7DFPS Challenge: Day 5

     Today is the day that "Empty Chambers" actually became a game (by a more conservative definition of the word, anyway). There is now a mini-dungeon with falling ceilings that will result in your untimely bloody death! It's really amazing how much variety there is in falling ceiling trap configurations: one could easily make an entire game out of such a concept.

     Also added player death and made the other character run away from you. Tomorrow is pretty much the last day of development: the challenge ends Friday at 8:00, and I have dinner plans with coworkers. All I have left to do is an optional boss fight, level transitions, bombs, zeppelins, and sound effects. There was originally going to be a section with turrets, and I was hoping to be able to do music, but there will be absolutely no time for those things.

7DFPS Challenge: Day 4

     Crap, it's day 4 already? I'm so far behind schedule it's not even funny. I predict that Friday night will be a coffee-filled all-night extravaganza.

     It's not as though I haven't been productive. It's just that I've been working altogether on the wrong things. I spent too much time making fancy health/stamina/ammo bars that disappear at full health/stamina/ammo (because I hate HUDs with a passion and just want them to go away), and I spent way too much time working on the sprite for the game's other character (I had to make sure that she was perfectly anatomically correct. Bah. Actually animating her is going to be such a pain.) I'm proud of my work and all, but pretty much all that I got done today on my to-do list was the title screen.

     Oh, and speaking of title screens, the game has a title now. I'm calling it "Empty Chambers".

7DFPS Challenge: Day 3

     Pretty much done with the levels. Running a little behind schedule - starting off working on a game during the weekend and finishing it during the workweek is really misleading in terms of what you think you can accomplish during a given day. I didn't get much sleep last night, and the game's suffering a little because of it- the level I made today doesn't look as good as the three made yesterday, and I can't find the willpower to populate the levels with the hazards and the game's other character - so I'm going to try to go to bed early tonight. Writing the AI for the game's "enemy" will be interesting - I haven't gotten far enough in an action game's development cycle to needed to have written combat AI in a loooong time.

     The look of the abandoned city that the game takes place in is probably subconsciously inspired by the poorest areas of Baltimore city - rows and rows of boarded up and decaying buildings. A lot of cities I make in games end up turning out that way.

7DFPS Challenge: Day 2

     I can't begin to tell you how satisfied I am with how the levels are starting to turn out. I hope to be finished with the levels tomorrow, hopefully I'll have enough time to actually start implementing the gameplay by then.

7DFPS Challenge: Day 1

     So today was the first day of the 7 Day First Person Shooter Challenge: an initiative for game developers to breath new life into the oversaturated, overdone, ever violent, and ever popular first person shooter challenge. Here's a screenshot of what I have to show for the first day of work. I'm working on the game's engine right now, trying to get as much coding out of the way as possible before I work on art and level design. I've mostly been recycling old code and graphics from old, unfinished 3D projects.

Fun Fact: The game on the left is the spiritual predecessor to Waker (see the aesthetic similarities?). I even ripped the text box scripts from it. Mostly ripping code from the unfinished FPS on the right, though.

      One of the keynote speakers for the events, Bradon Chung (creator of Gravity Bone and Thirty Flights of Loving) encouraged developers to questions the fundamentals of the genre. I've been thinking a lot lately about game violence, morality in games, the stories that violent games tell through gameplay, and how the stories told through the violent gameplay synthesize or conflict with the story that the game is trying to tell. In most first person shooters, the player's violent actions are "justified" in that the player character almost always acts in self defense. Whenever you encounter an enemy in an FPS, the enemy will fire first if the player does not. One of the premises of the game I intend to make is that the player is forced to be the aggressor and remove the moral crutch given to most shooter players, making things suuuuper aaaaawkward for them. What will follow the initial act of aggression is essentially a long, glorified chase scene and boss fight - I want to make the entire game focus on the relationship between the player and his victim with as little filler as possible. What I intend to do with this game is explore a new sort of story that can be told through shooter mechanics - hard to do since there are really so few stories that can be told primarily through shooting.

Game Maker really isn't great for 3D. Should have learned Unity... wish me luck!

Have I mentioned that I love Nightmare Mode?

Articles worth reading:
The Challenge of the Virtual Reality Code
Player-Character Dynamics, Identity, and Sexuality in Video Games

Recommendations: Tower of the Blood Lord and Leigh Alexander's Critique of Bioshock Infinite

Here's an interactive fiction game made in Twine called Tower of the Blood Lord, which starts out as an amusing parody of the first 20 minutes of Modern Warfare 2, but then takes a surreal twist, and eventually ascends into a really well written essay about games and culture and violence and prejudice and interacting with culture instead of just consuming it. The game gave me a much needed reminder to consider the relationship between narrative and gameplay, especially violent gameplay, and to consider my own role as a game developer in proliferating (or not) certain cultural attitudes about violence, gender, and race in games. Definitely worth a play/read.

Especially relevant to the themes of Tower of the Blood Lord is this brilliant critique of Bioshock: Infinite by Leigh Alexander. While I enjoyed Infinite very much, I was a little off-put by the narrative context of the game's violence, as well as how the game addressed race. I might write more about race in Infinite some other time (I need to go to bed), but Alexander does a fantastic job in critiquing violence in the game. Well worth reading.