So… long story short is that I’m not going back to Gameloft. Looks like I can hire out my services to any progressive company that will have me.
If you are looking for a designer/producer/TF2 spy, here’s my card:
No, really, that’s my card. If you see me in person, I’ll dig one out of my wallet for you.
Meanwhile, I’ve got a lot of time to work on my prototypes and writing! Door closing, window opening, cliches inflating.
It’s pretty damning for a blogger to not post for more than two-weeks. I’ve lost the link that showed a study between post density and traffic, but rest assured that quantity is indeed a component. So I apologize for being quiet recently. Work is busy and my free time is spent gearing up for GenCon.
I’m bringing the Airport game I blogged about recently to show to publishers and also quickly adapted a design I had shelved in 2009 after randomly coming upon a novel theme and scoring mechanism for the whole thing. It’s tenatively called New York Minute. I rudely threw that together with Gloriana’s help and so I’m bringing two well-tested (I got a lot of reps with NYM in its previous incarnation. It’s a pretty good game that lacked a theme and felt a little arbitrary. It was surprisingly easy to fix.) games to the show and hope to get some useful feedback from the publishing folk.
When I come back, I’ll post a full recap of the goodies of GenCon and then I’ll be back to my regular posting schedule. I’ll leave you with a link to a very hyped new blog that posts the tired and I thought defeated argument that you can divide price by hours and get some sort of enjoyment metric, as if enjoyment was measured in hours and not something more flighty like utils. These articles are inevitably written by college kids or people who generally have the time to fully appreciate 100+ hour titles where people with demanding jobs or kids or a life really appreciate getting a full experience in a digestible amount of time, even if that makes the price/hour metric all outta wack.
I’m not going to continue my posts about Airport Rush for the time being. I had a fantastic playtest session with some very talented designers at Eric Zimmerman‘s playtest group yesterday and I think I am going to make some major changes. While this is dangerous to do a month before I take the game to GenCon, I think it is absolutely necessary.
It highlights what I’ve known to be a problem with my process for some time now and that is the unfortunate necessity of having the same people playtest your games. Since you can’t take them out back and format their brains to see everything as a blank slate, they are forced to compare a new version with an old version. If the new version fixes problems with the old version, then the fixes must be good, right? Well, no, not exactly, because those fixes might make no sense to someone coming into the game raw.
There are problems in Airport Rush with the alignment of theme and mechanics. While I am no slave to theme – Why are there n identical San Juans in Puerto Rico? Why can only one type of good fit on a ship? Why in Ticket to Ride do you need special colors of track? What do the tickets represent? And so on – there is much to be said about congruency insofar as it helps people understand the rules and mechanics. If people are distracted by incongruent rules, then I should work to fix it. Some incongruencies will remain (to the chagrin of nitpicky designers), but I was looking for feedback, not orders.
It’s actually been a long time since I’ve received feedback that was in the form of: “Why did you do things this way?” “Because such and such.” “Oh, I see. I think that’s too slow. Wouldn’t such and other such be better?” It’s refreshing.
I’ll be typing up part three of my board games post sometime later this week when I have time. I had friends come up over the holiday and we went to Central Park, MoMa, the waffle truck, played Dominion, Puerto Rico and Le Havre, played at Dave & Busters, went shopping for Chinese junk on Canal Street, saw Avenue Q, saw the 4th of July Fireworks on the Hudson, went to Liberty Island (I took a great photo of the Statue with my phone that I am using as my wallpaper now. I’ll upload it later) and had delicious food in a number of places. It was a busy weekend!
This short post is to tell you about a gem of a game I played through on Thursday. It is Telltale’s pilot of Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent. If you like the Professor Layton games, then Puzzle Agent is familiar. It is a point-and-click adventure game sans inventory management, where the challenges come from brain teasers, logic puzzles and riddles that are interspersed with the story.
The pilot was great, but leaves on a bit of a To Be Continued note, so I’d be very sad if folks didn’t scoop it up in enough quantity to merit a whole season. I felt that the puzzles were more fair than in the latest Layton game (in that, some puzzles could be interpreted in multiple ways leading to incorrect correct answers). But the real draw here is the ridiculous writing and voice acting. I’ve found the voice acting in the Sam and Max games (of what I have played, at least) to be a bit monotonous. Plus there is a wonderful surprise that breaks the veil of puzzle and story that I will leave for you to discover.
One of the few things that I like about New York City is the density of unique events. On Friday, I read about the Come Out and Play festival in Brooklyn and figured that would be some good times for Glo and I. It was!
The essence of the festival is a mix of ARGs and impromptu sports. The above picture is me playing the awfully named “OMMRPG” which should really be called “Laser Football”. The idea is that each team has one laser pointer and a number of players with mirrors and must direct the laser to a “goal” while avoiding the other team’s defenders. It is wildly chaotic and actually works without a lot of rules. I stealthily hid behind an “official” and scored three times before the opposing team caught on and I was marked for the rest of the game. Once you are marked, there is little you can do to score, which is a weakness of the game (in basketball or soccer you can out-finesse someone to shake off a defender, in this, due to the precision required of angling a mirror, it is less possible). After I was sufficiently frustrated by a defender, I passed off my mirror to another player. I think more organization would lead to these kinds of strategies – passing mirrors to confuse defenders. I was surprised at how well the game worked.
There were a number of games that took place over the entire weekend. One was hosted by Scvngr. Since they have no vowels, you know they are Web 2.0. You download the Scvngr app for Android or iPhone and you are led on a photo scavenger hunt around town. It is the perfect melding of an old game with new technology and if AT&T’s network wasn’t such balls, it would have been very clever and smooth. Scvngr allows you to set up your own scavenger hunts for others. They are partnering with museums and such to offer these sort of ludically-guided tours (I just made that phrase up, sorry).
You can see on the above picture a bandanna tied to my leg that says “Human”. It was part of another of the whole-weekend games called simply Humans vs. Zombies. It is essentially Massively Multiplayer Thematic Tag. One player starts out as Subject Zero and by tagging humans (those with bandannas on their arms or legs) can turn hapless humans into flesh-eating zombies (indicated by bandannas worn on the head). Humans can stun zombies by hitting them with socks or nerf guns at which point they must wear their bandanna around their neck and cannot tag for ten minutes.
Gloriana and I were on our way to an event on Saturday morning when we saw a Zombie across the street in the direction we were headed. I paused and we made eye contact, yet he smiled and continued walking away from us. Were we safe? Was it a trap? I peeked around the corner. No Zombie there. But by then it was too late. The Zombie was hiding behind a trash can. I was taken, but Gloriana survived by spiking me and the attacker with socks.
My attacker (left) and the decoy (right).
Now, this led to an uncomfortable situation. I was a shambling shell of humanity while Glo was still pure. Nonetheless, she felt like she had a hand on the situation. She set her phone to go off in ten-minute intervals. When it would ring, she would instantly spike me with a sock. Hmph. I felt like in the last scene of Shaun of the Dead where Ed is chained to the shed and can only play Timesplitters instead of eating flesh.
Glo was protected in safe zones like the park (the game was suspended if you were in the park playing another game, in a business or crossing a street). Also helpful was the overprepared Nerf-based militia that patrolled Park Slope looking for zeds to shoot. Not pictured above is the guy who had a bandoleer of socks and a belt of Nerf cartridges.
But as in the precautionary zombie movies, a split second of indecision can upend an entire life. I was on the phone talking to a friend who were we going to meet for the day. While Glo thought I was distracted, she crossed the threshold of the park and was no longer in a safe zone. I tagged her “undead” and she was upset! Geeze, you would have thought that I did something bad like forget her birthday – I only converted her to a mindless automaton of insatiable hunger!
We continued on with the games. “Field Crumpets” was a lively variation on field hockey that was just wacky enough to be novel. We participated in a horde event where we Zombies milled about trying to trap helpless humans (we won!). And we also took great efforts to complete the SCVNGR hunt. We used props for extra effect. The prompt was to hug a tree in Prospect Park. Instead, I prosposed to one:
It said no.
Our pictures were pretty good (Glo is a creative photographer) and in the end thanks in part to our funny pictures, we won the SCVNGR hunt! Our prize? A new 3G iPad! Whoa! Supposedly, they are ordering it today and it will be in the mail.
If it doesn’t show up, I know a horde of flesh-rending abominations that I can send to the SCVNGR headquarters.
You are ridiculous:
It wasn’t that funny.
Looks like I’ll have to post some more relevant stuff to keep you folks around. Sorry. It’s mostly game design minutiae here.
I’m on Kotaku again for random Twitterings:
I don’t get the reference, Bashcraft, help me out here.
For old times’ sake, here’s the first my appearance on Kotaku, where I had a whole post to myself and could stretch my legs. That post is still the third most trafficked one on the blog, behind the two completely out of date Mafia Wars player’s guides. The Internet works in mysterious ways.
