So, I finished a simple demo for the Ruins of Time remake! You can play it over here.
This project was mostly to experiment some techincal stuff (source control and a style guide) and exercise my “gamedev muscles”. I achieved that, so I’ll be leaving it as is, and will move on to other new (and hopefully more interesting!) ideas. If you’re interested in checking it out though, the project can be found on Github.
Here’s some gameplay of the game I developed at the game jam I participated last weekend! You can read more about that here.
Last weekend, I participated in a special game jam here in Chile organized by LA.PCERA. Why special? Besides being a competition with a $1000 USD prize, the jam was about making games for scientific divulgation, a really respectable goal. I just went for the fun of the jam, especially since this time I was participating with friends (I usually go solo and join a team on site) and I never really thought about the prize… until I won! Totally unexpected…
As I mentioned in my previous post, my next project is making a remake of Ruins of Time, my first “serious” game.
Why am I doing this again? Well, my creative juices are kinda dry… A bit too dry to come up with interesting experimental games… So I want to tackle something simpler first: remaking an old game of mine using my current skills (an idea I got thanks to the Remake Jam), hopefully with an interesting twist. I also want to take the chance to focus less on design and more on technical/process aspects. Let’s hope it helps!
So… I’ve been kinda absent over the past few months. Sorry ’bout that. But thankfully I’m not dead! Just busy with other aspects of life. I did make a couple of games though that I haven’t shared here, and since I got some more time now, a couple of interesting plans for the near future.
This article was originally posted on Gamasutra. Reposting it here for the sake of posterity.
Something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is how to make games that, through the experience they provide, transmit important, heartfelt, and meaningful messages to the player. The conclusion I’ve been reaching is that, if I’m making a videogame, what makes most sense is to transmit the message neither through art nor story, but through what makes games games: mechanics. It’s not a new idea; mindful xp was a collection of prototypes that explored the same concept back in 2013. But it’s an idea I haven’t seen much, and an idea I wanted to try my hand at.
Wait, wasn’t I making a game called directions?
Yep… but I failed. I tried to make something simpler, but I failed at that too… Really, I could talk about what went wrong, but there isn’t anything more to say than “an interesting idea + a busy week = failure”. It’s incomplete, but you can play what I made here.
It’s pretty lame ending though: out of the 4 games I wanted to make in January, I only made two, failed at one, and couldn’t finish the last one… If anything, I’m going to be giving compatibility another go in February, and if that goes well I might try finishing directions properly. Ah well… I did learn something though, and I’m glad for that. Let’s hope what I learned here will be useful in the future!
