Sometimes art forms go through various periods, where the artists are inspired by similar themes and pursue various avenues in the same conceptual space.
I guess this is our Feeding Human Food to Animals period.
The first game is… fruit mystery.
The second game is… Jason Rohrer’s new artgame sketch, Regret.
(picture stolen from tigsource.com).
I just got around to playing Randy Balma: Municipal Abortionist (I had been intent on getting Braid done when it was originally released, but Chris Dahlen’s blog posting reminded me to play it today).
If you like art games, I recommend you try it, and stick with it through the very difficult first stage; spoilery commentary occurs after the fold.
In 2007, the indie developer messhof created FLYWRENCH, which I felt was a very interesting game. I recommend that all game designers play it. You can download FLYWRENCH here.
In February 2008, I created a game prototype called Nicewrench, which was about experimenting with FLYWRENCH’s design: what happens if you take a game that is about mercilessly killing the player, and remove the possibility for player death?
You can download Nicewrench on my game prototypes page, here.
Both FLYWRENCH and Nicewrench were shown (and played by a room full of attendees) in my presentation at Nuances of Design 2008.
There’s more in the way of design musing in the README, which is also copied here, after the fold.
Continue reading Nicewrench, a new game prototype, has been posted.
A pleasant surprise! This music-oriented 8-way-shooter by Jonathan Mak was originally released on the PS3 last year.
Here is the Steam page for the game.
I highly recommend it.
In other news, Jason’s NYU speech has been rescheduled for Friday, May 2, at 3:30pm.
In case anyone is reading this blog right now, we see on Game Design Advance that Jason Rohrer’s talk at NYU today has been postponed due to illness. Get better soon, dude!
Jason Rohrer has just started a new column at The Escapist called “Game Design Sketchbook”. Once a month, he’ll be making a prototype game, putting it up for download, and writing about it.
Here’s a link to this month’s column.
The first game is called “Perfectionism” (pictured above) and it’s very interesting. You can easily figure out how to play it from the game itself; you don’t need to read the article.
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.
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.
It’s sad, really.
Thanks to Casey for forwarding this from the Molly Rocket Forums where Tom Forsyth posted it. I don’t know where he got it, though.
The first time I saw Space Giraffe, I didn’t realize it was an excellent game. Jeff Minter was showing it off at the Game Developer’s Conference, and it looked just like Tempest, except you could push guys off the top of the web sometimes. And Jeff kept saying it wasn’t Tempest. But he was not sufficiently able to communicate to the audience why the game was interesting (which I verified, through several conversations, after his lecture. People pretty much thought it was just Tempest with some psychedelic stuff).
Continue reading In which I compare Space Giraffe to Ulysses.