Masquerade

A couple of months ago, agj came up with the idea of getting a few people to each make a game, and then each release another person's game in a ring of deception. And so it happened that four games were made, inspired by the theme "Masquerade", and released:
Ascension
Doppelganger
Face Time
The Sense of Connectedness

We chose not to explicitly lie by claiming to have made the games ourselves, and instead to just post them with a vague note like "here's a new game". The main purpose was just to have some fun and make some games, not to trick people.

I had very much expected that someone would spot the deception, but in retrospect it makes sense that nobody did - none of us are particularly well-known, so it wasn't likely someone would spot "that game is in X's style", and it's not at all uncommon for people to try out new styles and programming languages. Also, some of the people who are most familiar with our personal styles were already in on the plan.

(Feel free to try the games and attempt to match them to their authors before reading further, but from 16th Dec onwards some of the games will display their author.)

---

---

---

It's been quite a weird experience, and I'm struggling to write down my mixed feelings in any kind of coherent order.

My game The Sense of Connectedness got quite a bit of positive attention from around the internet - it's probably been my most successful game so far. But since it hasn't been under my own name, I've felt a sense of disconnectedness from it - it's still my game, I've just felt it a bit less. But instead, I feel a sense of identification with all four games, and I've taken personally the response to each of them - it's as though the feeling of ownership I'd usually have for my own game has gotten smeared around the ring. I feel the least connection to Ascension, perhaps because it's furthest from me around the cycle.

I've felt guilty that my game's gotten so much more of a positive response than the others have (and also a bit proud for the same reason, and then guilty again for feeling proud).
I've wondered if I should have done more to promote agj's Doppelganger, and if it's partially my fault that it's had the least response of any of the four games - should I have written more about it? Was Kongregate the wrong site for it? (Do people just not like me very much?)
Noyb's been feeling guilty as well - at seeing praise for my game directed towards him, and at seeing negative comments towards his game directed at Jonathan..
I think it makes sense that guilt is a common theme, because we've conspired to commit a deception, and even though we meant it in fun, it's still somehow transgressive (and the fact that we didn't explicitly lie doesn't really make a difference; we've still intentionally deceived people).

The following I'm not enjoying writing, but I'm going to anyway because I think it's worth exploring all the feelings that have come out of this experiment:
I resent the praise for my game having been directed at Noyb. Not in a big way, but it's there.
Partially this is explainable - I'd love to be able to make a living making games, and while marketing isn't something I value much, it does kind of matter. I fear that I've missed an opportunity to get my name in front of a bunch of people, to advertise myself and thus improve my chances of success as an "indie developer".
But largely it doesn't make any sense at all, it's just a crazy subconscious jealousy that he's getting the 'reward' for my work.
These aren't feelings I'm comfortable with having.
But they're just stupid irrational feelings, and in my intellect I don't mind at all. And it's actually helped me to think about what I consider most important, and to realise that ultimately I care way more that I've affected people with my art than whether they have any idea who I am.

I've dwelt too much on the negative here; there's been a lot of good as well. The feeling of community with my co-conspirators has been great, and reading people's comments on my game has been really nice - thanks everyone! And the most important thing is that we made some games that we wouldn't have otherwise. So while it hasn't been entirely a positive experience, it was definitely worth doing - I did consider backing out a few days before we released the games, and I'm glad I didn't.

The others have written up their thoughts after the experiment as well:
Noyb
jonathan
agj

Doppelganger

New flash game:

kongregate link

It's more sort of a weird interactive art/toy than a 'game'. Uses webcam.

edit: I didn't make this, it's actually the work of agj, see Masquerade.

Vertex Dispenser levels

Vertex Dispenser uses 3d models for its levels - the vertices and polygons of the models are the nodes of territory that you fight over. Quite a variety of levels are possible, but game balance and feel push towards particular kinds of level - moving around on the surface feels best if it's fairly smooth and homogeneous, the colouring rules constrain the degree of vertices, non-triangular faces are very weak, combat works best if the perimeter of a player's territory is in good proportion to the amount of territory (so a player who's winning is vulnerable to attack on more possible fronts). Also, it plays best with around 150-250 vertices - much less and there's no room to build up, much more and the game drags on after one player's already clearly won. And in some vague way, since players impose a lot of structure on the level through their actions in the game, it just kind of feels better for there to be less inherent structure as well.

All this means that the two levels i've found to work best are a plane grid, and a fairly regular sphere (from blender's "icosphere" primitive). Higher-genus surfaces don't work well at all - the torus is acceptable (though not great), and past that you just can't get enough smoothness without having too many vertices.

For some of the campaign levels I've used more intricate models, which work okay for levels with specific goals rather than a full battle to eliminate opposing players. Playtesters have had some difficulty with these though, and even a little with the sphere, so I've made the initial levels use a flat plane, and gradually worked up to other shapes. But then a few weeks back I was showing the game to a few people at the London Indies meetup, and a couple of guys who'd seen it before expressed disappointment at these 2d levels: the unusual shapes of levels are what they'd thought looked cool about it, so in making it more playable I make it less attractive!

I've been working on the final campaign level - originally I had a boss fight against Smestorp, but it turns out that fighting a big enemy with lots of hit points isn't fun in this game so I've had to invent something new - and as well as the above constraints, the design I have for the level requires that a particular subgraph appears, plus a visual effect I want to use looks best if the level is convex. I'd kind of wanted to make a "special" looking level for the ending, but so far I haven't found anything other than a sphere that will work.

what I've been up to

* I'm now a part-time student. This is partially because I'm moving to a different country from where I'm studying and it'll make things less complicated, and partially to give myself more time to spend making cool stuff. (So I should finally be able to finish Vertex Dispenser!)

* I submitted Vertex Dispenser to the IGF again. I don't feel like I've done a year's worth of work on it since last year, but I have dealt with the main issues that hurt it last time around (i.e. difficulty, lack of a proper tutorial), so I think my chances are better at least. Also, the judging system has been improved, and I think the new system is more favourable to niche games (because they're selected by a jury, rather than by assigning arbitrary numeric scores and taking the average), so who knows? I definitely got something out of entering last year anyway, even though it didn't place.

* Had a couple of my games featured in an exhibition last month: the start show. Pretty cool!

* I've been working on an album of smaller games, each a few minutes long, full of psychedelic sound and colour. I'm taking a "games as rock music" simile and trying to push it as far as it'll go - with hidden tracks, remixes, b-sides, etc.

* Computer has decided to break down again, I guess this was inevitable. So I've bought a shiny new one and am waiting for it to show up.

* Playing a lot of Dominion and Shadows over Camelot.

list of games

edit: I'm no longer maintaining this list. List of games is at http://www.smestorp.com/.

the purpose of this post is to list all of my released games.
I try to keep it arranged in approximate order of interest.

---

---

nourishment

---

---

Vertex Dispenser
strategy/action/puzzle
available on Steam
"spectacularly clever" - Jim Rossignol

---

Glitch Tank
fast-paced glitchy action-strategy game for iPad
available on AppStore

---

---

freedom

---

---

Idiolect
unfinished album
includes some of the games below: TSoC, KPSJ, HM, B2010

---

Exuberant Struggle
action/strategy
Versus game for TIGSource

---

The Sense of Connectedness
abstract/puzzle
for Masquerade

---

Knot-Pharmacard Subcondition J
abstract
bricolage game for The Games Collective

---

Hyperabuse Monolith
abstract
S.C.U.M. game for The Games Collective

---

Babeltron 2010
abstract
S.C.U.M. game for The Games Collective

---

Death Lights Dancing
lovecraftian rowing game
for tigsource commonplace book competition

---

Smestorpod Infestation
shmup
based on connecting up networks to power things
no sound, cool mechanics

---

Glutton Quest
shmup
my first game with 3d graphics, kind of interesting but a bit glitchy

---

Chango: Chaos Penguin
turn based strategy retro mashup
Chaos/Pango mashup for Retro Remakes

---

Elements.
7 day roguelike
nethack modification
just trying out a mechanic.

---

Doppelganger
webcam game thing
(not mine)

---

---

hey, completeness. except my old BASIC games, which don't seem to run anymore. and maybe some java crap, but nothing important and java can piss off.

Chango: Chaos Penguin

Started this for a Retro Remakes competition in 2008, just dug it up again and had a go at finishing it off in the last couple of days. Basically it's a mashup of Chaos: Battle of the Wizards with some other old games, mainly Pango.



I'm still fixing bugs and making lots of changes hoping to make it vaguely balanced. Currently it's two-player only, I'll have a go at enlarging that range sometime.

download

Edit (28/09): Updated. Still to do: fix more bugs, AI.

Dominion, segueing into Prestige

I've realised some other reasons my first couple of plays of Dominion were not very good.
- The first game was 2-player, and my opponent had put out all 12 of each type of victory card (in 2-player games you're only supposed to use 8 of each); this served to make the game drag on for much longer after I'd already lost.
- The second game was 5-player, and the game actually only supports 2 to 4 players. The official rules for playing with 5 players say "play two games of 2 and 3 players". They then go on to specify how many cards to put out if you insist on playing with 5, but strongly recommend against it, particularly if any of the players are not experienced (as I was not). We didn't actually even play according to these rules, but rather by some ad-hoc house-ruled 5-player variant.
I was not aware that we weren't playing by the "proper rules" at the time, and it certainly helps to explain why my experience was not so good.

I'm not opposed to house-rules in general, but I feel like people often prematurely make up house-rules before they understand how a game works.
I've noticed this quite a bit recently in the BoardGameGeek discussions about the latest RFTG expansion (The Brink of War). This expansion adds a new resource called "prestige" to the game, which can be gained as a one-off bonus for putting certain marked cards into play, or generated repeatedly by using certain card powers, and gives a small bonus each turn to whoever has the most of it. A lot of threads have started up discussing how prestige is overpowered, unbalanced, broken, and suggesting various changes to "fix" it.
Amusingly, one common suggestion is to make the Prestige Lead bonus give cards instead of points every turn. This betrays a complete lack of understanding of the game; cards are worth a lot more than points, particularly near the start of the game (when there's most variance in terms of somebody getting the prestige lead easily because of the luck of initial draws). So this proposed "weakening" of prestige actually makes it stronger! But these people are playing with this variant and not minding; feeling like they've fixed the problem and prestige isn't overpowered anymore. And maybe they have fixed the problem - because the problem was in their heads the whole time: if everyone believes that prestige is all-powerful, they will focus their efforts on gaining it; but since prestige only pays off for the leader, those who have spent resources on gaining prestige and have failed to become the leader end up behind; a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So it's an interesting example of an unstable equilibrium. As long as all players pursue Prestige strategies, the Prestige Leader will tend to win, reinforcing the view that Prestige-based strategies are the strongest. But as soon as someone tries a different approach (like using strategies that were already strong before this expansion) this illusion will be broken. I'd think that in a game that takes up to half an hour there'd be little cost in trying something different - if it doesn't work out, never mind, you haven't spent much time on it (this is one of the reasons I strongly favour short games - you can fit so much more learning in) - but it seems that some people will try the same approach over and over again, no matter what they draw.

It's something to think about when designing games. You can't guarantee that someone's initial experience will be good, and no matter what you do people might just make up house-rules that overturn your efforts (this is much less of a problem with videogames). You can't guarantee that people will figure out the best strategies and not get stuck on local maxima (even in the third expansion, apparently). But it's worth doing your best to avoid these types of problem anyway.