‘Bout damn time, too.
You Find Yourself In A Room enters “alpha.”
YFYIAR is extremely close to being finished now. It was sitting on the back burner for quite a while because I couldn’t find a sponsor. I finally decided to just forego the whole thing and throw in MochiAds.
Expect to see it released within the next few days.
More award nominations?
Apparently, Company just barely made the cutoff to be included in the 2010 FGL community awards, so at some point or another I might win an award or two. We’re nominated in four categories: Best Story/Ambience, Most Original Design, Best Music/Sound, and Best Game.
Sounds pretty fuckin awesome to me! I’ll let you know when the results come in.
New game soon…
I know, I know. I haven’t posted in almost two months. It’s been a crazy time over here. I’ve moved into a new house in an old town, adopted a kitten, cured AIDS, commissioned an oil painting of Ludacris for my living room, and found two people to work for me (LIKE A BOSS). Among other things.
This is a Work of Fiction is almost finished. It took a while longer than I was expecting because halfway through I realized that I probably don’t need to write code anymore, so I scrapped the shitty, unorganized script that I had written so far and instead hired two programmers to write it cleanly so I can focus on design.
What does that mean for you guys? It means I’ve got more time to work on the style, substance, and content of the games I make instead of the collision detection, physics, and keyboard input. And if you’re worried that my games are going to lose some kind of personal touch because someone else is making them now, consider this: What’s your favorite element of Company? Is it the control scheme? Maybe the audio management? The level data’s compression methods?
I doubt it. The stuff that made Company memorable had nothing to do with the code.
Anyway, the programmers should be done within a few days, according to their last estimate. David is working on the music and sound as of yesterday, and he’ll probably take around a week or so (?) to finish. I’m very close to being done with the writing (just some tweaks and stuff now), and then the last major thing for me to do is make the levels (after the programmers send over a level editor for me to play with, that is).
(Go figure, my “last major thing” is designing all of the actual game content. Weird.)
Video games, paintings, and alcoholism.
I got an email from Google Alerts that somebody had mentioned Company on their blog, so I went over to check it out and thank them for mentioning the game. They talked a little bit about how people view video games as an art form (or sometimes, not an art form at all). It piqued my interest, and I ended up rambling on for a while in their comments about how I viewed the subject. I figure it might be at least marginally interesting, so here’s the relevant stuff.
Part of the problem, I think, is that a lot of people don’t realize how broad the term “art” can be. It’s kind of like when people debate about whether or not alcoholism is a disease. It’s not an infection or a cancer or a virus, but diseases aren’t always infections and cancers and viruses. A disease can be anything involving your body that is out of the ordinary (and generally harmful). So, yes: alcoholism is a disease, and video games are art. Maybe a bit of a dark analogy, but a valid one, all the same.
Another element of it is that even if you ignore the semantics, a lot of people genuinely don’t believe that video games have the same potential as the more widely accepted art forms. Honestly, though, I think the opposite: The more you make the audience do, the more powerful the impact can become. The tradeoff is that it’s a hell of a lot harder to make a piece of art behave the way you want it to when you know, with absolute certainty, that the audience is going to interact with the work. It’s not like a painting where they can only see what you want them to see, and that’s all. When you make a video game, you know that it’s not going to sit behind a banister to be viewed from afar. They’re going to pick it up, examine it from all the angles they can find, and often, they’ll even spend time specifically trying to figure out how to break it. And even so, you have to make sure that the audience still sees what you want them to see.
You can check out the full blog post and other comments at Terminally Incoherent.
One Response
Mike
Nice idea with the musical instruments, that’s suuuuuuper important for learning something completely. Like you’re going to know about different materials and how sound works, thats cool. I learned about how meat dries, and now I have an idea of how things dry. Also, for the cell game, (maybe) making it more realistic, by like making it kinda like a 3d osmosis jones will make it more visceral and real. maybe. Yea but it’s gonna take you a while to make anything, just like my cousin who’s an artist, each mosaic takes like a month, depending how big it is. A big project, like on the side of a building took him like 8 months, but his work is…. rigorous and detailed and very thoughtful and carefully crafted. His works are good, old museum art good, like roman vases good. Anyway, yea it’s good that you are making your own instruments because i’m doing the same thing, but with economics. It really helps you understand precisely how the physical world works. It’s nice.