Summer 2013 @ NYU GameCenter

This summer, I'll be teaching 6 week Unity studio intensives at NYU Game Center. The "regular" class during the semester is usually 15 weeks, so trying to fit all that material into a summer course will be, uh, interesting.

The sessions themselves are pretty expensive, but I believe that they do count for credit that you can put toward a degree. I believe non-students can also take it for non-credit status, which might be cheaper? Unfortunately, I don't set the price, so all I can do is to try to help you get your moneys' worth. You can look at the Github for "Building Worlds", the (15 week) Unity course I'm teaching at Parsons right now -- as well as a blog post on my general approach to game development education.

You'll, uh, also get to hang out with me, I guess. That's a perk, right?

#lostlevels is an indie unconference on March 28th 2013, 1 PM, downtown San Francisco.

Lost Levels is a hyper-inclusive "unconference" about games and play that is FREE to attend, open to all, and anyone can run a session. It takes place Thursday afternoon of GDC week, in San Francisco. I'm co-running it with Harry Lee, Ian Snyder, and Fernando Ramallo.

I don't know about the others, but the main motivation to organize this, for me, was about imagining an alternate world. Yes, GDC conference sessions are fun, but they're really just an excuse for us all to get together and hang out, and we need a giant conference to motivate us all to fly over and converge in one place.

At its core, it's all about hanging out with people and enjoying each other. Everything else is just a fun ritual to facilitate that. But many people don't have GDC passes -- so what happens to them? The ritual isn't as fun if it prevents people from joining.

Our community will, inevitably, be incredibly diverse, chaotic, and messy. We should embrace the messiness and accept that diversity, and strive to lower barriers.

Please visit the site for more details and sign-up if you'd like to attend or give a talk or run a coloring session or dance it out to Tetris music or eat sandwiches. Thanks.

simian.interface, and filler puzzles as phenomenology.

simian.interface, by Vested Interest, is a game that never tells you the controls or how to play or what your goals are, but you'll immediately intuit all of those things just by interacting with it. In this sense, it's very toy-like: you're just playing with this thing, tossing it and turning it over in your hands. No instructions, hardly any rules.

Nominally, it's also a "puzzle game", but it really doesn't fit into the popular sense of a puzzle game. There's this concept of "filler puzzles" among puzzle games, where puzzles that don't demand any new skill or understanding from the player are not as valuable as more novel puzzles. You can be assured that in a Stephen Lavelle puzzle game, for example, every single puzzle has been consciously constructed and filtered and curated over the course of dozens of playtests. Same thing in Jelly No Puzzle: there's always a bit of additional new lateral thinking that trips you up.

In this sense, simian.interface is an awful puzzle game because it is made almost entirely of filler puzzles -- you're just doing the same thing over and over, and the shapes change a little bit. Most levels take about 15 seconds to complete.

... Except it's a puzzle game where the formal novelty of the puzzles doesn't matter?

Course catalog at Radiator University, Spring 2013

If I had a university, these are some of the courses I'd run:

GD 202: LEVEL DESIGN STUDIO: SPACE AND DATA
There are two paradigms of level design in video games: the level as a constructed space, an architectured environment -- and the level as pattern of challenges, a series of situations and encounters. Students will build floorplans in Doom and engineer enemy attack waves for bullet-hell SHMUP games, build custom chess and checkers boards, and populate Skyrim dungeons with systemic parameters. We will also read an introductory body of architectural criticism and attempt to realize that theory as first person levels in Unity. In the end, we will argue that space and data are actually the same.
(4 credits; meets twice a week; satisfies "Spatial" breadth req.; Paris campus only)

DH 100: INTRODUCTION TO DIE HARD 1 STUDIES
This is the introductory course to Die Hard 1 Studies for students interested in majoring in Die Hard 1. We will watch Die Hard 1 every three weeks. In between screenings, we will read the novel it is based upon ("Nothing Lasts Forever" by Roderick Thorp), play Die Hard Arcade, tour several local modernist skyscrapers, and re-create scenes from the film in both analog and digital formats. By the end of the semester, students will be able to argue persuasively that Die Hard 1's many sequels do not actually exist.
(3 credits; meets once a week; bring your helicopter pilot license to the first class)

GDC tips

It's GDC season again... Daphny has a lot of helpful advice on having a good time at GDC, so make sure you read that. Here's some bits of my own:

• My write-up / thoughts / post-mortem of GDC 2012.
• Don't over-extend / over-promise / flake on people, don't promise to meetup somewhere but then realize that you're actually somewhere else, etc. I did this to people last GDC and felt pretty bad about it. GDC, in particular, is really exciting because there's so much going on, so it's tempting to try to do everything at once... don't do it. Pace yourself.
• That said: here's the official unofficial GDC 2013 party list curated by Brandon Boyer.
• If you must be network-y, then don't be network-y with people who aren't network-y. Use your personal judgment as to whether the person you're talking to (especially an indie or academic) will care about the business card ritual or if they're like Daphny, who uses the business card to mean, "please go away."
• Typical flow / activity of the week goes like this:
  

On EA's Full Spectrum event: "the AAA dev's burden" and their DRM on diversity.

"I feel like I'm in Gattaca"

I honestly thought the Electronic Arts' "Full Spectrum" event was going to be a lot worse, but it was actually pretty okay for an AAA-run event on diversity in games. Going into it, I knew it wasn't going to be some groundbreaking thing on gender and media representation: the event was an advocacy / awareness thing, but it doubled as a press conference for EA to flaunt their brand, and I think that's okay -- marketing is okay as long as we all know it's marketing. They didn't pick the location lightly, a massive sci-fi skyscraper literally 1 minute down the street from the United Nations. It was very symbolic.

Generally, the subject material and arguments presented were pretty basic and really obvious to everyone in the room: a collection of power gays, gay media, LGBT game bloggers, and academics. It was preaching to the converted. Which again, was okay. I thought it was going to be worse. (Later, it turned out to be bad / problematic, but in a different way than I expected...)

Portrait of the game designer as a young artist: Avant-Garde, by Lucas "AD1337" Molina

In the short but esteemed tradition of "games about being a struggling artist in the art world", like Jonathan Blow's Painter or Pippin Barr's Art Game, here comes the new and charming RPG-sim Avant-Garde. Look, it even has its own domain name and everything.

Unity to Android (Nexus 7) with Windows, notes / workflow troubleshooting

Some misc. "quirks" I encountered in setting up a build pipeline from Unity (on Windows) to Android on a Nexus 7... some is mentioned on Unity's Android quickstart docs, some required additional research. Anyway, if you're having problems, here's a pile of different things to try:

Castle of the Red Prince, by CEJ Pacian

CEJ Pacian is probably the best short-form IF writer today. His (?) writing is usually firmly grounded in a genre -- Gun Mute in Mad Max / apocalyptic Western, Snowblind Aces in pulp adventure -- and Castle of the Red Prince is firmly rooted in magical fantasy.

The best part of his work, though, is that these genres and settings aren't really the point. In Gun Mute, Walker and Silhouette, as well as this newest entry, Pacian is clearly more interested in formal experimentation on a small but vital scale, and the genre is just a shortcut to approach narrative effect faster. What if navigation doesn't involve cardinal directions? What if everything is a metaphor? Above all, Pacian is interested in re-configuring how we perceive and navigate through space, in a way that only interactive fiction can afford.

Castle of the Red Prince's experiment, then, might follow these rationales:

This one's for the hometown fans.

An image materialized in my head, and I was forced to try to realize it. We'll see how it goes...

PlayThings, a toys and play symposium, 23-24 Feb 2013 at Parsons

PlayThings is a symposium about structures of play, and the ways in which design can enable or resist those structures. What does it mean to play? How meaningful is the distinction between toy and game? etc.

6 East 16th St, 12th flr
in NYC (near Union Square)
February 23rd - 24th
11 am - 5pm

Day 1:
a panel discussion around the ideas of play led by:
McKenzie Wark (Lang)
Colleen Macklin (PETLab)
Zach Gage (stfj.net)
Cas Holman (RISD)
moderated by John Sharp
+
a 3hr play session with various kinds of toys and games i.e. historical toys, mechanical toys, building blocks, plushies/puppets/dolls, board games, video games and physical games to introduce participants with the variety of things and activities that constitute as play.
(led by Kyle Li and Nick Fortugno)

Day 2:
Day 2 consists of a day-long workshop and play-jam session where participants come up with their own games, toys or other forms of public play and the creations are later reviewed by the panel and other participants.
(5 hr making + 1 hr judging/playtesting)
(basic toy building materials provided)

Game narrative as improvisational theater / negotiation.

The current narrative systems prototype Shakespeare has been somewhat disappointing so far: the director switches, seemingly erratically, between 5-6 different plot threads, and nothing seems coherent. I need a way of (a) allowing the player to influence story pacing / scope, and (b) a way for the system to push back, to try to force some story pacing / scope.

For this, I'm looking at how improvisational comedy generates and upholds structure. You might've heard that improv is about "always saying yes," but there's a lot more to it, apparently.

Specifically, longform improv comedy involves actors cooperating to "find the game" -- to find the core of a joke. Each actor makes "offers" to expand upon a premise and move action forward, hopefully toward a funny destination, and usually, actors err on always accepting offers ("saying yes") and building upon it since "blocking" offers frustrates your scene partners. However, it's very possible to "say yes" to a premise while still "blocking" the "game."

Here's an explanation from an NYC improv comedy personality, Will Hines:

Approaches to game development education.

I'm currently teaching a Unity class at Parsons called "Building Worlds" -- and I'm treating it as my opportunity to get everything right and Solve All Problems in Game Dev Education... Obviously, the reality of the class is much more complicated, and ambitious teaching philosophies never really survive a semester intact.

But before I become bitter and jaded, here are the main principles / pillars I'm starting with:

0) Game development is not game design. The former concerns process, implementation, and engineering, the latter is the art of theoretically abstracting behaviors and relationships into something compelling.

1) Breadth. Everyone should know a bit of every aspect of game development, a "liberal arts" education in all facets of development, and everyone should be able to make a game entirely by themselves. All developers should have basic drawing / modeling skills, basic coding skills, and basic design skills. Of course, everyone has their specialties and interests, but the goal of game development education should be to produce independent, T-shaped developers who can see the big picture and collaborate when they need to. Don't specialize too early.

On Limits and Demonstrations, and games as conceptual art.

This is a sort-of-review about Limits and Demonstrations, by Jake Elliott and Tamas Kemenczy. It gets just a little spoiler-y, but not in a way that'd seriously compromise your enjoyment.

Most people play chess with pieces and a board, but to many players that's not the actual game -- it's just a mnemonic aid, a thing that keeps track of chesspiece locations so you don't have to remember where your rook is. The people who live and breathe chess, however, can play chess just by reading chess notation in a book, which is to say that the game takes place entirely in their minds. This is more or less what happens when you lose a heated multiplayer match of Starcraft and agonize over what you could've should've didn't do, and wonder what alternate paths you might've taken. Likewise, I'd imagine the most skilled Starcraft players can play Starcraft entirely in their minds.

It's not just in games either: Beethoven was deaf but he could imagine the notes and harmonies so well that it didn't matter, and a Chinese concert pianist was jailed for 6 years but stayed skilled by "practicing in his head."

But I think game designers, designing games directly as a form of conceptual art, is still a relatively new thing.

A smoother triplanar shader for Unity.

To review: procedural UVs are amazing and you should consider using them in your games. Now, the old triplanar shader I posted was great at hard-edged cubes, but it didn't handle the transitions between textures very gracefully; curved surface like cylinders and spheres were forbidden.

So I took a look at how James "@farfarer" O'Hare handled the blending in his triplanar terrain shader, and how Tom "@quickfingerz" Jackson grabbed normals in his own triplanar shader (but the blending in his shader would "blow-out" a lot, I found) and I combined their respective strengths. I also added different handling for top vs. bottom textures, since grass rarely grows on ceilings. (Textures in the shot above are from Farfarer's pack.) One last change: I let Unity's built-in surface struct calculate world normals instead of calculating my own.

So far, I've been unable to get normal maps working with it, so if any enterprising blog readers would like to instruct me how to do it, and share that technique, then I'd be much obliged.

Here's my shader so far. Do what you will with it:

Narrative systems workflow; using Fourier analysis and level design metaphors to systemize stories.

This assumes familiarity with Shakespeare, a procedurally-branching narrative system that I'm designing. For an overview / introduction, read "More talk, more rock."

I started by arguing that interactive fiction's narrative systems expose too much complexity and detail to its authors and players, or at least more than most people need or want. With Shakespeare, I hope to achieve just a fraction of that functionality, and I think that fraction is enough to be very compelling while facilitating a writer's work.

In engineering Shakespeare, I think of the system in four parts:
a) The real-time system that runs algorithms, interfaces with the game as the player plays.
b) The data / format of narrative itself, how it's structured.
c) The Unity editor interface for generating, editing, or creating the narrative data.
d) The suggested workflow / instructions for using that interface.

Now that I have enough of a base implemented, I'm starting to think more about that last part, the operations design. Roughly, I think the tool could work like this:

My Spring 2013 at Parsons

This semester at Parsons, I have two things going on:

1) I'm teaching an undergrad / grad studio elective course.

Currents: Building Worlds was originally pitched as an "introduction to Unity" class, but then the administration said that Parsons never conducts purely "software" classes. They suggested teaching Unity through some sort of theoretical lens -- and the class design is probably much better for it. So now, it's kind of an intro to Unity / C# / working with expressive 3D / architectural theory class, and it argues for "3D" as a unique expressive medium in itself. There's also a strong focus on discussing "behaviors" theoretically, and how to combine simple behaviors to produce some sort of emergence... whether that's what constitutes a "world." I think I'll assign a chapter of 10 PRINT as a reading? (The "Currents" prefix is like a disclaimer -- "This course is an experiment. Take it at your own risk.")

2) I'm also a "consultant" / aide / "technologist" on another course, taught by Colleen Macklin / John Sharp / Heather Chaplin.

Datatoys is a collaborative class between journalists and design students to re-imagine journalism as a toy -- to turn data into interactive systems that demonstrate patterns of behavior. "Let's face it," began the journalism professor, "reading the New York Times is really boring. Print journalism is dying. Now, what is the journalism of the future?" What are the politics inherent in toys and play? How do we reconcile that with the ethics of journalism? If play is independent and unstructured, does that resemble how journalistic objectivity is independent? Can players act as journalists? How and when do toys lie?

The multidisciplinary nature of these two courses is what makes them conceptually strong and compelling, yet also very difficult to realize into actual designed things... But if they were easy, then they probably wouldn't be worth doing.

More talk, more rock: on algorithmic game narratives, speculative narrative design futures, and "Shakespeare."

Last time, I wrote about procedural narrative in the context of "process intensity." Here, I expand more on designing the procedural / process part.

Back in an expertly-conducted 2011 Rock Paper Shotgun interview, Dan Pinchbeck argued that game development culture unnecessarily separates narrative from the rest of a video game:

"I just want story to be talked about as a gameplay element that sometimes isn’t there. It’s part of the set of tools that a game designer uses to create an experience – and it should be thought of along the same lines, as physics or AI or something more mechanical."

We have physics engines or texture libraries, so why don't we think of narrative as a modular "asset" or "engine" or "library" to be swapped around as well? Why can't narrative be more "mechanical." Where's all the narrative middleware? (Storybricks doesn't seem to be doing too well, unfortunately. I also don't agree with them, that proc narrative is mainly an AI problem...)

Devlog: "Conanbowl"

(lighting / color test with random NPC mobs)
Me and Eddie decided we should make a game this past / current weekend. It started with our usual process: clicking "random page" in Wikipedia until something strikes us. This time, we were struck by "The God in the Bowl," a Conan the Barbarian short story where Conan has to solve a murder (?) when he's actually there because he wants to rob the museum, but then a ghost kills a bunch of people?

Anyway, this concept resonated with us: an adventure-ish game where you must steal things and solve a case; you're a kleptomaniac detective in Victorian-ish London, and you're assigned to cases where you're actually the thief.

Or something like that.

2/3

At some point, I think I forgot I was making a game. It became more like this expansive simulation of every possible reality, folding into itself; I caught myself wanting to make everything interchangable with everything else, to let every piece talk to another piece and act like yet another. Everything was a network, a graph, and every node was another network. Recursion upon recursion.

There's a tendency in game development to think that you will always be coding "the" framework you can re-use and re-use for everything. Everything should be modular, endlessly recyclable, endlessly useful. It's hard to let that go and accept that you should focus on making a game, first -- a game that works -- and not an engine or a library or something that'll change everything as we know it. I ended up forgetting the most basic lessons of making.

Convo felt too big, and it felt too big by 2/3. I had to cut 2/3. I don't know how I can quantify a fraction like that, but I thought about my ability to build and engineer and develop, within the timeframe I wanted, and decided it was overextended by at least 2/3. I've cut a bunch of stuff, but I'm not sure if the scraps on the floor -- do they add up? Is it enough? How do you know if you've cut too much? Is this what Peter Molyneux feels like?

More details soon...

The unportalable: games as paratexts and products

Several years ago, I sat-in on a "games as literature" course, and promptly got into an argument with the instructor. We were talking about Portal, and he argued the dark metal unportalable surfaces seem "sinister" because of their color, rustiness, sense of alien materiality and permanence, lack of affordance, etc. (This was also an introductory course, so a lot of his effort went towards getting students to make critical arguments about games at all.)

I argued that interpretation was irrelevant, and that type of thinking was obfuscating how these surfaces actually function to players: in Portal you don't think to yourself, "that wall is scary," but you more often think "I can't portal there, let's look somewhere else" or "wow that wall looks cool on these graphics settings." To me, the wall material told more of a paratextual story rather than a diegetic story.

Kentucky Route Zero (Act 1), by Jake Elliott and Tamas Kemenczy

The first act of Kentucky Route Zero is now available for purchase, conveniently on the same day as the news that it has more or less swept this year's IGF nominations. The praise is well-deserved. Cynically, you could sum it all up as Sword and Sworcery + Prairie Home Companion + the love child of a Jorge Luis Borges / David Lynch / Flannery O'Connor threesome (except, uh, less violent). It is a game consisting almost entirely of moods.

Convo's current epistemology spec / knowledge model

In Convo, characters do not have fixed names or skill stats, exactly. Instead, they have knowledge that they selectively believe about themselves and represent to others.

One character might have knowledge that they are sometimes Josef, a French civilian with 8 mind points. Someone else could also have knowledge that they are sometimes Josef, an Abwehr officer masquerading as a French civilian with 6 mind points and lockpicking abilities. Both characters can claim to be "the" Josef, and perhaps both characters are the Josef. The "truth" is partly whatever you can get the people who matter to believe -- that might be a commander, a guard, or a farmer, or whomever you need to accomplish your goals at a certain time and place. A "person" is just the sum of their knowledge and what other people believe and perceive about them.

This knowledge model, of separating objects from their qualities, describes personal identities -- but it also describes the entire world and what happened in it. To some extent, the world doesn't exist, just traces of it.

The 2013 Queer Feminist Agenda for Games

Identity politics in video games are on the rise: there are more transgender, gay, or queer people in games speaking out about their experiences, and more women are speaking up about harassment and discomfort that pervades game culture. As we approach next year and consolidate / organize / build-up this wonderful "queer feminist game culture" coalition, here are the major issues currently on my mind:

Amnesia Fortnight design notes / analysis: "Autonomous"

I played the Double Fine Amnesia Fortnight prototypes without watching their pitches or videos or reading anything at all about them, so my descriptions / genre framing might be different from the "official" language used. MECHANICS SPOILERS BELOW...

Autonomous is a first person game where you build and "program" robot NPCs to battle hostile NPCs / mine resources for you.

Just around the corner, always out of reach...

UPDATE, 19 June 2014: I have given up on this project, and I'm open-sourcing the project files.

The ballad of the bloodthirsty poet. Still a lot left to do...

Current to-do list:
- redo door textures
- redo hologram textures
- fix the buttons so the level is completable again
- add gubbins and doodads, geo detail pass
- tweak lighting (esp. plants in gravity chamber, boost crystal .rad)
- redo skybox, add space jellyfish (?)
- carve channels into the main chamber floor
- data effect pass: entire complex comes to life
- garg?

Deceptive epistemologies in strategy game interfaces, and a theory of strong vs. weak fallibility.

When you play Command and Conquer or Starcraft, you're supposedly some anonymous commander at a console who can see everything and command everyone via some combination of technology and/or space magic. When you play Warcraft, maybe you're looking into a magic mirror. When you play Company of Heroes, uh, you're... uh... a plane is flying above and radioing battlefield recon back to HQ, and some lovely women in neat khaki caps slide pieces around on a map?...

As far as user interface framing goes, there's very little metaphor outside of fantasy magic and holographic virtual magic. Of course, none of these are "problems" in these games, because everyone knows it's a trick -- that is, we all know it's just some stupid bullshit that doesn't matter, and that's okay. ("Tetris doesn't need a plot!!!")

But the only way to coherently read this kind of fiction is to disembody it, to assume you're more like some abstract "force" -- maybe you're the collective human will to survive or collective unconscious manifestation of nationalism, some system of belief guiding all these people and resources toward some grand purpose that few of them can imagine. (Frozen Synapse imagines that you are literally "Tactics," the player character is the squad's abstract ability to think, perceive, and act.)

A confirmed heart

A month ago I wrote about the Heart in Dishonored, and I'm glad my suspicions (it's a dressed-up radar / hint system / audio guide) were correct in this semi-interview at RPS with Arkane devs.

I can't say I share the author's admiration of its narrative results as meaningful narrative -- I found it way too transparent and instrumental in what "they wanted you to feel", which is why the Outsider NPC fails for me -- the designers want to narrate and interpret everything for me, to explain their game. I don't think it's subtle. (Comparatively, the Outsider's dad, the G-man, usually ends up confusing me more than anything. His magic is genuinely mysterious and Gordon Freeman never gets any access to it. In contrast, the Outsider isn't mysterious -- he's just an unexplained writer mouthpiece / deus ex machina / character with no stake at all in what goes on, it's hard to care about a non-presence)

So now I think the way forward for the industry (I believe in a "way forward" because I think novelty is extremely important in art, not in some game industry myth of innovation) to develop its storytelling techniques is, ironically, to listen to that crazy Far Cry 3 writer and think of an entire game as narrative, rather than confining narrative to an isolated series of dioramas with doomed corpses and "poignant" voice over narration. Some of the best indie games do this already: your entire experience is the game narrative, not just some one-off readables or loading screen lore that a writer typed into a spreadsheet.

How do you explain insanity

I remember talking to a game journalist about the difference between interviewing AAA developers and indies. He said a lot of indies and academics never stop talking, but AAA developers get quieter much faster -- maybe they were trained by PR or maybe they're tired? who knows -- but the most recent exception was an interview with a Far Cry 3 dev. This was back in August, so I was thinking, "oh yeah Far Cry 3, they're making that huh," and listened.

He said the Far Cry 3 interview was interesting because apparently the writers did a lot of research on insanity. They wanted to deconstruct insanity. They even featured an insane NPC as the character in the cover art, not the player character / protagonist, which was probably the first sign of them overestimating the importance (or, player interest) in all these details.

"But how do you explain insanity in rational terms?" I asked, "and I saw the trailer, it just looks like -"

The journalist nodded, "yeah, I know."

(Unrelated to insanity: this strange interview with the Far Cry 3 writer.)

new game: "Barback" for Ludum Dare #25

"Barback" is a 1-2 player cooperative / competitive Tapper-ish variant about 2 brothers and a bar. It should take you about 15-20 minutes to play through. It's a Ludum Dare "jam" game, which means I spent 72 hours instead of 48, and used remixed assets from outside sources. The extra day was worth it though.

Theme-wise, perhaps it doesn't really fit with the "You are the villain" theme, now that I'm done with it and looking back. I didn't want to make a game with obvious villains, but I think about my mental concept of a "villain" and by definition it seems to involve blatant villainy and a twirlable moustache. In this narrative, the villains are mundane: your own crushing feeling of failure, or people who care about you but are very pushy, etc.

some more words on the AAA manshooter / text games

I have a knack for sending too much material to journalists when really they just want a quote or two. I promise to stop doing that. In the meantime, John Brindle's posted up the rest of my response from a piece he did about text / introspection / war games. It's cross-posted here, with some marked edits.

Triple Jam Pile-up this weekend!

This weekend is the classic monolith of game jams, Ludum Dare #25! Theme is still pending for a few more hours...

Also, this weekend in New York City is a special game jam hosted at Parsons called "Game On", co-sponsored by Github and Mozilla. The main requirement is to make an HTML5 game. Prizes include a trip to GDC 2013 (wow!) and I think there's free food to jam with, at least. (And as long as you're here this weekend, also check out Spacewar! at the Museum of the Moving Image, charting the long lineage of shooters from ur-game "Spacewar!" on a PDP-1 replica through Metroid II and ending with Halo 4.)

ALSO, this month in Chicago, there's the Six Pack Jam. Jake Elliott and friends are putting an arcade cabinet in some bar in Wicker Park and they want cool games to put on the cabinet! Here, the implied constraints are 2 player compatible modes with short arcade-scope play sessions, but maybe that's just my interpretation.

You could, potentially, make a 2 player HTML5 game with [LD theme] and submit everywhere. Whoaa.

Tiny Soccer Manager Stories, by Pierre Corbinais

My very strong favorite of the TIGSource "Sports" compo is Pierre Corbinais' "Tiny Soccer Manager Stories." It's a 20 minute-ish puzzle game made in Adventure Game Studio that tasks you as a substitute junior high soccer coach, and your job is to balance the two teams to make sure everyone plays, even the kids who suck.

(INSTALLATION NOTE: To get this to run on my Win7x64 system, I had to change the settings to "Direct3D 9" windowed mode. Try that if it doesn't work for you.)
(HINT: If a particular puzzle gives you a lot of trouble, use the "Skip Puzzle" option in the menu. The game doesn't penalize you or limit you at all.)

I've whined before about how we should narrativize the sports genre, and I think TSMS does some really great things with game narrative using this roster mechanic -- it isn't the first sports mechanic that comes to mind, which just makes this all the more refreshing and novel. Here's why this game is awesome: (SPOILER ALERT)

CFP: "Different Games" at NYU Poly, due Feb 1

Different Games is a new game conference in NYC that focuses on race / gender / sexuality / disability / politics in games. If you have something to say or make (game / installation / workshop / talk) then you might want to submit something by Feb 1st. More info at http://www.differentgames.org/cfp/

(Also, NYC is at its best in April...)

Recent happenings at New Statesman

Liz Ryerson recently linked here in her "recommended game criticism reading list" at the New Statesman, and John Brindle recently wrote a piece for them about text-based games commenting on war better than AAA counterparts with a few quotes from me on the topic. Check it out.

Specially Level with Me, at Rock Paper Shotgun (updated)

Part 2 is up now. We talk about Portal 2 puzzle design, inspirations behind the underground chapters, and certainly nothing about HL3.

I talk more in this part than the other part because I'm trying to figure out why Adam Foster's work is so good -- is it because his floorplans are so 3D and holistic? Is it his bold use of symmetry in places? Someplace Else has a structure you don't see in-game: the alien complex has a spine, ribcage, and even some kind of pelvis with vestigial legs. I thought Half-Life 1's r_speeds were keeping him from linking all the areas and making this structure more apparent, but after the interview, I think it's more that he likes keeping some secrets to himself.

And to "justAModsLover": I totally forgot about the Someplace Else port, and I'm going to make that my winter project.

Part 1 of my interview with Adam Foster, fancy modding celebrity genius / Portal 2 level designer / one of Valve's ARG masterminds, is now up. (And, okay, I ask him about HL3 in part 2...)

I hope people notice my image curation cleverness re: putting a screenshot of his older HL1 mod Parallax with a giant funicular cargo lift next to a more recent screenshot from Nightwatch with a giant funicular cargo lift. Gotta love the hazard stripe trims. In both levels, these were pretty big epic setpieces and more or less define how the rest of the level is structured. The best part is that they all contradict the original funicular setpiece from HL1, the slow headcraby-descent in the middle of Unforeseen Consequences -- there are no monsters suddenly spawning in either of Foster's versions (if I remember correctly in Parallax?) so you just enjoy the ride and scenery, though you're probably on edge the entire time.

If you're an Adam Foster fan, I do encourage you to check-out Parallax. It's so old and a bit buggy, but the structure still feels pretty modern.

Teaching game development community.

In Spring 2013, I'll be teaching an undergrad / grad Unity course at Parsons called "Currents: Building Worlds."

The course has a few learning goals -- (a) to gain a broad conceptual understanding of how Unity works across art assets and code, (b) to learn some useful software engineering patterns for games, (c) to develop self-sufficiency for solving Unity problems / "learn how to learn", and lastly (d) to recognize membership in a global game development community.

That last one's probably the most ambitious.

Using screen-buffer masks in Unity Pro for a fog of war effect.

As I prototyped Convo, it became clear that I would need some sort of fog of war / sight radius visualization. Depth masks weren't very good for this because of the uneven terrain, and the other fog of war solutions I found involved a tile system (nah), or a vertex alpha plane (eww), or some other pretty convoluted thing. Lame. So I did a bunch of research and figured out my own technique... best of all, this visualization uses no script code at all, it's just shaders and geometry.

Also, you don't have to use this for fog of war. You can use it anytime you need to mask-off certain bits of the camera view on a per-object, per-triangle, or per-pixel basis. Like, maybe you'd want some stuff to glow red?...

The gist: (you will need Unity Pro since this uses render textures)
1) A camera's render texture is in RGBA format. You can technically do whatever you want with the alpha channel; most of Unity's built-in shaders use it to mask out alpha textures for various image effects.
2) If we use a shader that writes only to that alpha, we can use it to mask objects or pixels.
3) Then, we edit the image effect shader to modulate an effect with the alpha channel values.

If you need some more details and shader code, read on...

Radiator Blog: Three Year Anniversary

Wow, I've been blogging here for about 3 years now. This blog is now approaching the end of its toddler years. Much like last year, and the year before, here's a "greatest hits" compilation of this past year's posts:

(Oh, and feel free to have some cake. Forks and plates are over there, on the table.)

GAME ARCHITECTURE CRITICISM

• Why game architecture matters and the reality / unreality of de_dust. If digital life is real-life, then digital places are real places. QED.
• The shape of crime and escape. Notes from a BLDGBLOG panel / talk on heists and bank design, and me trying to apply it to game architecture. Sort of a sequel to last year's "On the first person military manshooter and the shape of modern warfare" which takes off from another BLDGBLOG talk on military infrastructure as war.
• Infinite Omaha. I went to the real-world Omaha Beach, then compared it to various video game portrayals of Omaha. 
• The shadow of the white cloud: architecture criticism at the 1893 World’s Fair and BioShock Infinite. These days, I'm more reluctant to credit the upcoming BioShock Infinite with intellectual subtlety -- it's a game where you shoot men while riding ziplines -- but still, "City Beautiful" is one of the most influential and distinctly traceable trends in architecture ever. It's also a forerunner to thought on Disneyland, theme parks, and "artificial" architecture.
• A short history of non-monoplanar first person movement. The biggest con of non-monoplanar movement is that it's hard to make giant impressive sweeping landscape levels: you're usually either stuck inside a padded room, or you're running outside on an asteroid, and neither offers a grand vista because you're either inside or outside but rarely just off to the side. The horizon is always shifting.
• What makes good writing on level design? I think writing is best when it's specific, and here I try to articulate what I like about certain writers' styles.
• On Joiner and the cult of greeble. If Sleep No More spams readables to show how much money went into it, then TF2 maps spam meticulous func_detail brushwork to imply the mastery and skill of the level designer. What happens when you automate the writing of readables, or automate the placement of detail? I think indie developers are more conscious of the cult of detail than AAA devs, mostly because detail is expensive to add.

COMMISSIONS

• Level With Me, a post-mortem. A Portal 2 mod I did for Rock Paper Shotgun. The level design is some of my better work, and I like the idea of game journalism in the form of games, but it seemed somewhat cooly received. I have to conclude that it must simply be not as good as I think it is... or that Portal 2 players are super lame.
• The Future of the FPS, written for PC Gamer UK in issue 240. A short essay and list of really cool indie FPS games and how they're changing the genre, kind of the basis for my later RPS series. Thanks Graham!
• A People's History of the FPS. A three-part essay series for Rock Paper Shotgun that argues mods are transcending their video game bodies, becoming genuine culture that is increasingly independent of the products that they're meant to be "modding" and adding value to.

ON GAME NARRATIVE

• The myth of psychological realism in narrative. Argues that thinking of fictional characters as "people" is meaningless for a writer. It is much more useful to write by thinking of a character as a vehicle for plot, and let the player fill-in character for themselves.
• Dishonored fails as an immersive sim in its first minute. The simulation should be "immersive" -- meaning, the scope of it should be consistent and everywhere. Scripting special cases goes against this genre dogma.
• Dishonored uses the Heart to lie to you. You'd expect the Heart to be an unreliable narrator of some sort, but it doesn't lie to you with narrative -- it lies to you through gameplay and psychological framing.
• "Stair K": architecture criticism, Thief, and a coffee maker. Situates Thief as dialog on social class and urban architecture. (e.g. stairs are invisible to rich people who take taxis, not subways, and frequent buildings with abundances of elevators) It argues that in Thief, stealing is framed as an ethical act because the rich deny the truth and infrastructure of cities.
• Thief 1's "Assassins" and its environmental storytelling. I really hate the type of analysis that just thinks of game narrative as a static text that you read -- game narrative is also a game design tool, a way to make the game better to play. Games tell stories, yes, but those stories tell games too.
• What do simulations simulate? Argues that a simulation gap is important for framing a narrative.
• The structure of Sleep No More (part 1, no spoilers) and (part 2, detailed and spoilery). You paid a lot to see this damn show everyone's raving about and now you're inside, on a timer. Are you going to spend your valuable time (a) reading faint scribbles on random pieces of paper under a dim flickering light-bulb or (b) follow the crazy naked people who have an interpretive dance orgy in a blood-smeared disco?
  
  I still think a lot of "game critics on Sleep No More" like the idea of it more than how people actually consume it -- unfortunately, reading is boring and performance is captivating. So I argue the readables function as set dressing to assure you of the production's expense, not to serve as barely coherent narrative in a familiar plot that's hundreds of years old. Of course, the dancing's fantastic, but I guess it's hard to argue for the value of dance to gamer culture.
• Rule Databases for Contextual Narrative. On modding Valve's dynamic self-branching conversation system and using it to author dynamic self-branching narrative, and how Emily Short's already doing something like that, naturally. I think it's one of the more promising directions toward a holy grail of procedural narrative.
• Balls and conversation: let's narrativize the sports genre. I really love baseball movies, but I'm really bored by the focus on statistics, which is probably why Moneyball sucked. There's a rich tradition of sports narratives in film and literature, but in video games it's conspicuously absent. Let's change that.
• "Do you think shooters take themselves too seriously?" We watch blockbusters in a special way, I think, but the gulf between action films and action games is this: the films are structured to be human and sympathetic, but games are sociopathic and mean. This is a game narrative writing problem.

ON GAME CULTURE

• Frog Fractions should really win something at the IGF.
• On appreciating the UV texture flat as fine art. Here, I propose three aesthetic modes for enjoying texture flats on their own merits and glorifying them as authentic game art, rather than the silly concept art we parade as game art. I later re-wrote this piece for Game Developer magazine, as "Loving the Bones."
• Desperate Gods and rules-forcing in games. Pretty recent, but I think it's a good summary of current thought on the issue -- if you can play a game of Starcraft in your head, and Starcraft exists fundamentally more as a mental construct than a product, then why can't we just argue the rules of Starcraft in the same way we interpret and amend the laws of board games.
• On grad school for games / what studying at Parsons was like. Imagine a cohort of game developers from all around the world, and 50% are women, and 10% aren't straight people. Parsons is like the rainforest: diverse, beautiful, and vital to the global ecosystem -- but it's also humid, with lots of insects everywhere, and it's constantly in danger of deforestation. It's not for some people, while others will really grow to love it.

GAME CONFERENCE / FESTIVAL NOTES

• Why Indiecade is the best games conference / festival I've ever been to. It might sound like hyperbole but it really isn't.
• I spoke at Games for Change this past year, on LGBTQ attitudes and developers in games. It went great. I began with "I'm Robert Yang, and I'm a practicing homosexual" -- and the entire auditorium erupted in applause and cheering. It was an amazing feeling.
• Notes on the Games for Change industry. Fun fact: I got into an argument with a G4C speaker in the comments. His stance -- yeah the games suck, but people want to put a lot of money into this, so just accept it. My stance -- art should be a free or reasonably available public good, not a product.
• How the worst part of the game industry uses PAX East to teabag your entire face with its cancerous scrotum. I encourage everyone to go to at least one big mass market game convention, because that's when you will know what "indie" really means and you'll realize how small, puny, and insignificant we "video game intelligentsia" really are. The sheer amount of money being thrown around in this industry is insane -- the money spent on a 20-foot tall Blops booth-complex, blaring out noise at a regular interval, is a huge contrast to the humility and humanity of indie game culture.
• What were the main trends of GDC 2012? A look-back on what happened and what stuck out as significant.

UNITY TUTORIALS / RESOURCES

• Shader-based worldspace UVs ("triplanar") in Unity. The worst thing about BioShock's environments is the cookie-cutter feel of the game architecture, the result of modular building in game engines today. The scale and proportions don't feel human or plausible. To me, one answer is to embrace old school BSP construction techniques with procedural UVs so that you can scale your primitives to arbitrary sizes without texture stretching.
• How to integrate Unity and Twine. Notes on Unity's web player JS hooks, and how that can feed into Twine's JS, or any webpage's JS, really.
• How to dig holes in Unity terrains. How to use depth mask meshes to selectively mask geometry, then disable the terrain collider temporarily.
• The best Unity tutorial writer in the world. He really is. I'd pay him to write a book, in fact, but unfortunately I'm poor.

Desperate Gods and rules-forcing in video games.

Desperate Gods, by Wolfire Games, is a virtual board game made for Fuck This Jam; you have a bunch of virtually simulated tokens and cards, but you must process and execute the game rules yourself. You can easily cheat, but then what's the point?

DG is not the first game or toolset to do this, although it's certainly the most polished and nicest looking so far. LackeyCCG, for instance, gives you a deck builder, a table, some tools for keeping track of state, then walks away and lets you get to it. The rationale, from their FAQ:

Q: Does LackeyCCG force people to follow a CCG's rules? Will it allow me to do something that isn't legal?
A: LackeyCCG does not implement rules forcing. I have tried other methods of playing CCGs online and I have found that forcing rules adherence just serves to bog down the game and makes it much less fun to play. Lackey allows you to simplify your turn when not much interesting is happen (so you can get to the more fun parts of a game faster). LackeyCCG will allow you to do anything you could do if you were playing with real cards. It also allows for a more formal adherence to the rules if you want to play that way, but it doesn't force any particular play style.

On why Convo is now a WW2 spy romance, and the myth of psychological realism in fiction.

Short version: I've chickened out, a bit. Long version?

To make some sort of procedural "anything", you have to have an idea of what the building blocks of that "anything" are, or at least what you'll argue they are -- and then either frame your game in those terms or expressly simulate those terms. So if Convo is a game about narrative instead of people, then what's a unit of narrative?

From there, my thinking goes like this...

Dear Esther postpartum, by Robert Briscoe.

Rob Briscoe has put-out a really heart-felt, personal, death-defying postpartum on Dear Esther.

I think if you ask the vast majority of career game developers out there (or anyone, really) what they're worried about -- it's probably money.

It's industry developers without any job security or a job, where shipping a title means the publisher will force layoffs to improve their quarterly financials. It's the average indies who glare at their monthly 3 figure check from their meager sales, assuming it's even that much, and wonder what that'll buy after rent.

Briscoe had to sacrifice a lot and felt poised to fail throughout the entire process, even though everyone was telling him that Dear Esther was going to do well. Given popular depictions of game development, it seems success comes to those who risk everything to the point of emotional breakdown.

Can we, in good conscience, recommend careers in game development (AAA or indie) to the uninitiated when our passions often lead to the verge of self-destruction? I guess you never hear about the developers with stable lives, happy families, and financial security -- their lives aren't stories -- but isn't it scary to think that passion can easily lead to hell instead of the good life?

Dishonored's narrative design: how The Heart lies to you.

(UPDATE: this interview at RPS with Arkane devs confirms that not only was I right, but that it was also a very conscious decision on their part to make it do that, wow.)

Dishonored does a lot of things with game narrative (abstract dream levels, scripted body awareness, lots of readables, overheard conversations, scripted sequences, branching missions changing based on player decisions) which fit neatly into the existing immersive sim / first person toolbox that we're used to. It's well-done, but it's not particularly new or anything.

The Heart is something slightly different, though, and I found it surprisingly subtle and ironic.

Level design / character SPOILERS (but no plot SPOILERS) below:

Convo and "what do simulations simulate?"

Simulations are simplified systems that have some semblance to the real world. The decrease in complexity, the ways in which the simulation is different from the actual thing, is called the "simulation gap."

In games, I argue that players never forget they're playing a game or simulation, but they're willing to suspend their disbelief and ignore the gap to enjoy themselves more. I think the term "immersion" in the sense of "forgetting you're playing a game", then, mischaracterizes this dynamic and implies the simulation is all-encompassing and consumes the player, when really, it's important that games are NOT holodecks and it's a good thing that they aren't.

As designers, one of our jobs is to "sell the simulation gap" and make it an asset instead of a liability.

Why Frog Fractions is one of the best games of 2012.

First, you really should play Frog Fractions right now.

My SPOILER-y thoughts are after the jump.

"Zobeide" at Playing The Game, 27-28 October in Milan

I'm fixing up Zobeide / adding a few features for yet another Lunarcade event, this time at "Playing The Game" in Milan from 27-28 October at Spazio O' Artoteca. If you're around, then you should attend, if for no other reason than to play XRA's mesmerizing "Memory of a Broken Dimension."

Machine translated website copy (from Italian to English) is after the jump:

Talking about Convo.

Figuring out how to talk about your game is part of designing your game -- so trying to explain Convo to various people has been extremely helpful in refining my design goals.

My favorite version so far has been, "it's an attempt to make The Sims accessible for hardcore gamers."

The argument is that social simulations like The Sims and Prom Week are actually really complicated systems, more complicated than most supposedly "hardcore" games -- like, I tried playing Prom Week again the other day, and couldn't understand how to achieve anything because each character has a dozen abilities and a dozen moods and a dozen relationships. It seemed like a brute force approach to simulation, to dissect the gamut of human feeling and then to directly design and represent each facet. Don't even get me started on how much stuff is in The Sims... it's all very fascinating, but it's also really intimidating.

But take something like XCOM -- I really like how there are just 3 core verbs (move, shoot, overwatch) that produce a variety of situations. However, the player stories consist mostly of "my squad was in danger and we survived" or "we got massacred" or stuff along those lines. I don't think XCOM's relatively limited range of emergent narratives come from its limited verb set; I think they come from the premise of its simulation, a military squad battling aliens. What if we replaced that premise with, uh, the mundane but thrilling dramas of everyday life?

"My bros were in danger but one chatted up a really hot girl, but then she started talking about particle physics which he knew nothing about, so I had him text his friend about particle physics so he could talk to her instead. Turns out, they both hated plaid."

Other elevator pitches:

• "It's like XCOM plus Jersey Shore."
• "It's about applied linguistics and binge drinking."
• "It's like XCOM plus Love Actually."

Dishonored fails as an immersive sim within its first minute.

This post DOES NOT spoil Dishonored's plot, but it DOES spoil a little bit about how Dishonored's branching narrative works.

I'm being dramatic here; Dishonored is pretty well-designed and gorgeous and I enjoyed myself. I liked Dishonored, on the whole. However, I couldn't help but notice that Dishonored, taken as the immersive sim it keeps insisting it is, fails within its first minute under that tradition. It fails upon giving you your first choice:

Do you want to play the tutorial or not?

Indiecade 2012, notes

Part of me thinks I shouldn't even write about Indiecade: it's something that should be jealously protected from all the evil in the world. Its "independence" doesn't refer to the substantial indie attendance; it refers to how differently it does things, standing apart from the giant game conventions I've been to:

• It's for the public. The "village" consumes the better half of the Culver Hotel parking lot / plaza, and you have a constant stream of random people strolling in. The finalist arcade is inside a firehouse. Various panels and talks are in random auditoriums / civic institutions. This is a festival that's actually interfacing with a city and takes pride in what a city is, while other conventions are so huge they isolate themselves in compounds far from city centers.
• Real access to people. Want to talk to Jonathan Blow? Well, he's sitting on that bench over there. All those darlings you follow on Twitter? Over there, getting a beer. Los Angeles' lack of effective public transit means that people generally stay around the festival area and it's easier to find / meet people, ironically.
• Really good cookies. Damn, those were good cookies.
• Real engagement. There was a talk about queer games and people asked critically interesting questions: What, structurally, is a queer game? Is identity politics a distraction from more pressing issues like the indie-industry relationship? Across the entire festival, there were very few stupid questions, very little noise about "that's not a game" or "this genre is better than that genre" -- work was approached on its own merits.
• It's not really about business. I mean, business totally took place -- Sony is a major sponsor and is definitely the most indie-friendly publisher I've seen -- so it's there if you look for it, but otherwise you'll never drown in it, which is really nice.

If you can afford Indiecade, then go. That's all I can say.

MINERVA Month!

As queen of all mod-dom, I do declare October to be MINERVA Month -- this year, celebrating the 5th anniversary of Adam Foster's MINERVA: Metastasis! Loyal acolytes are hereby advised to investigate new documents leaked to the public: https://hylobatidae.org/minerva/blogsheep.php?action=articleinfo&id=115

Also, look out for some MINERVA-related things, due out for later this month, if the stars align...