dave's blog of art and programming

Category: Games

  • Gameplay balancing and emotional turmoil

    Balancing is where you tweak games to get the right level of difficulty – doing this on a single player game is hard enough, but on a live game with active players its quite tricky. Germination X is currently too easy, which results in plants happily growing packed closely together (blocking subsequent players from planting)…

  • A week in Stockholm

    The Mobile Life Centre in Stockholm is an interdisciplinary lab that does serious research on unserious activities and comprises computer scientists, interaction designers, sociologists, psychologists and game designers. They are also part of SICS, and are partners with FoAM on the Lirec project. Last week I was lucky enough to work with them for 5…

  • Germination X: Game design in pieces

    The current focus for Germination X is encouraging collaboration between players, with the subjects of pemaculture and companion planting deeply interwoven into the gameplay. It’s important to avoid the normal problems with “educational games” where the subject matter is bolted onto some existing game. This is rarely a successful strategy. Firstly players now are grouped…

  • Germination X: player progression and surprises

    Slowly Germination X gets less like a prototype and more like a full game, lots of new stuff this week – as this is the first online release of the work done over the past month. Players can now pass items of fruit to each other or spirits as gifts (by dragging fruit over messages…

  • Naked on Pluto wins VIDA

    It’s been busy in Elastic Versailles lately, last week it was announced that Naked on Pluto won the VIDA award, and the game was selected to appear at a series of Robots and Avatars shows next year. The VIDA award concerns art and artificial life: The projects may be based on systems which emulate, imitate…

  • Germination X – designing for cooperation

    Over the last week I’ve been designing and implementing a lot more game mechanics for Germination X which are needed for an upcoming visit to the Mobile Life Lab in Stockholm. The more interesting ones involve some direct player – player interaction. The thing I’m trying to balance is keeping the central design simple (what…

  • GX – messages, colours and continuous worlds

    A big update for Germination X today. The main new stuff includes: The process of moving around the world is now more continuous, as the land is split into sub-tiles that are loaded 9 at a time. When you move out of the central tile the 3 at the back are discarded while the 3…

  • Missile Command machinima in São Paulo

    Some images of the Machinima exhibition at FILE 2011 in São Paulo, featuring a movie of a livecoded abstractification of a Missile Command game written/performed/destroyed/recorded in Fluxus.

  • GX companion planting diagnosis

    Finally the spirits in Germination X can provide some kind of help by diagnosing what is wrong with your plants if they get ill, and sending you a hint via a small message. They also look for other players who can plant seeds and ask them to help you. All the actions being driven by…

  • Naked on Pluto Bots