Blogging the experience of gameplayhttps://www.gamelog.cl/gamers/GamerPage.php?idgamer=1583https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=5214So my review for this week is Seiken Dentetsu 3. But not because I've played it. (Although I've got serious plans to reinstall that old ZSNES emulator and give all the classics a go). No, I'm writing on Dentetsu this week because I have been studying its landscapes religiously all weekend. The game I'm currently designing is in 2D, 3/4 perspective pixel art, and the creative team behind Seiken Dentetsu is, like, Michaelangelo, Donatello, Leonardo all in one... The ninja turtles of pixel art, basically. Most famous for its epic tree--glorious, shining, beautifully highlighted and hue-shifted tree--Seiken Dentetsu is like a bible of how to eliminate the grid through clever use of tilesets, and creating stunningly eye-popping textures out of limited palettes. I spent all of yesterday (when I might've should've been writing papers and studying for exams) trying to figure out how Dententsu's sand managed to look so organically textured. My attempt at imitation produced blocky sand dunes that looked like giant worms made of dark, gunky brownish sand color. The character sprites pale in comparison to the landscapes--Breath of Fire 4, for instance, has much more beautiful characters--but each piece of the terrain in Seiken Dentetsu offers lessons for the beginning pixel artist, and I've attempted to soak them all in. Creating an ecosystem of grasses and dirts, varied enough to look interesting but all retaining extremely similar palettes, has been my first lesson. But soon I hope to graduate to more advanced stuff, and begin, yknow, actually playing the thing.Mon, 01 Oct 2012 20:59:33 CSThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=5214&iddiary=9488https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=5160So I've been playing FTL and oh my god it is so hard. I managed to make it to the final boss the other day, completely unprepared, and was annihilated. Still, it felt great. I'm still in awe of a game that can make me feel SO connected to my ship and the events that befall it while still having such lo-fi programmer art. I think part of it is, for lack of a better word, realism--that the oxygen needs to be maintained, for instance. Or that drones are used to attack things (paralleling a real-life shift in military technology). But mostly it's just such a tight little game with 'nothing left to subtract,' totally simple and containing only what is contributes positively to the appreciation of the game. I like that I'm only just getting started, and I've logged multiple hours. I'm playing on easy--which is still crazily hard--and then there are 7,8,9 ships I can unlock and I can't wait to give myself new challenges with these more difficult ships. Once again, I find playing FTL to be a very inspiring experience, because with so little the designers were able to accomplish what big-budget AAA games so often can't--they make you feel immersed in a new world, just as effectively as literature or film. And all of this with the tiniest of pixel art and VERY few animations other than a rather static combat screen. Makes me want to work on my own projects more.Mon, 24 Sep 2012 21:41:51 CSThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=5160&iddiary=9457https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=5160Just started playing this new indie game that's all the rage on Steam, Faster Than Light. It's a space-exploration roguelike that is absolutely incredible. There is very little art to speak of--just your ship, and teeny-tiny little sprites moving around, as well as the ships of others, neither of which moves on screen. Not much plot either: you are a Federation ship carrying valuable information, and the rebels are chasing you. But an elegant design, combined with genius mechanics, makes this one of the best indie games I've ever played. Your ship has shields, oxygen, missiles, engines, etc. and it is your crew's job to keep them all working. When you fight an enemy, you can deploy drones as well as attack with standard missiles and beam weapons. But be careful! If you run out of missiles, you're screwed. And if one of the enemy's missiles pierces your hull and you spring an oxygen leak, you're screwed. And if any part of your ship catches fire, you're pretty close to screwed. And if you run out of fuel, well... I'm sure you can guess what happens. This feature is a commonality to roguelikes, which often have permadeath and are pretty difficult. With FTL you develop such an attachment to your randomized crew and their destinations that it's stunning that everything was generated randomly, by a computer. That almost adds to your attachment. A very excellent game.Tue, 18 Sep 2012 07:47:44 CSThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=5160&iddiary=9428https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=5121I was pleased to find out last semester that Amanitas Studios, creators of the charming and intelligent 'Machinarium,' had come out with a new adventure. It's called Botanicula, and it is a splendorous, playful, ultra-creative offering that takes itself seriously enough to be considered art, but nowhere near serious enough to ever be boring, pretentious, or anything other than delightful. The first twist it does on the standard adventure game format is that you're a team of characters, all huddled up and following along with one another, instead of a single person. Your team is made up of little tree creatures who are looking to save their giant tree from an attack by evil, light-stealing spiders. As in Machinarium, there is no actual dialogue--the narrative works through characters mumbling certain sounds, and thought bubbles appearing over their heads that have pictures conveying the plot. It's charming. There's an old wise man character (several of them, I think) that mumble what sounds like archaic Japanese noises and tell the story of how the great trees have been attacked by the spiders. The sound effects seem to all have been done in house, with squeals and shrieks coming from what sound like designers and programmers having way too much fun. None of the puzzles are very hard, but all of them are cute and have their own ingenuity. And that's really what's most striking about Botanicula--at every turn, the designers seem to have been engaged in a creative improvisation, coming up with whatever fun looking creatures and events they felt like, and enjoying themselves along the way. This really taught me something about game design, and had me thinking on creativity in general. It seems much more fun to just wing something--not having too much of it planned out in advance--and then just trusting yourself to be free to make whatever you want. How else can you come up with spoiled little acorn-looking children playing tennis with your characters, or 23 chickens running wild, that you must find in order to power a blimp that can take you off a tree branch? After playing Botanicula I was inspired to work on my own games similarly, inventing as I go along and not worrying about results so much as just having fun.Mon, 10 Sep 2012 11:02:16 CSThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=5121&iddiary=9384https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=5065I recently downloaded the new DLC for Civ 5 and was unsurprised to find myself once again completely sucked into the days-long fugue state that is playing Civ. The DLC adds on a couple new features--religion and espionage--some new nations, and a couple tweaks to the tech tree. In the vanilla version I was a pretty staunch Frenchman; Napoleon's early culture boost is amazingly helpful. If you pair it with an early Monument, and are perhaps lucky enough to find a culture ruin, you will breeze through the opening policies, collecting a free settler and free worker, which are so crucial on the harder difficulties. Now I am stuck on the Celts, who receive a religion boost for being next to unimproved forests. I could go on about the strategic awesomeness of this, but let's turn our attention to more delicate considerations. The idea of building a nation is part of what makes Civ so enjoyable, consuming your life for the duration of your play-time. And imagining my own little Edinburgh, building libraries and erecting shrines and so on, as a pagan, ecologically-friendly happy place, where on the outskirts of the city there are Sacred Forests that are untouched by man, harboring the spirits of the gods and etc. etc. etc., is immensely pleasing. Pictish warriors are incredible, too. Anyway, Civilization is definitely a game that can inspire creative, philosophical thinking about gaming. For instance, one could develop a robust, scholarly treatment of the implicit Eurocentric imperialism in a game like Civilization: Colonization, where your goal is to exploit native societies. (I think someone has done this already on one of those 'ludological' blogs.) I'm interested, though, in how Civilization relates to the idea of realpolitik--the idea that relations between nations are guided chiefly by the pursuit of power and exploitation, and all fantasies of benevolent rulers and policies guided by hope for the well-being of the citizenry are naive and foolish. I remember coming across some meme on Reddit a while ago titled "How I play Civ" that had a caption reading, "How I play at turn 10" with a picture of Gandhi above it, followed by "How I play on turn 250" underneath a picture of Hitler. It is a common phenomenon--you hope that in a game where you are allowed to live out your fantasies of nationcraft you would have the opportunity to be an enlightened king building a utopia. But that doesn't work for two reasons. One, the game is so centered around the military--it eats up half the tech tree--that just putting libraries and research labs and ampitheatres in your towns (with no corresponding graphics) gets terribly boring. Secondly, when you get bored, you want to start killing stuff. And if Catherine or Ramkamhaeng or any of the other greedy a-holes you neighbor decide they want some, you can't help but delight in razing their cities and hearing the lamentations of their people. The game just makes you act that way. Does this mirror real life? I don't know. But I feel strangely guilty about my murder sprees every time I start playing Civ. And I wonder if real-life rulers also set out in hopes of being one of the good guys, only to have the power game of nation-building seduce them into violence. Who knows. But if Civ is any indication, for all my good intentions I would become an iron-fisted ruler in a couple years and try to conquer the world were I to be president. Civ is one of those games that truly lets you feel like you have absolute power--being some sort of 1,000 year old god-king of a country--and, as they say, that will corrupt you absolutely.Fri, 31 Aug 2012 14:33:37 CSThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=5065&iddiary=9340