Archive for the ‘Game Design’ Category.
The engine I used for They Need To Be Fed (among others) is quite solid and smooth, and the best I’ve seen personally (excluding Super Mario Galaxy). I’m now releasing the engine for every Game Maker user who wants to do something with it. My code isn’t very easy to follow so you may have a hard time understanding… but I hope you can live with it. I tried to clean it up as much as possible.
Let me know if you have questions, or if you’ve made anything with it!
I haven’t updated this blog for a while. The reason was that I was busy with my graduation project. Initially I planned to write about it as it went along, but I was never happy with what I was doing. I waited and waited till my project turned into something awesome (so I could write about it) but it never really happened.
In retrospect, I’ll write a little about how it went for me and what I’ve learned from it.
Enlightenment
If you’re interested, here is a video of the final game, and you can play it over at YoYoGames. In “Enlightenment” you explore a world filled with planets, plants that make music, and little light orbs that you can collect. You can find messages and use them as portals to new worlds, or leave your own.
A screenshot:
I’ve written about previous prototypes such as Treasure Island Online, Everybody Play & Edit, and mini mmo before on this blog. All of these as well as the final game Enlightenment are asynchronous multiplayer games. It’s all about game worlds where every player has an influence on the experience of others following. The very first game I made that’s like this (and probably still the best) was Deaths, in 2008. I guess as a designer it’s more interesting for me to make a game that keeps evolving after it’s done, because then I don’t know what’s going to happen with it. So that’s kind of a selfish reason. The other thing is that in general I think there’s a lot that can be done by sharing data between players. Obviously social network games are experimenting with such things a lot; I could learn a thing or two from them!
Enlightenment is a beautiful game, and it’s definitely interesting. However, the content is in the hands of the players which means you’ll see a lot of crap too. (And that’s ok, I don’t blame players). The game lacks clear goals and starts to feel pointless after a while. Initially the idea was to create a world in which players can inspire and motivate each other, but not much is left of that. Looking back I realize I didn’t set clear goals for myself and lost track of them during development!
Ambition
There’s another theme that played a big part in my process. Starting the graduation project, I was very ambitious and wanted to make something truly innovative, something new and better than my previous work. I had already shown I could make games so I felt pressure to do something even better this time. Surely, with about 6 months in which I could do my own thing something amazing would be possible.
Let’s look at what made other games I’ve made turn out good:
Most of these didn’t apply for my graduation project. I had a hard time.
Here’s what made Frozzd and They Need To Be Fed good (both won the YoYoGames competition):
When I have to set my own goals it seems I don’t work very well. Because I set them myself it means I can also change them again, and this is what kept happening. It’s good to have some clear boundaries pushed upon you, it forces creativity. The alternative is to work with no goals at all (just make something that’s “fun”), which I think works as well.
Art
The other main difference between my graduation project and my previous work is that this time I also tried to be all artistic and stuff. There was (still is?) a lot of talk going on about “games as art” and even at the GDC they had a special panel on “art games”! This has had an influence on me and initially I thought I wanted to be an artist too, do my own thing, etc.
I think there are 2 extremes as far as game creators go:
I think an artist tries to advance the medium and a designer creates something because there is a need. You could say an artist makes something for him/herself and a designer makes something for the people. Of course it’s not all black and white, and I’m somewhere in the middle.
In conclusion, during the project I looked too much at what I wanted and thought was necessary and not enough at what people really want. I thought I wanted to be an artist but realize now I want to be a designer. The players determine what quality is, not the maker. (This is one of the reasons art games often feel condescending to people).
In the end I’m happy with what I’ve done and I’ve learned something about who I am as a designer. This will help me in my future work, which I’ll speak about in a new blog post soon! I plan to update the blog a lot more from now on. Let me know what you’d like to hear from me and I hope this post was interesting.
I got an idea and developed this “game” all in the span of 10 minutes. And then I made this blog post.
Have fun.
There won’t be a new prototype this week, but instead I present you “Shoot Stop Lollipop”!
I made this game together with Joel Nyström during the Global Game Jam in Denmark.
“Shoot Stop Lollipop” is a physics based puzzle platformer game. Make stuff fly all over the place, and then you stop the time to create your own level design, allowing you to reach the exit. The game is still a prototype, and we worked on it on and off after the Global Game Jam.
The game is made in Unity 3D and is playable in your browser. Here!
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In other news, I’ve been interviewed twice recently. One was for an interesting article titled “Suicide in videogames” on GameSpy. I recommend it! The other interview was for HugePush, about Frozzd and other things.
This week’s prototype is made in Flash.
It’s a simple game, a simple test. I had little time this week to make something bigger, since I had to learn a lot about Action Script 3 and integrated a data tracking API. Flash development is pretty new to me, but I want to do more with it, and am currently looking into great tools such as Flixel and Flash Punk.
Like my previous prototypes, this game makes use of data that is shared across all players.
The variable that is shared this time is the monster’s HP. So essentially, there’s (really actually) 1 monster with just 1 life. If he dies he’s dead and that’s that. No one will get to fight (or feed?) it again.
The idea of player’s actions having influence on the whole, on other people, and maybe also being influenced by others before that is something that intrigues me. This prototype is far too simple, but I hope to make something bigger where your actions truly shape the game.
New week new prototype.
“Everybody Play & Edit” is an experiment in collaborative gameplay. Simply put, it’s a platformer game in which everyone plays and edits the same level. Just like my previous prototype it makes use of an online database. Fans of my work might recognize some graphics and ideas from Deaths.
Play Mode
Edit Mode
Here are some special rules that make it interesting:
Download (.zip, 1.29 MB)
Current version: 2
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Reflection on Treasure Island Online
Treasure Island Online (the prototype of 2 weeks back) was a successful experiment. It was simple, but it worked pretty well and I had some fun play sessions with people I know and people I don’t. However the space of possibilities is really small and the game got boring fast. The decisions in the game (mainly the position of your dig) don’t really matter. I hope Everybody Plays & Edit addresses this problem. It allows for an endless amount of level designs, puzzles and clever traps.
The next step
I’m not sure what’s gonna happen with this game. It’s an experiment. I think right now it’s kind of sandbox-y. The next step could be to have more expensive objects you really need to earn money for. It would also be interesting if you get score or bonuses for killing as many others as you can. Or maybe I should make a totally peaceful collaborative game?
Please tell me if you have any ideas.
See you next week!
A new game and it’s very “gamey”. I think I’ve finally found a way to make a 2D 360 degree gravity platformer *fun*. I tried this with Maru, but it didn’t really work out. “2d 360 degree gravity platformer”, a new genre? 
This is an entry for the YoYoGames “design a handheld game” competition. (It’s not an actual PSP game though). It’s amazing what a competition deadline can do for my creativity. I started the game less than a week before the deadline (of course I’m re-using a finished engine, but still, doing actual game design is the important work) and finished 30 minutes before it passed. Haven’t worked so hard in ages. Working at this speed really requires quick decision making and being creative. It turned out much better than I thought it would.
They Need To Be Fed is a casual platforming game with original mechanics. There are 5 worlds with 7 levels each. Please enjoy!
Download link (.zip, 8.22 MB)
or play at YoYoGames
Screenshots:
I’m going to try to make a prototype / small game / something each week.
This week I present you:
Treasure Island Online
This is a small game I made within 2 days. The rules are simple:
Treasure chests give you an amount of gold (around 25 more or less), but digging also costs 1 gold. So far it sounds like your typical casual game. The twist however, is that everybody plays on the same board.
Similar to one of my previous games “Deaths“, the game uses an online database to save and load variables (to determine the board layout, in this case). So, if you dig a hole somewhere, everyone else that’s playing at that moment also sees that hole appear.
The strategy then, is as follows: Do you just go digging? Or do you wait till others have spent some gold digging holes, and then go for it with higher chances of finding the treasure chest?
Download link (.zip, 1.77MB)
The game is no fun playing by yourself. It works best if you get someone else to play on another pc, or invite someone over chat, etc.
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The game is simple, and in fact too simple. In practice it relies too much on chance and not enough on strategy. This means the game gets boring after a while. Nonetheless, for a quick prototype I’m very happy with the results. I want to do more with this idea in the future. I can imagine interesting results if you give players different abilities, or when players need to rely on co-operation, etc. I feel there are a lot of possibilities I’d like to explore.
I hope to have something new next week!
Update 2:
I’ve uploaded a slightly updated version with some bugs fixed (I think).
The game is fairly short, but you might need 2 or more tries to succeed. Please enjoy!
Happy new year everyone and thank you for playing my games in 2009! =)
What will the new year bring? For one thing it will bring many new exciting games that I’m going to develop! This is going to be my best year yet.
In previous posts I’ve spoken about how I want to develop smaller games and release something more often. Lately I’ve also been thinking about how I want to make more artistic / mature games, and reach wider audiences.
Not much has come of these ideas yet! I haven’t released anything since Focus even though I thought I would. I have been working on a few small projects regarding “expression through gameplay” but they haven’t been able to excite me too much. I’ve noticed that the amount of fun I have developing a game is very much comparable to the amount of fun it will be to play, and forcing myself to make “expressive” games isn’t really working.
What kind of games do I want to make? What kind of developer do I want to be? It’s becoming more clear now, and I will fully investigate these themes this year during my final, personal school project. It’s going to be exactly what I want and I will be able to focus purely on my work.
What to expect in the near future?
I’m working on a very interesting Flash platformer game with a fellow developer, which should come out this month. I’ve also recently started a new game in Game Maker (8) which is already showing potential to be one of my best games. I can’t wait to finish those!