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Free Love for the holiday weekend
Those who lament that nothing innovative and interesting is being done in the field of MMOs are probably unfamiliar with LOVE, a project seeking to redefine pretty much any core assumptions about the genre. Players build and create, levels are based upon relationships with other players, and the entire world is a surrealistic masterpiece of a landscape. Oh, and the entire project is the work of one man, Eskil Steenberg. It's the sort of thing that would be well worth checking out, and during the holiday weekend, you can do precisely that. From 6 PM GMT on Friday until noon on Monday, LOVE will be having its first free weekend, giving players curious about the actual mechanics of the game a chance to log in and take a close look at how the game works. That runs the majority of the Labor Day weekend, a fine time to log in and get some serious construction going. Keep an eye on the official site or on GamingLove for more information on registration. [Thanks to bartillo for the tip!]
GDC08: Cloning and mental confusion in Experimental Games session
One of our favorite annual sessions, in addition to the developers rant and the design challenge, is the Experimental Games session. Whereas last year we saw audio-infused titles and a then-lesser known Portal, this year's themes were replay, obfuscation, user-generated/controlled levels and "two levels at once," with a presentation by Rod Humble halfway through. (We unfortunately had to miss the two final themes to catch the Boom Blox presentation. Sorry, folks!) The first theme was "replay" and dealt with idea of, erm, playing with yourself. It's not as dirty as it sounds:
GDC08: Thwarting the XNA AI challenge
Located in the back of Moscone West's show floor, Microsoft is holding an XNA Game Studio AI Challenge, where contestants (divided into two teams of four each hour) have 50 minutes to program an artificial intelligence script (in C#) that will defeat the other three members on their team in a shoot-em-up multiplayer match (think: four Geometry Wars ships shooting each other for scores). The winner of each round receives "Invite Only passes to the XNA party" (which is happening tonight).
Valve's Kim Swift talks about designing Portal
At the Experimental Game Design lecture (where, among others, we heard from Crush's Alex Butterfield), Valve's Kim Swift, one of the designers of Portal, talked about the challenges of creating a first-person mind-screw puzzler, which is packaged with the oft-delayed Half-Life: :Episode 2, Black, and Orange sets, and concluded with a video demonstration solving one of Portal's crazy door-opening puzzles."Doing something new can be a really big risk and adding something innovative to something already exists can often disrupt and create new games," she said. Swift told the crowd that she and the team approached Portal problems as small gamelets in isolated environments. To her, trying to innovate too much at one time can lead to failure. Jurassic Park: Tresspasser, she quipped, is an example of a title that "tries a lot, and fails at all." Swift's mantra is to try one thing and polish it to the best of your ability.Following her talk, Swift started a video of one level of portal to explain the depth of the puzzle. In Portal, you can make a blue and orange-rimmed portal that interact with one another. You can attach a portal to most surfaces, although reflective and glass surfaces will not take a portal, "just to make your life more difficult," Swift notes.
The challenges and philosophies of Crush
At yesterday's Experimental Game Design lecture, Alex Butterfield discussed his latest project, the mind-bending PSP title Crush, billed as a "revolution twist on the puzzle platform." Butterfield's presentation focus on the challenges of making a game that seemingly transitions from 2D to 3D without effort. Crush is designed so that your character, who is under hypnosis to cure insomnia and forced to find a way through 40 dream sequence levels, can only "crush" (transform 3-dimensional space into 2-dimensional platformer) horizontally and top-down. Of the challenges discussed, Butterfield talked about the shortcut challenge, whereas the clever player would be able to use the crushing ability to move from the beginning of the level to the end without effort. Thus, the team devised three different blocks whose behavior differed when crushed: ghost block (insubstantial), solid blocks (impassible) and hollow blocks hollow block (somewhere in between). Other issues include disorientation, which Butterfield tried to fix by way of camera work and the placement of prominent landmarks to help the player. There were two design flaws that the dev team worked to solve. The creation of cut-zones let the developers section off part of the level so that one does not accidentally crush themselves next to a horrid enemy without prior knowledge. A safety feature was also implemented so that a crush process does not cause the character to fall helplessly to their doom; "an explanation as to why you failed the puzzle" will be shown instead. Many of these problems were also solved, of course, through countless QA and debugging. Following the talk of problems and problem solving, Butterfield moved into the realm of conjecture, philosophy and other higher-order thought. What if you were allowed to crush at any angle? What if you could crush outward into four dimensions (with time being the 4th candidate); i.e. a block could become a bridge, a cockroach would crush into a centipede, etc. How about multiplayer? Butterfield suggested separate realities for each character, whereby only you control the crushing in your reality and only your movement would be reported to the other player's screens. There's no clean-cut solution, but some of these problems give us an idea of the far future of platform puzzlers. Crush is looking good and the game's twist well-executed. The game is slated for release later this year on the PSP.
