Miegakure, by Marc ten Bosch, is a puzzle game where you travel through four-dimensional space (and manipulate objects in that space). I was privileged to play an early version in 2009; just this week I got to play the most recent version, and it is coming along tremendously. It is my Game of the Year, though it is unlikely to be released this year. I find it easy to think of Miegakure as one of the great puzzle games of all time.

If I can be said to have an agenda in game design, it has something to do with mind-expansion.  Because of that, I very much appreciate it when other designers make games with that kind of intention.  Games that are truly mind-expanding are very rare and very difficult to make, but this is one of them.

Here’s an introduction to the game.

Here’s an interview Marc did with Gamasutra with further details.

To keep up with news on the game, you can subscribe to Marc’s blog.

This was cross-posted from the development blog for The Witness.

You might have an impulse to skip this game because of the name, or because it looks like number puzzles. It is number puzzles, and the game does a very refreshing job of exploring that design space. You’ll be surprised many times before you are done playing. It is a joyful game to play.

The idea of thoroughly exploring a design space has come up in conversation a lot lately. Last week, Chris Hecker gave a rant on this topic, titled “Please Finish Your Game”. The ability to explore a space like this is a very, very valuable skill for a game designer to have. From the look of the games being produced currently, it seems that not many designers know how to do it. The best way to learn it is by example, and this game is a very good example.

I learned a lot of interesting things from SquareLogic.

Today we are announcing a fund that provides very good terms for talented indie developers working on high-quality games.  Our terms are much friendlier than what publishers offer.  Our goal is to help indies become stronger while retaining their independence.

The past couple of years have been good for independent game developers.  Through download services like Xbox Live Arcade, the PlayStation Network, WiiWare, and Steam, independent developers have found a very large audience.  Some of us have been lucky enough to develop hit indie games that were very financially successful.

Braid was one of those games.  The success of Braid has allowed me to undertake more-ambitious projects like The Witness.  At the same time, I felt that I wanted to do something with the profits that would help other indies with their own games.  More recently, while talking to publishers about The Witness, I felt that the business climate around publishing and funding these smaller games had not caught up with reality: it’s a model where the standard terms are tuned for budgets in the tens of millions of dollars.  Because publishers want to stick to this model even for low-budget games, it was very hard for indie developers to get a fair deal.

It turns out that other successful indies felt the same way, so we have pooled our resources and launched this fund.  We will be announcing further details soon.  At the GDC, Ron Carmel will be giving a talk about the problems that exist in the current publishing model for indie-budget games.

We’ve had the timing of this announcement planned for a while, but it seems like some kind of strange synchronicity that we’re revealing our existence just as all this trouble is happening at Infinity Ward.  When you’re a mainstream developer, and you’ve made one of the most successful and profitable games of all time, and then just a few months later your publisher and parent company is willing to so bald-facedly mutilate your company, well, what conclusions can be drawn from that?  If publishers of that size are so megalomaniacal as to be incapable of seeing the importance of a developer’s talent — instead believing that the game’s success is somehow due primarily to their brilliant marketing strategy or their CEO’s charming personality — then how will this ever change?

If Infinity Ward can’t be treated with respect, then who can?

Independent developers can.  That’s one answer, at least.  Indie Fund is here to help make that independent existence a reality for as many talented developers as we can.

Here’s a link to the main Indie Fund site, with an email you can use to contact us.

(Cross-posted from The Witness Development Blog.)

Not much information about the game has been made public yet. Well… here is some. More to come!

If you liked Braid, you may enjoy Terry Cavanaugh’s game VVVVVV. It’s also a platformer that is built around one core interaction, iterating on that piece of gameplay and exploring variations. In VVVVVV you will die a lot, but the penalty for death is extremely low, so it’s no big deal.

There’s a free demo (in downloadable and web-based versions). Here’s the link again.

So if you haven’t played Osmos (by Hemisphere Games), do yourself a favor and go try it out. There’s a free demo; the game is available on Steam as well as the developer’s own site.

Relatively speaking, a lot of independent game designers are trying to be experimental these days, and the problem I see with most of these games is that they don’t understand their own ideas — after playing, one feels that there was a lot of potential in the ideas that went unexplored, that the game never saw in the first place.

Osmos isn’t like that. It starts with an idea that several games have done before: you’re a cell and you eat guys that are smaller than you in order to get bigger. To this it adds the idea that makes the game stand out: This game is going to generally adhere to the nature and feel of physics in space; for example, momentum is conserved, so you need to eject your own mass in order to move. The game then explores the consequences of these ideas and ventures through a rich territory of additions that are all naturally suggested by the game’s premise.

The result, by the time you’ve finished, is not merely a satisfying game. It rings with that faint and distant sound of truth: because the game is based around laws of physics, it immerses you in these and you learn something about them. Perhaps not anything you didn’t already know in an abstract intellectual way, if you took physics classes in school; but here, you get a feel for them, so they become more real, more tangible. This game can change your perspective.

20 people have submitted the correct answers, and so the competition is now closed. (Actually, I mailed out 25 codes, because a few of the entries looked suspiciously like they were submitted by people trying to get more than one copy. But I can’t be sure about that, and the problem wasn’t big, so I just sent out extras.) If you haven’t received a reply, you didn’t win; sorry about the lack of personal replies, but there were too many submissions to respond to each.

Here are the answers. I chose these because they are all games worthy of your time and attention:

1. Adventure

by Warren Robinett, Atari VCS, 1979
 

Just about anyone who owned an Atari VCS played this game, and there were a lot of VCSs out there. Like all home games of that time, Adventure had to be pretty minimal (the VCS only had 128 bytes of RAM!) Adventure put the player into the role of a knight searching for the Holy Grail (err, the “gold chalice”) which he must return to the Gold Castle. Depending on the difficulty level, the world would change between 3 different layouts; items would be scattered around somewhat randomly so that you didn’t quite know where to go and what to do.

Something about the minimal graphics and game design helped Adventure flourish as a mini-system. As a player, I cared about the map of the world, small as it was. I wanted to experiment with the various objects. The gameplay was about searching and exploration in a very focused way. Many games were influenced by Adventure, but it seems that with all our modern riches our ability to create that simple kind of joy has mostly atrophied. (In, say, Fable 2 the world is very lushly rendered but I don’t care what’s in it because it somehow doesn’t matter; I barely see what’s being drawn on the screen as I fight guys or run on my way to the next waypoint.)

Recently I did get some of that old-style exploration-based feeling of joy from a couple of games: Mark Johns’ stdbits and Sean Barrett’s Lost in the Static.

2. Gamma Bros.

by PixelJam, Flash, 2007
 
 
 

Gamma Bros. is a simple space shooter with loads of character, playable for free on the Internet. Though simple in presentation and game mechanics, it manages to give you the feeling of an epic journey; by the time you get to the end of the game, you feel like you’ve been through something big, even though this game is “small” compared to today’s $60 retail games. Among the most notable elements contributing to this long-journey feeling are the sound design and the smooth way in which waves of enemies flow into and out of the player’s area of concern.

3. Strike Force

from Midway Games, Arcade, 1991.

 
 
 

4. Netrek

Kevin Smith, Scott Silvey et al
UNIX workstations (later spreading to Windows, MacOS and other platforms), 1991.

 
 
 

Netrek is one of the best video games ever made. It’s hard to say more than that. It’s a team-on-team game of realtime action and strategy in space. The quality and richness of the intense team-oriented gameplay has never been surpassed, though maybe Counter-Strike came close. (Yet, Netrek provides more opportunity for strategic-level thinking).

Netrek is a client/server game that can look a little different depending on which client you use. The image for the competition was rendered by the Client of Win; the full-screen shot is from a later client.

This full-game shot is nice — it shows an offensive starbase pressing forward to cover an enemy planet so that it can be taken. When this happens in a tournament game, it’s a very intense time. The defending team is under a lot of pressure to destroy this heavily armed, armored and escorted thing, but it’s a big risk for the offense too: if you lose your starbase in this game, your team is screwed for a while.

The base in this shot is piloted by my old teammate Mojo Riser (hi Tom!) and it looks like he’s not getting enough help from his team, and is going to have to back off quickly after this failed attempt to take the planet (the lower explosion is a Romulan ship that was trying to drop armies but didn’t make it). No Rigel for the Romulans today! But maybe while the Feds chase the starbase away, R9 and Rd will take Organia and the Roms will at least get some fuel near their front line. This map layout is rough for them!

5. Space Giraffe

by Llamasoft, Xbox 360 and Windows, 2007
 
 
 

I’m not sure what to say about Space Giraffe that I haven’t already said, so I’ll refer you to my previous blog posting about the game (and the comment thread will show you a wide variety of opinions about the game).

Space Giraffe sold poorly in its original release on XBLA and got mixed critical reviews, mostly lukewarm. However, with its recent PC release the game seems to finally getting some critical respect; for example, PC Gamer UK recently gave the game a review score of 92%.

Space Giraffe requires your attention and a very large helping of Benefit of the Doubt, but if you give it those things you’ll find it to be an extremely rewarding game of consciousness expansion, and an experience unlike any other.

6. Gravitation

by Jason Rohrer, Windows / MacOS / UNIX, 2008.

 
 

7. リズム天国ゴールド (Rhythm Tengoku Gold)

(Soon to be released as Rhythm Heaven in America)
from Nintendo SPD, Nintendo DS, 2008.
 
 
 

Some Japanese game developers seem to be adept at creating feelings of pure joy. Katamari Damacy has this kind of feeling, but achieves it mostly through the characters and the music. Rhythm Heaven definitely uses characters and music to good effect, but because the player’s actions are tied so closely to the music, the feeling of joy is closer and more intense.

Rhythm Heaven is a collection of mini-games, with each game requiring you to do a different kind of action in response to the music. The first time you reach the end of a section, where the song you play along with is (spoiler deleted), it feels like a wonderful tour de force, amplified because the idea is so simple and so natural and yet nobody had done it before now.

8. La La Land 4

 
TheAnemic, Windows, 2006
 
 
 

This game is freely downloadable. It is short to play. If you play it with an open mind, you’ll have an experience unlike those given to you by mainstream games.

We game developers can work so hard and spend so much money and development time to try to scrape together certain kinds of feelings, yet this less-than-no-budget-game gives you that stuff in a concentrated form.

Also, it’s Punk Rock.

9. The Gostak

by Carl Muckenhoupt, Z-machine 5, 2001.
 
 
 

The Gostak is a work of Interactive Fiction, a genre in which everything happening in the game is communicated through text, and similarly, the player performs actions by typing text. Click on the full-screen image above to get a readable version; that will give you some idea of what this game is like. If you read onward without doing that, you’re treading into spoilers! In fact, I recommend you download and play the game before continuing.

The title of the game comes from an old example in linguistic philosophy. I’ve shown this game to some friends, and a lot of them can’t be bothered to play it: they read the intro and think “yeah, yeah, I get it, the point is to decode what all these words mean,” and they just feel like they are busy or just don’t want to do the work, and quit.

But that’s not actually the point of the game, except at a very coarse level, because why would you assume that these words have English equivalents? The further you get into the game, the more you realize that things don’t work the way you are used to. Yes, you can think of English-language terms that are similar in some ways to the words you are learning, but whatever model you have in your head is likely to contradict with the way the world works, in some obvious way. This is a truly alien world that you’re in, yet you have learned to exist and succeed within it. That’s one of the most fascinating things about this game: a depiction of alien-ness that comes from interacting with the objects in the world, and that only works because the game is text rather than graphics. As such it feels deeper, or truer, than you might expect.

Ultima IV has been a huge influence to many game designers, and it’s started to pop up again in current game design discussions. Clint Hocking gave a lecture in 2007 that discussed the ways in which Ultima IV prompts self-exploration, and how we might pick up on that in the future. I gave a short rant in 2006 talking about how Ultima IV’s mapping of RPG stats to real-world moral values was an interesting way to grant new meaning and importance to a traditional game strucutre.

This game is very different from the RPGs of today; if you haven’t played it, give it a go on an emulator!

 
That’s that. Congratulations to all the winners!

Let’s have a Name That Game competition. Posted below are pieces of screenshots from 10 games. Correctly identify each game!

The first 20 people who mail competition@number-none.com with all the correct answers will each win a code for a free copy of Braid on the Xbox 360. The competition ends as soon as all the free copies are gone, or at 11:59pm GMT on March 23, 2009 — whichever comes first. (My bet is that at least one person gets them all within a day… we’ll see!)

If the competition ends without all the free copies having been given away, they will go to the people who got the most right answers. So even if you can’t figure them all out, send in what you’ve got — you still might win.

I reserve the right to deny people who look like they are spamming the answers to win multiple copies, or something.

The clues are after the fold. Update: The contest is now over. See this posting for the answers.

Here are the clues:

1.

 
 

2.

 
 

3.

 
 

4.

 
 

5.

 
 

6.

 
 

7.

 
 

8.

 
 

9.

 
 

10.

 
 

Jason Rohrer’s art game Passage, a work that has inspired many developers since its original release a year ago, is now available on the iPhone for the low low price of 99 cents.

Passage is a game that I recommend everyone play, especially if you are interested in game design. And if you’ve already played it, here’s your chance to have a portable version, and to support the art game community, all for a meager sum.

The PC version of Passage is still free; you can get it at Jason’s web site.

This is part of Microsoft’s Summer of Arcade promotion, wherein they publish good games on XBLA all in one big bundle. Here’s the full list of games:

• Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2, July 30
• Braid, August 6
• Bionic Commando: Rearmed, August 13
• Galaga Legions, August 20
• Castle Crashers, August 27

Here is Microsoft’s official Summer of Arcade site where you can find more information, including contests that some folks may be interested in. Disclaimer: We apologize for the way Microsoft chose to present our game’s logo with the big word “Braid” covering the interesting part of the picture, along with popping-out animals on it to make it look XXXTREME like the other games. This is not much like the art we submitted to them; our tastes don’t run that way.