Kloonigames

While surfing the intertubes I bumped into this Miyamoto interview cover: Miyamoto gives advice to game-design hopefuls. Basically he had two advices for us wannabe game designers: get a good well rounded education (on topics other than games) and seek criticism for your games early and often.

So now I remembered that it’s been a good while since I’ve reminded you all that I’m actually seeking harsh constructive criticism on my games. Usually the amount of comments a game gets is my only true indicator how well I did with the game. More comments equals better game, less comments equal crappier game. Just look at The Divorce, it got one comment and one trackback before I revealed that it was an April Fools joke.

I’d actually love to hear what you think of the games, even if it’s not pretty. Don’t threat my games lightly just because they were created in less than seven days. On the contrary I hope you’ll feel more secure at bashing them, because I’ve only invested seven days with each one. It’s not like I’ve developed them for years and go all crazy when somebody says they suck.

Even if I don’t continue the development of a particular game, I’m still interested how would you improve the game to make it more fun to play. Or if there was something that irritated or bothered your gaming experience.

Actually I consider myself lucky that up to this point I’ve gotten two great reviews, where my games were critiqued in constructive manner. One was on the Moby Games for The Truth About Game Development by General Error. The other was on the Fun-Motion -blog for Pluto Strikes Back by Matthew Wegner. I’m grateful for both of the authors for taking the time to play the games and for writing the reviews.

Note: If you have game specific criticism, please write it in that game’s original post. Since there are multiple game posts pointing to this post as an example on what kind of feedback I’m looking, it’s sometimes a bit hard for an outside reader to figure what game you’re talking about.

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.

The new version of Kloonigames Blog is here! On Thursday night I (finally) installed the new version (2.1.) of WordPress, plugged in the Sociable plug-in and then I started dreaming that perhaps I could also create a new layout for the site. I mean how hard could that possibly be. I used to do sites, back when Netscape Communicator 4.7 was the hottest browser and tables and invisible images where the formating choice of the professionals. Few years ago I briefly created some sites using XHTML and CSS and back then I thought it was easier to do a cross-browser layout with tables than it was with CSS. Luckily things haven’t changed a lot, it’s still a bitch to create a good cross-browser layout with CSS.

Well it turned out that it takes few days to get a new layout working in both Internet Explorer and Firefox. Well it doesn’t work perfectly in IE, but I consider it as a form of a punishment for the people using IE as their primary browser. And if you dear reader are one of those pagans (I know that 31% of you are), who still mainly uses Internet Explorer, do yourself a favor and download Mozilla Firefox.

Enough ranting. The new layout is here and I hope you like it. There’s the screenshot of the old site to refresh your memory and to see what has changed. Let me know, what you think of the new one. And also please report if (and when) you find out that something isn’t working as it should be.