Broken Dimensions is my graduation game from DADIU, the Danish Academy for Digital, Interactive Entertainment. Ours was the last class to make two full game productions as part of the programme (last year I worked on Imachination) – starting this fall, DADIU will become a one-semester programme involving a curriculum and a small prototype-style project in addition to one big game production. Time will tell if that produces better games or not, but it certainly will fit better into the curriculum of IT University students. I didn’t get any ECTS credit for this production, but I’m using it in my MSc thesis, so at least it’ll get me a modest scope reduction there.
Broken Dimensions is a puzzle-adventure game. I could also call it a puzzle-platformer, but then you immediately think of side-scrollers about jumping accurately, and Broken Dimensions is more about… falling with style. I could also call it a horror game, but it’s more creepy-freaky than horrific. Puzzle-adventure it is.
I’m not particularly a fan of challenge in games. I’ve never had a high tolerance for playing the same sections over and over again until they’re finally grokked, and that tolerance has only lowered as I’ve played more games. I’m currently at a stage in my life when I have enough time and money to play all the games I’m interested in playing, both out of personal taste and professional interest, but because I’m squeezing as many games as possible into the free time I have, I still don’t want to “waste” any of that time, and replaying difficult sections over and over certainly feels like a waste.
Obviously there’s a difference between my personal tastes and my professional design paradigms, and I’m fully aware that a lot of players love a solid challenge and get a kick out of finally pushing past a nearly impossible part of a game. That’s what difficulty settings are for. It’s just that I generally play on Easy, or Normal if I’m playing a type of game where I’m pretty confident in my own skills or which is pretty clearly targeted for a mainstream audience.
The Global Game Jam came and went around two months ago, but I never got around to blogging about it because things started happening immediately afterwards and never let up. Same old excuses I suppose. I also wanted to wait with posting about the game until I’d finished editing a quick video playthrough of the game, but when I did finish working on the video a few weeks after the jam, it had all sorts of problems pertaining to framerate and aspect ratio, so that whole video has been scrapped. Now I find myself with half an hour to kill before bedtime, I figure I may as well squeeze a game jam post in before my current project wraps up and I’ll need to write about that.
I somehow managed to finish Fable 3 twice. This usually never happens because I have other games to play or other things to do, or because the first long linear part of any RPG that’s worth replaying is almost always a tremendous slog to get through. I didn’t manage to finish Knights of the Old Republic twice. I didn’t manage it with Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines. I didn’t even really manage it with Deus Ex because I got distracted when I reached Area 51 for the second time. This time, I didn’t really have anything more interesting to do with my time than a second playthrough of a game I’d already completed, and I overcame the initial linearity problem with the help of EER, since co-op makes everything more interesting.
I have three projects this semester. Due on the 15th of December is a group project where we’re attempting to make a highly emergent game in the Unity engine. For December 8, I need to create a game level for Gamewords as Fields of Expression – I’ve decided to use the UDK because it has good CSG tools so I can produce something relatively good-looking without doing any real modelling. Also for December 8, I’m working on a game prototype with my mother as a target audience for User Experience and Prototyping. This, I’ve chosen to use XNA for, because I’m a masochist.
There are two reasons I chose to go with XNA. The weak reason is that my target audience (mom) prefers to play games on her Xbox 360 than on her PC, primarily because the gamepad is more ergonomic and its buttons are better structured semantically. XNA already has all the gamepad stuff taken care of so I can concentrate on translating the input into useful output rather than figuring out what the input is in the first place. However, the real reason for choosing XNA is that I’ve been wanting to learn C# for ages.
C# is a proper programming language, unlike eg. LUA or Uscript or NWscript (which is the language that taught me about programming), but at the same time it’s a very tidy and approachable language. Everything I’ve heard about C++ indicates that it will destroy your soul if it’s the first language you attempt to learn, which is why I didn’t opt for that despite it being far more popular for game programming. I’d heard C# was supposed to be a lot easier, and since it’s derived from Java the same way NWscript was, I’m more or less familiar with the syntax already.
I’m shocked and confused by how much more I enjoy Fallout: New Vegas than I did Fallout 3. On paper, Fallout 3 has several traits that ought to sit better with me than New Vegas.
Since Oblivion, Bethesda games have been all about complete freedom – at the cost of narrative coherence. The typical example is the way the various storylines and side quests of Oblivion exist in total isolation from each other, leading to that situation where you’re the archmage of the country but you’re still made to start as a bottom-feeder in the Thieves’ Guild and eventually made to break into your own quarters to steal your own staff without anybody so much as raising an eyebrow at the absurdness of it all. Freedom has been the fundamental design tenet of their games, which is why their enemies scale to your character level and you can go straight to the end of the game as soon as you leave the tutorial. I respect that.
Obsidian more or less throws that out the window with New Vegas. Yeah I’ve heard you can go straight to Vegas at the start if you’re really good, but I tried several different ways and I was completely annihilated until I just stuck to the highway and took the long way around like a good boy. First, I went through the quarry, where I was immediately beset upon and decapitated by a deathclaw. Then, I went straight across the middle of the map towards Novac, but I ran into three giant radscorpions and had to flee for my life. Then I went south of the mountains and discovered Primm Pass, but it held nothing but a Blind Deathclaw that ripped me to shreds in seconds. That’s when I decided to just follow the main questline as instructed.
I’ve been playing Descent with a group of class mates for a few months now. No, not the old 3D shooter PC game – the boardgame Descent: Journeys in the Dark, and more recently its expansion, The Road to Legend.
Descent is a tactical adventure game, meaning it takes place on a grid where each player controls a character who can move a certain amount of squares and take certain actions each turn, and as players move through each dungeon, they acquire money that they can use to buy new equipment, skills, and traits for their characters to level up for the final boss. One player is the Game Master (who in Descent is called the Overlord) and is in charge of spawning traps and monsters and controlling the enemies to thwart up to four players. It’s a lot like playing a hugely simplified version of Dungeons & Dragons with miniatures, except the narrative element is much more perfunctory and the Overlord is much more restricted in what he/she can do than in typical tabletop role-playing games.
For some reason, I immediately feel compelled to justify and excuse my decision to purchase it, which may say a thing or two about the cultural connotations of the device. Suffice to say it seems like the best phone on the market, and the weight of Apple’s enormous bulging app store is sufficient to balance out the phone’s ludicrously inflated price (yes it’s a great phone, but is it twice as good as an Android phone half as expensive? I doubt it).
Lawrence requested that I post a review, but I’m not structured enough on this blog for proper reviews, so this is what I always post when I’ve tried something I feel like blogging about: assorted thoughts and opinions.
As you may or may not have noticed, I’ve updated all my posts from Canada with relevant photos today. As usual, you can click on them to see a larger version, and if you hover over a thumbnail with your cursor, a caption will appear to explain what’s going on. Thanks goes to Winter for all the horseback riding photos in the Falcon Lake post.
As far as possible, the photos fit the text of the posts, but I chose to put the photos from my arrival at Winnipeg into the Winnipeg post even though that post actually starts the next day and my arrival is described in the second Peterborough post.
When I was done, I had a few photos left over that I didn’t want not to post (pardon the double negative), so I’ve included them here instead. They are pretty random. Feel free to use this entry to send me your comments pertaining to any of my Canada photos
I’m trying to debrief myself onto this blog before the last part of my head comes with me back from Canada. I should probably skip Thursday and Friday and go straight to Saturday, which I remember as the best day of my vacation because it was packed with activities.
Friday evening, Lawrence drove me up to Winter’s family cottage on Falcon Lake to meet with her uncle and cousins. It was about a 2 hour drive from St. Malo, and the night was spent playing Cranium and drinking with the neighbours. I may be generalising too much in either direction, but it seems to me that the Canadians use their cottages for the opposite purpose cottages are used over here: we leave the cities and go to our cottages to get away from people, whereas it seems like the Canadians come to their cottages to be around other people with cottages.
In the morning, we were joined by Winter and went swimming off a tiny, almost private beach. Then we went horse-back riding. Winter used to work at the nearby ranch, so we got a private ride for the price of a normal one, meaning the four of us went alone with a guide. The trail was really beautiful, taking us through coniferous forest, down into an old gravel pit, into deciduous forest, through the water of a marsh area, and over the rocky ground of the Canadian Shield. It was later brought to my attention that I looked quite amusing whenever we went into a trot, but at least I had no problem staying on the horse, so I suppose I’ll just have to learn proper trot technique next time I get a chance to ride.
After the ride, we went down to the lake again to go swimming off a rock outcropping (covered in seagull shit and bits of dead crab – all the more incentive to go into the water). For reasons of squeamishness, I’m not a fan of swimming in the sea, so I really appreciated this chance to frolic in a nice, clean fresh-water lake. As we’d returned to the cottage and dinner was being prepared, a friend of the family came by in his flashy new speed boat and took us for a sail around the lake at unreasonable velocity.
That, my dear friends, is how you enjoy your vacation.
Narcissism Inc. is the mostly game-related blog of Jonas Wæver, Creative Director of independent game development studio Logic Artists and recent MSc graduate from the Game Design programme at the IT University of Copenhagen. Curriculum Vitae (PDF). Portfolio.
