I’m just about done with Guppy, my watercolour fish-simulation game. Still need to work on sound effects and music.

Meanwhile, I made a short experimental game about the deciphering of the Egyptian Hieroglyphs and I’ve started working on a new prototype: Hellas

It’s a game about Greek mythology which takes place on the surface of a vase.

I’ll probably do some new interactive animation posts as well in the near future. I have some games I want to analyze, but haven’t had time to do the writing and video capture.

Stay tuned.

Molyneux, Mechner, Chahi et al discuss the making of their classic games,

Google zooms all the way in on the world’s art,

DICE explains the moves in Mirror’s Edge,

and Gambit talks to various Looking Glass alums.

RPS has an interesting spoiler-filled interview with the writers on Portal 2. They go into the how and why of the characters and story, and how people on the team were given free reign to try ideas and expand upon the basic premise.

Again, SPOILERS… Avoid if you haven’t played Portal 2 (and still want to):

Jay: … there’s never a, “Hey, you go do that so this crashes into that.” It’s just someone’s like, “Oh, Wheatley’s taking over now? Oh, I’m going to go try this!” And there’s that ethos at Valve where the passion goes through. If someone wants to contribute in that way, they will happily work on it for hours and hours, because they’re like, “This will be so cool when it’s in the game.”

Chet: It doesn’t take as long as you’d think. It would take a lot longer if somebody mapped it out, handed it to an animator, and said “Animate this.” But instead when you’ve got the animator say, “Oh, I’ve got this cool idea. I want to do this thing,” they tend to work a lot faster because it’s something they want to do. That makes a big difference.

I think trusting developers to bring their creativity to the table rather than just giving them a list of things to do is always going to give more interesting results.

When you get to be involved in the entire creative process, contributing ideas, then collaborating with other disciplines to put them together, that’s when game development is at its most inspiring…

J. Shea explores believability in fiction,

Victor Navone ponders animating limited characters,

Double Fine joins the podcasting world,

and Gamestorm collects indie design sketches.

A charming game about possessing furniture and scaring people,

Irrational Games lifts the curtain on development,

a kick-ass documentary about indie games in the making,

and your brain on metaphors…

Various gameplay additions also, including the recording of hi-scores…

Next: Red Dead Redemption

Last post I talked about proximity as a gameplay device.

Red Dead is another game that does some interesting things with this… I was somewhere in Mexico doing odd jobs for The Resistance, when ‘man of the people’ Reyes asks me to ride shotgun on a stagecoach. Now, you can choose to sit down next to him, OR if you happen to think he’s kind of a hypocrite, you can ride alongside on your own horse instead, to which Reyes responds:

“I guess my company is not good enough for you anymore, hm?”

You could argue the only gameplay consequence is missing some exposition… but it’s a great step towards making social cues matter in how your interactions with NPCs pan out.

You can also greet people as you walk or ride by. If you press the interact button when close to another character your avatar, Marston, tips his hat and says “hello”, or replies if the other has already spoken.

The game is full of little touches like this. NPCs call out and gesture to you when they want to ask you something and wave excitedly when you come back. If they’d implemented “He went THAT way!”-gestures as well, the mini-map would’ve been rendered all but obsolete.

[I found playing with the mini-map off a lot more enjoyable as it made the game less about riding from mission to mission and more about really exploring]

Of course, you can’t talk about Red Dead Redemption without mentioning the horses. While you could argue they are like the cars from GTA, there’s a believability and life to them that goes beyond that…

Like Agro from Shadow of the Colossus, they are characters you come to care about and this is in no small part thanks to the fluid animation and all the little details in their behavior, from the head-shaking when you push them too hard, to the intricate interaction with the terrain.

If you whistle anywhere in the world your horse comes to find you. It’s possible to keep the same horse throughout the game so you can get quite attached to the creature, to the point where some players felt compelled to mourn the loss of their horse when a stray bullet, or cougar took it…

To me this is the whole point of game animation: creating interactive characters you can believe in…

Last time I wrote one of these I believe I said something about weekly entries… Well, so much for that, but I’ve got a couple of new ones:

… starting with Assassin’s Creed 2.

I’ve talked about Assassin’s Creed before, but the sequel takes things a step further…

Where AC1 had you tagging along automatically with groups of monks at the press of a button, AC2 is all about proximity*. ANY gathering of NPCs can shield you from the eyes of the guards. Just standing close enough to or walking with a small group will make you effectively disappear. Your enemies are looking for a lone assassin. Blend into the crowd and you can travel freely.

Straying too close to the guards when they’re on edge will blow your cover. Like AC1, their state of alertness is communicated through posture.

Moving from group to group, pretending to chat with random pedestrians, weaving through the crowd, you can approach unseen – strike – and be gone…

[Incidentally, there was an interesting talk at the Paris AI Conference about how groups form in conversation, adapting to new arrivals, etc. They don't go quite that far here, but you could layer these systems on top of each other to great effect.]

Hiding in plain sight and adhering to social norms to avoid drawing attention to yourself is not something games experiment with a lot and it’s good to see someone taking this on.

Speaking of which, Spy Party continues to look interesting as well…

* more AI than animation, but it is body language.

Right now there’s an excellent series of interviews on Rock Paper Shotgun about the rise and fall of this particular school of design and its continuing legacy. Smart people talking game design philosophy. Great great stuff.