Merus

Did Spacebase come together? It looked, from Friday, like Dungeon Keeper in space but without a point. From the videos, it looked like JP was letting everyone get their pet idea into the game but not actually getting it to a point where it was fun. I'm particularly curious to know if there's any kind of resource constraint - most of these kind of games have you trying to set up an economy and push past the existing limitations, but I wasn't seeing that at all in the videos. It did look like Black Lake was getting somewhere; it had a lot of issues from the videos but the team knew where they were so I'm hoping they came together. We'll see if it's any good, I guess. Autonomous looks rad, White Birch looks pretty rad considering they don't have the five years it takes Team Ico to do something similar, Hack and Slash looks possibly a bit janky but at worse it'll be Double Fine Zelda and there is nothing wrong with that. So yeah, Spacebase was the only one that looked like it had significant problems from the summary videos, which is a little awkward. Edit: I guess there's livestream videos? Lemme find out. Edit to the edit: hmm, I think the building towards derelicts and asteroids/cost for salvaging in terms of lost resources works nicely as a gameplay loop. So I guess the videos were a tad misleading.

I'd guess it's because you're still under the impression that, unlike in the real world, there are predominantly normal-looking women in video games. Because you haven't really thought about it, we're all acting crazy and irrational and seeing things that aren't there, and that's amazing bait. A lot of the problems with this topic is that we're pointing out a hole and that looks to the untrained eye a lot like something that isn't there.

The interesting thing about Darksiders II is that everyone seems to say that they found a build that breaks the game but I strongly suspect it's balanced so that it's very easy to break if you build it in any intentional direction. For instance, I built a health steal/wrath steal build that makes me basically invincible, and before that I was using a critical hit/damage build. While I had some problems with it - it has some pacing issues, for instance - I think I liked it a lot more than Skyward Sword.

I figure at this point basically MoMA can do whatever the fuck it wants and claim it's part of a performance piece; recontextualising the relationship between art and gallery by turning the curation process itself into art.

I like MoMA selecting a bunch of games based on their opinion of artistic merit. I like the idea of a list of notable games that does not include Doom; I like the idea that we can determine which games are most notable in ways that do not end up with the same results. Considering what MoMA is, actually, I really like that list. You can really see MoMA's intent, there: they want games that have artistic depth to them, that can be interpreted, that comment on the time they're in either consciously, subconsciously, or by being part of the zeitgeist. Pacman, I think, captures that more than most of these games; its central metaphor is still being reinterpreted today, and its association with the rampant consumerism of the 80s lends itself to critiques of that consumerism in a way that is totally clear to most Westerners. I'm pleased it's in the same museum as Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans. Passage may not be particularly satisfying as a game, but it's important in the development of the art form as an artform and not purely an entertainment medium. Honestly Canabalt is a bit weird, I can't really see that one.

I found that whole cover art thing fatiguing. It's almost a tradition that the BioShock series' marketing materials straight up misrepresent what is interesting about the game in favour of talking about what's going to sell copies. And it worked, and it made them mad bank, and the people who were looking for a sober, mature storyline found out about the game anyway. And there will be reversible covers so once the box has done its job of selling it to the uninformed consumer you can put a nice cover on there. Moreover I don't really think you're going to get nearly as vividly realised a world from an indie downloadable game. It's basically just Take Two who have the combination of money and patience to let teams do this kind of thing, but I think the artform would be poorer if no-one was trying.

Hooray for you!

And now I'm beginning to understand why everyone bitches about the VGAs but inexplicably watch it anyway.

There's only one missable thing as well, and that's only an achievement you need to do while one of the side quests is still going (the one where there's a creepy dude standing on the rooftop watching you). Everything else can be done at your leisure.

Honestly I think we're all shocked there were two of them

Literally everything I know about these awards I've learnt from people complaining about them on the Internet. Even to the point that they're shown on a TV station in the US called Spike.

Pfft, that's for people who want money (also the video game industry is insanely competitive and has pretty terrible work conditions in all but the best studios so who you know is as helpful as what you know to avoid just being a QA tester on a Call of Duty game and hating your life)

It looks like your box will only animate when the space key is being pressed down. Also, I think I see why your box seems to snap to the location - you have a loop in AnimateGui that runs completely in one frame, so in one frame it moves from -200f to 20f. What you should have instead is only one statement changing the value of myBoxLeft that executes in any one call to AnimateGui; combine that with the deltaTime trick mentioned earlier, and you should be fine. Instead of using the position to indicate which direction the box should be moving, I'd probably use a boolean, as well, but that's your decision.

The big gulf between downloadable titles and AAA titles, particularly because anything in between just does not sell what it needs to any more, I think is leading to a lot of fatigue from experienced developers who remember knowing the names of everyone on your team.

Seems fairly straightforward to me: you get into the game industry by knowing people who can vouch for your excellence, and the easiest way to socialise with them and have them think you are excellent is by being on the same forum as them and saying interesting things. The bit where it backfires is if you hang out on the same forum as them and you say something embarrassing.

The longer this whole thing goes on the more I'm amused that Tim Schafer managed to wangle a camera crew to do whatever goofy shit he wants.

I can contribute to this topic without any of that! This looks like a scam. No-one said anything about accusations or insinuations.

I should point out that when I say "humans think in terms of stories" I'm talking on a much more fundamental level than a three-act-narrative structure. Our enjoyment of a puzzle comes from grasping the understanding of the cause and effect of the puzzle, which I am arguing here is, on a fundamental level, building a story of how the puzzle works. I am using "story" as a shorthand for "a simple cause-and-effect model that explains something" because "mental model" implies a higher-level intelligence than what I understand is at work here - it's an automatic reflex, not something we consciously assemble. I've been a bit careless when throwing around the word "story", my apologies - narrative is on a much higher conceptual level, and when I switch to talking about Halo all that's about narrative. While I think narrative is useful (both because it can be used in service to the game design and because it appeals to people who enjoy narratives without really affecting people who want pure mechanics) and shouldn't be abandoned for a myopic focus on pure mechanics, I am certainly not going to insist that every game should have a plot. What I'm getting at there is that what makes games different to other media is the participation of the player, and so when we're delivering narrative we should probably do it in a way that invites participation from the player. (I don't mean choice - you can do a lot of fun things with false choices, but the illusion of choice still invites player participation if they think it's real.) I think a potentially fruitful avenue to explore is the use of the environment and mechanics to deliver narrative - Super Metroid does this almost exclusively, and while its narrative is pretty sparse it's immediate and memorable. It's one of the many reasons it's my favourite game. From your argument here, I suspect we'll just have to agree to disagree; I feel the exact opposite way about many of your examples, so I guess it comes down to what we each find fun. I'd suspect in the case of being ordered around that I'd start mocking how little the game is trying to make me care about what I'm doing, but that'd be just fine for you. The trick with these AAA games is finding a balance between what everyone wants, whereas smaller games can go straight for a particular niche and ignore everyone else.

Games are a medium, and if a medium cannot tell stories than it is not capable of expressing things in a way humans understand, which would suggest that it was pretty bad at being a medium. That's where I was going with that argument, as incendiary as it was. You think they don't support stories? Sports support stories, or else we wouldn't have sports journalists. As I mentioned, humans are real real good at extracting stories out of a series of unrelated events, so we should probably try and anticipate that reaction when we create things. For instance, maybe we shouldn't use cutscenes as the only medium for transmitting a storyline! Maybe we should have actual dialogue mechanics instead of ripping control away from the player every time they want to talk to someone! I'd contend that Quake, Chess and Go support stories because there's a natural flow to the way the gamestate moves that allows people to ascribe narratives to it - to an extent, it's because there are two people playing against each other and two people in conflict in any medium is ripe story fodder. My point is what makes a game or a sport good is its ability to support a storyline, not the other way around. On the other hand, Tetris really doesn't, which might demonstrate some flaws in the argument. I don't have the distance required because I'm kind of bored of Tetris at this point, and I don't want to fall into the very common trap of proclaiming that What Games Are is what I like about games. So it's good that I'm putting this out there and testing the limits of the argument to try and avoid pretentious wankery. I guess I would argue, though, that Tetris only really starts becoming interesting when you fuck up and make a hole you can't fill, and that sets off a little narrative where you're trying to fix your own mistake and it's a lot, lot harder than it seems. When I stopped doing that, I kind of got bored of Tetris. I don't know if my experience is typical - again, I'm conscious that every armchair games theorist usually makes the mistake of assuming their personal tastes are universal properties of games. Well here's the thing: the shitty storyline in Halo is a direct result of the only good thing about that series being its combat mechanics. The storyline is basically a giant excuse for Master Chief to fight some Covenant, and all of it is oriented towards justifying Master Chief fighting Covenant because constant, unending war against a vast alien race is super-unrealistic so there's a lot of pointless backstory to generate - which wouldn't be necessary if there was something to Halo's storyline other than the combat mechanics. You can't let anything grow, you can't let anyone win, and so it descends increasingly into emotional retardation so the combat mechanics stay as intact as possible. But let's say they did just give up. No storyline in Halo 5 whatsoever. What happens? I'd put forward that a) obviously Halo lore fans are going to complain, but more importantly any objectives other than "shoot all the dudes" become notable roadblocks to players and c) players, on average, have less fun. The most important role of a game story is to provide context to the game mechanics. If it's absent, the game notably suffers, and we know this happens based on experiments by the Experimental Gameplay Project among others. It doesn't have to be much, World of Goo (which came directly out of the EGP) has the signpainter's signs and the vignettes every so often that provide just enough context to make the game more compelling than a series of anonymous puzzles. For a shooter like Halo, one of the most important pieces of context is to explain secondary and unusual objectives, and to be fair most games do this adequately. Our hypothetical Halo: No Story can't without it sounding like a bad action movie ("we have to get to that turret!") and so they're stuck either under-explaining what to do or violating their vision of a no-story Halo. There's also the jarring transition between maps you'll get by wanting to provide visual variety but not really trying to explain it, which makes all that additional art you created feel like a reskin and not an actual place. (Level 2 is Spaceship World!) If you're mostly just mad that the Halo series has too much fan wank and to tone it down a little, though, I think you and I can come to an accord. I'm not defending tiny stripper Cortana.

Having watched my housemate play through chunks of it, the early stuff hinges on the protagonist being native American, in one instance involving him turning away from the revolution stuff because a relatively minor player is trying to buy out his people's land. I'll have to ask him whether it comes into play much when the war begins in earnest. Re: story in games, I take the potentially extreme opinion is that if games can't tell stories they are completely fucking useless to us as humans, given that stories are fundamental to the way we see the world, often to the point of misinterpreting the world because we're trying to make it a story. Thankfully, this isn't the case! Games support stories just fine, as can be readily seen by the way everyone who's played Minecraft has a Minecraft story. That game has very minimal context, but it has a gameplay cycle that maps reasonably cleanly to a story structure, and so purely as a result of the game mechanics, a story emerges. I want to see more developers work their story into their game mechanics. The players don't care about what the protagonists care about because what the protagonists care about don't influence the game in any way. We don't need to know the context of anything to participate to our fullest extent, we don't need to ask questions, we don't need to know anything about the characters or the world to have perfect information. In terms of Halo, mostly John and Cortana solve their problems by shooting them and putting Cortana into a terminal, and other than making a mechanic out of putting Cortana into the terminal she needs to get the access/information she wants, I'm not sure how you'd go about it exactly.

I listened to Chris' discussion of the elemental nature of the Covenant with great interest, not having played much Halo, as it reminded me of one of my all time favourite puzzle games, DROD. In that game, each of the enemies you have to kill to advance have very simple behaviours, and the puzzles come from the interplay between their behaviours and the room design. Complex enemies in the DROD series are less interesting because there's only one "right" way to approach them, as they effortlessly counter everything else; simpler enemies, in inconvenient combinations, support multiple tactics. This lets the developers make interesting encounters out of the same pieces simply by using them in different ways, changing the tactics required.

Oh nice, they're making Black Lake as well. That's one I really wanted to see a prototype for. I am interested in all the successful prototypes, so let's hope they come together! Not watching the livestream because livestreams are terrible. My livestream experience: they always start when I'm asleep; I have a look, coming in on the middle of not very much happening, I have to sign up to use the chat or participate in any way, and I can't do anything else with the computer if I intend to watch it and also not be bored, so eventually I go play a game instead. Cricket test matches are all the fun of livestreams except they play it on TV so I can still do something interesting.

There is one circumstance where I will still accept the use of Lux Aeterna: when you are showing a character being laid low by their own obsessions. If you're just trying to be epic then, no.

So now we have more than one British developer that has a spotty history but would like to revisit their most beloved work with new ideas and new technology.

Imagine how many resources they sunk into building (the multiple) multiplayer modes that they didn't end up shipping. Then again, they could all have just been at a prototype stage, in which case it'd be "not very much" and so there's no problem.