Levels to Look Out For (March 2011)

These are WIP / in-progress levels or environments that look cool + some comments / analysis on my part.

Forbidden Place (Planet?) by Bram "Pericolos0" Eulaers and Anders Jansson
This is an amazing looking single player Source thing that's probably been dead for 2 years, but it looks positively stunning. I love the "had a lot of fun in zBrush" rock cliffs. I love the purple crystals. I love how seamless the skybox is. I love how it barely looks like the Source Engine. (Message to the authors who will find this blog post in their link referrers: "PLEASE PICK THIS UP AND FINISH IT FOR THE LOVE OF GOD")

> Untitled (Bachelor Pad) by Ryan "Loom" Bargiel
I'm a sucker for flat shaded anything. I'm not sure I'd actually want to live in this private orange hell, but gosh this blockout looks cool. (Note: All games should be vertex lit... forever. If it was good enough for Final Fantasy 7, it's good enough for everyone else.) It's also gotten me thinking about "composition" in scenes because I really like the floorplan here and all the shots seem well built.

However, I often see people post screenshots with people painting onto it treating it like a static 2D frame. Is that treatment of composition still valid in a freely-explored 3D space, where the player controls a camera and might spend the whole time staring at a wall or stare at enemies? Do leading lines actually "guide the eye" when we're playing? (I'm skeptical, to say the least.) I mean, yes, it's better portfolio presentation, but is is better game design? How does architecture handle the issue of scene composition?

Bugs are kinda cool.

First Person Films: Doom and Enter the Void

The "point of view" shot is ubiquitous in movies -- an actor glares at something off-frame, then the next shot is an eyeline match to the thing they're glaring at, mimicking their point of view -- but full, sustained sequences with substantial camera movement that doesn't break the rules of first person navigation? Pretty rare, I think. (Please leave a comment if you know of any other films.)

Doom (2005) is an obvious example, and probably the most immediately consumable: you see the gun at the bottom of the screen, bobbing and swaying with the movement of the camera, as it seems to glide up stairs and through metal corridors.



The problem with this (occasionally cool, I guess) scene from Doom is that it confines itself to the boring commonplace parts of the FPS game tropes (reloading a gun that many times?) and ignores what playing Doom 2 was actually like: strafing like mad, back-pedaling like a lunatic -- firing, always firing! -- in a linear, confined metal corridor instead of a non-linear open plan layout.

Or maybe the problem was that they were adapting the powerful sedative that was Doom 3? That's right, I said it.

Gaspar Noe's Enter the Void (2009) does it better, mostly because it does stuff with the first person view that we can't do very well in first person games. Here's the first 10 minutes, omitting the crazy nauseating opening credits:

New MapCore Compo: "The Cube"

Last time, we did a 20 brush compo. This time, it's THE CUBE; make a single player or multiplayer level, any game / mod / engine, as long as it's within a 1024 x 1024 x 1024 cube (or whatever engine equivalent.) That's it.

You have about a month. Get cracking!

Oh, and for reference, here's Duncan Blair's winning entry from the last cube compo we did. Ooooh shiny:

Well, it was nice while it lasted.

"I think the 'artgame' thing has pretty much run its course at this point."
-- Jason Rohrer, 27 December 2010

(bonus links: this epic 242+ page thread on TIGSource, or just read this comic by Cactus which sums it all up nicely... but now that it's dead, let's look upon its exquisite corpse -- what exactly was an 'artgame' anyway?)

Lucas Debes, v0.9 (pre-release beta released!)

REMINDER: You need 2 players for this game. One player clicks "Bailiff" to host the game, then the other player on the LAN clicks "Debes" to join the game.

Me and Eddie Cameron made another Unity game. There's gameplay in it. It's actually surprisingly fun, despite my best efforts to sabotage it.

The setup, kinda like Spy Party: there's an island with lots of NPCs. As Lucas Debes (17th century Danish priest) who's trying to escape the Faroe Islands in a rocketship, you have to blend in and pretend to be an NPC... or maybe you're the bailiff trying to kill him and/or sacrifice all the NPCs to Satan.

• A competitive asymmetrical multiplayer FPS for 2 players.
• Windows or OSX. 800x500 resolution minimum.
• Only LAN support for now, sorry.
• Two different but both amazing ending cutscenes.
• Limitless strategies and infinite levels of strategic yomi, the deepest & most strategic strategy game ever made with strategies

We're not particularly happy with the state of polish and everything, but it's long past that time in a project when you need fresh pairs of eyes to look at it and critique it. So here it is:

Download:  v0.9 PRE-RELEASE BETA
- Windows build (11 mb)
- Mac build (16 mb)
Unzip somewhere and play.
NOTE: only LAN support for now, sorry.

Credits:
Eddie Cameron: code + design, http://www.grapefruitgames.com
Robert Yang, art + design, http://www.radiator.debacle.us

Screenshots and "how to play" / strats / tips, after the jump...

Lucas Debes

Lucas Jacobsøn Debes (1623 in Stubbekøbing - 1675) was a Danish priest, topographer, rocket scientist and celebrated writer about the Faroe Islands. In 1673, he built the first rocket-powered aircraft in the world, with the purpose of escaping the local bailiff's clutches. When he finally reached Denmark (after mistakenly landing in Northern England), Debes was barely conscious and all of his limbs had suffered severe frostbite from the lack of frost shielding in the craft. He was then promptly wheeled into the Dutch Parliament, little more than a stump, and reported the bailiff's numerous abuses and saved the Faroese.

Comatose

"Comatose" is a single player HL2 mod by Aspik where you're bleeding uncontrollably, so you have to take all these pills (clotting agents?) as you try to escape a building in some sickly yellow apocalyptic city -- a great summation of my daily life in New York City.

 Warning! Mechanics spoilers / design analysis after the jump...