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Game Idea: Blindfolded (e.g. Blind Unfinished Swan)

Game Idea: Blindfolded (Blind Unfinished Swan)

Game:

What Unfinished Swan did was create a world devoid of color where it was the player’s job to put color back into the world to navigate through it.

The idea for Blindfolded is that instead of adding color to navigate through the world, the sound that you generate by moving through it paints the world in front of the player for a short time. Like the image perception that bats have with their echo location, Ben Affleck from that horrible Daredevil movie or Toph has in Avatar: The Last Airbender.

And with great sight comes things your can't un-see.
And with great sight comes things your can’t un-see.

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Forever a Fan: A game’s constant reprise to mind

A funny thing happens when I walk by an arcade. My neck cranes, scanning the room and if I gaze on a series of the flashing arrows scrolling up a screen my eyes lock onto the machine and my body tries to move towards the machine on instinct. The feeling intensifies if the machine happens to be part of the few generations that had the best track list, but regardless of the version there is always an urge and a rush of the good brain chemicals that get me feeling excited and anxious to hop on the machine and give it another round for old times sake. The machine, if you hadn’t guessed was a DDR machine. If you talked to 13-year-old me and told him that I’d be working at a place where there were several DDR machines in the area with easy access to, he’d be ecstatic because what 13-year-old me thought was that I’d be a fan of the series for life. Maybe that was immature thinking, but the more places that I pass where there’s a DDR machine there or the disappointment that I find when there isn’t when I’d thought there would be, the more I believe I had it right back then, though my reasoning was wrong for it.

You can call it nostalgia or not being able to let go of past experiences, but there are many groups among the community that live with their game of choice and have become “Forever Fans” of their game.

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Game Idea: Server Admin Simulator

Game Idea: Server Farm Simulator Tycooninator

Pitch

The backend of game dev tycoon, where the player maintains and fixes issues that occur when a web site or video game becomes too popular.

They grow up and obsolete, so fast. Time for the garbage dump
They grow up and obsolete, so fast. Time for the garbage dump

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Game Idea: Fun Evolution Spore

Game Idea: Fun Physics Evolution (Think Spore with less realistic evolutionary history)

What spore tried to create was a game about a single celled organism, following its biological descendants as it tries to follow the same evolutionary track as humans. The interesting parts of this were the evolutionary choices that the player presided over the creature that it created, e.g. long legs but stubby arms emphasizing defense over aggression, eyes predominantly higher on the creature to see objects and other creatures at a distance, no mouth making communication and “making friends” with other creatures next to impossible, these are all fun and biologically interesting aspects about the game. It takes real life animal psychology, animal biology and evolutionary postulation and tries to convey and teach these aspects in the most passive of ways, where the player isn’t reading text and trying to absorb information in order to progress (i.e. Edutainment games) but where the player sees their failures in their creature creation because they forgot to put eyes on so it can’t see it’s environment making surviving, or even simply navigating, a difficult task.

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Game Design: Color Design and Palette Choice

What makes a room easier to navigate, items easy to discover, paths easily discerned? Intricately crafted scenes, artistic renditions of the imagination to a tangibly-cognizant interact-able space are all important, but how is the player going to be interacting with the scene created?

  • Contrast to the surrounding environmenthuecontrast

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Gaming Data: Metacritic Scores over Time

The whole mess of it. Top is critic score data, bottom is user score data.
Animated summary. Poorly compressed, however...
Animated summary. Poorly compressed, however…
The whole mess of it. Top is critic score data, bottom is user score data.
Nintendo Handhelds – With some of the lowest averages for quality of game.
Oh, Nintendo. The Wii really did a number on you, didn’t it.
Why doesn’t anyone acknowledge PC as a viable platform, huh?
Probably the console with higher quality than others, but it has to still fight it out in order to keep its position.
Psp started out strong on debute and is probably the handheld with better quality of games. Too bad handhelds don’t typically sell well in the states.
The Xbox games. Started off with week games, but picked up in the late 2000s. Too bad the latest games haven’t been bringing up their average.

There’s also something to say about the user scores in all of the pictures. There is a trend that Users are grading games more harshly than the past. You can attribute this to the hedonic treadmill, where our future experiences require more novelty in order to get enjoyment due to the worn out novelty from past experiences. Or, you can attribute this to fanboys and ragewars about a game, franchise or console allegiance. Or, you can even attribute some of this to it being easier to hate on something than to find redeeming qualities in a piece of creation.

All data was collected from Metacritic.com around April 30th, 2014, graphed with Tableau.

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Let’s Talk about: Shovel Knight

I know I talked about it before, but Shovel Knight is probably one of the few games this year that I was hard-pressed to put down. Aside from being a fun Castlevania-Megaman style Platformer, attached is a great soundtrack, a style that references games of the past but is still able to carve out its own image and gameplay that is never “too easy” or “too hard” but consistently finds the middle ground to keep the player lingering in the “I know I can complete this” mentality.

You've come a long way NES-Dracula. Fighting me in a graveyard instead of near your shining throne.
You’ve come a long way NES-Dracula. Fighting me in a graveyard instead of near your shining throne.

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Hah. Racism. Threshes catching a wild Lucian
What a terrible top-lane to endure, Yasuo Mordekaiser
What a terrible top-lane to endure, Yasuo Mordekaiser
Power… Overwhelming… (Ahri)
That smile with a bit of crazy in it. (Jinx)
Summertime Graves is off-duty
Summertime Graves here to cool you off.
It’s ok to fraternize when you have nothing to do
The Ultimate Jungle, Khaz + Vi
The most unneeded threesome to ship.
Need to find popstar Ahri to make it a proper KPop sensation
Battle Yawn
Two Jaxes == 10 man team
Lulu about to gently touch… wands
Wonder Twin Lulus Activate
Caitlyn’s Smile after Ace-in-the-Hole is done

I might’ve had more pictures than this, but the gathering area was entirely too small for the amount of people. Mixing that with the heat wave that participated with the entrants to the con, we were all fighting for cooler locations to photograph. Tried to make better accommodations for other gatherings, but it was a shame that this one had to take the hit as far as quality of quantity

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Teaching the Player p2.2 – More on Reactive vs Planned Gameplay

Previous posts in the Series Teaching the Player

And a link to the part 1

Running for Speed

The Speed Running community is a fantastic example of people who take every opportunity to transition all games from a Reaction to Planned Gameplay. They approach every game with its predefined rules and regardless of how well a game teaches you a mechanic, the speed runners put in the time to perfect the most opportune route and routine in getting from the start to the end of the game. They epitomize the idea of “Reaction Gameplay + Time = Planned Gameplay” by learning all of the inadequacies of the player’s abilities and the gamespace’s rules and manipulating them to get a more optimized path for faster completion, and shaving frames, seconds or even minutes off of runtimes by understanding what can be done by the player and what will happen in the gamespace when the player performs the action.

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