First things first: my friend Lee and I have started a new blog for Stage!, the game we’re codeveloping. A few things have changed since the last time I talked about it here, namely, it’s now an interactive comic book rather than an adventure game proper, and it’s going to be made in Flash. [1] So far, only Lee has been posting, but it’s interesting reading regardless, and I’ll be following suit once I think of interesting things to add on my part. Have a looksie.

Second, I’ve posted a mini-review/critique of The Graveyard over on the Adventure Gamers staff blog. It’s an artsy interactive piece that I mentioned in passing in one scene of DREAMING, [2] and although I personally wasn’t too crazy about the execution, don’t let that stop you from taking a peek anyway.

Finally, I’m heading over to the other side of the world tomorrow — specifically, to Israel, followed by a small selection of European countries. Don’t mess up the place while I’m gone, okay?

It’s been more than two years since the first time I got paid to develop video games, and almost two months since I started working in the industry full-time. Sometime between then and now, I appear to have semi-officially transitioned from “hobbyist” to “professional”: a career dream I’ve had ever since I was prepubescent. Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about what that entails, and how this niggling detail has affected my work now and will continue to affect it in the future.

Initially, I’d thought — and sort of worried, to be frank — that once I started getting paid to develop games, I’d stop wanting to do freeware projects anymore. That has since come to wind up being far from true. Instead, I’m learning to see my job and my personal work as complimentary. The things I learn at my job — techniques of the trade, words of wisdom from those who have been there — helps inspire my personal projects, and in the meantime, what comes out of my own stuff — the willingness to try new things without the pressure of making sure it sells well — improves my craft and therefore makes me more useful to people who pay people like me to do stuff for them.

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This just in: I’ve gone and joined the Blogs of the Round Table. Okay, so the reason I’m doing this now instead of, say, sometime in the last several months I’ve been reading Man Bytes Blog is becaues this month’s topic, broadly speaking, is on character relationships in games, and as most of you know, it’s a topic I just can’t resist. And of course, it never hurts to get more exposure. So, here we go…

There are obviously many kinds of character relationships in games, and this time around, I’m going to focus solely on the relationship between the player and the player character. I’m sure I’ve mentioned a few times on this blog that I take a slightly unorthodox view on what this relationship must entail, which is that I play games not to be the main character, but rather to be the main character’s conscience. I say “unorthodox” because it seems like a lot of the leading interactive storytelling theory out there seems very concerned with giving the player a lot of freedom to act in whatever manner they choose (i.e. “being oneself”) and being able to respond to said freedom in a dramatically coherent fashion. From a programmer’s perspective — and I work as a programmer, so I should know — the fact that this problem is difficult and complex is a huge part of what makes it so fascinating.

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…has now been released.

Regrettably, I didn’t manage to use everyone’s artwork, but I think I got a good cross-section of styles in. Regardless, I thank you all for the submissions; developing this short game was a fun and interesting exercise for me, and I couldn’t have done it without the excellent audience participation. I’ll probably write more about the game itself later, but in the meantime, why don’t you just play it already?

I’m going to go off on a tangent and write about critically-acclaimed Canadian author Douglas Coupland. I’ve been reading quite a bit of his work lately, and it seems to be rather hit-or-miss where my tastes are concerned.

The ones I really liked:
The Gum Thief
Eleanor Rigby
Microserfs

The ones I found a bit meh:
JPod [1]
Generation X
Life After God
Hey Nostradamus!

I’m currently trying to read Shampoo Planet, but I seem to be getting bored of it, so I probably won’t finish.

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First things first: now that the deadline for artwork submissions has “passed”, so to speak, I think it’s time to give a tally of sorts. I have received a total of fifteen scenes, which will definitely be more than enough for what I need, so I won’t accept any more unless you’re really, really burning to join in on the fun, in which case I might make an exception or two. Four of these scenes have already been written, which means that there has been progress, so to speak. I can’t really give much of an estimate as to when this project will be up for public consumption, though, particularly given that I’m now working full-time at Hothead and there’s no telling how much of my creative energy this will eat up in the not-too-distant future. [1]

I will, however, reveal that the title will be Des Rêves Élastiques Avec Mille Insectes Nommés Georges, or DREAMING for short. Yes, I decided to revisit my love for obscenely long titles, last seen in TGTTPOACS, except this time you can, you know, actually pronounce the acronym. Plus, this time, the title’s in French, so you know it’s all artistic and avant-garde and stuff. Titter titter.

All right, now that the administrivia is over and done with, let’s get to the real topic of this post, which is the difference between a story-based video game and a movie. Now, this is something that’s frequently brought up whenever people discuss the role of storytelling in games. I get the impression that to most gamers, the difference is “gameplay”, e.g. dexterity challenges, logic puzzles, and anything else with rules, goals, and clear win/lose states. The argument therefore is — and forgive me in advance if I’m attacking a straw man here — that if you remove all the gameplay, all you’re left with is a “movie”, and usually one that is highly inferior to everything in your prized DVD collection, to boot.

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I’ve received nine submissions to my call for artwork so far, with a small handful of others who’ve said they plan to contribute as well. I have to admit, this is a lot more than I expected, though I suspect the project in question will be better for it — the more places to explore, the better, right? Anyway, given that so many people seem to be intrigued, I thought I’d talk a little bit about what this thing’s all about, and what you all can expect. [1]

The game’s another one of those not-really-a-game games I’ve been tinkering with lately. It’s a series of disjoint interactive conversational vignettes that all make up a single dream sequence. These vignettes are randomized into a different order each playthrough, highlighting the absence of a coherent, author-generated plot progression. Instead, much like dreams themselves, the plot becomes a creation of the player, who pieces what they’ve just seen into their own personal narrative. They have no control over the images presented to them, but it’s up to them to decide what they mean.

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