Procedural content generation has been applied to video games forever to create random content and to reduce the space requirements for games. Roguelikes are a genre that generally depend on procedural generation for level creation. And recently, Will Wright’s Spore has put this idea in the spotlight, since the game is mostly procedurally-generated.
But all in all, I think this is a concept that is still relatively unexplored, and it could be applied creatively to every part of a game to do some really neat stuff! The focus of this competition is to develop a 4-week game that uses PCG to create compelling, new content every time the player starts a game.
I worried that we might not be seeing any more of nenad’s excellent looking shooter Ablation X, but thankfully that’s not the case. Fantastic! A couple of days ago he updated his blog at 16×16.org with some information about its progress, as well as this video:
He’s teamed up with a musician called Aesqe, who also posted a bit about the game on his blog here. As well as recording the video above, Aesqe has added a soundtrack to the original trailer, which you can check out after the jump…
Hmmm, this is most definitely intriguing. Ian McConville, who’s probably best known for his work on the webcomic Mac Hall, joined Three Rings (Puzzle Pirates) in 2006 as an artist. What he has been working on there was anyone’s guess until about a week ago, when he revealed Whirled to the world (via his new webcomic with Matt Boyd, called Three Panel Soul).
At first glance, Whirled appears to be your average game portal/social network, but it’s a bit more than that. Ian describes it on TPS as “a Flash-Based Object Oriented Multi-User Dungeon.” Three Rings calls it “a web-based social world fueled at every turn by player created content.”
Aside from playing games alone or with other players, you can create your own Flash games and hook them up to Whirled via a free multiplayer library supplied by Three Rings. Ian himself designed a simple brawler (see image) with it that’s pretty awesome.
In the games you can earn points which can be used to buy things, including assets (avatars, pets, etc.) created by other players. You can also create a personalized “room” from the ground up and then connect it to other players’ rooms. These rooms can be embedded into any website, where anyone, account or not, can access it (guests show up as little ghost avatars).
It’s obviously early in the beta, but I’m excited by the idea… it seems like the next logical step for social networks, game portals, and MMOG’s could be right here.
The results are in! Voting for The VGNG Competition is now over, and our buddy Farbs caught 16% of the vote with his really-rather-brilliant ROM CHECK FAIL, followed close behind by Farmergnome’s excellent My First Skydiving Academy. All in all, the VGNG Compo was a huge success. It’s been said before, but all the entrants should be really proud of themselves for participating, and making some really good shit!
Regarding the next competition… keep your eyeballs peeled. You never know when or how it’s going to hit. But you can expect that it’s going to be a lot of fun!
Penny Arcade and Hothead Games have announced the launch of Greenhouse (Beta), their new portal for downloadable PC titles. The first title to be launched, of course, is Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, which is being developed by Hothead.
[Jerry “Tycho”] Holkins says that the idea is to give indie gamemakers a better financial shake. “I think that most publishing arrangements are full of shit,” he says, pointing out that Greenhouse will give indie gamemakers a better share of the profits.
Naturally, the games will be hand-picked by Tycho and Gabe themselves. No indies are currently on board, although Gabe did have this to say in their interview with Wired:
[If] you’re asking me what sort of things are out there right now that I would love to see on Greenhouse? The crayon game. Crayon Physics. That’s the sort of thing that I would love to put in front of our audience, and say, you guys should play this, definitely. And obviously, we can link it, but to be able to actually distribute it through Greenhouse would be fantastic. It would enable us in a way that would be easy for the developer to get it out there with a royalty structure that is not full of shit. Which I think is a great combination.
So what to say, other than that this is exciting news? The enormous, built-in fanbase, the general attitude… I hope the PA guys pull this one off.
I guess metanet and Nick Waander’s “Beyond the Postmortem” interview (which was incidentally conducted by insert credit’s Brandon Sheffield) sparked some controversy, because they were so candid about some of the failings of the service. One of the biggest being that the ratio of good games (like N+) to bad (like Toyota Yaris Racing) is totally out of whack.
metanet has since clarified their position a bit by saying that the people they worked with at Microsoft were good, and that they weren’t complaining about their sales (N+ was released after the interview).
But overall, what they said was much less controversial than I thought it would be (natch). It’s obvious to anyone who follows XBLA that there are way too many crappy games on the system. I’m sure part of the reason is that legitimately good developers are put off by the service’s notoriously difficult certification process (Minter rant alert), and prohibitive cost (possibly upwards of $125,000). And, of course, there was the bomb dropped around GDC 2008 that royalty rates have since slipped from 70% to 35-45% (depending on your sales).
The obvious fallout from all this is that Sony and Nintendo can probably look forward to an exodus of developers to their systems in the coming months.
Wow, amazing turnout for the Video Game Name Generator Competition – we have 48 hot hot entries for you to rub up against! A new record!
The quality and variety of the games is really just inspiring. I had a blast watching the development goin’ on, and the results met and exceeded expectations. I’m alternately excited and fearful by the prospect of later competitions – on the one hand, you guys are obviously honing your game-making skills like crazy… on the other hand, that means I’ll probably have to spend the rest of my life compiling the great games that are going to come out of the next compo!
I was also really happy to see so many new faces in the forums. Even if you joined just to participate in the compo, it was great to have you guys around, and I hope you stay!
Well, my blathering on isn’t really doing anyone any good. Just check out the games. And for everyone who participated, you should give yourselves a hearty clap on the back. This is legendary stuffs.
Special thanks to the creator(s) of the VGNG, ‘cause that thing rocks, and also to moi, who compiled the final list of games and made my life a lot easier.
EDIT: Fixed Time Shark’s link and added BaronCid’s Super Mario Versus Programming in China to the list (it’s a pen and paper game!). Sorry about that, guys!
Heather Kelley, aka “moboid,” aka one part of the experimental game group Kokoromi, has put together an event called “The Art of Play,” which will take place at Carnegie Mellon University on March 31st and April 1st.
The aim of this Symposium and Arcade is to survey the games that brought us to this moment with their unique creative vision, and to frame the field moving forward, as game makers finally abandon the question “CAN games be art,” and begin to ask ourselves in how many ways they WILL be.
Sounds good to me! If you’re in the Pittsburgh area, drop by – the event is free and open to the public.
Guest speakers/panelists include Phil Fish (Fez) and Jason Rohrer (Passage, Gravitation).
Hey, guys, I’m happy to announce a new addition to the TIGSource family: TIGdb, the indie game database! It’s a searchable, sortable compendium of independent games and independent developers.
Jeff and I have been talking about this for a while, and this weekend we finally got together and just set the damn thing up. 14 hours of video game music, disgusting energy drinks, and designing/hacking later, we came up with what you see here!
One thing that’s pretty cool is that we have a rating system. Anyone can sign up for an account and start rating games (out of five stars). Eventually, these accounts will let you do more, like keep track of your favorite games or submit games to the database. The task of populating the database is a monumental one, so it’d be great to crowd-source this… but until we have some controls in place, me and Terry (and perhaps a few other people) will be adding the games. I will, however, take submissions/suggestions very seriously! See this thread for details.
So yeah, this is a very early version of the site, but it’s a great start, I think. Once the site levels up a bit, there are a lot of things we could do with it. In an earlier post, we briefly discussed the idea of alternative business models for indies… well, once we have them all organized and sorted in one place, I’m sure there’s a lot you could do to that end…
But for now – sign up, rate games, and excuse any errors, unfinished bits. It was kind of a mad rush today to get the current 40 games/26 developers up so we could make the site public. I hope you like it!
I’m a fan of Passage and Gravitation, Jason Rohrer’s self-described “artgames,” but I know a lot of people find them irritating (to downright reprehensible!). Well, however you feel about the games, perhaps Jason’s new project, a monthly article for Escapist Magazine called “Game Design Sketchbook,” might convince you that the man at least has some interesting ideas!
In his inaugural design sketchbook, Jason brings up a concept that has spelled doom for many a promising game developer – perfectionism – and developed a game around it.
The game itself is fun and I think illustrates the concept pretty well – there were quite a few moments where I felt like I was obtaining some further insight into my own tendencies. However, it’s not a game that I would play too many times over. This is, perhaps, indicative of some sort of failure of Perfectionism as a game… I think if the production was not so sparse it would be more suited for repeated playthroughs.
As a design sketch I think it works pretty well, however.
