Did you know?

Games are inherently sociopathic when dealing with social interaction.

Perhaps I’m slow in realizing this but this comment on an online video made me think:

Andrew Scheil
The Whole concept of forging relationships with people in Persona is incredibly stupid. All you do is just agree with whatever they say and make them happy. It’s not being a friend, it’s being a manipulative sociopath.

This comment resonated with me since it’s one of the reasons I can’t play Persona-games, apart from the whole RPG-part of them being terribly dull. I try to max out the system and make people think well of me at all costs, which makes me feel terrible (yet I still do it, cause otherwise the game punishes me). My siblings love Persona 3 and 4 but when they say something like: “Ugh. I didn’t level up my social link. What a waste of time spending time with her. I should have done something else instead.”, there’s something wrong. And that’s despite both of them (particularly my sister) not really caring for personas or the Tartarus/TV World parts, thinking they’re boring and repetitive and being in it moreso for the social relations and story.

When you don’t pick the dialog options you want to pick but try to discern which ones are “correct” (the ones they want to hear) and when you’re doing it not for the sake of friendship but to amass power (stronger social links give in-game advantages by allowing you to forge stronger personas), that’s sociopathic.

I quickly realized that this is not unique in Persona’s implementation but inherent in game systems. As long as there are goals and rewards, players will try to beat the system (if there are goals then that’s what they’re supposed to do, they’re supposed to try to attain them). If these goals and rewards relate to social interactions then the player will try to beat that system, which is sociopathic in such a context. If there’s a reward for me in saying something dishonest, then the only sensible option is to say it, no matter how dishonest it is. Not saying it will hinder me from attaining the goal, and attaining the goal is the purpose of the game. It’s especially bad in dating sims (confession: I don’t play h-games that have branching options without a walkthrough guiding me all the way, cause I don’t want to miss something and have to play through it a second, or third time).

Now, if you want to make a game about a sociopath, that’s fine. But it doesn’t seem to me like most games intend to be sociopath simulators.

The only way to make it non-sociopathic is to remove goals and rewards from those systems, i.e. make them non-game systems. Only when you know that you’re not going to be punished for not trying to beat the system can you act naturally and pursue friendship for friendship’s sake, not because the game tells you to (sets it as a goal for you to achieve).

Did you kn0w?

The game is done. Let’s have fun.

First things first: it’s here.

Note: This is a Jam entry, not a Compo entry, because I wasn’t able to publish PyStroke, my personal code library, pre-compo.

I got the game to a reasonably working state on Linux, with no external libraries bar Pygame. I have a title screen, a win condition, a lose condition, some gameplay, and a couple of sounds. It’s three in the morning, and time to call this done. Over the last 27 hours I’ve put about twelve hours into this, and it has been very rewarding. My game library (in the source as pystroke.py) was quite helpful, although there are some design issues that need working out before I open-source it in the next month or so.

IdentiThief started off as many of my games do: with precisely this vision in my head. Once I got there I wasn’t sure what else to do visually, although I do have a few gameplay ideas. The ability to call a project finished is something everyone needs, to my mind, but until I have more ambitious, crazy visions of games, I’m going to keep making silly abstract ones like this. Still, I’m pretty pleased with what I turned out after the day.

If you do go to the trouble of downloading it, and it fails for whatever reason, please let me know. Whatever about the game code, I am trying to write a useful library, so any input is very much appreciated! Likewise, if pystroke.py looks to you like something you might like to play with, get in contact and I’ll keep you updated with the changes. In the next week or two I hope to be doing still more development on it, with the final wind-down of coursework for the semester.

G’luck, and thanks for taking this first Ludum Dare journey with me!

James (@PROGRAM_IX)

Phew, finally done. Got most of the stuff in.

Revenge Bear has had enough. Men with beards have been trying to prove their masculinity by attacking him with their fists for the longest time. Show them who is the boss by taking over their camp.

Finally Maniac: Total Darkness is uploaded. It took me one hour just making everything work with the extracting… Luckily the submission hour exists!

My game is about slaughtering people to sell their body parts and buy new awesome weapons to slaughter more people! Don’t believe me? Try the game! Link.

Howdy,

I manage to “finish” my game.

It’s called Eurydice.

Didn’t have time to make any sounds or music.

The last 4 hours have been HARDCORE.

I really thought i wasn’t going to make it. My whole body is shaking and i’m pretty sure i ate one of my own tooth.

It’s 4am here.

Can’t wait to play all your games.

Good night.

I didn’t think that I would make it this time. But I did (in my opinion)

such a nice and mushy brain

Here is my Entry

Looking forward to playing all of your games, and good luck to all of the jammers out there.

Mad Princess is finished! Go play it!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=rate&uid=11391

Phew! That was hard work but I barely managed to finish my Compo entry! There are 8 levels, and they might be a bit rushed, because I only had 2 hours before deadline to start designing them. Haha. I hope they are still fun to play through.

Now I need to head to sleep because I want to get couple of hours rest before I need to leave to work, but I’ll start rating your games and writing a post-mortem after work!

The biggest villains of our time: sub-prime mortgage brokers! Sell as many houses to under-qualified borrowers as you can before you crash the economy!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=14881

Ran around in circles and didn’t quite make enough progress. I did learn while floundering about and hope to join the next LD! Possibly even submit a game next time. We’ll see, thanks for the motivation so far. It’s been a nice kick in the butt.

If you want to play a game that has a twisted side-plot about an imaginery goat in a recursive nightmare, read on!

I submited my game Makarun in time and I am actually quite content with what I got. At least given the fact that I did not like the theme at all.

I’ll write a more detailed post mortem tomorrow. But I wanted to let you know, that although it is not written in the games description, in the end its absugoatly about goats.

Here’s my entry:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=15341
Gratulations to all fellow campaigners who took part in the compo!

This was my first Ludum Dare and I’m happy that I was able to get a playable game completed!

Subordination Day

Things which I didn’t manage to complete:

• sounds effects
• music
• explosions on the buildings/fighter jets
• missles
• more city choices
• defender fighters
• a goat

I’m a little disappointed that I ran out of time with so much more to do, but all in all, I’m pretty happy with my very first entry!

Well, I managed to survive another Ludum Dare.
I did intend to try to upload some WIP posts but again that didn’t happen.
My game could definitely do with a more work.
A better level, better AI flee behaviour, different stats for the different unit types… I could go on.
Victory and lose conditions would probably help too, forgot about them.
And I somehow completely managed to forget about the need for an ‘End Turn’ button. Oh well.

Its playable anyhow so go play!.
I will upload my timelapse video tomorrow.

Whew… it took most of the 48 hours but I’ve managed to submit my entry to LD48. It includes sound effects but no music… and some graphics could be improved… and the NPC behavior could be better. Still, it is playable and the main design ideas are there. It’s also very short and easy but that’s beside the point. I suppose that now is the best time to write down what I’ve learned, so here’s a little “postmortem”:

What went right:

1) Planning: 48 hours go by really fast. I had the overall game design written down in a sheet of paper and it was useful for me to keep track of the work I had to do to complete the game, as well as to select what tasks would have priority.

2) JawsJS: I guess it isn’t a surprise that this library worked well, as it was created for a previous edition of LD48. It isn’t as sophisticated (in code architecture and features) as some other Javascript/HTML5 libraries but for an event like this, it fits perfectly. Congratulations to ippa for making and releasing this.

3) Brainstorming: dedicating a few hours for brainstorming about the theme was good to explore different ideas before committing to one of them. Finding a concept I was interested in was important to keep motivation to the last hour of the project.

What went wrong:

1) Preparation: I didn’t have much time to prepare for the event. For instance, as I didn’t test my alternatives for music generation, my game ended without music because I simply didn’t have time during the event to learn any of them.

2) Content: my game concept had a big storytelling component, requiring a good amount of content to be generated. Depending too much on content for such a quick project isn’t a good idea. In the end, I had to cut down on some of it and what I did create didn’t have very good quality (even considering my limitations.)

3) Focus: this was my first participation in LD48 so I just came in with the intent of “making a game.” For future editions I intend to set a more specific goal — learn a given language or tool, experiment with a concept (like procedural generation or user interaction) or improve a given skill (coding, pixel art etc.) I felt that not having such a goal led to some bad decisions. For instance, in the end my game was about narrative and choice. If I had this goal from the beginning I could have used more appropriate tools.

In any case, this weekend was great. Now it’s time to rest a little before taking a look at the games that were submitted.

Tags: postmortem

Twisted Neighborhood

So here we are, after two days of fighting with it, I’m finally having something close to what I had in mind. Basically the idea is – you’re playing as a villain with weather control system, and testing it on small island shaped somewhat to remind US suburbs.

The objective is to gather small objects (each object you can pick up with your twister adds you points) the more objects you displace the more points you get – and therefore your tornado gets bigger. And by that you need to destroy the whole village.

Today I’m hoping to record/create some sounds and finish the small details.

Before and after your villainous deeds.

So tonight we are mostly working on polishing up our game! I’m really glad we are going to have an entry and even though this game is basic and filled with bugs its actually pretty sweet.

At this point we have most of the animations and all of the music and sound effects! Bunnies now die when you jump on them and they re-spawn! For our first completed game written in a completely unfamiliar language we are really happy with the results!

We have school tomorrow. We will probably submit around 4 P.M. PST

It’s a goat.

Game progress is coming along! Game is called “Nippon no Gemu”! We hope enjoy.

Well, I finished. The coolest thing about my entry is that it plays and feels just like an Atari 2600 game. Click here to play.

An atari 2600 remake of a game I made for Speed Hack where the theme was… “You are the Villain” back in 2002.

There are multiple levels, all randomly generated.

In the end I don’t think it reached its potential. I wanted to add pedestrians and cars as obstacles. Right now it doesn’t seem challenging enough. I feel like I’m hunting down the cops to beat them up. Oh well. In retrospect a warm-up and a pre-designing of the engine would have vastly improved this entry.

Click here to play.

Took me all night to figure out how to make a background tile! But then I added a castle and a crosshair.

My idea is kind of simple, you are a villain inside the castle, and you have to shoot missiles at the incoming bad..er..good guys and stop them from getting into your castle. I want to add different powerups, enemy types, and that should take me the next 22 hours… hahaha… we’ll see!

Yet another print of the game . This wheel shows up between levels and decides a small modifier for the next one. Game is pretty playable already but we want to make a really nice version before we can post it here =]

So! I, like the thousand-odd other people who’ve slid their games under the door at the last moment, just participated in Ludum Dare. No kidding! It’s not like I’d be writing a post on this site for any other reason! But it’s still true. This was my first Ludum Dare, but not my first GameJam in general. I’ve been doing them all year, so I’m pretty gosh-darned familiar with the whole idea of making a game in 48 hours.

Not so familiar with the whole idea of do it all yourself, though! I’ve had artists, musicians, and sometimes other programmers, working with me on every GameJam I’ve done so far. So…this time was a little nerve-wracking! Combine that with the fact that I was out at a family get together for the first six or so hours of LD, and I was feeling pretty friggin nervous when I started!

But it all came together in the end

Once I learned that the topic was “You’re The Villain”, thanks to a swift text from a pal, I got my brainstorm on. The first dozen ideas I came up with were all super complex: what if you’ve just stolen a priceless jewel from a millionaire, and accidentally triggered the security, and now you have to escape his booby-trapped mansion! Sounds like fun! …To play. You expect me to a) build a mansion (already out of the question, let’s be real. I like to think I’m okay at 2d art. I draw cute stuff! but 3d is not exactly my area of expertise. Yet. I’ll get there one day!), b) come up with a bunch of mini game ideas (probably not too hard! time consuming, though), and c) code all the mini games? Oh, and it was going to be a visual novel? So I’d have to dust off my python skills?

Yeah, no.

After another few dozen terrible ideas, I decided this one wasn’t too bad. I have kind of an addiction to those games where you have to get the couple to sneakily kiss, without anyone seeing. They’re pretty fun! And very, very simple. So what if I built a game like that, but instead of staying in one place, you’re sneaking towards treasure? And when you let go of the mouse, you transform into a ridiculous disguise? Perfect GameJam fodder, imo. I like to make really simple games for this kind of thing, so that I can relax and gossip with everyone else doing the jam, and just… have fun! Why bother getting stressed out over something that I signed up for?

So I was pretty happy with this idea. I spent like, honestly, probably only an hour or two actually coding. hold down mouse: lerp towards treasure. let go of mouse: change material. guard’s looking and you’re moving? oops, you just lost a life. It wasn’t exactly rocket science. I got to spend most of my time with paint tool sai, doodlin sprites and backgrounds and stuff. I kind of regret deciding to build this in Unity, as honestly it probably would have been better in flash or something, but…I have never done a flash game before. Maybe it’s something to check out before next LD?

(Also, omg. I spent way too much time with FL Studio open, trying to remember how to use it. “I used to be good at this,” I said to myself. “Come on, Megan! You can make a cute, atmospheric violin-y loop! Even just something mediocre for the menu will be fine!”. That’s when I found the folder of my old FL projects. Um, it turns out…I was never good at this program? Resolution for next LD: become good at music! I’m sad I couldn’t pull that part of Heist! together, but there’s always next time.)

So anyway, I had a lot of fun! I wasn’t even really planning on participating, but I’m glad I changed my mind My idea was really simple, and it let me just hang out with some cool devs over twitter, and make some friends, and tool around in Unity for a couple of days…which, let’s be honest here, is pretty much my favourite thing to do.

Anyway: I hope you give Heist! a try, and I hope you enjoy playing it. I certainly enjoyed making it

(Play & Rate Heist! HERE)

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem, screenshot, SuccessStory, unity