Gravitation is another art game. It’s good. It’s also easier for new players to “get” than Passage, which hopefully will help more people realize how interesting these games are.

Here is the link.

If you’re not familiar with Jason’s previous game, Passage, you can get it here.

If you’re new to this whole Art Game thing, you may want to check out Rod Humble’s The Marriage and the more-difficult Stars over Half Moon Bay.

It’s great that Jason is managing to create such good games in such a short time period. It makes me wonder if I’ve been going the wrong way working 3 years on Braid.

This email interview of Jonathan Blow was conducted by Jeff Lindsay a few weeks ago. Please disregard the excessive personality-glorifcation at the beginning.

This was a good interview to do, because I managed to clarify several points in my thinking about game development.  Here’s an excerpt:

Marketing is not, in fact, a need.  Getting enough people to buy your game such that you make money is not a need, if you really care about the integrity of what you are making.  That integrity is the primary need; earning enough money through selling that thing, such that you can make more without taking up another job or whatever, is a luxury. People bend to this luxury all the time.  There are lots of ways to rationalize it.  But I think it is usually due to weakness — or rather, lack of commitment to principles.

Among indies there is some kind of desire to be more like bigger companies, to be “professional” about making games.  Owning a business and making money and having business cards is all part of that.  But if you really care about games, it’s a huge mistake, and being “professional” will only hurt your work and cause it to be mediocre. Business is, inherently, a corruptive influence on everything that is non-business.

I’m looking for a handful of volunteer playtesters to help verify that the translations of Braid into various languages are doing a good job.

Braid is in the process of being translated right now. The translators seem like they know what they are doing, so I have no explicit reason to be worried about the quality of the translations. However, it would seem weird to me to just take the translated version of the game and put it out into the world without doing some kind of due diligence on the result (especially given how many badly-translated games we have all seen!)

So if you are fluent in one of the following languages, drop a note here with a way to contact you (it doesn’t have to be public; just let it go into moderation and I will read it). And I will set you up with a playtest copy of the game. I mean seriously fluent, i.e. speaks the language like a native; not, hey, I had a couple of years of that in school.

The languages are: French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Traditional Chinese (which I guess means Mandarin non-simplified?)

Thanks!

Nuances of Design is a session I am running at the GDC next week, on Friday, February 22nd.

The idea behind this session is to let the audience play games in real time while the presenters guide them through the experience to make certain points and encourage certain observations. Because games are about interactivity and not passive absorption, it always seemed weird to me that we used passive absorption (listening to lectures) in order to communicate about games.

If you’d like to participate, please bring a laptop that can run small games well (i.e. Windows XP or Vista, though I think last year a few people managed to run with Macs and emulation), and also a pair of in-ear headphones. (With headpones like these you can stick half in one ear, to hear the game, and leave the other ear open to listen to the presenter). We will pass around USB flash drives containing the games.

This will be the second time I’ve done this session; the first one, last year, went very well.

I’m also potentially looking for one more presenter/game so if you are interested, and have a game that you don’t mind people getting copies of, which is conducive to being played in a short session, then email me (or post here). Thanks!

Most people vocal enough to post had negative reactions to the proposed ad we put up last month. So, we put together some images that are less literal and more moody. Many possibilities are shown here for you to look at; if you like any of them especially, please post and let us know.

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I gave this lecture as the keynote at the Nordic Game Jam in Copenhagen. You can download it as a .zip file containing the PowerPoint slides, along with an mp3 of the audio.

(Nordic Game Jam lecture, 35MB).

It’s about how to develop high-quality games as an indie or a student; but unlike the prototyping lecture I gave before, this one revolves around the different categories of development tasks, and the ways in which people get stuck creating games that fall far short of their real potential.

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