Phun

One thing I enjoy is looking through the myriad of little flash games you can find on newgrounds/albinoblacksheep/etc. So many little ideas condensed into their simplest form to fit into the system requirements of a downloadable flash object.

Something I found today though was a slightly different beast. It was only a youtube demo of the program, but the idea it showed had some interesting game potential. It is called "Phun", from Umeå University. It isn't a game exactly, more of a sandbox. A physics sandbox to be exact. It is a bit like those 'animator vs animated' shorts except interactive and real time. You draw stuff, the laws of physics apply to the objects, stuff happens. Quite sophisticated actually.. I would love to poke through and see how they made it work.

But on to the game angle. Watching the examples I couldn't help think about the game potential of such an engine. Sure there are lots of physics engines out there, many of them capable of far more complex things. But this was was geared twoards the player interacting with the engine rather then the artist+programmer. This has all sorts of potential for problem solving games.

The example that came to mind was the simple artillery game (a favorite of mine). But in this case not only would you have to aim and such, but actually build the mechanism from primitives. Or a racing game where you have to design the car. Lots of potential there ^_^

Duke Nuk'em. Horrible for interesting reasons

Last night I got a craving for mindless FPS. Not a type of game I have many of I'm afraid. I usually just play Mercenaries when I want thing to go 'splode but I had just finished running through it twice the other day, so that wasn't going to cut it.

So I poke through my collection of games and find 'Duke Nukem, Time to Kill', a PS1 game from years back. I had forgotten just how horrible it was. But horrible for what I think are interesting reasons.

Time to Kill was made in the shadow of Doom. Doom was a fairly revolutionary (in the iterative sense) game,.. it had a highly efficient engine, lots of variety, a good pseudo-3d environment, good controls with lots of capabilities without overwhelming the person, and smooth movement.

Time to Kill seemed to try to take this formula expand upon it and bring in things that, I am guessing at the time, conventional wisdom felt would be 'better'. So it added an inventory (which was clunky access and use), step based movement instead of phantom-slidy (which result in coarse grained control that made maneuvering difficult), the ability to put away your gun and do other things like climb (which was more realistic perhaps but added unnecessary and confusing state-fulness), and a more 3D engine that followed Doom's pseudo 'everything on one plane' 3D but added multiple slices (or something) so you could climb around. It felt like a bad comprise.

The end result? An utterly unplayable game that felt like it was designed by a few modders who looked at doom and asked 'wouldn't it be cool if?' but failed to integrate everything into a balanced game.

At least that is my take ^_^

Ultimate solution? I finally bought an xbox360 and a copy of Halo3,.. which I have a different set of complaints about having come from Mercenaries ^_^ but that is a different rant.

Wumpus

So, I am writing a demo game as part of a challenge.

1 Week, in an API I am not familiar with in a language I don't know. Interesting I admit but stressful too.

Anyway, I have finished up the tutorial so I think I have an idea of how the system works. A nice block diagram or UML would have been good, but I think I am getting it. Very 'automagic' oriented,.. a bit like gendef + netsprites from our system but with more crack. But anyway.....

So now I am at the stage where I have to make an actual minigame.
I had several ideas for what to do. I tend to have that problem, there are so many games I would love to have the time (and art skills) to write. Unfortunately many of them get pretty complicated pretty quick and are not all that easy to simplify into a 'you have a couple days to learn and code' type project.

I thought of various smaller ones... a turn based artillery game came to mind (since that is a simplified case of one of the other games) but even that felt like a bit much. While it would be fun to throw together a quick physics engine that would be one more thing to worry about.

So what about Wumpus world? Ok, it's been done to death, there is no real originality or creativity. But it is a well understood problem (thus I can focus on the things I don't understand like the API). I also have a bit of a soft spot for the game given all that time spent solving it in college ^_^.

And thus my evil plan.