Wednesday, July 31, 2019

Hedera and brief notes on ivy aesthetics


This actually happened weeks ago, but I just realized I never posted anything here about it: I built a 3D ivy painting tool called Hedera. Each time you paint ivy, the Hedera "AI" will grow and simulate an approximation of real-life ivy behavior, clinging to surfaces and climbing towards the sun. It's pretty magical to watch in action.

Much of the core technique is based on Thomas Luft's C++ code from 2006 and a much more recent C# port from 2016 by Weng Xiao Yi, but I found both of their implementations to be very bare-bones proof of concepts intended more for engineers and less for artists, with little concern for workflow or usability. Most of my work focused on front-end user experience stuff -- making the simulation more predictable, conceptualizing a layer-like planting system, optimizing the procedural mesh generation, and getting it to play nice with the Unity Editor's arcane IMGUI and file serialization rules. I definitely learned a lot about tool-making.

ivy mesh wireframes / process from "Crysis 3 - Ivy" by Tom Deerberg
3D ivy meshes, like most video game foliage, were traditionally a very expensive photorealistic detail intended to evoke high production value and thus skilled craftsmanship. It is my hope that my tool lowers the barrier for covering 3D worlds in detailed ivy, thus decimating this value system in game art. Let ivy be worthless!

Perhaps when we stop oohing-and-aahing at the fidelity of game ivy and demystify its creation, then we can finally appreciate a more subtle and artistic use of ivy. As I've argued before, many indie game devs often have a (misguided) knee-jerk reaction against realism, but I think realist aesthetics have an important role to play in any visual culture.

Monday, July 8, 2019

On climate crisis games, for Rock Paper Shotgun


As part of previously announced shifts for this blog, I'm going to start pitching my longer design articles to various outlets instead of posting it here.

The first of these articles is now up -- it's a piece about various climate crisis games and how they play with the idea of environmental apocalypse. I also define a rough taxonomy of different climate crisis game subgenres, like flood games, ice age survival sims, and world sims.

As we all grapple with the ramifications of climate change, it's important for us to imagine stories and worlds about it, because this is how we process life as a society. If you look back at art and media in the 60s and 70s, you'll see a lot of "space age" art and aesthetic, obsessed with rocket ships and moon colonies, essentially giving birth to alien invasion stories and space opera. I think we're in the first half of a similar "green age" wave of environmentalism across art and culture, and there's already a lot of emerging genres and traditions here.

You can read it all over on Rock Paper Shotgun. Thanks to Brendan Caldwell for thoughtful edits.

Wednesday, July 3, 2019

Interview(s) with Mashable for Pride Month

Last month I ranted to Jess Joho (for Mashable) about sex games and the industry, and I also did a nice and awkward video interview (also for Mashable) filmed in the lovely Wonderville indie arcade bar in Brooklyn.

If you want to see me squirm, then maybe check out the video -- but whatever you do, definitely check out Wonderville if you're ever in New York City. It has one of those rare and coveted Killer Queen cabinets set to freeplay, it has an amazing Soviet flight sim cabinet where you destroy America (with real vector display), and it's also currently the home of the first queer community arcade cabinet The DreamboxXx for which I contributed my queer brawler defense game Dream Hard.

Happy pride, and have a good summer everyone!

Friday, June 28, 2019

State of the design blog

You may have noticed this blog has been a bit quiet lately. There's a few incidental immediate reasons for that: (a) it's summer so it's nice outside, (b) I'm doing a lot of holiday traveling, (c) my laptop recently broke and I have to coordinate loaner laptops and repairs, etc.

But those are just convenient reasons, instead of the more difficult reason that I'm reluctant to face:

I've decided I'm going to blog here less, and I'm not going to feel bad about it.

Thursday, May 16, 2019

Capsule reviews, vol. 1


Capsule reviews are short critiques of games that I've been playing. In this post, I discuss Heaven's Vault, Virginia, Islanders, and Two Point Hospital. There's no specific story spoilers, but I do talk about how I think the games work.

Heaven's Vault. The dynamic branching and language system is great and impressive, and the Muslim-inflected sci-fi art direction feels fresh. It's basically a must-play for anyone interested in narrative design. (Maybe the main weakness is the less-than-relatable characters, who basically feel like vehicles to bring about plot beats. Which is probably how the narrative system works! Hmm.)

The game pacing feels awkward for much of the game. You get to do one fun archaeological linguistics detective scene every hour, but to get there, you have to sit through an uncomfortable water slide mini-game. It's meant to give a sense of journey and a bit of rest (as well as pad out the game length) but it's a bad sign when even the fast travel options here feel inconsistent and confusing; sometimes the game lets you go back to your ship cabin to ask for fast travel, and sometimes not.

But also just on a core minute-to-minute basis, the movement and camera never felt comfortable for me, and The Last Express styled character animation never stopped feeling like a crutch for scoping down production costs. It's interesting how this project made so much (very impressive) progress on "hard" game design problems like dynamic narrative or language simulation, but then tripped on what's considered relatively "easy" solved design problems like 3D character movement, game feel, or encounter pacing.

Again, though, I still think this is a must-play for anyone working in narrative. Just soldier through the less fluent parts.

Tuesday, April 30, 2019

We must cultivate our garden: games as personal history


This post is based on a talk I gave at A MAZE Berlin 2019, as part of the Dev.olution "Games as Gardening" summit, as part of my 2019 European Tour.

When I think about gardening, I think of Voltaire's 1759 novel Candide. (No, really. No joke. I did think this.)

It's about a teen named Candide who goes on an extremely painful journey of tragedy, loss, and struggle. The entire time, his mentor Dr. Pangloss keeps insisting that nonetheless they still live in "the best of all possible worlds." The video game equivalent would be indies lamenting how hard it is to make a living, and tone-deaf Steam reps and Epic Store reps claiming that "games are a meritocracy"

Voltaire asks, how can you witness all that pain and still insist that everything is fine? By the end of the book, Candide and his few surviving friends are barely scraping a meager existence on a desolate farm. And after suffering absurd hardship and misery, Pangloss still insists everything turned out for the best, to which Candide responds: "all that is very well, but let us cultivate our garden."

Monday, April 22, 2019

Lessons from Europe: fields reports from EGX Rezzed, Now Play This, and A MAZE Berlin

I just came back from a games event tour through London and Berlin, where I had a lovely time meeting new people and catching up with old friends.

I had never been to EGX Rezzed or Now Play This before, and this was my third time at A MAZE.

I went because I feel like much of the game industry is still focused on the US, but to me, the majority of the interesting games culture and arts events seemed to be happening in (Western) Europe. What are they doing over there, what's their magic sauce, and how can I bring some of that sensibility back to the US?

Here's some general thoughts and Wot I Think:


EGX Rezzed

EGX Rezzed is mainly a customer-facing fan expo branded by Eurogamer and Rock Paper Shotgun in the Tobacco Docks, a complex of open-air brick vaults ringed with balconies and breakout rooms that feel like giant people-sized aquariums. It's a fraction of the size of the main EGX London or bigger US fan expos like PAX, but still features the same tabletop gaming rooms, indie publisher megabooths, and merch stands. It was fine, but personally I'm just not very interested in fan expos.

I enjoyed the more eclectic Leftfield Collection room, curated by David Hayward each year. And I particularly enjoyed Doggerland Radio by Amy Godliman, a modded vintage radio that you can tune to pseudo-real BBC radio dramas and poetic shipping forecasts, while playing with bespoke "feelies" like an impossibly old novel made of other novels or old vintage-style maps. It's like a very British version of Calvino's Invisible Cities, a mobile art game installation that would make the most sense in the UK.

The local neighborhood feels awkward even for London -- you either have to walk 20 minutes east from the Tower of London tube station, or take a semi-incorporated public transit line called the DLR. Other than the event venue, there's approximately one McDonalds with a 100 person line queue streaming out the door, and exactly one decent pub that everyone slowly drifts towards at the end of each day. (For designers and devs, this informal pub afterparty is probably the highlight of the whole thing.)

Wednesday, March 27, 2019

Radiator European Tour 2019 (London, Berlin, Milan) + Level With Me hiatus until April 17


In April, I'm going to cram ~6 different events into a whirlwind week of travel through London and Berlin. What's wrong with me? Why did I sign up for all this? There's only one way to find out how much of a wreck I'm going to be...

I'm planning on covering a wide variety of events, both free / non-free, and for gays / gamers / insiders / general public alike, so take your pick:

LONDON, UK
  • April 6: EGX Rezzed at Tobacco Docks, London
    I've heard nice things about Rezzed and I've always meant to go, so now is the time of reckoning. My talk "Designing For Sex Games" will be a short teen-friendly PG-13 introduction to sex and intimacy in game design, aimed at the general gaming public, at around 4:30pm on the last day of the festival.
  • April 7: Now Play This at Somerset House, London
    Now Play This is one of the jewels of the European game festival circuit, and I've always been meaning to go. I'll be presenting at their very very cleverly named mini-conference "A Series Of Interesting Decisions" on the design choices going into my next sex game Macho Cam.