Despite being unfinished, not particularly polished, and quite a short experience, Spy Party offers a lot to talk about. In Spy Party, you are one of two people: either you are a spy, attempting to complete a series of covert spy-y tasks . . .
Talking, patting people on the butt, moving statues around, etc.
. . . or you are a sniper, attempting to shoot the spy (and only the spy).
Looking at his watch. Suspicious.
Spy Party is necessarily asymmetrical and necessarily multiplayer. The game ends in one of four ways: the spy fails to complete his objective before time expires (sniper wins), the spy completes all his objectives and time expires (spy wins), the sniper shoots a regular partygoer and not the spy (spy wins), or the sniper shoots the spy (sniper wnis). It turns into an interesting game of "how good are you at fitting in" and "how good are you at seeing what doesn't belong." If the spy completes one of his objectives too visibly, he can be dead in a second; if he convincingly blends in, the sniper can make a false move at the last second. If the sniper isn't careful the beam from his rifle is visible, cuing the spy in that he is being watched.
The players aren't directly competing, but you will always have the other player's intentions and information (what you know about them, anyway) guiding your decisions. Did the sniper notice the statues got switched? Did the spy just signal the double agent, or was he faking it to confuse you? Does the sniper know all the little tells that give you away? The asymmetry makes the feeling of the game very different from other kinds of player-vs-player competition. As a spy, you are exposed and vulnerable; as a sniper, you are powerful but have a lot of pressure on you - when you pull the trigger, you win or lose the game. The variety in the missions and the ability to switch between the two roles help keep things from getting too repetitive.
I want to talk more about the asymmetry, though, because it's what's most interesting to me here. Lots of games are asymmetrical. Chess is mostly symmetrical, though one player starts first. Starcraft introduces some asymmetry, with players having different units and different responses to threats. This is one of the few multiplayer games with an asymmetry in goals, where players are competing for different things. What's interesting is that, in some ways, it's more like a single-player game than a multiplayer one. Lots of single-player games have asymmetry in them, obviously - Pac-Man is a simple example, since you want to eat the dots and the ghosts want to eat you. In some ways, it doesn't matter that your opponent is a human, since you're just trying to complete your own goal, and no one is directly competing with you. But the added element of human psychology makes the asymmetry unique - no computer could make the kinds of decisions - and mistakes - a human makes, and that knowledge is how a spy blends in and how a sniper perforates the ill-fitting guest. The game is so subtle, and the information transmitted so sparse and unreliable, that between two experienced players (this is a hypothetical game not involving me) it turns into quite the battle of wits. The conflict is personal, the experience is tense, and the game is quite different and fun from most multiplayer games, symmetrical or not. There's a lot more coming here, and what we've seen so far is very promising. I hope someday AIs can give us this kind of silly-yet-nailbiting psychological fun, but I still don't think we'll ever match the satisfaction of seeing the score screen at the end and knowing the other guy slipped up first.
Oh, and did I mention how slick the proposed art direction looks?
Pretty sure second-from-the-left is based on another, perhaps less wily spy.
Website: http://www.spyparty.com/
The beta is closed without donation (and even then it's limited), but rumors say that may change soon.
Dominique Pamplemousse is first not-currently-existing video game I'm doing a plug for, and that's because it's the first one that seems both like it needs us and we (you, I, others) need it.
If you haven't seen it, it's a stop-motion musical adventure game with a single indie developer, and those are possibly not even the most interesting things about it. It's been featured on Twitter and on the front page of IndieGoGo. You can play the early demo of the game here to get a sense of it. It's strange, it's fun, and it seems potentially quite significant. Deirdra has posted a list of reasons why you should support it, and I want to pull just a few of those out.
Let's start with these:
"If you’ve ever wanted to see a musical turned into a videogame, you should contribute to Dominique Pamplemousse."
"If you like videogames that use stop motion animation, you should contribute to Dominique Pamplemousse."
"If you like videogames with unusual art direction, you should contribute to Dominique Pamplemousse."
The first two should convince you of the third. As a video game - as an aggregate of story, mechanics, art, and technology - this is already doing things we don't see in the industry. We've come a long way in video game artistry, going more towards realism with voice acting and sharp graphics, but I sometimes think that the pace of the technology causes us to skip over some meaningful digressions along the way. The stop-motion art Deirdra's going for has the kind of stylization that the English Major part of me wants to expound on for pages, but for now, just consider whether you've seen anything that, visually, looks anything at all like this in video games. You haven't? Then don't you want to see where she can go with it, and where people after her go with it? New ground doesn't get broken on this front every day. You can help her make it so. The same goes for the musical element. It's a really different, more poetic, way of telling a story. I'm not sure there's been a game yet that has a significant lyrical element as a driving force throughout. Some games have made music a key feature, but it's never felt like a critical mechanic or means of communicating the story. There's space to explore here, and Pamplemousse seems well-qualified to lead the initial expedition.
For me, though, the more significant reasons to support it are the following, again from Deirdra's list:
"If you want to play a videogame featuring a protagonist who defies the gender binary, you should contribute to Dominique Pamplemousse."
"If you want to play a videogame featuring interesting and varied female characters who don’t exist purely for the straight male gaze, you should contribute to Dominique Pamplemousse."
"If you want to play a videogame where the main characters aren’t all white people, you should contribute to Dominique Pamplemousse."
I haven't done a post about gender and video games, mostly because I'm not sure a graduate dissertation would have the breadth and depth to properly address it. Start here, though: Aren't you, as a gamer, a little embarrassed that so few games do ANY of the above in a meaningful way? (Ms. Pac-Man doesn't count.) The problem is that, really, games like this aren't being made. And there are reasons for that - mostly bad ones, but they exist. It's hard in a medium associated with frivolity to really get at some of the issues underlying race and gender so that we can deliver them in a way that feels authentic. I don't really know how Pamplemousse plans to address this, but so far our protagonist is of ambiguous race and gender, and it doesn't seem like we're expected to presume him/her to be a white male. That, by itself, is pretty new. Not by any means completely new, but there's a wealth of cool storytelling to be had in these areas, and again, Pamplemousse looks like a strong place to start.The game still hasn't hit its funding on IndieGoGo. I for one would like to see it do that, but it's running short on time. If you can give $5, you'll net yourself a preorder of the game, and $10 gets you the soundtrack. If you can't give, post about it on Facebook. There's a lot of cookie-cutter crap out there that's too much like what came before it to make meaningful changes to the medium. Don't pass up an opportunity for something novel.
My officially-submitted reason for not finishing Slender is "because f*** that s***," but I feel my credibility would be sullied somewhat if I really couldn't offer any better than that for a review.
Slender is a horror game, based on the Internet-spawned story of the Slender Man (I refuse to refer to it or anything Internet-spawned as a "mythos") , and takes a lot of cues from Amnesia. It fancies atmosphere above all else, forgoes combat, makes the fear of seeing the enemy secondary to the fear of knowing it's there. You are tasked with finding 8 notes, each near a landmark in a densely wooded area. You have a flashlight with limited battery and something hunting you. With each note you find, the enemy's pursuit becomes more intense. If it catches up to you . . . game over.
Given how little the notes communicate, it's unclear why finding them is so critical.
The pacing is perfect. Your flashlight's view is narrow and claustrophobic, and your character's pace is ploddingly slow; there's no way to just rush ahead quickly and complete this task. Worse, pausing or alt-tabbing out ends your game, so there's no way to take a breather when you get scared. Like Amnesia, looking at the enemy is a bad idea, as the note above suggests - staring for extended periods of time is a game-ender. The result is painfully suspenseful; it could be a long way back, it could be right behind you, and your only choice is to carry on forward.
I screamed. It was a prolonged and terrified scream.
It would be pretty easy to say that I didn't finish Slender for the same reason I didn't finish Justine - because I didn't like backtracking, I didn't like completing the same tasks again and again so that I could fail in the same place and start over. It would be true, probably. But it would be hiding the reason why I didn't want to do the same tasks again and again, which is because I was DAMN TERRIFIED the whole time.
This was my setup for playing. The adorable puppies absolutely did not help enough.
The game scared the hell out of me. I'm incredibly pleased about that, that a game so simple - the art and sound is nothing especially out of the ordinary - can come together so effectively and succeed so completely at its purpose. I want this, and games like it, to be successful. These little micro-experiences based on eliciting one specific response and focused on that are at the very least exercises in great game design, and at their very best, great games themselves.
This week, I'm doing short reviews of two games, Justine and Slender, both of which I did not finish playing.
Justine is an add-on game for Amnesia: The Dark Descent - if you download a copy now, it'll come with the main game. Justine uses a lot of the same mechanics, but the gameplay is much different. You play as an unnamed woman, trapped in a dungeon, and follow the commands of a woman named Justine as issued from wax-cylinder phonographs left for you to find.
She's really excited about this technology. It's like watching your grandmother discover Twitter. "Check it out, phonograph! LOL #murder #awfulshamblingnightmaremonsters"
Justine, who is not of particularly sound mind, tells you that you have several tests to take that will serve as indicators of your mental state. These "tests" involve several other prisoners she has captured; you must either find a way to exit the area on your own . . . or activate the emergency exit and kill the captive in the process.
The captives, evidently, have a preference.
You can't save the game, and it doesn't save for you; if you die, you die. Justine does lose a little in scare factor compared to Amnesia; there are monsters, but they're less frequent and they don't feel as central. The knowledge that they could blindly chop all your progress into little irrecoverable pieces does a lot to notch your concern about them back up to where it belongs, though. The puzzles themselves are more complicated than Amnesia's; where Amnesia is mostly about snooping around finding obvious bits, Justine involves a little more thinking, a little more putting together of pieces, and yes, a little more trial and error.
I felt that Amnesia provided a more complete experience, though to be fair that might be because I completed it. In the end, the perma-death component of Justine kept me from wanting to finish; I could only carefully solve the first few puzzles before dying on the last one so many times before it began to lose its luster. The completionist part of me really doesn't like that about Justine; if I want to finish it, I feel, I have to play it over and over, playing through experiences I've already had, and after awhile of that the original experience - which was quite nice (that is, terrifying) gets watered down a bit. But when I think of the game as it is presented - a test - I can deal with it more easily. It's not a test I passed, and I didn't get to see the ending, but it was an experience I enjoyed, even if incomplete. It's certainly worth a go if you've already got the original game - and why don't you?
So, with the game I'm working on successfully submitted, I'm able to take some time to think about stuff that's less that and more other stuff. This boils down to me trying to decide what video game I should review next, and while I went on a spirit journey about that I decided I might as well think about what my criteria are for picking games to review, and why I think those reasons are important.
1) Reviewing indie games draws attention to games with smaller budgets.
If this is a site where people come to learn new things about games (and I hope it will be, if it isn't yet), then I want them to be seeing games that don't have the benefit of a huge advertising budget, or a recognizable studio name behind them. To me, it's important that people learn about games that don't have that, because as with all art (or all business, really) sometimes the best ideas come from outside what's already established, because they're less restricted by previous successes or the expectations of their audience. Granted, a lot of the games I've reviewed so far have already seen immense popularity or been reviewed by publications with a much broader readership than this one has, but I don't think it'll always be that way, and I'm hoping that people discover a game they wouldn't have otherwise because of this. Plus, I want to believe that there are lots of people like me who want to draw attention to small, independently-produced games, because someday I hope one of them is drawing attention to my own game.
2) Reviewing indie games gives indie developers more power.
When those little games with smaller budgets do enjoy success, that success gives them the ability to take concepts further. Look again at Frictional Games. When they released the Penumbra series in short, episodic form, they were taking some older concepts (point-and-click adventure, first-person action) and by combining them and adding in some really novel horror concepts (like getting frightened by looking at monsters), they created something truly innovative, to which people responded well. With that success under their belts, they took even more risks with Amnesia, making a longer, more-involved, higher-quality game that explored the same concepts. This happens in big industry games too, of course, but what's exciting to me is that successes in the established industry often lead to less experimentation, not more; people loved Portal and Bioshock because they were brilliant and innovative and eye-opening but when the sequels came out, public response was a little wistful. People loved the new games, which executed the original concepts more precisely, but din't really deviate enough from the original to give us the same wonder. Frictional, however, took more risks with amnesia, removing the combat entirely and almost singlehandedly giving new meaning to "survival" in "survival horror." I think a lot of indie developers work independently because they want to take more risks, and if we support those endeavors with our voices (and our wallets), we can effect some really significant change in the industry.
3) Indie games often have lower barriers to entry into the medium (for players).
It's just impossible for me to review a new 40-hour title every week with a day job, and to spend $60 on that game, and I think this belies significant barriers to entry into the hobby of video games. Even for people with sufficient disposable income to plop down $300 on a new game console, or $800 on a new gaming PC (that's if they have the technical know-how to build it themselves) and still have enough left over for $60 games, you also need to have the time to play. Once you factor all those things together, it's a pretty exclusive club. Shorter games lower the barrier to entry created by time, and since game length and price are often interconnected, the cost barrier is reduced too. Moreover, remember how I said indie games can be more innovative? That sometimes (not always!) means they expect less of their players coming in. Sure, your problem solving, rational thinking, and platforming skills are helpful in playing Braid, but those puzzles are probably pretty new. Same with Amnesia; it's creepy as hell, but it doesn't ask a lot of you technically for the most part, and that's important. Skill, time, and money barriers are all reasons why people don't play, and indie games, exploring new concepts and ideas, can compete with big-budget games along these axes even without having a lot of money themselves. I'd like to think that sometimes these reviews might convince someone who doesn't play a lot of games to pick something up and try it out, and they're most likely going to go for ones that won't take a lot of time or money, and that won't make them feel bad if they have trouble with it.
4) Indie games often have lower barriers to entry into the medium (for developers).
I mentioned this before but I wanted to mention it again. I really can't overstate how important the broadening of the developer community is. Not only does it mean that we get really cool games, games that push the boundaries of what qualifies as a game, but we get broader perspectives, broader ideas, and maybe most importantly, broader voices. If video games are going to be treated as an art form, we need the breadth of experience - both technical and personal - that lets us feel, at the end, like we're experiencing something real and significant. All the blog posts and retweets and Facebook shares and Kickstarter donations are our way of saying "We want to see this succeed. We want to tell our friends about this. We want the idea you had to be successful." And sometimes that's something that just seems like a really fun idea, and sometimes it's something really strange and neat that could give the medium a little bit of a shaking up, that could give other developers new ideas and carry the conversation to places it hasn't been yet.
At the end of the day, that's what I want: to be part of the conversation, as a writer and as a developer. There's a lot that's been said but there's a lot more to say yet; I'm excited, really genuinely quite excited, to see how that conversation will go.
I finally completed (I don't want to say "won" or "beat") Amnesia last night, and I'm torn between completely submerging myself in anything related I can find and trying as hard as I can to never, ever think about it again.
From Frictional Games, the studio that brought us the similar-in-concept-but-much-less-terrifying Penumbra series (still quite terrifying in its own right) comes Amnesia: The Dark Descent, a survival horror/adventure-style game that just has me so excited I don't really know where to start.
You play as Daniel, and awake in a dark castle with no memory of how you came to be there. Soon, you find a note explaining that you've erased your own memory, and giving a simple instruction: Go to the castle's inner sanctum and kill a man named Alexander.
Of course, Daniel couldn't be bothered to erase his memory on the far side of all the creepy dungeons between you and your target.
As you explore, you begin to fill in the blanks about what happened in this place, and about who Alexander and Daniel are. What results is a dark and horrifying story that investigates eldritch horror and unspeakable, unimaginable insanity at the edge of human knowledge, of the kind that H.P. Lovecraft made so famous in the early 1900s. That style is much imitated, and we've seen it in games ranging from the original Alone in the Dark to Eternal Darkness: Sanity's requiem, and though those games are frightening enough in their own right they miss what made Lovecraft's work so unsettling: that any writing or technology will always fall short of the sheer terror our own imaginations can produce. Amnesia nails this, and the review could almost end there: It is a terrifying game precisely because it doesn't want to reveal much about these horrors. We know that there is a darkness, a "shadow", following Daniel, slowly but deliberately, and that it will not stop until it has collected him. Unlike the indifferent and seemingly purposeless violence of Limbo, the evil in Amnesia is incredibly personal; if Limbo's nightmare is a grey world of arbitrary gore, Amnesia's nightmare is an unseen, inevitable horror, tailor-made to your worst fears, that seeks you and only you and will not rest until it claims you. The game gives you the sensation of being surrounded and pursued without ever tipping its hand and giving you a clear sense of what it is you're up against. Resident Evil and Eternal Darkness can have big scaries jumping out at you, and it's alarming, but being able to see them clearly, and to best them eventually, gives you back a power that Amnesia doesn't let you have. If you want to know what that's like, watch the teaser:
Not only does Amnesia deny you the ability to fight back - you have no weapons and there is no way to kill any of the monsters roaming the castle's corridors and dungeons - but it denies you even the knowledge of the monsters that would make them less frightening. Daniel, like most people, has a limit as to how much horrific, unnatural, and unholy abominations he can witness before he either has to go stand in the light for awhile or have a lie-down wherever he happens to be at the moment. Staying in the dark or witnessing something unsettling starts to cause Daniel to hallucinate, usually in the form of visual or auditory distortions. When he steps into the light, or solves a puzzle, he recovers some of that sanity. If his sanity drops too low, he begins to stagger and can fall down, leaving him helpless until he composes himself. Because seeing a monster drains sanity rapidly, you can never safely get a clear look at them. You'll spend more than a little playtime hiding in the corner, facing inwards so you don't see anything horrifying. Since that's my emotional inclination anyway, it's great that the game rewards that behavior. You'll come to be afraid just of seeing the monsters, let alone being forced to flee from one.
The puzzles you solve in the game are usually confined to small areas and often quite simple, though there are a few that are frustrating to figure out. The tension comes in trying to carry out your tasks without alerting the monsters, which may or may not even be nearby. Puzzle-wise, the game is nowhere near as mind-bending as something like Myst or Braid, but they're involved enough to give you a sense of accomplishment, and they give you a reason to explore the creepy environments and give those environments further context, adding their own sometimes gruesome flavor to the story.
But what makes Amnesia so successful as a horror game is that it goes far beyond the supernatural to find the player's fear. Monsters are scary, but they're unreal, and we know logically, even if not emotionally, that we'll never be in danger from them. But when the game starts to explore the psychologies of its characters, it finds a darkness in the human soul that is all too believable.
I waited a long time but this guy never got out of the bath. Awfully rude.
The game's supernatural elements act as extreme motivators for the characters, but their responses seem all too believable. The breadth of emotion on display here - curiosity, anger, hatred, self-loathing, cold calculation, fear - plumbs the depths of human experience. Like I mentioned in my player-avatar connection post, the bond formed between you and Daniel - made the stronger because the two of you begin on equal footing, both with no idea who you are or what's going on - serves to amplify the emotions you feel. The notes, diaries, and flashbacks throughout the game detail the events that led up to your current situation, and they all contribute to a miasma of disgust, doubt, guilt, and above all terror that dogs you, like the shadow hunting Daniel, until the end.
Also, pigs!
Which is why I love it. It's hard to describe how I felt while playing the game, because I wouldn't say it was "fun" - a lot of the time, what I felt was quite unpleasant - but the experience was so exact and so successful that it was hard not to be in love with the game for its craftsmanship alone. Like with Dear Esther, the voice acting sometimes dips a little in quality, and in some places the writing feels overwrought or the puzzles a little contrived, and those are serious marks against Amnesia because it's so dependent upon maintaining its atmosphere. But it's appropriately creepy where it needs to be, and even if it doesn't always work perfectly, the places where it does work are vivid and memorable. Should you play it? If you can't deal with horror, or violence, or gore, it may not be for you. But for me, the discomfort I felt with it - at first I couldn't play more than 15 minutes at a time - was a critical part of the experience, and even if I was genuinely upset by it at times, I was simply too engrossed in the story and feel of the game to let it go. The emotions this game elicits, though sometimes horribly uncomfortable, have a power and magnitude almost unmatched in the medium. Only a handful of other games have offered the same emotional intensity as Amnesia, and the acute desperation and fear it evokes is, as far as I've experienced in games, without equal.
Also: Dear Esther's thechineseroom is teaming up with Frictional to make another game in the same universe, titled Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs. I will be following it (from a safe distance) and report as more becomes clear.
So! I'm going to talk about that thing I haven't really talked about yet.
A team of delightfully talented people, collectively called Idle Action Studios, have been working on our first project (hopefully of several!), tentatively titled "Candlelight."
What is Candlelight?
Candlelight is a 2d puzzle-platformer that looks like this:
That's so pretty, isn't it? It's still in pre-proto-alpha. Here is what one character looks like right now:
Note the mask. That'll be important later.
And here is what the other looks like right now:
He's a lot more shy. That's why I put him second.
Two characters might make you think "multiplayer," and when we've had two people sit down to it, that's often how they approach it. But! The game is intended to be single-player. That might make you think that you control one at a time and switch off, or that one is an AI, or that you pick one to play as. But! Those are untrue. You control both at once. This might sound a little complicated, but remember we said "puzzle platformer." Don't picture trying to jump both Mario and Luigi through Bowser's castle, picture trying to position a second character in Braid, or in Limbo (maybe on some of the earlier puzzles). The ability to move both at once, so far, hasn't translated into a need, though most players haven't so far had trouble with that. The controls are relatively simple; the characters can move, jump, and pull levers, and that's about it at this stage.
OK, so you're controlling two characters. At the outset, there's not a lot of explanation of what the characters are doing; they are exploring, helping one another along. When one gets stuck, the other usually has to find a way to help him/her proceed.
ANYWAY. "But Sol," strawperson reader says ("strawman" makes assumptions about my readership that I don't like) "what if I walk the characters away from each other? WOULDN'T THAT SUCK."
Turns out, not really! Check out that picture up above, where there are two small rectangular screens. That's what happens when you separate them! Dynamic split-screen. Your characters get separate screens that separate and rejoin as they go away from each other. Better still: The screens move in relation to one another to give you a sense of where the characters are in relation to each other! So, in that picture up there, the boy is to the upper-left of the girl. In the picture below, they're directly above and below each other:
I guess the boy isn't directly below the girl, but it's close enough, come on.
The characters may have abilities in common, but they aren't interchangeable. Each, in fact, has a special ability. The boy's ability is the one demonstrated in the screenshot above, and the one that I showed you earlier:
That lantern isn't just for show; it causes some objects to appear, and others to disappear - either of which can be good or bad. In situations like this, it lets him see new paths and assist his friend (what IS their relationship, anyway?) along through places she wouldn't be able to get to otherwise. It has its downsides, though - spike pits only he can see, gates that only appear when he's close to him, and so on. It is an ability, but it's also a limitation; it's a fact that sometimes assists and other times must be contended with, and since it can't be disabled, it's something the boy just has to deal with. What's this all about? Seeing. The lantern is the boy's way of seeing the world, and that is both empowering and limiting. The world might conform to the way he imagines it, but maybe that isn't always in his best interest?
What's the girl's power? It's a secret. Unfortunately, her ability is a little more complicated, so we aren't doing it in time for our submission to BostonFIG, and I don't intend to reveal much more about it until we can show it off a little, because it's going to be really neat. I will give you a hint, though: take a look at that mask. Why the mask? If the mask is the counterpart to the lantern, what does that mean? Maybe I'll tell you soon.
So, what else do I have to tell you about it? At this point, not too much - we really want to get more feedback before we tell you more, and we'd certainly like to prototype more. But I'll tell you a little about our influences.
-Super Metroid is a huge influence; the feeling of exploring that cool, creepy underground rule is something I still haven't seen perfectly replicated anywhere else.
-Shadow of the Colossus has a lot of the emotional weight we want our game to have, and it tells us that less is more; I think that game could have had zero dialogue and gotten away with it a-ok.
-Braid has lovely puzzles that break my brain. Are we doing the same puzzles? No. Will our puzzles be that lovely to solve? I hope so. Braid also did a magnificent job of getting emotion across, and that's always something to aspire towards.
-Limbo is dark and dreary and dreamy, and maybe at this stage our game looks a little more like Limbo than we'd thought it would. Is that what we're going for? Not strictly; when we find our style, it will be much different from Limbo. But would I love to have the organic puzzles and creepy, lethargic atmosphere that Limbo does such a good job at.
Questions? Thoughts? Concerns? Post 'em. I'd love to know what's going on in your minds.
"That Asshole!" you've been thinking to yourself. "He said he would talk about video games and then he just took like more than a week off! What kind of stunt is he trying to pull?!"
The answer, gentle strawman reader, is that I have been trying to pull the stunt of meeting a deadline. Which takes a lot of time! But! We have done it (or near enough as makes no difference). We have something to submit to BostonFIG, which is of course the deadline we were rushing at, AND they've done us the fine courtesy of extending that deadline. So we have some touching up to do but none of the blind panic.
"OK, Asshole," you say, less confused but still angry, "then if the deadline got changed, why haven't you been posting??"
Well, actually, I'm going to be! New post Tuesday, wherein I will try to describe what I can about the game we have been creating. It's kind of going to be a lot of fun! Here. I will give you a teasing picture.
Hey! Woah! What's going on there? Looks like a guy and a girl, and maybe some other stuff? Awfully monochrome - is that on purpose? I wonder how you move them, and how that girl is going to get out of there. Man! So mysterious! I guess I'll give some more details soon, maybe? Development right now is still in the "put something together and see where that goes" phase, and our next phase will probably "prototype the hell out of a million different ideas and find the fun." I hope you'll help us find the fun.
Also - you know I review indie games, right? And that most of the games I've reviewed so far have been more popular indie games because I know and love them but that doesn't mean they're the only games I want to know and love, right? So, what I'm saying is, if you want me to review your game (people coming here from Twitter, you especially!) drop me a line or leave a comment and I'll get right on that. I have a lot of games to play right now! But I'd love to give attention to someone who needs/wants/deserves it. So let me know.
Hello!
There will be a brief pause in posting, beginning last Tuesday and ending a week from today. The Boston Festival of Indie Games is happening soon, and I am working on a game I'd like to submit. This is very exciting! But it also takes a lot of time and energy and leaves me with very little of either for blogging. When I return in a week, I will be happy to explain a little about the game myself and my team, Idle Action Studios, are producing. Stand by!
