Vidcon Alley

[marek-kapolka]

Dead Belt Notes

Dead Belt is a solo tabletop RPG about salvaging loot from derelict spaceships. Dead Belt has two tiers of gameplay: There's a moment-to-moment tier, in which you explore derelict ships, moving from room to room finding tricks and treats, rolling dice, and trying not to die of asphyxiation. Between your looting sessions, you tally up your lucre, pay off (or take on more) debts, buy upgrades, and roll the next ship you'll be diving into. Randomness permeates almost every single mechanic throughout the game to a degree that can feel obsessive at times. You roll to determine what kind of ship you're going to, you roll every time you move between rooms, you roll when you encounter an obstacle, you roll when you try to stash your loot, you roll to determine how the ship breaks apart, etc etc etc. All the rolling and randomness during the ship-scavenging gameplay can be justified as a way of representing an inherently dangerous and unstable occupation, but it becomes a slog when it shows up in the meta-progression. In between scavenging trips, you roll to determine whether or not your debt, a long-term measure of how close your game is to ending, goes up. That single roll, which you have no control over whatsoever, has a greater impact than any other roll, and is potentially more important than the outcome of your salvage operation.

Here's a few more words to cover some of the more questionable mechanics in detail:

Gas

Gas is how much air you have to breathe. Every time you "check gas" (which happens most commonly as you move between modules, but also as a penalty in other circumstances), you roll 1d6. If that number is >= your current gas value, your gas value decreases by one. If it reaches zero, you die. As your gas counts down, it becomes increasingly risky to move between modules. The mechanic has a nice feeling in that, when you're at 6 gas, it feels safe and comfortable, but it can quickly turn a corner and become a strict time limit to get out of the ship you're looting.

On the other hand, this mechanic is very swingy. It's not uncommon to get your first 6 roll early in your expedition, and because losing points of gas means that future rolls are more likely to fail, your run will go downhill quickly. Gas tends to be main factor that limits how long you can spend in a wreck. There are very few ways to refill your gas, and no permanent upgrades that improve your gas capacity. A few consumable items allow you to traverse a few modules without spending gas, and another item allows you to refill a few points of gas at the airlock at a cost. The value of being able to refill your gas varies. If you can top yourself off, from 5 to 6, that brings you back to where you were at the start of the mission. Going from 1 to 2, however, will most likely only let you explore one more module that's adjacent to the airlock.

Going through the trouble of setting up an 18 card ship, only to get a series of bad rolls and only be able to spend 6 turns in there, is incredibly frustrating. Doubly so if, afterwards, you get hit with an increase in Debt.

Payday

Your goal is to get the payday for the big cred

Each ship has one Joker card mixed in- the Payday. Ostensibly, this is the big treasure you came to find- the spectacularly valuable artifact that makes risking your life worth it, but there's a catch. Extracting the payday comes with several nasty surprises. When you find the Payday, you roll a d6. On 1,2, and 3, the payday is worthless, though you can spend a point of Grit to avoid this. On 4, 5, and 6 you get to choose a few penalties that don't apply, presumably (although, somewhat awkwardly, this isn't stated explicitly in the rules) applying all the remaining ones. The penalties can range from the ship breaking into pieces, causing a Threat to appear (Threats being tremendously dangerous, persistent foes that hunt you and can't be removed), or forcing you to spent Grit or Gas to remove it. For your trouble, you get a certain amount of treasure. The amount of treasure you get, however, is slightly underwhelming. More than half the diamond cards give more loot than the payday of a small ship, entirely without a drawback. Larger ships have larger paydays, but unless you choose the bonus that allows you to transport the payday without regard to your Load stat (forcing you to take some different penalty), the amount of loot you can carry back to the airlock is limited.

The payday guarantees you have at least some loot in every ship, even if you are unlucky in the cards you draw, but typically it doesn't really define the success of your salvage operation in the way you'd expect it to.

Debt

Your Debt value goes from zero to 10. Depending on your choice of character and ship, you start at a different debt level. When this reaches 10, you lose. Whenever you come back from a salvage operation, you roll 1d6 and, if you roll 1 (or 1-2 at high debt levels), your debt increases. You can pay off debt with 10 credits, which is the maximum haul of the smallest ship and a typical haul for the second tier of ship.

Debt has the same issue with fickleness as Gas- you're a few bad rolls away from death regardless of how well you're doing. Getting a haul of 10 credits isn't a bad run, but to then lose those 10 credits to debt immediately due to a bad roll sets you right back to where you were when you started, which is incredibly frustrating. There's a strong desire to scum this roll, since it's unilaterally bad, somewhat rare, and very straightforward- If I had not rolled a 1 here, I would be ahead. In the moment-to-moment game, rolling badly is an expected part of the ebb and flow of fortunes. I can work around a bad roll and, to some degree, change my strategy as I go. I'm always making the choice- do I continue to push my luck, or return to my ship and cut my losses?

In the session-to-session game, that choice becomes, "do I pay off debt to stay in the safer tiers of debt, or do I re-invest it to gain more loot per salvage operation?" on paper this seems like it should be reasonable, but I think psychologically it's just too oppressive to roll a 1 and have that much progress taken away. Also, the particulars of the likelihood of each outcome on the debt roll mean that, until you get to 7 debt, it feels like it's always the right answer to re-invest, and if you aren't pulling in >10 loot per session on average once you hit 7 debt, you're not going to make it. I'm not sure if that's realistically how it works out.

Gas and debt form an interesting thematic pair. With both, you periodically roll 1d6 and, if the roll is bad, march towards your demise. With both, the likelihood of your roll being bad increases as your situation gets worse. The idea of compounding interest making debt worse and worse makes sense, although tying it a dice roll doesn't. Debt doesn't compound at random intervals, it happens with the inexorable periodicity that calls to mind the crushing forces of gravity of the black hole that the derelict spaceships orbit in the game's narrative. The pull of gravity gets stronger exponentially as you fall nearer to the event horizon, just as the pull of debt and gas gets stronger as you get nearer to death. The session-to-session gameplay has a "do or die" quality- if you don't earn money fast enough, you can't pay off your debt and it'll compound and kill you. If you can reach financial escape velocity, however, you can start paying it off and eventually win. It's a nice quality when it works, and it hastens the game towards a conclusion, but when you get stuck in the middle, neither spiraling out of control towards defeat nor rocketing towards victory, it feels like a pointless scramble to stay where you are.

Rolling Ships

When you set out to go loot a new ship, you roll twice. The first roll determines the rank of the ship you're going to loot, the second determines its class - Civilian, Merchant, or Military. Ships with a higher rank have more cards (modules / rooms), and their payday is worth more. You can buy an item that biases the outcome of the roll towards higher tier ships, but you can't choose what tier of ship you want to loot next.

Your ability to spend longer amounts of time in derelicts is highly tied to how much you've progressed in the meta-progression: What kind of ship you have, how many upgrades you have, etc. I'd expect the tier of derelict I want to explore would depend on what I think I can take on- I want to salvage the biggest ship I can, to find the most loot, but I don't want to overestimate my abilities and end up running out of air before I find the payday. However, because the payday isn't of critical importance, and because you don't have much influence over what kind of ships you can find, the game doesn't have as much room to allow the difference in ship size to be a major factor.

Redesign?

Some things I'd be curious to try in a redesign:

Instead of rolling debt after each mission, tie it to whether or not you gathered the payday. If you got the payday, no debt. If you didn't, increase debt.

If you can't randomly get fucked by dice rolls, 10 lives might be too many, maybe bring the max debt down to 6 to keep the connection to the Gas mechanic

This would probably get rid of some of the "do or die" quality, and it would privilege looting smaller ships to a degree. Maybe a mechanic that increases the amount of credits it takes to get rid of a point of debt? Or maybe debt just costs 20, 30 to get rid of. 

If you can more consistently avoid accruing it through skilled play, it's not as important how quickly you pay it off

Allow you to choose the tier of ship you're going to loot next, and make the tiers of ships more impactful

With the debt redesign above, this becomes the big wager- do I think I can successfully get the payday of a medium ship with my skills? If not, it's big trouble for me.

This gives you a goal for vertical progression - I want to get my stats up high enough to take on the higher tier ships

To avoid privileging running small ships over and over again, increase the cost of upkeep and... make the lower tiers of power less consistent?

I'm not as sure about this one, but with the above two changes I think you'd privilege running small ships over and over again, since if you're overpowered for small ships you can reliably find the payday while bringing in small amounts of money each time, and eventually grind out a victory.

You might be able to balance things in such a way that, if you have a few upgrades, you can't get the payday consistently to avoid debt, but if you have enough upgrades to gain consistency you're paying too much for upkeep.

Alternatively, If the lower tiers of upgrades were less consistent overall, then the small amount of $ you get from small ships wouldn't overcome the slow increase of debt. If you miss the payday in 1/10 runs, but it takes 20 runs to pay off a debt, then you'll still come out behind.

[marek-kapolka]

One of several reasons analog games give me hope

A while back I had a yen to boot up some of my old games and see what kind of changes I've been through as a game developer. I made some old games in klik and play but they no longer run in newer versions of windows - something about being 16 bit executables no longer being supported. I made a bunch of games in Flash in college, but now that's gone too. Thanks to the heroic efforts of the fine folks at the Internet Archive, those can run emulated in the browser, but what will happen when those, too, stop working? It takes constant effort to keep these compatibility layers operating. Will the successes of digital archivists continue forever?

Video games are built on a desert of shifting sand dunes. APIs change, old versions of shared libraries cease to be hosted, services are deprecated. PCs need constant updates to prevent them from becoming the target of hackers, and alongside those updates comes the changing behaviors that cause software to misbehave.

When a painting ages, it does so gradually- layers of grime accrete, resins yellow, the sun fades pigments - but it happens slowly, in a way that we can watch happen as we age. It happens predictably, we so we can learn how it happens and make choices when we're painting that will prolong the life of a painting, or restore it. It happens inexorably, so we can accept it's temporal existence.

When a video game ages, it does so all at once. One changed API, or missing library, or new security setting will stop the whole thing in its tracks until someone with very specialized knowledge goes in and fixes it. An unfathomably vast complex of industry create the conditions that allow a video game to execute - from rare metal miners to manufacturers of CPUs, GPUs, PSUs, RAM modules, monitors and keyboards and cases, fabs and dies, to programmers of operating systems and game frameworks, their business and marketing and HR departments. Each entity in this sprawling network has the potential, through pettiness both personal and political, through market incentives, competence or incompetence, with intentions both good and evil, to create a rippling chain reaction that flows through this mysterious medium and renames a single registry value that your game depends on in order to run. There is no solemn dignity for art that is macerated in the grinding gears of progress. Your art will not stand as a testament to hubris, eroded by eons of lonely winds. It will be silently garroted by an update that fixes touch gestures in a sticker app.

The same force that through the green fuse drives the flower does not drive tech's eternal puberty, but you are just as dumb to tell this to Google's support page as you are to the hanging man.

Do your games run on Apple silicon? It's a different instruction set, you know - don't take that for granted. There's some kind of compatibility shim for x86 apps that's already set to be deprecated, and it's up to you- yes, you, the person reading this- to re-build your apps to run on the new macbooks. Unity is certainly not going to do it for you. Your value to Unity (or Unreal, or Game Maker, or whatever) is exactly equal to how much you pay them every year. Any concessions they seem to make to your workflow are the lurchings of a giant whose limbs stretch beyond the horizon. If you died today, would your grandchildren be able to experience the art you made? Do you have someone to cut a new build before your chosen version of Unity falls out of Long Term Support?

When journalists from the real world come visit our beloved slime bog and interview the rare developer that can stand tall enough to poke their head out of the muck, they (both parties) like to make excuses for games' smelliness by calling it a "Young Medium". Two thoughts on that: In the British Museum there's a copy of the game of Ur from ~4600 years ago. They won't let you play with that one but with a bit of elbow grease you can whip up your own version and play the same game as the Mesopotamians. Secondly, everyone gets one lifetime to work on their art. I just want to be able to put my games in a box and take them out when I'm older and make some sense of where my head's been at, but I don't want to have to keep debugging build errors on all these dang things for the rest of my life.

[marek-kapolka]

Codename: Portia

This image is the humble beginning of the game engine I've been working on for the past month. It's an implementation of the classic Gamemaker tutorial "Catch the Clown" - where clowns bounce around the screen and you have to click on them to earn points. It doesn't look like much, but most of the core pieces of the engine are now working in the way I expected them to, so it represents a nice milestone.

In the hope of not jinxing myself, I'm going to try to only talk about what already exists in the project, but I will say that the ultimate goal of the project is to create a game making tool / engine with a deep focus on creating games quickly and with flow.

Overview of the system

A core feature of Portia (and one of its most complete ATM) is its mechanism for creating game objects. The approach here is a bit of a mashup between Gamemaker's approach of having distinct object types with unique behaviors and Unity's approach of creating game objects out of collections of components. In Portia, each game object has a type, but that type is defined as a collection of interrelated components.

Each component is an object that fulfills some kind of purpose in the game: some of them render images on screen, some will play an sound effect, some handle the logic of moving a character when you press the arrow keys, etc. Components communicate with each other by sending and receiving values via inputs and outputs (the eponymous "ports" of Portia). Inputs allow you to parameterize the behavior of a component, and outputs allow you to access attributes of the components in order to pass to the inputs of another component. As an example, if you were creating a mario, you might have one component handle mario's movement and another which renders his character. The Movement component would output its current position, and the Sprite would accept that position as an input and use it to determine where to render the image. These relationships are defined statically (they don't change at runtime) and declaratively (as the value of one component's output changes, the value of the downstream input will also change)

Input values can be modified via functions in order to tweak the value that the component receives. If you wanted to offset the image of Mario, for instance, you might have a function that modifies the value of position that's passed into the Sprite component: add(movement.position, vector(10, 10)). This would take the output position of the movement component and add vector(10, 10), a constant vector value, to it. The sprite would then draw its image in that offset position instead of the original place.

Clusters of components and their relationships can be composed into re-usable units, called Composites. Composites can receive inputs and emit outputs, and can be used in other Composites as if they were themselves Components. This allows you to build abstractions around particular patterns or collections of components and re-use them throughout the game, or between games.

Each game object is an instance of some root Composite. When the composite is updated, the game object's behavior is also updated. This is a bit of a departure from the way Unity handles components. In Unity, each instance of a GameObject has its own collection of components, and each component has its own copy of its parameters. There's a loose concept of "type" in the form of Prefabs, which are predefined templates of nested game objects & their components. When a prefab changes Unity does its best to update the instances of that prefab, but an instance of that prefab can deviate in any way from the template. This has the advantage that any instance of a game object in a scene can be tweaked on the spot (you can turn one particular tree yellow by altering the renderer component), but the drawback is that you can accidentally cause drift between a game object and its template in a way you didn't intend. In Dondgynns auv ye Wyrdd the monsters are complex interrelations of little components, with event handlers in one part of the monster pointing to components in another part of the monster's game object. I would occasionally accidentally alter one of those event handlers in one of the monsters, causing only that one particular monster to be broken in a subtle way, creating a very hard problem to debug.

In Portia, fields that can be parameterized on a per-object level are explicitly exposed at the top level and carried down to the place in the object where they need to be used. Every other component's parameter is defined statically- either as a constant value or in relation to another component's outputs.

Why this

Having a first class mechanism for connecting components together solves what I've seen to be a common problem in similar entity-component systems such as Unity: that of figuring out how components should talk to each other. By design, no component operates alone- it has a single purpose and is meant to be composed with other components. A typical pattern in systems like this is for components to go rooting around in their game object to find another component that it can interact with. In Unity, when a SpriteRenderer wants to know where to render itself, it looks for a Transform, a component common to each GameObject which has the position, rotation, and scale information for that object.

This approach has a few drawbacks. The relationship between the SpriteRenderer and the Transform is implicit; we have to know that the SpriteRenderer will be looking for a Transform component in order to determine where it will be rendered. This also creates a tight coupling between the two components. If we want to have the sprite render in a different location, we have to alter the properties of the Transform component itself, which will also alter any other components that rely on that Transform's properties.

Having a language of inputs and outputs means that the relationships between components are made much more explicit and can also be made much thinner and loosely coupled- for a sprite renderer, it no longer needs a Transform to get position data: any component that can output a vector can suffice- be it a character controller, a component that outputs the current mouse position, or a component that simulates a physics object. It should also allow you to be able to combine pre-existing components in more robust and creative ways, and play around with different combinations in a way that should be more experimental and fun. In Unity, making two components talk to each other in a new way tends to involve writing a brand new component from scratch in C#, which is annoying.

So, that’s what I’ve been working on. There’s definitely still a long way to go, but I think it’s off to a promising start. Some of the ideas regarding combining components are starting to seem like they’re working, so I think it’ll be fun to see how it shapes up, and how it feels to make more serious projects with it.

[marek-kapolka]

Thoughts on a new project

nuuup

Space has a lot of interesting properties that makes it so widely used in games. You can put shapes and colors in space wherever you want, and their positions relative to each other create a large number of effects that create meaning, contrasts, aesthetic effects, whatever. You can overlap things or put them far apart, you can put them into geometric patterns, you can place them in space in ordered or unordered ways. You can put two things next to each other to contrast them, or you can arrange them so they agree, or conflict, or collude. The player can move through this space in all sorts of ways- in first person or third person, with platformer controls or with driving mechanics. You can put them on rails or stick them in one spot. All of these choices impact the character of the scene. And to bring interactivity to the piece, there are a number of conventions you can draw on. If two things are overlapping just a bit, you can make them push apart from each other, and thereby create solidity. When two things touch each other, you can trigger some other effect. Or maybe an effect is triggered when they get close to each other. You can have things automatically orient themselves to face a particular point in space, or another object that’s moving through the scene. These interactions can happen because of the potentials offered by space. Space acts as a kind of connective tissue in which interactions can take place.  

Robert Rauschenberg

There’s a split here, though. Between the tools that we use to orient objects in space and how to set up literal interactions between objects. With a tool like Unity, placing images and models, etc in space is relatively straightforward. With a little practice you can get a pretty intuitive understanding of how to move things around, and you can get into a very intuitive and creative mindset. Building interactions, though, almost always requires writing code in one form or another. And once you’re writing code you have to bring yourself into a problem solving mindset. Code requires very precise, literal understanding of the symbols it traffics in, and it requires you to string together and understand complex systems in exact ways in order to achieve the effect you want.

Does it need to be this way? Can we devise a way to create literal interactions with the same ease as aesthetic interactions? And perhaps with the same ambiguity and ambivalence? I’m reminded of something thecatamites wrote once, about an ideal videogame interaction being driving a car in a desert, colliding with a clown in the middle of the road who makes an ambiguous buzzing sound. Or of any of nuuup’s games, the haphazard triggers and sloppily coded rules. Squishy collision detection algorithms that suggest walls but don’t reliably prevent objects from moving through. But most importantly the process of building them should be intuitive, soft. Small changes in C# code can result in massive changes to the behavior of the game, or more likely a fatal syntax error. Many programming languages are built to minimize the potential of misunderstanding, and requiring slavish exactness in syntax is one strategy for that.  But with aesthetic interactions small changes have small effects, usually.

fizzhog

What I want to experiment with in this project is to explore the properties of space that allows it to be a medium for interactions (aesthetic and literal) and what kinds of alternatives could exist that could supplement them that might have some of the intuitiveness and permissiveness of placing objects in space, without requiring the precision and literal thought patterns of programming.

What form this might take, though, I’m not so sure of. I’m reminded of the particular types of glitches that appear on NES and old systems like that. Array methods going beyond the bounds of the array and accessing different memory. High level languages check for that and will throw an exception, but older platforms don’t care. There’s an ambivalence regarding where the data you’re passing to a method comes from. Often there are very few terminal control flow situations. Methods will return -1 if they’re in a bad state, or w/e. Or set an error flag elsewhere, and you can either check it or not.

In space, you can create an array of objects in a line. Moving them closer or farther apart changes their qualities, individually and collectively. In a data array, there’s no equivalent. Indices are fundamentally different from distances in space, but there’s a connection there. Could we make a language, or a medium, or… what word to use? In which arrays could be spaced differently, and that would somehow change how they feel, without, perhaps, changing how they operate?

[marek-kapolka]

July 3, 2017

saving the animals by sam mortimer

CW: Suicide

Like always I glazed over the introductory text before downloading and running this game, only really noting the content warning that both clyde and the author mentioned, so when I got to the penultimate scene I thought to myself, “this seems like the kind of game where critics would speculate that all of this is the twisted delusion of a guy about to commit suicide. Why is there such a reluctance to read abstract scenes as such?” Or allegory? Over lunch the other day my coworkers were talking about The Life Of Pi. They all agreed with the psychiatrists at the end of the movie who decide that Pi imagined the story about the tiger and the animals to protect himself from the horrors of whatever happened on the boat. Apparently those psychiatrists didn’t exist, none of us really remembered the details of the movie, but the aspect of parable especially was obliterated. The story exists only as a puzzle to be solved: what really happened on the boat? Humans match up to animals like puzzle pieces, but you’re left with an extra tiger. Well, cut the tail off and he kind of looks like the animal side of human nature. Must be a manufacturing error.

Then the ultimate scene. Ah. Everything clicks into place. It’s a good ol’ fashion repressed trauma narrative. And, yes, when you go back and peek into the corners you find all the telltale signs you expect- the cocks and the drugs and the dead bodies, and even a cool tiger-scorpion chimera. You can go through and puzzle yourself a tragic, real world narrative for the protagonist if you’d like. He’s trying to save all his friends, maybe, or himself when he was younger. You can play with the symbols all day, and the game supports that kind of reading. You feel like you’re progressing towards some kind of truth. It feels as though this is meant to be a tragedy- as though if this character could only give up his illusions and see things how they are, he wouldn’t have to kill himself. Except that destroying the illusion is what kills him after all.

I think part of the appeal of these stories (the static speaks my name comes to mind, and binding of isaac moves in some of the same territory I think) is in the idea that all these mercurial, overwhelming subconscious forces can be conquered with a dry exercise in pattern recognition. Because these aren’t really stories about people with psychoses. In these games, psychosis is a vehicle to turn trauma into melodrama, and to imprint all these wounds onto a literal physical landscape. There are parts of the emotional tenor of save the animals that feel honest, but the frame is all wrong. The game of mapping individual mental phenomenon to lived events, 1:1, is doomed. The mind just isn’t that simple, and any work of art that tries to nail down meaning in that way kills any trace of human experience. The simplest image explodes with meanings, connections, emotions, from all the viewers, secretly within themselves and projected onto their facades, shared with each other & changing through time. Even if our past were just a video of everything that’s happened to us, we’d still need an extra lifetime of exegesis to make heads or tails of it.

[freeindiegame]

Forest Egg by Marek Kapolka

A brand new game from Glorious Trainwrecks rather than an old favourite today. Soothing exploration and a unique visual style that I adore.

[marek-kapolka]

100 Free Beetles

I made this game for the No Pressure Appreciation Nicejam over at GT, and the description kind of turned into a nice lil’ blog post, so I’ll post it here as well.

A mashup of 100 Free Assets by Blueberrysoft and Noisy Beetle by clyde.

I really enjoyed reading about the process of Noisy Beetle, that of making a series of very deliberate and thoughtful formal experiments to see how the different elements of the game interact with each other to form a whole. I went to school for digital media art, but where I felt like the classes for more traditional forms of media had exercises that let you practice these formal interactions really closely, the program I was in didn’t really have that level of rigor and experience when it came to game development.

The unity asset store is a treasure trove, and I feel a particular materialistic allure from the funny meeting of the val-u-store marketing and toylike nature of individual assets on the asset store (Fantasy SFX Sample Pak w/ 10 FREE WEAPONS). Importing and playing with free assets is fundamentally satisfying, but if you arrange and select your assets in the way they want to be arranged, you end up with a game that’s, at best, as milquetoast as the individual assets. 100 Free Assets felt like a very good experiment in reappropriating and recontextualizing those assets in a way that resolved* them somewhat. So I wanted to try doing that, but with more of a compartmental, Noisy Beetle kind of way.

The scenes are presented in the order they were made. I think there’s a sense of progression among them. The car and mushroom skeleton, particularly, feel clean and purposeful and intentional, although with the skeleton particularly it feels like I found a few asset packs that fit together tonally and thematically and made a scene with them, rather than working towards a more complete resolution to the problem of assets, in general. But the idea of climbing on a big skeleton overgrown with mushrooms was too delightful, and when I found that wonderful space within his ribs, well, I couldn’t resist. I’m not sorry, but I do think there’s a lot more work to be done before I feel really comfortable using assets.

* By resolved, I’m referring to the process of removing the various tensions that one feels from these assets: On a formal level, they have the quality of images cut out of a magazine: a skeleton with an attack animation wants to have something to attack, a photorealistic rock wants to nestle alongside a HD river with bloom lighting.  There’s a context that gets conspicuously cut when the assets live on their own.  And this also gives the assets a certain awkwardness, since they often aren’t created to live in any world in particular, or they’re made with reference to some kind of amalgam of random artistic styles the artist wanted to mimic, but they don’t land in any in particular.

There’s also a political dimension to this tension, since the ostensible purpose of the asset store is to serve up *professional* assets.  Assets that look as if a professional made them, and they belong in a AAA game.  The deal being, if you use these assets your game can look like it’s a professional game too.  And the games that are born out of this faustian bargain - you know the type, with a 10,000 poly Dark Knight stomping around an empty field with cartoon goblins - reveal, by turns, the optimistic dreams of some kid who Wants To Make Games When He Grows Up, or the cynicism of someone taking a pre-built infinite runner and hacking in a different player model, or the narcissism of a 3-idea-guy-and-one-programmer team’s kickstarter ($10 pledged of $500,000) who’ve got the next big MMORPG in the making. So this particular aesthetic becomes a synecdoche for the whole fucked up relationship between individual gamers and the multi billion dollar video game industry, with all the implications that that conjures up.

So, I know of two strategies to resolve this tension. The first is to simply find the right assets that go together, polish up the gameplay, and make a convincing fantasy that can hide the political dimensions of the relationship between the game maker, the asset store, and the games industry.  The other is the strategy of the collage artist: to combine the elements in such a way that their original purpose is subverted or obliterated.  And there’s a lot of ways of achieving that: through punning recontextualization of the images, or intentionally ruining the high quality assets, or using the objects such that they’re reduced to their formal qualities, or using the objects in such a way that you create an aesthetic of ugliness, or whatever.  100 Free Assets makes some good moves in that direction, THE ARCHICTECTURAL BODY AUTOMOBILISATION KIT is another good one, and oikospiel looks promising, though I haven’t played it yet, but I think for the true masters you have to look back to Hannah Hoch or Rauschenberg.

[marek-kapolka]

Game Journal: April 2, 2017

Future Unfolding by Spaces of Play UG

This is one of the first monologues that you see in Future Unfolding. It tries to set the tone for the philosophy of the game: that this game should be approached as if it were a universe of its own, and that its logic will seem alien to you, an outsider. What ultimately bothered me about Future Unfolding is that both of the statements in this monologue are wrong. If you want to follow the game’s overarching linear structure and get to the “end”, then eventually you will need to understand a fair few of the game’s mechanics in order to solve puzzles in your way. And while that room in particular isn’t a tutorial, there will be rooms in the future that are designed in such a way as to demonstrate various properties of the fauna that inhabit the world.

There’s a line of thinking you can follow in which every video game creates its own universe. The fundamental reality of that universe isn’t always what’s depicted visually: a mario on the screen doesn’t act like a living, conscious human but rather like a rectangle that slides through a universe of other rectangles, occasionally destroying or being destroyed by those other rectangles.

The other monologues that you find along the way talk about the cosmology of the world of Future Unfolding, or about a philosophy of presence, or the history of conflict between the different types of animals. The monologues never really seem to add up to a cohesive whole, though. Part of this is how they’re presented: one vague statement at a time, randomly, as a reward for exploration. I think each animal has its own train of thought, so if you found 5 talking wolfs in a row you might have an easier time putting the pieces together, but you never do, so you get a bit of cosmology, then a snippet of philosophy, then some history, etc. By the time you’ve found another snippet you’ve forgotten the last one, and you certainly forgot the last one of the same type (Dondjynns suffers from this same problem. I’m thinking having a central repository of bits of dialog  that you can re-read all at once might help?).

Another difficulty I had in getting any value out of the monologues is that I couldn’t find a way to relate them to the world I was experiencing. I remember one in particular that said something to the effect of “underneath the ground there’s a whole universe.” There’s a wonderful effect when you die where the ground opens up, revealing a void below, and swallows you whole. I wanted to connect that monologue to that visual effect and maybe understand some kind of mechanic, or some truth about how the game was laid out. I suspect it was going for more of a chthonic kind of truth- where do these little blue guys go when they die? But you die like mario dies - teleporting back to the beginning of the screen, and I read it as such.

And that’s ultimately where the disconnect, for me, came from. Future Unfolding operates like a puzzle adventure game. Over the course of the game you learn the various ways to interact with all the plants and animals and how they interact with each other, and the game will put obstacles in your way that rely on you knowing how they work. The zones are laid out in a slightly non-linear way, which prevents it from feeling too railroaded, but the individual screens are highly authored and intentional. This all puts you in the mindset of a puzzle solver. The game’s mechanics are very clear cut and logical, but all the while it tries to sell you on a mystical interpretation of the game’s world without ever giving you the space (or a reason, really) to think of it that way.

[marek-kapolka]

Game Journal- Dec 2, 2016

Breach's Murmur: TraumRock by gevaudan

Breach's Murmur: Sexuality's End by gevaudan

I find the serial nature of these games really exciting. There’s only two so far, but already their connection as part of a series gives them a lot more interest than they’d have on their own. It’s very hard, I’ve found, to write about small artgames in isolation, especially when they’re very abstract like these, but as they build on each other you start to see the contrasts between them they start to make more sense.

TraumRock has two cameras, one from a birds eye view, and one a first person view with a very short clipping plane. The views give you very different, incomplete perspectives of the desert you’re navigating, and you need to use both to get around. The aerial view helps you spot monuments from further out which you wouldn’t be able to find bumbling around with the nearsighted main camera, but the first person camera still feels like the “main” camera. Which I think has as much to do with that viewport’s superior positioning as with the aerial view’s historical connection with the mini map. That gets into an interesting can of worms regarding the validity of the map vs first person accounts, especially considering who is the one doing the accounts, creating the maps, etc. Which is a pretty fun territory to get into, considering that, according to gevaudan in the comments, the overhead view was a last minute addition, just for the sake of navigability.

Sexuality’s End has a sort of “picture in picture” view, two different shaders applied to the inside and outside of the screen. The outside shader distorts the appearance of the space pretty heavily. I found myself tricked often into thinking that a wall was actually a hallway that I could walk into when it was rendered with the outside shader. The space is actually very open and empty, ceremonial even, centered around this ambiguous organic looking thing that clyde thought was a genital. Gevaudan’s response to clyde thinking it was a genital, along with the title, give an interesting interpretation. The space is somewhat crypt-like, or museum-like. Certainly dead, and profoundly, unquestionably so. Dead for a long time. It’s an approach to dealing with themes of sexuality that sit in an interesting way with the majority of game culture. On the one hand you have the frustrated, adolescent sexuality of whatever AAA murder game, and you have the sort of indie countercultural hypersexuality in someone like Robert Yang, but I feel like Sexuality’s End represents a kind of [a?]sexual angst that pierces that dichotomy.

[marek-kapolka]

Game Journal, November 28, 2016

“Colored Candles” by Jack Perkins

Colored Candles evokes a very early-2000s java applet kind of feel, with little mysterious hyperlinks taking you to different pages. Some of the screens are interactive, or games, or visuals. There’s a button that when you click on it it takes away one of your smiley face currency units and plays a 5 second long FMV, which kind of makes it feel like one of those lame zoetrope things you can check out at the Musee Mechanique, where you put in a quarter and watch a little animation of a horse running or whatever. Kind of hilariously disappointing. The games are tied together by some shared state- a smiley face currency / life meter and the overall quest for the candles. There’s also a shared iconography- smiles, fortunes cookies, sugar cubes, that have roughly similar meanings in the different games but get reinterpreted a little bit.

The structure of this game really appealed to me. I’ve been thinking a bit recently about this style, especially in light of Jake Clover’s games, of jumping between different genres in different screens. I like the opportunity to make lots of little games that build toward something more whole and cohesive. It’s a style that has a long history and an unfairly bad reputation. Probably due to bad mini games, which get the least attention but most overused. Also because of the way that polish accretes on game mechanics, and making lots of mini games stretches your attention across them. But then art games have a different relationship to polish and entertainment than AAA games do, so. 

I’ve always had the most fun making trainwrecks, but my more serious ideas tend to be really big, bigger than I really have the patience to work on, and I usually want to couch the concepts that I want to explore within a fantasy world, which requires a level of boiler plate work to creating the narrative that surrounds and introduces those concepts, or at least that’s what I seem to convince myself of. 

[marek-kapolka]

Game Journal, November 18, 2016

Strawberry Smoothie by Jake Clover

Strawberry Smoothie has these awesome little geegaws that float around. The donut and dolphins in the above picture. My favorite are the viral dodecahedra and the techno gizmos in black and neon green (not pictured). Floating symbols in a cyber city. I’m trying to hone that intuition to realize that a space needs a floating, vibrating hotdog and the inhibition to be able to put it in there. My tendency is to keep things representational and grounded. I tried to loosen up in Dondjynns Auv Ye Wyrdd but I couldn’t resist the urge to keep the swamp reeds thin and to put the catty wampa where they belong and to make sure the spaces fit together logically. And to explicate even the UI elements, who have names and roles. I intuitively tend towards order and internal cohesion, towards explication. Part of that is related to fantasy: a fantastic world needs to live in the mind, and to do so it needs to have some kind of cohesion, a scheme by which to exist. But does it have to be logical? Our own world is seemingly bound by deterministic laws, at least at certain levels, but why should any arbitrary world be so? In Strawberry Smoothie when you stop driving your car to enter a building you might be in a platformer, or a point and click adventure, or a coin collecting zone, or who knows. Your lens into that world is chaotic, and it has a strange effect on how you perceive the underlying fantasy world. Today I will try to carry the world of Strawberry Smoothie in my imagination, and see what kind of form it takes.

[marek-kapolka]

October 31, 2016

2 by hubol

To make a metroidvania, or any platformer really, you have to create a lot of levels. The player is going to move through them pretty quickly if they aren’t going to be frustrated, or if they are going to be frustrated then the levels need to be twice as good so you need to spend longer on them. Every screen gets a lot of attention in order to get everything right, but that delicate, nuanced, loving process can get obfuscated by the method of implementation. Tiles exist because of their economy. They’re cheap to prototype with, drag around, re-use, etc. They create an stable and immediate design language. Jumper and Mario have screen after screen of levels built up of these building blocks. The same building blocks in every level, and it can give the levels a feeling of fungibility, or maybe even immediateness. And I think with block-based games there’s a sense of “I could make that.” Which of course you can’t. Not like that, and not how you’re thinking, anyway.

Every screen in 2 is drawn by hand. There’s a little bump on one of the screens that has a nose and mouth, which otherwise would just be a tile. One screen takes place inside of this monster, and when you find a secret part of the room it looks like it’s standing differently. There are little messages written in the grout in brickwork. It’s absolutely lavish. There’s some kind of tile system, mechanically, but it is in no place used as a means of supplying the visuals, which are always drawn specially for every screen. The art makes it immediately clear that an incredible amount of care and love and imagination went into making this game in a way that tile systems obfuscate.

[marek-kapolka]

October 29, 2016

Magic Wand, by thecatamites

Making representational games requires an immense amount of magic to make them legible as worlds like our own. I don’t need to say that the methods games use to simulate the world are heavily, heavily abstracted. Moving protagonists and characters along tiles is fundamentally different from how we as humans move through space. When you use these abstractions the way they’re designed it can seem reasonable. Every door and chest is a tile big, so the space in between isn’t relevant. Our hero is a warrior, we want him to swing his sword, and if he doesn’t he’ll die, so it doesn’t matter that that’s all we can do. But these abstractions also have a logic of their own, which is something that I think thecatamites does a really fantastic job of tapping into.

The stages of Magic Wand take place on these islands made of cubes floating in space, kind of reminiscent of Final Fantasy Tactics or Super Mario RPG. It’s a very abstract way of representing a space in a way that’s completely unambiguous about how that space works, mechanically. Take a sectional slice of the fantasy world and say, “the world as we are concerned about it ends here.” The world of Magic Wand takes this conceit and self consciously makes it the natural order. The world of Magic Wand is made of boxes floating in space, rather than having that as a mechanism for simulation, and the architecture reflects that. Areas have a vague resemblance to e.g. deserts or buildings or whatever, but it’s largely lipservice, and it subverts those representations as often as it uses them.

There’s another wonderful feature regarding the way the stages work in Magic Wand, which is that if you fall off the edge of the world you end up landing back on the map from the top. In a representational game, the moment when your character falls off the map is disastrous for the game’s believability. That’s one of the relatively common situations that forces your player to confront the fact that they’re playing a game. There’s a thousand different ways that their will could be frustrated, or that they could find the simulation isn’t adequate, or w/e, but in all those they have the choice to play along. “I guess it’s fine that Mario could just walk past this toad, it’s not in his character.” You can’t make that kind of allowance if your character falls off the world, though. Even if your world is represented as tiles floating in space, the player understands that those tiles represent a slice of a world that continues on. Falling past them is something that can only happen with tiles, not with a physical world. In Magic Wand, though, you just fall back down from the top. No big deal. And I really like that confidence.

The last thing I want to write about real quick (and really you could go all picking apart the little things in this game) is Magic Wand’s use of NPC models. JRPGs, especially NES/SNES era ones like Magic Wand seems to be pulling most of its inspiration from, re-use NPC graphics. All games do in some capacity or another, but JRPGs have a particular penchant for re-using precisely the same character sprites to represent unique individuals (as opposed to, say, having the same sprite represent functionally identical goombas). In Magic Wand there’s a vague amount of tying character sprite to identity. Mose have (has?) the same sprite and the same name wherever they appear, and sometimes are and sometimes are not the same individual character. Characters of a “type” have some shared characteristics, but there’s no explicit fiction for this like, say, different races in a western fantasy game.

[marek-kapolka]

October 22 2016, “Routine”

Diary of a Spaceport Janitor by Sundae Month

October 2015 by everythingistaken

Stardew Valley by ConcernedApe

These three games all share a common theme of routine. They take place in the same geographical area over a period of time, and every day you’ve got some amount of responsibilities to take care of  that you’ve got to do before you can proceed. They all depict professions of one kind or another, which puts them in very conscious contrast with adventure games. Their characters have responsibilities and a fixed station in life, rather than a grand quest to pursue.

Diary of a Spaceport Janitor is about an oppressed, impoverished janitor stuck making subsistence wages. The contrast between the “typical” adventure game structure is really apparent here since the spaceport is a hub for exactly that type of adventurer. A lot of the detritus you find lying around on the ground are monster blasters, quest fliers, healing potions or w/e. Since you’re not an adventurer they’re stripped of their use value, which gives the loot kind of an interesting flatness. And I guess that raises the question of “why isn’t the janitor an adventurer?” or rather, “why isn’t the janitor aspiring to be an adventurer, and what does the janitor aspire to?” If the janitor wanted to be an adventurer you’d expect to see stat blocks on the weapons and more attention paid to the use value of the various items. Living a hand-to-mouth subsistence life, though, doesn’t really afford that kind of aspiration, so that’s a subtle, successful part of that game.

October 2015 has that sort of sanitary deadness of the kitchen in a commercial for coffee filters. You do the exact same actions every day without variance, for which you receive a little text snippet of a storyline that you aren’t really a character in. The bleakness is cut a bit by being from the perspective of the coffee cup. Making coffee and giving it to the writer is the only thing that life can possibly hold for our hero. He certainly seems chipper about it. Needing to do the same actions in the same order every day reminded me of making the sign of the cross. It has the quality of the more formal type of ritual, that of tea ceremonies or catholic mass, where every motion is precisely prescribed, which takes away the responsibility and potential for failure. There’s a big difference between an action that’s completely mindless and an action that’s only mostly mindless, the former being habitual and unconscious and the latter being tortuous and boring.

Stardew Valley taps into the fantasy of being a farmer, which makes it idyllic. It’s interesting to see what professions get fantasized about and which ones become nightmares. Farming certainly is no cakewalk. There’s a lot of manual labor, dull routine, a history of exploitation. Which isn’t to say that Stardew Valley glosses over these aspects, but that it presents the fantasy of a farmer who isn’t bound by these restrictions. The protagonist of Stardew Valley owns their own land, doesn’t have daily needs to worry about, and has a fit body that never gets seriously and chronically injured. It’s a scaled up version of the practice of keeping a little tomato garden in your backyard. You could easily make a Grapes of Wrath game in the style of Diary of a Spaceport Janitor by giving the protagonist of Stardew Valley a few mortal woes. Conversely, you could take away the eating and gender shifting requirements of Diary, change the numbers a bit, throw in some love stories, and end up with a game that glamorizes janitorial work as much as Stardew Valley glamorizes farming.

[marek-kapolka]

October 12, 2016

Ticket by magicdweedoo

There’s an interesting tension in game development between structure and novelty. When you’re programming you generally want your implementation to be as generic and reusable as possible, and build the content of the game to fit within that framework. Every bit of custom behavior takes time to develop and test, so it’s efficient to make mechanics that you can reuse in a lot of contexts. Having that structure is good for the players, as well, since the familiarity helps them learn the rules faster.

If you go to the extreme end of this line of thinking, you end up with a game like Stephen’s Sausage Roll, which has very few individual mechanics but explores the space of those mechanics completely, which makes the game about mastery; in order to continue being entertaining to the player is has to keep finding new and interesting ways to combining and reusing the same mechanics. It’s a sign of great skill on the part of the game developer to be able to explore the design space of simple mechanics in a robust and interesting way, and on the part of the player to be able to understand all the different ways of rolling their sausage.

On the other end of that line of thinking is maybe something like Wario Ware, where every little game has its own rules. Ticket finds a really well balanced middle ground. There’s a platforming game at its core, and it uses that familiar structure in order to make its subversive surprises legible. The world map that ties platforming levels together changes its style of representation several times, even changing places and becoming a platforming level itself at one point. Each time you visit the store to buy groceries the mechanics are different. One of the menu options that comes up when you die is “cry” and it sends you into a little vignette of a shoe crying.

All these little gimmicks are really fun to encounter as you’re going through, but they start to wear thin pretty quickly. The platformer context that gives these gimmicks their meaning is also what sucks the life out of them. For example, sometimes when you die, instead of going back to the world map you go to this little purgatory level that you have to run through. The first time you see it it’s cool and shocking- it breaks the rules of how you expect the death loop to go, but after you die a bunch of times (and if you’re me you die a lot, it’s a hard game) the gimmicks cease to be subversions of the standard death cycle and just start to be expected. After you see it a few times it's no longer an exception to the rule, it is the rule, and most annoying of all the possible death screens is the one where you have to play another level that’s the same every time.

[sergiocornaga]

CYOA (2016)

For the 2016 edition of 24 Hour Zine Making Challenge, I mixed things up by giving the reigns of my scout series to Liam Bowen, who produced the official third entry, The Saga of the Shifty Space Scout. In exchange, I made an interactive zine inspired by Seeing With Closed Eyes, Liam’s ongoing comic series based on his dreams. The zine debuted at Auckland Zinefest 2016 with 16 hand-painted variant covers, and after the event I made a crude browser-based version which can be played below by clicking the numbers offered. If no numbers are given, you have reached an ending and can backtrack with your browser’s back button.

Play online (HTML)

[marek-kapolka]

Game Diary, October 6 2016

finger based game no. 1 by ihavefivehat

One of my goals for starting this game journal is to get a better sense of the overarching trends of the different game developers I encounter. I have a bad habit of glossing over the individuals on Glorious Trainwrecks and only focusing on the overall spirit of the games, rather than letting any particular individual’s games stick with me. I think the fact that there is such a strong binding philosophy (even if it isn’t 100% coherent or articulated) is one of the things that makes GT such a lasting community, even though otherwise it’s kind of low traffic and low engagement.

Ihavefivehat has one of the most distinctive styles of the regulars on GT. He’s got a way of doing texture and pattern that I admire. He takes shitty, low-res google images and photoshops them together to make really beautiful images and textures in a way that’s completely respectful to the weirdness of the source materials. He’s not shy about the weird artefacts of the techniques: the chunky, lossy pixels of the compressed and scaled up photos, the arbitrary borders that form when you import a photo into an RPG Maker tileset. I especially love the just barely legible “shutterstock” watermark in the cornhub box art.

finger based game no. 1 exists as a solid chunk of texture. You don’t really travel in this game. There’s an ostensible goal of moving vertically, but the goal only exists to be frustrated by boinging around on the fingers. The entirety of the composition is in the first five seconds, and all the seconds thereafter- trying to move through the place and failing. If you stick with it there’s an ending where you get to be big and blast all the fingies and move freely, which is a very appropriate cathartic moment for all that frustrating texture.