This is one of my favorite stories from HP Lovecraft and it should also serve as an excellent introduction. It is very short and a perfect example of fear of the unknown. This story really got to under my skin and has served as an important influence when coming up with good scares for our horror games.
Closer look at Teaser and more
After a lot of work we are finally done with the teaser! Hope you all enjoy it! In case you have not seen the teaser yet then do so before continuing with this post:
Exploring Deeper Meaning In Games
This post aims to be a deeper look at my earlier rant about meaning, narrative (plot) and gameplay. After considering feedback and thinking about it some more I would now like to write a more constructive text. In this post I will outline some steps and ways of thinking that I think are needed in order to achieve deeper and more varied meaning in games. “Deeper meaning” is of course a highly subjective thing, but what I mean is simply games where the core is not just about a gameplay mechanic, showing entertaining gore or similar. Instead, the focus should be on exploring something other than pure “fun”.
Alpha – the beginning of the end!
Yesterday, after several weeks of grueling 15 hour (kid you not) days, we finally reached a really important milestone here at Frictional Games. It’s by far the most important milestone we have reached so far and might be the most important milestone of the entire project!
The perception of $100 000
I read the other day that the US budget deficit is expected to be $1 300 billion for 2010. Which led me to say to Thomas that we should ask the US government (Yes, I know we are Swedes. Yes, I know it is wrong to expect Swedish game development support from the US government.) for $100 000… Who would notice?
How Gameplay and Narrative kill Meaning in “Games”
In many of the posts here I have been discussing how having “unfun” gameplay can greatly enhance the experience. I have also ranted about how too much “fun” can completely destroy the intended experience. What I want to discuss now is how a game’s most common ingredients might be detracting from certain kinds of experiences and are in some cases best gotten rid of. These ingredients are Gameplay and Narrative. It is my view that these two features can seriously get in the way when trying to take the interactive medium in new directions.
When focusing on fun fails
Because of a past as sort-of-toys important features of games are: How “fun” they are, replay value and how long they last. Reviews often take this into account and in turn this makes developers focus a lot on making a game “fun”, “replayable” and “long lasting”. I think this kind of thinking (which I am at times guilty of myself…) can seriously hurt a game. I think designers shall focus entirely on what kind of experience they want to deliver and make that come across as effectively as possible!
Future of Adventure Game Interaction
Interactions in adventure games has gone from written input (aka “text adventures”) to todays mouse controlled (and often single-button-driven) games. There still exist text adventures though, although now called “Interactive Fiction”, and here the complexity of interaction has increased instead of becoming simpler. It seems like the way of interacting has on one end gotten more and more complex over the years, while on the other end it has gotten more and more simplified. What I want to explore in this post is if this great polarization has made us miss out on other ways to interact in adventure games and in what other ways interaction might be possible.
On Versioning (or how the simplest thing can save you from the hardest pain)
Long titles aside, this is no flashy post. Some will even find it a bit boring, but if at least one can learn anything from it, I will be happy. The motivation for it comes from an often overlooked issue.
The art of Timelapse
To speed up the development of our next horror game Amnesia: The Dark Descent we have started to timelapse ourselves. This way it only takes 5 minutes to do the same amount of work as you would normally need 30 minutes to accomplish!
