This isn’t really a completely original game mechanic per-se, because the description of the game is completely within the header. For completeness-sake, let’s go about describing this, though.
You know that look a dog gets as they are pooping. That pathetic, helpless, protect me face? There’s a reason for it.
Continue reading “Game Idea: Ico (if Yorda was a dog that needed to poop)”
The gap between gaming as a medium to be taken seriously and lightly has been narrowing in many storytelling genres. We can find well scripted humor in the midst in contextual-placement of the player in games like Portal or The Stanley Parable, drama in actions that we choose to do or are helpless in preventing in The Last of Us or Bioshock Infinite, or walk through the blackness of our paranoia in Amnesia or Slender Man. What’s interesting though is that other mediums like movies had an extremely rough time getting the average story in a game to not feel forced or that the campiness from genre films hasn’t particularly translated well in gaming as of yet.
Don’t get me wrong, there is a difference between campiness and cliché, and it’s easy to spot one over the other. Cliché is taking what we’re used to and regurgitating it back to us in a form that we are already used to seeing. Campy is taking what we’re used to and being almost self-referential to it by exaggerating the parts that make it campy. I don’t mean self-referential like some side-character saying “Do you think this is a game?” or “What kind of game do you think this it?” because this is already a cliché and completely un-original. The idea of the campy-self-referential is that you make the cliché feel original. Being campy isn’t a bad thing either. Campiness worked in the reboot of 21/22 Jump Street, Hot Tub Time Machine and the more recent Guardians of the Galaxy.
Oculus game again. You and your Oculus are in a small room, 10 x 10, or the standard living space in downtown San Francisco for your month’s paycheck. But the room is set up with hundreds of tiny jets, like the ones from Jacuzzis and jets are laced throughout all planes of the room. The floor, the walls, the room. Maybe there are obstacles around the room, with air jets on them as well. But here’s the fun part, it’s a chase game, e.g. SlenderMan or If Only.
I talked about different controller types lending itself to the birth of different gameplay mechanics here, well the new interactive medium will be the room itself. Suspense/thriller games get you to jump by two main means, jump scares and creep-factor. But now you have a new set of mediums in the room to mess with your adrenal-glands.
Continue reading “Game Idea: Suspense with Oculus + A Rentable Room”
There are currently 5 million users logged into steam, 300 thousand of which are playing DOTA 2, 150 thousand of which playing Counter-Strike: GO and 56 thousand of which playing Team Fortress 2, and 16.6 thousand still playing Counter-Strike Source. Doing a bit of math, we roughly have 500k players across just 4 games and mainly in just DOTA 2 and CS:GO. So, 10% of the Steam-PC gaming population is playing DOTA 2 and CS:GO at this moment.
Steam thankfully gave us a nice graph of the daily log-ins so we can do a bit more fun math at the moment. With a peak of ~6.5 million and a valley of ~3.75 million, that leaves 2.75 million users in flux on Steam daily. That means that there’s always the population of Los Angeles (3.85 million) always logged into Steam, or that computer’s being left on throughout Los Angeles can be tracked through Steam. “Hi, Rolling-Blackouts! Nice to see you again, you forget something?”
Game Idea: Star Wars via Oculus Rift and Wii mote
The Game: Star Wars Jedis mutha-fucka. Do I have to keep typin’
The Mechanic:
The combo mechanic I had is kinda simple, but can add a bit of depth to the game. The idea is we’re going no HUD for the game, much like how Metal Gear Solid 5 is changing their approach to keep the focus on the visuals around you rather than the patrol map and vision cones from its previous games.
Having a large a lot of peripherals for you gaming set up, console or pc, helps build senses of immersion into your gaming experience. Your plastic guitars and tennis racket molds help shape the perception of what you’re playing, helps creating the illusion of the rock star or tennis pro.
But for games where the peripheral isn’t as obvious, what are the things that can be done to construct a better experience of a game?
For myself, the biggest asset in my collection is a 5.1 sound system. Having a game’s environment completely envelop one of your senses to a more realistic degree help dissolve the wall between virtual and reality. Actually, that’s the intention of most peripherals. Giving your body extra information to help it believe the reality that you’re perceiving. In the case of my 5.1 sound system, when the sound design is of a master class, which it tends to be for adventure games or suspense games, then the sound system makes it more believable to be in the perceived environment.
Continue reading “Thoughts on: Non-Obvious Gaming Peripherals”
To build up hype over a game, what do you think is more effective? We get them in the form of advertisements, cinematic trailers, gameplay trailers, demos (== early access [paid demo]), and other various forms of promotion.
I prefer gameplay trailers because I’m generally more interested in how a game plays, but it should depend on the game itself. Gameplay videos don’t make the most sense when you’re promoting a game with a heavy story, in which case having a strong narrative and a teaser is extremely important. Games like The Last of Us, Uncharted, Bioshock Infinite, and World of Warcraft have both gameplay and cinematic trailers, but unless we’re new to the series a gameplay trailer is unneeded. We already know the basics of the gameplay so try to draw us in with a teaser for the story. Just don’t go ham-fisting the entire story into a one-minute spot like most movie trailers today. You still want some surprises to be had when the player actually goes to play the bloody thing.
Continue reading “Thoughts on Trailers (Gameplay and Cinematics)”
Nintendo has a lot of series under their monolithic umbrella of games. Mario and Zelda games get trotted out in a near yearly cycle. Fire Emblem has had a lot of success in a once per generation fashion. Pikmin and Star Fox skipped a generation but are still able to perform to current generation expectations.
But what about the old franchises that were Nintendo staples? Metroid had a handful of games in the previous generation but has no titles coming out in the near future. Kirby has had titles every so often, but has had to re-invent itself over the past few games to seem fresh in idea.
Continue reading “Where have all the Metroid’s Gone? (Nintendo Change-ware Neglect-ware)”
As anyone in the industry should be telling you, graphics doesn’t equal fun and some of the most costly things about a game are graphics. Large teams of artists, designers, story writer, motion capture crews and voice actors, all working together to make a large-scale game what it is. Not just the graphics. Graphics aren’t a substitute for fun, but it can help amplify it. We don’t necessarily go into every game looking to have fun the whole time, but to think, to experience a different world and to get lost in a well told story for a while. It’s our form of escapism that we choose to occupy our reality with. One that is interactive and one that isn’t necessarily possible in our own reality.
Large scale productions don’t necessarily give you fun, but they give you opportunity. Opportunity to develop a mature design, develop detailed backdrops and sceneries, get the best voice actors in the market to bring all the characters outside of their reality and accepted in ours.
I will preface this with not every big budget game does this well, and I prefer indie games because they have a better sense of identity with how the product should be. That being said, there are sources of entertainment to be had in both the big-budget market and the small-budget one.
Continue reading “More Money for a Better Entertainment Ride? (Movies vs Gaming costs)”
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