2014 was a pretty meagre year for video games, and even though I finally managed to play 60% of my Steam library, I didn’t finish a lot of games:
That’s three advenutre game and two “non-games”, and you’ll notice there are no mobile games. Can you even beat those?
Last Sunday saw another installment of our popular children hackathon at the Tech Museum in San Jose. We get a room full of middleschool students, pair them with hacker mentors, and let them play with all kinds of technology – programming, electronics, robots, that sort of fun stuff.
I had decided that I wanted to show them how to make flash games in Stencyl. It turned out to be a super popular station,I feel like I gave a lot of kids the gift of game-making to take home, and feedback was positive. Stencyl got mentioned as a highlight in quite a lot of our feedback forms.
What really worked was knowing the tool that I was teaching, and having a plan for how to introduce the kids to it. Stencyl is a game programming framework, but I figured out that “game” is the fun part of that, and “programming” is more of a necessary evil. Except it’s not immediately necessary: The secret sauce to my table was to use the pre-made example games in Stencyl (particularly the run-and-gun game and the angry birds clone), and use them as a basis for exploring the possibilities of Stencyl.
Very much like the Pong and Chess Javascript games I’d used earlier, this gives you a thing that already works: Starting with a single-level Angry Birds game gives you something you can play immediately, and because the kids have all played it on their phone, they know immediately that it is incomplete and have ideas on how it should be made better. And the first steps to making it better involve making content, not features: Everyone started building their own levels (the built-in physics are fun, that also helps), and eventually got to a point that needed a small bit of programming (transitioning from one level to the next), so by the time they got in touch with the scratch-like language, it was because they wanted to solve a very specific problem, and were already quite familiar with how the game was constructed.
This was totally a recipe for making my life easier, too: I had to install the game on their computer (bringing a USB stick saved my life), get them started with the game and show them the level editor, and they’d be self-sufficient for the next 30 minutes. I will probably run this station exactly the same way again next time. What didn’t work well was when the kids wanted to make their own art: The built-in image editor is not very good, didn’t work at all on Linux, and making game art takes a LOT of time during which you’re not really learning something about making games. I found it was best to steer away from that and make them recycle the existing assets in creative ways.
Almost all the kids at my table installed Stencyl on their own computers, and I feel positive that they’ll work on their game (pun intended) until the next HtF, because they clearly had fun. It was great that Stencyl works on Mac, Linux and Windows, because I had about equal amounts of each come to my table, and it would have been a shame to turn someone away.
Rather than post a million tiny links all the time, here’s only the best of what I’ve seen on the web this past week, by categories
GOG.com is currently offering one of my all-time favorite games, Wing Commander for purchase and download. Even though I still have the original floppies somewhere, I whipped out my credit card and figured I’d spend a fun afternoon with it. My friend Francis came over that day, and he’d never heard of it (he is 20 years old and was not quite born yet when the game was released), so I figured I’d show him what a great game it was. Except it turns out it isn’t. Because we live in the future now.
Never mind that it took a while to configure DOSBox properly, the game itself just doesn’t hold up to modern standards in so many ways:
On the plus side, I was right about the game being crack for Francis. The story is great, even full of tropes as it is, and the pacing works, the space combat is exactly what a young nerd who has seen too much Star Wars wants it to be like. There are likeable characters that you care about, and your protagonist’s character development is fantastic. This game would still be a blockbuster if it was made today, with today’s technology. But as it is, it runs in an emulator and is stuck in the technological constraints of the very early 90s.
Compare this with the movies or music industry. If the only way to watch Charlie Chaplin’s movies today was to go to a cinema and watch it on the original celluloid, few of us would even know who he is. But the movie industry has moved with the times, and I can watch Metropolis on Blu-ray and Charlie Chaplin on Netflix. And before this, they were available on VHS and Laserdisc.
I strongly believe the Game Industry is leaving lots of money on the table by neglecting its back catalog in this way. There is an entire generation of consumers that have never played the great games of the 90s, and we’re discouraging them from that because we’re basically letting these games rot.
What it takes to keep these games attractive is not a reboot every couple of years. Those are expensive and risky, as DNF should have shown all of us. Why aren’t we just keeping the original games fresh? If new hardware comes along, or the way people consume games changes, it should be so much easier to adapt an existing game to that then to make an entirely new game. To use my Wing commander example: Support game pads. Port it to consoles. Sell it on Steam. If numbers are still good after 10 years, pay a studio to re-do all the art in higher resolution, using the originals as their guide. Don’t make me use an emulator.
There are a few games that get this. Another World had a 15th anniversary edition with new graphics and a port to Windows. Monkey Island released a Special Edition that was the talk of the press, because who doesn’t love Monkey Island? It’s gorgeous, and it got me to play through one of my favorite games one more time. And you know what? The story holds up, the humor is still funny, and it doesn’t feel like I’m playing something that came out of a time capsule.
I wholeheartedly agree with this article in the Escapist: Give me a Win Button
I have a number of games that I absolutely love to bits, but I haven’t been able to finishe them simpl because I’m stuck at some boss or other thing and cannot bring myself do sit down again and try and beat it. And with every month I don’t do it, I forget how the comboes in the game work, and my chances of beating the game get worse. So I’m left halfway in the game, and I’ll never get my money’s worth of awesome.
This affects the following games:
Game Designers: Please give me some cheat codes. I know I complained about them when I was a teenager, but I have changed my mind.
2008 is over in a couple of hours. Time to make a few predictions for 2009:
Happy 2009!
Today’s Indie game discovery is Rescue: The Beagles. It’s a side-scrolling game with procedural content, the basic idea is very retro, but it’s fun to play.
I wish I had written this. Really. I feel that I need to write more small things, keep the brain active. Anyone want to partner up for some weekend coding?
Stop whatever you are doing, and play Passage. It takes 5 minutes to complete, and you owe yourself that. Download for Windows is here. You will not regret this.
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Stop whatever you are doing, and play Passage. It takes 5 minutes to complete, and you owe yourself that. Download for Windows is here. You will not regret this.
I am very late to the party with this, there have been reviews everywhere. I’m kinda happy that I didn’t read any of them before I played the game, because that let me experience it on my own terms first. When you’e done it, read the Creator’s Statement. Done? What did you think? And is it Art?
If you missed this game, you’re not alone. As someone who has played it, let me recommend this game warmly: It’s among my favorites on the Gamecube, and one of the few games I played all the way through. Soon now it’s coming to Steam, so go and get it!
It looks like all the good adventures are being put on Steam these days: The longest Journey, Jack Keane, Sherlock Holmes, Beyond Good & Evil and not to forget, the excellent Telltale games. As an adventure gamer, I should rejoice – just one wish: Somebody convince Lucasarts to do the same. I’d absolutely buy Monkey Island over again.