Some quick minor updates here.


I was at Video Games Live and it was pretty good. Definitely worth it if you ever get the chance. I saw several friends and contacts from the games industry, and noticed several shoutouts to games in the form of t-shirts and costumes, including:
The Legend of Zelda (x6), Portal (x3), Sonic (x3), Mario (x7), Batman, Star Wars (x2), Final Fantasy (x2), Mass Effect, Resident Evil, Pokemon (x3), Assassin's Creed, Megaman, Guild Wars, Call of Duty, PacMan, Kingdom Hearts, Jurassic Park, Guitar Hero, Halo (x2), TF2, HL2, Space Invaders, Uncharted, Star Trek, D&D, and Alice


Also note that Global Game Jam is coming up and the rules have just been updated: http://globalgamejam.org/sites/2012/igda-salt-lake-city

Here is my entry for the 0h game making event. Make a game in zero hours. (To read more about the event: http://0hgame.eu http://ludumdare.com )

The idea was pretty simple but original so I thought it would work well for this event. I still took more time than I would have liked, since I didn't use a framework I wrote beforehand or anything, and I underestimated how much time the art would take.

Head over here to try it (Flash Player): http://vazor222.com/Pizza/Pizza.html

I attended the PushButton summit and GEEX this weekend. There were many great speakers, and I got a chance to help some people with my "How to get into the Video Game Industry" panel. It was pretty awesome seeing ChAIR and Eat Sleep Play coming out to participate and winning awards, and catching up with many old contacts.

For the Game in a Day event at GEEX, our theme words were 8-bit, disease, jewels. I threw together a game in my spare moments during the event. It is 8-bit because there are 8 toggles you switch on and off to play. It is disease because the algorithm does not guarantee you can win, so sometimes it is impossible. It is also addicting to try to solve these kinds of puzzles. Finally it is jewels because the line drawing algorithm is designed to make crystalline type structures.
Head over here to try it (Flash Player): http://vazor222.com/linetastic/linetastic.html

This month was "Story Game" and I've had this idea for a while (which is loosely based on Corvus' new game Bhaloidam: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/corvuse/bhaloidam-an-indie-tabletop-storytelling-game) where two AI agents determine the dynamic elements of the story.

In two short days all I could do was have the agents dynamically determine where the frontlines are in an ongoing battle. So I framed the story around this and made it a ninjas vs robots game. The game is realtime so you need to read quickly or you will miss things. Luckily it's fairly short so you can replay to find anything you might have missed.

Head over here to try it (Flash Player): http://vazor222.com/cardwood/cardwood.html

When I read the EGP Theme this month, I thought about it for a few moments and then had an idea that I felt captured the theme in a unique way.

This is a game that disintegrates itself as you play it.

You have to mess up to see it start to break down. If you play perfectly, there is no particular reward for winning, and the game continues forever and is rather easy.

In a sense, it is ~8 games in one, including the game it starts out with that has all three game mechanics enabled, games that have a mix of some of the mechanics enabled, and the last "game" with no mechanics enabled.

You could apply this concept to games in various ways. For example in an RPG you have a feature to talk to NPCs. Perhaps you have an option to ignore, or skip all conversations. The game remembers this and from then on you never do conversations again. Or perhaps in an action game, between levels there could be a minigame to try to earn a bonus life. If the user fails the minigame in a certain way or skips it many times in a row, or otherwise expresses frustration with it, they don't get that minigame presented to them again.

Anyway, I am glad to have something much more experimental this time. I made it in ~6 hours over the course of 3 days. Instructions for the game mechanics are in the game.

Head over here to try it (Flash Player): http://vazor222.com/integamerated/Integamerated.html

So the EGP Theme this month motivated me enough to crank out a quick game. It is very simple and not very experimental but it fits the ZOOM theme a couple ways. I made it in ~2 hours so you could say I zoomed through the development. Then of course the game itself has a speedy cube as the main centerpiece, zooming around a lot.

Head over here to try it (Unity Web Player): http://vazor222.com/quickpoint


Also here is a quick note about what I saw at the recent Indie Game Night.

 

Here are my notes from GDC- mostly technical sessions focused on online games and server scaling.




 

I should have updated this sooner, but for the record I am still working on projects. Right now it is an iphone game for my brother, and it takes up all my spare time, so I don't do many experimental games at the moment.

It should be noted that I did participate in the Global Game Jam this year, and made a game:
http://www.globalgamejam.org/2011/eat-sleep-prey

In other news, I am tired and my shoulder hurts. I am playing Aquaria, SC2, Guild Wars, and TF2 and D&D here and there. I am also trying to catch up on all the http://experimentalgameplay.com games from last year. Some of them are pretty awesome!

Had a great time- very casual group meeting this time. Nick's talk was short and sweet and there was pizza and plenty of projects on display. Low-ish turnout but still the quality of demos was high overall. It was great to see NinjaBee's latest updates on A World of Keflings- Nintendo/Blizzard/Valve quality in the mini RTS genre. Frayed Knights and Siphon Spirit were way awesome- both of them are starting to look really polished and ready to put up for sale. My favorite for the night was a game called Recursion by the great folks over at Gabob - Recursion is a mind bending cross of rock paper scissors, pacman, and time travel. Thanks as always to Greg for putting it all together!

I haven't posted anything for a while and I recently wrote up these answers in an interview so I thought I'd post them here. I am still facing difficult server load issues at work with our online game and working on an ipad project on the side which is taking away time for experimental gameplay projects. That and StarCraft II and Guild Wars and Team Fortress 2, heh.