Culturally, a small portion of the population will be stuffed with hormone-injected garbage (Huffington Post slideshows, Facebook linkbait and other Cheetos-like information) while the other portion lives in its own reality of tailor-made, high quality information that makes them increasingly wealthy and utterly detached. One side will be able to influence, direct and exploit the other side because one controls the media while the other is at its mercy.
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In essence, I see the value of journalism as resting in a twofold mission: informing the public of accurate and vital information, and its unique ability to provide a truly adversarial check on those in power. Any unwritten rules that interfere with either of those two prongs are ones I see as antithetical to real journalism and ought to be disregarded.
MOOCs are the mp3 of education: the easiest thing to distribute over the internet, will be. Just as the mp3 has indeed disrupted the music industry, but not really music, so the MOOCs will remove much of the lecture, but possibly not broader education.
When you fire the pistol in Nuclear Throne, first of all the Pistol sound effect plays. Then a little shell is ejected at relatively low speed (2-4 pixels per frame, at 30fps and a 320×240 resolution) in the direction where you’re aiming + 100-150 degrees offset. The bullet flies out at 16 pixels per frame, with a 0-4 degree offset to either direction.
We then kick the camera back 6 pixels from where you are aiming, and “add 4 to the screenshake”. The screenshake degenerates quickly, the total being the amount of pixels the screen can shake up, down, left or right.
Weapon kick is then set to 2, which makes the gun sprite move back just a little bit after which it super quickly slides back into place. A really cool thing we do with that is when a shotgun reloads, (which is when the shell pops out) we add some reverse weapon kick. This makes it look as if the character is reloading manually.
The bullet is circular the first frame, after that it’s more of a bullet shape. This is a simple way to pretend we have muzzle flashes.
So now we have this projectile flying. It could either hit a wall, a prop or an enemy. The props are there to add some permanence to the battles. We’d rather have a loose bullet flying and hitting a cactus (to show you that there has been a battle there) than for it to hit a wall. Filling the levels with cacti might be weird though.
If the bullet hits something it creates a bullet hit effect and plays a nice impact sound.
Hitting an enemy also creates that hit effect, plays that enemies own specific impact sounds (which is a mix of a material – meat, plant, rock or metal – getting hit and that characters own hit sound), adds some motion to the enemy in the bullet’s direction (3 pixels per frame) and triggers their ‘get hit’ animation. The get hit animation always starts with a frame white, then two frames of the character looking hit with big eyes. The game also freezes for about 10-20 milliseconds whenever you hit something.
This is just the basic shooting. So much more systems come in to play here. Enemies dying send out flying corpses that can damage other enemies, radiation flies out at just the right satisfying speed, etc. We could keep going on and on. It’s that attention to details and the relationships of all those systems that matter. You might miss an enemy and hit a radiation canister, forcing you to run into danger to grab all that exp before it expires, etc. It’s the mix of things that matters, not the things themselves. I guess what our games have is our view on what makes those values feel and play good. That’s the Vlambeer “feel”.
[…] drawing, even at a representational level, is the construction of ideas. Therefore the conscious manipulation of ideas through the act of drawing becomes highly fruitful for a designer.
What is near-future late-capitalist dystopian fiction but a world where there is no discernible difference between corporations, nations, sports teams, brands, and celebrities?
Game design is not about making games – about shipping finished products. It is more like a martial art or learning a musical instrument: a practice where we learn over time by taking on challenging problems.
LOLcatism has penetrated rap culture. From Tyler the Creator’s fantastic video for Tamale.
It is always between players that play happens. Play is always a composition, a mixture, an assemblage of players. And these players need not, by any means, be human.
wombflash forest: Notes On Eric Zimmerman’s “Manifesto for a Ludic Century”
Haven’t posted here in ages but this blog post is just too good. So many fantastic bits in here that y’all should read.
Recess! 11 – Restate My Assumptions
Recess! is a correspondence series with personal ruminations on games.
Dear Alper and Niels,
My apologies, I fell off the Recess! horse there for a minute. But I’m back in the saddle. Let’s see, what were we talking about again?
Alper obsessively played Ultratron for a while, got bored, stopped and felt guilty for spending 11 hours on it.
Niels helped make Toki Tori 2, got all conflicted about his feelings for the game and went on about how elegantly its world conveys his story.
Sigh. I hope you’ll both excuse me while I don my schoolmaster’s cap and proceed to school you.
It’s telling Alper feels Moves offers more meaningful play than Ultratron. He’s stuck in what Sutton-Smith calls ‘the rhetorics of animal progress’. The idea that play is only meaningful when it contributes to ‘individual development and group culture’. Alper, you should lighten up and maybe submit to the rhetoric of frivolity. Put simply, you should allow yourself to play the fool. Because “unlike the rest of us, who are all losers in most of the conventional senses, and most surely in the mortal sense, the fool transcends triviality.”
Niels, on the other hand, should do himself a favor and read Remediation because he seems to think ‘immediacy’ is the holy grail of media. The medium should disappear, it should not get in the way of the audience’s experience of the message. Well Niels, I have news for you: immediacy is only one possible media mode and its drawbacks are considerable. Most importantly, it precludes critical engagement of an audience with a medium’s message. Hypermediacy, on the other hand, foregrounds the workings of media. It foregoes ‘immersion’ and ‘seamlesness’ in favor of bricolage and seamfulness (PDF). In doing so, it allows for active audience engagement. Don’t you wish that for your stories?
In short, let’s restate our assumptions. I’ll go first:
- Play can be meaningful and useless at the same time.
- Games can tell stories without being immersive.
Kars