Notgames Forum
March 29, 2024, 01:02:33 PM *
Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
 
  Home Help Search Calendar Login Register  
  Show Posts
Pages: 1 2 [3] 4 5 ... 7
31  Creation / From the ridiculous to the sublime / Re: What are you Playing on: May 27, 2012, 01:37:06 AM
Before I got mired in revision and exams I was playing Gotham City Imposters which was fun, though I hold little hope that anyone still plays it since finding a game was getting difficult even before I stopped playing. Post-exams I'm planning to play spyro the dragon and then some of the indie-ish/bundle games that all seemed to have appeared over the last week or so. I also have silent hill 2 sitting on my desktop (as it has been for a very long time) as well as Drawn: the painted tower and the most recent Deus Ex game on my shelf. I probably won't end up playing all of these, but maybe some combination of them.
32  General / Check this out! / Re: Anyone heard of thecatamites? on: May 27, 2012, 01:30:04 AM
I've played space funeral a bit, which was fairly interesting, and I also played a bit of drill killer, though I don't think I "got" it and it just seemed a bit pointless. Space funeral did a nice job of building its twisted world completely, even down to (kind of)subverting traditional jrpg aspects to fit better into the world. More games should do that, even if they're not willing to remove the aspects fully when they're not needed.
33  Creation / From the ridiculous to the sublime / Re: bored by emotion on: April 22, 2012, 10:16:32 PM
I know that is true for me. But does it apply to all? How explain the desire for more of the same, then, in a large part of the audience?

It could be because, apart from a relatively small 'hardcore' part of the audience, people don't really play that many games so they don't particularly care if they're all pretty similar.

According to this article only 8 games have been sold per xbox 360 and 5.3 per PS3 which isn't necessarily enough for them to start getting bored of seeing the same things over and over in videogames. (Although those statistics may have changed a bit now since the article is 4 years old.)
34  General / Everything / Re: Dear Esther took 5 hours to become profitable on: February 15, 2012, 09:51:53 PM
Hurrah. Well done Dan et al. I'm hoping to find some time to play this in the next week or so.

Interestingly (for me at least) one of my friends, who I don't think really follows indie games, out of the blue mentioned Dear Esther a few days ago. That and the high sales makes me think that it has permeated the mainstream to some extent.
35  Creation / From the ridiculous to the sublime / Re: error-free universe on: February 14, 2012, 07:17:26 PM
It probably depends on what you mean by "error". For me an error in something is when that aspect deviates from, or works against, its purpose within the given context.

For the universe I don't believe it has a purpose, or if it does its unknowable to us and thus irrelevant, and as such it is error-free by definition (as far as we can tell). For games you presumably make each for some purpose and so every aspect that goes against that purpose is an error, be it weird graphics glitches or inappropriate game mechanics.

Fixing bugs often makes me feel kinda sad because the bugs amuse me in and of themselves, but if they detract from the game as a whole then they've gotta go.

EDIT: just realised that my first line is very similar to what Chris said. Well played...
36  General / Everything / Re: "Active Art"? on: February 11, 2012, 11:11:50 PM
We could maybe refer to the creations as "active compositions" to avoid the art thing?
37  General / Check this out! / Re: 4 hour games on: January 26, 2012, 01:18:44 AM
Good to hear I helped. I've also found getting the controls to feel right can be difficult (people doing the traditional game genres with years of games to borrow from have it easy  Wink).
38  General / Check this out! / Re: 4 hour games on: January 25, 2012, 05:01:11 PM
I think the problem is partly to do with the level of interaction and partly to do with the control methods (I could definitely see a touch interface helping here). I tried to write down why I felt that way, though I'm not sure how helpful it is since describing the feel of interaction is quite hard so I'm not sure I did a good job of it.

Flower - I'm not entirely sure, I think it was sommething to do with the way that the button presses didn't really seem to correspond to what I was doing and also it seemed to be encouraging me to press the buttons as fast as possible which was fairly opposed to the mood.

For the bottle, it's movement felt artificially restricted - it didn't seem like it was moving slow because that was as fast as it could move, but because that's what the rules were. Maybe it would have been better if it excellerated to that speed to give the impression that it'd reached the maximum speed it was capable of rather than just moving at some arbitrary slow speed. Also, the movement is pretty binary (well, ternary) since you can move left, move right or do nothing, with no variance of speed, and each of these didn't really have any effect. I think that interactions tend to steal the focus a little since they require active cognition to perform and that simply by having them you draw focus to their effects, so these effects should be interesting or mentally engaging in some way (or perhaps even be drawing the eyes towards something interesting/engaging) which I don't think was the case here.
39  General / Check this out! / Siren is not fun, it's a slog, it's cruel, it's tough... on: January 24, 2012, 11:27:22 PM
I happened to see this review for Siren and the way it was reviewed was surprising. Focusing on how it's worth playing because it gives you a glimpse into someone else's world rather than because it's fun. Seems a Notgames-ish type of thing.
40  General / Check this out! / Re: 4 hour games on: January 24, 2012, 10:45:39 PM
09801's idea was pretty cool and worked really well. Remnants was interesting and a little disturbing. Lone Flower looked really nice, but I found the controls/(lack of control) a bit frustrating. All really good for four hours (or even with some expansion).
41  General / Check this out! / Re: Jason Rohrer in favour of challenge on: December 19, 2011, 02:41:42 PM
Because he's a fairly prominent art and games things person, I think. He also has some pretty progressive ideas about games, or at least I believe they were progressive at the time.
42  Creation / Notgames design / Re: What to expect of the player? on: December 10, 2011, 11:41:06 PM
I think you're probably right with the irrelevant thing. Stuff that causes disruptions to the core game, whether being internal to the game or external, do tend to be very annoying and thus cause a large emotional reaction. For example I seem to remember playing a platformer called 'Hubris' which, as one of its core mechanics, had graphics that made it difficult to tell what was going on and were quite disruptive to the platformy bits. Presumably because it was a core mechanic this disruption didn't bother me, whereas generally the graphics making it difficult to see what's going on is annoying in other games.
43  Creation / Notgames design / Re: What to expect of the player? on: November 25, 2011, 07:22:39 PM
Perhaps. It's difficult to say for sure since such absolute disruptions generally don't happen except as bugs so there's nothing to compare it with.
44  Creation / Notgames design / Re: What to expect of the player? on: November 20, 2011, 09:12:03 PM
I was looking through some notes I took for my 3rd year project today and I found this quote:

Quote from: Affective Computing by Rosalind W. Picard - p91
One of our undergraduates played the computer game of "Doom" while wired up to several physiological sensors detecting signals that change with affective responses. We saw minor changes in several of the signals when he "found the rocket launcher" or when he "was killed." However, the biggest response we found, significantly higher than any other in the game, occurred not during a stressful life-threatening battle, but at a more surprising moment: when the software failed to work properly. None of the violent events in the game aroused the player as much as the software problem.


And underneath I had written the following note to myself: "Should assume that players believe/are invested in the game world? (Games have evolved a lot since then)"

So apparently I was thinking about this very same thing a few weeks ago, the idea just got burried in with a load of other irrelevant stuff.
45  Creation / Notgames design / Re: What to expect of the player? on: November 18, 2011, 07:51:42 PM
We shouldn't expect them to be immersed at all.

Ideally I'd agree with this. In practise it might be too much work on the designer's part to fulfill this so I'd say expect as little as possible from your audience, then be pleasantly surprised if they bring more to it.
Pages: 1 2 [3] 4 5 ... 7
Powered by MySQL Powered by PHP Powered by SMF 1.1.20 | SMF © 2006-2008, Simple Machines Valid XHTML 1.0! Valid CSS!