I’ve had an exciting week sitting at my computer. Reading all the news and happenings from GDC. Hoping for some great info, some great discoveries to be rained down upon me like liquid inspiration.

The most important news story to me is that on Wednesday Microsoft finally announced that games created with XNA Game Studio will be able to be distributed to ALL Xbox Live members. They’ve developed a system similar to Newgrounds.com, allowing anybody to upload content, undergoing peer review to be approved. This seems like another great way to reach a game audience, beyond Flash. You can read the details of how they plan to “Democratize Game Distribution” here.

N+ on Xbox 360

I don’t think it’s any coincidence that Wednesday marked the release of N+ on Xbox Live Marketplace, an upgrade to Metanet Software’s well-known ninja-simulator Flash game.

It seems that making the transition from free Flash game to a commercial product is becoming more reasonably obtainable/acceptable.

In other news… what have I been playing recently?

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Update: The Liberty Engine: Running Clean

I’ve been all damn talk for too long. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you, the Liberty Engine Demo!

CONTROLS:

-Click the scrolling play button (or press space) to pause the animation.

-“In” and “Out” values determine number of seconds into the animation that the loop will begin and end.

-“Rate” determines the speed at which time will pass (seconds per second).

-“Duration” is the duration of the loop. If modified, it will automatically change the “Out” value.

-All forces in the system are set to enact at the 10 second mark and all calculations end at the 30 second mark.

Aside from the animation controls, this is not an interactive demo. Interactivity will probably be in the next one, but this demonstrates all of the engine principles. You’ll notice a slight lag period just as the swf loads. That’s because it is calculating all of the physics for the entire animation during the first frame. It saves all of that data and then replays it based on the passage of time. That’s why you can scroll back and forth or play at different rates (super slow-motion or fast-forward). The animation is actually set to 40fps, but I guarantee your browser can’t keep up with that speed. Fortunately, because the engine is time based rather than frame based, dropped frames do not effect the rate of movement. Oh, and by the way this is in AS2. I’ll translate it to AS3 later.

I haven’t mentioned the Liberty Engine up here very much, but it’s been a project of mine for over a year now. The concept behind the Liberty Engine is to create a physics engine that ANYONE can use; to liberate the thousands of young game developers without the programming or mathematical know-how to build the kind of games they dream of and provide it for public use free of charge. I hope, with a powerful and easy-to-use engine like this one, to foster a serious indie gaming movement at the grassroots level.

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Monday morning and I just stumbled upon this game on the Flashkit forum. In this game you cooperate with yourself to finish stages. Very interesting concept and excellent execution.

Cursor*10 by Nekogames

I never saw a dame yet that didn’t understand a good slap in the mouth or a slug from a .45.

So I got a bit worked up about an Opinion article on Gamasutra by Steve Gaynor. It was discussing the concept of the noir video game (one following in the footsteps of Film Noir). Figured my response was worth posting here:

While I would love to see a truly noir approach to games and I appreciate the plea Gaynor is making, this summary of the genre does not do it justice. Noir was not created as a means to an end. There was no group of directors that didn’t know how to make a film with a small budget except “by focusing on flawed, unpredictable characters living out street-level conflicts between individuals in the mundane, modern-day urban world.”

Low budgets may have helped kickstart noir, I’m sure they did. It can’t be denied that big budget projects tend to lack experimentation because the backers don’t want to take any risks with their bank books. Still, noir is more related to artistic innovation than business strategy.

Film Noir was a movement which sprouted from an increasingly dark outlook in American filmmakers, reflecting an increasingly dark outlook in American culture (due to the Depression, the rise of organized crime and eventually the WW2 environment). It was influenced by German expressionism of the 20’s, but came from American filmmakers; not an “influx of expatriate German [Expressionists].”
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“Indie games are the new form of self expression for the motivated misfit. I’m blown away by little Flash games oozing with style made by kids who aren’t even old enough to drink, wtf? The community of lovable and terrifyingly capable indie developers is steadily making big budgets irrelevant.”

-Kyle Gabler

From a Gamasutra interview on The World of Goo as part of their “Road to the IGF” series.

Gabler and Ron Carmel are coming from 2D boy. After a glance at their main page, I stumbled across Gabler’s Human Brain Cloud; one of a number of interesting experiments Gabler is running. Seemingly useless data . . . I’d like to put it to use.

-Christopher J. Rock

Continuing my coverage of the Wii, I must today discuss the “Check Mii Out Channel.” I’m happy to announce that the first Mii contest is finally over and this, ladies and gentlemen, is my award; a souvenir photo:

You may notice, I went for a more classical approach. He is based on the original Mario, with small pixel eyes and an open mouth.

I assumed everyone was going to make Marios that looked the same, and so I made one that was more individualistic. I was only half right. While voting, I saw hundreds of Marios that generally looked nothing like Mario or were strange spins on him. The top 50 winners though were basically identical, which is somewhat disappointing. My Mario was in the “7th level.” I’m not quite sure what that means, but I was shown an animation of Mario running up a Fuji-esque mountain and he stopped near the snowcapped top, so I’m happy with that.

For those of you that haven’t heard, this channel allows online Wii owners to upload their miis for public viewing and judgment. You can view public miis with a random “grab bag,” by popularity, or by searching for a specific type of or individual mii. That’s pretty cool, but the real fun is in the contests.

Nintendo is hosting contests on this channel that ask players to design miis to a given theme. The first worldwide contest asked for “Mario without his hat.” After that we saw “A Pilgrim from the first Thanksgiving,” “The Tooth Fairy,” and “Cleopatra” as national contests in the US. I understand that in Europe, instead of the pilgrim contest, players were asked to produce “King Arthur.” Continue Reading…

Daymare Town. I found this gem when someone mentioned it on the Flashkit games forum. Straight forward point-and-click adventure game. Excellent presentation, interesting art style, great puzzle design.

I couldn’t finish this without a walkthrough, but I blame it on a couple poorly drawn props. You’re in for a good hour or so of headscratching.

This game reminds me that there’s nothing wrong with keeping things simple sometimes. Props to the designer.

Check out Daymare Town at www.pastelstories.com.

I was excited when this game was announced. A sequel to one of my favorite games. And Treasure never makes sequels. If you’re not familiar with the work of Treasure, I wrote some impressions on their title Radiant Silvergun a few weeks ago.

Unfortunately this wasn’t the kind of sequel I was expecting. This game retains many of the fundamental qualities that made the first one so great but it’s missing something. Soul. And that’s ironic because the ridiculous storyline in the game revolves around your character being possessed by the souls of the heroes from the first game.

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I was reading the Flashkit Gaming Forum and someone made a post about this game. I was hesitant to try it because I believed it was just going to be a cheap knock-off. What I discovered was a cleverly designed and well executed game. This one is simply fun to pick up and play. I played 23 stages in one sitting.

Check it out at http://portal.wecreatestuff.com/. Game by We Create Stuff.

I’ve been putting some work into a new game in the past few weeks. It’s a game that takes place within the Thugjacker world. You’re not playing as Deebone, as you might expect. Instead you play as a rogue police officer with his mind set on one thing. Donuts. Donuts falling from the sky.

This is a background sketch I drew for the game. I’m vectorizing it now and shall paint it after I’m finished with that. As usual, I’m doing the programming and background design with this game. Ricky’s working on some character designs so he should be passing them my way soon.

As anyone who’s played any of our games before should know, this game’s gonna be a bit different. Good times 🙂