abstract

Afer looking at jeff minters stuff im thinking maybe the visuals should be abstract and maybe I need to try making a trance level.

Jeff Minter on tutorials

" Back in the day discovering the nuances of an arcade game was part of the journey to mastery. You learned the basics from the label on the cabinet and the brief attract mode, but you learned the elite skills through exploration and experimentation, and also by watching and learning from other gamers.

Nowadays it seems that players expect every little detail spoon-fed to them in excruciating detail by enormous great handholding tutorial modes, and even though SG does contain a tutorial mode, a couple of goes of of which should be enough to teach any reasonably sentient individual the basics of the game, it seems that some people feel that the game requires altogether too much thinking, one website describing the experience of playing as being like trying to do sudoku under slightly unusual and stressful conditions."

from http://www.llamasoft.co.uk/blog/index.php?paged=2

Space Giraffe

Space Giraffe has some interactive audio, at 4:15 on this video you will see the bonus round, in which the player must collect flowers with "hoovers" eachof the flowers you collect makes a sound and they play out a little tune its all very relaxing untill Barney Gumble starts burping, I'd expect nothing less form Jeff Minter, creator of Revenge of the mutant camels.



in one of his talks Jon Blow of braid fame criticised the games graphics saying they got in the way of the gameplay, in respnse the PC version has the option of having toned down back grounds (see video below)

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-GB&amp;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:6d367097-c280-43db-844b-9e092626c3e2&amp;showPlaylist=true&amp;from=msnvideo" target="_new" title="Space Giraffe - level 22(NUXX remix)">Video: Space Giraffe - level 22(NUXX remix)</a>

Jeff Minter did a talk about his games and being an independent game developer at google here's the video

Art games and Not games

I found a cool blog post over at http://bluewyverntea.blogspot.com/ in which shows some cool art games and not games, check it out http://bluewyverntea.blogspot.com/2008/09/art-games-and-not-games.html



one of the ones he looks at is Echogenesis (http://www.echogenesis.com)a flah art peice that lets you travel through five scenes that you can interact with, the snow stage has music that reacts to your actions. I like the art style of this interactive peice and the wat it uses photographs along with vector graphics.

just had an idea for a story, you play a song backwards on a record player, and a portal to the afterlife opens up. in a serious non funny kinda way. as you go through the game you get lost and cant find your way back to the life you knew. you wonder if your dead, and consider the people you left behind......its a bit grim.

Kandinsky-inspired Little Big Planet Level

I've been playing Little Big Planet recently. If you don't know Its a PlayStaion 3 physics based platformer that allows the player to create there own levels and share them with other players. It's a very good game the jumping can be a little floaty and not being able to use the D-pad to move is a it annoying but otherwise its great, and its good to see a 2d platformer getting such a strong backing by a big company like Sony.

You can have up four players playing sanctimoniously which is great fun, I dont think my game would work so well in co-op as each player would be setting off difrent sound boxes and the reulting audio would be a bit of a mess. I guess I could make it so the player in the lead or the player with the most collectibles controls the music. I think ill concentrate on getting a good single player game done before thinking about multiplayer.

I have been looking at a lot of user generated levels for inspiration and I found one by
Richard "KirbyKid" Terrell he has created a musical platform level in Little Big Planet inspired by Kandinsky's Improvisation #1 painting.

Heres a liknk to his blog where he elaberates on the creation process.

http://critical-gaming.squarespace.com/blog/2008/11/24/improvisation-1.html

A video of the level.


In order to make the level sound like it does he had to put sound objects into the playfeild, here is a diogram he made showing where all the sound elelments are placed.



He also has some good tips on making platform levels

" * Check Points: I think everyone can learn from the example I set in Improvisation #1. Though I didn't put a single hazardous element in the entire level, I still added 3 checkpoints. I did this for a few reasons. 1) Especially in LBP, players will always find a way to kill themselves. The game is just too emergent to eliminate death altogether. 2) If the player ever fell to the bottom of the level, they always have the option of trying again and teleporting back up.
* So, if your level is more dangerous than Improvisation #1 by any degree, then you need to be sure to place check points that demark gameplay ideas.

* Level Boundaries: Make sure that you take extra precautions to seal off the "level from the level." What I mean by this is, we're given a very large space to create a level in. If you don't use all of that space, be sure that the player can't escape into the "no man's land." Remember, LBP is very emergent. Just because you don't think players can slip through the cracks doesn't mean they won't.
* Also, if you have an "elephant graveyard" of spare bits and broken bobs hanging out in your no man's land, then be sure to delete them. There's no point in wasting server space or prolong the download times. Just because it's electronic doesn't mean we should be wasteful."

Tetsuya Mizuguchi Interviews

Tetsuya Mizuguchi joined SEGA in 1990 and has worked on notable games like SEGA Rally and musical games such as Space Chanel 5 and Rez in 2003 he left SEGA, He felt that sinse SEGA merged with sammy he had not been given the freedom he desired, so he formed his own company Q entertainment who are responsible for musical games such as Lumines. Here are some interviews with him.







In this video he talks about Rez and how he was influenced by kandinsky it sounds like he struggling to say what he wants to in english.