Experimental Game Dev Podcast Show

Why You Should Develop Games for A Mobile Social Network

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/podcast-mocospace.mp3

Or listen to it here…

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The Joy of Running an Online MMO For Over 15 Years

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/gdco-frogdice.mp3

Or listen to it here…

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Guest Post: A Change In Perspective

Metroid: Other M recently came out, and in it, you must switch between first and third person, I began to think about perspective. Which should designers pick?

Too many people just pick the first they visualize with the game, without giving it any thought, a huge pitfall. The perspective one plays the game from will change everything.

A reason designers pick one over the other is the mechanics they want to use in the game. A shooter (guy running around with a gun) consists mainly of the mechanic of aiming and shooting. It is usually harder to present a game in which the player shoots enemies with the third person perspective (Resident Evil has done it well). First person shooters like Call of Duty work very well because you can focus on shooting, and the controls between aiming and running mesh.

Now imagine Super Mario Galaxy 2 in the first person. You won’t be able to see the puzzle, a planet, and pieces like buttons become hard to work with, as they are hard to see. It’s hard to play a platformer without seeing where you’re jumping. These problems are fixed in third person.
Another basic difference is the character you want to show. God of War, a third person game, tells the powerful tragedy (at least the first one) of Kranos. Not being able to see his movements, expressions, and violent moves would be a damper on the game. Without that interesting protagonist, the story is meaningless, right?

Wrong. Look at Half Life 2. The entire game is in first perspective, and it has one of the best stories of all time. Being in first person allows for roleplay. You ARE Gordan Freeman, the leader of the resistance. YOU are the chosen one. When you play, you become the character, so your thoughts become Gordan’s thoughts. If you’ve ever spoken out loud to any of the characters, or thought of the things you would do if it wasn’t just a game, you know what I mean.

The sense of immersion you want in the game can also weigh into the perspective choice. In Half Life 2, that immersion helped build the story. Watching other members of the resistance bring down the television screen outside the train station felt awesome, and really added to the living, breathing world around you. It would not have felt as cool watching Gordan watch these things. This is probably the strongest pro for the first person perspective – how much immersion adds to the story and to the player’s feeling that his actions matter in the living world around him/her.

So, when deciding the perspective of your game, follow these steps.

1. If being in first perspective can hinder the gameplay (make it hard to accomplish challenges), choose the third perspective (like platformers, most fighters, and games where you control many people/units).

2. If being in third perspective can hinder the gameplay, choose the first perspective (like most shooters).

3. If you want to tell a powerful story (a major focus of your game) of the character, you may want to lean towards third person (Ico, Alan Wake, most RPGs).

4. If you really want to immerse your audience in the very interesting world you have created, and don’t mine if the lack of character occurs, you may want to lean towards first person (Half Life 2, horror games that aren’t character-driven).

That should clear any confusion, and if you can’t decide from that, you probably haven’t developed you vision enough.

Dylan Woodbury lives with his family in Southern California. He runs http://dtwgames.com, a game design website that posts intriguing new articles every week, both beginner’s tutorials and theoretical ideas. He also has an interest in writing, and is planning his first novel. His primary goal is to change the world through video games.

Using GetJar to Promote Your Mobile Game…

Hey folks,

Last time I mentioned marketing…I talked about Kickstarter and how one could use that to get exposure for a game.

There is another place that may be a way to get exposure for indie mobile game developers…and that is GetJar…they are the 2nd largest mobile app store (behind the Apple app store) and they allow indie developers to place an app on the store for free.

They publish apps for all of the major mobile platforms including iOS, Android, Blackberry, Symbian, etc.

Developers can also by preferred placement in the store…

So this seems like another way to distribute your mobile game app. Check it out.
http://www.getjar.com

Why You Should Consider A Publisher For Your Facebook Game

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/gdco-6-waves.mp3

Or listen to it here…

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Using The New Concept of Narrative Mechanics To Design Better Games

Jeremy, freelance game designer and writer, discusses using Narrative Mechanics as a tool to create emotions in games.

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/narrative-mechanics.mp3

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Guest Post: Video Games as Art

Today, I am going to begin to tackle one of the industry’s most debated questions: Can video games be art?
Up front, I want to say that I am not going to just pick one based on superficial reasons – I am not going to say that games are art because I really really like them, and give you some uneducated excuse as to why they are artistic. I am going to give you an honest answer (upon writing this introduction, I still have no answer written in stone).

So, starting, what is art? Are the qualifications restrictive, allowing only masterpieces to qualify, or is it very broad (I once saw a commercial vacuum in an art museum… on display). Some things that some consider art include paintings, drawings, photos, songs, crafts, sculptures, buildings, movies, books, poems, food, etc. The problem is that these things are all very varied in terms of skill required.
For example – food. Is an expert chef’s well-planned dish considered art? What about the bowl of soup I just made? I just made a paint mark on my paper. Is it put on the same level as da Vinci’s Mona Lisa? No… right?

Or maybe my painting is considered art, but just not very good art. In this case, art would be a scale used to measure the artistic value of something. I think that this is true to a point – some art is better, more artistic, that other art. However, what decides whether or not my single-stroked painting is considered art or not?

I believe that anything can be considered art, but not everything is. I think that it can depend on the artist’s intentions – did the artist try to make something pleasing to the audience, or did he/she design it for other reasons. This leads us to our major qualification. The artist must have designed the “art” with the intentions to make art. What does this mean? It means that if a construction company designs a house, taking into account its usability and other practicalities, it cannot be art. If I painted my painting with the intention to make art, something its audience will find attractive in some way, creating feelings or thoughts.

So do games meet this requirement? Sometimes. Sometimes, designers set out to make the player think or feel. Sometimes, they hash together what the targeted audience wants to see – another cliché shooting game with lots of bad guys, powerful weapons, cursing dialogue, etc. These kinds of things rip the title of art right off the game, because designers are creating the game to please what the gamer already wants. For some games, designers design the game in a way to make the audience experience something that they will like without taking into account what “needs” to be in the game. From the start, nothing “needs” to be in the game – just whatever will add to the player’s experience. This is artistic.

In regards to usability, some elements of the game industry receive fire for not being artistic. The testing process games go through within the company can be shot down, with claims that designers are changing what gamers do and do not like. If a designer does this, taking out aspects of the game the player doesn’t like, even if the designer thinks it will add to the experience, the game can be considered non-artistic. I think what happens most of the time, though, is that designers take what works and doesn’t work in the game and changes it based on the player’s experience to make the artistic value easier to admire. This could make games even more artistic, as designers peer into the user’s mind and take that into account to make the game into a better experience.

It is very common in the other articles I’ve seen on the topic of games as art to see the claim
that games are art, taking into account the artistic things that make them up. Writers point out that the music is art, as well as designing the buildings and landscapes the players see, but that does not mean that the game is art. Sure, all of these things add to the experience and could make the artistic value greater, but that does not make it art! It would be like saying the album art is artistic, therefore whatever you throw onto the CD is art, which is absolutely untrue. It is possible that the album cover could add to the overall experience, but it is not the main point.

So what is the point of video games? What is at the very roots? I’d say that we can break it down to the primary elements – story and gameplay. Story is a known medium of art, but gameplay is the unique artistic aspect to games. When these two are combined, they make something extraordinary – giving the story a far different role than the story in a book.

Art is made by combining story with gameplay – and yes, they both have to be there. However, just because a game has both of these does not mean that it is art. Some examples of these principles… Simple puzzle games, like Tetris, are not art – they do not have a story, so the game becomes a gameplay-focused process that has no additional aspects that cannot give the audience anything to walk away with or think about (beyond the gameplay). The same thing goes for most sports games (all of the EA sports and 2K titles, etc.), most music/rhythm games (just because Rock Band has music, does not make it art), most mini-game games (their sole purpose is for the player to compete in light-hearted, shallow challenges that have no message), some simulation games (Flight Simulator), and some of every other genre. There are exceptions for all of these, though. EA could come out tomorrow with a boxing game that takes you through the life of an immigrant athelete in the 1800s who goes through much inequality and adversity (this artistic setup in terms of story could fall apart as a work of art if the gameplay and story do not come together to teach or make the audience feel something deeply rooted in humanity, not just how to play baseball). I think that the Sims should be considered art, as one could find inside questions regarding humanity, life, and everything. Same goes for Spore.

The story-gameplay I gave can be broken, though (many serious games do not have a real story, but still teach us or make us feel a certain way). Very few games do this, though. However, a minigame-game with no story could have minigames that concern a serious topic, and make us think about something. Any game CAN be art, but not all games are.

I have come to the conclusion that video games can be art, and that the medium of video games should also be listed under artistic mediums, right in between literature and architecture. In fact, video games could be considered THE most powerful artistic medium, as they fully engage the audience in a way that cannot be seen elsewhere. I thought about the roles and duties of civilization and mankind while playing Civilization 5. I experienced the feeling of guild while playing Photopia in a way that I have never felt before, regardless of the fact that the whole game is about 10 pages of text (play it now – you will see just what I am talking about, http://www.ifiction.org/games/play.phpz?cat=&game=87&mode=html). I questioned life and love while playing Heavy Rain. There is an endless list of examples, and it grows every day.

I have made it clear that I believe games are art, and that they can be more powerful than any other medium (seriously, play Photopia), but our medium is so new (it has been 38 years since pong – there are prehistoric cave drawings), and I think that games are not meeting their potential as an art medium. In fact, how unobvious the fact is that games can be art shows that we have a long way to go until we make a game that grabs hold of people with the same strength that Grapes of Wrath or Beethoven’s Fifth does.
Video games are even more powerful as an art form because they use so many artistic elements to add to the audience’s experience, aesthetically, musically, in terms of flow, etc. This could be a contributing factor as to why it is hard for designers to make artistically powerful games, and why Photopia, one of the most artistic games I have played, really nails the art form without any graphics (besides text) and music. I should restate that these additional elements cannot be used as proof that video games can be art – sure, the individual components can be, but you are not selling the individual components. The game’s core is what counts.

So what can we do? We need to continue making games, evolving our art form from the cave drawings of Pong to the Mona Lisa of tomorrow. Others will learn our art is art once we make people cry, shiver in fear, ponder humanity, etc. Until then, we can all spread the message by putting the titles of games in italics or underlines, as art should be.

Dylan Woodbury lives with his family in Southern California. He runs http://dtwgames.com, a game design website that posts intriguing new articles every week, both beginner’s tutorials and theoretical ideas. He also has an interest in writing, and is planning his first novel. His primary goal is to change the world through video games.

The Benefits of IndiePub for Small Game Developers

The Benefits of IndiePub for Small Game Developers…

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/gdco-indie-pub.mp3

Or listen to it here…

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Changing Up The Podcast A Little…

Hey folks,

I’ve been checking out other game dev podcasts…and noticed that they have longer shows. This show use to have longer shows, but they got cut out because it seemed like the same story on each podcast…but a different developer. It felt repetitive…although, people seem to like these stories more.

So this show is going to change things a little…mainly, there will still be interviews from conferences…but each week will also have a longer, in-depth interview.

I’m announcing it today 🙂

This change will start next week 🙂 There’s a good in-depth talk on an interesting design concept of “Narrative Mechanics” that will air next week 🙂

Thomas talks about developing the IndiePub Audio Design Winner, Coma

Thomas talks about developing the IndiePub Audio Design Winner, Coma

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/gdco-coma.mp3

Or listen to it here…

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