p0nd

http://peanutgallerygames.com/blog/games/pond/

http://www.rjlayton.com/pond (update! mirror!)

The greatest Flash game ever. A masterpiece. Make sure you inhale / exhale in-time with your character in order to experience the full effect.

(prediction: it's going to go viral in, like, 5 hours)

On Game Reviews + Games Writing + Sports Writing Is Cool

Did anyone else read the "Blacklight: Tango Down" review at Eurogamer? My god. I mean, I don't intend to bite the hand that feeds me, and I definitely don't want to defend a game I haven't played / looks mediocre anyway, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to risk an ungrateful nibble here:

"All the major functions are present, correct and mapped exactly where you'd expect to find them."

So it copied Halo's control scheme on the X360 -- or, as we would say in PC-land, it has keyboard bindings! Awesome.

"The sprint feels a bit sticky..."

I don't know what this means. When you sprint, you stick to surfaces? When you sprint and let go of the button, you continue to sprint? When you sprint, sticks fly out of your screen and poke you in the eye?

Must game controls necessarily feel responsive, or can they be "sticky," whatever that means, by design? (e.g. in Team Fortress 2, the Heavy's slower aiming / movement when firing the minigun) Would you criticize the Heavy Weapons class for moving too slowly, or the Scout for moving too quickly, or the player character in the Graveyard for handling like a shopping cart -- when it is all by design?

If a playtester ever told me that the "sprint feels a bit sticky" or that I had to "tighten up the graphics", I'd probably stickily sprint off to the front of the nearest speeding bus.

"... but the genre basics are pretty much as they should be."

By using the word "but" after talking about sticky sprinting, the reviewer flags this as a compliment. I thought the problem was that this game was too average, and now suddenly it's good that this game follows conventions? And why is it necessarily a strength that the game keeps to "genre basics"? The tone of this review keeps going back and forth between "not different enough from AAA games" and "not similar enough to AAA games." Which is it?

"... it's only really co-operative in the sense that you're playing alongside other people." 

I understand what the reviewer means, but still -- this is an amazingly dumb thing to say because cooperative play means... well, playing alongside other people. It's like saying "it's only singleplayer in the sense that you play by yourself."

But here's the part of the review that originally got me thinking, "what the hell is he talking about?!"...

GeoComp2: Demon Pigs Go Hog Wild, by Charon + the brief and unremarkable history of the non-photorealistic FPS

(GeoComp2 posts feature Quake 3 levels with outstanding geometry inspired by modern architecture practices; unfortunately GameSpy deleted the original GeoComp2 pages, so these blog posts are an attempt at creating a historical record.)

Demon Pigs Go Hog Wild, by Charon, is an extremely difficult-to-find anomaly from the competition. (Fortunately I've tracked it down for you.) It seems like the community spontaneously forgot about it upon its release and it never really garnered much play -- which makes sense, as it's calculated to be utterly disorienting, using only 2 colors to create a strobe-like effect as you move through the level. (EDIT: I'm told Fileplanet is shutting down, so I'm mirroring the ZIP on Dropbox.)

It was an experiment more than anything, using the new cel-shader functionality that Randy "ydnar" Reddig (fun fact: he also worked on Marathon Infinity and designed an Adam Foster-esque easter egg for it) implemented in the Quake 3 level compiler tools Q3Map2.

The result is an aesthetic that emphasizes the rhythm of lines and silhouettes, and serves as one of the earliest (and probably best executed) uses of a cel-shading style in an FPS. Charon only used two colors, and yet his level is still pretty readable: you can discern walls, floors -- the ribbing on a recessed wall indicates a jump-pad at its feet -- and the bold white chunks of wall serve as potent landmarks. Exposing the net of triangle mesh along the floor and walls was also an inspired touch; a lesser designer (like me, maybe) would've painted a black and white tile texture or something instead.

Of course, it's still pretty unplayable... BUT. Looking back, it's understandable why there was a brief period of experimentation in this direction. It was the promise of something new...

GeoComp2: Neorganic Epiphany, by Dubblilan + notes on CQB and "slicing the pie"

(GeoComp2 posts feature Quake 3 levels with outstanding geometry inspired by modern architecture practices; unfortunately GameSpy deleted the original GeoComp2 pages, so these blog posts are an attempt at creating a historical record.)

Neorganic Epiphany, by Dubbilan, is blobitecture / "parametricism" with a "Miami Vice" sensibility. The floorplan isn't what makes this level special -- it's a decent central arena plan with a handful of small side atria that feed back into the middle. But the style does make one rather important difference in gameplay...

See, most arcade DM maps -- especially those in the BSP era -- are rather blocky, due to the nature of BSP construction. It's easier to manipulate rectangular shapes than curved, slanted shapes. This is mirrored in real-life construction practice with four-cornered rooms and long, straight planes for walls that meet other walls at 90 degree corners...

Offered without comment.

http://www.moddb.com/mods/pearce-pachuta

Holy shit.

http://www.moddb.com/mods/dear-esther/news/a-light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel1

What do you get when you have a professional artist / designer pour a year into building something? Nothing short of "I can't believe that's the Source Engine."

The art and actual level design of Dear Esther was always its weakest attribute. But now... yowza. I can't even figure out how he achieved some of these effects -- the water caustics on the cave walls are probably an animated detail texture, and there's a crap-load of particles going on with the waterfalls -- but how did he get the water running down the rocks like that? It's definitely not a particle system. Is it some kind of refracting overlay, or did he model a prop_static and slap on a refraction shader onto that?

It's really pretty. The craftsmanship is superb. Don't get me wrong.

But it's the same game, more or less, with roughly the same narrative, more or less.

I can't help but wish he instead worked with Pinchbeck on something new.

The fortune cookie sprite finally shows up correctly! YES. YES. YES. You have no idea how long I've spent on this fortune cookie sprite -- what's felt like years. Practically decades. And now the transparency works! Hurrah! Hurrah!

You may now carry on with your daily business.

Sunday Papers (June 27)

(Title / idea / concept stolen from RPS, but my focus is more on architecture / education / game development stuff with an art and design emphasis.)

• Eric Heimburg writes about selective attention / the "death-trap" device used to regulate pacing in MMORPG zones. I posted my proposed solution over there -- make the gorilla swipe at the ball. Or am I oversimplifying?
• Philip Klevestav talks about his workflow for modular props in games. I think I recognize the assets at the end from Natural Selection 2. It's important to read on art asset theory because he's basically talking about the bricks of video game levels -- and the shape / size / color of the bricks affects how we build our levels.
• Mammoth writes a manifesto of sorts for the new wave of urban design / BLDGBLOG kind of thinking -- "The future of architecture isn’t finding a worthy formal successor to modernism, post-modernism, or parametricism, it’s learning to manipulate the command line." I'm not sure if I understand it fully. Is he implying that function doesn't necessarily follow form in the real-world, by invoking the case study of One Wilshire? Or am I poor reader?
• Patrik Schumacher's (unconvincing) defense of parametricism -- unconvincing mainly because, as the commentators mention, it is ignoring the reality of materials scarcity in the future. Linking to it just in case you read over that word in the previous bullet and was wondering what the hell "parametricism" was. I know I sure did. "Huh," I thought, "so that's the name for all that weird curvy NURBs architecture everywhere."
• Stanley Fish talks about how student evaluations are poor gauges of teacher performance. I agree. When I watch playtesters, I care less about what they report and more about what they actually do. Along those lines, I have a bunch of friends in "urban studies" and they aren't really sure what it entails; maybe the problem is that they're expecting architecture when urban design isn't? Or maybe they won't know what they've learned until 10 years from now?
• Dan Reeder - "I Drink Beer"