"Mission Improbable" by Magnar Jenssen and Rick D

It's fascinating how two of the most polished Half-Life 2 single player campaigns (Magnar and Rick's newly released Mission Improbable and Adam Foster's MINERVA: Metastasis) totally ignore the gravity gun and dispense with the most iconic piece of the original game.

The implied argument, then, is that the gravity gun can't replace the sheer killing power of the AR2. The gravity gun is a gimmick, it only gets used as a last resort -- after hordes of zombies in Ravenholm eat up all your ammo.

Or maybe we, as designers, avoid the gravity gun because we can't control it. There's no "gravity gun ammo" to ration out. We have to contrive really specific puzzle-like situations to overcome how much players loathe using it: here, pick up these mines and shoot them at the chopper, or here, pick up these sawblades, or here, pick up these strider-busters.

Some last remarks: the brushwork and custom assets in Mission Improbable are meticulous. The setpieces are large and involving. There's some strong Robert Briscoe influence in the pair's interpretation of Combine architecture. Good variation of encounters and effective use of manhacks. The car still feels like an afterthought, but there wasn't much room to expand the car portion anyway, I suppose.

Anyway. It's very pretty and very playable, so give it a go.

(DISCLOSURE: I beta-tested this mod.)

Thief 1's "Assassins" and environmental storytelling.

Thief 1 and 2 didn't have an "open world" structure. They got around this constraint (and arguably, surpassed the "open world" as an organizing principle) by inventing their own level design conventions and expectations.

From the very first mission of Thief ("Lord Bafford's Manor"), there's always a safe "outside" area and then the actual "interior" you must infiltrate and mercilessly loot. The outside is usually an open space with a skybox, the public space where you can roam outside mansion walls or in city streets with little danger or penalty -- your first task is to figure out what to infiltrate and how to do it.

By the fourth mission of Thief 1 (and, what I argue, the best mission of the game) you are pretty well accustomed to this design pattern. And that's when Looking Glass flips the script a bit.

"Lighting Design for Level Designers" @ GDC Europe 2012 / 1st Annual Radiator European Tour

I'll be speaking at GDC Europe this year on "Lighting Design for Level Designers" at 5:30 PM on Tuesday, August 14th. That's in about 3 weeks! Yikes.

The session will focus on lighting patterns and light fixtures as ludonarrative / ludodiegetic devices, and describe some useful lighting design terminology I learned from a lighting design course I took at Parsons, how I've applied it to games, while mixing in some of the relevant bits from Randy Smith's seminal GDC 2006 talk.

Radiator readers: I'll be in London the weekends before and after GDC Europe. Feel free to hit me up, in London or Cologne, to drink beer and argue about games or something. (Tweet at me??? That's what the kids do, right?) Also, if there's some sort of RPS Social Club thing going on, I'll try to swing by that too.

"March" by Mindful XP

"March" is a first person art-platformer in your browser (never thought I'd type that) about a relationship by some students at Carnegie Mellon.

Brief spoilery review after the jump.

Zobeide at Lunarcade Sydney, August 3-9

Zobeide will have its public debut in Lunarcade at Serial Space, running from August 3rd - 9th. The Facebook thing is here if you're into that. Here's the scoop:

Exploration is a universal subtext in games. The ‘fog of war’ and line of sight are emblematic tropes of exploration as well as a persistent motif of video games – almost every game involves the implicit mapping of uncharted virtual or representational territory. However, interpreting exploration has a second approach: we can explore uncharted, artificial territory within a game as well as explore the meaning of a work as situated within the real world – we can explore the video game itself as an artifact for the communication of meaning.

Bientôt l’été – Tale of Tales
Dear Esther – Dan Pinchbeck
J.S. Joust – Die Gute Fabrik
Lifeless Planet – Stage 2 Studios
Memory of a Broken Dimension – XRA
Thirty Flights of Loving – Brendon Chung
TRIP – Axel Shokk
Zobeide – Robert Yang

Opening: August 3rd, 6 – 9 pm
Exhibition Hours: August 4th & 5th, 12 – 6 pm, August 6th-9th, 12 – 8 pm
J.S. Joust events – daily at 7 PM

I'm also really honored to be mentioned in the same breath as some of these fantastic games and designers! Unfortunately, I won't be able to make it to the opening -- I'll likely be locked inside my Brooklyn apartment, frantically putting together my GDC Europe talk together at the last minute -- but have a blast and enjoy some JS Joust, Australians!

Also: Thirty Flights of Loving is one of the most important games made in the last decade, so make sure you play it at some point.

Also: LONG LIVE NARRATIVE, DEATH TO "MECHANICS" AND "GAMEPLAY"! BURN IT ALL!

Return to Zobeide.

To tell the truth, I had kind of forgotten about Zobeide. My Twine / Unity interface experiment, instead of being my own version of Unmanned's interface, was strange and broken. People kept forgetting the text was there. But after conferring with some interactive fiction people at No Show -- where one had an interpretation of the game that made it sound much more fascinating than it really was -- I think I know what to do with this.

Expect another announcement in a few days (or weeks?)...

How to integrate Unity and Twine.

EDIT, 16 May 2013: Unity has changed their Browser to Web Player communications, but just a little. Basically, you don't use "getObjectById()" anymore, you just use "getUnity()" to get a reference to the web player -- more details here.

*****

Okay, I'm one of those people who thinks the problem with interactive fiction is that it's not sexy enough. However, I think IF, as a mode of interaction, is extremely powerful and is quite possibly light years ahead of whatever we're doing with narrative / meaning in the latest 3D whiz-bang video games.

Then one day I realized -- I could combine the CYOA tool Twine with the web player export of Unity, and the two could possibly hook into each other through Javascript. Turns out, they can.

Unfortunately, the project I used it for -- well, it didn't really work out -- but maybe someone else can use it?

The Unity Web Player has a useful method Application.ExternalCall() that can call Javascript methods on the web page. Similarly, you can call SendMessage() from a page script to call a method on a specific GameObject and even pass strings into Unity. That's the gist. If you need more help / my code snippets, a more detailed guide is here:

The shape of crime and escape.

From "Payday: The Heist"

I went to another BLDGBLOG / Studio-X event: "Breaking Out Breaking In." This time, it was a panel with FBI agents, crime experts, and architects, all focusing on heists: what does it mean to break into a bank and how should we approach bank design?

As I sat there, I pondered a much, much, much more important question: how does it affect the ways we design video games and levels about heists. How should we abstract the heist?