I just got back from Boston, where I was attending the insane and wonderful ROFLcon, in my capacity as rathergood animator. It wasn’t at all videogame related, so I won’t bore you with the details too much, but I have a picture which pretty much entirely sums up my experience:

I’m the one on the right.

Anyway, I’ve been playing a few games recently. Would you like to hear about them? I’m just going to assume you said yes.

Fez (Xbox360)

Fez is absolutely fantastic. I think maybe I’ll talk about it in more detail in a subsequent post – I have a lot to say about it – but for now I’ll just leave it at that. A single caveat: It’s quite absurdly buggy – it’s only due to the fact that the game is so wonderful that when my saved game (at 61/64 collectibles!) managed to somehow corrupt itself, I sighed sadly then started a new game instead of just angrily deleting the game from my hard drive. There’s a patch coming soon though – I have sneaky insider info that this particular problem is already solved.

Mass Effect (Xbox360, PS3, and PC)

I don’t very often play these big AAA ‘event’ games, but on a whim I decided to play through all three Mass Effect games in a row. It took me a few weeks, but I have to say I really enjoyed them. The first one is rather shoddy, if I’m honest: It’s a mess of mismatched half-baked gameplay elements, lazily repeated assets, and painfully underdeveloped writing. The much-hyped ‘romance’ subplot is charmless and mechanical, and the game conspicuously lacks an ‘actually I think genocide is a bad thing’ dialogue option at certain key points, but from the second game onwards it develops into a genuinely engaging story. It’s constantly surprising how much weight the decisions you’re asked to make turn out to have – moral choices in the first game have ramifications in the third, and by the end of the trilogy I was geniuinely proud of my achievements in that universe, and unashamedly invested in the survival of my team-mates.

The ending’s a bit crap, but you probably already knew that.

You Have To Win The Game (PC) (link)

Ha, this one came from nowhere yesterday and ate my entire evening. A really great exploration platformer – an old-school flip-screen Metroidvania, which takes cues from Super Meat Boy and (particularly) VVVVVV, wrapped up in a completely wonderful cathode-ray CGA monitor aesthetic. It’s really good, and bizarrely features a final meta-puzzle which wouldn’t seem at all out of place in Fez.

Oh look! In a nice circular way we’re back at the first game. I’ll pretend that I planned that, and wrap things up. I just need a clever observation to finish on…

…Videogames! Sometimes they are quite good.

Bye!

The ‘notgame’ debate in general frustrates me though – primarily because of the near-universal assumption that videogames are a subset of ‘games’ – and that Dear Esther (for example) can’t be a true videogame because it has no challenge, or obstacles, or game elements. Rather, it must be a piece of interactive art; as Koster says, one which possibly needs a new name since it fits poorly into either existing category.

But is that what really defines a videogame? I’ve long held the belief that ‘videogame’ is a poor choice of name for the sorts of things we create and enjoy, chosen too early in the medium’s creation, before we really understood what it was truly capable of. Is the ability to lose really the sole unique defining aspect?

If Dear Esther isn’t a true videogame, because it doesn’t rate your progress, or allow you to fail, then what happens when I turn on the invincibility cheat in Doom? Am I no longer playing a videogame? I’m pretty sure I’m not suddenly participating in a piece of interactive art. Surely by removing one element of the experience I haven’t fundamentally changed what it is?

We could try a clumsy analogy: If I remove the wheels from a car, then it no longer provides the basic fundamental functionality I’d expect a car to have. But it’s still a car – Its carness requires some qualification, admittedly, but it hasn’t suddenly become something else, and we don’t need to define a new category of objects for ‘things that are just like cars but can’t be driven.’

There’s a philosophical concept know as qualia – simply put, a quale is the essential quality of something, considered completely on its own terms. Qualia are, by their definition, extremely hard to define, but immediately familiar to everyone who’s experienced them. An example would be ‘redness;’ it’d be impossible to describe the experience of seeing the colour red to someone who’d never seen it – but as soon as they did, they’d understand it completely.

I’d argue there’s a quale to playing a videogame – an essential videogameness that’s hard to define, but easy to recognise, and it’s this experience, this feeling that defines them, not their position in a Venn diagram. And I’d argue that as long as something has the quale of videogameness, then that’s exactly what it is, regardless of what individual properties it has.

To me, it’s obvious that Dear Esther is a videogame, because it feels like one. when I play Dear Esther I’m experiencing and inhabiting that world in exactly the same way I experience and inhabit any videogame world – it has an essential videogameness that’s clearly distinct from the way I experience an architectural simulation, or a DVD menu, or a powerpoint slideshow. I might struggle to explain the distinction between them in words, or construct a diagram than neatly places everything in strict categories, but the distinction is nonetheless clear.

Anyway, back to my original point, the attempt to define videogames as a subset of games, or as a subset of interactive art, or (as Koster does,) the subset of both, belittles them. As far as I’m concerned, Videogames are a thing all to themselves, not simply a shaded area on a diagram where two arbitrarily chosen categories overlap. They mostly incorporate elements of gameplay, and very often elements of artistic expression, but it doesn’t follow that they must always do both.

I don’t know exactly how to define a videogame, any more than I know how to define redness. But my point is, does it really matter? Koster says he’d “hate to lose precision on something that we are finally able to pin down,” but have we ever actually had that precision? And do we really need to?

It’s great that expressive media don’t always have clear-cut definitions, and this debate reaches back far further than the birth of videogames – it’s inevitable, whenever people start to make things that don’t fit neatly into the existing categories; Dear Esther is a videogame in the same way that Fountain is a work of art, or Blue is a movie, or 4’33″ is a piece of music. We have nothing to gain from building arbitrary semantic walls around the things we make. Quite the opposite: not clearly defining the boundaries is exactly what allows us to exceed them.

“Updating Serious Sam 3: BFE. Ready to play in approximately: 59 minutes 31 seconds.”

Fantastic. An hour later:

“Steam was unable to sync your files with the Steam Cloud.”

Great. Maybe it won’t matter? I’ll start it anyway.

“Preparing to launch Serious Sam 3: BFE…”

Twenty minutes later:

“Preparing to launch Serious Sam 3: BFE…”

Right. Ok. No game for me tonight. Thanks Steam!

PC Gaming, eh? What laughs we have.

EDIT: So the RSS for this post is messed up too for some reason. This has been an evening of techno-frustration.

Thought I’d give a little progress report, just to reassure you all that I’m actually doing some work, and not just living the dizzying highlife that comes with having written a moderately successful freeware indie game a couple of years ago. I am living that highlife, I should add; it’s a whirlwind of caviar, champagne and society balls round our way, but I’ve also found the time to make some progress on Two.

I’m hard at work on level design at the moment: Here are a couple of screen captures! They’re both from the same area, very early in the game. This isn’t final art – I’m still fiddling with the look of the thing, but I think I’m getting pretty close now.

(click the images for full-size)

One last thing – would anyone be interested in me putting up some more in-depth posts about the nuts and bolts of game design? I find that stuff pretty hard to write, to be honest, but I’d quite like to give it a go, and I do have this nagging feeling that I should be making more use of this blog. I think I might give it a go.

I’ve gone and made a bit of a quick teaser trailer thing, showing a little bit of gameplay. It’s pretty much the most exciting thing ever released EVER.

So I suppose it’s time to actually explain what the game’s all about. Two is a puzzle platformer with a strong exploration aspect. It’s a game about being in two different places at the same time; you can switch between viewing each of the locations seperately, or crucially, both at the same time, superimposed on top of each other. By moving around in each world and carefully aligning the views, you can use objects in one world to get past obstacles in the other. And that’s basically it!

There’s a whole load of really interesting stuff I can do with that mechanic, but to ease people into the idea the video just shows the simplest puzzle I could think of. Two will start off pretty simple, but by the end it’ll hopefully be quite a brainteaser.

Hope you enjoy it!

IT IS A MYSTERY.

I also gave him a bunch of images from a few of the unfinished games scattered across my hard drives, and a piece of never-before-seen Small Worlds concept art, from the literally hundreds of thousands of pages of research and planning that went into that game. It’s like looking directly into my mind, only with less screaming and crying.

You can read the interview here.

Finally I can get back to gamedev – Two and Sentinel have been gathering dust for the last few months, and I’m excited about finishing them up and actually releasing something worthwhile for people to play, but I’m also really happy to have the time to actually play games again. I played Minecraft for the first time in about four months yesterday, I’ll briefly sum up my experience:

* What are all these extra status bars for? Food? That’s interesting.
* A village! Saves me having to make a house.
* Huh, food doesn’t seem to heal you any more. Oh right, health regenerates when you’ve filled up your food bar. Nice.
* Massive cave! Some sort of giant underground ravine, that’s new.
* Are those torches down there? And some sort of wooden structure?
* An abandoned mineshaft! Brilliant!
* I don’t remember spiders being blue.
* POISONED! OH NO
* Aha, a spider spawner. I SHALL DESTROY IT
* Oh right yeah I can’t instantly heal myself any more. ARGH SPIDERS STOP BITING ME
* DEAD

Next on my list are Bastion, the Stanley Parable, all those fanmade levels for VVVVVV, and I’ve ordered Xenoblade, which I’m very much looking forward to. Also, when I started my big animation project I abandoned poor Vin Diesel about to assault the Dark Athena for about the 19th time, I should probably go back and help him out. If I can stand the fact that all the dialogue seems to have been written by a very angry sexually frustrated 15 year old.

Anyway, gamedev: It’s all a bit overwhelming right now, and I’m not sure where I should start. Two is the shorter game, but Sentinel is further along. I just want to finish something as quickly as I can, maybe I should do a quick three-week game just to get back into the swing of things? or maybe I should work on the upgraded version of Rocket Storm? Choices!

It’s good to be back! Hooray!

In smaller game news: Fireflight has failed utterly at gathering a sponsor; I wondered for a while whether I should modify it to be more sponsor-friendly (read: discrete levels and an upgrade shop,) but having ignored it for a couple of months it seems pretty obvious that the right thing to do is to just release it as is, without a sponsor: Hopefully I’ll find the time to do that this week. No promises though! I am bad at those.

On the other hand, the animation side of things is going pretty awesomely well. Remember this thing we made at rathergood last year? It turns out we’re making a full half-hour Christmas special based on it, narrated by some amazing stroke of luck by Steve Coogan. Making a half-hour animation in four months doesn’t leave much time for gamedev though, which is why this blog has gone a bit quiet recently. But: we’re set to finish the film in mid september, so I’ll definitely have some exciting news in roughly two month’s time. Argh there I go again making promises.

Right: So, without making any more rash promises, here’s my gamedev schedule – Pretty soon you’ll be able to play Fireflight. Then in September, I’ll be able to give you proper news with regards to Sentinel, Two, and a proper multi-platform, upgraded release of Rocket Storm. Then, I will become Emperor of Space.

I promise!

Ahem.

It’s been gathering a good few downloads – more than I thought it would, and overall the store reviews have been pretty positive. A lot of users have identified a bug with the ‘next wave’ banner though – occasionally it hangs around for longer than it should, obscuring the first couple of missiles and making the game harder than it needs to be. I actually fixed this bug a few days ago, but there’s a delay between submitting an update and it getting approved and posted up on the store. I have no idea how the machine handles updating, I hope it’s reasonably well automated.

The reason I don’t know how updating works is because I don’t actually own a Playbook. They aren’t released over here until June, so I made the game using an emulator – I’ve never even seen the actual device, let alone tested my game on one. So I’m in the slightly weird position that thousands of people have played the game, but I still have absolutely no idea whether it’s running at the right frame rate, or the touch controls work ok, or even whether the sound is working! Haha, it’s a complete mystery.

Anyway, There’s now a link on the right sidebar over there to Rocket Storm, which I intend to release on as many systems as I can just as soon as I can. Starting with Flash! You may consider this an official COMING SOON.

Speaking of other systems, my Android experiments have been largely successful, with working Android versions of Small Worlds and Fireflight up and running on my phone right now. They’re both not quite perfect – Fireflight is the best fit, although it’s not yet running at its full framerate. Small Worlds is completable, but has some issues: it occasionally goes completely, insanely wrong (gets confused about which world the player is on, so picks random images from them all), and seems to suffer a noticeable slowdown about one minute into each level. Also touch-screen platformer controls are tricky; I have yet to find a control scheme that isn’t a horrible compromise. Next on the conquerable platform list is iOS. Then, the world! Probably.

Obligatory non-game news: I made a little stop-motion comedy sketch thing that you can watch right now over at BBC Online! Yay! It is the very best work of animation you will ever see. Also, this film here that I made last year with Rathergood has been nominated for a Webby Award in the Animation category! Hooray, it is also the very best work of animation you will ever see. We’re actually up against Aardman in the same category though, so there’s absolutely no chance we’ll win. The Aardman film is really really very good. It is the very best animation you’ll ever oh forget it.

Anyway that’s it for now BYE!