dreamfeel

Read: A lit window

"Squint skyward and listen-"

Six people, one cold night. It started at the Dublin Twine & Jam with the theme 'Flirt', in and around organizing the event and helping people. I finished the story the following weekend in Donegal. 

Designed for a 1600x900 resolution & Google Chrome. Some minor bugs in other browsers. Also, please wait for the image on the first page to load. <3

On the Thursday night before the IGF deadline, and after a few drinks, I decided 'fuck everything' and that I would attempt to get at least a trailer finished for the competition after all. I had previously given up and felt pretty awful about the prior month (most of the actual work just involved a couple small games which are neat and some writing). With new motivation, I pulled it all together a little and submitted. Right now this is 'It Clicks'; the name seems to change faster than I can type it.

I'm unsure about the video quality, Youtube - even in HD - isn't quite friendly to it, but it was nice to stake a marker of the game's development into the ground. Indie Statik noticed it and Cactus! It also continued my IGF submitting streak for the third year, so with that in mind I thought it might be interesting to take a look at some of the other games I've entered in the past and whether that might illuminate over two years of making games.

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Doctor Drown (Ph D) was my second dare Ludum Dare entry (Bayou my first), my second doing it with Sam too, and probably my 5th/6th game jam where I finished something. You play a corny 60's Super Villain who floods his chambers with sharks. Simple. I'm happy to have made it, but I definitely learned a few lessons I thought I should already know. So let's start with that so we can end positively.

What went wrong:

- A focus on mechanics, AGAIN. I've become increasingly disinterested with game mechanics, at least the traditional forms of them, beyond being a means to an end, and the real lasting appeal of digital attractions for me is in their sustance. By 'substance' I don't mean "hours of content" or even exactly a thematic total but the volume, maybe density, of detail/love/personality/experience/gamestuff/expression/ units of resonance a game contains. Expression might be a good word actually. Often things that have no functional reason to be there. Example! Earthbound & Mother 3 are full of it. The black & the white pixels you can talk to or don't in the desert, that's substance. In Problem Attic, the entire game is built upon distorted memories and methaphor, everything drips substance. In Stephen Lavelle's Missing the world is full of characters despite them all saying the same thing, no they haven't seen your son, and every character is aching substance. It's not necessarily textual either. In Proteus, the standing the stones, the crabs, the owl, the abstact reactive music itself is all substance. So, a fairly ill-defined, nebulous idea so far but an idea all the same. Strange. Funny. Heartrending.

 

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Doctor Drown was created by myself & Sam Gross for Ludum Dare 27 over three days with the theme of 'Ten Seconds'.

Ludum Dare page (including download)

Post-mortem

Doctor Drown is known for one thing, shark tank torture. Also his evil underwater lair. Two things! His love of shark based torture and his vast underwater lair. And the cat. Ok, at least three! 

Follow the Double-O Do-Gooder agents on your lair's monitors and drown them in sharks before they reach you. Featuring, honest-to-goodness, three whole different endings.  Oh but someone scrambled all his monitors, so adjacent rooms probably aren't adjacent monitors!

Clicking the monitor of an adjacent room to one already filled with water drains from one to the other. Rooms that are adjacent, and so can be flooded on mouse-clicking, have a low line of water. However you must also wait for the current room to finish flooding. Good luck! 

Music - Come Spy With Me by Hugo Montenegro & His Orchestra  

Somehow in the past year I have convinced myself to only publish a blog if I have either finished a game, which seems to coincide with rare planetary alignments, or written some monumental 5000 word treatise on the nature of being. And even more recently I've started thinking that I might only post if I have both, that is the thesis and a new game that exemplifies it! Because of this the only piece of writing I've managed to get out was a revised edition of an almost 12 month old paper on minimalist narratives. Expectation, or maybe pretension, is the enemy of productivity and this second guessing has a slowing effect in producing anything. So! Fuck that. Let's just talk.

Way too much more after the jump...

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Developed for the Jennifer Ann Crecente Memorial Group to raise awareness for Teen Dating Violence, YourSpace is an interactive story for iOS that mimicks a social network app.

The game begins as 17 year old teenager Liz receives an insistent invite to join YourSpace from her boyfriend Jack, and soon everything begins to unravel. Players control every choice Liz makes as she interacts in YourSpace with Jack; Emma, her friend; and Andrew, her neighbour, over the course of three days.

Teen dating abuse affects one in three adolscents. Girls and women between the ages of 16 and 24 are most affected, but dating abuse can affect people of any gender. Visit JenniferAnn.org for more information.

Credits
Art: Sam Gross
Design & Code: Paul Andrew McGee
FX: Ross McWilliam
Music: kayfaraday
Writing: Lyndsey Moulds & Paul Andrew McGee
  

Cross-posted to Gamasutra.

This was written, a bit more formally than presented here, last year during my Master's at Abertay University, Dundee. I thought with Ludum Dare 26 coming to a close this was an apt time to repost and would love to hear any thoughts.

Suibokuga - Shek Ho (2007)
Abstract
Writing in computer games is often criticised; the narrative of most contemporary mainstream titles is expositional, obvious and largely redundant. I argue that we shouldn't worry about ensuring every player knows perfectly what is happening at every moment. Instead that by leaving purposeful but known gaps and ambiguity we can give a player's imagination room to breathe and engage with the material as they do with the game itself, and thus create stronger expierences.

First we will look at art movements and theories in other media, such as Hemingway’s ‘Iceberg Theory’ and ‘Pure Cinema’, to demonstrate the power minimalist techniques can have. Secondly we apply these minimalist concepts to the allure of ‘retro’ games and explain why many contemporary games such as ‘A Slow Year’ have come to draw on those aesthetics again. Thirdly we look at minimalist techniques which are already pervasive in many modern titles such as the fragmented delivery of ‘Dear Esther’ or the embedded narrative of ‘Amnesia: The Dark Descent’. Finally to conclude the author looks at why such techniques may not always appeal, and why experimental games and fostering audiences for them are vital for the health of the industry.

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