News You Can Bruise for 2006 February 4

Today I wrote a poem:

Shake and shake the ketchup bottle
None will come, then Quetzlcoatl

Now with babbling about game design problems and death!

• Miller's Quest is a game you can just let run and it does the dull repetitive things for you. If you are a Windows person you can play its ancestor, Progress Quest. Written by a guy who I think used to write Segfault stories, though I can't prove this. Basically a non-bad Segfault story in game form.

  This game is written in Ruby, and it has a bizarre attitude towards generating colored text, but I'm probably the only person who will notice. I have been thinking about writing an MMORPG in which all the players are scripted robots, but the idea keeps running into problems. I've also been thinking about mentioning in the Ruby Cookbook the bizarre curses-less colored text hack used in this program, but I don't think I want to encourage this kind of behavior.

• Enemy Lines wins many points for extreme literalism (your enemies are lines) and its castlezzt.net-type presentation. It foolishly squanders them all by being kind of like Missile Command. Bah!

  The author has also put out three other games with the same name, only some of which are like Missile Command. The best-looking one is #4, which has a great cyberpunk Zaxxon look.

• You'd think a game whose file is called "todoom" would be "To-Doom", an action-packed slaughterfest organized around the principles of the Getting Things Done productivity philosophy. But it's actually a Roguelike game called Tower of Doom. Pretty good, not great. All your characters are various lowlife types (because the Tower of Doom is a punishment). Peculiarities: no enemy spawning and complete knowledge of all enemies on the level.

  Hmm, since I downloaded this game, the project seems to have undergone a freakish metamorphosis! It's now called Warp Rogue and is much different. That's what I get for writing reviews of ancient copies of games found on my hard drive while I have no Internet access. Developing...

• Zoid's Quest is potentially a really good side-scroller game like Jill of the Jungle. It has an excellent, original fighting mechanic, and good first-level music that reminds me of NES games like Faxanadu. But this game makes many of the tiny mistakes or misalignments that ruin so many NES-like open source games. I should make a big list of these and do a cookbook on how to avoid them, so here are a couple:
  • Jerky or disproportionate character movement. Zoid's Quest has pretty smooth character movement, but as in almost all of these platform games, the speed of the character is much slower than the character dimensions would indicate. A good rule of thumb is that I should not be continually jumping from place to place because it's faster than running.
  • Ladder behavior. When you jump and grab onto a ladder, your horizontal motion should stop or be absorbed by the ladder. The ladder is not a strip on the wall that lets you defy gravity; it's actively supporting you.

    The ladder is not a hole. It's bolted to its platform; it doesn't bisect it. You should be able to walk on top of a ladder square.

    If you stop moving on a ladder you should stay clinging to the ladder, rather than falling off of it.

  • Jumping and gravity behavior. First, you should be able to jump more than one square in height. This overlaps somewhat with disproportionate character movement. Maybe you think it's cliche that your character should be able to jump as high as Mario, but Mario jumps that high for a reason: jumping games aren't fun when you can't friggin' jump.

    Before dropping down below the edge of the screen, you should have some way of seeing whether or not a drop is infinite. You either need to provide some kind of "look up/down" facility, or design the level so that the player has a chance to experience the lower levels before the higher, or design the level so that it all fits on the screen. (This is actually in the Zoid's Quest TODO, as a magic spell.)

  • Enemies. You must have more than one kind of enemy, and each type of enemy must have different behavior, and in particular the first level must have more than one kind of enemy. I know your game is in development, but just make another kind of enemy for us.
  • Okay, that's enough for now. You get the idea.
• Holotz's Castle is the first game to ask, "What the hell are doing all these keys here?" But it never answers it. Instead, it disguises itself as two games with identical mechanics. In one, you must gather keys to escape the level. In the other, you must gather gems to... escape the level. After Zoid's Quest, the movement in this game felt perfect, and your characters gradually become faster and able to jump higher. Nice cut scenes use the game engine and have a somewhat juvenile Nintendo of America-approved sense of humor. The only problems: one touch of an enemy's hand kills you, and it's possible to get stuck in the corner of a block. And there's a big ol' cut scene cliffhanger. (though I should check a newer version; maybe it's done a Tower of Doom).

  "How do you know what I think?"

  "I KNOW EVERYTHING!"

• The other day I was laughing about the classic Rounded-up game Apricots. Specifically, I was recalling the limerick I'd written about the hilarious deaths which are impossible to avoid in that game. Sumana said I shouldn't talk that way online about death, because it might be read by someone who's thinking of committing suicide and it might give them the idea that suicide is somehow fun or that I approve of death in real life. Well, I'm here to tell you that suicide is not fun and that death is a bunch of crap. And there's no better game to tell you this than N.

  N is a game with a wonderful physics model and a million deaths. Your character is a greedy ninja with a lust for gold--and not being killed! Unfortunately you get killed a lot, usually in hilarious ways that top even the deaths in Apricots. In Apricots you might crash your plane into a tiny island in the middle of a lake. Explosion. In N you might do a ninja leap right into an active death ray. Your body plummets the length of the screen and splats on the ground. Then your wireframe corpse bounces around for a bit and hits a mine, which blows it into its little wireframe parts. The parts themselves will bounce around and get into all sorts of trouble: setting off more mines, being shot around the game board by trampolines, being zapped by zap-robots, and so on. It's the most morbid game with the simplest graphics I've ever seen, and I've seen at least five.

  But it's not fun to die, because that means you've got to start the whole frustrating Lode Runner-esque level over again instead of going to the next cool level. Which, under Nietzsche's theory of eternal recurrence, is basically the same thing that happens in real life. So I guess I'm saying it inculcates a healthier attitude towards your own, actual death than Apricots.

  It's also one of the best games I've ever seen on my Game Roundup scale of game-liking: "a flexible set of techniques to use towards your goals, and lots of random variation within well-defined parameters." Except it's not random here; varity here comes from a huge number of well-designed levels. There are also many user-created levels that simply use the player's (non-dead) body as a pinball in the machine of the board, bouncing you around narrowly avoiding rockets and zap-bots and all sorts of horrible fates.

  Oh, I should mention that it's composed of Flash and it's not open source. Good game though.