“Don’t forget to move your car,” my dad said. “It’s a thirty-seven dollar ticket for parking in front of our house.”
“Thirty-seven exactly? And you knew that off the top of your head?”
“Of course I did. Want to see the check stub? You can pay by credit card, but there’s a one dollar fee for that.”
“Don’t worry, Dad. If any cops see my fifteen-year-old car parked in Upper Montclair, they’ll skip the ticket and just tow me away.”
Before settling down to create the full length Crayon Physics Deluxe, Petri Purho, of the one-man game studio Kloonigames, wrote one minigame a month. You can really see that creativity and adaptability in the finished Crayon Physics. Each level of CPD is a new crayoned picture, and players interact by drawing ramps, levers, spinners, stairs and other contraptions to complete the brilliantly simple objective of bringing the red ball over to the star. In the first couple of levels, the red ball reaches the star by means of stairs or a slide, while later levels involve levers, weights and all kinds of moving parts, for an irresistible mix of coloring outside the lines and Rube Goldberg contraptions.
Remember those old Sierra games, where you’d go to cross the road and get hit by a car? Get into an elevator and plunge to your death? Pet a cat and contract a particularly virulent strain of rabies? Well, you see where I’m going with this. Games that screw players for creative problem-solving or exploration just aren’t fun.
Crayon Physics Deluxe is an excellent sandbox game in that it’s never punishing for players to experiment. If your experiment fails, a new red ball appears. You’re not timed, you’re not losing points for screwing up, the only real effect of failure is that you haven’t met your goal and so you need to try again. With unlimited attempts, feel free to try any crazy ideas that come to mind. Write your name in crayon and see what happens! Build a swing or a seesaw!
The endless supply of new chances has a Civ-like “one more turn!” effect, and coupled with the rewards of seeing what’ll happen, can make this an addictive game. And, although you’ll be trying again and again, CPD thankfully stays clear of all those annoying attempts at encouragement. No saccharine requests to please try again here.
The sandbox-y aspect, and the lack of punishment make Crayon Physics a great game to introduce to a non-gamer in your life. Because the controls are so intuitive, you won’t be spending a long time explaining the many uses of the A button. Everything in CPD is done with the mouse, so if you can master Paint, you can start crayoning creations. A simple, intuitive set of controls goes a long way towards making a game playable, you don’t want to mash buttons while you sort out what A and B do in each situation. CPD eliminates that learning curve without eliminating the new-game challenge.
Crayon Physics keeps the cute crayon style throughout the game. After completing the basic levels, players hop in a messy crayoned boat and sail to new green-outlined islands, full of new levels. Even the game menus look like something your little niece or nephew would want you to hang on the fridge.
By being so brilliantly simple, Crayon Physics Deluxe highlights everything that’s overblown in typical mainstream games. It’s an addictive game, without any half-naked women, any explosions or any blood, it’s great to see a game that goes in a totally different direction.
Originally written February ’09, for AngryGamers.com
Saturday morning at IndieCade was the Iron Game Dev Challenge. I was excited to see so man creative devs together, and I’m kind of fascinated by what goes into a game. No matter how many games I playtest or how many developers are kind enough to talk with me, I always see it as a three-step process.
1: Clever idea
2: ???
3: Game
In the spirit of community-based video game design, the moderators opened the session by taking suggestions from the audience for the game’s theme. I was hoping differential calculus, the Spanish Civil War or ginger ice cream would be chosen from the list of shouted suggestions, but the panel picked a more art-game theme, birth. (I blame Brenda!)
Nine developers formed three teams of three, quickly proclaiming themselves East Coast, California, and People Who Aren’t American. Everyone had access to a table of office supplies and summer-camp art supplies, audience volunteer playtesters and one hour to work on their game.
And then moderator Eric Zimmerman revealed the super-secret ingredient: Band-Aids. Team International would like you to know they’re called “sticking plasters.”
Other IndieCade talks discussed how games are never really finished (I feel like my writing is never finished, I just stop improving it around the time my editor’s requests become death threats), but the three teams had to produce a working prototype in an hour.
East Coast immediately chose to call their game BirthSpank, and in what seemed like minutes, they had ten audience volunteer playtesters in a huddle, holding their breath and sticking band-aids. Their game asked players to form two teams and compete to make a band-aid chain, while holding their breath. When a player’s need for oxygen overcame their need to play, the team had to stop, and one player — the doctor — would cut the band-aid chain in two. The band-aids had different point values (Hello Kitty were worth the most. No word on the point value of Spiderman bandaids), and the team with the highest-valued smaller half would win.
Since the game relies on players holding their breath, it was pointed out that it would be easy to cheat. I don’t really like anti-cheating mechanics. Whenever I’m presented with anti-cheating rules at an exam, I start thinking of how easy it would be to get around it. Seriously.
Team Not-America used the band-aids for my least favorite use: Pulling them off. This is a partner game where one person must guess how many seconds between their partners’ breaths. Let’s not dwell too much on the ow factor of band-aid — sorry, sticking plaster — removal here.
Again, the themes of breathing, birth, teamwork and pain appear pretty clearly in an experimental game.
It was clear the California team had a completely different approach when they changed their name from Blind-Babymaking into SuperSperm Each player stuck on 1, 2 or 3 patch band-aids, which divided them into Egg, Sperm and SuperSperm. I was laughing too hard to take down which number was which, but the object was for sperm and supersperm was to find an egg. The egg was trying to avoid the ordinary sperm, and find the supersperm, all by blindfolded groping, er. by touch.
At this point, a guerrilla team of audience members demoed a PC game they’d thrown together during the session. (I didn’t get these guys’ names — let me know if you did!)
Winners were decided via audience clap-off, but it seems like West Coast’s, uh, conception-related activities, were the most fun.
I have a lot more to say about IndieCade, but this moment really captures the weekend.
Saturday night was Brenda Brathwaite’s tearjerking discussion of her new project, One Falls For Each Of Us. This is a game, well, I don’t think game is the word I want, but an interactive experience based on the Trail of Tears. (I talked about Brathwaite’s Train on ThumbGods a while back, a similar one-of-a-kind game/experience based on the Holocaust.) She talked about her inspirations for One Falls For Each of Us, and showed slides of her pieces in progress, 50,000 (not hyperbole) meeples stained brown. As a teacher, I was focused on the themes of games as interactive experiences for education and the failures of the average history class to bring home the emotional truth of historical events.
Leaving the talk, some of the Zombies saw Humans and started chasing them to eat their brains.
As seen in a downtown parking lot. Just because I’m having an awesome weekend doesn’t mean I’m too cheerful to mock mistakes.
Last night, on my way from LAX into Los Angeles for IndieCade, I snapped some touristy pictures of the neon and palm trees and general LA glamour. I know that bookish girls who majored in Latin are supposed to eschew the glitz and see through the phoniness of LA, but I don’t. I kind of love it.
So I leaned out the window of the airport and snapped some pictures in different directions. It was getting late at night by this time. See, I missed my connecting flight in Philly because someone had just repainted a strip on the runway and we weren’t allowed to taxi in until it dried. (Yes, really. This isn’t blog hyperbole because it would never occur to me to paint stripes on an active runway.) I started giggling at the thought of being stuck while we watched paint dry. You know when you shouldn’t giggle? On a plane full of angry people. I’m just saying.
I unlocked my phone to take another picture. It unlocked and faded to black. I tried again. It went black. I tried a couple more times, because if something doesn’t work the first six times, it might on the seventh try. I was starting to panic. OH NO! MY PHONE! HOW AM I GOING TO CALL OR TEXT MY INDIE FRIENDS? HOW AM I GOING TO GET TO INDIECADE WITHOUT MY LA METRO APP? AND MY EVENT SCHEDULE!
Then I realized that that black screen wasn’t a broken phone, but a flashless picture of an LA night.
From this point on, everything I ever write about usability can easily be countered with YOU TOOK A PICTURE AND THOUGHT YOU KILLED YOUR PHONE.
I’m chatting about text-based Choice of the Vampire over on RoboAwesome:
CotV asks players a lot of questions about their goals for their, uh, un-life. Do you want to create lasting art, find true love, rise to the top of the vampire society or accumulate power? This helped me feel like my character had actual motivation, but I was frustrated by the lack of progress towards my stated goal. Choice of the Vampire is the first of several planned installments, so hopefully I’ll get another chance at rocking the undead art world.
I couldn’t quite work it into the post, but it’s worth mentioning that the CotV story includes the botched Jackson assassination, one of my favorite bizarre history moments.
From the post Girls Got Game! A Look at Gender & Gaming, on the usually-awesome site Frisky Mongoose:
First and foremost, what would you say if I told you that 60% of women that play games don’t actually consider themselves gamers?
What would I say? Oh, I’d just be preparing myself for another one of these ZOMG! Girls play social games! conclusions. Of course people who play the odd Facebook game (ZOMG! Girls playing games! All game players aren’t antisocial teenage boys!) don’t call themselves gamers, kind of like the way people who enjoy fixing an occasional grilled cheese don’t call themselves gourmet chefs. Especially if “gourmet chef” was usually associated with angry, unshowered teenage boys.
(Yeah. Casual games are grilled cheese. Not my best metaphor ever.)
Via Girls Got Game! A Look at Gender & Gaming | Frisky Mongoose
A recent post on Brenda Brathwaite’s blog discusses “the frequently forced, painful and cramped narrative-on-rails that is the in-game tutorial” (Full text here). These are usually an awkward blend in media res urgency with a constant jarring reminder of what keys to press. Her example is “Grab that gun! Let’s go! They’re after us. Oh, and if you need me to give you ammo, press CTRL A.”
I like a world-building intro, whether it’s cinematic or a story, but I prefer jumping in to play. (Amanda D’adesky has an awesome post in defense of cut scenes as a storytelling mechanic.) Ideally there’s an easy setting or a slow curve, so I don’t get killed too badly while figuring out what’s going on. The ideal game would let me know about shortcuts once my basic commands become unwieldy, but once I have too many items in my inventory, too many attacks in my action bar, I’ll look up shortcut keys on my own.
And the usual tutorial feels repetitive, like my credits didn’t transfer and I’m sitting through Gaming 101 again. We don’t need to be told W walks forward and space bar jumps, and I can work out on my own how to go into the Options and reverse the mouse. (Apparently no one else likes playing that way. My only conclusion is that developers put that option in just for me. Thanks!) We really only need to be shown the controls if something’s going to be unusual, like M represents not Map but Massive Self-Destruct Button, or if there’s a special mechanic for the game.
We all know my personal preference for jumping in without reading the instructions (Stop nodding, Mom and Dad!), but what do you think about detailed tutorials? Are they essential to understanding a new game? Do you like a tutorial level, or a slow introduction of skills and abilities, or just experimenting and seeing what happens?
A couple months ago, Eric and I had this conversation.
Eric: Do you want to come to Carolyn and Dave’s wedding with me?
Meg: Let me think about this… Do I want to see your sister Kristine in a dress? A dress your fashion-design sister picked out for your swamp sister? With makeup and heels and everything? Of course I do!
The wedding was this weekend, and it was absolutely gorgeous. A glowing bride, perfect New England fall evening, classic fifties style. But it’s just possible that I took more photos of Kristine in girl clothes than of the newlyweds, the decorations and the ceremony site combined.
