I quite agree with Michael, Journey feels allot more about the structure then the content.
Maybe the design(or rather use of structure) is a bit....excessive?

For me it feels extra obvious when watching the video. The whole project is more or less based on utilizing different kinds of structures for an emotional roller coaster in game form. As seen in the video they're iterating over the content to match the structure, so the structure is dictating what the content will be, which feels very much that the emotional response according to the structure is what's important for the developers.

When thinking about this even more, it's easy to spot in other entertainment forms.

Take comedy for example, how much of comedy isn't based on the actually delivery and timing of the joke? So when separating the content from the structure(delivery) it might loose what's funny about it.

Same goes for popular music I guess. It's pretty easy to recognize certain combinations and build ups that evoke a emotional response, that's being used in allot of the pop idol songs.

Should the content or the structure be the real focus?

Now they've posted Jenova Chens "Designing Journey" talk over at gdc vault, it's pretty interesting.
http://gdcvault.com/play/1017700/Designing

There is one thing I've been thinking about thou, the use of catharsis to achieve the strong emotional reaction in the player.
I think it was mentioned here before, but is really the ultimate goal of this medium to achieve strong emotional response through our work? And through which means should we achieve this?

Through this "catharsis" you get the emotional response due to extreme changes in the emotional state of the game/book/movie, so maybe it's not really thanks to the actually content you achieve this but instead through the emotional flux. So I was just asking myself is this really a fair(to the player) way to achieve the emotional response? Perhaps it's too manipulative? But then, what isn't? Through audio & visuals we're constantly manipulating the player to evoke a certain emotion or mood. Maybe we're crossing some line sometimes in terms of manipulating the player to achieve our goals.

We've been through this before regarding to some free to play games, where players constantly are manipulated to get them to buy more in-game currency among other things. But now, we instead use "tricks" to achieve our own justified goals.

So where goes the line between what's okey and what's not?

brilliant. If you need a beta tester, I would submit myself

Thanks allot!
Yea when the time is right we'll definitely need beta testers and we certainly want the feedback from people at this forum. So I'll post about it when it's time for it.

Finally we submitted to IGF and I thought I post our teaser video here. Hope you enjoy it!

PAVILION FIRST TEASER

and some more info.

Time to sleep!

The soccer game looks pretty interesting, will definitely give it a try!
Regarding steambird I think it's well over 2 years old, maybe even over 3 years old, also I've heard it's more or less based on some board game that have a similar structure.

For the IGF, we also have a teaser cooking, will post it in the upcoming week.

Found this talk by Charlie Kaufman the other they, it's not explicitly about screenwriting, it's more about the movie industry, creativity and such. And I think there's allot of similarities with how the game industry works and what, especially smaller developers can and should do in order to make more personal experiences. He even uses the expression "non-story" as a way to write more personal stories. Anyhow pretty inspiring.

http://soundcloud.com/bafta/charlie-kaufman-screenwriting-lecture

I think I'm trying to do a bit of this in Bientôt l'été. But there's probably still too much structure in it, and too much concern with "going deep".

I totally agree, Bientôt l'été is one of the few interactive experiences that made me feel something in line with that. I definitely like that there's no explicit goal in it, I think that could be the first big step towards some kind of "notgame". One other game I've been returning to(replayed 3 times now, which has not happened with any game the latest 5 years) is Sword & Sworcery, it has something special with it's atmosphere and how I get immersed in it. And I think it also have this kind of poetic beauty that I'm looking for. Upon that it lacks in some strong explicit goal for the player and it's more of an exploratory goal that leads you through the experience. I think I would love a more non-linear S&S experience filled with small pieces of beauty for you to discover through the exploration of the world.

Today when I was reading a book something struck me, something that I'm missing from games, something that all the other medias provides me with. Pretty often in a book there's a certain phrase that's incredible beautiful and evokes a kind of beautiful imagery and feelings inside of me. The same goes for film, there could be certain shots that does exactly the same for me, and in music it could be some lyric or a part of the melody that evoke something special in me.

This is something I've almost never felt from a videogame, and another thing here is that allot of them might not have anything directly to do with the actually plot of the book/movie or "what it's about" / "meaning of the piece" but just a little poetic beauty injected into it.

So what is the equivalent and how can we achieve this in an interactive experience, especially through some kind of interaction? Often in games it feels like all interactivity that we create must be an "important mechanic" that's deep and can have allot of outcomes/effect on the world. Instead of this why not take advantage of that the interactive media could really be about the NOW, the being instead of how you change the world or the plot in a longer perspective, or that it's not about any "meaning" or message, it's more about the beauty in the details, experiencing the details and the beauty that's held within.

So instead trying to make something with a "meaning" why not only try to do something that evoke a certain feeling in the details, maybe small interactions that focus on evoking and enhancing this specific feeling, interactions that might not play an important part in the underlying systems in a traditional sense of a game.

And of course this is just one way of thinking of it in how we can create interactive experiences that would be different from games. Maybe it could be seen as some kind of poetry in an visual and interactive form, short but mainly focusing on evoking a certain feeling, no explicit goal for the user, just simply being.

To this day I haven't found anyone online with whom I could play.

Maybe we can have a date some day 

I just bought the 8$ preorder and found myself walking around and experience the great atmosphere for a good 30-40 minutes.

So here's some initial thoughts about the whole experience.

I totally looove the atmosphere of the whole experience, walking along the empty beach to the sound of birds and waves mixed with the atmospheric tune. Definitely makes me immersed in the scene.

I think the french voice over also enhance the atmosphere and the overall "poetic" and melancholy(at least for me) feel.

Regarding the controls I feel like it's 2 different combination that works the best. The most enjoyable one for me was the combination of 3rd person view and mouse control. This took the game-ish feel away from controlling the character with the keyboard and made it feel more integrated in the whole experience. It also allowed me to change the view while still walking and kind of making a beautiful moment out of having control over the camera while the character was just walking by him self. The other setup I found less game-ish was the first person view with the keyboard controls, not as good as the above one but still it felt more immersive then teh 3rd person view with the keyboard which really felt game-ish and you got the feeling that you wanted to be more agile and move around allot as in many 3rd person games.

For the whole thing with the sentences that you'll find on the beach I had a harder time understanding how to interact with that system. I later on read the instructions on how to interact with this system and understood that there was some thing that could be picked up but couldn't figure it out for some reason. I think I would like to see some more streamlined interaction here. So maybe instead of sentences washing ashore it could be some kind of object tied to the sentences, that the character would pick up by him self when walking close enough, and then get the actually sentence displayed for you. Same goes for when you then close your eye, you could get some visuals of the object, the text and the voice over at the same time.

Then for the "cafe" part, I think this could also be more minimalistic when it comes to displaying the sentences. Now it felt a bit like an old point 'n click adventure game where you go through all the different branches you have in a certain dialogue to proceed in the game or find out a clue from the dialogue. And since in Bientôt l’été you don't have that kind of explicit goal of the conversation, i presume, more then enjoying the atmosphere and the now, I think you could make it much more minimalistic to draw less attention from the user and place more of the attention on the being rather then the doing(interacting). So I could imagine something where you display less sentences at the same time but as you interact with them they either disappears totally or exchanged for another sentence.

Another little thought that popped up I had about the beach is that one thing to not break the immersion of reaching the end of the beach and not being able to walk further could be some kind of physical loop/illusion so you will always come back to the house on the beach if you just keep walking. I don't know how difficult this could be on the technical side but I can imagine that that one could do some smooth transition and move the player back to the other side of the beach as soon as he reach the end of one side. Might be a bit trouble if you still can see the house from this point....

So this is what kind of striked me at a first glance and some things suggested might break your vision of it, I don't know, but the overall feeling of the experience is REALLY good and it feels like there's allot of potential here if you just keep putting your heart into it.

I've used corona for quite a while at work. And I would definitely recommend it for people with no or just a little coding experience. It also have a great community and allot of free code to dig into. We have deployed on ios & android with no problem and compared building and dealing with provision files in xcode for ios builds, corona makes it really slick and easy to deal with. I guess the backside is that it's only for mobile platforms so no windows or mac osx builds.(Thou you can run the simulator on both mac osx and windows)
If you compare AS3 and LUA I would say that LUA is better if you come from a non coding background, pretty easy to get into, no compiletime and pretty forgiving as a language.

Anyone tried this unity plugin called Brain builder?

I'm note sure if this has been discussed before, anyhow lately I've been thinking about what we as developer can or should expect from the players in terms of devotion and commitment to be immersed into the game.

In general I think that most games can be immersive and it's mostly up the player to engage in role playing. This has been true since we were kids and engaged in playing cowboys and Indians which was as I can remember highly immersive, but also trough our teens I think we were more prone to engage in role playing with games then what we might be today. I can remember myself playing both Ghost Recon, Mafia and Pokemon and it being a highly immersive experience due to strong role playing by my self, I was unconsciously almost changing the narrative set up in the games to better fit my self into them and acting like I really were the main character. Now days it's rarely happening, can't even remember the last time I really was immersed in a game.

So what could this depend on? Are we less prone to engage in role playing as we grow older? Or is it something with being a developer that makes you analyze it instead of just letting go, accepting the game and be immersed into it?

So how much can we or should we expect the player to set his mind to be immersed into the game? Or how much hand holding, forcing(?) and manipulating should we do to make sure that the player will be immersed?   

http://youtu.be/oyTabH8PpZs
Sounds interesting and seems like it's gonna be pretty notgame-ish.

[THAT]

Actually, lately i've been feeling that maybe the doing part is not THAT important for this medium. Of course it plays a central role to interact with the creation, but I feel that allot of things regarding "making meaningful choices" and to be able to interact with allot of stuff is somewhat overrated. So I would rather see that its about being rather then doing.