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.)

Souvenir and abstraction.

I was the main artist on Souvenir and did the bulk of environmental modeling / level design / art effects. The cypress tree and archway were one of the very first things I made.

Back in September, we realized that if there were any limits on what Souvenir would look like, it would probably reflect my own personal limits as a novice 3D hard surface modeler, as well as my partners Ben and Mohini who weren't incredibly experienced artists either. (Know thyself!... and judge others, I suppose, too.)

We needed an art style that would emphasize simpler forms with very little surface detail, and we made a very early decision to pursue a papercraft / untextured color direction. Otherwise, the UV mapping required would be time-consuming and cost prohibitive and wouldn't really look good anyway because I'm not a great painter. There were also huge performance gains in using just one small palette texture for virtually every environment mesh in the game; that means Unity can batch all the polys efficiently and reduce overall draw calls.

Our early experiments with the mechanic indicated that falling / shifting over long distances felt good... Which meant that our final game world had to be huge, and that most of the world would be experienced from afar as silhouettes and shapes. (Again, our mechanics suggested that investing in surface detail was pointless.)

Souvenir prototype (build 08) is public!

You can play an early version (and by early, I mean still really unpolished, buggy, and unfinished) of our collaborative thesis at Parsons: "Souvenir." It's basically VVVVVV + Proteus + Dear Esther + a bit of Portal. For some of the thinking behind the design, read "Against Puzzles?"

Here are some bugs / glitches / issues we already know about:

"What were the main trends of GDC 2012?"

So I checked my spam folder and found out I'm signed up for this thing called Quora, which wanted me to answer the question, "What were the main trends of GDC 2012"... which I found compelling because lately I've been wondering, who writes game developer history? Who decides "what happened" and where? What goes in the Wikipedia entry?

Here's how I answered, with a heavy indie bias. I invite competing accounts in comments or on the Quora thing if you happen to have a Quora thing:

What were the main trends of GDC 2012? 
Like, what were people talking about? What was on their minds?

Wot I Think: "Indie"

Context: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/05/03/why-indie-has-become-a-bad-word/

The mild Socialist streak in me says:

• Don't let EA co-opt a word. Don't let EA set a dangerous precedent, the moment when this golden age ends.
• Nothing is inevitable. Fight back. Define indie ourselves by performing it.

The linguist / English lit student in me says:

• Indie will mean whatever it will mean. Linguistic prescription, toward more use or less use, is pointless.
• Words do not have to have stable meanings to be useful / important. "Occupy" = "we're pissed off about something" + _____. In the same way, "Indie" = "there should be more kinds of games" + _____.

The indie game dev in me says:

• I'm indie because I say I'm indie. Now leave me alone so I can make some games; why don't you make yourself useful and go gossip about the new Call of Duty guns DLC trailer or something.
• I DON'T CARE. STOP BEING BORING. TALK ABOUT SOMETHING INTERESTING.

Ode to Neil / Jed "Wunderboy" Jedrzejewski

The Source modder community has always been a bit apocalyptic, but still its community leaders generally kept things going. Jed has been one of the most selfless and important mod tool developers out there since 2002: his updated Half-Life 1 model viewer with alpha texture support, his collaboration with Nem on VTFEdit / VTFLib, his early work on 3DS Max plugins, and the VTF Thumbnails plugins... all his tools were utterly indispensable.

On April 8th, he announced his "retirement" from the mod community, citing real-life stuff / general disenchantment with modding / the stagnation of his own Source mod, Ham & Jam.

I won't chastise Valve. Given what we now know from their employee handbook, you'd do the same too: you'd work on Half-Life 3 or Portal 5 or something new entirely, with all of your friends, instead of fixing an outdated SDK for an old engine branch that a handful of ungrateful fans use. Would you rather do fulfilling work or thankless work?

Anyway. Thanks for everything, Jed.

What makes "good" writing on level design?

Liz Ryerson recently did a great write-up of level 5-5 from Wolfenstein 3D (and makes a good case for the surrealism of 4-3) and it occurred to me that there's a pattern to this type of writing -- it's usually very specific, talks only about a single level (but contextualizes it within the whole game), and makes ample use of screenshots to help the reader understand the layout.

Writing about level design is incredibly important because we often run through levels so fast and understand "the language of games" so intuitively that it can be difficult to verbalize and explain. In playing levels, they exist more as tools to express our intentionality, not as objects to be studied and examined. The reality of it is that it would take a long time, or sometimes it's very difficult, to gain the type of fluency in platformers or Wolf3D that the best levels require.

But this is how we do research -- we make games and play the ones we can. Articles and essays are the best way to learn about levels that you haven't played / can't play.

Here are two authors of "level criticism canon" that, in my mind, show us how to do it...

CFP: Critical Information 2012 @ SVA / watch me talk briefly about Handle with Care.

I know a few grad students (you poor souls) read this blog, so I thought I'd share a CFP for a grad student conference I participated in last year -- Critical Information is pretty small, but the intimacy helps you engage the people with the people actually sitting there.

The rooms were small, which meant every talk was a "packed" house. Unfortunately I had to leave after I presented, so I didn't see any of the other panels, but I'd say SVA is a pretty cool place -- and they're clearly somewhat video game / new media friendly. If you'll be in the NYC area / or can travel there somewhat easily, consider submitting your project or research. (Also, the small size means less competition.)

Some people were asking about a video? Here's a highlights reel they put together of my group's session. (Note to self: next time, shave.) Also, see if you can pinpoint the exact moment in the Q&A when I enraged an entire room full of gender studies scholars... or, uh, hopefully they edited it out?

On "Joiner", detail, and greeble.

Joiner is a command-line pre-compile brush generator by prolific TF2 mapper Timothy "YM" Johnson; you make several brushes to represent the volumes of your rooms, run your VMF through it, then out comes another VMF with all the struts and support beams built and textured for you.

I find Joiner fascinating because it's also (an unintentional?) commentary on TF2 design styles: rooms are still composed mostly of simple rectangular planes that join at 90 degree angles -- that's the actual functional level geometry, but a typical player would recognize that as undetailed and thus as an unfinished / crappy map. What Johnson has made is not a "make level" button, but rather a "make detail" or "stop players from whining" button. The purpose of these struts is to cover the surface in a sort of greeble, so the player won't be distracted in comparing its perceived quality against other maps with "better" detail.

Surface detail is a paradox. It is "necessary" to exist in front of the player, but it exists to be more or less ignored.

Levels to Look Out For, May 2012.

These are some unreleased levels / environment WIPs I've seen posted around the internet, along with some brief commentary.

Island of the Dead, by Mac "macattackk" Hart.

Hart bases this CryEngine3 environment off the Arnold Bocklin's notorious Isle of the Dead paintings. What I really admire here is the masterful control over materials; the normal map on the rocks is really important to ground the unorthodox shape of the rock. It's a really surreal treatment of realism that, I think, is really subtle and difficult to pull off -- a desaturated, muted palette that somehow isn't boring. What I like most about this piece, though, is that Hart is actually fleshing it out into a level. He could've stopped with this one view and one camera angle to produce a diorama / portfolio piece, but now it's actually turning into a legitimate space as he extrapolates the painting's original style.

Why game architecture matters, and the reality / unreality of de_dust.

(This architecture criticism post was cross-posted to my department's research blog, Game @ Parsons. In general, I post my architecture criticism stuff there.)

Last July, the German new media artist Aram Bartholl secured funding from Rhizome to begin building de_dust, a popular video game level, as a 1:1 scale model cast out of solid concrete. It would be a crime to paraphrase his concisely argued rationale, so I’ve pasted a large chunk of it here:

“Computer games differ from other mediums such as books, movies or TV, in that spatial cognition is a crucial aspect in computer games. To win a game the player needs to know the 3D game space very very well. Spatial recognition and remembrance is an important part of our human capability and has formed over millions of years by evolution. A place, house or space inscribes itself in our spatial memory. We can talk about the qualities of the same movies we watched or books we have read.

How the worst part of the game industry uses PAX East to teabag your entire face with its cancerous scrotum.

(I attended PAX East on a scholarship from the IGDA, for which I'm grateful. They also facilitated a lovely lunch with Tom Lin of Demiurge Studios, some neat studio visits, and other things. Thank you IGDA.)

(Also, a warning: this gets pretty dramatic, but I hope it comes off as honest.)

First, understand that PAX East is actually made of two conventions. Literally, a gigantic wall divides the analog (card and board games) from digital (the video game industry).

In game design, it's popular to say that analog and digital games are the same at their cores, because they both depict systems -- and PAX East is the place where all that rhetoric utterly falls apart. One side of the convention floor is a quiet and personal pastime, the other is a deafening business. If you're a games academic or optimistic indie, this dissonance will test your faith, because here the game industry teabags your entire face with its cancerous scrotum.

For sure, there are good parts of the game industry. But here, it is clear that the bad parts still completely control the entire body, erecting giant temples to its glory. Me and many indies felt alienated, and relatively alone in our alienation. This is the weekend when you're painfully reminded that Anna Anthropy's idealism remains mostly just idealism. (... for now.)

"Real Life Goldeneye 64"

The most compelling part of Real Life Goldeneye 64, to me, isn't how they mimicked the pathfinding / enemy animations. To me, it's the way they used Let's Play culture ("I'm using save states") to justify the editing choices, and more impressively, how they kind of mimic the "feel" of moving and aiming in Goldeneye 64.

The game had a strange kind of floatiness to it, mainly caused by the control scheme -- the N64 controller only had one analog stick (unlike the dual-stick standard now mandatory for all consoles) which meant one control had to handle both moving AND looking. To freely look around, you'd have to hold "R" (one of the shoulder bumper buttons) to aim, which also meant you had to stand in-place while your arm wildly flails around the screen. And as this video reveals, people are actually kind of nostalgic for it.

Come see CondomCorps and others @ Spring Fair

If you're going to be in the New York City area on Sunday, April 15th, come check out my department's first ever "Spring Fair" -- basically, we're all just going to show the random stuff and side projects we've been working on for the past semester. I'm planning on debuting the newest version of CondomCorps (now with romantic subplots!) and I know my classmates have plenty up their own sleeves; there'll be plenty of games, robots, interactive installations, and just plain cool shit.

Come pop in for an hour or stay and hang out / mingle with Manhattan's technorati!

We'll be at 6 East 16th Street, 12th floor, right off the Union Square stop. Sunday, 1-6 PM. (map)

Book Club, level design edition

Here are some books I've been reading, most of them about halfway through. I haven't bought any of these; they're all from my university library. (Pro-Tip: If you're a student, take full advantage of your library.) I'll probably give them more detailed write-ups later...

Myst and Riven, by Mark J. Wolf. (2011). I only picked this up because I saw it on the shelf next to Ian Bogost's "How To Do Things With Videogames." I'm not going to say it's bad -- if you've never played Myst or Riven, this'll give you a decent idea of what that's like, and the various idiosyncrasies involved -- but from my perspective, Wolf seems like a huge fanboy who overestimates the series' significance and place in history. I argue against his account in an upcoming feature on FPS games in May's PC Gamer UK; Myst sold a lot and seemed poised to start a revolution, then it didn't. Instead, Myst (along with Second Life) is "significant" more in the minds of humanities professors. Where are the scholarly monographs on Doom and Quake? (Actually, I think Dan Pinchbeck's in the middle of writing it?)

Against Puzzles?

(I was going to do a "Radiator 1-3 is done" post for April Fools, but it hurt too much...)

We had a public playtest of me and my teammates' VVVVVV-FPS thesis project, "Souvenir," with a bunch of New York City junior high / high school students -- and I don't know if you've ever been to a New York City public school, but these kids generally speak their mind (to put it mildly) and they're ideal playtesters. I also had a few interesting conversations with them. One of them asked what the goal of the game was, so I started trolling / engaging them:

Well, when you go out for a walk, do you have a goal? No, you just walk because you like walking.

"Yeah," she said, "but if all you do is walk around, it gets boring after a while. I'll stop playing." Well, that's fine, then stop playing.

"Plus," her friend says, "I'd just play it once. And then it would gather dust on my hard drive." That's fine. Play it once and delete the game then.

"But like, if I wanted to walk around, I'd just go outside." That's fine. Then go outside!

They're so young, and already they're perpetuating the same messaging from massive industry interests: that the "realism of games" competes with the realism of reality, addictive games are better games, clear goal structures are best -- and retention, retention, retention. That's just one way of thinking about games, and they've already locked themselves in that mindset. They've been indoctrinated.

Mass Effect 3, minutiae

Spoiler free. Here's stuff I thought while playing the latest and hottest "guns and conversation" game:

THE GUNS

• I had 300,000 credits and didn't know what to do with it. Upgrading guns seemed pointless (the bars barely budge in the stats readouts) and clicking on stuff in a menu with little visual change or feedback was unsatisfying. Seems like the gun upgrades were a last minute feature that could've used another GUI design pass.
• Functionally, all squadmates seem pretty much the same (1 crowd-control ability, 1 buff, 1 debuff) except Liara who has significantly less health. It doesn't really matter who you bring, which I somewhat liked, because that meant squad choice was based on narrative and characterization instead.
• My Shepard had a "biotic charge" ability that lets her fly across rooms through cover, tackle enemies, and completely recharge her shields; combined with other bonuses, the cooldown period becomes negligible even early on. I didn't feel particularly smart when I figured out how overpowered this ability was -- I felt like the balance was broken. 
• Well, I don't think anyone plays Mass Effect for the gunplay anyway. It serves an aesthetic purpose: to make you feel like you're fighting in battles. What baffles me is spending time developing a multiplayer game that capitalizes on the weakest, least interesting part of the series?

THE CONVERSATION

• Again, I chose a LadyShep who decided to romance her secretary. From watching the YouTubes though, the GayMaleShep stuff seems pretty well done and even a little cute. (see above) I wish I had had the faith to stick it out with a MaleShep through the entire trilogy, but the male voice actor is just so much worse.
• Given the heavy proceduralizing of conversations, BioWare does a really smart thing during cutscenes: it cuts to different cameras frequently so that your brain better processes the discontinuities. The dialog doesn't sound as disjointed if there's a visual cut in time. (see above)
• Some weird player to player-character dissonance when my Shepard always confesses how much she misses Ashley, when I'm wondering, "Ashley who?"
• They kept all the core design from Mass Effect 2 and instead pooled all their resources into art, which I think was a smart move: there's a lot of variety to the levels, and the abundance of scripted animations turned stale conversations in a hallway into "getting dinner" or "going out to the bar" -- functionally, nothing is really different, but the new narrative context does wonders.
• When the characters aren't blathering on about the price of war to the point of parody, there's some genuinely good writing and characterization going on -- well, Garrus and Liara mostly. The "military stud squadmate" NPCs (Kaidan, Jacob, and the new unexplained mildly hispanic guy) are still awfully boring characters with amazing normal maps on their pecs. I guess Alistair really was the anomaly in a milquetoast lineage of Carths.
• I like how RPGs always have the "endgame" moment; a character literally tells you that the endgame is beginning, all side quests will be disabled, and you must confirm whether you're ready. It kind of breaks the fourth wall (assuming you really care about that) but at the same time you appreciate the game signaling itself to you. It's such a uniquely game-y thing to be able to read and understand what the game is actually saying beneath the thin narrative skin.

What games can learn from Sleep No More (part 2): specific and spoilery design observations

SPOILER WARNING: this will definitely ruin the novelty of the show for you. Read further only if you have no intention of ever going to see this. Ever. Yes, it's worth it. If you live in New York City or nearby and can afford it, you should go, otherwise you're an idiot. Non-spoilery Part 1 offers a general overview.

Sleep No More starts like this: You wait in line for a while. It's probably a bit cold.

You walk down a long, dark hallway. You wait in line to check your coat.

Then you walk up to a contemporary-looking reception desk and give your name / reservation.

MirrorMoon, by Team Focaccia / Santa Ragione

Run, don't walk, to your nearest electro-computer-device and play MirrorMoon. It was a Global Game Jam 2012 project / recent contestant at this last GDC's Experimental Gameplay Workshop, and stupid ol' me had never heard of it before then.

The FPS controls are somewhat non-standard, but it's for an important reason, and the deviation is handled pretty gracefully. Otherwise, the sounds, the colors, the scope of the level design -- everything is perfect. So so so perfect; part of the GGJ team included the man behind first person runner Fotonica, and it shows in the bold visual design. It's a really solid first person experience that'll improve your day.

What games can learn from Sleep No More (part 1): the death of environmental storytelling.

Part 1 contains VAGUE SPOILERS, as if your friend had gone to Sleep No More and told you about it, or as if you had read a news article about it.

Although there have been many past theater productions that have done generally what it does, Sleep No More is what's going to be most prominent in history. It's basically a 5 floor tall, 100 room haunted house with dancers wordlessly performing a loose adaptation of Macbeth throughout the maze -- and you and everyone else are wearing masks, staring and shuffling silently through the halls. It transforms contemporary theater and dance into something relevant for people who'd otherwise see little value in it.

I value it mostly for its interaction model and the ways it uses architecture in specific ways; it is what happens when outsiders use level design concepts better than video games ever have. First I'd like to debunk what I consider to be the "conventional reading" of it and its relevance to video games, as argued by game critics.

Anna Anthropy: book release + lecture @ NYU Game Center, March 29th @ 7 PM

Anna Anthropy's new book "Rise of the Videogame Zinesters," sums up a lot of contemporary indie scene thinking and contextualizes it in history / current practice. I'm impressed in the ways that it never talks down to the reader, but still worry that only "gamers" will deeply understand Anna's account of aesthetics when it gets down to the details of video games and meaning-making. But if I were ever to teach a liberal arts course on video games, this would definitely be on the reading list: I think it's a really great primer / manifesto for the growing "game design as pastime" school of indie thought.

If you live in or near New York City, make sure you RSVP for the book release / talk at the NYU Game Center. The food is awesome, the environment is swanky, and I'm sure Frank Lantz will have some lovely questions for her.

(DISCLAIMER: I'm in this book.)

We apologize for the break in programming and are working tirelessly to restore service. Regularly scheduled blog posts will return within a few days, once I've finally scrubbed all the GDC off of me.

GDC 2012 Halftime Report + Notes on the Industry / Indie Divide

It's Thursday now, and I'm writing this in Moscone North on Thursday, the 4th day of the conference. There's some kind of podcast recording going on to my right ("One Life Left") and it looks important. People are eating $15 crepes behind me. The carpet is boring and inoffensive. People are making Blackberry Playbook jokes. So it goes.

The past few days, I went to some Indie Game Summit / Education Summit talks and I've been to a few Game Design track talks. I found a lot of it redundant because I already follow all these people and their ideas; they've been blogging and tweeting and talking about it for the past year. Like, if you're a Doug Wilson super fan, you're already familiar with a lot of his theories and his recent body of work. And even if there's a little bit of new information, you can just read a Gamasutra write-up and get all the salient points in a few minutes instead of sitting there for an hour.

It's making me reconsider how I'm "using" GDC. It makes me think I should only attend talks where I don't know the speaker or if I'm not familiar with the games already -- but that's risky too for obvious reasons. Some people here don't even go to the talks and they're just here to hang out, and I think that's probably the right way to approach things. I think next time I'm not going to shell out for the indie pass, and I'll just try to bum an expo pass off someone, or, if Buddha wills it, I'll have my own IGF passes to give out.

In general, the indie / industry divide is kind of jarring. I'm not sure whether that's good or bad.

The IGF Awards and the Game Developer Choice Awards are back-to-back, hour-long events. After the IGF was over, I swear, at least 200-300 people left; many of them I recognized as mainly indie people. Actions speak for themselves... we seem to see the GDC awards as a largely irrelevant exercise. Indies don't need the permission or acceptance of the industry, though the awards that went to J.S. Joust and Sworcery show that it's there.

This tension between indie and industry got played-out by the Mega64 skits that made light of indie uncertainty about corporate interests. It's okay to laugh, as long as we recognize why we're laughing -- the conflict is still very real. Corporate power can often help and empower indies, but often it belittles us with a reality show that implies the ultimate goal of being an indie is to join the industry, or it exploits us by signing a contract that robs the developer of their property, or maybe it even steals an idea wholesale and cross-markets it with their other cloned apps. Then you also hear success stories like Steam enabling Brendon Chung to sell 160,000 units of Atom Zombie Smasher, which is great, and that's a corporate industry-indie partnership.

As we left the Venus Patrol / Wild Rumpus / One Life Left indie game party at Public Works, we passed a group of industry game developers leaving as well: "It's okay, we'll just never understand their indie ways."

The party was pretty fun. Watching Bennett Foddy get trolled by his own game (Mega-GIRP) was entertaining. Eric Zimmerman tackling 10 people in a crazy J.S. Joust maneuver was awesome. Helping Anna Anthropy push the Oak-u-tron arcade cabinet onto the middle of the dance floor ("occupying the party") was pretty amazing.

I am a little confused, though, as to why the Killscreen party tonight is at the same venue featuring many of the same games: I feel like it's going to be the same party. I wonder what the differences will be, if any. It does beg the question as to how "scene-y" the indie scene really is, that all of these various indie organizations share so many of the same members with power and we all know each other and play each others games over and over. But isn't it the nature of a community to define itself and exclude others? Again, I'm not sure how to interpret Brandon Boyer's face being projected on the walls -- is this fun and great that we're celebrating him, or is this a weird perverse cult of personality we're perpetuating?

I honestly don't know. I'm still trying to figure it out.

But I do know what I heard as we passed that group of industry devs walking home from the indie party. The one with the glasses half-chuckled and then said: "At least one of them shook my hand."

Stuff I'm Working On, GDC 2012 Edition

Souvenir is a group MFA thesis project at Parsons about exploring your memories and holding onto the ones that mattered most. You start disoriented and overwhelmed, figuring out how to walk on walls and ceilings, but eventually you get the hang of it and start sorting stuff out. We started with Portal as our template, but eventually we came to dislike how everything felt so designed -- go here, go there, find the next step someone intended for you to find... For a more "organic" feel we started building areas around ideas instead: nature, school, and religion.

Zobeide, meanwhile, is a collaboration with sound designers Robin Arnott and Eduardo Ortiz. It's my super secret Proteus-killer. (... Well, not really.) In it, you build cities on top of other players' cities, chase naked women through moonlit alleys, and listen to the music that results. It is also an experiment with combining first person interfaces with hypertext, as a literary ode to Borges' Calvino's "Invisible Cities."

CondomCorps XL did pretty well at Jaime Woo's queer games show in Toronto. Apparently it's going to be on a Canadian TV news program too, or something? I'm going to do some more interface tweaks, add a silly campaign mode / narrative, and then call it done. I'm aiming to mirror the final feature scope of "Fear is Vigilance"... well, maybe half of that.

Radiator 1-3 might get dusted off. When I talked about it a few months ago at SVA, it reminded me how much I liked working on it sometimes. Maybe the San Francisco air will do me some good.

If you want to see any of these at GDC (or at the associated parties) come say hey at me, especially if you're a big important games person. Also, if you'd like to give me a job when I graduate, that'd be nice! My portfolio is here.

Koumei Satou working on a sequel to Mistake of Pythagoras? Or probably not.

Longtime Half-Life 1 / Source mod players may remember Koumei Satou, who made crazy quirky single player mods like Sweet Half-Life (HEV scientists with SMGs; a boss fight in the room from Brazil), Peaces Like Us (one of the first mods with friendly Xen aliens), and Mistake of Pythagoras (an HL2 mod where one of the puzzles is deriving the Pythagorean theorem!)

Now, apparently, he has some sort of blog post where he's talking about workflow from Hammer to XSI Mod Tool to SketchUp to Hammer (?!) and it looks like some sort of sequel to Mistake of Pythagoras. The machine translation of the page doesn't provide much more insight, it sounds more like he's lamenting that everyone's ditching the Source mod scene for UDK and Unity. Am I reading correctly?

(Thanks to @Orihaus for the info)

Dear Esther

From the Wikipedia article on "cut-up technique," emphasis mine:

A precedent of the technique occurred during a Dadaist rally in the 1920s in which Tristan Tzara offered to create a poem on the spot by pulling words at random from a hat. [...] Gysin introduced Burroughs to the technique at the Beat Hotel. The pair later applied the technique to printed media and audio recordings in an effort to decode the material's implicit content, hypothesizing that such a technique could be used to discover the true meaning of a given text. Burroughs also suggested cut-ups may be effective as a form of divination saying, "When you cut into the present the future leaks out."

See also "unreliable narrator," "lyrical poetry," and "ludodiegesis." Though some people would rather argue that poetry is supposed to be straightforward and accessible and worth $10 of some arbitrary unit of entertainment?

I imagine it'd be fairly easy to rig Hammer to make custom Dear Esther levels. Coming soon: "Dearer Esther."

Unmanned, by Molleindustria

I'm a bit late to the party, but Unmanned is probably one of the best games I've played in a while.

It's a fantastic use of interactive fiction / first person sensibilities (some of which I'm going to steal) with innovative use of split-frame and achievements, contemporary relevance but also rather personal narratives... it's got everything.

If you're upset that it's not subtle enough, consider all the noise it's trying to combat, all by itself. You don't bring a toothpick to a knife fight, folks. Also, in case you missed it the first time, check out this game's distant cousin, "maybe make some change."

Funny how similar the premises of these two games' methodologies are: that text and only text can adequately communicate the psychological damage of modern warfare, and militaristic first person games thrive on the lack of text and introspection.

Pop music doesn't care whether you think it's authentic, though.

The shadow of the white cloud: architecture criticism at the 1893 World’s Fair and BioShock Infinite.

I’m taking an architecture criticism class with Paul Goldberger, the architecture critic at the New Yorker. My interest in the class involves its intersection with video game architecture and virtual environments. This is my research, as cross-posted at the Games @ Parsons group research blog too.

While the original BioShock’s diegesis focused on objectivism and the dangers of uncontrolled capitalism, Infinite’s level architecture is more about the dangers of American exceptionalism as exemplified by the 1893 World's Fair.

In my architecture seminar, the story of the World's Fair was a bit more nuanced than that, and it goes something like this:

"Prisoner" by Frank Lantz, a forgotten bit of "art mod" history.

Here's a bit of archaeology for you: in March 2003, a guy named Frank Lantz made a mod called "Prisoner." Google returns approximately zero results on this matter, so it's safe to say that pretty much no one's played this fairly early "art mod." In fact, it's so esoteric it makes my own art mod stuff look like Call of Duty, but I think by the end, through grace of repetition, it's still fairly straightforward and earnest. (Or if you're lost, you can take a look at his list of references to glean some meaning.)

The maps are incredibly spartan and unsophisticated by the standard of the Half-Life 1 mod scene at the time (Adam Foster's Someplace Else, Muddasheep's Half-Quake Amen, and unreleased thing called "Nightwatch") but again, much like with The Stanley Parable or Dear Esther, the point is that the author was an outsider, capable of making something more conceptually complex to compensate for the lack of technical finesse, or maybe we're all just full of artsy bullshit, who knows.

Still, it's neat to see what the current director of NYU's game design MFA program was doing about ten years ago -- well, other than living in Hoboken and playing a lot of poker -- so in the public interest, with Mr. Lantz's permission, I have repackaged it into a Steam-compatible Half-Life 1 mod for you to try.

1) Download it here, 2) unzip it to SteamApps\[account_name]\half-life\, 3) restart Steam, then 4) double-click on "Prisoner" in your game list. Again, you'll need a copy of Half-Life 1 on Steam to play it.


(Conceptually, it reminds me a bit of Ludum Dare 21 entry "Bathos" by Johan Peitz.)

Shilling for a friend: "Doodle Defense"

I don't normally shill, but when I do, it's for Kickstarters that explore new input methods. Doodle Defense, by Andy Wallace, could use a few of your Earth dollars. Draw on a whiteboard and watch colored things magically avoid them; ah, the magic of A*!

Jersey Shouroboros

The full write-up of "Jersey Shouroboros," me and Eddie Cameron's Global Game Jam 2012 entry, is up and over at Altercation blog. Check it out, along with some juicy gossip / dev anecdotes. Oh la la!

There's a link to the Unity Web Player build there, which you're welcome to try, but I really (really really really) recommend plugging in a PS3 or X360 gamepad to play it because apparently analog sticks are really important for feeling like an infinitely long serpent god / TV producer devouring Italian American reality show stars from Long Island but who moved to New Jersey. Who knew?

"Stair K"; architecture criticism, Thief, and a coffee maker.

I'm currently taking an architecture criticism class taught by Paul Goldberger, the architecture critic at the New Yorker. These are my essays, along with a post-mortem of how the essay went down in-class. This is cross-posted at the Parsons Games research blog games.parsons.edu too.

Longtime Parsons students and veteran faculty at the Sheila Johnson Design Center are forgiven if they have no idea what Stair K is, and where it leads – it is invisible, and it leads approximately nowhere.

CondomCorps XL is crowd-sourcing fake orgasm sounds from you, soldier!

I'm currently re-mastering my Ludum Dare game CondomCorps into CondomCorps XL -- that is, making it minimally playable for humans -- and I just realized I need some sexy moaning sounds, yet I am only one person. Then I remembered the wonders of the internets and its powers of protein folding.

Unfortunately all the in-game character models (all one of them) will appear male, due to the nature of the patented bulge-gaze mechanic, so I would greatly prefer audio that "sounds like a man." (Non-men: please do your best impression of a man, or even your worst. Feel free to exaggerate / be silly. Drag is fun!)

> > > To submit:

"Lun3DM5: You'll Shoot Your Eye Out" by Matthew Breit and Andrew Weldon

They finally got it done; download the map / read Breit's write-up and Weldon's write-up.

Flipping through the screenshots, I'm not sure if I would've went with such a noisy concrete texture for this, as it kind of muddies up the real star here -- the ambient occlusion on the surfaces, the subtle lighting. I also would've went with some more color too. Though maybe with this, he wanted to differentiate himself more from Rob Briscoe's Mirrors Edge abstract speedrun-floater level treatments, and break away from the legacy of GeoComp2 with its demand for very plain textures. I guess in the end, the difference is pretty trivial, as we're just two different flavors of modernists.

I'm taking a lighting design class right now, and it's remarkable how useless it is in the context of real-time game lighting solutions that have no concept of bouncing light or glare -- that's partly what an ambient term, SSAO, and HDR are supposed to simulate.

The paradox is even weirder the more I think about it. Commercial lighting design is all about avoiding harsh shadows, but in the days of the Source Engine, people were obsessed with mimicking the pitch-dark high-contrast shadow projections that aren't photorealistic nor terribly flattering nor well-stylized, yet are still subject to the weaknesses of static lighting. (My history: many were upset that Source didn't have stencil shadows like the other engines, unaware that Source's radiosity tool was much more futureproof anyway; Unreal ended up focusing on lightmap baking too.) It was like hitting no birds with two stones.

My lighting design instructor would cry if he knew what most of us have done: letting our technology fetish get in the way of good ol' artistic composition. However, I think he'd be okay with what the boys did on this very pretty level. Maybe I'll show it to him.

Also, I think Matthew "Lunaran" Breit should, um, share his CubeSpew Python script for Maya. Let's protest by joining servers running this map, and standing still. I propose the hashtag #OccupyLunaran.

Levels that make me want to start using UDK

I still really like Unity, don't get me wrong, but it'd be nice, sometimes, to be able to slather post processing on everything without breaking a sweat. Here are two UDK levels that are really awesome looking and don't rely on the default UDK assets, which is so much of the UDK stuff I see out there. (I also wish Dead End Thrills would feature indie work more often, like, 99% of the time.)

Animal Memory (Test 01), by Jack "Gauss" Monahan. Download here. Find all the pink cassette tapes, just like the cool kids in Tony Hawk games. My critique to him -- it's so postmodern cool-looking that I found the level very difficult to navigate. Masterful use of color and silhouettes though, of course. Next build, I believe, Mr. Monahan plans on adding mans to shoot.

Hubris, by Andrew Yoder. Download here. Not much to do here, other than walk around and be freaked out by the ambient sounds. He cites me (oh dear) and Dan Pinchbeck as his inspirations. The models and forms are technically very simple, and sometimes that's more of statement than fancy cubemapped parallax stuff. It's like Ico HD on acid.

Games @ Parsons

Hey all, just a brief plug -- me and my fellow students / faculty at Parsons are starting a new initiative to talk about the stuff we do in graduate-level game design studies. This public research blog is called "Games @ Parsons" -- we'll analyze indie games, post our own experimental prototypes, try to situate your favorite games in the context of academic research, announce cool NYC events for you to attend, and generally just be cool because school is cool.

Skyrim, Steam Workshop, and the means of mod distribution

Auto-updating Skyrim mods sound amazing to me, but you have to wonder what will happen to the existing infrastructure; this move is extremely disruptive. Will Skyrim Nexus become a ghetto of unlicensed content / adult mods? ModDB will miss out on this entirely too. Sure, they'll say Steam Workshop is "optional" -- but if all the best mods are auto-updated with one-click installation, the player base will move and it won't really be optional anymore.

As Bethesda moves to weaponize mods like no one else before, and assumes an Apple-ish App Store relationship to its games and peoples' mods, you have to wonder what the effect of oversight and censorship will be.

Can your Steam account get banned from the Steam Workshop? If you make works that are critical of Bethesda's practices, can they just ban and silence you forever? Will there be room for LGBTQ-themed content or will it be institutionally repressed, as on the App Store? What if people start harassing your Steam account because you made a mod they didn't like? Is this more than an attempt to make sure they don't have another nudity-mod ESRB scandal that rocked Oblivion?

That isn't to say Skyrim Nexus doesn't police / censor their content too, but they certainly had a lot less to lose.

Game mods, like all games, can be used as political forms of speech. It's always a little spooky when someone decides to change the means of distributing that speech. We might not realize what we've lost, if anything, until it's gone.

Maybe everything will be fine and it'll be a new golden age of mods... or maybe we'll be setting up tents to occupy the Steam Workshop one day. What could be paradise here and now could just as easily become hell itself.

THAT Mod, by Axel "Xenon" Shokk

I just wanted to remind people that this existed, because it didn't get nearly as much coverage as it deserved.  It reminds me of an alternate universe GeoComp, where Sparth wouldn't have been so heavily influential in emphasizing economy of form rather than some crazy acid-induced color vomit -- and I truly use the word "vomit" in the best sense possible because walking through these places is fascinating as Xenon dances on the edges of realism so delightfully. Again, we must thank the indie FPS community.

I also remember reading somewhere that he was working on a sequel in Unity3D...

Download THAT Mod @ ModDB. (132 mb)
(Source SDK Base 2007 required... so basically, it's free.)

The joys of using world space / procedural UVs for Unity3D

NEW, 9 July 2013: I've detailed a different implementation of the same effect, better for texturing smooth bumpy surface / terrain, in another post -- "A Smoother Triplanar Shader." I still think this way is good for some things too, though.

One of the greatest benefits of old Quake-lineage BSP systems is managed UVs for world geometry; move your polygons wherever you want, and let shaders texture and tile them properly. It lets level designers focus on building, and frees environment modelers to focus on geometry rather than the mundane work of UVing and texturing yet another concrete wall.

If you're an indie developer doing the work of both, well, any shortcuts are welcome. And if you're not thinking about these things, then just ask yourself whether the player's going to look at this thing you're modeling for more than a few seconds. Just use a block and let the engine worry about it.

If you're an actual graphics / shader programmer, you can do pretty nifty stuff with this technique: Tom Betts at Big Robot is working on a not-Minecraft, and talks about using "voxel skinning and virtual texturing" which sure sounds and looks rather pretty. It's kind of similar to what Valve used for the caves in Half-Life 2: Episode Two -- let the computers do math and walk away!

But I'm not Mr. Betts, so I'm using a much more pitiful and simplistic thing.

Here's the shader I've been using for my projects, slightly modified from something I found on Unity3D Answers a long time ago. I found it after a lot of fruitless digging through significantly worse implementations -- one editor script destructively re-UV'd all the meshes in your scenes, the other script did some weird thing with material offsets -- just leave that all at the door and use a shader-based solution, trust me.

Level With Me, a post-mortem / some unnecessary notes / dear players, it's no longer okay to not know how video games work.

To be clear, I think all readings of "Level With Me" are valid, even the ones that say it's pretentious (though I think it's a remarkably contentless thing to say about experimental work) and it's indulgent (which is like berating a biography for focusing on an individual). But at least it implies a player's willingness to read the levels, even if they don't like what they read -- assuming they even played it.

Game design relies on a theory of mind for players. By that measure, many mainstream commercial games think players are utter simpletons and strive to explain every single thing -- Arkham City will have the Penguin frequently tell you how upset he is and how many enemies are left in the room; tool-tips will remind you that, yes, that glowing electric plate is electrified -- if you prefer your games to talk down to you, to patronize you, then I'm sorry you're going to be disappointed with this mod.

I was shocked, then, by the most common line of criticism I saw: a refusal to read, an insistence that a level without a puzzle-y Portal puzzle is a bad level. It's like the rhetorical equivalent of donkeyspace. I literally can't go through the mental gymnastics required to conclude that challenge is the only interesting thing about first person single player games. Comments like that make me miss all the people who said it was pretentious; I want a higher level of criticism.

Then I watched a "Let's Play" of Level With Me, even the grueling hour or two where he's stuck at the end of chapter one -- and at the end of the whole playlist, he says he doesn't think he "got it" and wants an explanation. Well, whatever you took from it is what it meant. You don't need me to tell you what it means. (This, perhaps, is what the anti-intellectual "pretension police / gestapo" understand better than anyone else.)

Nonetheless, given his struggle and triumph, I'll honor his request. If you can't bother playing the mod, check out his Let's Play Level With Me playlist on YouTube. Now, here's an explanation of my intent and one possible reading of the mod. There are MASSIVE SPOILERS. You were warned:

Tales from Zobeide

The biggest bottleneck for city generation right now is time; it takes 80 seconds for 2800 buildings. I guess I can just delay the player and make them watch a lot of loading screens? I'm also hoping a "complete" city will have at least 4000, which will probably be about 1.5 million polys -- but they're among the cheapest type of polygon to render, so it'll hopefully be okay. Draw calls seem under control too; I'm merging entire city blocks as combined meshes. (And I'm testing on an integrated card, so it should be fine.)

Postcard from Antiquity

Currently finishing up a geocentric space RTS, another collab with Eddie Cameron, for the Super Friendship Club "Universe" pageant. (Newer interface demo is playable here.) Come make games with us!

Postcard from Yorda

Started working on an Ico-ish game on a whim, now I have a half-finished monster -- all because I have to prove to Unity's Flash export that I'm not going to let it beat me with it's half-implemented functions and dozens upon dozens of undocumented bugs.

Right now I'm just improvising a giant castle thing, and then I'm going to sprinkle some gameplay in there or something -- I've left some empty spaces for puzzles, whatever those will be. Try out the v0.3 prototype here, which'll probably be the last public prototype since so much of this one is about novelty:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/19887116/yorda/03/yorda3.html

(click to walk, double-click to run, or just sit back and let the pathfinding work its magic)

Postcard from Zobeide

Zobeide is going to be a hypertext FPS about the danger of desire. I have a decent interface with Twine working, but the seamless level-sharing has been kind of a technical roadblock, with the Playtomic API randomly deciding to fail sometimes. Now I'm thinking I need to have a generic backup city to load in case it can't reach the servers. Next, I need to model some more buildings and think a bit more about the interaction / aesthetic.