Hey everyone! Geoff, Erik, Arsen and I recorded the newest podcast last night, so head on over to give it a listen, or open up iTunes to get your latest fix of our indie-ramblings.

Are you a developer or self-proclaimed indie expert who wants to be on the show? Let us know!

We sure do like talking about indie games.

I’m not saying that everything has to be original. We’ve gone over this before; some of the best ideas in history began by ripping someone else off and then veering off in an original direction. One of the best ways for a budding artist to learn form and space is to trace everything in sight. That’s the way that we think; we take what’s in front of us, and we bend it and shape it until it suits our needs. The best of us just do a very good job of hiding our influences — and then if someone spots them, we call them influences.

These guys… they weren’t so good at hiding it. Over the next three columns I’m going to go into some of the stranger creative blanks in the Game-Maker community. What can be confusing is the amount of genuine talent at work — or, having grabbed and run, the bizarre directions they took their borrowed source material. One of these artists pushed Game-Maker in a way that few others did. Another chose the strangest route of influence, but at least made all his own material. The other guy just didn’t care what people thought. Most of these games I find inexplicable, one way or another.

Felix Leung

Felix Leung had a darned good command of Game-Maker. He knew how the engine worked, he knew its tricks, and he sure as heck knew how it used animation files. Leung’s games have extended — often very extended — animated cutscenes, that often transition seamlessly into each other and tend to provide excellent context for the in-game action.

Given these skills, it’s curious that Leung’s most original ideas seem to include renaming Star Trek‘s Federation the Confederation, and placing Final Fantasy‘s fighter in conflict with Barney the Dinosaur.

Die Blarney!

You may remember the Barney backlash of the early-mid ’90s. There was that Doom add-on that replaced the zombie soldiers with Barney, and caused his singsong voice to echo down the corridors of Phobos. Well, here’s an individual addition to the dogpile.

In its perspective, setting, and unremitting enemy attacks, the game is a little reminiscent of Mark Hadley’s Pro or Congress, though I imagine that’s incidental. As one of Square’s Warriors of Light, you roam the town, enter every possible building, and destroy the chances of… er, Blarney ever transmitting himself to the innocent populace. As you slay herds of Blarney clones, they will catch fire or lose limbs, or otherwise die in random and gory ways.

For what it is, Leung made a clean and well-organized game. And trite as the sentiment may be, I guess I can understand the impulse. Once I designed a game where EGM’s Sushi-X, with help from the rest of the Review Crew, demolished the logos to other game magazines. So okay, fair enough.

Xenoblaster: Attack of the Xorg

But what do we make of this? It’s dozens of minutes of carefully animated cutscenes wrapped around four levels of yet another noble, if failed, attempt at a Game-Maker space shooter. In turn those four stages are wrapped around a single short, strange action-adventure segment with a character borrowed straight out of Sample. And every single bit of it is consciously quoted from Star Trek.

The outfits are Starfleet uniforms. The human character is named D.A.T.A., which clearly is completely different from Data. The info screens are based on the Starfleet touchscreen computer interface. Space is full of Romulan ships. And as for the Confederation’s greatest foe, the Xorg…

None of these borrowed elements would be important on their own, or even collectively, if they were just incidental. What makes this game so weird is that there is so little game, and what game is there is both very simple and very forgettable. That leaves the endless and meticulous cutscenes and scenario to carry the package. Even then it might be another thing entirely if Leung were to have gone for it and just made this a fan game. Instead he very slightly changes every proper name, and alters the player’s ship — despite its “Enterprise” file name — to more closely resemble a traditional space shooter vessel.

Despite this constant winking, the game seems to take itself and its dramatic premise rather seriously. The mind boggles at how to process this information.

High Density Disks

What further confuses me, not just about Leung but about all these artists, is that they’re not doing this for free. They’re not just whipping together a borrowed game and putting it out there as freeware. This stuff, it’s shareware. It’s got order forms and everything. You want to register Die Blarney!, it’s $16 ($20, Canadian). Xenoblaster? $21 or $30, depending on your national boundary. Whether these price differences are accurate for 1995, I can’t say. Since Mr. Leung is from Ontario, perhaps he knew exactly what he was doing.

If you want to play his games, you can download them here. If you feel like registering them, that’s on your own head.

[Read all of our Game-Maker Archive editorials]

My association with Recreational Software Designs started early, maybe around the time of my first game. I don’t remember the circumstances. Maybe I wrote in with some suggestions. Maybe I was trying to show off my work. Whatever my motivation, I was fourteen and unhampered with caution or tact. I mailed a letter and maybe a 3.5” diskette, and then forgot about it. Weeks later, the phone rang. Against my normal habits, I picked up. The voice, which asked for me by name, sounded uncannily like one of my friends. Being fourteen and tactless, I told the voice that it was an idiot. The voice was confused. I unleashed more rudeness. The exchange continued until the voice identified itself as the president of RSD, a certain Oliver Stone. Tickled with the oddness of the situation, I laughed for a minute or more.

I’m not sure why he stayed on the phone, or indeed continued contact with me. Eventually we developed a rapport. He would mail me pre-release versions of new Game-Maker updates; I would scour them for bugs and inconsistencies. I would mail in my newest creations; he would introduce me to other Game-Maker users and show me their work. This went on for a few years.

For the 3.0 release of Game-Maker, RSD chose to transition from floppies to CD-ROM. In 1995, this was a big step. It was like having a book or an album published. Within a year AOL mailers and demo discs would render the CD common; in 1995, it was still a magical endless data well. So RSD now had a whole CD to fill, and to justify the leap they needed to fill it.

I was prolific, and able to hide my ineptitude behind polish and an intimate understanding of the game engine, so evidently I was just what RSD needed. They contracted me to design six games, and to sign over another two. My rudeness persisted; when asked to contribute, my first impulse was to toss them a couple of my least favorite games. It was only with later discussion that I twigged their desire for new, flashy, and instructive content. With that goal in mind, a certain inspiration struck me. I progressed at about a game a week. Some of the games served to demonstrate certain design concepts; others spun themselves out of a whim.

At reader request, here are those six games, in the rough order of development. I’ll hold off on the overt criticism, and instead try my best to explain what was going through my head. We’ll just see if a sensible train of thought develops.

Glubada Pond

The best I can do here is reconstruct my motivation. It’s clear that I was inspired both by Taito’s Bubble Bobble and by Novotrade’s Ecco the Dolphin. It’s also clear that I was both fascinated with monster mechanics and eager to bend Game-Maker toward different goals and play structures, beyond the standard inventory-based action-adventure games.

The usual Game-Maker structure involves finding power-ups and defeating monsters as you travel a map in search of an end point. Here, I tried a more classical arcade structure. Instead of searching for a destination, how about we clear the level of enemies to move on. Sounds simple enough, right? The idea goes all the way back to Space Invaders — or Breakout, if you want to get philosophical. I also liked the hop-’n-bop structure of games like Mario Bros. or Tumblepop, where you disable enemies before knocking them out for prizes.

As usual, my ambitions led to wrangling with the engine’s eccentricities. And as usual the wrinkles that I could never quite smooth out determined the game’s identifying quirks. Limits in character idle sequences meant that a character couldn’t just stay put when done moving, so I had the my fish face the audience and wiggle back and forth. The end result is odd and a little creepy, but certainly memorable.

Since the only way for a player to progress was to touch a designated exit tile, I couldn’t directly tie success to monster deaths. My solution was for each monster to leave behind a tiny bubble; collect all the bubbles and insert them in a vending machine (I don’t know; I think I was out of ideas), and the machine would open, allowing access to the next level. A problem was in the power levels of enemies.

Any item left over from a monster death would also, technically, be a monster; it would just be a monster with positive rather than negative qualities. If the monster had a lower power level than the character, it would die on contact, passing to the player its positive qualities — such as increasing a counter. I didn’t want to make every monster of a lower power level, or else the player could simply ram them to defeat them; the point was to shoot bubbles at them to disable them. Yet if one of these higher-level monsters touched the reward bubbles, it would defeat those bubbles and cause them to disappear.

This was a dangerous situation. If there were only so many monsters, and thus only so many reward bubbles, what would happen if some of those bubbles vanished before the player could collect them? Basically, the player would be stuck. One solution might be to overload the level with monsters, or even allow them to respawn, and only ask for so-many bubbles to progress. That isn’t ideal either, as Game-Maker has no option to reset counters either on character death or on leaving an area. So if you were to die, or rack up bubbles in an early level, you would build up a backlog that you could trade in later to zoom right through the levels.

I never really worked out the problems, so in that respect the game is flawed. It is possible both to get stuck without bubbles and to mine bubbles for later. Despite the inelegance, the game finds its own flow and basically works. The faults almost open up a strategic element. It’s a strange game, though.

Crullo: Adventures of a Donut

The premise here is pure whimsy. After Glubada Pond, I figured I’d go with a more traditional platform adventure. Instead of a fish shooting bubbles, I had a doughnut shooting raspberry jelly. I didn’t think really hard about this.

Once I settled on a theme, the rest of the game was me screwing around with tools. This may be the first game where I did all the visuals in Deluxe Paint, and I was anything but subtle about it. I just created piles of random blocks decorated with gradient fills. Likewise for the sound I pulled out an old Radio Shack keyboard that had been gathering dust since the late ’80s. Whether or not the notion was appropriate to a game about a doughnut, I figured all the sounds would be musical, or at least synthesized.

The game, then, has a strange atmosphere. The sound effects give it a cold, mournful, and sterile sound. The visuals are noisy and hard to differentiate. The only thing in keeping with the theme is the monsters; for foes I littered the levels with more savory bakery items: bagels, croissants, English muffins. I’m not sure what they were up to, and I didn’t bother to give them much personality or behavior. They were just sort of there, as obstacles.

I put just as much effort into the level design. I chose a block set, settled on a starting and an end point, and drew random, winding tunnels and passages and rooms to connect the two. I threw in the odd secret passage or geographical feature, but I never really made sure the geometry matched the character’s movements and abilities. I figured it was possible to progress, it was fine.

Zark

Whereas Glubada Pond gets caught up in mechanics, and Crullo gets caught up in the design tools, Zark gets caught up in genre. After Crullo, I wanted to stretch the boundaries again. Game-Maker really wasn’t made for shooters, especially scrolling space shooters, but I was determined.

Based on some earlier experience, I knew what really didn’t work; I just wasn’t sure what did. I figured that the only way to create a constant scroll was to ensure that the player’s ship always moved right. Even when backing up, it would move at a lower speed than when moving forward. It did little good to prevent scrolling back to the left, so I let the player flit around and explore at will.

I also had poor experience with weapon pick-ups. With Game-Maker you can’t just exchange one weapon type for another on the fly; you can only upgrade from one to the next. That is, if you load all the weapons onto the same key — which I intended to do. So instead, I chose a numbered system. Each number represented the number of shots the ship would emit at a time. They would spread in various directions and patterns, depending on the number. This worked out well, except in that fast-moving monsters tend to skip across the screen rather than moving smoothly. Any shots are classified as monsters. Thus any fast-moving shots have a good chance of skipping past a target even if you shoot it head-on.

This may be the first time that I experimented with large, multi-block monsters. When the player destroyed a weak point, it would unleash a high-power “explosion” monster that would swirl around and destroy all the other boss parts, which would themselves unleash swirling explosion monsters. It worked pretty well, if you could ignore the occasional engine bug that would cause an explosion to randomly spawn a boss segment. Not sure why that happened.

Peach the Lobster

Back to the familiar action-platformer. I figured that RSD deserved its own mascot, to help give the company an identity. My solution: throw a lobster in a track suit, and rip off the general design of another mascot game.

By now I was comfortable with importing graphics from Deluxe Paint, and indeed a bit more skilled at it. I even managed to pay some attention to the theme and storyline. Yet I was just as distracted by the process as I was on Crullo, and so made some strange errors of judgment. All of the monsters are one block tall, and Peach is two blocks tall. His only attack is with a claw gun, which shoots from above the waist. This means that, all things being equal, there is no way to hit the enemies. Oh, if you screwed around and fought with the game you could eventually kill them. It was just a nuisance to do.

Again when designing the levels I paid little attention to the character’s abilities. If a jump required the player to hammer on the jump keys and glitch out the game, that was fine — so long as it was possible in the end. If it was possible to avoid an enemy, even if it was nearly impossible to do so, then that was all I asked.

I’m not sure what happened to Peach’s other six limbs. Maybe they’re under his clothes?

The Patchwork Heart

Peach was an exhausting project, and it took much longer than I expected. I cooled off by tossing together what I felt was a simple, brainless game. It consists of three maps, one tile set, a character with basically no animation, and no grand plan behind its design.

The character is a golden orb; for variety, and just to dink around with a technique I hadn’t used before, I had it emit motion lines when it jumped. The result was a kind of neat trail effect, which also served as a secondary attack. To set the levels apart, I played around with palette swapping. To further break up the sameness, which I felt made the game confusing in places, I made it so every surface touched would also turn golden. This allowed the player to sort of leave a trail, as well as generally establish a sense of ownership over the level geometry.

I borrowed monsters from Zark; since they were mostly body parts, I had them drop pools of blood when defeated. Thinking back to a secret from Wolfenstein 3D, I had the pools restore energy whenever the player touched them. With the sharing of resources, I gave the game a tenuous story connection to Zark.

Aside from a weird super-jump gimmick, that right there was the game. In retrospect, despite the lack of effort, it’s probably the most playable and progressive of the bunch.

Clyde & Zeke

The deadline was quickly approaching, and I wanted to get in one last game. I figured I’d do a simple demo to show how monsters could also be used as helpful partners. I looked out the back window of my parents’ house, at the lake. The lake was full of ducks. There was a theme: one duck following another duck. Why not.

I found a photograph of a duck, and shrank it down to 20×20 pixels. It was going to be swimming, so it didn’t need much animation. I whipped up some actually pretty decent marsh tiles and imported them from Deluxe Paint. I created a single adversary — a paper boat — and a single pick-up — a school of fish, which restored health. I then quickly threw together a maze level. Find your way from A to B; use your AI partner to protect you. That’s it.

The game only took a day or two to finish, and I sent it off. I know that RSD received it before finalizing the CD, but it arrived late enough that it seemed to skip their minds. Although I got paid for it, it never actually wound up on the disc. When I asked why not, they seemed as surprised as I. No great loss, but it is sort of curious.

The 3.0 release of Game-Maker was both the most influential and the final one. For another year I continued to pester RSD with suggestions for further updates, but the programmers moved on and soon after RSD ceased to exist.

[Read all of our Game-Maker Archive editorials]

by: Matt Hackett

How do you find out about these things?

I hear about game development contests relatively often, but it’s almost always too late to enter. I end up just being frustrated and wonder: “Where do people find out about these contests?”

We’ve recently been more fortunate and have been able to successfully enter two contests. And here’s how we finally were able to find out about them in time: by subscribing to insane amount of gaming news. Below is a list of game development related news sites, feeds and other resources.

News sites:

Gamasutra • News RS

GameDev.net • RSS

Global Game Jam • RSS

Independent Games Festival • News RSS

reddit IndieGaming • RSS

TIGSource • RSS

And DIYgamer.com, of course, and their RSS.

Indie-related Twitter profiles:

Andrew Wooldridge – random game news and web development links from a professional web developer.

IndieDB – News, insight and media direct from the developers.

IndieGames.com – The latest independent games news, interviews, and features, from the makers of Gamasutra.

Jacob Seidelin – Ridiculously good JavaScript hacker and creator of javascriptgaming.com.

Make Games – A collection of interesting games and game design related links. High content, no noise. (From a current Twitter employee and previous co-worker of mine, Kevin Cheng)

Wolfire – An independent game company (they blog almost every single day, yowza).

Of course there’s also our Twitter profile where we tweet about our own doings and game-related news.

Do you know of any additional resources for game development contest news? Please let me know in the comments and I’ll happily add them to the list.

So now that you know about these contests coming up …

How do you know if you should enter?

So you found out about an upcoming contest and you’re interested. Should you try to put a game together to enter into the contest? This is a difficult question. First: is it a good fit?

If the contest requires that your game is built on Unity but all of your experience is with pygame, that’s probably a good sign to forget about the contest and get back to whatever else you were doing.

It could be that the contest is so amazing that it’s worth derailing your current project, starting a new one, or learning a new language, but I’d seriously advise against that. I think it’s a good adage to finish what you’ve started and play to your strengths. You might be able to enter a contest outside of your skill set, but you’d probably make a better game just for yourself for fun. So I guess what you should ask yourself is:

Will you benefit from entering?

On the surface, this is another way of asking, Could you win? The benefit of winning many of these contests is clear: for example, with the recently-announced Activision contest, the grand prize is something like $100k and a publishing deal. That’s pretty major! But keep in mind that with a prize like that, you’re going to get some very polished entries by some veteran game developers. The competition will be intense.

So, maybe you can win and maybe you can’t; other benefits can arise from entering. For example, if you read our postmortem on the Boing Boing contest, you saw that we were driven by the hard, unchangeable deadline, which was great because we often can’t find motivation. We also made a bunch of mistakes and learned from them, which is another beneficial side effect.

Merely being involved in a contest can also get some much desired attention to your game. According to Google Analytics, Boing Boing has referred over 1,500 people to our game Onslaught!. That’s not much from a big business perspective, but for a tiny and unknown team like ours, it’s great!

Determining if a contest or promotion is shady

So you found a contest, you figured it’s worth your time for one reason or another, and now you’re in! You want to enter. Just please do one more quick thing first: make sure the contest isn’t shady. You can do that by reading the fine print and getting a second opinion.

If you’re seriously considering entering, it’s probably worth your time to read the fine print. It’s certainly not fun reading, but you could get into a bind otherwise: a single sentence could disqualify your game or remove your rights to your intellectual property. Fortunately, there are resources out there to help you.

The guys over at Wolfire often write about the bigger contests (like they recently did). For that particular contest, you can also get insight from Tom Buscaglia: The Game Attorney (a real attorney!).

Now, if you can’t find the fine print, that’s a bad sign right there. A legitimate company running a “real” contest is going to have documentation to cover their asses. If you’re just entering into a quick weekend contest like the fine folks over at Game Jolt regularly hold, that’s fine. But if there’s supposedly a cash prize, and you’re going to expend hard-earned time and/or money on your project, it had damned well better be legit.

When in doubt, why not ask your indie game development peers? Late last year I bumped into an interesting thread with the subject Indie Game Competition – $15k and possible publishing deals!. What was interesting to me was a post that said:

And you still owe me over $250,000. I also found out I am not the only developer being scammed by Zoo Games, so this should be a warning to everyone here.

I’m not going to pretend to know what’s going on there, but it doesn’t smell right, know what I mean? For that reason, I’d have passed on that contest.

Decide quickly and move on with your development

The most important thing is not to be affected by decision paralysis. In the past I’ve spent an embarassing amount of time just thinking about these sort of contests. And in the end I never entered, so all I had to show for it was a ton of lost time. Think about it this way: you’re probably going to keep making games either way, aren’t you? So set aside a little time to determine if it’s worth your while, then move on and get back to making games!

Have I missed any important steps? Have you had any luck (good or bad) with these contests? Hope to hear from you in the comments.

[Read more from Matt at the Lost Decade Games Blog]

We’ve just uploaded our 11th podcast featuring the likes of myself, Arsen, Erik and Mike.

Covering topics from IGF China to the pros/cons of pay-what-you-want sales, catch up on your audio indie news via our podcast.

As always it features the music of Whitaker Blackall and is available for subscription via iTunes. Check it out!

[While our XBLIG Thursday feature fights against the main issue of Xbox 360’s Indie Games channel–gaming brilliance being lost in a sea of medicore titles and cheap apps–as good as anything out there, there’s just too many total releases for us to try them all.

That being said, we can still highlight them on a daily* basis, and perhaps posting these new titles will benefit both player and developer by allowing a connection to be made before the game floats on down the river and into the backlogs of the channel. Whether it be an all-time great, a one time play-through or a complete lemon; all will have their chance to speak. Here are today’s releases.]

Block Puzzle’s Revenge (80 MS Points)
“The block’s are getting their revenge! Take control and move between four fields at once and try to keep the fields up and alive. The timer keeps ticking, boss blocks keep dropping, prolong the block menace as long as possible! Features visual and audio changes to keep the pacing up, along with classic and two player competitive modes.”

萌めくり (80 MS Points)
“This game is as simple as just flipping all the panels to face up. Can you pass all the stages and add the girls’ illustrations to the gallery?”

Graviton (80 MS Points)
“Freely inspired by the old Gravitation of the Net Yaroze with some improvements. Learn to perfectly control your ship and challenge your friends in both making the best lap time or fast dead match. Thirty-one race map, nine dead match map, nine power up in dead match mode, in a fast simple and good looking game. Author: Silvano Mantione.”

Can someone please explain to me how August crept up so quickly? I understand I’ve just returned from an extended vacation and time flies when you’re having fun (it sure is nice to come back to a job I enjoy), but seriously…August? That means my birthday is on the horizon and school is creeping up. Well, if I wasn’t an old man (soon to be older) and no longer went to school, anyway.

I’ve been musing on what has me the most excited as far as indie games on the horizon. LIMBO is out. Joe Danger is out. And plenty of other heavy-hitting indies have made their way to the marketplace. But luckily we just caught wind that Super Meat Boy is heading into its alpha stage. I daresay that’s the next game that I’m really looking forward to. I played it at IGF, I played it at E3 and I’m ready to have the full game in my hands.

Also I’ve been itching for a chance to put more than show-floor demo time into Hazard: The Journey of Life. Alexander Bruce’s intriguing use of the Unreal Engine for this unique first-person shoo…game is nothing if not beautiful and haunting. I’ve seen videos and had a handful of minutes into it, but I want more.

What are you guys looking forward to?

We’re past the halfway point in the year, so in that same mindset. Which game has your vote for game of the year so far? VVVVVV still has a special place in my heart, especially after putting in the extra hours to get all the Trinkets. Its gameplay is pure excellence and if you haven’t even tried the demo yet…for shame.

When I want to read Catch-22, what are the options? I can go to a library, and do it for free. While I’m there, I can browse the rest of his works or nearby, possibly similar, books. I can search by topic, author, or year of publication. If I want my own copy, I probably can find it at a nearby bookstore. Failing that, I can order it online for a pittance.

Thanks to Gutenberg, books are indexed and ageless. They may go out of print or become obscure, but one way or another you will always be able to find a copy. Then with a copy in hand, the only thing between you and their ideas is the work of digesting them.

How about if I want to watch Nosferatu — not the Werner Herzog one; the Murnau version? If I’m near an urban center, it may be showing at an indie theater or festival. If it’s October, I may track it down on a classic movie channel on cable. Or I can rent the DVD or VHS (or indeed borrow it from the library). If I go to a video store, there’s a good chance it’s in stock. Or, again, I can just hit up Amazon.

Ephemera

Much like books, films have found their posterity. Home video has certainly helped them on the way. Previously, particularly under the studio system, they were treated as ephemeral, throwaway experiences. Why worry about the old Clark Gable flick when there’s a new one running? If it was that memorable, why don’t the studios just remake it? Anyway, short of an expensive home projection system, how would you watch it?

Home video equipment is now cheap and standardized. Everyone has a TV and DVD or VHS player, or at least access to one. Netflix is ridiculously cheap, and carries everything except porn. This availability has opened the door to the restoration, documentation, and publication of archive films. Just recently researchers found the missing bits to Fritz Lang’s legendary 1927 film Metropolis, and the upcoming restored DVD is one of the most anticipated releases of 2010. You can put your DVD of Das Boot next to Halloween, next to The Dark Knight. There’s nothing stopping you, and there’s nothing strange about it. If it was filmed then chances are you can easily track it down and play it. Much as with books, all of the history of film is now current and all is relevant.

Until just a few years ago, TV had a similar problem to film. Most TV is, or has been, produced as disposable filler around commercials. Much early television was shot and broadcast live. Until the late 1970s the BBC regularly wiped its videotapes after broadcast, and burned any film copies when returned to them. Archive space was considered more valuable than the actual content being archived. Indeed, aside from the odd rerun or syndication deal most TV would run once and then sit on the shelf. Much as with the old studio system, the demand was always for new content.

There are still big problems with the format, but we now have enough patches and workarounds that broadcast TV is almost pointless. Previously if you missed an episode you would have to hope for a rerun or else shrug and move on. Now you just have to check your TiVo to sit back and watch a week’s worth of content — without the commercials. Or catch up on recent episodes, or indeed whole shows, on Netflix (again) or Hulu. If you want a hard copy, there will be a DVD set. Now it is completely normal to own a season of Supernatural, or even to skip the broadcasts and wait for the DVDs. This change in availability has begun to affect TV production, placing us in the middle of a creative boom.

Pursuit

Now, what if I want to play the original Asteroids? Or Ultima III? Or Jill of the Jungle? Or, heck, what if I just want to play the original Silent Hill?

Well. If all you’ve got is a current piece of hardware, your options are kind of limited. Without resorting to emulation or warez, good luck tracking down a copy of Ultima. And when you find a copy, good luck getting it to run on your modern PC. Maybe you can find a recent retro compilation that features Asteroids, or maybe there’s a remake for some download service.

Even Silent Hill, it’s only ten years old. This is one of the most important games of its era, and probably one of the best games ever made. Again you can buy the Wii remake, which isn’t quite the same. You may still have a PS2, or even an original PlayStation kicking around — though given Sony’s manufacturing history, it won’t last forever. Maybe Sony offers the game on its PS3 download service. I’m not going to check, because I don’t care. If it is available, it’s a special case.

I still have my NES, and my Master System, and my Sega Genesis. I made the effort to track down a Sega Saturn, even though I missed it the first time around. They all still work fine. How many consoles do I have plugged in? Aside from my Xbox 360, I’ve got my NES. I own Streets of Rage, but is it worth it to set everything up? And if I didn’t have the original equipment, I would have to settle for a Sega compilation — except most of those are for last generation’s platforms.

Videogames have it harder than other media because with no easy access to the past there is only ever a present. They are designed to specific, fleeting hardware configurations and the hardware is always changing. There is no centralized index of videogames, and if there were then stores only carry current software and libraries tend to approach games with caution.

It’s frustrating, as both on the creative and the user end understanding of game history and the way that one idea leads into another is spotty at best. People design and accept games like Twilight Princess not because they actually use the medium but because that’s the way they always remember games being designed, or because that is the current shape of the form. Yes, this game sort of reminds me of Ocarina of Time, which in turn sort of remembers me of Link to the Past, which reminds me of the original Legend of Zelda. It’s a little different now because there’s a wolf in it, and my arm gets tired.

Lip Service

When Nintendo first announced the Virtual Console, I felt a mix of relief and excitement. How wonderful, I thought, to have an archive of the bulk of console history — all in one place, easily accessible, in the mainstream eye. The implications seemed endless.

Now with the whole Zelda series available for comparison and contrast, Nintendo would have no excuse to keep remaking the game with slight changes. New games in a series could come with credits for their predecessors, so you could appreciate where they came from. Presumably a person could waste a whole afternoon browsing the Virtual Console for hidden gems. Every time the user booted up the system, the Virtual Console could suggest other games the user might like based on past preferences. Maybe previously obscure games would rise to the top of the pile, through social connections and pattern analysis, and gain a new recognition.

Well, none of that quite happened. Instead of a tabulated archive of gaming history, or even a sort of interactive wiki or Netflix/Amazon interface, we got an awkward store front shilling a select handful of overpriced ROMs, more or less without context. Granted a few obscure games have joined the roster, including a few that previously never enjoyed a worldwide release.

True to Nintendo form, the Virtual Console is both a brilliant idea and an enormous wasted opportunity. The idea of infinite reverse compatibility, freeing a medium from the constraints of hardware and availability and so rolling the history into the present, is… close to what we need. It’s not enough to offer the games for download; we need a framework: a deeply analytical indexing system.

Nodes

The pieces of a system like this, they’re out there. Aside from the Virtual Console and abandonware sites like Home of the Underdogs, we have indexing sites like Mobygames and GameFAQs and the Killer List of Video Games. Valve also comes to the fore again with Steam, which sort of aspires to collect and serve all your games in one place — indie games, classic shareware, and all. Yet none of these sites connects all the dots.

Another piece comes from the music node-exploring engine Liveplasma. Type in, say, Blondie, and you get a web of related artists. Artists who have some direct connection are linked by a line. The more connections, and the more influential the related artists, the bigger an artist’s bubble. What you will see is a sort of a star chart, with tight groupings of artists, each visually ranked by scale.

The ideal videogame index would work similarly — not necessarily the visual bubble thing that Liveplasma goes on; rather, it would focus on the webs that connect and contextualize forty years of design. If you were to search for The Legend of Zelda, you would get its release date (in various regions), its hardware configuration, its development staff, and lists of games that may have influenced Zelda, as well as games that it may have influenced — perhaps by various degrees. Pong would have influenced Space Invaders through Breakout!.

With all this data, it would be easy to chart and explore significant developments in design. If you’re looking at Double Dragon, you can check out what else was going on around its release date. You can chart its influence ranking amongst games by its creative director. You can put the database on a timeline and trace the most influential games through the 1980.

You also can flag or rate your favorite games, and through the wealth of connections (as well as your own past ratings) it can suggest for you other games that you may want to look at. And then it will offer a link to download the game, or to it purchase from, say, Amazon.

If I like Silent Hill, I may well enjoy D2 — and yet I may never have heard of it. The index would explain everything I need to play it, and offer links plus a total cost. Dreamcast? Check. VMU? Check. Based on that information, I could check or uncheck items from the list and put in an order. There we have it.

If available, the site could also offer review quotes or video clips; possibly information scraped from Wikipedia. If there are any interviews with Kenji Eno about his design of the game, perhaps include them too.

Let’s say I like Dragon Warrior and I dislike Final Fantasy. The game would trace games related to Dragon Warrior, and somewhat depreciate the links that also link to Final Fantasy. This shows that I have some discrimination, and don’t like like just any RPG. This may specialize the links, so that instead of Romancing SaGa I am linked to Lost in Blue. If I like Doom but dislike Quake, I may get links to Super Mario Bros. and Half-Life. If I like Quake but dislike Doom, I may get links to Unreal Tournament and Tribes. And I’ll be able to check them out either immediately or in a few days, with no hassle.

The Now

One of the major cultural and creative hurdles for videogames is a lack of permanence or history or posterity. It’s a self-fulfilling cycle. So long as the only games available are under six months old, it is hard to get a sense of the swamp of creativity that they crawled out of. The present simply exists in a bubble, and the past is old and outdated. The challenge is to fold the past into the present, and to to develop a constant present tense. Alex Kidd is just as much a part of the present as Kratos; the games are still there, and they still have things to say. He just isn’t getting as much attention at the moment. Yet maybe, if you like Phantasy Star and Super Mario Bros., he will present himself.

This is what we call conservation. It’s to make the sum of human experience available for present and future appreciation, and thereby to help us understand where we sit in the greater order. We can see mistakes repeated, and loose ends unexploited. We can see patterns and cycles and sudden epiphanies, and we come to understand how they occurred. And if there’s anything that the mainstream of videogames lacks, it’s self-awareness.

A medium goes through its phases. Generally it starts off piecemeal, little snippets of ideas that stand alone, each studying the nature of the medium. What’s possible? How do things look? How do people respond? Later the ideas coalesce into short subjects, often delivered through a reservation in some passing medium. Periodicals set aside pages for short stories. Networks set aside airtime for TV episodes.

Later, as the public becomes accustomed to format and language of the medium and as its authors start to understand its implications and potential, the ideas will get more complex and demand more room to develop. That extra room in turn demands new methods and understanding of the changed space and its implications for communicating. Thus we have long-form subjects — your novel and your Sistine Chapel and feature film and television serial.

Although videogames have been around for a few decades, they have spent about half of their active life spinning their wheels. Part of the problem, I think, is in the eagerness about twenty years ago to move on to long-form subjects before anyone really mastered the short form. If we’re to look to any model for a healthy development of what we now know about game design, that model might be the golden era of television.

The Other Video Mode

It’s only since the late 1990s that television has come unto its own as a mature long-form medium. Self-contained shows like The Sopranos and The Wire, or even Lost or the re-envisioned Battlestar Galactica, would have been if not impossible then highly improbable under earlier conditions. Previously the vagaries of syndication hindered long-term plotting and character development, and a focus on monocultural event programming discouraged nuanced or unconventional storytelling. Later, as the information spectrum exploded and simultaneous audiences plummeted, networks largely turned to DVD retail in place of syndication and premium channels saw a way to lure in dedicated subscribers in place of ad revenue. Both systems to a larger extent put the end user, or customer, or audience, as the arbiter of value — as opposed to advertisers or distributors — at just around the time that audience sophistication and expectations had reached a mature point.

TV’s previous golden era was back in the late 1950s, in the heyday of anthology programming. These are the evenings when The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Outer Limits were appointment viewing. These were reserved hunks of the schedule, devoted not so much to a particular story as to a theme. It wasn’t enough to think up a new adventure for a familiar cast of characters in a familiar set of locations; each week a new writer — often a highly-regarded short story author — had to establish an original, clever spin on the show’s premise, develop it, and wrap it up in about 25 minutes. Back then shows often ran 52 weeks a year, meaning a huge turnover in scripts and so a formidable effort to avoid the duplication of ideas. Almost from the start the format forced an extreme exploration of the nature, limitations, and possibilities of television writing and production. The shows of this era developed reputations for their their thoroughness and imagination in milking their topics, and remain to this day some of the most most distinctive and essential programming ever to air.

Expressively, this is kind of where we are now. Or, rather, where we could be.

Jumping the Gun

Through the early ’80s, videogames could best be compared to Fred Ott’s “The Sneeze”; the designer would throw a single, simple idea at the player, and see what happened. Even games as complex as Pac-Man can be summed up by their mission statements. In that case it’s a game about eating and fashion, created to lure women into video arcades. Eat dots, avoid being eaten, and move on to the next (identical) stage. As women’s literature goes, this ain’t Jane Eyre.

Later Miyamoto grabbed onto and expanded Pac-Man‘s linear story and distinct character elements into a framework for his own fairy tales, which the rest of the development community then latched onto and top-loaded with its own flashy stories and characters and gimmicks without quite understanding why Miyamoto did what he did or just how thin they were spreading his ideas.

Although the odd developer or the odd game transcends 1987 — usually either Valve or indie developers — if we’re talking about a snapshot of the medium and everything it has to say to its audience, the last original videogame was The Legend of Zelda. It was a good — actually, brilliant — rough draft for a long-form videogame, extrapolated from Miyamoto’s earlier ideas. We can think of it as, I don’t know, Gulliver’s Travels. The thing is, over the next century and a half people kept hacking away at the short story and refining the form and goal of the novel. By the time we get to the mid twentieth century and authors like Joseph Heller and Kafka and Nabokov, the novel has evolved from a sensationalistic fictionalized travelogue (as further novels were, for a time) to a complex and individual perspective on life. Of course there’s always pulp, that pays more attention to the form than the content. Yet there is room for literature, and it is the literature that persists.

The status quo of videogames would do well to dial down. Although perhaps we don’t have the grammar and the understanding to do lots with long-form designs, the last half-decade or so has proved a wealth of advancement in smaller-scale development. Likewise, one of the frequent complaints you hear from mainstream developers is the lack of a sliding scale for pricing and pitching. To sell in a store, these days every game has to be a major, top-shelf, triple-A release, whatever that means, so there’s no room and no budget to develop small ideas. Xbox Live Arcade has been a small relief, providing an excuse for games like Pac-Man Championship Edition and Geometry Wars. Distribution systems like Steam have opened a worldwide market and deregulated scale and pricing for PC developers. And then there’s the indie scene, which generally does what it wants without much concern for market pressures and is all the healthier for it.

This is all and well, and we seem to be entering an era where distribution can be equated to periodicals or broadcast TV — which brings me to my central argument: that anthologies are, if not the way to the future, then potentially a very powerful tool for sharpening both the art and craft of game design and public perception and expectations of the medium.

Building a Bottle

We don’t have a lot of precedent for game anthologies. Oh, there are the retro compilations, many of which are excellent in their own right. So long as Digital Eclipse went nowhere near them. Valve again rears its head with The Orange Box, which was not so much a thematic compilation as it was… well, it kind of was a thematic compilation. You got the entire Half-Life 2 experience to date, plus a spin-off that focused on and refined the macho shooter side of the series to a level of near epiphany, and another spin-off that focused and refined the gentler, progressive puzzle-adventure side of Half-Life to its own kind of epiphany. The one game has all male characters, and the other all female. Considering that Half-Life is a deliberate cross between Doom and Myst, this all is fascinating stuff.

That anthology made a huge impression on both the industry and the public. It also gave both Portal and Team Fortress 2 an audience far beyond what either would have achieved as a stand-alone product, without the need to artificially expand either game to fit famliar retail models. Yet it continues to be a relative anomaly.

Recently Sabarasa announced an anthology of art game darling Jason Rohrer’s games for DSiWare. As a package, Alt-Play is closing in on exactly the kind of thing this industry needs. It’s a selection of short subjects, all by the same author, all musing about some aspect of love and life and family. As a distribution platform, I’m unsure how DSiWare compares even to Xbox Live or WiiWare. I doubt it’s absolutely ideal. It’s as if David Sedaris put out a book exclusively for download on the Android platform — before everyone knew who David Sedaris was. Maybe not the best way to make an impact, even if I’m sure Rohrer can stretch his royalties to buy vegetable seeds for the next twenty years.

Game jams hit close to the mark, challenging a handful of authors to craft their own take on a theme within certain time and often technical constraints. Some problems are that the results are rarely compiled and promoted and that often the incentive to finish and hone the projects is fairly small. Let’s say twenty game artists of various levels spend twenty-four hours to design a game about ice. Three or four of the games might be polished yet empty. Another four or five might be brilliant yet devoid of style or grace. Another three might be a good start, then simply end for lack of development time. And then the rest might involve a square moving against a green background. Game jams are a wonderful exercise. It’s just a shame that they’re rarely more than an exercise.

A Common Voice

What I would like to see is a mainstream editorial construct to arrange bite-sized games around a central conceit, thereby building something like a comprehensive perspective on that conceit. You do get a bit of this with old-fashioned sequels like Simon’s Quest and The Adventure of Link, that take the same basic premise from the original game and then approach it from a different direction. Imagine if every four to six months some publisher were to release a disc with six perspectives from major game developers on a single theme. Let’s say the June 2011 volume is called Sour, and it contains short games by Tetsuya Mizuguchi, Kenji Eno, Peter Molyneux, Cactus, Kenta Cho, and (of all people) Ed Logg. And let’s say it costs, oh, twenty bucks.

People would buy Sour on the basis of the big-name designers, and thus would be introduced both to the indie designers and the work of an old master. Players would be able to cross reference all the perspectives and see the many different ways that the medium can be used to communicate a simple theme. If there were a certain prestige around this publication — if it were to become the “in” thing for a developer to contribute to, to show that he knew what he was doing or to spread awareness for her work, then it could take off without having to pay the big developers huge fees. Everyone would get perhaps a small flat rate and then a percentage of the royalties.

And then four to six months later, we’d have another volume. Let’s call it Ancient. Then another four to six months, and we’d have Awkward. Maybe their spines would match. Maybe they’d be numbered. For people who came in late, it would be a big deal to collect the back issues and build a complete collection. Eventually your or my favorite designer would have a shot, and we would be forced to take a dip and see what the fuss was about. People would get hooked; word would spread.

This is just an example, but it is exactly what the industry needs. Right now. And after five years of talking about it, I’m still waiting for it to happen.

Over time Recreational Software Designs’ Game-Maker may have become obscure, but in its time it was both progressive and widespread. From a small family business in New Hampshire, the software traveled to Russia, to South America, to Singapore, to Australia. It sometimes seemed that every other game was from a new country. This was before the Web, when consumer software spread through magazine advertisements and shareware spread through bulletin boards, so people had to spend some real effort to seek out the software and trade its games.

Then attention shifted to the Web, and those BBS archives started to gather dust. It’s kind of like moving to a new computer; you transfer the most relevant files, then leave everything else sitting around on your old hard drive. Maybe, months or years down the line, you will remember an old file or application and dig it up again. Mostly, you forget. Somehow, despite its pervasiveness in the BBS scene, Game-Maker never quite made that transition.

And yet because of that pervasiveness, you can find echoes of Game-Maker everywhere if you know how and where to look. The Web contains huge unfiltered archives of content gathered from bulletin boards, dumped either directly from those boards or from late-’90s software bundle CDs. Abandonware and DOS software archives, in languages from Russian to Esperanto, are dotted with Game-Maker games. You just need the right search keys.

Obviously it helps to know a game or publisher name. Failing that, you can recognize the Game-Maker file structure at a glance. Every game consists of an unusually large collection of raw data files — some combination of .PAL, .BBL, .CBL, .MBL, .CHR, .MON, .MAP, .SND, .GAM, .VOC, .CMF, .GIF, and .TXT files, with a handful of others. Furthermore, nearly every Game-Maker game contains a few common files: SNDBLAST.DRV, CONFIG.DAT, CONFIG.BAT, CONFIG.HLP, GMHELP.TXT. A few other files pop up frequently enough: GMTITLE.GIF, GMTITLE.CMF, GMSONG1.CMF.

Not every game you find will be a winner, but if you keep poking around you will find a few weird gems. Like, for instance…

Roland Ludlam’s Hurdles

Offhand I can think of half a dozen attempts to contort Game-Maker’s engine into permitting a traditional space shooter. Despite the odd moment of brilliance, none of those attempts has been successful. In his simplicity, and in his slightly shifted goals, “13 Year Old Wiz Kid” Roland Ludlam almost makes it work.

Ludlam describes Hurdles as “A game of timing, and skill.” Although it takes the basic form of a shooter, there is no actual shooting — rather like a side-scrolling F-Zero or OutRun, I suppose. rather, the game consists almost entirely of dodging back and forth to avoid obstacles and collect bonuses. The dodging itself is a bit unconventional; to move up and down, you use the left and right arrows.

Also notable is that the intended goal is not so much to finish the game as it is to collect as many points as possible — a bit of a novelty for Game-Maker. Come to think of it, I’m not sure that I have seen another game focus on score. Game-Maker has a built-in high score table, and score is one of the major default counters, yet the engine tends to lend itself more to action-adventure games than to arcade action, making the score table a bit extraneous.

The game is one of a handful that I have seen to include an in-game menu system; hit start, and the game dumps you into a stage select screen. Available are stages 0-3, with 0 being a sort of training level, and — for the utter novelty of it — a music test. Ludlam put some not-insignificant effort into the latter, with custom visuals — some of them digitized from photographs — to accompany each .CMF file. Why he bothered, considering that none of the music is original, I don’t know. I am pleased with the effort, though!

For the main challenge, Ludlam provides dozens of lives. The goal, again, is to be challenging but not necessarily to limit the player’s progress. And the game is tough, and fast-paced. Every level seems to be built with hard right-leaning gravity that the engine just barely keeps up with and that gives the player just enough reflex time to dodge around obstructions. Each level is distinct, and some of the visuals are rather gorgeous. You’ll even find the odd bit of faux parallex scrolling.

Despite all this effort, Ludlam seemed to have little interest in presentation. He didn’t bother with a story or a title screen. It’s all about the content here — and the content is some of the most original, for its part, you’ll find in a Game-Maker game.

And I just found this two days ago. How? By searching for Game-Maker’s SNDBLAST.DRV and CONFIG.DAT files.

Matthew Groves’ Space Cadet

This is perhaps more par for the space shooter course. For the visuals Matthew Groves employed his best MS Paint skills; for the music he raided Sierra’s Space Quest. The game design involves roaming around an inscrutable maze in a sort of a cross between a lunar lander and a Space Invader. The space bar fires lasers at monsters yanked from, I believe, Penguin Pete.

And yet, the game has charm. And it plays well. The laser in particular, has a satisfying crunchiness to it. Part of that comes from the sound effects, part from the visual, and part just from the timing of the animation. Movement is precise. Groves seems to have paid actual attention to the difficulty balance. There’s little sense of nonsense about this game, and yet a huge sense of playfulness. Stereo visualizer bars serve as spikes. What seem to be old 1950s B-movie posters animate in the background.

How did I find this one? GMTITLE.GIF and GMSONG1.CMF.

To save you the search I’ll upload the two games here. You see how it works, though. Even something as obscure as Game-Maker has become leaves its traces; you just need to know how to look. And you never really know what’s out there until you do.

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