clyde

Do y'all ever go back and play completed levels when they are selectable from a menu? It seems like the Angry Birds 3-star system encourages levels to be full consumed and then forgotten. How would you imagine a character-driven narrative game that had selectable menus and designations of completion while still encouraging players to go back and play through their favorite short-stories again? Like with the Tell Tale episodic games, I never say to myself "Oh I'm going to go back and play chapter two again!" Is there a way to organize or present or write short, narrative-centric vignettes that encourage revists? Btw: I will likely be stealing the ideas that y'all provide and using them as my own. Edit: I think this might be the motivation behind unlockable abilities and unlockable characters/classes.

Merry Coristmas, Sergio http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/9040

I'm going with Problem Machine on this one.

This tutorial on making gameObject fractals is rad. I worked through a third of it this evening and really enjoyed it. http://catlikecoding.com/unity/tutorials/constructing-a-fractal/

Don't bother playing this one. The graphics suck so much that they didn't upload a screenshot so that you wouldn't see how much the graphics suck.

Maybe we should make a new rule where we skip any games that don't have screenshots. You know... because they don't have screenshots.

Yeah, I'm probably going to spend a week figuring out how to convince everyone that I'm not doing the thing that is highlighted in this game. . . and failing.

I think the idea is that the patient can't hear properly now that their ear has been bitten off. So they answer the wrong question. I don't know what that question would be though. If I made the joke I'd probably re-write the ending answer with something like "Chicken."

For the week of December 29th, 2014 we will be playing: Nasty by thecatamites You can play the game in your browser here. You can download the single game from here for free Or you can buy the entire collection of 50 games from here.

I interpreted this as a soggy loaf of bread.

I'm not doing the game a week thing, but this is totally what I've learned about making games quickly. I feel like I have two types of projects now: the ones where I have time to just fiddle around and endlessly tune mechanics until I get something neat; and the jam-games where I just need to put enough art assets up to make it look like a legitimate screen-shot and then figure out how to make some of it move.

Tychocelchuuu recommended A1 Reviews a while back and I never got around to read them. Seeing some of these excerpts has convinced me that I've been missing out. This is really good stuff and informative about the sensibility from which 50 Short Games was made. I love the style of writing that you describe so well in the above quotation. A tendency I notice (and enjoy) is the way the initial moments of learning a game's systems is leveraged for player-engagement similar to that of instinctual survival. A good example of this is the subject of our recent conversation over Twitter about American Baseball. By the time you figure out how to play, you have had some time to build up a sense of responsibility for your performance and suspicions about how much that performance matters, and you have no warmup-round within which to tease out. So you find yourself onstage trying to do the best that you can. The WarioWare games and Revenge of the Sunfish do this, but because they involve multiple games in quick succession, the player has no time to digest what just happened. the inexplicable regret of failure I experienced after my first playthrough of 2hrs 1man show was interesting in a different way than my eventual successful playthroughs where the game became awkward because I couldn't really end it. The trainwrecks tend to feel either super-short or exhausted when I play them and I agree; those inherent qualities of the tools and culture that you speak of seem to surface more easily within that spectrum. ///////////////////////////////////////// Sea of Love After a few dissatisfied playthroughs, the title lended meaning in a rather obtuse manner. I began to see the game as an explicit and clumsy metaphor representing the process of being alone and attempting to find romance. Added to that, the method represented was depressingly acquiescent; I got the sense that the highs of romantic fancy and the lows of repeated discontent with willing partners had averaged out into this routine of just showing up, saying the right things and waiting to see what you already know, that they are boring or possibly a bit entertaining. And then you do it again. In this reading, I found it interesting that you didn't play as a fish in the sea-of-love seeing how many other fish there are. The circumstances presented seemed like a paradoxical existence where the player-character doesn't believe the platitudinal advice on love will work, but has to make some effort, and this repeatitious grind that pays off little (at most) is the only perceived option. The other day I was telling a friend of mine who is actively disinterested in games about 50 Short Games and the immediate comparison I came up with was 69 Love Songs. Sea of Love has managed to make that comparison much more concrete. Sea of Love is not remotely a game about love. It's a game about love-games, which are very far away from anything to do with love.

Watching the BBC's The History of Racism and this particular excerpt (0:43-1:35) was so succint that I became excited to share it.

This article makes me ask some interesting questions such as: -What is femininity when abstracted from women? -What is the relationship between femininity and women? http://killscreendaily.com/articles/remaking-Video game-canon-rachel-weil/?utm_content=buffer0de9d&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer Also look into "anti-racism" It's useful to find out that racism is not some sort of natural tendency to favor one's own race, but instead a fiction created to delegitimize the rights of one group so that the race in power can steal all their shit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-racism On a related note, I watched this video this morning which points out that current U.S. policy towards native americans is strongly tied to this technique of systematic dispossession. http://billmoyers.com/episode/american-indians-confront-racism/ But all this would probably fit better in the Social Justice thread so we don't derail intersectional feminism.

Paperknife http://paperknife.itch.io/paperknife Super interesting, I'd love to be good enough to complete it or patient enough to play it 15 times. I love it when narratives are about personal difficulties. via SuperbiasedMan.

Super Space Angles A minimal shmup with a clean aesthetic where your bullets ricochet. It works very well. http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/9009

I hope you post your thoughts on them eot.

Both are mixed-bags for me. I like StrongBad, the Heavy, and Brock. Everyone else is annoying and unfunny to me. Well... Sam is not funny, but I don't find him annoying. In fact, he's kinda pleasant to be around and it's not dependent on his humor-value. It would be cool if this was made in such a way where you could populate the table with DLC characters of your own choosing, but I can't imagine how that would work considering that their banter is relationship-specific. If you could buy characters individually, they would all just talk about themselves instead of having opinions about each other.

I started playing this series during the current steam-sale and really enjoy it. Is there another thread where people provide their wishlist of characters to play with? It seems like the obvious question. I want to play with Dragon Age and Mass Effect characters so bad. I don't know though, everyone but Morrigan is so dry and humorless. Still, I'd love to play with Leliana and Alistair, mostly so I can listen to Morrigan and Alistair bicker.

That's how I see it. I think of those globes as navigation tools. I think I get what you are saying. I struggle to explain how the high artificiality is appealing to me. Or maybe the problem is that I'm having a hard time reliably predicting when I switch gears from believing an illusion and investigating craft. I am preoccupied with the obtuse intentionality of Hernhand for over half the time I spend in it. I really like that. I'd just like to take a moment to thank you all for being members of this fine forum because I can't imagine being able to pretend like anyone would care about what I'm about to say anywhere else. So it's weird, and I need to restate that I can't say that Hernhand is better than Bernband or vice-versa; I'm fascinated by what happens when you compare these twins. Where my descriptions and generalities usually distinguish between two works, I have to provide extra effort to examine what makes one of these so different from the other. Bernband is exquisite in its ability unify its parts and create a tight, closed loop that feels free and exciting, and whole. Here is the paradox: Bernband is seemingly convincing in it's illusion and Hernhand's appeal is partly the transparency of the way it is put together; but Bernband feels fully designed while Hernhand feels representational of real experiences. Maybe it's because of my personal experiences and the particular places I've been, but Hernhand feels like exploring a strange city whie Bernband feels like I'm in a super cool amusement-park. The pace and pay-off of discovery is often similar, but Hernhand feels real in the level of specificity it suggests. Bernband certainly has some specificity, walking past a recital-rooms is totally a valid experience that is neat to see in a game and one I've had the pleasure of awkwarding, but for some reason I identify so much more with listening to a pond gurgle, walking past three figures drinking while listening to a broadcast in a foriegn language, and then finding a mediocre sax-player giving it their all for an audience of rodents. It's not better, it's just different and something that has more resonance with me. There is a lot more to be said about the way the two games compare; bothe have portions that could easily be mistaken for walking toward a game of lazer-tag, but one has campy blacklit geometric designs on the wall paper, while the other has monumental architecture fit for a legendary arena battle. The amount that the bar-atmospheres variate in Hernhand compared to the level of variation in Bernband is also worth discussion. Bernband is more of a college town where the regulars crawl whereas Hernhand is a place where the bar you frequent is a notable part of your identity. One things I really disagree with you on is the quality of Hernhand's sound-design. The ambient sounds provide me with a lot of enjoyment.

For the week of December 22nd, 2014 we will be playing: Sea Of Love by thecatamites You can play the game in your browser here. You can download the single game from here for free Or you can buy the entire collection of 50 games from here.

I love the song in your trailer.

I've decided. I considered some alternatives, but it is always 50 Short Games that I am considering alternatives to. I touch on what I think is so special about 50 Short Games here.