Kloonigames

In efforts to sharpen my rapid blogging skills, I present you something that happened less than 24 hours ago.

Rod Humble has just released his experimental game The Marriage for public. The game can be download from his website and it run under Windows 2000, XP and Vista.

The game was presented at this years Experimental Gameplay Session and for me it was the most interesting game presented there. It was also presented at the Nuances of Design session, where we actually got to play it.

The Marriage is an art game, so be warned. It’s gameplay isn’t geared towards the fun (in the common sense), but it’s meant to express how Rod feels about his marriage. It’s very abstract and Rod provides on his website an explanation of the symbols in the game. I don’t recommend you read them. If you don’t know anything about the game, try it out and try to find the meaning to the game yourself. And if you really don’t get it, then go and read the descriptions.

[Via: Arthouse Games].

Yes I’m alive and back home from the Game Developers Conference. I’m still suffering from a horrible jet-lag (I woke up today at 05:00 AM), and my computer broke down on me (I feel like I’ve lost a family member) and the credit card bill just landed in the mailbox. On top of that I’ve been really busy trying to catch up on all the things I had to postpone because of GDC. So this week’s been really sucky. I think it’s a karma thing, I had too much fun in San Francisco and now karma is punishing me for it. If the conference would have been any more fun, I would have probably died this week.

My presentation at the Experimental Gameplay Session went well in the sense that the audience enjoyed it. I noticed that people tend to share the presentation slides on their blog. So here’s mine: egs_slides.ppt. There isn’t all that much useful information in the slides. I basically put them together to let the people know that the games I presented, could be download from this site. And since your reading this, you probably now that already.

I was going to write about the other people’s games presented at Experimental Gameplay Session, but people with faster blogging skills did that already. I really suck at this rapid blogging of events happening right now. I mean the session happened over a week ago. I blame the jet-lag. Anyway Gamasutra has a brilliant coverage of the event, but unfortunately they missed some games. You can read about them from joystiq and from And Maw! This. And also check out these videos recorded during the session (thanks Louis).

As for the conference, it was great. It was my first GDC, and I really enjoyed it. I got to attend some really great lectures, like Chaim Gingold’s Spore’s Magic Crayons and Raph Koster’s Where Game Meets Web, but my favorite was easily the Nuances of Design session by Jonathan Blow. At the Nuances of Design session we had our own laptops there and we played the games as the designers talked about them. I really hope there will be a Nuances of Design session at GDC 2008.

Other thing I really enjoyed about GDC, was the fact that I got meet all these like minded people, creators of my favorite games and people I look up to as great game developers. Everybody seemed very down to earth, passionate and willing share their ideas. Luckily for my safety I didn’t bump into any grumpy old game developers, who would have no doubt strangled me for my enthusiasm. One of my personal highlights was the fact that I got meet and hang out with Kyle Gray and Kyle Gabler of ExperimentalGameplay.com. They are two of the four guys who inspired me to start creating experimental games in the first place. They’re like my idols, so meeting them was really great.

GDC was such a fun event that I promised already to everybody that I’d be there next year also. I really have to start saving up already, since I might not be as lucky as I was this time 🙂

I’m sorry for the lack of posts in February. I’ve been really busy and I was lucky to get the game out in time. But being busy, is not a valid excuse for lack of updates. Fortunately February has traditionally been a slow month for all the game development blogs, usually because of the Game Developers Conference. And up until this Tuesday I wasn’t sure if I could use the GDC as an excuse for my lack of posts. But luckily I can.

Long story short: I’m going to GDC and I’ll be presenting my games at the Experimental Gameplay Session. And yes I’m very excited about the whole thing, since it’s my first GDC. And I really have to thank Darius Kazemi for the whole shenanigans, since he was the one who encouraged me to send my games to the EGW. And Frozenbyte (game development company I work for) for sponsoring my trip, I really couldn’t have afforded to travel there with out their financial support. And the boys and girls (they are actually all older than me, so maybe I should call them grandpa’s and grandma’s) of Experimental Gameplay Workshop for having me there in the first place.

I’ll try to make at least some kind of notes about the other games presented at the Experimental Gameplay Workshop and post them here, since there are some very cool games there. I know since I’ve seen the schedule of the session.

Edit: If any of you who read this blog will be at the GDC this year, drop by and say hi after the session.

Here’s my 7th experimental done-in-under-a-week game. It’s my take on the one button design challenge, that seems to pop up every now and then on every game development forum that I read.

Moo at the Moon

Download
Moo.zip (3.6 Mb) (Release 1)

Instructions

As the full moon rises, nature’s most savage beast (cows) reveal their true nature: their ability to fly.

You play as one of the cows, who tries to jump over the moon. The game is played by only using your left mouse button. When you press down on the mouse button the cow clings to the nearest star. Try to jump from star to star and reach the moon.

Esc – Will quit the game.
Alt + enter – Will toggle fullscreen.

Credits

Game Design, Code & Gfx: Petri Purho ( petri.purho (at) gmail.com )

Music: Dance Orchestra – Blue Danube Waltz.

Sound Effects: From acclivity’s TwoCows.wav, licensed under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus 1.0 License.

Thanks

Physics model is based on Markus Ilmola’s tutorials.

Inspiration source: Experimental Gameplay Project.

Moo at the Moon uses: SDL, SDL_Image, SDL_Mixer and SDL_RotoZoom