You’re so amazing, you’re invincible.
You’re so awesome, you can shoot enemy bullets right out of the air.
You’re so adorable, you’re going to Destroy the Brain as fast as you can.

Click here to play Destroy The Brain

In early July, I took part in a 24 hour gamejam at my university, in a team with four other students. We made a game for the given theme of “two massive heads”, and then spent some time after the event polishing it up.

It’s a shooter with omnidirectional fire, and some innovative twists.

I’ve wanted for some time to make something inspired by Warning Forever. So in this you’re dismantling a huge enemy structure piece by piece trying to get to the core, with extremities falling away if you target and destroy their parent components closer to the hub. I’d love to come back to this later to make the layout of the enemy procedurally adapt like in Warning Forever, but I’m happy to publish this as a one-level demonstration of the ideas for now.

You’re invincible. Anyone who’s listened to me chatter on about game design will know that I’d like to see more games experimenting with removing player death and game-ending consequences for failure, and a lot of games I design involve me trying out some new way of making that work.

Everything is physically simulated, including the projectiles, which can collide with each other. This changes the character and utility of weapons fire considerably. As you are ultimately invincible, the enemy’s fire is purely defensive. You can’t destroy a weapons turret by attacking it head on, as all of your projectiles will be deflected away. Attacking another portion of the station while in range of an enemy turret is equally difficult, as unless you direct your own fire to deflect the enemy’s, you will get pushed away by the bullets.

There’s some other subtler consequences of the physics simulation too, such as the rotation of the enemy structure being affected by the turret’s recoil, and further manipulatable by pushing at the arms with your projectiles.

The other students on the team that made Destroy The Brain have all recently graduated from their courses at Anglia Ruskin University, and some of them are amazingly talented. It’s a sad thing that I have another difficult year of uni to go, so can’t seriously talk to any of them about running away to form an indie game studio immediately.

Programming:
Robin Burkinshaw

Art:
Craig Dockerill
Ross Martin

Audio:
Daniel Servante
Pete Sperring

Gamejams are where game developers get together and make games in each other’s company, usually with a time limit and a specific theme. Sometimes the games are collaborations, sometimes they are solo projects.

Over the last two months and a bit, I’ve been to five of these events, and I’ve enjoyed them enormously. I’ve been trying to make games in 48 hours, 24 hours, 12 hours, and often just 3 hours or less.

It wasn’t that long ago I first started feeling like I was maybe getting the hang of this programming business, and could keep working on something without having to spend two weeks solving a problem for every hour of progress. But now I sometimes start these gamejam projects with ideas that feel far too ambitious for the time available, and then find myself completing them anyway. Being given a theme for a jam will become inspiration for an idea I would never have thought of otherwise. I’m constantly surprising myself.

Not everything gets finished, and not everything is any good or has any potential. But it’s generally an amazing experience. I met Terry Cavanagh at these events, and his enthusiasm for these things is an inspiration. His talk at World Of Love was about how his process is almost dependent on the focused creativity of gamejams.

My first gamejam was one organised by the university. It was a 12 hour event, where I worked in a team of five with other students. The majority of students taking part were from the arts courses – I was one of the few confident programmers.

We were given the theme of “two players, two buttons”, and tried to make a co-op tower defense type thing with 2 button controls. The game itself was pretty terrible, but the art and sound themed on zombies, pirates, robots and ninjas that the other students made possibly saved it.

The weekend after that, I met up with some local indie game developers for the 17th Ludum Dare challenge. Ludum Dare isn’t usually done as a gamejam. It’s an international 48 hour solo game making competition, but we were going to work alongside each other to make it a more social experience.

The theme for the event was “Islands”. My instincts were to try to make a game with a meaning that related to the theme, rather than superficially dressing a game with it. I ended up trying to do something based on the idea of an island as isolation – social isolation in particular. The quote of “No man is an island” was possibly partly inspiration. I gave it a working title of Isolated.

This was one of those projects that was hugely ambitious for the time available, and I utterly surprised myself that I actually created something that appeared to work. I got a few people to play it after the event, and the idea of it seemed to resonate with them, even if the underlying mechanics of it weren’t up to the task. I thought there was still potential for me to make it provide the experience I intended with a few small tweaks, so I decided to spend some time improving it.

That was two months ago, and I’m still working on it. But the latest version was on display at the Brains Eden exhibition at Anglia Ruskin University this week. It’s still clearly not very good at explaining itself, but I got to demonstrate it to a few people who found it interesting. I said to a couple of people that the game would be available on this website sometime this week, but I don’t think that’s going to be the case. There’s still more I want to do to it before I release it to the world.

But if you are interested in it, send me an email and I’ll give you a link to the latest build.

Near the beginning of june, there was TIGJam UK 3, hosted in Cambridge. This was three days of three hour challenges. Everyone would write down a theme on a piece of paper, then two or three would be randomly picked to be the themes for the next challenge.

Getting something out in three hours still feels slightly beyond my abilities. I found myself getting stuck on the themes a lot at this jam, trying to find something that was both possible in three hours with the skills I possessed, and dealt with the themes in a way I was happy with.

The first challenge had a theme of ‘fish’, for which I made the unity toy embedded above, called Fish Are OK At Swimming. Like most of these three hour jams the most I was able to do was a basic implementation of a single idea – that of fish that moved in a somewhat fish-like way and followed the mouse cursor. If you’re not seeing any fish, they’ve been following your mouse elsewhere on the screen. Hover the cursor over their window, and they’ll come back.

The second challenge I attempted was much more difficult. The theme was “antidepressants”, and had a time limit of two hours. There are things I would like to say about antidepressants, and that I could possibly say through games. But I couldn’t think of any way of approaching that subject in two hours with techniques I already knew. I ended up abandoning it, and that was a pretty disappointing way to end the day.

Considering that experience, on the second day I attended I chose to try to use the challenges as an opportunity to learn new skills. For the theme of “Garden of Delight”, I experimented with joint physics in Unity, trying to make segmented plants that could be blown about by the wind when you swept the mouse over them. I didn’t get anything presentable by the end of the three hours, but I learned a lot and I’ve ended up using the code I wrote for it in other projects since.

Two weeks ago, I went to the World Of Love indie games conference, where there was a gamejam attached to it organised by Terry Cavanagh. It followed the same format as TIGJam, but with a different mix of people.

The games I made for it were pretty unremarkable, I used them mainly as attempts to put together game elements that would be useful for larger ideas I had swimming around in my head. I mostly enjoyed the event for getting to chat to people like Tom Betts, and give out terrible advice on programming in Unity.

Finally my most recent gamejam was another organised by the university. A bunch of teams of five students came from universities around the country to Anglia Ruskin to take part in a 24 hour gamejam attached to the Brains Eden event.

My team included Pete Sperring and Daniel Servante from an audio tech course, and Ross Martin and Craig Dockerill from arts and visual effects courses. I had worked with Pete and Ross at the last uni gamejam, and was hugely impressed by them then, so I was confident we could do something good for this with twice the time.

What we made was an arena shooter called Destroy The Brain.

The initial idea was you were attacking a space station, and could destroy it piece by piece in a style inspired by Warning Forever. Our twist on that formula would be that the player is invincible – the consequences for being hit merely being that you are pushed back by enemy fire, making the task harder. A moment of curiosity when setting this up made me try enabling physics on all the projectiles and putting them on the same plane. Suddenly you could shoot your enemy’s bullets out of the air, and I was having so much fun playing my test scene I was having trouble getting back to work.

On top of these interesting mechanics, we poured layer after layer of insanity with the visuals and audio. The centre of our space station was a giant spinning brain. Attached to it were two enormous comedy and tragedy theatre masks that played ludicrous music as they span past you. An enormous hypnotic disk rotates in the background. The brain taunts you in a silly voice as you come close to destroying it.

I think we came up with something genuinely interesting in those 24 hours. All it needs before we properly release it to the world is a little polish to make it easier to pick up and play.

Suspiciously Spherical is a stealth puzzle game. You are an anthropomorphised rolling ball, in a place where it is not good to be an anthropomorphised rolling ball. You must escape detection by the sentries, and make your way to the exit.

Click here to go to the download page

Click here to visit the story of Alice and Kev

This is the continuing story of my slightly unusual playing of The Sims 3. It follows little girl Alice and her struggle to survive with no home, no money, no food, and the worst Dad in the world.

I had completed the game before, so this time I wanted to try something a little different. I decided that I would try a crazy plan I’d had the last time I played, but never seriously put into practice.

I would become the best space ranger in the galaxy. But I would do it by assassinating every ranger above me in the rankings.

 
Part 1

A little explanation might be needed. This is a game about being a space hero. You play as one of the eponymous space rangers, tasked with saving the galaxy from the robot Dominators threatening to enslave everyone. You start off with a weak little spacecraft, flying around a living universe, trading, improving your equipment, getting into turn-based space fights, maybe occasionally being thrown into a bizaare badly-translated text adventure.

While you’re doing this, there are a load of other AI controlled space rangers doing the same thing. Most of them do their best to improve their skills and weaponry and fight in the Dominator wars, some are content just to trade drugs and alcohol between planets, a few become space pirates and forget all about the wars. All of them show up on the ranger rankings, showing how each one matches up to another in terms of weaponry, wealth and experience. When you begin, you’re at the bottom. If you want to catch up with the rest and become the top ranger, you have to work hard and do more than your fair share of fighting the Dominators.

Unless, like me, you don’t want to do the hard work of being a space hero, but you still want all the glory. Then you could track down each of those rangers above you in the rankings, and kill them all off until there’s just you left. The greatest space ranger, by default.

My first ranger kill was a strike of opportunity. I was pottering along trying to do some early missions to gain some cash when I saw a ranger-merchant passing me. I looked him up on the ranger rankings, saw he had a very low weaponry rating, and opened fire. He led me on a chase through three star systems before exploding above Venus.

The second was a premeditated attack. I looked through the ranger rankings for a suitable target, a ranger-fighter with a weapon rating lower than mine, then paid 3 credits to use the wonderful info search facility to find his location. I ambushed him as he launched from a planet. He cursed at me, and shouted some stuff about how much a hero he was, and we should be working together to fight the Dominators. Eventually, I had him fleeing towards another planet as my missiles closed in on him. My scanner wasn’t good enough to tell me how badly damaged he was, but there was only two turns left before he’d be able to land and repair, and it looked like he was going to get away. However, I then spotted there were two pirate ships by the planet that clearly saw he was weak and were moving in to intercept him.

I considered my options. Then opened a conversation with him. I offered to let him live for a sum of money. He accepted. I ceased fire. The pirates blew him up. I took all his loot. I moved up a place in the rankings.

 
Part 2

After my earlier exploits, I no longer had to hunt down the remaining well-equipped, high-ranking space rangers. They were hunting me down.

I got attacked by a ranger pirate as I was returning to Earth’s solar system. He wasn’t demanding money, but I didn’t have any to give to him anyway. I didn’t have the fuel to jump out back the way I came, and the nearest planet was half the system away. My engine was already half dead, but I put it into overdrive anyway. A few turns later, I had taken heavy damage, and the missiles I had launched hadn’t even hit him yet. But several other ships had just come into sensor range. I called them up, and begged them to help. Miraculously, they all agreed.

It turned out they were all poorly armed cargo vessels and passenger liners. But I wasn’t in a position to be picky. I turned around at the head of a fleet of angry civilian craft. They circled him and softened him up with mining lasers while I delivered the killing blow with an upgraded fragment cannon I had dug up on Mercury. I moved up a place in the rankings.

That was the last straw for the authorities on Earth, however, and I became a wanted man. I had to flee the system as a squadron of battleships chased me down.

I got myself fixed up elsewhere, and then decided to head to the site of a battle with the Dominators at the Kephrone system. I thought I might be able to dodge the fighting hotspots and grab some nice loot to sell from the wreckages. As it turned out, there was a damaged Dominator craft in a fight with a transport near where I came in, and I helped destroy it while hoovering up alien nodes. The system residents were terribly ungrateful, however. As soon as the system was declared free of the Dominator threat, the Gaalian planet sent a police battleship after me. It was then I remembered I had done a couple of missions from the Pelengs to destroy Gaalian transports in this system a while back. The Gaalians clearly remembered me.

I had to land and repair on another human planet in the system before he destroyed me. I tried bribing the battleship with all of my money, but it wasn’t enough. I tried to escape a couple of times, only to be destroyed and forced to reload from the autosave. I wondered, if I was careful, if I would be able to fight back and drive it off. I launched, and began to circle around the planet firing missiles while he fired back from outside my fragment cannon range. When I had taken heavy damage, I landed, repaired my ship, and launched again. I spent all of my remaining money on repair bills doing this over and over again, but I eventually wore him down, and he began to flee back to his home planet. This kicked some kind of hunter instinct in me to life, and I gave chase. I thought that maybe if I finished him, I would be able to pass through this system in peace for a while, so I kept firing. He exploded just as he was about to enter the atmosphere.

I didn’t think that whole situation through very well, though, as the authorities on the two human planets in the system saw this, and launched whole squadrons of police ships of their own. Needless to say, I ran for the system border as fast as my deteriorating engines would allow. Combined with a couple of other misunderstandings, I am now a wanted criminal across half of known space. The other half is occupied by the Dominators.

 
Part 3

I gave all my money to charity. I’m like some kind of incompetent Space Robin Hood, who blows up the rich, then accidentally gives all his legitimately earned life savings to the poor while browsing investment options at the bank. This did have the pleasant consequence of making the authorities across the galaxy forgive me for all of my many murder and extortion crimes.

Rangers are still hunting me down, though. They seem to like to interrupt me while I’m trying to collect dominator loot, having dropped all my combat equipment off on a nearby planet to make room. I’ve had to do a lot of running away, particularly when they come in teams of two or three. One time I cowered on a planet for two weeks while I waited for the guy with two thousand laser cannons in orbit to give up and fly away. One attacker I managed to destroy, as he begged for his life over and over again. I moved up another place in the rankings.

I noticed on the ranger rankings screen that the weapon rating of Blodro, the number one space ranger, had dropped down to almost nothing. I reckon he must have downgraded his equipment to do some trading. Of course I immediately did a search on his name, got his system, and headed there as fast as I could. I spent a month searching for him, and dodging the local pirates who seemed to object to my recent charity work. But I could never catch up with him.

I had been storing all my Dominator loot from this system in the business centre that I had donated money at. I noticed while docking with another hold full of loot that it looked really badly damaged, presumably from the recent Dominator assaults. But I was shocked when I undocked from it later to see an asteroid collide with it, destroying it along with all of my stuff inside.

I considered just putting the many months of Dominator battling and looting I had done in this system as a loss, and hope there was another business centre somewhere that hadn’t yet been destroyed by the Dominators. After all, there was nothing I could have done to save it, was there?

Reloading from the autosave, just one turn away from the collision, I took a look at the option for paying to upgrade the starbase. I thought that maybe I could repair it and save all my possessions, but first I had to pay a fee for them to trust me with the station equipment, and I was a few credits short. Then I remembered: this was a space bank! I took out a loan of a few thousand credits. I paid to upgrade the station, and was presented with a fitting screen just like that for my ship. Here I noticed the problem – the station’s repair bot was completely broken. To repair that would take another 500 credits. But there was no way that little bot could repair enough in time for the starbase to survive the asteroid hit. I ended up paying the absolute last of my money to fully repair the hull of the station and the bot.

I undocked and with pride I watched the station survive its collision with the asteroid. I may have done some very bad things in my life, but I had just selflessly saved a space station full of people, spending all of my money and putting myself heavily into debt to do it.

 
Part 4

I finally found Blodro, the supposed best space ranger in the galaxy. He was practically unarmed, and was carrying a hold full of alcohol. I exploded him, and escorted the remains of his cargo to the nearest market. This is what the ranger rankings look like now. I’m Arthur Stone, in third place, still with the starting ranger rank of ‘rookie’.

This is the new best space ranger. His name is Afaikay, and he’s been very active in the Dominator wars. Look at that weapon rating – he is flying the most heavily armed spaceship in the galaxy. I don’t think I’ll be going for him just yet. I need to build up my funds, get a bigger ship.

This is the new second best space ranger. His name is Rorra-Aki, and he’s a pirate. He’s flying the second most heavily armed spaceship in the galaxy. But that’s not what worries me about Rorra-Aki. What worries me is the little tooltip showing me he has practically every other space ranger left on the leaderboard under his command. The guy has turned the ranger program into his own private army.

Things are going to get tough now.

 
Part 5

With recent profits from scavenged Dominator loot, I thought it was time to upgrade my weaponry. I had two missile launchers and a fragment cannon, but the cannon and one of the missile launchers took up far too much space. I used the search function and found two good affordable launchers that were positively tiny. One was on sale in the business centre that I had saved a few months ago, and the other was in the Murratz system.

I saw this on my way to the business centre.

The guy at the back in the golden spaceship is Rorra-Aki. The five guys in front of him launching missiles are his minions. I moused over each one to check my relationship with them. They were all ‘bad’ or ‘hostile’. Luckily, they already had a target and were chasing a transport as it fled towards a planet. I kept my head down and hurried past.

I got to the business centre, bought my new weapon, removed my two old weapons and installed the new one. I mounted the old ones on to the station for safe keeping.

When I undocked, I saw this.

Oh crap. He’d been waiting for me.

I’m the little green one in that picture, desperately trying to redock at the space station while being pounded by laser fire.

I waited for a week in that station. When I undocked again, Rorra-Aki had found a new target, and I fled the system in the opposite direction as fast as I could. I then took a circular route around that system in order to reach the Murratz system where my other new weapon was waiting to be bought.

When I reached the system, though, the Gaalian planet sent a squadron of battleships after me. Gaalians don’t seem to like me much. I overloaded my engine and sped past them to land on the human planet just before their swarm of missiles caught me. There I discovered that the humans didn’t like me much either, and refused to trade with me. I bribed the government to let me in to the market, but then I didn’t have enough to buy the launcher.

A wasted trip. I’d need to go do a mission or something to get enough money again. But until then I was a weapon short. I couldn’t go back to retrieve my old guns from the business centre while Rorra-Aki was guarding it.

I launched off and tried to head for Peleng space. But the battleships were waiting for me, and destroyed me. I reloaded. I repaired my equipment, launched again, overloaded my engine, and ran for the system border. My engine broke a few turns away from freedom, and the clouds of Gaalian missiles caught up with me and destroyed me. I reloaded. I couldn’t go in the other direction because all space over there was Dominator-controlled. No matter how or where I tried to run, those missiles caught me. I tried bribing the police, but I didn’t have the money. I tried convincing passing spaceships to help me out, but they were all either law-abiding or afraid. I tried waiting for them to get bored, but these were patient police battleships, not opportunistic pirates. It seemed like there was nothing I could do. This was the end.

But then inspiration struck. I reloaded, and waited on the planet for several months. When I launched again, the planet I was on had orbited closer to the system border I needed to reach, and I was easily able to escape.

This game’s capacity for creative solutions to problems can make you feel so clever sometimes.

 
Part 6

A Peleng planet offered me a mission. They told me this long story about a peleng who fell for the culture of the Gaalians, started spreading messages of peace and harmony among the Peleng, took plastic surgery to look more like a Gaalian, started flying Gaalian ships, and then joined the ranger program. The Pelengs want me to kill him.

His name? Rorra-Aki.

The next planet offered me the same mission, so I guess it must be true. I turned both missions down, though. I’m not quite ready for Rorra-Aki.

I donated some more money to charity to get the police off my back. Then went looking for missions again to build up my cash.

The first mission was to prevent all pirate activity in the Murratz system for the next four months. I really didn’t like the idea of sitting around in there waiting while I could be doing other stuff, or the prospect of trying to fight while still missing a third of my firepower, so I tried another bit of creative problem solving. First I tracked down every pirate in the system. But instead of attacking them, I hired them, thus preventing them from doing any piracy there until the end of our contract.

This is me and my two new bodyguards. I’m the one in the ‘diplomat’ hull at the back, and the ones in the spiky ships are my minions.

So with every pirate who might have threatened anyone in that system now under my control, I took some other missions for me and my unlawful buddies to go kill people elsewhere, and by the time I had come back and collected the money from the original mission, I had gained quite a bit of cash.

With my new riches, I did a search for a new ship, taking care to avoid anything in the system Rorra-Aki was controlling. I found a fantastic deal for a ship almost twice the size as my last one, and with more weapon slots, although less armour plating. After getting into it, I found my spare cargo hold space had gone from 10 cubic units to over 200. I immediately went looking for Dominator battle sites, and started scooping up so much stuff that my gripper module broke several times through over-use.

I spent the money from that on some new launchers. In exchange for Dominator nodes, the ranger program gave me some micro-modules that greatly improved my missile damage. According to the ranger ratings, I now had the best weaponry in the galaxy.

I think it’s time me and my boys had some words with Mr Afaikay.

 
Part 7

I did an info search and tracked him down. Afaikay – the greatest hero in the galaxy, bane of the Dominators, saviour of worlds. Just another obstacle to my pride.

My hired guns went in close with energy weapons. I hung back and laid down a carpet of missiles. Afaikay had a human partner, a junior ranger who quickly turned up to help and attempt to cover his master’s escape. Judging by the explosions, they were giving my pirate allies a beating.

But Afaikay crumpled first, as we all knew he would. He may have been many times more experienced than me, more valiant, more heroic, more successful. But I had the most ambition. And the most missiles.

The junior ranger who was formerly on Afaikay’s payroll apparently harbored me no ill will, and I still had good relations with him. I decided to offer him a new job with my warband, and he accepted. But one of my pirates was outraged with this decision. He immediately handed me his resignation, killed the young ranger on the spot, and zoomed off back to his old hunting ground. My contract with the other ended soon after, and he was off shooting at transport ships and fleeing from the police before I could object.

Now the only challenge left before I could claim my title as the best space ranger in the galaxy was the pirate king Rorra-Aki. This bully and his five lackeys had been dictating where I could and could not roam since our first meeting. He was without doubt the most dangerous man alive. And now I was going to have to face him alone.

 
Part 8

I was making preparations for my final battle with Rorra-Aki when I got a demand from a Peleng pirate to pay him a large amount of money in exchange for my life. This was not an unusual occurrence, but I recognised this Peleng. This was one of the pirates who had helped me kill Afaikay, and had stormed off afterwards in disgust when I tried to recruit a ranger.

Oh well. I could kill off traitorous former allies as well as any other pirate. I made no changes to my course, and merely used my enormous missile range to fire back as I went. He was using missiles as well, but also kept close to my exhaust to use fragment weapons at the same time. I was a couple of turns away from my destination planet when I realised I was actually about to die. This guy was packing a surprising amount of firepower.

This was the first pirate in a long time that had caused me any trouble at all, let alone been clearly my superior in a fight. I gave in to his demands, and sent him the money he was after. Then I sent him an offer to rejoin me on my payroll. I decided I could do with a man like this when I next met Rorra-Aki. As long as he didn’t choose that moment to betray me again…

We shadowed Rorra-Aki for a while, waiting for our moment. We were tough, but I had no illusions about what would happen if we took on the full force of the Rorra-Aki army. As we entered the peleng Pkhedock system, I decided the time was right. The ranger-brigand and most of his buddies were in battle with a Peleng passenger liner, but crucially his band was split up around the system. One was docking to refuel. One was off chasing another transport. That still left three Human rangers at his side, but it was the best chance I thought I was going to get.

I gave the order. I told my henchman to target Rorra-Aki himself. We were going straight for the head, and we’d worry about the flailing body of his subordinates in the aftermath.

As we moved in to missile range, I overhead the radio messages from a peleng police battleship as it informed one of Rorra-Aki’s minions he was under arrest.

The minion started running for the system border. Things were looking better and better.

We opened fire.

 
Part 9

Lyakusha Gagarish gave his life for my cause. As did Rorra-Aki, of course. And all of his hired guns that hadn’t fled before their master died.

I’ve done it. I’ve become the best space ranger in the galaxy by assassinating everyone better than me. Note the screens full of static where there should be portraits of the best fighter, trader and pirate. They don’t have a screen on there for greatest traitor.

Pity the galaxy’s a pretty fucked up place as a result of my actions. With so few rangers left to defend civilised space, the Dominators have been making great gains. I’ve only explored a little way, but it’s plain to see that outside a small handful of free systems, the entire galaxy now belongs to the Dominators. All of the systems you can see with teal names are Dominator-controlled.

I gained a new medal when I killed Rorra-Aki. The ‘Rusty Nail’. Even though I had set my own goals and made my own fun, the game still gave me an award for it.

Arthur Stone is still flying. But after accomplishing all my goals in life, things were a little aimless for a while. I spent some time just going with the flow, finding myself getting sucked in to the normal drive to earn cash, upgrade my ship, see how many Dominators I could take down on my own before retreating. I thought that maybe now I had proved myself to be the best, I should actually get down to the task originally set before me, and go try to win the war. But I eventually realised that I couldn’t be happy with that kind of life. Not any more. Not after the things I’d done. More importantly, in the time I had spent playing by the rules since disposing with my betters, I found the ranger program had recovered. There were scores of new young space rangers out there, fighting the fight. And to my horror, I discovered they were winning. The Dominators were being beaten back.

This would just not do. I was still deciding whether the war should be won or not. That’s my job, no-one else’s. So now Arthur Stone is out there, still in the most heavily armed ship in the galaxy, cleansing the universe of all space rangers, regardless of rank. He has his work cut out for him. There’s a lot to get through, and more signing up every month. What’s more, the free planets have recognised him for the monster that he is, and hound him wherever he goes. He’s at war with the entire civilised world. And he likes it.

‘Rest to Reset‘ by Trash80 is one of my favourite pieces of music. Trash80 provided the music used in Darwinia, all low-tech electronic sounds reminiscent of early videogames. Rest to Reset was written and performed on 4 GameBoys, and recorded live. I think it’s beautiful.

This game is intended to provide an experience that supports that music, with everything that happens in the game happening in response to something in the music. Like an interactive music video. Or like Audiosurf, but sculpted just for this one track. It’s an experience rather than a challenge. Although you can treat it like a challenge if you want to – there’s a score of sorts displayed at the end.

You control a spacecraft as it launches from a planet and ventures on its first journey into space. It turns out space isn’t terribly friendly to you.

Click here to visit the download page

In Far Cry 2, you are dropped into an african nation erupting into civil war. Your overall mission, as is repeated to you on the loading screen every time you load your game, is to kill the “bastard that armed both sides”. You are free to explore the world, have lots of explosive fiery fights with the agressive militias, and mess about, but to advance the story you have to do missions for the leaders of the warring factions. Every one of these missions is to commit an immoral act that will make the state of the country worse. Stop the production of medicine. Assassinate the chief of police. Destroy a water pipeline. Prevent a peace agreement.

The opening of Far Cry 2 shows you the deteriorating state of the country. Your mission, as you are reminded every time you load your game, is one motivated by the cruelty of the developing war. I wanted to help the country. I wanted to save the civilians. I wanted to stop the war. It’s a credit to the excellent job of the Far Cry 2 team, of all the work they put into immersion, of the work they put into that opening sequence, of the impression of an open world of choices, that I felt so strongly about it. But as Bioshock proved, when you’re a playing a game you’re not in complete control of your own actions. You can only do what the game allows you to do. And Far Cry 2, despite its open sandbox world, will only allow you to do bad things.

It made me angry, at first. There has never been a character in a game I have hated as much as Hector Voorhees, who offered me a mission to disrupt the peace talks between the warring factions just so that he could continue to get work as a mercenary. A mission that the game would not let me refuse. But then over the course of the game, I lost all personal connection to the story and gameworld. I couldn’t stay emotionally involved when despite all appearances, it was made abundantly clear that when it came to the missions, my character was not me, he was some faceless person I would never meet and had no control over.

If you press escape to go into the menu, then go into a journal sub-page, you get to read your character’s thoughts about recent events. From reading this, and from Patrick Redding’s narrative design presentation, I get the sense that there is a predefined character for the player, with defined motives. Namely, that like the rest of the foreigners in the game, you’re a mercenary here to profit from the troubles of the country. Being a villain in a game is perfectly valid kind of story to tell, although I can’t think of an example I’m familiar with that’s been quite so shameless about it as this. Even Hitman included some subtle details to suggest your targets were bad men, in case you needed some kind of moral justification for your killing. Even ignoring that element, I enjoyed being the villain in Hitman. But I hated it in Far Cry 2.

I believe the problem of my reaction to the game comes from a collision between different styles of game storytelling. The Far Cry 2 team have given the protagonist of their story definite motives and character. But in presentation, this is not communicated at all. The protagonist is presented as a blank slate character, in the style of the Half-Life games. We never leave first person perspective, the character never speaks, and even never takes an action that the player did not initiate (it just sometimes doesn’t implement any other actions than the one you’re intended to take). These kind of devices are commonly used in order for the player to put themselves into the protagonist’s shoes, to empathise with him/her, or to prevent the in-game character from ever saying or doing anything that would contradict the player. It helps immersion a lot, which is why I imagine it was chosen to be used in Far Cry 2.

But I’m not sure the story is one that will fit this. In both Far Cry 2 and in Half-Life, the player’s character does whatever he’s told to do. The difference is in what those tasks are, and how they are presented to you. In Half-Life, your goals are generally clearly the only option in the circumstances, the instruction from other characters is merely an explanation of those circumstances. “You’re being hunted, you should get out of the city”, “We’re under attack, defend yourself”. In Far Cry 2, things are not so clear and obvious and urgent. It gives you choice, and only then reveals that its a choice of one, and your option is not one most people would want to pick.

It’s possible that I’m wrong about this, and it isn’t impossible to merge these two styles of storytelling. Maybe it is just a matter of the difficulty of execution, as Clint Hocking claims on Pentadact’s blog. He admits that there were some weaknesses in the early story, and maybe if the changes he describes had made it in, I wouldn’t have had a problem. I nevertheless applaud the Far Cry 2 team for their efforts. It’s an ambitious game, and I think very successful in almost everything it has tried to do, even if I think the story was a poor choice.

The above are my creations made using the Spore Creature Creator. They’re not just pictures, each of those files contains the data for the actual creature as well. You can just drag them from the browser into the creature creator to load them up and walk them about.

You can also click on any of the above creatures to see their entries on the Sporepedia, or on any of the pictures below to go to my flickr photostream.

Below was the first creature I made with the trial that I liked. I gleefully discovered you could rip limbs apart and glue them back together by holding down the Ctrl key, so I started trying to make unusual leg arrangements. I discovered that longer legs gave you much smoother, more natural movements, which gave rise to the Creepbeak. I imagine this guy as a predator in a jungle environment, disguising himself from smaller prey as some kind of tree or creepers.

Further experimentation into bizaare legs gave rise to the Limbalossus. I tried to make a creature that was just a mass of limbs, all folding over and wrapping around each other. It’s got a wonderful walk animation where he appears to move along by rocking his body.

More playing about with legs. It’s the Fleshhenge! The living building/structure. His legs form a perfect circle when at rest, then explode into a spasming mass as soon as he starts to move. I was expecting the game to treat each side as a single leg, and move in a simple left/right rythm, but its movements are actually quite complex. Its quite surprising how natural it looks considering what I gave the game to work with.

Realising all of my previous creatures were quite animal, and mostly entirely faceless, I set out to make my first humanoid, or at least a creature capable of facial expression. This is Brainskin, the scaly muscly three-legged monkey. His stubby little arms give him some great expression doing the “hey you”, “cutie” and “point dance” animations. But what I love the most about Brainskin is his turtle-like ability to hide his head in his torso when sad or scared. I’m not sure I’d be able to recreate it, but I think it’s to do with most of his upper body bulk beind made of limb stumps, and not normal torso.

This is the Preyworm. Since the purpose of the early release of the Creature Creator, and of the Sporepedia, is for Maxis to gather creatures to populate the Spore Universe in the final game, I thought I should create some poor little herbivores for all the player-controlled carnivores to eat. Hence, the Preyworm. Its Sporepedia description says “Tasty little creature with no legs, no defences, and lots of protein and vitamins.”

This was my final play with the limb editor. The Spring Stomper. Two legs, with as many joints as possible, and therefore as long an extended length as possible. This one breaks the game a bit, in rather amusing fashion. Load it up, and ask it to do the ‘sumo’, or be ‘angry’. It will stick its legs through the skybox.

SOS is my mod for the freeware game Notrium.

It’s a 2D top-down game about survival on an alien planet. You are a cyborg slave, waking to find your ship crashed, and the human crew dead. You have to find food and water, build weapons and defend yourself, investigate the unusual creatures of the world, and try to repair the spaceship to escape.

You can download the original Notrium here.
You can download my mod here.

To install, extract the SOS .zip file into the directory you installed Notrium into. Then to run the mod, select ‘SOS’ under the mod option when starting a new game.

Play on the easy difficulty setting the first time you play the game. This includes a short sequence that introduces you to the controls and the world. For later attempts, the default medium setting skips this. In almost all other aspects, the three difficulty settings are the same.

I might write more about this later.

“Dude, there’s pride and stupidity, and you are massively outgunned.”

A video of a battle in Eve Online.

A coalition of hundreds of pilots gathers to attack the territory of Insurgency. The two forces gather either side of a stargate, the Insurgency force wildly outnumbered.

The non-aggression pact ends, and the war begins.

It’s very different to my last video. Much slower paced, and showing a bit more of the story behind it.

Length: 3:49
Size: 87MB

Eve Files download
EveTube link
YouTube link

Eve-Online forum thread

Credits:
Music: Hidden Mementos by Jon Hallur
Map image based on the 2D EveMaps by Ombey