Happion Labs GameDevBlog

Contrived Story To Go With Your Gameplay?

So I'm playing Arkham City and really enjoying it.

It reminds me of a conversation Mark Nau and I had in the early days of Spidey 3.  I was throwing out ideas for how we could take our highly 'gamey' challenges - the trick markers - and make them part of the story. I forget what the ideas were exactly, something along the lines of Dennis Hopper in Speed giving you various challenges or he's going to blow someone up. Contrived. Transparent.

Mark said if the game is going to have these really gamey bits he'd rather just have them be gamey. So the trick markers stayed pretty much the same as Spidey 2.

Arkham City, on the other hand, weaves them in. Frex, it has the "Augmented Reality Training" where the tricks you do are theoretically pre-progrmamed missions batman created to practice; and the Szasz telephone missions, which are pure races from one point of the city to another. Part of me recognizes these things as contrived and transparent; the other part of me appreciates the immersion.

What do you think?

Notes on Triple Town

Triple Town is my new Drop 7.

Actually, that pretty much sums it up.

Well, okay, I'll go deeper. I still haven't managed to match three castles, so I'm not sure where it goes from there, but the very act of building a castle is slightly reminiscent of a tower of Hanoi puzzle: to build a castle here, I need to put my last mansion here, so my last house is going to need to go here, so my last hut will need to go here, so my last tree will need to go here, so my last bush will need to here ... but tower of Hanoi is lame, this is so much better, because those bears and ninjas get in the mix and I make mistakes and mess up my own plans. (Then there's the economy of turning bears into churches into cathedrals into treasure which you can then use to get yourself out of tight spots later.) It's really engaging and compelling, a great example of simple rules creating a ton of depth.

And I just got a new high score, over 250K - and that's without even matching castles. There's this awareness that there's additional depth beyond my reach.

Tournament Results, 4/29/12

Oh, It's One Of *Those* Days

Been trying to record some footage of the swinging game prototype and it's one thing after another.  The windowed build isn't recording ... my cool debug info doesn't show up in the deployment build ... Bandicam is sucking down too much cpu, making it too slow ... our other computer is fast enough, but refuses to acknowledge the gamepad ...

I'm running out of Saturday. Oh well, nothing for it but to keep plugging along. See if I can get it recording at a decent speed on the gamepad-happy laptop, or maybe get that half-assed mouse support working? 

 

 

The Swinging Game Kickstarter Moving Along...

We're still doing this. We've got a small team together. I've invented a company and some logos. We shot footage for the pitch video today. I'm pretty busy with We're No Angels and grading assignments for Digipen, but soon I'll announce something for reals...

Comics Vs Games

This is what it is. And there's *We're No Angels*.

We're No Angels

We're No Angels - Steve Manale's, Ivan Neveu's, and my entry for Comics vs. Games is almost done, because, well, it has to be.

You play rockstars trying to escape from Heaven and God - your biggest fan. (Why else do you think you were taken so young?)

We wanted to get Amy and Tupac in there, but looks like we're going to settle for just Elvis and Jimi.

It's another twin stick shooter. Nothing particularly innovative design wise, though the heroin powerup is cool - you float up into the third dimension and get a strategic view of the map. Here's Elvis on drugs:

Tournament Results, 4/22/12

I remembered to take the screenshot but forgot to post it. Here it is.  Are scores trending up? Hard to tell - this is better than two weeks ago, but there have been weeks just this good in the past...

Tournament Results, 4/15/12

Whoops - swamped with grading I forgot to take a screenshot.

Anyhow, it looks like it was Joseph7099 with 5242065, followed by heibenator in second with 3518004.

Leaderboards 4/8/12