Indiecade 2013 postpartum

So Indiecade 2013 came and went. I had a pretty great time and I still think it's a pretty good games event. I also think untempered compliments are the least useful form of feedback, so here are some notes, observations, and thoughts:

Indiecade 2013

Hey blog readers. I'll be hanging around Indiecade this year, and Nostrum will be on display at the Oculus booth there. Feel free to say hey to me. (It'll probably be awkward for everyone involved, and that's okay.)

On "How to Destroy Everything"

"How to Destroy Everything" is a fairly comprehensive argument for destroying everything.

That if games are art, or if games are culture, or if games are communities -- then we must recognize how art fractures, how culture is in tension with itself, and how communities constantly collapse and re-form into new ones. "Destroying everything" is about celebrating change and diversity and resilience, with the confidence that together we have the power to make something better in the future.

One of the more common instances of bullshit gamer presser-preview snake-oil-speak, alongside "day 1 purchase" and "immersive" and "cinematic," invokes the idea of "our young evolving medium." Whose medium is it? Why, it is We, the Gamers' Medium!!!! But does this Dorito-flavored ruin of Ozymandias -- does this "gamers" even realize what it whispers to itself, about evolving mediums?

At the core of evolution is sex, sex, and sex. Vulnerability! Energy! Trust! Passion! Grunting, feeling, throbbing, moaning... yes... yes... YESSSSSSSS!

I'm pretty sure the "Ludic Century" is already over.

Nostrum update: now with a map!

I added a map. This was the first version.

Then I tweaked the colors a bit. And animated it so it flaps in the wind based on how fast you're flying.

Then I added a border from an old atlas, and a map trail that indicates where you've been...

... But now I'm probably going to remove the trail, since I want the player to orient themselves with the compass and local landmarks.

Nostrum and clouds.

Hey! I made "Nostrum," a short flight sim game for the Oculus Rift VR Jam thing, and I placed 2nd. I won a bunch of money and a t-shirt, so I'm pretty happy with that.

For the first week of the three week jam, I was actually prototyping a lion simulator game. Then I watched Porco Rosso and thought, "wow, that'd be a fantastic game." So I stashed away all that previous work and started something new.

Teaching struggle.

The other day, I sat down with a student in my Unity class to review some course material and answer some questions. They were wondering why their code wasn't compiling. Their code looked something like this:

Hacking blend transition masks into the Unity terrain shader.

It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that grass rarely fades linearly into dirt. Grass is often quite clumpy. I wasn't satisfied with the non-clumpiness of my grass in a certain project, so I hacked Unity's terrain shader to add some blend mask support. You could probably use this technique for cobblestones, bricks, debris, gold coins... whatever you want to remain clumpy when overlaid on top of another texture.

First, let's think a bit about how Unity's terrain system renders the textures you paint on it:

Level With Me, series 2

Level With Me is a whole new batch of "candid interviews with game developers about their design process" going up on Rock Paper Shotgun, one a week.

The first half of each interview focuses on their past work / approaches, and the second half is a conversation where we design part of a first person game together, based on what previous interviewees did. This way, you get a 90s net-art pioneer indirectly collaborating with a veteran AAA level designer indirectly collaborating with an indie horror game designer, as they all deal with the weight of each others' design decisions.

The goal here, as before, is to demystify game development. Games are magic, but not because they are unknowable -- they are magic because they are so hard to execute and they require so much work and blood and sweat of human wills. I believe we can talk about game development / struggle, straightforwardly, in plain words.

This is also how we design games: we ask ourselves questions, and then try to answer honestly. Different people will ask themselves different questions and give different answers.