Two-man indie studio StarQuail Productions (Sky Puppy, Crystal Skies) announced the upcoming release of its next title, Astroman, for Xbox Live Indie Games. It might look like a basic 2D platformer in the first 30 seconds of this trailer, but you’ll see some fun ideas/elements if you keep with it.

The portion that stands out from its traditional jumping/shooting/exploring segments is when you control the hero’s ship — throughout the game, you can collect upgrades and parts for the craft that allow it to travel farther and bring you to new worlds. Piloting the ship plays out as a sort of Asteroids-like shooter minigame.

Expect StarQuail to release Astroman to Xbox Live Indie Games this fall.

Original post editors@gamesetwatch.com (Eric Caoili)

“It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt.” -Abraham Lincoln.

Dialogue for a videogame protagonist is a double-edged sword. Develop them into a three dimensional character and you’ll risk alienating your audience who may not like them. A common workaround is to leave the protagonist silent so the player can impart their own identity unto their avatar.

The problem here is often one-sided conversations feel awkward. Just look at Gordon Freeman, silent hero of the Half-Life series for example. Gordon never speaks, but other characters talk to him and it feels disingenuous when he doesn’t respond. The idea is that by making him silent the character is supposed to be the player.

So when cute, spunky, ass-kicking scientist pal, Alyx Vance flirts with the silent hero it feels pandering and false because, let’s face it, she says that to all the guys. However, there is hope for this approach. I’d like to take a look at some of the best examples of silent protagonists that manage to make us care about them and their relationships with others without seeming at odds with the fiction.

The example that comes to mind first for me is Amaterasu, heroine of Clover’s 2006 cult-hit, Okami. Ametarasu (Ammy for short) is a wolf. Actually, she’s a wolf goddess of the sun. The player can see her celestial blood-stained tattoo-like marks and otherworldly weapons adorning her back, but to everyone else she just looks like a regular wolf. Everyone that is save one bite-sized “wandering artist” named Issun, represented by a bouncy green ball hopping on her nose. It makes sense that Ammy can’t talk, what with being a wolf and all, so her interactions with villagers seem far less awkward than those of her spiritual predecessor, Link from the Zelda series.

With Link there’s no excuse. He’s human (or elf) and others of his kind talk to him- he even has what seems to be a girlfriend in Ocarina of Time- yet he can only respond in pantomime. Ammy’s reactions make sense given her species, but that doesn’t explain why others talk to her as they do.

That responsibility lies with Issun who does all the talking. He’s kind of annoying at first, but grows into a more lovable character as the game draws on. More importantly, he’s allowed a distinct personality because he’s still technically an NPC. Just one that happens to be parasitic.

Together, the two of them form a symbiotic relationship creating a silent noble goddess and a street smart (well wannabe street-smart anyway) wayfarer. Accompanying them on their quest creates a stronger bond than either of them would have been capable of on their own.

Similar to Ammy and Issun a recent game that takes this symbiosis to its extreme is Deadly Premonition. Protagonist, FBI Agent Francis York Morgan does talk. Quite a lot and often to himself. Or does he? See, York (it’s what everyone calls him) has a split personality. He can often be found conversing with his alter ego, Zach. Watch closely, however, and you’ll see that Zach is meant to be the player.

Thus you control York’s movement, but aren’t actually playing as him. You’re playing as Zach just as in Okami you played as Ammy, and York fills the same roll as Issun- the half of the party the game world can see. Nobody addresses Zach except York and it doesn’t feel unbelievable when Zach doesn’t respond as York is presumably talking to himself.

The result is that York feels at least one degree away from the player’s control, so we’re meant to remain a bemused detachment to York’s more ridiculous antics (such as when he tells a story of his previous case over dinner and how the culprit both peed and drank from his victim’s skulls. Incredibly, York is quick to point out, he used the same skulls).

On the other end of the spectrum there’s Bioshock 2. I’ll get this out of the way right now; I liked Bioshock, but the silent protagonist thing bugged me. If you’re playing as a regular Joe who happens to discover a ruined underwater city and some guy starts yapping to you over a two-way radio, wouldn’t ya know, want to ask him questions about what the hell’s going on?

Bioshock 2 fixes that. This time around you play as Subject Delta, a Big Daddy (a brainwashed Frankenstein’s monster like beast in scuba gear). Big Daddy’s can’t talk so this explains the silent protagonist thing well. Characters even respond to your silent treatment.

The first time you encounter a non-hostile NPC she thinks you’re there to murder her. You can, but I chose not to (much to her surprise). Big Daddies are assigned to protect mutated little girls called Little Sisters and your Little Sister, Eleanor is in danger and needs rescuing. Since you’re already a monster of sorts you have little to live for, saving Eleanor is your sole goal. It’s hard not to empathize with such a determined powerful beast and that’s all we need to know about him.

Simply by integrating a characters silence into the fiction isn’t a sure-fire success. In Deadly Creatures you play as a tarantula and scorpion, but unlike their cartoon counterparts these ones don’t talk. They have no motive beyond killing and eating creatures, so there’s really no reason for them to be going along the game’s prescribed path.

There is a story about a couple unsavory prospectors that is overheard by the playable arachnids, but they have no reason to be involved since it’s not like they’d be able to understand what people are saying. While the deadly creatures of the title are tied to this story thematically in their harsh, dog-eat-dog struggle for survival, they play a passive role and it’s hard to care about them. Simply coming up with an excuse for a characters silence isn’t enough if there’s no motivation to go along with it.

What all of these successful silent protagonists have in common is that they’re a). Explained in the fiction why they can’t talk back to others. And b). All have clear, sympathetic motivations. Ammy is a wolf goddess more aware of what’s at stake than she can let on to others. Zach is trying to aide York in solving a murder. And Subject Delta only exists to protect, so his fatherly instincts take over.

Silent protagonists can work wonders when the barrier between them and the game world is properly explained. Not being able to communicate is a scary, Kafka-esque nightmare but it only takes a keen understanding of the systems at work to turn said nightmare into a lucid dream.

[Jeffrey Matulef is a freelance writer for G4TV.com, blogs about games at JumpingMoustache.com and is a regular on the Big Red Potion podcast. You can contact him at jmatulef at gmail dot com.]

Original post editors@gamesetwatch.com (Jeffrey Matulef)

Now in its fourth year, the IndieCade festival aims to provide exhibitions, conferences, and curated attractions that “encourage, publicize, and cultivate, innovation and artistry in interactive media”, as it strives to “create a public perception of games as rich, diverse, artistic, and culturally significant.”

In this year’s IndieCade awards. all finalists are eligible to for each of the 12 categories: Jury Award, Aesthetics, Fun/Compelling, Gameplay Innovation, Technical Innovation, World/Story, Vanguard, Sublime Experience, Wildcard, Documentary, Sound, The IndieCade 2010 Honorary Trailblazer Award for Lifetime Achievement.

The 32 announced finalists — including descriptions, links to developer/game sites, and countries of origin — follow:

1066 – The Game (Preloaded / Channel 4, United Kingdom): A historical game commissioned by Channel 4 (UK) to accompany its two part documentary series on the War of 1066 and the battle for Middle Earth. A simple, fun strategy game that leverages causal gameplay elements and beautiful design while providing its audience with interesting information and knowledge about the War of 1066. 1066 – The Game was created by Preloaded, the developers behind Super Me and other social change game projects.

A Slow Year (Ian Bogost, USA): A Slow Year is a collection of four game “poems” for the Atari Video Computer System, one for each season, about the experience of observation and awareness. A Slow Year stakes out a deep and interesting design problem, searching for engaging and meaningful interactivity outside the traditional reaches of modern gameplay and typical genre design. Ian Bogot is a professor at Georgia Tech, and co-founder of Persuasive Games, creator of Airport Insecurity and a series of news games for the New York Times. Ian is also co-creator of IndieCade featured Cruel2BKind. A Slow Year was featured in the 2010’s Independent Game Festival (IGF) at the Game Developers Conference.

Auditorium (Cipher Prime, USA): Auditorium is an audio puzzle game where you convert light into sound, creating an explosion of orchestral music. Its addictively simple mechanic consists of manipulating icons to deflect light into a target on each level to generate bursts of music. The game has a flexible design, allowing for a range of solutions to each puzzle. Available for PC and Mac, and now iPhone, Auditorium was created by Philadelphia-based Cipher Prime.

B.U.T.T.O.N. (Brutally Unfair Tactics Totally OK Now) (Copenhagen Game Collective, Denmark): B.U.T.T.O.N. is a four-player, one-button party game played with Xbox controllers on the PC. The game has a WarioWare style mechanic consisting of short mini games in which players must stand back and rush the controllers to press the “right” button, although which button that is not always clear! Created by Copenhagen Game Collective, winner of the Most Fun Game at IndieCade 2008, B.U.T.T.O.N. was a hit at Gamma IV and at IndieCade’s E3 Showcase.

Bit.Trip Runner (Gaijin Games, USA): The fourth Bit.Trip game developed by Gaijin Games for WiiWare, Bit.Trip Runner features music from Anamanaguchi driving an energetic and exciting rhythm action platforming game. The game features awesome Boss Battles inside 50 challenging levels, and provides a visually impressive experience and auditory treat. Bit.Trip Runner provides addictive and fun, while exploring interesting interaction and puzzle spaces inside the realm of synaesthesia.

Blue Lacuna (Aaron Reed, USA): Blue Lacuna is among the largest text-based interactive stories ever produced, a full-length novel and adventure game in one. Blue Lacuna is rich with deep, beautiful writing, and a vast story world with emotional depth and meaningful player choice. Blue Lacuna is a triumph in prose-based interactivity from Aaron Reed, the writer and designer of Whom The Telling Changed, and a PhD candidate at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Cargo Delivery (Cat in the Sky, Brazil): Cargo Delivery is a skill-based puzzle game revolving around the adventures of Rufus. To achieve his goal of having a nice sailboat to call home, Rufus must sail a freighter with loads of cargo. The churning seas, which cause cargo to topple overboard, and numerous obstacles along the way, must be overcome for Rufus to earn enough money to realize his dream. The delightfully quirky graphics combine well with the cartoon physics, and make this an adventure worth taking. Created by Santo Andre, Brazil based Cat in the Sky.

Castle Vox (Sillysoft, Canada): Castle Vox is a new turn-based strategy game from SillySoft, developers of Lux and American History Lux. Castle Vox brings the engaging multiplayer social play and strategy of Diplomacy and Axis and Allies to the digital realm of turn based strategy. A fully realized digital board game, Castle Vox takes advantage of the computer medium to ease and finesse many of the mechanics of classic social strategy board games, and wraps them into a well designed, approachable and entertaining package.

Continuity (Ragtime Games, Sweden): A well-designed and mechanically clever mashup of a simple platformer with classic sliding puzzle gameplay. Continuity has a strong aesthetic design, and simple, refined, and well-balanced gameplay. Top notch attention to design details such as audio allow the simple pleasures of the mechanic to be presented at the forefront of the IGF-winning, addictive and entertaining game developed by Elias Holmlid, Dmitri Kurteanu, Guy Lima Jr., and Stefan Mikaelsson, aka Ragtime Games, a student team at Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg.

Creaky Old Memory (DADIU, Denmark): Creaky Old Memory puts players in the role of Tatiana, an elderly Russian lady who must journey through the nooks and crannies of her self-fabricated house in order to reveal the truth about her own past. The game cleverly blends multiple modes of gameplay as you first must collect different paintings to assemble a picture of Tatiana’s life, and then must search these paintings for hidden clues to unlock the deeper mysteries of the story. Created by a team at the National Academy of Digital Interactive Entertainment in Copenhagen, Creaky Old Memories’ deftly designed aesthetics are well integrated into the story and mood of the game, and help bring genuine meaning to the puzzle-based interactivity.

Every Day The Same Dream (Molleindustria, Italy): Made for the experimental gameplay project themed “Art game”, Every Day The Same Dream is an attempt to translate a well known narrative about daily routine and white collar alienation into a playable form. Only by finding subtle deviations from the repetitive, looping levels can the player free the character from a meaningless eternal present. Designed by progressive game design collective Molleindustria, Every Day the Same Dream is a short, intellectually engaging experience that brilliantly captures the feel and tone of modern art film and art games, while cutting these recognizable ideas to their core concepts. This is Molleindustria’s first game to be selected for IndieCade.

Faraway (Steph Thirion, USA): Created by Steph Thirion for the Gamma IV showcase, Faraway is a one-button game where you swing your way through space, finding and connecting star clusters to create the most complex constellations you can. Faraway’s simple but lovely and iconic visual design lets the tightly designed interactions and gameplay take forefront. Steph Thirion is the creator of Eliss, winner of the Auteur Award at IndieCade 2009.

Fatale (Tale of Tales, Belgium): Fatale is an interactive vignette in real-time 3D inspired by the biblical story of Salome and the play about her by Oscar Wilde. Developed by Tale of Tales, the creators of IndieCade 2009 finalist The Path, and 2008 finalist The Graveyard, Fatale is a living tableau that allows you to freely explore many poetic, historical and literary references to the ancient legend, while bringing it relevance to a contemporary audience.

feelforit (Chris DeLeon, USA): feelforit, developed by “Game-A-Day” virtuoso Chris DeLeon, is a small art toy for iPad, iPod Touch and iPhone that exploits the affordances of the device’s accelerometer to create an abstract, spatialized metaphor for how we navigate our lives. By rotating the phone, you manipulate an interactive sculpture whose characteristic properties and rule sets are revealed to you as you play with it. This is the IndieCade debut of Chris DeLeon, a Carnegie-Mellon grad who is currently a master’s student in Georgia Tech’s Digital Media program.

Fractal (Cipher Prime, USA): Go over the top with this new audio puzzle game. Listen as the game reacts to your decisions, taking easy-to-learn, hard-to-master gameplay to new extremes. Fractal is played on a hex grid, and leverages simple, engaging puzzles to generate beautiful procedural audio. Created by Philadelphia-based Cipher Prime, Fractal is a rewarding and compelling auditory experience.

Gentleman of the South Sandwiche Islands (Taylor & Gray, USA): Created by a team of students in USC’s Interactive Media program, the Gentlemen of the South Sandwiche Islands is a lovingly-crafted board game in which gentlemen callers compete for the attentions of Lady Ashley by strategically crossing bridges to get her alone on of a series of small islands. A comedy of manners translated into a board game, the story, the surreal, Victorian art-style and its questionable 200-year history provide a backdrop for a devilish and highly entertaining game of absurd logic. Funded by Jim Taylor through Kickstarter, Gentleman of the South Sandwiche Islands is a great indie design story.

Groping in the Dark (Team Arex, South Korea): Groping in the Dark is a lyrical interactive narrative that tells the story of a kidnapped girl’s decision and attempt to escape her captors. The player progresses through the narrative by manipulating phrases of Korean text to unravel the story. The kinetic typography creates an almost mystical experience, turning letters into images and images into meanings. With its alternative to traditional visual representation in games, Groping in the Dark transforms a game into interactive poetry. Created by Seoul-based Team Arex.

Humans vs. Zombies (Gnarwhal Studios, USA): Humans vs. Zombies is a moderated game of tag where all but one player begin as humans, wearing bandanas on their arms and able to defend themselves with socks from the zombie horde. The horde is generated by the randomly-selected “Original Zombie,” who can tag human players and turn them into zombies, who wear bandanas on their heads. Humans will need to rely on cunning and teamwork to survive the zombie apocalypse and complete challenging missions organized by the game moderators. Created by Gnarwhal Studios, Humans vs. Zombies is a played in neighborhoods, military bases, and over 600 colleges and universities around the world and was featured at this summer’s Come Out and Play. It is part of IndieCade’s Outdoor and Pervasive Games track.

Limbo (Playdead, Denmark): Limbo is a hauntingly beautiful black and white “horror” platform puzzler, released to widespread acclaim this summer on the Xbox Live Arcade. The game is set among the rooftops of a mesmerizing macabre world that draws you into its dark narrative. The narrative, the story of a young boy trying to find his lost sister, is reinforced by a tightly designed film noir style that also expands the interesting, well implemented 2D platforming puzzle challenges. Created by Denmark’s Playdead, Limbo is a stunning example of the quality and experience that can be created out of careful attention to detail and delicate integration of the many different elements that make up a game.

Miegakure (Marc ten Bosch, USA): Miegakure is a platform game where you solve puzzles by exploring the fourth dimension. An inventive approach to spatial puzzle design and problem solving from Marc ten Bosch, Miegakure creates engaging and maddening puzzles from the mathematics and theory of a fourth spatial dimension. Miegakure was featured at the IGF, and at IndieCade’s E3 showcase, and is a stunning technical and design achievement, which educates and explores fourth dimension mathematical theory without requiring a PhD in math or physics.

Monsters (Probably) Stole My Princess! (Mediatonic, United Kingdom): Monsters (Probably) Stole my Princess! is a vertical platformer which you take control of the super sexy aristocratic demon known only as “The Duke” in a fantastical world where chasing down giant yet adorable monsters is the business at hand. The game borrows from classic platformer mechanics, embellished with frantic gameplay, novel power-ups, strategic moves, and delightful macabre-cartoon aesthetic. Created by the UK’s Mediatonic as a PSP and PS3 Mini, the game is also now available on Xbox Live.

Recurse (Matt Parker, USA): An installation commissioned by the NYU Game Center for its “No Quarter” art game exhibition, Recurse has a simple, embodied mechanic: a video camera transforms the player’s body into a giant cursor. Crystals grow where the body intersects with objects on the screen. Players must grow Crystals in green zones while avoiding growing them in red zones. The zones shift intermittently to create new challenges. A digital game about movement in physical space, the Recurse’s distorted “funhouse mirror” encourages players to forget themselves as they twist and stretch their bodies in order to get a high score and effect the game’s abstract world. Created by New York-based artist/developer Matt Parker.

Retro/Grade (24 Caret Games, USA): Retro/Grade is an innovative PS3 game that fuses the white-knuckle thrills and over the top visuals of a shooter with the broad appeal of a rhythm game. The developers at 24 Caret Games have deeply explored their central idea of a time-reversed space battle through tight game mechanics and polished UI and user feedback. Retro/Grade is visually engaging, attractive, and leverages its aesthetic and auditory beauty to craft an addictive and entertaining user experience.

Sixteen Tons (Nathalie Pozzi and Eric Zimmerman, USA): Sixteen Tons, inspired by a folk song about a mining company town, is a gallery installation in which four players move heavy sections of steel pipe on a colorful grid. This simple gameplay is complicated by the social interaction of a mechanic in which players bid to hire other players (using real cash) to move their pieces, enacting the game’s central themes of debt bondage and forced labor. Created by architect Nathalie Pozzi and independent game designer Eric Zimmerman, Sixteen Tons was originally commissioned by the Art History of Games conference in Atlanta (February 2010). Its presentation at IndieCade is sponsored by the NYU Game Center.

Socks, Inc. (Jim Babb/Data Played, USA): Socks, Inc. is a family-oriented alternate reality that combines web 2.0 co-creation and adventure within an imaginary world entirely populated with sock puppets. Dubbed by its creator “World of Sockcraft,” players socialize within an imaginary Willy-Wonka-style factory, role-playing the story of their sock puppet. A player completes missions by creating storytelling content with their puppet and distributing it via video and still images. As a part of IndieCade, Socks, Inc. will host a sock puppet creation workshop, where participants can create an avatar, an account, and play through the first missions. Socks, Inc., created by New School Master’s Student Jim Babb/Data Played, debuted at ARGfest 2010 in Atlanta, and is part of IndieCade’s Outdoor and Pervasive Games track.

Solace (One Man Down, USA): Solace is an interactive aesthetic experience utilizing dynamic audio and “bullet hell” overtones to provide a unique perspective on the five stages of grief. One Man Down, a design team from Digipen Institute of Technology, has produced impressive visuals and audio to build a fully realized mood space for the game. Solace does not settle on traditional gameplay inside this environment, but explores “bullet hell” mechanics to reinforce the mood and message of the game.

Spirits (Spaces of Play, Germany): Spirits is an action-puzzle game for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad with a Lemmings-style mechanic in which players manipulate the wind to guide name-giving Spirits towards each level of the game world. The wind, which is both helpful and uncontrollable, can serve as the player’s friend and enemy at the same time. The game’s unique atmosphere is created by a combination of beautifully hand-drawn graphics and a music track comprised completely of orchestral musical instruments. Created by Berlin-based Spaces of Play.

Tic-Tac-Totum (Jesse Fuchs, USA): Tic-Tac-Totem is an “open source” tabletop game that uses the traditional game elements of dice and poker chips in clever and novel ways. The game rules, which consist of mini-games that determine the outcome of a Tic-Tac-Toe game, are presented and constantly modified via wiki. This is the IndieCade debut of developer Jesse Fuchs.

The Cat And The Coup (Peter Brinson, USA): The Cat and the Coup is a documentary game in which you play the cat of Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh, the first democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran. You observe and coax Mossadegh through the events of the coup as the cat, knocking over objects on the Prime Minister’s desk and scratching him. With its striking visual style and engaging mechanic, The Cat and The Coup brings a completely original novel ach to documentary gameplay. Developer Peter Brinson is the creator of IndieCade exhibited Meanwhile and a member of the team that created Waco Resurrection.

The Games of Nonchalance (Nonchalance, USA): An epic, immersive, poly-media, real-world adventure. Four episodes of interactive content lead participants on a journey through the fabric of San Francisco and discover the threads of a narrative woven into the city’s past and present. Currently running in San Francisco, The Games of Nonchalance received the “Best of the Bay” SFBG 2009 award. Nonchalance’s Scoop!, a live pirate radio news game, was featured at Come Out and Play 2010. This is their debut game as part of IndieCade’s Outdoor and Pervasive Games track.

Trauma (Krystian Majewski, Germany): Trauma takes you into the subconscious of a young woman who survives a car accident as you explore her dreams and memories. The game has a compelling aesthetic and interaction design that involves navigating 3D photographs using a novel, gesture-based interface, drawing you intuitively into its narrative dreamspace. Trauma is a quintessential next-generation adventure game, an emerging genre among indie developers. Created by Polish-born, Cologne-based design student Krystian Majewski.

VVVVVV (Terry Cavanagh, Ireland): In VVVVVV, you play as the fearless leader of a team of dimension-exploring scientists who are separated after inadvertently crashing their ship. A high energy, cleverly designed platforming experience from Terry Cavanaugh, creator of Don’t Look Back and Self Destruct, VVVVVV deeply explores its central gravity-reversing mechanic through smart, interesting puzzles and a strong world and environment, supported by simple but compelling visual design and awesome music.

This year’s festival will take place at Culver City, California from October 8 to 10. The first night of IndieCade will offer a “Red Carpet Awards Show” hosted by actor Levar Burton, where the winners of the twelve categories will be announced.

All 32 games, which were picked from over 350 submissions by 160 international jurors, will be available for the public to play at various locations during the festival.

“Indie developers continue to expand their range and depth, from offering casual games featuring sock puppets to fresh experiences where you voyage through the stars as a comet,” says IndieCade’s Stephanie Barish.

Barish adds, “The spirit of independent game creation burns brightly this year, and we are thrilled to be able to bring these games to professionals interested in cutting-edge digital media, game developers, artists, publishers, and enthusiasts of all ages.”

Original post editors@gamesetwatch.com (Eric Caoili)

Taking a break from working on DeathSpank: Thongs of Virtue, Vancouver-based independent developer/publisher Hothead Games has put out a second developer diary video, and it makes about as much sense as the first Three’s Company-filled entry.

Here, the studio’s lead designer Darren Evenson imagines a historical film that tours the Hothead Games office and examines the effects of the developer’s titles on the human mind. Apparently, those games are effective at combating communism!

The cold war might be over here in the States, but it rages on in Canada!

Original post editors@gamesetwatch.com (Eric Caoili)

It’s been a while since the last @Play column! Sorry for the long delay. I was working very hard on a personal game project. I bring it up because, as luck would have it, that project is the subject of this column….

The months I was MIA I spent working on a personal game development project, called Mayflight. (It’s available for download from here. I’ve put most of a demo playthrough up on YouTube in this playlist.) And in its construction, I ended up using a good number of roguelike design concepts to make a game that no one would mistake for a roguelike.

I’m still recovering from the development process so I need to get back into the swing of things concerning roguelikes (Dungeon Crawl had another major release while I was gone!), but considering that Mayflight uses random area generation and more than a few roguelike design principles, it might be useful and interesting to go over some aspects of the game’s design, especially since the game, itself, is not a roguelike, not even in the style of Spelunky, which prizes object interactions.

Glimpses of infinity

Some years ago I had an idea for a randomly-generated platformer game. The concept was what we might call non-traditional: there were no enemies, there was no explicit goal, and there was no real purpose to the game.

What was there was a few ideas as to how to create random terrain algorithmically, and the hope that this would be interesting enough by itself. Really, I think it isn’t. (I actually think that it can be, but we aren’t there yet. I may say more on this later.)

Some time back I registered a copy of YoYoGames’ beginners’ game development kit Game Maker 8. After poking around with it, I found that it was actually much more powerful than I had expected. One can jettison the annoying “drag an drop” scripting system and use C-like code almost exclusively.

It also maintains the DirectX commands for you, and generally lets you get on with the work of constructing your vision instead of wrestling so much with APIs. I will not say that it is perfect. If you prove the edges of the system you sometimes unexpected problem cases, such as if you try to generate random numbers within a very large range.

It also has real problems concerning keeping code to yourself; as it stands, anyone can take any published Game Maker game and fairly easily get the scripts and resources out of it. However, “real” games have been made with it before, most notably to my mind two games we’ve mentioned here in the past, Spelunky and Desktop Dungeons.

Around the time I installed Game Maker on a new system, a news post opened up on its greeting screen about a game development contest YoYoGames was sponsoring, “Competition06.”

I gathered from the text that they were working on a Game Maker runtime that would be runnable on Playstation Network systems, most notably the PSP. Because of that, the requirements for the contest were fairly restrictive, and geared towards producing games that could run on the PSP. There was some prize money offered, and the theme of the contest was discovery….

Discovery. That got me to thinking about my old random platformer idea, and wondering if it could be adapted. I decided to give it a good, solid attempt. That was the middle of May. The deadline, as I write these words, was six hours ago. After three-and-a-half months of near-obsessive work, the game that I submitted to the contest was Mayflight.

Postponing mortality two seconds at a time

Your character in Mayflight is a fairy named Aurora. She exists in what is almost an infinite world: the game terrain is created algorithmically as you enter rooms. It uses pseudorandom number generator seeding creatively to make its terrain consistent.

Although the structure and graphical look of each room is overwritten in memory the moment you leave it, if you were to return to it in backtracking it can recreate the area just as you had first seen it. The game does store some data on which items you collected in a room and which enemies you killed, so the state of vacated rooms are preserved to a degree.

If it were just Aurora running and flying around a bunch of terrain, even if the graphics were fairly interesting (I think they are; judge for yourself from the screenshots on this article), it still wouldn’t be a very interesting game. This isn’t a roguelike lesson; it is obvious.

Strong roguelike game designs have one essential element that drives the play, some danger or process that forces the player to keep exploring territory instead of staying in an easily-controllable area and grinding. In many roguelikes this is provided by the food requirement. In Mayflight, this is provided by a harsh time limit. Aurora’s species of fairy has a ludicrously short lifespan: she only can survive ten seconds on her own.

To overcome this dire predicament, Aurora can collect “sparks,” spinning balls of light that are scattered everywhere in the world with the ubiquity of Mario’s coins. Each grants her from 0.5 to two seconds of continued existence. (The amount varies according to time remaining; the more time you have, the less you get.)

Although the collection mechanism is a lot more pressing than having to find a food ration every two or three levels, it is the same idea at heart: to force the player to explore ever more terrain to find time extenders, and in the process stay alive.

However, in Mayflight, the further you explore from the start the rarer sparks become, decreasing the player’s time income. Eventually equilibrium will be reached between time gained and time lost, and after that the player will go on a slow march towards oblivion. The player’s skill in maneuvering determines where exactly that equilibrium is reached. Too, other dangers will often intercede before that, taking tolls of time both directly and in navigation hazards.

A factor that works in the player’s favor is that some places naturally have more sparks than others. In the center of each “area” there is a shrine that always has several sparks, rooms with only a single exit will tend to have more sparks than well-connected rooms as a compensation for hitting a dead-end in the maze, and the rare one-screen-size rooms that are rarely generated always contain lots of sparks, and other powerup items besides.

Maps that may be randomly found in the game give the player an overview of a local area of the maze, and thus allow him to devise strategy about which rooms to visit. The maze generator is purposely imperfect; there are biases in the area structures it creates, and a canny player may take advantage of those to find these special areas with slightly greater frequency. This may be viewed as analogous to the usefully-predictable maze builder in Rogue.

Morbo says your quest is doomed. DOOOOMED!

Randomly-placed goal rooms were originally planned for the game, but time drew short before I could implement them and the other game features that would make them useful to the design. (Work may continue on the game into the future, at a reduced pace, and these things will probably be an early addition.) So the focus of the game is another roguelike borrowing, one that they themselves borrowed from arcade games: the game is played for two types of score, and a high-score table is tracked for each.

One is raw distance from the starting screen, measured in “meters,” and the other is a general score that takes into account a few different kinds of accomplishments. I am not actually sure if the score-based design is compelling enough for sustained play; when you’re working full-tilt on an idiosyncratic personal project up against a strict deadline, things like this don’t always get tested for. It was interesting enough for me to continue play-testing it, at least, enough so that my best distance score is over 1,700 meters, which took about an hour to achieve.

There are not a large number of monster types in the game, although their behaviors vary depending on the difficulty of the current area. In truth, the real challenge of the game is in keeping Aurora alive by collecting sparks, but that isn’t varied enough to make a generally-accessible game.

Holding down the Z key allows Aurora to throw “darts” at the monsters, and pressing different arrow keys hurls them at different angles. She can also stomp them, which does a bit more damage but carries with it the risk of getting hit. Later on the monstrous opposition ramps up considerably; in the demo playthrough video given you’ll notice times in the later levels where Aurora is swarmed with monsters.

There is a rudimentary physics simulation that both Aurora and the monsters follow. It’s not particularly detailed (this is one of the things that I had to wrestle with Game Maker in getting to work), but works for the game. Unfortunately, this is the closest the game comes at the moment to providing a roguelike cause-and-effect system.

The original idea was to provide physics-based traps and tools that could be used against the monsters if triggered creatively, but I couldn’t get a more-complete physics system going than this without things getting stuck in walls, clipping weirdly and shooting off towards the stratosphere randomly on contact with each other, despite expending several development days on it.

Engineering an arms race that does something other than escalate

As it is, there is still some of it in place. If Aurora’s speed is over a certain level, she becomes invincible. This is shown in the game as a fireball aura that surrounds her. There are several ways to build up enough speed to reach this state. At the start of a game falling from a height is the only thing that will even come close. Once wing strength has been powered up a bit, there come brief flashes of fire from flapping that can immediately slaughter a monster only if timed and aimed exactly right.

As wings continue to get stronger these flashes become longer, and eventually almost continual. Once run speed and jump strength have been improved a bit, jumps made while running at a good clip will produce a streak of fire that will tear through monsters. Eventually just running will provide enough speed to destroy monsters, but the game is balanced that this happens only when max run speed is near or at the top level.

To counter the player’s increased avenues for invulnerability, monsters gain much more health towards their most powerful levels, so much that Aurora’s stomp and dart attacks become much less useful. The idea is not to provide a linear increase in power on the player and monster’s parts so that they are evenly matched through the game.

This may seem to be sensible game design, and certainly a lot of MMORPGs subscribe to this school of design, but it’s actually fairly uninteresting. If the opposition is always matched to your level in power, then the game feels exactly the same as you progress, promoting boredom.

At its worst, this thinking has given us RPGs in which the monsters are artificially scaled to the player’s level, which I consider to be a grave sign of design decadence. The two approaches are the result of design philosophies that are different at the root: the idea that the game is a set challenge that the player must overcome, and the idea that the game is an interesting experience for the player to have.

Neither is good or bad in itself, but currently the prevailing trend in experience gaming is towards trying to cook the game’s challenges in order to always just be slightly beneath the player’s ability to overcome, through techniques like level scaling and dynamic difficulty adjustment. I hereby go on record: this is a bad trend. It is treating the player like a pet, trying to induce him to feel powerful through largely artificial means.

To return to Mayflight, the game gives the player more frequent and longer moments of invincibility, but makes monsters much stronger in the elite levels of play so he has to rely on them. This helps Mayflight to feel like its play changes in the later phases of a long game. The roguelike this is most like is Rogue itself, where the monsters get stronger faster than the player so that ultimately he must rely on his accumulated consumable equipment, and sometimes just plain-out running away, to survive.

There is so much to talk about concerning Mayflight that I’m splitting it up into two columns. This has been the overview and introduction column. The next one will concern design details, the nitty-gritty of how its levels are constructed, the thinking that went into object placement, and how the backgrounds were constructed.

Most of these things were deeply inspired by roguelikes. After that I should be recovered enough to start up talking about other peoples’ games again, and I expect we’ll be covering either Baroque for the Wii, the newest version of Dungeon Crawl, or Crawl’s special game mode Dungeon Sprint. See you soon!

Original post editors@gamesetwatch.com (John Harris)

The Alamo Drafthouse has posted this neat promotional clip for Fantastic Arcade, the upcoming indie game spin-off of annual genre film festival Fantastic Fest, taking place at Austin’s Highball and Alamo South Lamar from September 23rd to the 26th.

Featured in the video are some of the 29 principal indie titles that will appear at the event, like Justin Smith’s Enviro-Bear 2000, Mark ‘Messhof’ Essen’s Nidhogg, Jonatan ‘Cactus’ Söderström’s Norrland.

You can purchase tickets for Fantastic Fest and find more information on the event at its official site.

[Via @brandonnn]

Original post editors@gamesetwatch.com (Eric Caoili)

French cartoonist Bastien Vivès has been posting a killer series of illustrations titled “No Love For Street Fighters”, depicting several World Warrior couples in various states of melancholy and heartbreak. There’s even one of Maki desperate and on her knees, banging her tonfa on a window.

I’ve featured here four out of the six pieces Vivès has uploaded — you can heck out the rest on his personal blog. My favorite is definitely the one of Makoto quietly consoling Blanka as he weeps into his giant green hands. I imagine his is the song playing during the scene.

[Via Electric Ant Zine,, mossmouth]]

Original post editors@gamesetwatch.com (Eric Caoili)

Gaijin Games (Bit.Trip series) has posted a new website and trailer for its next release, a WiiWare port of Different Cloth’s “rhythmical racing” iPhone gem and 2010 Mobile IGF’s “Audio Excellence” award winner Lilt Line.

The WiiWare game features a “filthy” dubstep soundtrack by 16bit, 15 levels of music racing, and motion controls with the Wii Remote. This seems like a perfect fit for Gaijin Games, as the developer tends to release titles with minimalist graphics, simple but fun/addictive mechanics, and a really strong music component.

Lilt Line for WiiWare is scheduled to release this fall, but if you’re attending PAX, you can try it out there! You can also download the original iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad game from the App Store for just $2.99.

Original post editors@gamesetwatch.com (Eric Caoili)

Mass Effect is a game I powered through on the 360 because I was on a bender, having just acquired my first Xbox ever. When it came time to put the controller away, I had finished the first game and its sequel in less than a week. Truthfully, I only played the original because the sequel was coming out. I figured that understanding the story so far is important in this kind of game.

What I did not expect was my sudden attachment to the female incarnation of Commander Shepard—fondly referred to as FemShep around the web—during the first game and my continued connection in the second. It’s not that I’m opposed to BroShep/ManShep but something about the female version drew me in and made my gameplay that much more meaningful.

I’m not alone in my adoration, either. There have been numerous polls, hundreds of votes cast and countless discussions about FemShep and her alluring nature. It isn’t a stretch to say that BioWare has managed to, seemingly unintentionally, create a female protagonist that has attracted the attentions of hundreds if not thousands of people.

This seeming preference of the female Commander Shepard, as opposed to the standard male one, even extends to some of the products associated with the game. Specifically, the hardcover Collector’s Edition guide has screenshots that walk the player through the game section by section. All pertinent quests, places to go and people to shoot often have an associated picture of the Commander.

And they’re all of a blonde FemShep that the person making the guide decided to play.

That is to say, the person who had to explore every edifice, speak with every NPC and generally scour the game for tidbits willingly chose to play as FemShep. Mind you, blonde isn’t the default hair color either, so it was a conscious choice on the part of the person taking all of the screenshots.

What, You Can Play As A Female?

The weird thing about the popularity of the female option is that there has been absolutely no marketing for FemShep. Commander Shepard, as evidenced by posters, box art, promotional videos and television advertisements, is male. He is voiced by Mark Meer and the character is modeled after Mark Vanderloo. In some ways, he might as well be Mark Shepard.

Any casual observer may be entirely unaware that playing a female protagonist is even an option in Mass Effect or Mass Effect 2. So why is FemShep so popular? Any standard textbook on marketing will lay down some laws about brand and name recognition. Icons, figureheads and mascots tend to be very clearly defined for just this reason. Imagining a completely unadvertised female version of Kratos is, while sort of sexy, mind-boggling.

There are two main reasons as to why this has occurred. The first and admittedly less academic of the two reasons is pretty simple to explain: female gamers may jump at the chance to play female characters. (Not to mention that anyone wanting to romance Jacob, Thane or Garrus has to play as FemShep.) That isn’t to say that females can’t play as Mr. Commander Shepard but simply that, given the rare option, it seems like women would be prone to trying to play their own gender.

With the more general hypothesis out of the way, the second is that people play as the female version precisely because Commander Shepard is male in all other ways. The lines, the character animations and various other tidbits are male-oriented in a way that makes FemShep more than your stereotypical RPG female protagonist. For one, she wears practical armor. Well, mostly, but it is science fiction after all; we can accept floating visors and the like.

Mass Effect is a bit of an odd franchise because while all the official materials that relate to marketing and the like showcase a man, leading many to assume that the canonical Shepard is one, the story within makes every effort to avoid such insinuations. Pronouns are used sparingly and often tend to be gender neutral at best and at worst the “he/she” conversion is integrated smoothly into the dialogue. Even in the Mass Effect: Redemption comic series, they refrain from referring to the Commander as one or the other, going so far as to say that it’s difficult to discern gender from the remains they found.

Dude Looks Like A Lady Only Vice-Versa

But even with these intentionally neutral mechanics, many of the other male characteristics seep into the FemShep gameplay. For example, you can choose to dance at the clubs present in the game, be it Afterlife or the Eternity Bar or what-have-you. Because the option was there and I happened to notice it, I figured I’d go ahead and dance a bit. Never know, right? Dancing could, theoretically, be an important part of the game.

And it was.

But that wasn’t because some quest triggered or an NPC wandered up to offer me a job. This was an important moment in my gameplay because Commander Shepard, my FemShep, was doing the standard animation that all the NPC male dancers perform. She swayed to and fro while the other females cut a proverbial rug.

Speaking from anecdotal experience alone, it looks as if many of the character animations were used for both models. As another obvious point of animation-borrowing from ManShep to FemShep, there is a scene when speaking to Miranda where FemShep is sitting in an almost undeniably male position: slouched over in her chair, hands between her legs with said legs pushed out in a v-shape.

The borrowing only becomes obvious when wearing the party dress from the Kasumi’s Stolen Memory DLC while talking to Miranda in the previously mentioned scene. Shepard’s hands are through the fabric, for one, and you can see up the dress. There is, in fact, a reason that girls sit as they do in skirts and dresses.

It goes beyond just the aesthetic, though. Shepard presents the same set of lines regardless of gender. Whether you’re telling off the Illusive Man, saving a disease-stricken batarian or pushing some Blue Suns thug out a window, the actions and dialogue are the exact same. None of this proves to be a hindrance to FemShep, nor is she popular in spite of it.

In fact, FemShep is so wildly popular because of it.

The moment that FemShep prepares to take on the threat to the universe, she inevitably will give an impassioned speech as to why they must do what they are preparing to do. This is true for both games in Mass Effect and many other franchises. The oddity is that it’s an empowered female doing the speaking.

If we wanted to see yet another righteous man bolstering his troops, we’d watch Braveheart, play Halo or just roll up a ManShep. Watching FemShep, and hearing Jessica Hale, doing this bolstering is almost unsettling. It shifts our expectations and moves us to the edge of our seats. And we love her for it.

[James Bishop is a freelance writer for various outlets, holds a Bachelor of Arts in English from Indiana University Southeast and is not fond of the Oxford comma. He can be reached at jamesrollinbishop at gmail dot com.]

Original post editors@gamesetwatch.com (James Bishop)

Earlier this week, we mentioned the Experimental Gameplay Project’s “Zero Button” challenge when we featured Nicolai Troshinsky’s excellent UFO On Tape, but now organizers have posted all 40 submissions from the monthly competition for you to play for free.

Though there are a few titles that broke the theme’s rules and used one or two buttons, most of the others came up with creative ways for users to play with just the mouse, a microphone, or camera. All of the games were developed by just one person in seven days.

If you’re looking for a good place to start while checking out the list, the games at the top of the list — Capz Machinery, Jitter, and Avoidal — are worth a few minutes of your time. Tiejo Mursu’s Movie Theater is also pretty clever, though it doesn’t have much replay value.

Don’t forget that with the new month, there’s a new Experimental Gameplay Project challenge, which asks developers to create a “neverending” game.

Original post editors@gamesetwatch.com (Eric Caoili)