Sign in to follow this  
clyde

Game Critique Club (Round 2.5)

Recommended Posts

Game Critique Club works like this:

1. Submit a single game you made to receive feedback.

2. There are only seven slots for submissions in a round of Game Critique Club. This limits a round to fourteen weeks.

3. Each submission will receive two weeks of consideration by the club.

4. Once you have submitted a game for Game Critique Club, you are obligated to provide substantial feedback for all other submissions during their two-week period of discussion.

5. You are not required to submit a game in order to provide feedback.

Game Critique Club (Round 2) will start on April 1st 2016. If you are interested in participating or have questions, please say so here or contact me on Twitter @cafefiction Slots for submission are filled first-come-first-serve so be quick about it. Because each submitter is obligated to provide feedback on all submissions, new submissions are not accepted after the round begins. Here is a link to Game Critique Club (Round 1), note that we changed the process from its original intention considerably.

I felt that the first round was incredibly successful and somewhat stressful. Those two experiences are not mutually exclusive. Not only did I receive an overwhelming amount of thoughtful critique on one of my games, but I also had an opportunity to examine a handful of games for two weeks each that I grew to appreciate greatly in that time. If you can handle the heat, it's pretty fun. New people are very much encouraged to join us.

 

 

Game Critique Club has been hosted over on the makega.me forums, but that forum is shutting its doors or changing its administration. Either way, we needed to move elsewhere so here we are.

 

We've gone through two submissions thus far:

April 1st-14th: Cartas

April 15th-29th: Leaving Ur

 

The remaining submissions are scheduled as such:

April 29th-May 13th: @marek

May 13th-27th: @racarate

May 27th-June 10th: @SuperBiasedMan

June 10th-24th: @GerbilsInSpace

June 24th-July 8th: @sergio

 

The plan is to used this thread as a hub for organization and administration and to link to the individual submissions and their discussions. As a reminder, you do not have to submit a game in order to contribute to the discussion.

Onwards!

 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

The game I submitted is Rehgehstoy. It's a tool-game for creating islands, inspired by the Myst mythos. It uses a little bit of the language from the Myst games, D'ni, but don't let that scare you off. I don't expect you to know or learn any of it.

Let me know if you have any trouble playing it, I know the interface is a little bit obtuse.

Enjoy!

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

So I still feel that I only have initial impressions even though I've been playing this every once in a while and I've been thinking about it a bit.

My memory of Myst is that it is a series of static photos arranged as perspectives on a computer-graphics island of puzzle machinery and trees. I never got off the first island. I just walked back and forth across it trying to make anything happen. My macintosh took a while to load each individual perspective so deciding to go elsewhere took some sense of commitment. The only things I know of Myst's lore are things I've misheard in passing. So really, the game's bio on its itch.io page is the most I know of Myst's lore. In that context Rehgehstoy is neat largely because it approaches a fan-art effort with systems-thinking conjecture. I like that Rehgehstoy expands the universe only by allowing the player to experience the details of the labor of creating that universe as told in the fiction of the original work (I'm assuming a bit here). This is especially entertaining for me considering that the authors of Myst were likely relying heavily on a metaphor of their own experience making the game, here realized in an experiential form they never intended to be experienced. And it works; Unity's visual defaults are compatible with my fallible memories of Myst's aesthetics. I felt that this is how the fictional creators may have gone about beginning to create the digital place I experienced briefly 20 years ago.

here are some things I found interesting about the design decisions that went into Rehgehstoy:

-I'm surprised that the books aren't re-rolled every time I open the program. That permanence makes the shelf feel specific. In this context, the ones that are just oceans become something akin to the blank Unity projects I have with different names.

-The prioritization of the increment-notations is really odd. It communicates a lot about the D'ni people's awareness and control of intensity. I think that cooking-recipes communicate that priority in cooking as a comparison; there is a culture that notices the difference in a teaspoon of salt and a table-spoon of it.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I found Rehgehstoy to be really fun to play with, and really interesting, so to keep me focused while playing and figuring out how the system worked.

I like these kind of toys systems that are a joy to discover and keep the player engaded.

I think that in this game this toy-system works so well because having a blank canvas, an instrument to make something that has personal results, makes it particularly satisfactory and keeps the player curiosity.

I liked a lot having the library there, it really gave a subtle narrative element to the game, like "you are in your laboratory and you can consult books by ancient sages and try to learn from them / look to your past experiments"

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I'm starting to get into it a bit.

 

hHu1HJX.jpg

 

For some reason, this morning it clicked for me. I opened the book on the far-left, top and found a note that says "hello". I wanted to add it to my vocabulary, but couldn't find a way to. I noticed that that particular book and a few near it are oceans. having already played the game a bit, I was confused as to why I couldn't write; I ended up thinking of this status as a narrative where the D'ni sometimes have writers-block. I started clicking a bunch of books randomly trying to get to the point where I could write again and slowly started becoming interested in what was written in some of them. There was one particular island that caught my interest because I couldn't understand how it was made with the mechanics I'm currently aware of. It was kinda like a waterless caldera with a few pits about fifteen-feet wide each. I noticed that the word "scattered" was used and that there was almost a meter to the poem where the verses could be thought of as nesting in the previous ones; this created a coherency with the island itself which seemed to have concentric deformations. So once I got words (still not sure how), I tried to do it myself whimsically and it resulted in the island depicted above. What was most interesting to me was that the ambient noises and the action of creating repetitive verse hinted at a trance-state as I added stanzas. When I go back in, I plan to try this method of writing islands in earnest.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

As I played this morning, I was reminded of the wonder I felt from Scribblenauts. Sometimes I get excited when I search for an exotic term of my own creation and look at the image results on Google. For example, if I type "birds playing scrabble" (which I haven't yet), I'll likely be able to check the image results that will have some amount of coherency with my wish as I phrased it. There is this thing in Slack that allows you to type /giphy and a term or phrase that will then show you some animated clip that the database associates to your reference. In all these cases and in Rehgehstoy, I experience a moment of genuine delight in seeing how my text-input will manifest. When I was in highschool, talking to friends on the phone in the evening, sometimes I would ask them to draw me a picture while we talked and give them a list of subjects to make sure and include. Then when I saw them at school, they'd present a picture to me and it would always be so exciting to see how my words were translated into an image within the artist's capacity. For me, the incompatibility between text and the manifestations they attempt to describe is something I think about frequently. Sartre's thoughts on the essence of a chair and other philosophical musings about how language is a crutch for understanding help me try to remember that instances are not the references we use for them.

The presentation in Rehgehstoy feels much different from a google search-bar though. There is a sense that the manifestations did not exist before the words were put down; there is a library where the ambient sounds of rain create a distinction between the place in which the references exist and the place where the instances manifest; there is an exotic language, implied culture, and motive within the fiction through which we write things into existence. These aspects of the presentation and the psuedo-enforced formatting of the vocabulary-mechanic make me more receptive to cadences similar to the sing-songy spells in Shakespeare's plays or Disney movies. When I select my words in repetitive parallel stanzas, I experience a slight trance that moves my mind into a text-centric thought-pattern that conflicts with the non-textual manifestation that I can access immediately afterwards. This conflict is not only that I might have imagined the results differently while rapping, but also in the particular tooling my mind wants to use in order to approach understanding of the subject. Because of the poetic-technique I'm encouraged to employ due to the presentation of Rehgehstoy, I'm more likely to experience this dissonance more intensely. If only Google would try harder at making guesses when I type multiple stanzas into the search-bar.

a51dda665b69c4da1ba4790d0ebb1a37.jpg

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

psyched.

 

edit: I don't know much about epilepsy, but I would think that what I just saw when I opened  the program would trigger it.

 

2nd edit: yeah, this is pretty interesting.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Clyde: Thanks so much for engaging with Rehgehstoy so deeply! I was too intimidated to respond, I'm sorry! I'm glad that you got something out of the indirectness of moving between words and worlds and back, and that you picked up on the D'ni proclivity to precision in their language, and I liked how much you imagined the history of the past D'ni book writers. The books on the bookshelf are actually networked, and anyone can edit them, which is why they stay the same between resets and also why they're so screwed up.

 

Julk: Thanks for playing as well! I'm glad you thought it was a joy to discover and it kept you engaged. I feel like it could stand to be more intuitive in how you actually use it, as evidenced by Clyde's difficulty in finding a book to actually write in. I'm  also really glad that you picked up on the little implied narrative that the bookshelf gives off.

 

Racarate: For the first thirty seconds of this game, I absolutely loathed it. After my first cycle I liked it, then after my second cycle I loved it. The incessant flashing that makes it horrible to look at also gives it a sort of transcendental, divine feeling once you understand what's going on. It reminds me of that Borges story, The Aleph, as if it's trying to show all these stories at the same time, overlapping. It's too much for human eyes to take. You could soften the blow by changing the lighter scenes to earth tones, and I wonder if it might be possible to change the pattern of the flicking? Like if instead of going 1-2-3-4-5 you went 1-2-1-2-1-2-3-2-3-2-3-2-3 or something. When two stories are flicking at 60hz it's not so bad, but when you have 10 stories flicking at 6hz each it's horrible. Definitely 100% for sure add an epilepsy warning, though. Even if you don't suffer from that condition it's nice to have the opportunity to steel yourself before you plunge in.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

60 HZ DAYDREAM is difficult to examine because the flickering is so abrasive. I think I may try to record a play-through in hopes of being able to see how different the experience is on various monitors. It hasn't given me a headache yet, but every time I play it, I expect it to.

I enjoy the exploration and discovery of the various scenes and soundtracks. It's not similar to tuning a radio-station, but it feels like a similar kind of thing. As I'm going through trying to see each of the scenes, I notice how some are more difficult to isolate due to the varying ease of reaching their trigger. I felt a sense of accomplishment when I got to see the fish alone after eventually figuring out how to guide the bug(?) to the ladybug-shell(?) without the fish reaching the grass.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I've managed to isolate all of the scenes with the exception of the Sun. I've grown to really enjoy 60 HZ DAYDREAM. The flat art with its earth-tones and dithery zones complement the experimental melodies of low bit-rate synth chimes and phase-shifting. I'm not sure if there is an inherent synergy between them or if playing the game a lot has created a new association; I think it's kinda cool either way.

I notice that the subjects are all animals reaching their targets in natural settings, but I never managed to connect that with the larger organization of having all the games shuffle as fast as they can and being eliminated one by one in order to achieve a more easily observable scene. If the game was composed of noisy disruptions within our modern technological lives or if I eliminated layers of illusions in order to reveal a more relevant reality, then I would have felt that the themeing and the format would easily feel related; I'm just trying to give some examples for comparison to show you what I mean. I can certainly come up with a personal interpretation, but I feel that it would lack corroboration with a third aspect. that personal interpretation would be this: Sitting in a park, at first it appears to me as the hyper-reality of nature. But once I take the time to witness and observe various examples of animal-life going about its business, I no longer see these instances as a single summary. I had this experience sitting in a park today in fact. I examined a fractured twig for a while, watched a flying insect crawling across a twig-bridge over a portion of the creek and blew a black ant off of my melodica-case after watching it panic about how to get back off of it.

 

I would like to have more to say about how the game feels so incredibly abrasive; that aspect is such intense part of the presentation, but I don't really know what to say about it beyond the satisfaction of forcing myself through electronic-media that is aggresively irritating to eventually reach one of a few digital folky renditions of tropishly peaceful scenes. When I type that out I realize that I enjoy the concept.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Sorry I haven't been responding about people's games, I will catch up and give feedback to both of you!

 

As it's my turn now, I have a simple twine game I made a couple years back. It's quite short so it shouldn't take people long, but it's one of my most cohesive games. It actually came out with the feel I intended when I first came up with the idea, which is actually pretty rare for me.

 

It's called Perfection and you can find it on my itch.io here:

 

https://superbiasedman.itch.io/perfection

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Perfection reminds me of Depression Quest. I enjoy that context, because the differences in how the self-skepticism is presented is interesting to think about. In Depression Quest, the choices to live a healthy, productive life slowly become inert. In Perfection, the choices to continue working on the current project always remain, but they have to compete for attention with an increasing number of reasons for the work's negation.
I should also mention that I can identify with the sentiment expressed in this game, but I always write in pen and never throw anything away in order to disprove those momentary thoughts of dismissal by simply discovering my incomplete works from the past at later dates; it works beautifully.

I'll continue to play and write more thoughts later.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I'm in the perfect mood to play through Perfection this morning. I started watching episode 1 of  Agnes Varda's

and quickly became overwhelmed by the intensity, awareness, and significance of her work and the work of those she involves herself with. Then I came across
that has an artism to it without the timeless quality of Varda's observations; it still has a lot of intention to it like a student art-film with a budget that got lucky with their soundtrack. I then wanted to share the music-video without fully recommending it; this is an emotion I feel frequently as I find myself appreciating work that has something to express without the tools and/or ability to capture and communicate it fully. I'm not suggestion that Perfection is such a work, I'm suggesting that this morning-coffee experience of bouncing around the spectrum of artistic-worth with personally verifiable feelings but no empirical foundation, is relevant to Perfection.

The protagonist has a name and it's implied that Sam has a past, but for the most part Perfection is made out of generalities about creative-process mostly consisting of platitudinal terms of encouragement and nihilistic psuedo-rationales for dismissal. Instead of progress in the game consisting of details that fill out whatever Sam is manifesting, we know we are making progress with a new set of unspecific ambitions and a set of summarized self-doubts; neither set tells us anything about Sam or the work, everything we learn is from the format and theme.

Choosing a perspective that sees the current state of work (within terms of glamorous depictions of an artistic genius) rolls us into another moment where we have the option between it again, or cynicism. Choosing a phrase that depicts a moment where Sam has lost momentum resets the game entirely. The results of the dichotomy weights it heavily. The good-ending suggests that all of these failed cycles are informing another attempt. This is never the actual case within the game though; It's implied that I should be encouraged, knowing that the next attempt is informed by all the previous failures, but in reality I know that I'll end up going through another non-conclusive cycle that results in nothing but increased experience within that cycle. I never end up with a sense that something is actually being created. So in essence, Perfection is communicating to me that the relevance of artistic work is purely the sense of progress during the process in which nothing can possibly be produced.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

The first time I played 60hzdaydream I spent some time just watching the images and trying to catch all the figures and characters that were in the different layers.

I liked a lot the look of the textures and the quality added by the overlapping images.

I couldn't understand well if I could move something, until I realized that a butterfly was moving! That was a nice moment.

Second time I played it I finally saw that there were other characters moving, obviously simultaneously.

All the time I was wondering if there was possibility to advance and to finish the game and maybe to make things happen.

The third time I played it I finished it! Sometimes characters where vanishing and I had the suspicion that maybe a layer was not there anymore.

And then I continued and I felt that layers were vanishing and things were becoming clear until I ended with only one layer!

I think that was powerful, once you understand how it works and you achieve peace in the last layer.

I'm sure that there can be a lot of endings, so I will replay it :)

This reminded me of the beginning of the chapters in Increpare's Bedrooms, which all begin with overlapping of 3d models.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I like that the player is choosing the descriptions of the artistic process as if they were the next sentences in the story. There's a confusion between the process of creation, the creation itself, and the result of the creation that really captures that sort of ensnaring narcissistic fantasy where everything is framed in terms of what the art will do rather than what it will be, specifically. The structure of Perfection reminds me of a combo system. You've got to keep moving forward, stay in that creative zone in order to keep the work moving. Any kind of reflection or slowing down stops the combo and you die. 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I've kicked off discussion of GerbilsInSpace's Wikilynx game over at its makega.me thread with some very cursory remarks. I have a lot of discussion to catch up on and I'm not sure if I actually will, as I've been overly busy and was hit by an onslaught of horrible colds over the last couple of months. Nonetheless, it would be a shame to see Game Critique Club fizzle out entirely! I'll withdraw my scheduled submission if interest seems to have waned.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
Sign in to follow this