View Larger (via Feminism And Videogames: A Look At Anita Sarkeesian’s Tropes vs. Women Series | The Creators Project)
Hey! I wrote a thing about Anita Sarkeesian and strong female characters in games. You should check it out. xox, SB
Punk Arcade
View Larger 
View Larger Pippin Barr is a major fave of the Punk Arcade duo. His games are always winners, even if depressing, confusing, slow, simple, or deliberately melancholic! His game Art Game that came out earlier this year is both a visual punchline and a commentary on the artworld in full 8bit excitement. He often creates his games with the game-making non-coder tools we favor, such as GameMaker. Until recently, he’s never charged for his games. There’s been a trend recently for indie game makers to bundle many games together for a low price. Now, Pippin has bundled together a bunch of games in the Mumble Indie Bungle here for free, along with one pay-what-you-wish game. Give it a shot.-LT
Five games for the price of none! A bonus game for the price of one! It could only be the most fabulous Bungle of your dreams! Play the games your grandma might have bought you at a mall in Singapore by mistake! Experience the highs and lows of spying, gardening, dying, loathing, and gluing! Maybe you can even go fishing! -Pippin Barr
View Larger The NYU Game Center is happy to announce the premiere of four new games from Bennett Foddy, Sophie Houlden, Matthew LoPresti, Nik Mikros, and Josh DeBonis at the fourth annual No Quarter Exhibition. This year the show will held on Friday, May 3rd at 7pm and located at the Tisch School of the Arts, 721 Broadway on the 9th floor.
For the past several years the NYU Game Center has commissioned new work from established and emerging independent game developers, challenging them to create games for a social, gallery setting. Previous commissions have included games such as Mark Essen’s Nidhogg (IGF Nuovo Award Winner) and Robin Arnott’s Deep Sea (SXSW Propeller Award Winner), Margaret Robertson’s Drunk Dungeon, Terry Cavanagh’s At a Distance, Noah Sasso’s Barabariball, and Ramiro Corbetta’s Hokra, as well as others. This year’s No Quarter promises a new batch of exciting games that explore the design space of social and local play, with commissions from talented game creators from all over the world.
In addition to our games this year we have also partnered with the video game culture shop Attract Mode to commission five talented artists to create illustrations based on some of the most notable games that have come out of the Exhibition. Each of these pieces will be on display at the during the premiere of the show, and prints will be available for purchase, with all profits from these sales going directly to the illustrators. The motivation behind No Quarter has always been to give game designers a chance to create unique and evocative work, and we’re excited to include visual artists this year as well.
The Exhibition will be held on the 9th Floor of the Tisch School of the Arts, 721 Broadway. Light fare and refreshments will be provided, with drinks provided by the Brooklyn Brewery.
Free and open to the public. Please RSVP here.
See you all tonight!
5 Questions With Aniwey, Creator of Candy Box
I previously posted that I’m in love with the new game Candy Box. I contacted the creator to ask some questions!-LT
What’s your name? Where are you based?
You can call me “aniwey” (with a lower-case a, please ! ^^), I study computer science in the city of Caen, France.
Candy Box plays unlike almost any other game I’ve played. At first I wasn’t even aware it was a game and then I’ve become swept into an extensive, fun RPG game. Was it your intention to make the game seem minimal and to slowly reveal more as you play?
It was absolutely my intention. I think revealing things like that, and modifying the gameplay as we go further in the game is one of the best ways to surprise the player :)
Why did you want to make the game with ASCII art instead of “traditionally” with graphics?
Well, I think there are three reasons : I’m very bad at making graphics, I like ASCII art, and it also allows me to concentrate on the gameplay itself : if I want to add a feature, it’s easy, there’s no art to modify, it’s really quick.
What are some of your favorite games?
Some of my favourite games… I’d say Zelda : Majora’s mask (on N64) for the creativity and the story, Tales of Symphonia (NGC) for the RPG aspects, and Tetris for the multiplayer part - nothing more fun than playing Tetris with a friend :-)
How was Candy Box made?
Candy Box is made with javascript, so it runs entirely inside the browser, and only communicates with the server when saving or loading. I made it in two months on my free time.
Thanks! I’m excited to play more of your games, and I hope I can beat Candy Box!
I hope I answered your questions ! :)
The Candy Box game has been sweeping the nerd internet the past few days ever since it popped up on 4chan. It’s an ascii RPG game that plays in your browser. It starts small and inconspicuous and you think, “what is this thing?” and then all of a sudden you’re hours into it and playing a game much larger than you ever realized. There’s a lot more and people are getting really into it. I don’t want to say any more other than give it a shot! Candy Box!-LT
Discover Games: Tips for designing your first game! →
- Start really small and really simple.
- Don’t worry if it’s good or not, just try something and try to see it through to the end! You’ll have more time and better experience after to make better games!
- Try old concepts and ideas and just fiddle around with them! No harm in…
View Larger I just saw that there’s a class being offered on Skillshare called Play! Make Your First Video Game in 4 Weeks from Scratch with Unity (no coding!). If you sign up at that link you’ll get $10 off, bringing the total cost of this 4-week online class to a whopping $15 US. It begins Wednesday May 1. If you sign up, be sure to post us a link to any games you create.-LT
What do you do when you have a great idea for a game but no programming background? Before you give up, let me introduce you to the world of indie game development. With the technology and tools available today, you can start creating the game you’ve always wanted to make as soon as, well, today! Who is This Class for?This class is for beginners with no prior game development or programming experience. If you know how to code in Javascript, C#, Object-C, Basic, this may be too basic for you.
What You Will Need
- Put aside 7-10 hours a week for 4 weeks as we dive into the process of game development.
- A modern PC / Mac with 3D graphic compatibility (if you bought your computer in the past 5 years, it should be good enough.)
- Download and install the Unity3D game engine http://www.unity3d.com/. We will be using Unity 3D for this class. Don’t worry about the seemingly complicated interface. We will go over it in the class - piece of cake!
- Students will be provided a special student version of the popular Unity 3D Tool -PlayMaker! This is the tool that enables us to create games without writing codes. Thanks to Hutong Games, this special student version will include ALL actions in the tool (note: student version not for commercial use).
A few days ago I posted a game I thought was by Jake Elliott of Cardboard Computer but was actually by Benedict Fritz. So here’s something that actually is from Jake Elliott, video footage of his hour-long talk about “Bad Games Arcade” which includes amateur videogames, Klik n Play Glorious Trainwrecks games created in 2 hours, and more. This was filmed at the Notacon art and tech conference that was held about 2 weeks ago in Cleveland.-LT
View Larger The Different Games Conference is today and tomorrow at NYU’s Polytechnic Institute in Brooklyn. It’s sold out allready, but check out what’s going on here and the arcade games here.-LT
Different Games is a two-day conference on diversity and inclusiveness in digital games, hosted April 26-27, 2013 at NYU’s Polytechnic Institute in downtown Brooklyn.
Different Games is a space for radical discussions of representation in games and the relationship of the medium to designer and player identity.
View Larger Does everyone know freeindiegam.es? You should, and now you do. Curated by indie/diy gamers Increpare, Terry Cavanagh, Noyb, Porpentine and Aquine (yes, only Terry is using his real name. And check all these links for more amazing games!), they post new free downloadable and/or online-playable free games. Check it early and often.
Martian Middle School Dance is by Benedict Fritz, and I’m looking forward to playing more of his games.
I actually thought it was by Jake Elliott, 1/2 of Cardboard Computer, who are responsible for the gorgeously fun-to-play Kentucky Route Zero that I’ve written about before that combines adventure, visual exploration, poetic prose, with a choose-your-own adventure style. I notice similarities that this game uses simple text dialogue and lets you choose a text answer to proceed in the game, letting you make minimal poetic choices that affect your place in the game. Ultimately, it’s an adventure as an alien trying to navigate a middle school dance, and ultimately, isn’t that all life really is? Play it! The game was created in Unity.-LT
View Larger What the hell is Twine? You may have seen me mention it in past posts. Twine is easy-to-use software that lets you make choose-your-own-adventure style stories quickly, easily, and able to be uploaded anywhere online. There’s a huge community of users, all kinds of experimental games, and you can sit down and write your first game in a few minutes without any previous experience.
Twine’s become recently popular as it’s been championed (and has a how-to guide) by Anna Anthropy, author of Rise of the videogame zinesters that’s a manifesto and mini-manual for DIY videogame creation. Anna loves that all kinds of people, including and especially those brand new to games and many who have not been part of the videogame industry, are now able to create games from their own perspective. There’s a gallery of Twine games here, created in Twine! Great article on Vice’s Motherboard about Twine here. One of the things I find interesting is that this turns videogames back into the early lineage of Zork and other super-early videogames. And reminds us that games are about making choices, and giving your players choices to make. It’s pretty amazing that in an era of intense graphics capabilities that something as compelling as a great story can be so transformational.
We’ll try to profile some great games here. Send us ones you’ve made in twine, or your favorites.-LT
View Larger From FastCoLab.
For Frank Lee, the pressure to achieve perfection has never been heavier. Normally, the Drexel University computer scientist only needs to impress students and peers. But this week, his work will be displayed on the side of a 29-story skyscraper. When you’re building the world’s largest video game, the experience needs to be bulletproof.
Lee, the cofounder of Drexel’s Game Design Program, first had the idea when he was driving past the Philadelphia skyline one day in 2008. The newly erected Cira Center building was wide enough that it could be used as a gigantic display for a video game that would be visible from miles away. Even better, the all-glass exterior of the building was already affixed with an LED lighting system that could display simple graphics.
Lee and his colleagues set out to code an enormous version of Pong that would be playable from a half mile away, on the south terrace of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, just across the Schuylkill River. The game’s simplistic nature would lend itself well to the Cira Center’s low-resolution graphics capabilities, as well as to the fact that they now had a hard deadline. That’s because the public unveiling of the game was set to kick off Philly Tech Week, an annual series of events that takes place across the city in late April.
“Super Mario Spacetime Organ” is a short video by Chris Novello. It depicts the NES classic Super Mario Bros. piped through two devices, an illucia patchbay, which Novello invented, and the multitouch Soundplane created by Madrona labs. Using the Open Sound Control protocol (a modern MIDI alternative) Novello uses the hardware to directly manipulate the game’s state in memory.
It starts off simply enough. Novello plays the game for a bit before stroking the Soundplane to make Mario hover in mid air. He begins physically patching parts of the memory into other parts and the game goes wild. Then the mallets come out…
“I was exploring the RAM state of Super Mario Bros., and I discovered that the game could be controlled in amazing ways by directly manipulating the memory,” says Novello. “It is a game we all know super well, so it was really fascinating to experience it in an entirely different way.”
The game in the video is running on an emulator that runs Lua scripts. By writing OSC hooks into the scripts, software from outside the game can read and write to the game’s memory directly. By mapping the OSC addresses in the scripts on to the illucia’s OSC addresses, Novello can change settings and variables by fiddling knobs and flicking switches.
The process isn’t that different from how the Game Genie alters the ways games are played, except that Novello isn’t in it to win. “I never used Game Genie for extra lives,” he says. “I always played as the bosses in Mortal Kombat for the 30 seconds or so before the game crashed!”
Great article by Leigh Alexander on Kentucky Route Zero and connecting it to the history of adventure and text games. She connects its lineage to the early text adventure game Colossal Cave. Look soon for a post on the history of text games, and the new DIY interactive fiction games enabled by Twine that have received a lot of guidance and support by DIY videogame zinestress Anna Anthropy, Porpentine and others.
The game commonly known as the “grandfather” of all adventures was 1976’s Colossal Cave Adventure, a text-only game about underground exploration. Its author, Will Crowther, liked to explore Kentucky‘s Mammoth Cave system, and amid divorce he made the game as a way to share his hobby with his daughters.
The game’s origin story didn’t become widely known until those for whom it was a formative early experience of interactive entertainment could connect and gather via the internet. Mostly, Colossal Cave Adventure earned its enduring place in history because it was no ordinary cave exploration, but an unsympathetically minimalist and occasionally frustrating little game that often detoured into the surreal, with magic and treasures abundant.
Like its inspiration, Kentucky Route Zero rejects the idea that story logic ought to be transparent, or that a game needs challenges or puzzles to take players on a meaningful adventure. It is never frustrating—in fact, it’d be meaningfully accessible even to someone with little to no “video gaming” vocabulary. The primary point of engagement in games is identifying who Conway is and what he’s feeling through subtle choices in dialog—like whether to admit something hurts, or whether he has named his dog.
View Larger Okay, let me say right from the get-go that I’m not totally sure what this thing by artist/musician Yung Pharaoh really is. It’s made in the Unity 3d Game Development Engine and is a total mind-blower, and it has several things going against it. The website link has pretty much no info/background. You can only press the “up” button in the game (which moves the bus forward). And it’s a 130MEGABYTE download. That said, I’m glad I downloaded and experienced driving a bus on a road of doom into the abyss with a debilitating hypnagogic psychedelic sound background and mesmerizing shifting landscape. If not a game exactly, it’s definitely an experience. If you’re a glutton for confusion and visual pleasure, hit the link. P/U/N/K/ A/R/C/A/D/E/. -lt
NEW UNITY GAME FOR REMIX-IT-RIGHT LAST WEEK
