Sheets support, but personally I'm probably not going to expand the feature set much beyond that.
I hope you find it useful! And as always, feel free to submit any bug reports (or small feature requests) by opening an issue on the github.
Tuesday, March 19, 2019
Consider supporting Wonderville on Kickstarter
I rarely stump for Kickstarters on this blog. Maybe once or twice a year? So it's a big deal when I spend this year's quota on Wonderville, a new indie game arcade / event space / bar in Brooklyn run by longtime non-profit art games organization Death By Audio Arcade.
They need $70,000+ to support their first year of operations, as they take over the space from Secret Project Robot, a well-known and beloved queer-friendly performance space / venue in Bushwick.
Honestly, that last bit caught me by surprise. I didn't know Secret Project Robot was looking for someone to take over? If we're deciding between allowing the death of yet another creative venue in NYC vs. finding a worthy successor to carry on similar work, the choice is obvious.
Everyone knows and recognizes the importance of independent venues to sustain a local music scene. Well, it's also the same ideal for video games too: we need these physical places to build and sustain creative communities. And once we have these local anchors and templates, we can follow up in other cities throughout the world too.
For more context and discussion, see my older post on "Theorizing local games cultures in a post-TIGSource era".
Saturday, March 16, 2019
GDC 2019 plans
I'm already exhausted, just from looking at this picture |
The usual GDC disclaimers apply: GDC is mostly a business event, and it's boring unless you have any business to do, or if you have some weird public profile to maintain. Anyway, don't feel bad about not going. You saved yourself a lot of money!
On Tuesday, I'll probably be spending a lot of the day at the Level Design Workshop mini-track. My days of breathlessly live-tweeting talks are over, but I'll probably do at least a brief summary for most of the sessions.
For Wednesday afternoon, I'm holding some "open office hours" at the NYU Game Center booth on the expo floor. If you'd like to meet me or ask for advice or discuss something, I'll be there. Later that night, however, I actually won't be participating in the Delete GDC party anymore -- you can read our statement here. Instead, I might spend a quiet night somewhere else, or maybe I'll check out the Gay Game Professionals (GGP) party; last year there was even free gourmet pizza if you arrived early. The gays know how to eat.
On Thursday afternoon, I'll probably hangout at Lost Levels in Yerba Buena Gardens for a little while; if you don't have a GDC pass and I don't already know you, then that's probably your best chance of randomly talking with me. Afterward, I'm giving a sexy game design micro-talk at 5:30pm on the Advocacy track, which means anyone at any GDC pass tier can attend. Then to celebrate the end of my obligations, I'll probably attend the GDC speaker party / open bar, where I'll try to drink as much fancy Japanese whiskey as I can.
Friday, March 8, 2019
Why you should almost always localize your games
screenshot from my game Rinse And Repeat, with a sexy shower hunk speaking in Russian subtitles |
It's hard to feel validated and respected as an artist or creator on the internet. One common (and unhealthy) barometer of "success" is to measure how many people play your game or look at your work -- did you find an audience and are you reaching that audience? I argue that localizing your project into other languages will help you find your audience. It might not be an audience you necessarily understand or communicate directly to, but for example, a large Russian or Chinese fan base might help offset the hurt of being ignored in English-speaking media, and so on.
If you believe these random stats I found, about ~80% of Steam users live in countries where English is not the main language. This roughly corresponds to the worldwide average, where it is estimated that only about ~20% of the world (native and non-native speakers combined) uses English, and about ~25% of all internet users use English. Note that these are all very generalized numbers with lots of assumptions, but let's assume they're in the right ballpark -- that means English-only games basically ignore 75-80% of the world.
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