Maybe we can even do little thought experiments reversing the roles and then see how we would design the game. How would the game react to the player? Can we express the joy of the game? Its curiosity? Its wonder about the player? Its desire to interact with him/her?

Play in the proper sense of the word. You play with the game, and the game plays with you. I like that thought.

I submitted it to a couple of web design galleries (www.onepagelove.com, cssline.com, etc), and from there it got picked up by some people on Twitter. Then the Tweet, Like and +1 buttons did the rest. I suspect if the right people had picked it up, it would have gotten even more spread.

Great stuff Thomas.

For my last game (which was a regular ol' puzzle game) I tried emailing lots of blogs and sites directly with promo codes. Didn't work at all. This time I'm trying other things. Something that has worked pretty well so far was making a teaser site with a gimmick that makes people want to spread it. I've collected a couple hundred email addresses that way.

"what can I add to make the player WANT to stay in this environment",
instead of the more usual
"what can I do to FORCE the player into staying in the environment"

This is exactly how I've been thinking about Flight of the Fireflies. And the more I work on it, the more it feels like the right approach.

I still think there needs to be interaction – not in the sense of change or agency or any of that, but more in the Crawfordesque sense of you do something, the game responds with something. You do something aesthetic, the game responds with something aesthetic.

If the visual programming language exposes everything (logic as well as assets), as Quest3D does, then the artist is stimulated to make connections between all those things. And this is exactly where games become interesting: when the appearance of the objects in the games are influenced by the behavior of the player, for instance, or when the sound is influenced by the state of the game, or the speed of an animation by the time of day, etc. It's all numbers, in the end, and a visual interface allows you to make calculations with all of them. This can lead to wonderful environments that feel much more alive than things that can only be built through careful and rational construction.

I've never had any problem switching between code and art myself, so I've always wondered where your aversion to programming comes from, but this finally made it click. It's not that making those connections in code is impossible or even harder, it's that coding discourages experimentation, whereas visual programming encourages it.

Makes me think of the music program Reason, where you can flip over the synthesizers to pull cords between different inputs and outputs. I always loved that.

Perhaps I should try some visual programming.

Thanks guys!

Yeah, I'm starting with iOS anyway. Not for technical reasons (it's Unity, so porting isn't very hard), but because I think the experience is just so much better when it's touch. Just feels much more immersive dragging things around with your finger than with a mouse.

Hi everybody, I'm Jonathan.

I met some of you at the Notgames Fest in Cologne, where my upcoming game Flight of the Fireflies was shown. If you missed it, you can find a teaser for the game at http://www.flightofthefireflies.com

I've always been interested in video games as stories and experiences. The more video games I've played, the more bored I've become with points and goals and shooting and pointless choices that don't mean anything and silly stories that say nothing of the human condition. It felt good meeting people in Cologne who think the same way. Hope we can continue some of our discussions here!

PS. My website is http://www.woollyrobot.com