peng ink

COME. That is all.

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“Heather Kelley, Rod Humble and Gregory Peng — all experienced game designers — give a look into the process, people and resources involved in creating a video game. Aside from a game’s plot, art and music, they argue that game developers offer an artistic statement in controlling, through “rules,” the way a player interacts with the game’s environment, characters, and what they have to do to win.”

WARNING: I am ask to define an art game, as well as what indie means. Tread at own risk.

Trying to get a job these days is strange. Everyone’s got a role for you to fill. “Hey, I can do that!” I think to myself. “Sorry, we’re looking for somebody more senior,” they return.

Rather than simply filling a role, I’d like to carve my own niche in the games industry. The games industry, however, is averse to carving, running away as soon as I draw near. Maybe one day I’ll get tired of chasing, and take out the “indie axe of mightiness” and chop a hole so big, a manbaby could fit inside of it. But until then, the resumes go out on Fridays.

GDC was amazing. So amazing that attempting to describe it might cause the writer to undergo convulsive seizure due to overexposure to awesome. I dare not tread those waters.

Made a quick little game for Game Design class, integrating physical die with a digital game. It actually doesn’t work too badly (and is still somewhat playable without the die, though not nearly as much fun).

The best parts are the sound effects, made with the super awesome indie sound tool sfxr. Honestly, I don’t know how I ever got by without it. There’s only so much I can do with Audacity and a Singstar mike.

As an assignment for Game Design class, we had to redesign Hopscotch. Having sprained my ankle only days prior to working on the assignment, I knew that digital hopscotch was the only way to go. Cactus, who has been consistently churning out great games almost every other week, primarily uses Game Maker, so I thought I’d give the thing a shot. Due to time though, the end result was a bit (very) lacking, so I took a page out of the Tim Schafer’s book and tried to solve some of my design problems with a bit of prose.

Hop lives in a world where robots have taken over the world. In order to retaliate for the human cause, he must upload viruses to all the mainframe robot computers, deep in the earth’s molten lava core. But the evil robots anticipate his moves, setting up a honey-pot (booby trapping one of the computers). Hop must jump from computer to computer, and upload each virus in the correct order, all the while avoiding both lava and honey-pots. He must do this four times, because four is the number of true death.

Bossmen (title pending) is the game that I’ll be leading this semester. Before we ended up deciding on the idea, I threw a couple of ideas at a wall, saw what stuck, and gathered them into a little powerpoint presentation for easy viewing. For those who don’t feel like downloading, here’s the skinny:

Bossmen - 3D action shooter entirely consistent of boss-fights
Army of Children – save/massacre an army of children controlled by alien parasites
Your Idea Here – exactly what it sounds like
Lashback – arcade space shooter based on reflecting bullets rather than shooting them
Hellavation – zombies in a tall building
Akinetopsia – the player has the inability to see movement, resulting in “slideshow gameplay”

Maybe I’ll return to these other ideas one day, but for now Bossmen (title pending) shall take the limelight!

In my opinion, what do I think defines an indie game? One word: heart.

I’m talking about the pulsating organ within your chest that fills arteries with warm blood. In other words, Indie games are all about warm blood. That’s why people are always talking about the Indie Spirit; one sip of Indie Spirit and you’ll feel warm all over. This also explains why a few commercial game companies are able to make games with heart. It’s because they have the Indie Spirit!

Somehow I landed myself the CA position for GDC, leaving me speechless flabbergasted fühlen fantastisch.

My final semester of Game Creation Society begins in a week. I can’t believe it’s been four years. But don’t put this old man out to pasture yet! I’ve got enough time for one last game, one final statement before i go. But should that statement be?

I thought about it for awhile, musing over development methodologies or design philosophies that might solve some of the problems that we’ve been running into. In the end, everything seemed to pale in comparison to big issue: how do we as a club continuously improve the quality of our games?

Well, the solution is obvious: I must lead by example and harness liquid awesome, pouring it into the cast-iron mold of gaming excellence.

No turning back now, it’s time to rock ‘n roll.

Lest I miraculously get a chance to be a CA at GDC, I’ll likely have to make some sort of decision amongst the remaining pass options. Looking at the options, other than the fact that each of them is a financial equivalent of a kick in the balls, these passes otherwise share little in common, catering to the fact that we as developers are segregated into our own little niches. By skipping over the parts of game industry that don’t interest us, we save a bundle. What a great deal.

Or is it? I for one don’t like that we have to choose between the indies and the professionals. By separating these two groups in the most effective way – that is by instating both a monetary and temporal barrier – we arrive at a suboptimal situation: main conference goers will miss out on the ragtag indie gamedev insights and methods, while the indies can only sit outside closed doors and imagine what juicy industry secrets are being discussed. And the students? Well they can more or less stand in the hallways and hope to “network” with random passers by.

While I’m not proposing some sort of communist distribution of passes, surely there must be some better arrangement that lets us get a slice of both worlds for less than the cost of a shiny new laptop?