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Games / Re: Labyrinth
« Last post by NiallM on Today at 10:18:50 am »
I love this, I enjoy it thoroughly from a purely sensory perspective. Your photos are great, by the way. I haven't read 'The society of the spectacle', but it seems like a good read.

I did find the exit. ;)

Technical note: I'm on Windows 7 64-bit here, and it didn't work correctly in fullscreen (it seemed to flicker and then minimized itself, and when I brought it back up it would do it again), so I had to force it into windowed mode.
Did you happen to be running firefox at the same time?  Firefox does something on Vista and upwards which screws with any app which wants to be fullscreen.  Some games seem to be immune, but none of mine are (wish I knew why).  Here's the firefox bug report.
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Games / Re: Labyrinth
« Last post by Ed on Today at 07:59:28 am »
I finally got round to trying this and loved it - found it strangely moving somehow. Not sure why... perhaps because it really touched that feeling of wandering through a city, random thoughts coming from the subconcious (of another person?).

it's very nice the way the images/text were kind of pushed aside like walking through foliage although i found some of the movements a bit jarring. Also it felt to me that left and right controls were inverted.

I didn't find the exit and didn't really try... maybe i'll try next time.

Win7 64 bit, had no problems....
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Games / Re: 10 Years - Terminus
« Last post by Ed on Today at 07:40:28 am »
Yeah, interesting stuff about perception, and impressive terrain! I'm working on something similar (at least, with a similar theme) so i'm curious about a few things...
will the world be rendered top-down or from some other perspective? It suprised me how different it felt and it might affect what the map creation should produce.
Something that might be useful/intersting is to generate some layers of secondary "meaningfulness" on top of the physical terrain - don't really have a good explanation of this yet, but it's about features and areas that relate to each other and to the terrain and add some kind of behavioural logic to the world. Stuff like fish shoals gathering at places where nutrients well up from the ocean, bird colonies on safe places near the fish shoals, town and roads built according to resources, etc.

Taking a day to walk from one end to the other is great.... if you can make some compelling reasons to explore, then it would be fun to plan and make difficult expeditions/pilgrimages etc
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Games / Re: Labyrinth
« Last post by agj on Today at 03:45:50 am »
I love this, I enjoy it thoroughly from a purely sensory perspective. Your photos are great, by the way. I haven't read 'The society of the spectacle', but it seems like a good read.

I did find the exit. ;)

Technical note: I'm on Windows 7 64-bit here, and it didn't work correctly in fullscreen (it seemed to flicker and then minimized itself, and when I brought it back up it would do it again), so I had to force it into windowed mode.
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Games / Re: 10 Years - History vs. Glasgow
« Last post by agj on Yesterday at 06:28:24 pm »
You're not misunderstanding me, I don't think, but I feel the way you're adding a goal (which I don't feel something necessary, as you say, to make it a game, if it at all needs to be one) to be forced, and gamey,* unnatural, tacky. That's just how it hit me; perhaps in practice it wouldn't be so bad.

What I suggested is probably more like some ARGs, if anything. Interesting that you're already doing something like that; I'll have to check that wiki of yours.


* Not sure how everyone defines this invented word, but I use it here to remind of certain design elements that are usually considered to be necessary in games by some, while they're really not: e.g. score, lives, baddies. Something is gamey when it has more traditionally game-like elements than the core concept affords.
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Games / Re: 10 Years - History vs. Glasgow
« Last post by NiallM on Yesterday at 01:18:57 pm »
This is sounding more down-to-earth to me now, and I'm liking it. The wiki-like interface sounds like a plan. The idea of filling in blanks doesn't sound very appealing to me, though. I'd be more interested in something more abstract (i.e. not a literal game puzzle); for instance: You're reading a page on certain happenings in a certain specific date. As you read, you learn that there was a certain someone involved. You click the name. In that individual's page you read about their death, a year a few decades later. You click the date. You find something that connects that death to the first occurrence you were reading some pages back, not explicitly. You begin to complete the picture of what went on.
That does sound like how I want the game to unfold, but doesn't it just describe the process of reading a wiki?  The appeal of filling in the redacted sections for me is that it gives the player a goal, it turns that process into a game.  Without that interaction (or something along those lines) it's just a wiki written in a slightly roundabout way.  And I actually already run a wiki like that (it needs more content and some of the entries are a little simplistic/childish, though I think I may have finally found a decent rhythm with the story starting here).

Unless I'm misunderstanding you?
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Creative / Re: Resources for Inspiration
« Last post by agj on September 05, 2010, 09:59:45 pm »
I'd like Kafka's 'Complete short stories'. If I were able to, I'd walk over to your house and claim it. A lot of other good stuff, but I've been looking for a compilation of Kafka's stories.
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Creative / Re: Resources for Inspiration
« Last post by Stephen L on September 05, 2010, 08:19:16 pm »
It's a given that people enjoy poking about in other people's libraries - I'm selling off/disposing of all of my books/cds right now, and as part of that I had to compile a list of all of my books.  Lots of books in it that I never got around to reading : P

I can say that, in spite of his dickishness, Dali has been important to me as a writer, as has Duchamp (as both a writer and an artist I guess). 

Borges and Calvino are probably the only authors who I've rigorously tried to read everything by. 

I got a hell of a lot from Fink's books on Lacan. 

Mary Fulbrook's book Historical Theory was a fantastic view over various approaches to the writing of history (has a similar effect to me as Hobsbawm's book On History and to some extent Leech-Wilkinson's The Modern Invention of Medieval Music).

Levi-Strauss is someone I find super-cool, though to be honest I've read more about his works than I have stuff he actually wrote (not that he's at all hard to read).  In that field, I love Barthes in a lot of ways - especially Lovers Discourse.

Edit: one book that was really inspiring to me, and pretty much single-handedly making me feel quite well-disposed towards mysticism was Swedenborg and Esoteric Islam, by Corbin.  It contained such beautiful imagery/words/terms and a number of very interesting stories/worldviews.
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Games / Re: 10 Years - Terminus
« Last post by agj on September 05, 2010, 06:09:34 pm »
Fun idea. I know that feeling you speak of when one is a child, and I think it's possibly due to how little we have so far explored of our own world, so that things in a game still seem comparatively large. I think that in order to recreate that feeling you need something more than just size (have you played Spore? I haven't, but isn't it like an infinite universe to explore?); you would need new stuff to discover as you travel, something to compel you to go further. If everything is nearly the same everywhere you go, then there's no reason to explore much. If there is more concrete reason to explore, all the better; for instance, to gather or hunt, to find a refuge for the rain...
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Games / Re: 10 Years - Terminus
« Last post by newobj on September 05, 2010, 02:21:53 pm »
Heh, no.

There's an interesting phenomenon I've observed how when you're a kid, houses/rooms seemed bigger than they really were. I thought this was an entirely physical phenomenon (maybe a function of your relative size?), but I also remember feeling how video games also felt bigger than they really were; even the most linear, boxy world felt big to me, and something sandboxy, like an Ultima, felt epically large, almost infinite, like it would take effort to go to the same random place twice.

I almost never feel that "epic" size in games anymore (maybe Oblivion is an exception)? And I really want to create that feeling, and combine it with a sense of exploration/mystery. And maybe unknowability, that is, you can't find everything the world has to offer, nor do you need to.

Yeah, well, game design is not my forte :)
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