Quotes

I had been using the Ren­der Ghosts as way to under­stand some­thing about the Inter­net, but it felt like the Ren­der Ghosts, the Inter­net, were try­ing to explain some­thing to me. The Ren­der Ghosts are lost too, adrift in his­to­ry and vir­tu­al net­works, which increas­ing­ly resem­ble mem­o­ry. We can’t hear their voic­es but we can see them every­where, if we look: those parts of our­selves and oth­ers, the remem­brance of things, strug­gling to sur­vive in the churn of information.

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.

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.

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.