Vertex Cortex Remix Vortex

Vertex Dispenser is currently available as part of an Indie Royale bundle. So you can pay a variable amount of money for it. Weird!
(I updated the game last week or so with some minor bug-fixes and balance tweaks. Nothing significant.)

But that's old hat. Made that game ages ago.

They asked if I had any bonus content that could be included. Nothing immediately came to mind, but with my head full of game jams I said "tell you what, I'll do a remix for it". So I came up with Vertex Vortex Cortex Remix. It reuses code and aesthetics from Vertex Dispenser, but it behaves completely differently. It's a "figure it out as you go" puzzle/experience/thing in the vein of Knot-Pharmacard Subcondition J and The Sense of Connectedness.

Have a screenshot:


I've also thrown in a level that was cut from the Vertex Dispenser campaign: Boss Fight. It was going to be the final level, so it's fairly hard. Inappropriately hard, in fact - if it had stayed I'd have certainly had to drop the difficulty. I only recommend it if you've completed the campaign and really want an extra challenge.

I haven't played any of the other games in the bundle yet.

Jam and Kart

I've made thirteen games in the last eleven days.

For TIGJamUK6:
- Cube Gallery
- Number Quality
- a physical card game.

For Pirate Kart V:
- Game Title
- Game Title: Lost Levels
- i heard you like videogames
- Ludoname
- Ytilauq Rebnum
- Reverse Passage
- Grand Vampire Chase
- Reverse Passage 2: Mother's Edition
- Gardens of Time: Design Problem Solving
- Multicolour Alien Olympic (two-player)

Whew!
Obviously some of these will be less interesting than others. Game Title is probably the best place to start if you want to try one of them.
I highly recommend doing game jams. There's really nothing else like sitting down for a couple of hours and having a new game at the end of it.

Note that this isn't even that many. SophieH made 16 this weekend.

(All downloads are Windows only at this point, I'll try to do mac builds of some of them this week.)

a dead end

Still making two-player games. There's a particular dead end I've run into repeatedly. It seems quite natural, at least to the way I think - lots of designs have ended up in the same place for completely different reasons.

(Definitions: I'm just talking about real-time competitive videogames here.)
(Disclaimer: Somewhat tired and unwell. Thoughts may be fragmented or incoherent.)

So, I'm not interested in making games where being quicker than your opponent guarantees a win. Just a matter of taste. I'm happy for speed (and chance) to play a part, but in general I prefer the outcome to be determined by decisions made by the players.
Part of the reason for this is that I play games with my wife, and usually if speed is very dominant in a game then I'll just win in a kind of boring way. My reflexes are better trained by more years of playing videogames, big deal. In a battle of wits, we're usually evenly matched (although don't ask about Chess). Having relatively even chances of winning is more interesting.

So the problem is: how to make a real-time game where quick action doesn't dominate?
A too-obvious solution is to have some kind of resource that accumulates over time and constrains how fast you can act. This leads to the dead end of which I spoke: having resource constraints on all actions. I've made at least four different games on this model, and although they had interesting decisions to make, they weren't interesting to play. Build something, wait to recharge, build something, wait to recharge. Games where you spend most of your time waiting for something to happen are boring. BORING. There's a lack of engagement. No matter how short the delay is, eventually you've made your decision and are just waiting. (Make the delay short enough and the quicker player wins and still spends most of the game waiting impatiently.)

I'm working on a very short timescale. Games that are over within five minutes. I've seen this type of thing done on a much larger time scale, games like Neptunes Pride with actions that take hours to execute. Circumvents the boredom by letting you achieve something else while waiting. But I don't like these either, they tend to advantage logging in frequently and at inappropriate times; they take over your life.

I've done games with some continuous actions with no time constraint, and some discrete actions constrained by a resource dependent on time. e.g. Exuberant Struggle. This works. I'm working with very restricted controls so it becomes quite limiting, but it's led to nice designs. The continuous actions often give false decisions - "do you want to dodge the incoming bomb? y/n" - but still give something to do and make the game more engaging. Speed is still an advantage, but I've been able to constrain how much of an advantage it is enough so that a player with slower reflexes can still win.

Glitch Tank's a curious example. It has a built-in disadvantage to haste. Spamming actions will let you build up lots of tanks and mines quickly, but friendly fire means this isn't a strict advantage. Acting quickly is an advantage, but only if you do so safely. It just barely works.

There are other ways out. I'm interested if anyone has examples that solve this. But I recommend avoiding it because it's been a dead end for me. Certainly if you throw away my constraints there isn't a problem - if you're happy for speed to be a big advantage, or if you make a turn-based game (which can end up playing faster as you master it). Or if a game is intentionally boring (?).

definitions

(This is a response to a discussion on twitter last night between @doougle, @raphkoster, @ElectronDance, @edclef, @v21 and others. Tried to reply on twitter but it expanded to like 8 tweets so I'm posting it here instead. Sorry if that makes it EVEN LONGER AND RAMBLIER.)

Definitions are a powerful tool. In mathematics, we can precisely define classes of object (numbers, algebraic structures, topological spaces, etc.) and then learn things about them by logically manipulating the definition. Writing down a formal definition is the only way we can actually get at a class of non-physical objects and do stuff with it. This the thing I've seen students struggle the most with in learning maths - they will start out trying to prove a result without considering the definitions of the objects it mentions, and they get nowhere at all because they have nothing to work with but a vague intuition and some examples.

Definitions need to be exclusive to be useful. The smaller the class of objects you're talking about, the more truths will hold in general for all objects in the class. If you talk about finite two-player perfect-information zero-sum games, you can make some pretty strong statements, which are very useful if you're working in that context.

It's important to bear in mind that theorems are completely meaningless if not all their conditions are satisfied - if you try to apply them where your assumptions don't hold, bad things can happen.

And it's important to bear in mind that a definition does not say anything about how things should be. It's not a prescription. It doesn't say that what lies outside is not worthy of consideration.

@doougle: @ElectronDance @raphkoster Raph, these discussions have POLITICAL consequences. Like what games get recognized at IGF, etc.

So there's a tension here. For POLITICAL purposes, definitions should be as inclusive as possible. Everyone should just make cool stuff and not care whether it fits some restriction, and festivals like IGF should be broad and accepting of all of this. But for useful technical discussions, we need to be clear and precise about what we're talking about by using exclusive definitions. When people confuse the two there's a problem.

I kind of wish "game" wasn't the general term for interactive software art. Maybe we kind of need a new term for rule-driven consequentially-interactive maybe-competitive games, because they're an interesting class of object and it's worth discussing them, and it would be nice if we could reason about them without having to make exceptions for Proteus every time.

New Year cleansing

It's now 2012.
Here are some smaller games I made in 2010. Some of them are from an album concept I was working on, but at this point I think it's better just to release them and make something new than to try to complete the album.

download link: IDIOLECT (dropbox) (windows only)

* Fire Up The Lemma Engines
* You And Your Motion
* Cubic Computing Carcass (doesn't have an end-state)
* The Bristling Beard of Science (puzzle game, doesn't really fit with the rest here)



I've included an exe (Idiolect) with some of the other album tracks which are fragmentary and very unfinished but that you might like to look at anyway:
* Black Pyramid Script
* This Is The Dystopian Future
* Cryptoforest
* A Simple Instruction (no interaction in this one, but mesmerising)



I've also bundled in a few of my other games from the same period that are already released, that fit with these stylistically and round it out to a nice collection:
* Knot-Pharmacard Subcondition J
* the sense of connectedness
* Babeltron 2010
* Hyperabuse Monolith

not a bundle

Oh, and maybe I'm a bit late posting this here, but Vertex Dispenser is 50% off over Christmas, until Jan 2. Here are some other cool games that are discounted too (thanks Dejobaan for the mention!):

Glitch Tank

Released a game for iPad: Glitch Tank (app store)
(edit: now on iphone also, but ipad recommended)

It's a competitive two-player game, made with the same constraints and aesthetic as Exuberant Struggle (160*100 resolution, 8 colours, 2 players, arrow-keys only as input^*, minimalist real-time strategy, high randomness).

It's somewhat inspired by RoboRally, but takes things in a different direction. You have a hand of four random actions which are replaced when you play them, and have to try to use them to destroy the other player. Basically I made up a list of all the things I could think of that tanks do and made them be actions in the game: drive around, lay minefields, fire lasers, jump, reproduce. The twist comes from that last one: you end up with multiple tanks, and the same commands are given to all of them.

^* Since I've put it on iPad the control restriction doesn't apply anymore, but it influenced the design.

Something that came up when playtesting this was that sometimes people would spam actions as fast as they could instead of trying to pick what was best to do. This didn't turn out to be a good strategy - you're more likely to kill yourself than your opponent - but it tended to dominate the game if someone did it; their opponent couldn't effectively do much more than wait for them to kill themselves. So I added an "overheating" effect, where your tank will lock up for several seconds if you press actions too quickly. It feels like a bit of a hack since it wasn't a viable strategy, but since players were doing it anyway and not enjoying it something had to be done. (I may need to adjust the parameters for when this happens - let me know if you're finding games dominated by button-mashing.)

At some point I'll release a PC version, but probably not on its own - it just doesn't work as well on PC, because there's an extra layer of indirection in the controls. Will probably do a telephone build as well, although the screen does seems too small for it to be very natural with two players; I'll have to get hold of one to test.