Great article. It reminds me a bit of how children or young teenagers who start to watch "grown up" movies often have a hard time understanding everything. They often miss things that are clearly hinted to, and when they realize this they tend to ask questions about all kinds of things, including things that have yet to be revealed.

My mother does that as well.

Exactly the same for me.

Also, I never really did the asking about things in movies, I just sort of accepted the things I'd seen and didn't really bother with anything else. Of course that's probably a pretty limited way to do it. I'm sure it shows me to not be very inquisitive, or to at least have a different kind of inquisitiveness to most.

I've been looking forward to this. It's the only game I've been excited enough about to pre-order recently apart from Demon's Souls, and I don't even particularly like the horror genre. I think a lot of your blog posts about designing it convinced me that it would be interesting, plus I started playing Penumbra Overture recently which helped convince me of Amnesia's potential.

Saying that, I probably won't download it until I go back to uni, partly because of my crappy internet connection here and partly because I'm currently low on hard drive space and need some time to delete stuff. But I'm really looking forward to playing it.

An invaluble resource for anyone who wants their games to be accessible to non-'gamers'. I would like to highlight some bits which I think were especially important, but the problem is that they all were. A couple (such as the bit titled 'The Unknown Is a Dangerous Place') are similar to things I had noticed myself both in a game context, but also just a general using computer software context.

Thanks a lot for sharing this

I stand corrected. I was just going on personal knowledge. I guess the reason may be more interesting than I thought.

So, perhaps if we didn't name our "games".

I kinda like this idea, naming is always difficult. Although it would probably only be even remotely plausible for well-established developers.


I think a lot of the problem is that game's are generally made by large groups of people. In fact, within the gaming press, games (and game series) are often reffered to as belonging to their developer (or copyright holder).

Perhaps it's also a matter of scale, as in, it's hard to believe that something so vast could be one person's. For example, I tend to think of Braid as being by Jonathan Blow (even though I think he used a contractor for the graphics), partly because his name is synonamous with it in the press, but there's also something else. On the other hand, American McGee's Alice has his name all over the title, but I don't really think of it as being by American himself. I'm not exactly sure why, but maybe it's a subconcious thing to do with scale (or possibly just because I know a lot of other people's work went into it).


Of course, the ultimate game company at not recieving credit is TOSE. I only happened to hear about them because I was looking at some top-ten lists on gamefaqs.

I had been thinking I should post this. It's pretty cool, I think it does a nice job of expressing a message in a personalised way.

Although, if you lived on a street with trees on it, the end may look a bit weird  .

4.) (A somewhat petty one) Who the hell follows an 11-year old around trying to shape his thoughts anyway? All I can think of is some kind of paedophile trying to groom him.

Literature is full of imaginary friends. This sort of mindset really bothers me, I actually used to get dirty looks for being friendly towards children here in Britain (and then I started shopping downtown where being friendly to children does not equal grooming them).

Again, this was meant more as a tounge-in-cheek 'it's kinda petty and I don't really think it' sort of reason. I actually agree with your point, people really should be allowed to be friends with younger children without being looked down upon. I like children too, although I have plenty of younger brothers so I didn't really get dirty looks for it. I was drawing this reason more from society than my own personal beliefs to try and emphasise that the whole thing seemed 'unnatural', like you didn't really belong there.

And yes, I believe you're meant to be an imaginery friend, it's mentioned that Milo "counjures you up", I just don't think that playing as an imaginery character that doesn't really exist is going to enable you to immerse yourself in the world. At the very least, it just seems like an odd and forced setting. Maybe that's because I've never had an imaginery friend though.

The problem is not doing things around him, the problem is (I think) that he doesn't seems to be that involved with them.

Yeah, that's what I was trying to get at. Your activities are almost separate from his, Like you're two people who just happen to be in the same place.

The idéa of a "real" character that changes depending on the players' actions is interesting. The natural way of doing this is with a child, as children are usually more impressionate than adults, who seem to be stuck in the same ways. Otherwise the change might be too slow to notice or simply not feel very natural. Pedophilia has hardly anything to do with it.

True. I don't really think it's paedophilic, I was just trying to point out that the setting makes it feel like your presence is very much "forced" just to make the game possible, which happens to highlight to fact that he's not real and that it's just a game.


It's definitely one to keep track of though.

To start with, I have some bias against this because I had an idea that was fairly similar before I'd heard of this game (I think even before it had been announced). So when I found out someone had been working on a similar idea (admittedly having butchered it) I was kinda peeved. That notwithstanding, I still have issues with it.

The first is, as Chainsawkitten pointed out, those cartoony things that pop-up. Because of course, real people get that all the time when they "change". I think it completely spoils the illusion of him being anything other than a component of a computer game.

Secondly, I don't like the fact that it just seems to be a giant series of mini-games, almost like Wario-Ware (I think that's what it was called) on the Wii.

3.) It also seems like you don't really interact with Milo himself most of the time, it's more like you just happen to be there and doing things around him.

4.) (A somewhat petty one) Who the hell follows an 11-year old around trying to shape his thoughts anyway? All I can think of is some kind of paedophile trying to groom him.

Also, the first time I watched it I thought Mr. Molyneux treated him more like some sort of RPG character rather than a person. Though, watching it again, it didn't really seem that way.

Saying that, while I don't really think it's much of a notgame, it definitely has some very interesting ideas with a lot of potential and I am looking forward to see how it turns out.

I think he makes some excellent points. I also think that he's on the right track (well, right or wrong implies only two possibilities which is kinda stupid. So a "very good track" may be better) and that he can probably only do good for the games industry.

I haven't watched the video (my internet doesn't seem up to it at the moment), but I read the slides and stuff and it seemed like a very interesting presentation. I don't see why some people can't accept that not everyone agrees with them and then, instead of actually discussing the real issues, just quibble minor details like an 11 year old who wants to seem superior to everyone else, despite lacking any semblence of critical analysis.

(As much as I'd like to argue those two morons in the TIGSource thread to the ground, I don't think it'd be worth it. They're far too childish to ever admit that something they've said could possibly be anything but the gospel truth.)

EDIT: I just finished watching the video, and it was very good. I think it clarifies a lot which wasn't as clear on your website.

True, but it's probably to do with the fact that comparatively few adults play videogames, so they're just targeting their main audience.

Even if videogames weren't as childish, I don't think that would necessarily change, because a lot of adults are very uncomfortable with computers (and consoles) and only really learn how to do certain tasks on them, e.g. write a word document, use internet explorer, and they have no interest in learning to use them for anything else. On the other hand, the youth of today has generally grown up with computers and videogames being the norm, and if they (we) desire to keep playing after growing up somewhat, there could perhaps finally be a larger demand for games that are more targeted at adults and these might get made. Maybe.

The reason for the collision detection is that movement is square by square, i.e. if you tap right, you move one square to the right. As you've pointed out, this makes for some wierd collision detection, but the only other option was to write customised collision detection for every single possible tile, which would probably have required a rediculous amount of coding. It would perhaps have been better if the edges were at the edges of the edge pieces (if that makes sense), something I'll bear in mind if I ever design my own tileset.

I don't think it's quite as simple as it being too big, it just has a poor size:immersion ratio. I think if it were more immersive it would be perfectly fine the way it is. I think this is largely because the corridors all look very samey (variations in lighting would have helped there) and the fact that the music wasn't entirely tone-appropriate, although it was far better than the other potential candidates I listened to. Also, a lack of other sounds may have detracted. I actually wanted it to be quite empty, it's just that the walking around inbetween events wasn't supposed to be quite as tedious, but more mood setting. The mood setting being sabotaged by the aformentioned problems.

But still, I think my only future plan for this will be to try recording voice-overs (which I probably won't release unless I surprise myself with my voicing talents), since most other potential improvements would require re-writing too much of the game's code and I think that no matter what I do, it will always remain fairly rudamentry, one might even say crude.

Next time I plan to do graphics/music myself (or get friends to help under my supervision) so hopefully it should all go together better. Additionally, I now have a much better idea of how to plan the program than I did before I started, which should help in the future. Incidentally, my next planned game will have no in-game text (or perhaps very little).

The comments/criticisms are much appreciated, thanks for giving it a go. 

(On the off-chance that someone was waitng for a linix build, it's not comming any time soon, linux is too much of a pain for me to get it to work in, even though the code should be perfectly cross-platform)

Though I did like being able to just wander without being stopped by a puzzle or an enemy. It's so rare. As a result I spent more time with this than I did with many other, much more ambitious games.
Proving how easily pleased I am.

I'm going to add this to the positive list for the game 

Thanks for trying it   

The main reason for the inconsistencies in viewpoints is that I didn't make the art myself and was just trying to mix'n'match art from various sources as best I could. If I'd tried to make them myself, I would probably never have finished. I suppose I could have searched wider for resources though.

I guess the main reason for requiring space/enter to be pressed was that I wanted items to be able to be picked up on non-walkable squares (this would have required far more work with just the walking because the "event" and the "image" would be on different squares). I could probably have used the walkable ones more often than I did though.
And the main reason why you can't continue walking while reading is that I never considered it. The only potential problem would be if you walked over another event, but that's manageable I suppose.

Voice acting? I'm not sure it would be that good because I'm not very confident with speaking in any capacity plus I mumble greatly. Although I might try it to see if it sounds good, I hadn't really considered it.

As for controls, it is rigid mostly to simplify things for me, as this was my first project. To add in diagonals would have necessitated more animation and mouse movement would have needed some form of pathfinding (probably not a very sophisticated one though). I didn't really want to do too much as it was more of a learning experience and I just wanted to have something that was finished (and relatively playable). I'm not sure what you mean by tilting, but it sounds more complicated than I was willing to go for.

All bridges, or just the one?  Incidentally that was probably my favourite bit of writing I did for this.

Very true. I was actually thinking that it would be good to have different darkness levels in different areas as I was getting close to finishing the mapping, but due to the way I hacked my tile rendering code into the main loop it seemed like it would be a daunting task. I think I'll probably try and look for an easy way to do that though. I was also planning to add some sound effects, including waterfall sounds, but I kinda forgot / the waterfall wasn't as impressive as I'd hoped.

Originally I was thinking of doing more of a puzzle-ish game. Only simple puzzles, but the main character would have been a wizard, cast a few spells. There would probably also have been some enemies in there. Essentially all I kept was the cave setting and the writings (although they would probably have had a different tone if I'd kept the original setting).

As for the ending, I'm surprised that you found it funny, I actually find it to be more morose or depressing, although I wouldn't interpret in the context of being within a videogame (even though technically it is). It wasn't really supposed to be reflexive or satirical or anything. But to each his own.


Anyway, thank you very much for the feedback and I'll start looking at trying out some of your suggestions tomorrow evening (assuming I don't just fall asleep).

p.s. Just out of interest, did you find the "less obvious" event? I'd be surprised if you did unless you read the event.txt file, but still...

Sorry, someone pointed this out to me on the TIGsource forums, I just forgot to update the link here. It should include it now if anyone else was wanting to try it.