Experimental Game Mechanics, GDC
The GDC panel that engaged me most was the one on experimental game mechanics, moderated by Jonathan Blow (Braid). I appreciate both its exposing me to really innovative game mechanics and its providing a really helpful chance to see and hear about the process(es) developers follow to develop a germ of an idea into prototype(s) and game. (Several of the featured projects were unfinished and are, as yet, more mechanics than games).
Since I was already familiar with the mechanics in the work of the two featured USC affiliates (Ian Dallas and Jenova Chen), I learned the most from what they revealed re: their development processes. Ian explained that, to his mechanic that revealed – via spurts of what appeared to be thrown black paint -- the dimensions and depth of, and shapes in, a wholly white seemingly 2d space, he’d added a narrative: a boy’s search for a swan. Over time, he too had made peace with deploying his mechanic toward creating (at least some) puzzle games, even if he’d first vigorously avoided them.
Jenova explained that his process began with, and centers around, the experience he wants his game to deliver. That Flower – intended to create a free space “filled with love” – ultimately created a game that resembled Flow [plus 3d movement, minus AI] was a consequence of his process and its logic that drove it. Next he presented a series of prototypes – first built in Processing (!) and later in XNA – through which he and Nick Clark worked to design game play. He explained that they’d rejected a few– e. g one centering game play in the player’s/wind’s depositing seeds on a field, another requiring players’ deposit petals into orbs – because they worked against their basic goal of creating a peaceful experience.
Just as there were two games from USC, a second game joined Ian’s in revealing a 2d white space’s depth and dimensions via the splatter of paint. While the “paint” of Ian’s game, The Unfinished Swan, was black and appeared thrown, that of Steve Swink’s was magenta and blue looked as though produced by a spray can. After confessing to having shared many of Ian’s difficulties in developing story and design, Swink showed a second game – a compelling one called Shadow Physics that combines 2d and 3d to subvert the traditional relationship between shadow and light maintained in games. Typically shadows are subordinated to character, Swink explained; his goal was to subordinate character to shadow so that shadow functioned as the overwhelming dynamic. In Shadow Physics the player-character is a shadow-creature that pushes on the shadow of 3d objects to move the objects themselves. The player must move those objects or the lights in the environment to create shadows that the player character can jump across, enabling it to complete puzzles.
A second game, called Closure, also played with light. Frustrated with games’ “dark levels” – levels where one is obligated to navigate through levels where one can’t see – designer Tyler Glail created a game in which things in the darkness do not exist. While the player-character carries a light and can use still more lights to illuminate the world, there are distinct advantages to keeping the light low: in darkness, player-character walks unhindered by objects (walls, obstacles) that would halt its path in light.
There were two other games that, while intriguing for playing with space and time, were tough to get one’s head around. Miegakure is a puzzle/platformer that’s intended to be 4d but which designer Marc ten Bosh demonstrated by showing via a presentation showing a character living in a 2d plane within a 3d world. Rather than making time the fourth dimension, Bosh made the fourth dimension the mechanism that enabled a player to jump easily from any of the other three – a trick that enabled the player-character to move around object that would hinder its passage in 2d.
Chris Hazard and Mike Resnick’s Achron is an RTS that employs a timeline to permit extraordinarily dynamic play with time. His explanation of the game’s mechanics was obtuse enough to make stories of earlier game-play a better way of explaining a game, he believed. It still didn’t clarify much to me. The timeline, he explains, permits the player to send units of his army back in time to destroy units of his opponents’ forces before that opponent has even had a chance to build them. Similarly, he explained that – given the timeline and a series of projections backwards and forwards in time-- a battle over one property had enabled him to watch his opponent nuke his own troops. It’s my hope that later prototypes, and/or the chance to play the game oneself, will help me to make more sense of the game.
For more information about these games and for some whose demonstrations I missed, one can read the following:
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=22946