Machinarium

--> Play Machinarium

Amanita Design, the creators of Samorost and Questionaut, may have outdone themselves. The point-and-click gameplay is similar, the world equally impressive, but now you collect an inventory of items. And only grab items within reach. Fun to play so far.

Also of note, Boing Boing featured a post detailing a comeback of sorts of point-and-click gaming. Check it out here.

Scarygirl Game

Scarygirl Game Trailer from Touch My Pixel on Vimeo.

So, the game landed on the web yesterday. I only found about it today (thanks Brian Romero), but I can guarantee you word is spreading. The fact that the site is currently pretty bogged down supports that. Catch the trailer above, then head on over to play the game at:

--> www.scarygirl.com

Where to begin? This is a Flash-game, folks. Not unlike the games we make at FableVision (see Lure of the Labyrinth). The visual impact is probably the most striking. It's practically like dancing around in an illustration. I haven't had a chance to become fully immersed in the game, but Keith dove in and I was impressed with what I've seen so far. Very responsive controls, great sound design...you name it. Load time is a bit cumbersome right now, but I suspect that will improve.

I'm first reminded of Crappy Cat, and then Poptropica. But the presentation here exceeds both of those games. How are they getting this level of performance out of Flash? First off, I measured the gameplay window: only 750 x 480 (give or take a few pixels). When was the last time we designed a game that small? You don't even realize this because they've designed a smart html shell around it with even more beautiful artwork that doesn't distract from the gameplay. Also, they have an impressive parallax working in the sidescroll part of the game. None of this appears to slow anything down. The mixing of vector and pixel is seamless, but definitely intentional for optimization. They've figured out how to pull it off (they being: Touch My Pixel).

I keep posting stuff like this to inspire everyone to think big. I know we can create something this fabulous.

World of Goo design tour

via Worldfire Blog:



David Rosen has taken the time to do a video walkthrough of World of Goo. He pays special attention to all the little details that put the game over the top:

"Whenever I play a game, I look for design lessons that I can learn and apply to my own games. Recently, I decided to show these lessons in the form of a video tour of games that make interesting design decisions."

We should do the same at FableVision. And World of Goo is exactly the kind of game we should be studying to make our games better.

Thanks for passing it along, Matt!

previously: Word of Goo

Rolando for iPhone

via BoingBoing:Offworld



Looks like A LOT of FUN! Created by a company called Hand Circus. Coming in December for all of you in the iPhone cult.

---> http://rolando.ngmoco.com/

Immersion (Video Game Faces)

via Videogum:

New York Times photographer Robbie Cooper used a camera behind a screen to capture kids' faces while they play video games

I hear someone calling us to make games that matter...

4 Flash Games to Help Educate Your Kids

via Geekdad

"There are possibly millions of flash-based games out there. And, this short list is a way of sharing a few, but also putting the call out to GeekDad readers. What flash games do you play with your children? What do they learn from them? What games have had to be banned – for their sheer addictiveness?"

Here are the 4 games they're offering up (I've included their descriptions as well). The games all think outside the box...not sure if they'll make your kids smarter. A handful include open-ended play, which is plus.

Bomomo
This art-based game is beautiful. It allows you to explore shape, and more beautiful in its open-ended style that allows you to play and create amazing images forever. A series of bubbles follow the mouse in very subtle ways, in the beginning it is a little slow, so may be difficult to hold children’s attention. But, there are ample buttons to click and options to try. And, you can save the final results as a jpg file.


Thinking Machine 4
Ok, it is chess. But, this isn’t just another chess game. When the computer has its turn it begins graphically representing all the possibilities before it. What results is an amazing pictorial representation of the thousands of options a computer considers before making a move. It looks pretty, in fact, it may be a ruse to distract you from concentrating on your next move.


Falling Sand
This is possibly one of the ultimate flash games. It has appeared in a couple of different forms, but what is nice is that it challenges the concept that people need an end goal, or a points tally to make the game enjoyable and addictive. Using a suite of simple tools you can stop the falling materials, change thgeir direction, gather them up, plant algae in the water and watch it spread, set the oil on fire and watch it burn. The possibilities are endless. It is great for primary aged children to explore a whole range of concepts in simple ways from volume to through to gravity.


Physics Invaders
Suggested by a GeekDad contributor (thanks Matt), here we have space invaders turned even more geek by the fact true principles of physics apply. Rather than exploding, aliens bump and plummet into each other and it takes some effort to push them out of the way. This version of the classic game is also set up to be a bit easier, so even pre-school aged children will enjoy the aliens flying and bumping all over the place – just as Newton theorised.

World of Goo

For all the hype behind a behemoth of a game like Spore (2+ years of hype and delay!), this little game may come out of nowhere and steal some of the thunder for best game of the year. Enter World of Goo, a new puzzle game due out in a week (October 13) for WiiWare and PC that brings something entirely fun and new to the genre of puzzle games. From what I can gather so far, you basically form bonds to build structures out of blobs of Goo.

Here's an early review delivering a ton of praise.

Here's a link to a handful of video clips from IGN.

And here's the link the official website (check out the blog for info and updates).

There's much to look forward to here! Best of all, it shows how innovative indie-gaming studios have the potential to break through.

Crappy Cat

--> Crappy Cat

Another great find over at Beautifully. You get to navigate a fun "crappy" cat around a landscape where you can practically interact with everything. Great music, animation, characters, color, design...all around bizarre FUN! Created by VanBeater.

Questionaut

Gary passed a game on to me called Questionaut. It's a free game on the BBC's KS2 Bitesize site, described as the following: "Journey through strange worlds and test your knowledge of English, Maths and Science on this magical mission to recover your friend’s hat." It looks like it's by the same creative folks behind Samorost.

The game design is striking, and just like Samorost, involves a lot of click-based exploration. It's educational, but once you get into the game, you discover it's more of a pretty packaging for quiz format education. Not ideal, but each of the stages are related to the subject matter you get quizzed on. I enjoyed it—the quizzes seemed 6th grade level or so.

A couple things to point out in terms of Flash production: they are really clever about mixing beautifully rendered raster art with simple vector characters that are easy to animate because of their design. The sound design adds a ton, but the game doesn't take long to load at all. So they've definitely optimized everything well.

You follow a simple narrative as you travel from stage to stage, so overall, I think they've done a nice job of wrapping a story around a quiz game. And the puzzles you solve to get to the quizzes are also very pleasurable (to interact with, and watch). Nicely done!

Creating Video Games Is Not Just Fun, It's Educational

We've recently been talking a lot about the educational benefits of video games around the studio. We create lots of great games and activities that helps kids learn as they play them. Below are a few examples that take another 'meta' step outward to promote the idea that students can learn through the act of actually making the video games.


Alice - An Educational Software that teaches students computer programming in a 3D environment

Alice is a visual programming environment that is used to teach students Computer Science concepts. It is often used in introductory Computer Science courses.

Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games. In Alice, 3-D objects (e.g., people, animals, and vehicles) populate a virtual world and students create a program to animate the objects.

In Alice's interactive interface, students drag and drop graphic tiles to create a program, where the instructions correspond to standard statements in a production oriented programming language, such as Java, C++, and C#. Alice allows students to immediately see how their animation programs run, enabling them to easily understand the relationship between the programming statements and the behavior of objects in their animation. By manipulating the objects in their virtual world, students gain experience with all the programming constructs typically taught in an introductory programming course.

Scratch - A visual programming language from the MIT Media Lab

Scratch has a very simple interface for creating video games. It can be used to help students learn concepts in math, programming, design, and digital media.

Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design.


Computer Games As Liberal Arts

Here's a cool article that talks about how creating video games can even help students learn concepts in writing, logic, math, science, marketing, sociology, and Internet culture.

[...] some educators are going a step further, teaching kids to make the games themselves. It turns out to be perhaps the ultimate form of liberal arts. In order to create a computer game you have to think about the content. You have to write a script. The programming involves logic, math and science. And to understand how you distribute a game you have to get into issues of marketing, sociology, and Internet culture.


Given the above, think about how much smarter we're getting every day at work!

What kids are searching for online

via eSchool News:

What are students searching the web for most frequently while at school? Turns out, it's math games, animals, and historic figures and events, according to an unscientific index of the 15 most popular in-school search terms released by Thinkronize Inc.

Here's the full list:

1. Games
2. Dogs
3. Animals
4. Civil War
5. George Washington
6. Holocaust
7. Abraham Lincoln
8. Multiplication
9. Math Games
10. Weather
11. Frogs
12. Fractions
13. Planets
14. Sharks
15. Plants

--I loved this quote:

I really think it says, 'I want something more than what I'm getting from my [textbook].'

Also glad to see Sharks still have their pull!
Thanks, Brian!

Nintendo the new Disney?

I've heard people compare Nintendo to Apple as of late, but here's an article from the New York Times which basically compares Shigero Miyamoto to Walt Disney. And Mario to Mickey Mouse—apparently Mario is only second to Mickey as the most recognized fictional character around the world (I guess they both have white gloves!). A fun article; give it a read. This was something of particular interest to me:

"Just as a film is not measured by the quality of its special effects, a game is not measured merely by its graphics. This concept is lost on many designers, but not on Mr. Miyamoto. And just as a film buff might prefer to watch an old black-and-white movie instead of, say, “Iron Man,” even Mr. Miyamoto’s earliest games hold up as worthy diversions."

via Cartoon Brew

WiiWare

via Wired Blogs:

We didn't get a Wii just so You-Jin could beat Keith in boxing. What game could we make? WiiWare is on the way. Shigeru Miyamoto (creator of Mario and Zelda) spoke to Wired recently. Read the article.

"With WiiWare, Nintendo is attempting to flip the equation. By opening the service to even the smallest indie designers, the company hopes to tap the talents of the world's brightest gamemakers and snag brilliant new ideas for its popular Wii console. If the company finds the next little thing that blows up big -- like 2007's sleeper hit Portal, which got its start as an undergraduate project -- Nintendo will benefit from both the sales and the critical buzz. And it will do so with a minimal investment."

Put your gamer-caps on!
Official info from Nintendo--->here

UPDATE: Here's a review of a game called Lost Winds (a title coming to WiiWare). Looks great! Thanks, Keith.

Things are Heating Up in SimCity

I just read that the newest version of the city building classic SimCity will feature a global warming variable. In SimCity Societies, if you don't carefully manage your green house gases, your societies will collapse. Yet another game for change? Maybe they should have real city planners and government officials take it for a spin.

"The game does not force players to power their cities any specific way, but allows them to make choices, each of which come with advantages and disadvantages. Similar to real-life, the least expensive and most readily-available buildings in SimCity Societies are also the biggest producers of carbon dioxide, an invisible gas that contributes to global warming. Should players choose to build cities dependent on these types of sources for power to conserve their in-game money, their carbon ratings will rise and, at reaching critical levels, the game will issue alerts about the threat of the various natural disasters like droughts, heat waves and others that may strike their cities."

Wonderland (via Boing Boing)

McDonald's Video Game

A game for change? Another goodie via Boing Boing:

"Paolo Pedercini is a mad bastard, and the McDonald's game is his sharp, procedural satire of how fast food is a corrupt industry by necessity. The game is set up so that you cannot win without compromising. Try it, you'll see. While you can maintain mild growth without using hormones or genetically modified crops, your bosses will not be satisfied. To really succeed, you have to employ what some might call "unnatural" means, though at Corporate, they call it "McFriendly growth measures".

--> Play McDonalds Game