World of Goo: Indie games win

There are a ton of free indie games you can just download from the net. Most of them are worth the time of playing them. Some are not. A lot of them are well worth the time. Spending 15 minutes trying a game out isn't a big cost for me. It is for some people. 15 bucks on the other hand is a huge deal for a lot of people. So when you get into indie games you pay for you're in a whole other world from the free stuff. When you're playing something for free you're usually playing the cheapest possible production that it would take to try out a game design idea. But when you get into an indie production with cash, now you're talking about a case where that guy with that good idea can realize it with some cash -- he can hire an artist or a programmer and license some software. He'll still keep creative control. He's just using the money to realize his idea.

That's how you get something like World of Goo. The $15 WiiWare game was made by Kyle Gabler and Ron Carmel -- a couple of ex-EA employees who's office is, as they describe on their website, is whichever free wi-fi coffee shop they wander into on a given day.

World of Goo is one of the most engaging single player games I've played all year. The playthisthing.com guys describe it well when they say the style is all about spunk. World of Goo makes Braid look horribly pretentious.

The story is ambiguous at first. You know your goal is to build a tower of goo toward a pipe to deliver goo to it though you're not sure why. Maybe it's for an ill purpose. But that's not really important. The gameplay revolves around building physical structures in the warped physical game world. The gameplay is completely fresh. As soon as I started groking what was thrown at me Kyle and Ron further build on and variate the gameplay. It engaged me into a perfect state of flow through the whole game which took me several nights to get through.

This game is one of the best games on the Wii. And it's only 15 bucks. It's a little pricier than going out to see a movie. If you own a Wii you should play this. If not just for the reason of stopping Space Horror Shooter X or Shallow Fun For All from consuming the industry. Why not try something new?

Depth in mainstream genres

The first person shooter is a genre that demands a lot of the player in terms of understanding the game's complexity. Yet the first person shooter is among the most popular genres today. It's very strange to me that something that difficult can become so popular. But I guess it's like a sport. No one's going to just kick around a soccer ball for the first time and really play soccer. A lot of people are just going to quit because playing soccer when you don't play soccer isn't fun. But say you're young and you've got time and patience. You'll find fun in uncoordinated wanderings of multiplayer Goldeneye maps. And once you fight the inaccessibility you find yourself having grokked a deep and complicated system. And there's just something incredibly fun about grokking something like that.

Game makers know this phenomenon -- at least intuitively. They react to player grokking by supplying to the market deeper games of the same genre. Once a player gets platform jumping he's going to want more. And he's going to want to shoot bullets at the same time. And he'll want harder jumps to plan. And he'll want enemies that he can predict the patterns of enough to dodge them in a platforming world. So he'll have to be challenged while not being frustrated and not being bored. He wants a state of flow. That demand drives game makers to deliver harder, deeper games of the genre.

That's how you end up with Megaman 9. A 10 buck XBLA game marketed toward the people who find the platforming in New Super Mario Bros. boring and easy. I actually like Megaman 9 quite a bit. It goes against a lot of my ideas about indie games and what games should be and how the medium needs to evolve but I don't want to talk about that tonight. Saying that you want games like first person shooters to stop being produced because it's stagnating the medium is hard to say because it's this thirst for a deeper instance of a familiar genre that gives us incredibly deep games like Call of Duty 4. Calling CoD4 deep sounds weird but a lot sounds weird with the present vocabulary of the medium.

There's a place for the mainstream genre and mainstream game. We shouldn't keep people from practicing what they have grokked so well over years. It's fun. I'll worry about games as an artistic medium after getting through this new Wily Castle.

Indie game development in the real world

It's a pretty rough hobby to stay active with, this whole indie game development hobby thing. If my job isn't asking for a ton of my time outside of a reasonable work schedule I find myself compensating by winding down way more than I would. But that's not going to cut it for indie game development. You've got to be immersed in a project to produce anything. An hour here and there just isn't productive in any sort of software development.

I've started writing a game I'm calling Rhythm Shooter. It's about as shallow as it sounds like. You control your small pixelated 2D avatar with your mouse in a top-down shooter. There's a persistent song. To shoot to the left and right you need to click to the downbeat of the music. To shoot up and down you need to right click to the upbeat, that is, you'd need to play syncopatedly with right clicks. You can alternate between left and right clicks but the bullet stream will be lighter for all 4 directions.

I like the idea because I think it'll produce a strong feeling of synesthesia with the player. This should be particularly synesthesic because not only are you asking the player to play to the rhythm of the song but your asking him to play his own beat to strategically get through a situation.

Rhythm Shooter would be easy fun. It's a small project as long as I kept it as a small project. And I'd get another shot at producing something other people found fun.

But it's not happening anytime soon. I'm at the critical point of a project with one of my company's biggest clients. I'm busy. In fact, I shouldn't write anymore. It's late.

Storyteller is why I like indie games

Storyteller, like a lot of indie games, simulates to us the dormant expressive power of the video game. It only takes about 15 seconds of playing this small flash app to deeply appreciate it, though you might find yourself messing with it for much longer.

The staff at playthisthing.com, as always, does a professional job at describing what Storyteller about:

"Taking more pages from Braid than Storytron, Benmergui's Storyteller takes a vertical slice of causality and serves it up for ready manipulation. Instead of pushing a story forward from the perspective of a protagonist, acting in a linear, causal manner and then adapting to the changing flow, you play director and reader all in one. Simple click and drag a character to change their situation and relationships with the other characters. The combinations are quite interesting, and the play feels less like acting out a role and more like puzzling through quantum physics."

This game brings to a light the relationship between narrative and simulation. While interpreting Storyteller as a deconstruction of the fairy tale, just think of what it would have taken to narrate this idea.

The emergence of meaning in this game is what's profound here. While some of the gameplay still means something violent, the gameplay as a whole gives us a small glimpse into the future of a medium capable of being about what stories are about.

Games are just awesome

I'm Ken Grafals. I go by Baseless Rook in various places. The video game is the most exiting art medium today. It's just recently started to rapidly mature as a medium. I've set up this blog because I want to participate in this development. I'll talk about games that I feel I have something to say about and I'll talk about some of my own game development.



A couple of months ago I released my first Game Maker game called Specter Spelunker. You can play it here.