It’s true and weird that while both Half-Life games are considered influential and important, hardly any of what was uniquely compelling about them made it into anything else. It’s still hard to find anything that feels like it does what they did: dynamically-chatty bit-part characters with interesting behaviours, NPC classes with specific attitudes to each other, dozens of elaborate one-off scripted behaviours, the continuous sense of not being the main character. Both games are full of stubs of situations that you could build a whole game around.
Aesthetic Deception
Ico, disruptive game design, and experiences that live forever.
100 updates later. Why we enjoy games, why we stop, and how live game design might bring us back.
Hylics 2 Takes CRAZY To The NEXT LEVEL!
Temporarily Offline
A slightly unerving game on technological violence induced by pseudosimplicity and increasingly awful UI.
Erlend Sogge Heggen (@erlend.sh)
1. solitude: single-player game loop 2. bottomlessness: infinite scroll 3. speed: instant delivery/gratification 4. teasing: generally satisfactory, never perfect; “maybe the next one is exactly what I want” ↘️ quoting NPR (@npr.org): Taken together, these four features can create a trancelike state that can keep us stuck on social media apps or video games for hours. Children are particularly vulnerable. n.pr/4mH6i6s
» The Goldilocks Principle in Fantasy Strategy The Digital Antiquarian
Although I’ve played way too many games for way too many hours over the way too many years I’ve been writing these histories, it’s safe to say that I haven’t spent more time with any one game than Heroes of Might and Magic II. Partly this was down to circumstance. Heroes II showed up on the syllabus just as I was embarking on one of my periodic digressions, a long series about international communications networks and how they culminated in the World Wide Web. Without the need to write in detail about a new game every fortnight, I was freer than I usually am just to play whatever I felt like playing. And what I felt like playing at that time was Heroes II. I beat every single Heroes II scenario in my Heroes of Might and Magic Millennium Edition set, some alone, some in multiplayer mode with my wife Dorte, who became almost as obsessed as I was. I must confess that my usual rule of no more than two hours of gaming per day was strained at times, shattered completely at others. But we were still in the midst of the pandemic then and there wasn’t much else for me to do with my free time, so I figured it was okay to set self-discipline aside for a while. Maybe it was even good experiential research, in that it re-familiarized me with that strange hungover feeling you get when you’ve spent hours and hours peering into an imaginary world behind your monitor screen — like butter that’s been scraped over too much bread, to steal a phrase from Tolkien. (For what it’s worth, I’ve found that the best cure for this condition is the same as that for a conventional hangover: a long walk in nature.)
Turn-based RPG Entropy offers up a world abandoned by the gods that looks like a PS1 game fished from a toilet
Come wallow in the demo for Entropy, an absorbingly ugly take on the Final Fantasy RPG format from the creators of Dread Delusion.
the Enshittification of Cozy Games
Game Balance Isn't Real
Resonite
A novel digital universe with infinite possibilities. Whether you resonate with people around the world in a casual conversation, playing games and socializing. Or you riff off each other when creating anything from art to programming complex games, you'll find your place here.
Vibe Check: Effort, Risk, and Games in The Atmosphere - rpg.actor Updates
What Do "Real" Devs Think? — We left our bubble to chat with some world-class indie developers and experienced a sharp whiplash from The Atmosphere back to terra firma and developed a better understanding of the future both near and far in terms of game development on the AT Protocol.
Trust — Moving Castles: Modular and Portable Multiplayer Miniverses
Something is crawling out of the dark forest.
“interest sources”, contextual interactions for NPCs in Sleight of Hand
I’ve worked with a few “target-based” contextual interaction systems for NPCs on different projects, they’re one of my favourite things to make, and lately I’ve been making one for Sleight of Hand, a stealth game I’m working on at RiffRaff, deets of which I shall here now divulge. Everyone calls these objects something different: at Wolfeye and (I think) Arkane they were Distractions, I’ve also heard Smart Objects and Chores, but I call them Interest Sources on account of I first read about them in a technical article about Mark Of The Ninja while working on The Siege & The Sandfox, whose interest system I also made.
Mega Viral Games
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