7dfps: The Leaden Circles, prep

(I'm making an FPS in 7 days, as are many other designers. This is cross-posted.)

"One feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air."

Mrs. Dalloway is a novel by Virginia Woolf about a rich white lady in 1920s London throwing a party for a bunch of random acquaintances she doesn't really care about. She does it because she likes the attention and it's good for her husband's career.

It's also about a smart-ass white dude coming back from India who judges everyone.

It's also about a depressed World War I veteran who's going insane, hearing trees sing in ancient Greek. It's also about.... well, 20 other people.

It's not an easy read on the first try. Virginia Woolf wrote it in a "stream of consciousness" style, meaning you go back and forth between different characters' heads, often without warning -- sometimes several times in a paragraph. Sometimes you're reading what he thinks she thinks he thinks, as filtered by her (?!) but trust me, it's rewarding. Part of the idea behind making this is that hopefully it'll make the logic and systems governing the book (novels and narratives are systems!) more apparent.

Now, most of the different book covers feature a portrait of some random lady on the front... which totally misses the point. My favorite version is the one above, Wassily Kandinsky's Akzent in Rosa (1926). Sure, the book is about a Mrs. Dalloway, but it's also about consciousness, some kind of unseen universe on the edges of human comprehension.

My plan is to adapt Mrs. Dalloway as "The Leaden Circles," a single player squad shooter with a stream of consciousness mechanic, kind of in a Space Hulk format. You'll ping pong between the different characters, chaining together thoughts, memories, and feelings -- and to win, you have to get this rich petty vapid white lady to feel something deeply profound at the end of the day.

I'll be using Unity, C#, Maya, Audacity, Photoshop, and source material from Virginia Woolf, CGTextures, FreeSound.org.

Let's do this, and good luck to everyone!

PCG UK #240, "The Weird Future of the FPS"

I'm published! In print! Unfortunately it's pretty difficult to find a copy of PCG UK if you live outside of the UK, but I'll be giving a longer, more comprehensive talk on FPS past / present / future at the No Show Conference on July 14th / 15th at MIT.

Thanks to PCG UK Deputy Editor Mr. Graham Smith / modding pal from way back when.

France Diaries: sketches + a 3 sentence review of "Game Feel"

I'm in France right now. This is part of a series of game architecture diaries about France.

If anyone thinks I'm qualified to offer advice to beginning level designers, then here's that advice: draw, even if you're awful at it.

France Diaries: Infinite Omaha.

I'm in France right now. This is part of a series of game architecture diaries about France.

Walking through French farms and wandering Parisian streets has been somewhat unreal because merde, I've been here before... even though I haven't. Among all the Omaha Beaches, the Caens, and the Parises I've visited, the layout has been new and foreign, but the architectural language and landscapes are always familiar. It's the same place but it's also not.

Sure, we've all visited countless virtual New Yorks and Londons and Iraqs too, but France is different.

France, as depicted in military shooters, has always been the battlefield of stone farmhouses, green fields, medieval towns, cathedrals -- and it's up to the Americans to sprint up the beach and save this poor bleeding land. It's surprising, then, to discover that France's France is not a smoldering ruin covered in grass sprites.

Balls and conversation; let's narrativize the sports genre.

The mechanics in baseball video games usually work like this: the pitcher chooses between a fastball, a slower pitch (change-up), or one that rapidly sinks / curves (breaking ball). The batter tries to predict the trajectory of the pitch to hit it. Both players try to fake each other out. It's rock paper scissors with a heavy element of timing.

However, I'm making a game about a specific pitcher named Troy Percival, and Percival rarely threw slow pitches. In fact, he pretty much only threw fastballs -- but they were deadly, among the speediest fastballs in the history of the sport.

Bases loaded, Jeter at the plate? Percy threw fastballs.

"Where would be the fun of making something you knew was going to work?" -Neil Gaiman

Parsons post-mortem: "Games and..."

Parsons is a bit of a secret games school: they don't advertise much, and the students / faculty rarely shill for the program. (I'm an exception, I guess.)

I enjoyed my time here, but it's not for everyone. I find most prospective students are trying to decide between Parsons / NYU / USC or something, so this post is mostly tailored to them. (There's also a tl;dr at the bottom.)

Here are, what I think, the strengths of studying games at MFA Design and Technology at Parsons:

• Diversity. A Model UN's worth of international students. About 40-50% of the students / faculty are women. Also, there's a healthy LGBT presence and culture, e.g. some of our bathrooms are branded "gender-inclusive", and ~10% of our cohort was LGBT. Some students are 36 year old engineers; some are 24 year old dancers and biologists. Altogether, this makeup is VERY rare in the monoculture that is the technology / games field.
• Breadth. You will go to gallery openings and interact with the larger New York City art scene. You will learn soldering, coding, and typography. You'll get a general sense of where the "new media" art scene is at, to the point where you can go to a MoMA exhibition and yawn at their curation with knowing confidence.
• Flexibility. If you realize you're not into games so much, you can totally do something else without any disruption toward your degree. Start welding something! Sew a dress! Make a video performance! Grow algae batteries! Build robots! Just start doing it and you can.
• Maturity. MFADT is a very old program (15+ years old?) compared to most dedicated games programs. The veteran faculty know what they're doing. The courses and curriculum generally work.
• New York City isn't AAA! The NYC indie scene is among the strongest in the world, with frequent meet-ups and events. Killscreen and Babycastles regularly partner with museums to do stuff, and there's always at least one games-related thing going on every weekend.

Now, as for the gaps in the program, I actually regard them as strengths, but I understand people see things differently -- so here are the "weaknesses"...

Levels to Look Out For, June 2012: "Future of the FPS"

I don't normally theme these posts around anything, but these three indie FPS experiments share so much DNA that it's impossible to ignore. They're all very grounded in digital / virtual / "futuristic" aesthetics, but they're confident to sometimes let that futurism be incredibly alien. Also, I'd hazard a guess that few of these designers have worked on many FPS games in the AAA manshoot tradition, but these "outsiders" are the future of the FPS.

(Coincidental but shameless plug: if you pick up a recent issue of PC Gamer UK, there's a "Future of the FPS" feature I wrote, though I guess it's already inaccurate now, seeing as I've neglected two of these beauties...)

Dirac by "Orihaus"

Descriptions offered so far seem intentionally cryptic and foggy -- a multiplayer co-op wandering survival sim (?!) with an emphasis on atmosphere over gameplay, set in a stark Mordor-Tron world, with a little help from Structure Synth. What grabs me most is how the forms are so mechanical yet still incredibly abstract and inscrutable. You always see generic sci-fi corridors with gubbins and doodads embedded in the walls, and they're always encoded as "electrical panel" or "fuel pipes" or something. They're obsessed with being knowable because supposedly that's good design; I think Dirac shows how nice just a shape can be. (Unfortunately I missed the last multiplayer playtest, but there's another open test coming up on May 20th at 8 PM EST, just meet in #merveilles IRC on esper.net. Check the TIGSource thread for the most recent schedule.)