Megastructure Industries is already a tongue-in-cheek kind of name. It means to invoke Tsutomu Nihei’s fictional company Toha Heavy Industries, as well as give the feeling of a cyberpunk megacorp, with either millions of employees or a fully robotic staff (or both). We obviously build skyscrapers or planet-sized structures on a daily basis. It’s also a callback to Epic MegaGames, which was originally only a few people (and needed the most grandiose name possible).

I love the aesthetic of that era, where companies would spell out their techno-dream right in their name. Digital Equipment Corporation. US Robotics. Microsoft.

If Megastructure Industries had existed in the 80s, it would probably be called Megastructure Technologies, Incorporated.

I was so excited, I put together a logo that would probably work well as a letterhead for official correspondence:

(SVG version)

It uses the Computer font.

My answer to this was FEX, which you can play right now, on many home computers, for free!

This game is notable for being one of the fastest games I’ve ever made — having conceived of the idea late in the afternoon, and completing it only a few hours later. Daniel Zoran graciously made the music (also very quickly and at short notice!).

Go ahead! Give it a try!

EDIT! See the FEX LONG SCREENSHOT teaser trailer:

Thanks to the efforts of ExciteMike (and the incredible Glorious Trainwrecks!), over 1000 games were collected for a “GDC Pirate Kart”! The concept is simple: getting to GDC is expensive, and putting up a booth is even more expensive. Making a pirate kart that would be displayed on the GDC floor enabled a conference presence to any game that anyone could think to make.

I ended up submitting three games to the Kart, and I wanted to present them here.

Disbeliever Drop

An “asset-free” game I doodled in Processing. The goal is to push the red squares (the disbelievers) off the ends of the earth (which you are proving to be flat), before they reach your scientific papers in the center. There’s no sound and no win condition, yet it provides about 3 minutes of solid entertainment. This was also an entry for SoS’s “nanoLD”, though it took me longer than 48 minutes to make it.

Play here (requires Java).

Foreskin Defender

Censored version (uncensored available below)

As part of the Pirate Kart kickstarter campaign to raise enough money to set up the booth, one of the rewards was to have any idea made into a game by the Pirate Kart people. I chose the raciest idea I could find on the list:

My wife is an ANTI-circumcision activist and I would like a game made for her about protecting foreskins. (Seriously.)

The result is the game “Forskin Defender”. This was built in Construct Classic, using original graphics and sounds! The music was ripped from smickandsmudew.com.

Windows only. Original version / censored version.

Realistic GDC Lecture Session Simulator

This game was created in a few hours while waiting in line for “Indie Game: The Movie” at the conference itself. Along with a bunch of other amazing indies, we held an impromptu jam in the queue. This was made in Processing and mspaint (and awkwardstockphotos.com).

Download here.

Entering the Ludum Dare competition takes on different meanings depending on your experience level. At the beginning, LD was a reason to finish a game. Personally, I had never completed a single game project I had started until I joined the competition. This was the reason to participate, and finishing the game was the reward.

While finishing a game is extremely satisfying (and a worthwhile skill to have!), this eventually must cease being the only reason to compete. There are newer challenges that must be addressed — and all the while, retaining this ability to finish the games you start (ie. wisely choosing content, infrastructures, and keeping scope within range….).

One of the challenges is building a game worth experiencing. But if the player doesn’t actually have to “go through the experience” on their own, how personal could it possibly be?

In games, “going through” the experience translates to a difficulty that needs to be overcome. There must be a challenge, a wall against which the player must struggle. It’s more than that, of course: in order to feel connected at any level, there must be something at stake. If we return to games of yore, limited lives means something very real at stake. If you can’t make it through this level, you might lose the game and have to start over (or be forced to part with another quarter!).

To speak from my own experience, the games I have typically built for Ludum Dare are the kind that hold your hand throughout. It’s not entirely clear to me if this hand-holding was the product of an informed design decision, or if I just wanted to make sure anyone who cared to judge the game could see it through to the end. When judged, the best case end result would invariably be “nice”.

I think this changed during the last Ludum Dare, with my entry “Ghost town“. It may not have achieved much in the way of critical review, but one quote has stayed with me:

This is the first game of yours that I get to play where I feel in danger.

-Wolfgang

This game suddenly had an element of risk to it. Something was at stake. And it seemed to me that life was imitating art, because my attitude towards the Ludum Dare competition was different this time. Usually, I try to get my friends to join me on the Ludum Dare challenge. This time I took it a bit further, as I tried to dig a bit deeper into the Israeli LD scene. This was my first foray into the GameIS forum on Facebook, and I was quite nervous. From the responses, I understood that very few people even knew that the Dare existed, despite the community being involved in similar events (like the Global Game Jam).

And so it became a personal mission. I was to give this competition my all, and follow up by presenting the results the next weekend at the Games Unconference. This was risky! If I simply “made a game”, I wouldn’t really have much to show. But if I made something special, something I believed in that contained a piece of myself, I would be able to present it proudly and maybe convince a few others to join in next time.

I think the game shows this improvement. While it may be a standard platformer game (and certainly not as good as I imagined it becoming), I believe it has something “at stake” in it, something slightly special that elevates it beyond a game that I “was able to finish in 48 hours”.

The follow-up talk also went well, and I think we’ll have more Israelis joining in next time (This April is the 10 year anniversary of Ludum Dare! Come make games with us!).

Having no risk is the safest way to do nothing. Obviously too much risk won’t help at all, but there is a balance to be found. When there is something at stake — maybe something special or important, but not necessarily crucial — an interesting thing happens, and the whole experience becomes more personal.

As in life, as in games.

Get It Up - an impromptu folk game

Having finished my degree the previous summer, it would appear that everything should just go “back to normal”. The craziness is over, my brief foray into a bizarre and even slightly antagonistic field (Physics) has come to an end, and now I can return to the workforce with renewed vigor. Because there is only so much exploration a person can do, right?

But it seems that 2012 is already distinguishing itself from previous years. Just over a week ago, I found myself nearly halfway around the world, attending a conference with the most energetic, talented and interesting people I could possibly dream of. This was the Game Developers Conference, held in San Francisco, USA.

A few themes permeated the conference in my perception, themes that resonated with me, my thoughts, and the mindset that brought me ten time zones west of home. In the hopes of making this a mini-series of posts, I’ll discuss one of these themes here.

I’d like to talk about folk games. The first time I had ever heard the term “folk game” was at the inspiring session given by Douglas Wilson (of Die Gute Fabrik). All but devoid of tactical and strategical elements, these mostly physical games are generally very simple and easy to learn, and demand a certain cunning and skillful coordination. According to Douglas, a good folk game makes the players feel extremely competent (or able to gain mastery over the game), while being extremely entertaining to watch. One game cited had blindfolded players  dueling with wooden spoons in slow motion. The popularity of the game was attributed as much to how “badass” it feels to move in slow motion as it was to watching someone move in slow motion being “really fucking hilarious”.

So folk games are fun for all involved, even if only an observer. In the blindfolded example, the spectators play an important role of mediation — bystanders must verbally discourage players who move too fast. This theatrical element immediately brings the folk game into a broader context of interaction between people. It affords a place and justification to make a fool out of one’s self among friends.

Of all the games Douglas presented in his talk, my favorite remains the only one made by Die Gute Fabrik that I’ve played: Johann Sebastian Joust. The game is reminiscent of Lemon Jousting, where players attempt to knock the lemon off their opponents’ wooden sticks while protecting their own. But JS. Joust has an extra layer too it, which is the computer. A lemon on a stick is an excellent feedback mechanism indeed — however, there is something intrinsically external about having a computer mediate. I feel it adds a great sense of fairness to the game, and less of a need to rely on “house rules”. Winning is extremely satisfying, and losing tends to make you think, “I can do better next time”, accompanied by a desire to play again.

It might seem unrelated, but I find that Bennett Foddy‘s work is extremely in tune with this sort of philosophy. In Bennett’s talk (by absolute coincidence, right before Douglas’s), he explains how he believes that the player wants to be humiliated and frustrated. He showed a video of the ending of his game GIRP, in which the player took too long to reach the prize at the end. Winner: Bird. This subversive move on Bennett’s part brings to light so many positive aspects of his game: the emotional connection made during those fateful 20 minutes. The fact that the player actually uploaded this video to YouTube, “shaming” himself in the face of the world. And the idea that when the player does finally beat the game, he will have achieved a mastery over it. Similar to folk games, Bennett’s projects are extremely simple to understand, needing little to no explanation. Finally, a collaboration between Bennett and Douglas led to Mega-GIRP, which turns regular GIRP into a single-player game of twister. This modified version is even harder than the already-hard game, and players look ridiculous playing it. This kind of spectacle sport becomes a nexus of truly social gaming among groups of people.

Early on in the conference, I had the pleasure of being involved in an unusual game jam. Many people were involved with the final product, among them Harry Lee, Stephen Lavelle, Sara G, Stephen A, Matt Thorson, and Alan Hazelden. Instead of focusing on graphics or programming, physical props were laid out and explored. Paper cups, chairs, and some dice Harry had that denoted parts of the body. The game we ended up playing was dubbed “Get it Up” (photos here!). Two players go at a time, each rolling a die. They then have to transfer a single paper cup from one pyramid to another pyramid, while only using the body part designated by the die. The group wins when the new pyramid is completely built.

Another example was the game DRINK, by Anna and Loren, which is a real-world drinking game played against a virtual opponent.

How can I summarize and/or wrap up this post?? There’s a growing feeling of moving games into a shared physical space, while taking advantage of available technology to aid the way. Let’s make more games!!!

• This year I will be attending the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, California. All arrangements have been booked, and I will arrive a few days earlier to poke around the city and meet with family and friends. If you are into game development and want to meet up, please let me know! Especially if you want to jam. I hope to document my experiences (photos and writing), so keep an eye on this blog.
• I am currently seeking a new work situation. My CV is available in Hebrew and English — please contact me if you are interested.

== — == and now back to your regularly-scheduled programming == — ==

When I say “crapware”, I mean trial software/shareware of dubious origin. The process I came up with has plenty of software involved, but it is all freeware and stuff I trust or already had installed for other reasons. This is probably not the ideal way to do it.

1. Determine the origin of the RM file. If you have a link to an RM, you’re fine. If you have a .RAM file instead, download it and open in a text editor. The .RAM file contains a single line pointing to the .RM file you need.
2. Download the RM file. This is easy if the protocol is http. If the protocol is RTSP, you must use a special program. I used mplayer on Linux, following instructions found here. Simply run:mplayer -noframedrop -dumpfile out.rm -dumpstream rtsp://url/to/file.rm -bandwidth 250000
to download your music file. (“Bandwidth” is some random number to make it go faster.)
3. Convert the file to PCM (WAV) format. I used mplayer for this as well, under Linux. Simply run: mplayer out.rm -ap pcm Your file is now in PCM format!
4. Convert the PCM file to MP3. We have finished the ugly parts and now I’m sure you can do this on your own. I use Audacity to open the WAV file and export to MP3.

Good luck!

snake snake snake snake snake snake snake

Less than a week ago, I was busy developing a game called “Ghost Town” (see relevant post). This has been, by far, my most productive and successful Ludum Dare for quite a while, perhaps since April 2010. That’s not to say I haven’t gained anything from these other Ludum Dare competitions, but I’ve usually gone into them half-heartedly or with too grandiose a concept. The main reason is probably because I was trying to juggle my Physics degree and work at the same time.

However, I would like to save the motivational analysis for a future post (I have much to say in this regard!), and let’s get down to the technical/artistic breakdown of what happened.

The theme

I’m going to let you in on a secret: I didn’t do any voting for the theme! Not a single round. I think SoS Sosowski and the other Ludum Dare organizers did a fantastic job of weeding out the “weak” themes before the voting even began. Each round, I found myself looking at the list with indifference, because any one of the themes could work as an inspiration for games. I’m happy to say I didn’t build any expectations, nor did I feel any disappointment when I woke up on Saturday morning to find the theme announced as “Alone”. That said, I didn’t feel much in the way of identification with the theme either. (Though I will say that it was a crushing blow to see “Kittens” pushed to the end of the list. That was undeserved cruelty.)

When I awoke that morning, I didn’t get up immediately. I kind of went back to sleep. During this quasi-sleep, or maybe when I woke the second time, the idea of having a snake jump out and bite the player in a surprise cut-scene came to me. I put it aside in my gigantic brain, in the hopes that I’d come up with something better.

As per tradition, I left the house almost immediately, carrying my trusty camera. Instead of standing around waiting for an idea or forcing one into existence, I try to clear my head and frame photos around the theme. You can see these photos here, on my G+ photo album. I think they captured the feeling of “Alone” pretty well.

When I got back, I stared at the whiteboard for a while, trying to build some free associations. This didn’t lead me too far, and I just kind of ended up starting to code and draw things without really having a clear idea of where it was going.

I don’t believe that this thoughtlessness did much harm to my project. I knew something had to happen with ghosts, and something had to have a dangerous, filthy atmosphere to it. I knew there was a snake in it, and the snake was meant to surprise the player. This would be introduced by a cut scene, in which the player has a near-death experience by a hit-and-run snake.

With these things in mind, I set to work.

Coding

I used my boilerplate Flixel code to put together this platformer. On the one hand, I’m quite pleased with Flixel and I’m very comfortable with it as middleware for my Ludum Dare games. It is extremely fast and easy for me to get up and running, because if I forget how to do something, I have tons of in-house reference code I can look at. On the other hand, it means my games usually look and feel the same, and not just because Flixel lends its own look-and-feel. It has to do with how I build them, always in the same kind of general way. If I ever want to branch out and try something new, it will probably be difficult if I use the same Flixel basecode I am used to. But like I said, the learning curve was absolutely flat, and my game was up and running in no time at all.

But this smooth flow of coding was not to last. Following up on my “surprise snake” cutscene, I decided I needed a generic[ish] scripting method…. Things started to slow down here. I implemented a generic scene that would receive an embedded XML with a list of triggers and actions. The triggers would be read from each scene’s maps built in Tiled. It was daring and risky, because once you start building such a system, there really is no end to it. You can keep adding features and trigger options until coding each script takes longer than it would to simply add a huge “switch” statement with special cases.

It ended well, because it did work. But I think things would have been smoother if I had either already built such a thing (elegantly, unlike how it came out during the competition), or if I had just added special cases (ugly, but much faster to get working, and justified because of the small scope of the project). So this goes on the list of things to practice or wrap in an Eli Basecode library for the next time.

The artwork

Artwork for this game splits itself into two neat categories: spriting and backgrounds. Spriting was a huge challenge for me, because I really suck at animating. I think I did better than usually, because the walk cycle for the main character has more than two frames in it.

But the sprites did come out ok. Especially the ghosts, which I made using Photoshop, not GraphicsGale.

The backgrounds are a whole different story. For over a month, I’ve been attending “intuitive” drawing classes, and drawing something on my own nearly every day. While the idea was not to make “intuitive” style backdrops, I decided I would use the painterly style. These backgrounds were very easy to make, and I blitzed through ten of them in a really short time on Saturday night (direct link to portion of video with “background blitz”). Doing these backgrounds (and the tiles that went with them) are surely the high points of my Ludum Dare entry. Feeling at home with a tool is the greatest. In this case, it was Photoshop.

Sounds and music

And after that bout of self-congratulation, we arrive at the hardest part of the post-mortem. This part went all wrong! There are no sounds, and only one tiny musical riff played when the player finishes a screen. (I have been told that it does more harm than good, and I should probably have just left it out.)

So what happened here? I’m no stranger to music and sound in games, especially Ludum Dare. In retrospect, I think there was a certain kind of pressure I fabricated for myself, demanding too high a level of quality for the game. I could have made something simple and had a more complete entry, but the “visionary” Eli decided this was not good enough. I had great ideas for atmospheric sounds (windy building interiors, ghostly ambience, etc.), and five minutes with bfxr just weren’t enough to make it happen for me. I gave up on sound.

Music had a similar failure. I wanted some kind of moody music. The original idea even had more than one tune: Quiet ambience from the start of the game, followed by tense action sounds after the snake cut-scene, and finishing up with a wistful melancholy song for the ghosts. Obviously this was too much.

I think there are two ways to deal with this in the future. Either I should practice throwing together simple songs on a theme, or I should lower the demand on myself when it comes to the compo. Perhaps a mixture of the two will do it. Either way, being paralyzed because “it probably won’t come out good enough” is against the spirit of Ludum Dare and my own recent mindset about creation.

Overall

Overall, it was an excellent Ludum Dare weekend. I had a terrific time. Stress levels were high, and I had a very hard time getting to sleep, even after submitting the finished entry. But I did eat properly (mostly thanks to having a caring wifes — highly recommended), and I don’t feel I neglected myself.

Another difference this time was the recording of the timelapse. I found this to be a great productivity tool. I did take breaks, and I did find myself staring at Gmail or Google+, but every time I did so, I remembered the timelapse photos being taken and these breaks sort of ended themselves. Trying to make a good impression for the camera is an excellent motivational tool, (as long as it is voluntary!). Of course, when it’s all said and done, the timelapse looks pretty much the same. A blur of code and pixels flying by, and it inevitably looks like the subject is some kind of magician. So who knows if this productivity “trick” will work next time….

All in all, it was a fantastic weekend, and I look forward to the next one: Ludum Dare’s April 2012 edition will mark its 10th anniversary, and it will surely be a compo to remember.

Here is my entry for the 22nd Ludum Dare 48-hour game development competition.

All in all, it was a terrific experience (again). Very stressful, but extremely fun at the same time.

Links:

• Play the game (web-based Flash)
• See the Ludum Dare entry page

Simon reminded me how much glitchy animation is fun, so for one of my “daily exercises” I made a jittery guy do some silly animation. Looking at it again about a week later still makes me feel good, so here it is.

B.A.D. Animation (Flash)