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The Game-Maker Archive: Easy Lifting

by Eric-Jon Rössel Tairne

Indie game design being what it is, especially for younger developers the impulse to kife elements from your favorite games is almost irresistible. Witness Duke Nukem (icon of the shareware movement), which not only copied its catch phrases from Bruce Campbell movies; the 2D entries blatantly ripped art resources from Turrican and other Amiga games. Depending on your philosophy, you might call this reappropriation lazy, criminal, postmodern, or pragmatic. Frankly, theft is a fact of the creative process. The creative aspect depends on how far you take the theft, how well you reinterpret the material you’ve stolen, and how well you cover your tracks.

Game-Maker being set up the way it was, a certain amount of reappropriation was almost encouraged — particularly of RSD’s own sample games. Some of the results were more blatant than others. The male and female characters or the background tiles found their way into practically everyone’s games at some point or another. I had a few original sprites and tiles lifted, myself. Generally all it took was an e-mail to the derivative author, and I would get a credit and a virtual handshake. It was a pretty loose culture.

And of course that loose-fingered approach had little real effect on the quality of a game. Granted, the more borrowed elements generally the lower the bar. Still, it’s interesting to see what can grow from someone else’s seeds.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

(June 26th, 2010 @ 1:24pm)



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David Shute’s Unnatural Selection makes you squirm

The Small Worlds designer has unleashed a new wayside-n-wayward opus, Unnatural Selection. In this game, you grab a handful of worms, introduce them to new environments, and hope for them to evolve into more grotesque and dangerous life forms. Shute promises sixteen different creatures, and notes that “the last few are pretty fiendish” to find.

I guess it’s a kind of a sandbox puzzle game, both in that you’re free to experiment at will and in that you’re mostly playing in the sand. Sand and drainage ditches and rotted corpses. It’s all high society here.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

(June 25th, 2010 @ 1:33pm)



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The Game-Maker Archive: Sheldon Chase and the Woman Warrior

by Eric-Jon Rössel Tairne

Toward the end of Recreational Software Designs’ support of its Game-Maker development suite, Sheldon Chase became a kind of pervasive presence. Somewhere around 1995 or early ‘96, he hit on the notion of digitizing Eadweard Muybridge’s early motion photography for use as character sprites — sort of a retro Mortal Kombat effect, if you will. The result was a few drafts of a silvery, jittery nude model. After a bit of anti-aliasing and some animation tweaks, and finally some wardrobe assistance, he presented to RSD a stock female character for inclusion in future software updates.

Much as RSD’s Sample hero formed the template for uncounted male protagonists, Chase’s Muybridge lady became the starting place for legions of (often lurid) sprite edits. If for that reason alone Chase’s input would be notable. Yet his Woman Warrior games also exemplified several unusual and advanced techniques, as well as a curious borrowed aesthetic that sticks in the mind.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

(June 24th, 2010 @ 1:20pm)



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Phantom Fingers: The Series – Part Three: Focused Fire

by Eric-Jon Rössel Tairne

What can I say about Space Invaders that you don’t already know? Not a lot, I reckon, so I’m not going to go into too much depth on the facts. If you need more, there’s the Internet. Rather, I mean to frame the available information within the discussion we’ve been having, with an aim to highlighting its greater relevance.

You will recall we talked about Pong, and the easy introduction it provided into that alien space on the other side of the TV screen. Although there wasn’t much meaning to be had, the passive control the game provided over that one packet of information, bouncing around its tiny gameworld according to discernible laws acting on their own, allowed the player to mentally map out the game’s reality.

There was a whole new, bottled system of cause and effect for the player’s mind to lock into and understand. And as minimally involving as the laws and interface were, they were novel and fascinating, and simple to digest — to the extent that Pong became a cultural sensation.

Then, as we discussed, four years later, Breakout came along and reframed Pong as a solitary experience, as a complex space, and as a distinct narrative. Now the player’s focus was entirely on the gameworld, rather than the gameworld acting as a catalyst for two players to entertain each other. In turn, the gameworld had more to focus on.

The player’s every action — as indirect as the interface remained — resulted in a tangible effect, or consequence, within the world. A tile would break, the board would be a little more open, and the surfaces to bounce off of would be a little different. The interaction was suddenly more meaningful, at least within the narrow scope provided. And then when the board was clear, twice over, the game was over. There was a distinct goal to achieve, entirely within the parameters of the game’s bottle universe.

Well, all those changes were significant. Different designers took away different lessons by how they balanced those changes in their heads, and ran off to extrapolate further — leading us to at least two distinct schools of game design and a new focus on a single player’s causal relationship with the gameworld, as compared to videogames as a mere game or social tool.

For now let’s jump the Pacific, and ride the narrative train for a while.

( Continue reading at Game Set Watch )

(June 21st, 2010 @ 1:07pm)



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Radio; live transmission

Having Internet problems. They should be resolved sometime in the next week. Just so everyone is up to speed.

(June 19th, 2010 @ 3:19pm)



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