Free games by Michael Brough. Game Title. Game Title: Lost Levels.

Among the scads of wonderful things Michael Brough (http://www.smestorp.com/) has been making in the past year or so are these gems from the GDC Pirate Kart. One of the rewards for donating to the kart was to have a game made to fit a description you provide. Game Title was made for one of these: “a zelda-esque dungeon crawler, but you only have one hit point, various weapons are hidden to ease the difficulty”. He hadn’t played a Legend of Zelda game before, though. This may have worked out to his advantage because Game Title’s exploration and puzzles came out much more interesting than if he had stuck to the Zelda formula. The spoiler? click to showteleporter in particular really changes the way you relate to the shape of the dungeon, where Zelda’s items tend to work in a more simple lock-and-key fashion.

A bug in Game Title inspired the even more amazing Game Title: Lost Levels. It introduces new glitchy rules and combines them with the rules of Game Title. The relationship of these rules with the shape and placement of items in the dungeon makes for very interesting exploration and challenges the player to use what they’ve discovered and learned so far to reach further and, eventually, to escape the dungeon.

You can get stuck and have to restart these games (and probably will several times), meaning that you need to understand the consequences of what you are doing and can’t just mess around until you hit a solution. This could be a positive or a negative depending on how you approach these games.

I hear his new game Corrypt (Windows/Mac, iOS) is kind of like a third game in this series, but I only just bought it and haven’t played it yet.

Increpare has proven himself to be maddeningly good at designing puzzles many times over. English Country Tune might be the best example.

Comparisons to Sokoban are hard to avoid – pushing things around on a grid IS the main thing you do here – but here the behavior of the different kinds of blocks is extended to three dimensions in very interesting ways. It goes beyond being a Sokoban clone.

It’s also pretty danged hard! I only get through a couple levels a night, and I’ll admit I’ve gone onto YouTube more than once or twice to try and get hints by watching part of someone else’s solution.

Each puzzle you complete is very rewarding, because each requires you to think differently about the mechanics and how they interact. If you find puzzle design interesting, this is something you need to play.

This series of posts is starting to cover a bunch of things that aren’t exactly games themselves, but that’s okay. This book is a cool thing that happened in games in 2012 so I’d hate to leave it out.

Rise of the Videogame Zinesters discusses zine culture, Anna’s personal experience at a game development school, and problems with games as an industry, but more importantly it also goes on to discuss how you (yes YOU) can sidestep the existing game industry and culture (and maybe even help fix them) by treating game-making as an art form and making games of your own. It even helps you figure out how to get started!

One out of a whole lot of games in the GDC Pirate Kart.

If you go download Pirate Kart V, you get a launcher that lets you browse and play just over a thousand games, mostly made in a day or less, specifically for the event, and without much regard for the quality of the output. This resulted in a collection of games that’s very diverse and thus difficult to generalize about, but there’s definitely more than enough charming, surprising, funny, interesting, strange, awesome, terrible, awesomely terrible, and terribly awesome experiences to keep you occupied for a hell of a long time. In other words, it is full of the sort of game that comes out of a game jam and would never be made for profit. From what I’m told, it was a very welcome break from the sales pitches and marketing an expo like that at GDC is full of (see also the Winnitron in 2011 and the IGF pavillion every year).

I could end this here because that is wonderful enough in itself, but the pirate karts have been more than just wonderful collections of games to me. They’ve been important to me. I’ll try to explain but it may not come out terribly coherent.

It gave voice to certain attitudes that needed to be heard in game-making communities. Maybe it is just a matter of which corners of the internet I went to at the time, but in late 2011 and early 2012, it seemed like every other day there was another elitist and exclusionary article appearing. They would attempt to argue that diversity in game development wasn’t important, or that certain sorts of games shouldn’t count, or that we needed to leave game-creation to the experts, or that you needed a certain background, or that you needed to use certain tools, or that you needed to take certain approaches, or whatever else they could think of. The world of game-making is getting larger and more diverse and it’s natural for those comfortable in the status quo to fear and discourage change. The pirate karts are big, loud, messy ways to instead welcome, encourage, and give a home to games of all sorts.

But before I organized the Pirate Kart V, I kind of screwed up the IGF Pirate Kart. “Screwed up” might be the wrong way to say it. It was full of really neat games. What was a mistake is that it was associated with a contest. Between that, it’s big skull-and-crossbones logo, and the fact that a lot of folks heard about it through a blog post that was very critical of the IGF, it was seen by many as a sort of protest. It probably also didn’t help that the Occupy movement was fresh in everyone’s minds. I was very critical of the IGF and it was putting a bunch of games into the contest that didn’t belong there and it did lack a coherent message with which to counter whatever anyone wanted to project onto it. So in the end I suppose I should not be surprised that it was seen as a protest. I suppose it even was a protest to a greater degree than I’ve been willing to admit.

I couldn’t leave it like that, though. The games and the making of them need to be the focus.

So we did a bigger, better Pirate Kart and we took it to GDC and the whole world made games and they were wonderful and people loved them and they laughed and they made more and there was a place at GDC where this kind of thing could live. It was magnificent.

Creativity and expression require no one’s approval. Ten percent of everything is awesome. Making games is for everyone. There is no reason you can’t do it. There is no reason you shouldn’t. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Bad art is still worth making. Making games doesn’t have to be a business or a career. Making games can itself be playful. Ideas like these need celebrating. Ideas like these need to be said out loud because the people who need to hear them keep hearing the opposite. We need to go “Look! Look at what everyone is making!”.

To borrow phrasing from a quote that is fresh on my mind: games in their endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. In 2013, we are going to see EVEN MORE amazing new things that will blow our minds EVEN MORE and I can’t wait!

Endless Forms Most Beautiful is a ZX Spectrum game made in 2012 (the video and link above are actually for a remake of the ZX Spectrum version that can be found here). It’s simple, strange but elegant rules evoke a time before some of the basic vocabulary of what jumping, screenwrap, and other mechanics meant in videogames hadn’t really been set yet. It would not seem out of place in an arcade cabinet between Donkey Kong and Popeye. It’s a simplicity and elegance that I would love to achieve in my own games.

It takes its name from a Charles Darwin quote that I love.

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Thirty Flights of Loving is excellent storytelling done through through a first-person perspective videogame.

There is a game design concept called ludonarrative dissonance in which the traditional storytelling techniques that appear in the game – prose, dialog, non-interactive sequences – present one version of the story and game world, while what happens when the user takes control and the game mechanics play out is something different. For instance, the player might have used items to revive killed party members many times, only to have the item strangely ignored when a character dies in a cutscene. Or the heroes’ dialogue suggests they are on an urgent quest to defeat a great evil, but once the player gets control, they seem more interested in breaking pots.

One might think that this problem (if it even is a problem) is intrinsic to games with stories, but games like Thirty Flights of Loving and Dys4ia demonstrate otherwise. A game’s goals and rules create a system of characters, motivations, complications, struggles, and sequences of causes and effects. So even checkers tells a story, even if it is only about how two players navigate a possibility space of board configurations. Ludonarrative dissonance arises not because play and story are incompatible, but because videogames are inadvertently trying to tell two stories at once.

Thirty Flights of Loving has an interesting story to tell and its rules and systems are tools used to tell it.

Check out twinehub.weebly.com.

Twine probably existed before, but I seldom saw games made in it until 2012′s explosion of Twine games. Something wonderful happened, and this tool seems to have been involved in a path that formed around a lot of what makes game-making kind of exclusionary.

Legitimacy

A lot of people feel unwelcome in game-making communities because of hostility (intended that way or not) toward their approach, goals, interests, or tastes. “Real gamers”, “real games”, “real game development”, and similar phrases used to come up a lot and serve to delegitimize (is that even a word? hopefully you get what I mean) those who make games differently (without conscious intent to do so, I’m sure). In 2012, I saw tons and tons of hypertext games made in Twine and little of anyone dismissing them like this, and coverage of them on (well, a few) sites alongside other games without being treated like a separate, lesser thing like I’ve come to expect.

Accessibility

Game-making tools and software have mostly been built by programmers, for programmers. Even the exceptions, like Multimedia Fusion, Game Maker, or Stencyl, still frequently require programming and debugging skills even if the interface is not typing code. There’s nothing wrong with having those sorts of tools, but programming is a skill that strongly favors those who have had lots of free time, access to hardware and software, and an environment that encouraged those sorts of pursuits. Upper-middle-class people in nerdy cliques are uniquely set up for success in programming and especially game development.

Twine is extremely neat in that to use it you pretty much just type a story and add some very minimal markup. (ok yes, the minimal built-in scripting in it is probably Turing-complete and you can put arbitrary javascript in Twine games if you want to, but I don’t think I’ve actually seen anyone do that) And it’s free. Lots of people are making their first games in Twine, spending little time learning new skills or to use the software and sharing it with easy and free Dropbox hosting.

Distribution

To me personally, I don’t feel like I’ve finished something until I’ve shared it. Releasing games is part of making games. So having welcoming and accessible ways to get things to players is important too. Most of the time, making a game means exporting a platform-specific executable that has to be downloaded, extracted, and launched. Even that teensy bit of effort is actually enough to stop a lot of the people that might play even if you support their platform.

Twine’s simple html output means that if they click the link, they are playing right away. They don’t even need Flash, any other plugin, or even a modern browser. Nearly any device that even can access a web page will support the simple html and javascript that Twine produces. If you have Dropbox, you might already have it hosted online somewhere automagically soon after you export.

I’m sure this seems like a pretty minor thing to most folks, but it feels big and important to me. It makes me extremely excited to see what is going to happen in 2013.

As I wrote this, I learned of a Twine game somebody made in a couple of hours for a party. http://mkopas.net/files/queerpirateplane.html Making games is a thing you can just go and do! Like you might decide to make a batch of cookies! You don’t have to be a programmer! You don’t have to make it a career or a life-consuming project!

Making games is for everyone!

Surprising and funny. I will not spoil it here except to say that if you play it for a bit and you don’t seem to ‘get it’, notice that the turtle can go down.

Go play it.

Perspective is a brilliant 3d puzzle game that make you change how you think about how physical space. In this and many other ways it is easy to compare it to Portal, and it holds up very well to that comparison. Like what happened with other brilliant DigiPen 3d puzzle games (Narbacular Drop and Tag), I would not be at all surprised if hired Valve hired this team and their ideas became part of the Portal series.

Rhythm Heaven is cool as hell. The series has always been excellent on its own merits, but the exciting thing about Rhythm Heaven Fever for me is how it actually fits into my life. This version is on your TV instead of a handheld, which is a big-ish deal because now others can watch you play or join in for multiplayer! Even playing single player this makes a fantastic party game. The simple controls and practice mode that begins each game/song make it so you can hand the game to someone who has never played a video game before and they can still play the easier games and have fun. And the music and animations are great so it’s fun just to watch, too.

It’s a game you can just pull out during a gathering and everybody will be able to enjoy and participate. There aren’t enough games like that. (Happy Action Theatre, Wii Sports… what else?)

It does make a big, glaring, why-do-games-still-do-this mistake: requiring that you play the single player mode to unlock things in multiplayer. The single-player is excellent and fun to watch, so it doesn’t work out that badly, but still. What gives?