http://hyperbound.net/hyperbound
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfUHdKv5DYU

unlike most ROM hacks, Hyperbound isn't filled with swear words and crudely-drawn penises. It strips most of the RPG elements out of Earthbound and focuses entirely on dialogue; you play as a character who wakes up in a hospital with no recollection of who he is or why he's there. Your task is to talk to as many people as possible in order to learn more about yourself, and then undergo an experimental medical treatment which either will 'cure' you or leave you with permanent mental damage (which shows up as data corruption in-game). The latter only happens if you've missed talking to certain key people ... I believe you can go back and seek treatment as many times as you like, but the game world can decay to a point where it's entirely scrambled and unusable.

I thought the greatest thing about Earthbound is that it's the kind of game you *wanted* to explore because the world felt so inviting and 'complete'. So taking the exploration aspect and making it the focus of the game (ie: you have the easiest time 'winning' if you've explored every nook and cranny) works brilliantly here, in spite of a few rough edges.

I see that too. And I don't understand this either.

There's a certain group of people that is extremely defensive about games. You can't say anything negative about games without infuriating them. Even if it's entirely irrelevant. You can't say that games are not, say blue dolphins, without them making an argument for games being blue dolphins and ultimately saying that it doesn't matter whether they are or not but you still shouldn't say that they are not.

[...]

Maybe they are afraid of losing what they have.

In a way, we're in an easier situation. We don't like the present very much but we have high hopes for the future. They, on the other hand, are delighted with the present and thus they fear that it may one day come to an end. They love video games so much and perhaps they realize that their lives are supisciously wonderful, with all this attention and money devoted to their hobby. Maybe deep down they feel that it is not really justified for a geek thing to get that much, that they don't really deserve this happiness. So perhaps they perceive the current status as fragile and they attack everything that might disturb the subtle balance.

I think a lot of it relates to the young age (physical and/or emotional) of a lot of self-described "gamers". I know when I was in my teens, my likes and dislikes basically defined me ... if someone talked shit about something I enjoyed, it was like they were insulting me personally. Or if it was something that slowly became mainstream, I looked upon the newer fans with disdain because "they weren't there at the beginning". And now that I'm getting older, I care less and less about that. My favorite band gets mainstream success? Awesome! The sports-nut guy at work starts playing my favorite video game? Great, now we have some common ground.

So notgames/artgames/etc. are affronts to THEM. Even if we're just using video game technology to create art, by god we're invading their territory and they have to defend it at all costs lest episode 3 of Half-Life 2 ends up being 15 hours of Gordon and Alyx having a conversation about philosophy. In black and white. And with subtitles.

But what if I wanted to make a notgame?  Do notgames even have genres?  I was thinking of just having them walk around and talk to each other (One of my favorite past times is just to observe the patrol routes of NPCs in RPGs).  But then what?

that's it! Weave bits of a story into the conversations ... you talk to people, you get little snippets. Maybe the people have different viewpoints regarding what happened in the story. And if the story is incomplete? Let the imagination of the player and the atmosphere of the world fill in the blanks. Them maybe create some kind of 'endgame' ... ie: if you interact with enough people you'll learn to go to a certain location where something happens that provides a conclusion of sorts to the story.

http://www.colorcave.com/january.html

it's a pretty neat experience ... you walk around a pixelated winter scene and make little sprays of twinkly music based on the snowflakes you eat. I could've done without the twee sentence fragments that appear every so often, but that's my only complaint.

I was never one to hallucinate either (unless you count being intensely sick and full of Nyquil), but I found it to be oddly relaxing to play. Not often, mind you ... but kind of an Animal Crossing thing where you spend fifteen or twenty minutes with it to relax before bed/after work/etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LSD_(video_game)

I feel like, in some respects, this might be the granddaddy of notgames. It plays like any number of early 3d games for the PSX or otherwise, but all you do is effectively walk around and explore and examine the changing scenery. Touching walls/objects will usually warp you somewhere else, and if you jump into a chasm you'll wake up. And sometimes your nightly dream is replaced with a completely unrelated video clip. And there's certain events that can happen which affect the dreams.

... it's hard to adequately describe the experience.

I'd love to see a modern remake of this, given all that can be done nowadays with modern graphics cards and procedural generation and the like. But at the same time, I think the primitive PSX graphics really drive home the fragile and dream/hallucination-like feel.

I do agree it is complicated. I also think it is a very difficult game. I haven't played a ton of "modern" FPS games but Bioshock and Crysis are two of them. I suppose you could throw STALKER in there as well. I suck at them. STALKER I do better because you have more time to plan out what you're doing (that and I actually enjoy the atmosphere and story). But the other two, the controls are ridiculously complex and clunky to use. They are certainly a long way from the simplicity of the original Doom or Quake. I hated the environment of Bioshock. It's an unpleasant place and I have no desire to explore it. It's dark, claustrophobic and oppressive. And not in a cool horror movie sort of way, more a "damn, this place sucks, I don't want to be here" sort of way.

I felt like I should've enjoyed the atmosphere of Bioshock more than I did, mostly because I'm a sucker for the retro-future thing. But it was tough to really let myself get lost in the game when it felt like a bunch of corridors punctuated by the occasional room with a few doors in it (that led to other corridors). Or occasionally, you'd hit a building that felt explorable but was cut up into sections by clichés. Oh, the door leading into the room I need to enter is locked? I guess I'll have to investigate the very conspicuous vent that, against all odds or common sense, is just large enough for a grown man to crouch through. But I suppose my feelings on realistic worlds in games getting wrecked by video game logic is a rant for another topic ...

I think the thing that really drove home how poorly implemented the controls seemed was that I'd just come off a massive Fallout: New Vegas jag when I played through Bioshock. F:NV is undeniably a much larger, more immersive, and more complex game ... but it's so much simpler with regard to input. There were a few awkward parts (the merchants and gambling mini-games take a little getting used to) but still, everything can be done without having to move far from the WASD position.

I spent most of this morning playing Left 4 Dead. Absolutely brilliant game. You go in, blow shit up, and an hour later you're done.

Meanwhile, it took me about three weeks of on-and-off playing to get through Bioshock. It was a pretty game, sure, but trying to figure out what I was supposed to do and how I was supposed to do it was a bit irritating. Switch to fire plasmid to melt the ice, switch back to the shotgun, hack the turret, switch to incendiary ammo, listen to the voiceover, check the map to find my target, follow the arrow, decide whether or not to save the little girl, turn it off and go back to watching TV, try again in a few days.

From a purely game-related standpoint, Bioshock is arguably far easier than L4D. Money and health boosts and vending machines were everywhere, to say nothing of the omnipresent Vitachambers. But it's more difficult to play. Too many verbs. My hands are all over the place for even the simplest of things, since I have to worry about juggling the weapons (and their different kinds of ammo) and the plasmids even for basic fighting. Left 4 Dead? Everything I have to do falls right under my fingertips. I might have to work harder at not failing miserably, but it's a lot easier to do so.

I think this is one area to pay close attention to when it comes to developing new experiences, game/notgame/otherwise. I have well over 100 things in front of me to push/spin/move, but I don't want to have to push/spin/move them all in order to make progress. Can I get by using a normal three-button mouse? Or a simple NES-style gamepad? If no, why not?

I've seen similar things happen in music -- you take a genre that, depending on your opinion, is stable or stagnant and add your own twist on it. No matter how well you do, you will have some people screaming and crying because you're not doing the original style justice and that you don't know anything about it and blah blah blah. In the end, some just refuse to accept that a genre/label/style/whatever isn't a rigid, inflexible category so much as an adjective, and you're not going to win them over short of giving them a lobotomy.

And the ones who might dig on what you do? They're a lot quieter, because chances are they have better things to do than sit around writing incendiary screeds against things they don't like and arguing with people who have differing opinions. But they'll still enjoy it and probably spread the word as well.

Part of your problem could be that you're trying to go for photo-realism.  You could try something much more stylized. The games on this page are all made with Unity, and they're absolutely oozing with style: http://wiki.xxiivv.com/Visual

Another problem could simply be lighting; maybe your dark tones are too black and not enough blue/purple/pink.  Here is a very good tutorial on lighting: http://www.itchy-animation.co.uk/light.htm

actually, I was working on what was essentially a big box with a few platforms and ramps. And magenta lighting.

I have the sinking feeling that my problems might come from using the free version of Unity, instead of the 'pro' one with all the neat features. My experiments in UDK confirm that gratuitous post-processing makes *everything* better.

I wonder what would happen if the designers on this forum each made a small hidden object game with a subject of their choice. It would make a nice bundle! What would a bunch of artistic hidden object games look like, when the designers are not interested in mass appeal?

I think it could be brilliant. Unfortunately, the only ones I've been exposed to seemed so geared toward a 'casual gamer' stereotype that not only was there no challenge, but there wasn't even anything to enjoy (gameplay-wise or artistically). "Here's an hour, now find the 10 items whose pictures were the first thing we found in Google Image Search".

Or perhaps escape-the-room games? I love the surreal logic that inhabits these ... an extreme example would be reaching a key by building a racecar out of a remote control, some knobs, and part of a pen, although the better ones typically have gentler puzzles.

I took from the article that even if you're not in an art-related role, to treat it as if it were. Like if you're working on a platformer, don't just make the run/jump physics 'functional' ... try to give them the same elegance that the physics in Super Mario Bros. or Knytt have. Something to that effect.

But I guess I don't see that big a gap between art and craft. Anyone can learn to compose music just as anyone can learn to be a plumber ... writing what most would consider 'good' chord progressions/melodies/harmonies/etc. can basically be boiled down to a set of formulas and rules. But knowing when to break those rules (and how) is where it changes from simple craft to art.

I like Unity -- it's easy to use and seems like a nice blank canvas to work with. However, everything I've done in it looks like crap. I suspect it's partially my not-so-hot Blender skills, but even when only using the built-in Unity primitives everything looks washed-out and cheap.

I like UDK as well -- it takes no effort on my part to create a world which looks great. However, it's an incredible pain sifting through all the game scripts just to find and change minor details like whether or not you hear footstep noises, or what the player's movement speed is. I don't mind a little bit of code, but if I wanted to deal with that much of it I'd just write my own engine.

I feel like in both instances I'm missing something fundamental that would make my life a million times easier. Or is there a third/fourth/nth option that would suit me better?

interactive things tend to be more interesting accompaniment to music than Winamp visualizations, haha.

Also have to say I like this game. Too bad it was never made into a full game (as in a longer game, right now it is very short and does not feel like full experience).

I think that's almost my favorite part -- it does its thing very well, very briefly, and then leaves you wanting more. It's a nice change of pace in the age of games that take a whole weekend (or more) to complete.

also, Michaël -- where did you get stuck? I found it to be a charmingly self-explanatory game right up until the flagpole jumping bit (which IMO was a questionable design decision, and one which I noclip-ed through without a twinge of guilt).