3/16/11

GDC 2011: Experimental Gaming Sessions


(I didn’t see the whole panel)

Loop Raccord
Nicholai Troshinsky   

-          Raccord = feeling of continuity
-          You manipulate video (choose start point) so that it looks as though movement is happening logically across all of the video clips (but you do it one at a time)
-          Troshinsky has no game background, only film editing
-          Found that it was satisfying to get this raccord. Act of editing films was satisfying
-          Idea of looking outside of genres



-          In all other games, you have time manipulating mechanics, but they all modify an existing present
-          In this game, you cannot change the present
-          History explains how the present happened, and asks the player to find alternate explanations of how it happened
-          Gameplay
o   Variables – cities, famine, war, population etc
o   Can change position on timeline
o   Only player action is migration – connect 2 cities with arrow – game engine tries to reconcile your changes with the present
-          So basically a puzzle game where you have to explain how the past got to the present
-          You are changing what happened (so there is an explanation that everyone died, but you don’t like that, so you come up with an alternative solution)
-          Moral dimension to what you’re doing


Inside a Star-Filled Sky
Jason Rohrer
http://insideastarfilledsky.net/

-          Recursive shooter
-          Procedurally generated game
-          8 directional controls, mouse to aim, hold button to shoot
-          Pick up ‘upgrades’
-          When you die, you go down a level – now the level is inside of your former self.
o   Now you see that the powerups you have collected affect the larger self (not your current self)
-          Can enter yourself, can enter enemy change what his powers are
-          Can go inside of the powerups themselves
-          Infinite game! All procedural. Can go 32 levels up and 32 levels down
-          Death mechanic – you go back to your starting position.
o   Found that if you just respawned where you were, people wouldn’t try to acoid death – just kept dying and coming back
o   To prove a point, wrote main character as robot – and found that he was progressing through the game successfully (what people had been doing) – funny then that people said his game was boring – it was that they were playing as robots. J
o   It adds a small amount of tediousness to have respawn at start – but keeps players from being robots.

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