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maxemole · 7 years

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Raft represents the difference between imitation and inspiration. The developers seem to have struck gold here, and I really hope they continue with development.

Survive the harsh life of being stuck on a raft in the middle of the ocean! Gather debris from the water in order to craft equipment necessary for your survival. Expand your raft in order to create a more comfortable living for yourself, but be wary of the dangers of the ocean! In this video, I go over my thoughts on my time with Raft. Raft is a downloadable game for Windows, macOS, and LInux. Help fund Raft: http://bit.ly/2hL9XyQ Check out the written post over at Early Access Gaming: http://bit.ly/2keWpjE The song in the video can be found here: http://bit.ly/2kfaI7O ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This channel runs in tandem with my blog, wowimanerd.net: http://bit.ly/2hP8pUd Check out the site I work for, The Koalition: http://bit.ly/1x5zMLJ Check out the other site I work for, Early Access Gaming: http://bit.ly/2gCda2y Social Media Twitter: http://bit.ly/2hxKCct Instagram: http://bit.ly/2huWgaM Facebook:http://bit.ly/2hmXDaU

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TR6ENYq8aw)

#oc #indie review #indie game #indie title #indie video game #video games #games journalism #gamesjournalist #journalism #gameswriting #gametalk #videogametalk #3d #survivalgame #3dsurvival

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kidskaala · 5 years

Video

Learn Numbers for Children with Drone Camera Transport Color Number Bloc...

#number gameswriting numberskids learningabc songsurprise boxescolours for kidskids learning videoscolors for children

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pierreqies · 4 years

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Super Toy Cars 2 Is Now Available For Digital Pre-order And Pre-download On Xbox One

NOTE: It’s possible you’ll pre-download this recreation, but it surely is not going to be playable till the discharge date/time: 04/30/2020 – 5:00 PM (test the product web page for launch date/time in your area). Product Data:Developer: Eclipse Video gamesWriter: Eclipse Video gamesWeb site: Tremendous Toy Vehicles 2Twitter:

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The post Super Toy Cars 2 Is Now Available For Digital Pre-order And Pre-download On Xbox One appeared first on Hammers and Steel.

from WordPress https://hammersandsteel.com/index.php/2020/04/22/super-toy-cars-2-is-now-available-for-digital-pre-order-and-pre-download-on-xbox-one/

#Xbox One #CARS #digital #Predownload #Preorder #Super #Toy #Xbox

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sionsionsionsion · 10 years

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Titanic Storytelling

I’ve said in past blog posts that I believe that a big part of the future for video game storytelling is going to be in an online space, and I’ve been asked to write a little more about that. Since this week has seen the release of Titanfall, now seems like the perfect opportunity to discuss more about multiplayer narrative.

Titanfall is the new game by Respawn entertainment, an offshoot from Infinity Ward. The story of the development studio is fascinating in and of itself but one of the unique selling points of Titanfall was how it was meant to combine the scripted, narrative heavy sequences from titles like Modern Warfare with the open ended and organic play that comes from large scale multiplayer environments. As the game got closer to release, however, it started to become apparent that this wasn’t quite how this was going to happen - the multiplayer environment got smaller and the players involvement in the storyline became ever weaker. Don’t misunderstand me - Titanfall is a huge amount of fun as a game in a mechanical sense and I’m enjoying it greatly, but in terms of multiplayer narrative, when you stack up what it promised against what it delivered it falls desperately short of its original intentions.

Titanfall tells the story of two sides of the same war in the far flung reaches of space, at an indeterminate point in the future. Villainous mega-corporation Hammond Robotics produces mechanical soldiers called Spectres and bipedal tanks called Titans. They control the interstellar government through methods unmentioned and unexplained (presumably having the biggest army helps) and a group on the Frontier called The Militia have taken exception to this and have decided to fight back in the hope of being able to establish their own government. It’s never really explained. Titanfall probably won't win any awards for originality but what it does, it does very well - Artisan vanilla ice cream was how one commentator described it.

The first thing you do outside of the tutorial in Titanfall is run through the campaign as the Militia. There’s been a huge amount of effort put into the presentation of the campaign and the main feel of the piece is that there’s a huge amount of stuff going on here - on a technical level, it’s incredibly impressive. You see characters moving around, talking about the situation and you see starships coming out of warp over head. You see drop pods heading for the ground like comets and you hear the comms chatter in your ear, warning you about incoming enemy titans. You approach a Frontier town where you’ve been told that a radio signal for an old IMC commander has been activated and you are to take him prisoner. The IMC are on their way there to rescue the commander.

A small cast of supporting characters is created during this opening mission and they’re introduced to you in the lobby sequence (structured as a pilot briefing this lobby sequence shows some real panache) and through picture-in-picture style presentations on your HUD. You get out there, you fight, you generally have a good time and then depending on how well you and your team play, you win or you lose and the world keeps turning.

That’s the thing though. There’s nothing that really stops the world from spinning in this game and there’s nothing that really feels permanent. The supporting cast of characters go off and start carrying out the mission that you were told about in the briefing and, even though you never see them on the battlefield, you’re told that they’re doing their job and making real good progress. ‘We just need you to hold out against the IMC for a couple more minutes while we finish refueling! Come on, Pilot! You can do it!’

You realise that you’re not the main character in this story. None of the other humans that you’re playing with are the main characters in this story - through its scripted nature of wanting to provide bombast and the appearance of narrative weight in the outcome of these battles, what actually ends up happening is that nothing you do matters a single bit.

The second mission is the same no matter the outcome of the first mission. You can lose eight missions in a row in the campaign as the Militia and the game will still progress to the final map, with the IMC beaten back to their jumpgate to the Frontier and the Militia victorious. Respawn have tried to find an elegant solution to one of the core problems with MMO storytelling - if everyone is the hero of the piece, then no one is. The solution to the problem that they’ve come to is to turn everyone into a cog in the machine of a great war.

Perhaps there will be some third or first person adventure game that specifically focuses on the events hinted at in the multiplayer campaign of Titanfall - some DLC campaign or something where you play the hero characters and switch between their viewpoints as you might will a Call of Duty game. By attempting to keep things tight and controlled, Respawn have managed to turn everyone into supporting characters in a story about a group of NPC’s.

Your efforts don’t matter, the results never change anything and how well you play is of no consequence. Titanfall sets the stage for a great many things to come in terms of single player story telling and I'll eat my hat if there's not a single player focused title in the planning stages at Respawn, but attempting to tell a multiplayer story through its campaign mode seems to be entirely outside of its reach. In this sense, Titanfall is a stunning disappointment in terms of Multiplayer narrative - the player isn't the hero. The player isn't even a character. The player is one of those grunts that the hero races by on their way to save the day.

#titanfall #gameswriting #games writing

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sionsionsionsion · 10 years

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Transmedia, Linearity and Expanded Universes

Developers and publishers are becoming more and more obsessed with story in their games - they're looking for multi-platform, multi-format narratives that they can spin off into a variety of settings and environments. Ubisoft have really led the charge on this, with Assassins Creed doing a lot of the heavy lifting - the big yearly console releases, the smaller tie-in games on portable devices and social media platforms, the novels, comic books, an upcoming movie adaptation and the TV shorts have all moved together to bring more texture to the game and its universe. The Assassins Creed series isn't the first example of transmedia in games, but it is certainly one of the most successful considering the franchise now weighs in at over a billion dollars total.

There's been other attempts at it -Bioware gave it a shot with Mass Effect, and received less fruitful results for their efforts. The Mass Effect mobile game, Facebook game, novels, comics and anime movie all had the same problem; they had to skirt around the characters that were core to the franchise. They were all either prequels to the core games in the series that used the core characters from the main titles in the franchise in a way that was 'safe', or they were set on some far flung planet, removed from the main thrust of the franchise. They felt more tacked on than Ubisoft's efforts with Assassins Creen and, for a company that's famous for its storytelling, this came as a real surprise.

The idea of telling parts of the same story through different media has existed for a long time, but gaming is really only now starting to find its feet with storytelling and I’m not sure that transmedia storytelling is totally compatible with a lot of the more interesting storytelling techniques that are available to game developers and writers today.

Using the Assassins Creed and Mass Effect examples above, I’d like to try and explain why.

The Assassins Creed story is a sprawling historical and science fiction epic. It’s experimenting with meta-textual story telling, unreliable narration and high concept ideas that would make Hollywood consider changing the dosage for whoever was coming up with it. It’s also extremely linear in a mechanical sense. The experience that I had playing Assassins Creed 2 was the same experience that other people had playing Assassins Creed 2 - Ezio starts as a handsome, vivacious rogue without a care in the world but soon finds himself embroiled in a conspiracy that will likely outlive him. He uses his wits, cunning and tools made available to him by his friends and family to set about this conspiracy and right the wrongs that were committed by the Venetian aristocracy against his family. There’s an identifiable beginning, middle and end here.

Since it’s linear, it’s far friendlier to the ideas and concepts that make Transmedia such a tempting prospect. You can insert a character into the history of your story and have them take part in an event in a new way by simply changing the timeframe and going forwards from there. You don’t even have to limit yourself to just ancillary characters either - Because Ezio reacts the same way in every cutscene, there’s nothing that you can write in a novel about the character that will seem out of place for the character when the player is playing as them so long as all your writers maintain consistency and pay attention to your character dossier. Ezio’s arc is the same through all the transmedia properties because it has an identifiable beginning, middle and end.

Mass Effect is different.

Mass Effect uses what’s sometimes called the Beads on a String approach to game storytelling. You walk into a room, are presented with a situation and that situation develops in a way that’ appears to be impacted by your choices. Usually, by the time you're through the room and into the next one, the outcome of your choices has arrived and you’re stuck with it. Sometimes the outcome of your choice is essentially the same only with more Paragon or Renegade points for you. Sometimes your choice might take two games to have its full impact felt (meeting Wrex on the Krogan homeworld because you managed to talk him down from his rage in Mass Effect 1 vs meeting Wrex’s successor in Mass Effect 2 because you failed to convince him to not go berserk.) You start at a point, there are branches, and then you come back to the same point.

You move along the string, you hit the bead and can go left or right but sooner or later you’re going to come back to the string on the other side of it.

There’s still a beginning, a middle and end to the story but it’s the stuff that happens between those big narrative moments that belong to the player. That’s why using Shepard in the Mass Effect transmedia properties is risky - the Shepard that you see on your screen, your Shepard, isn’t the one that you see on paper. They do things that your Shepard wouldn’t do. They look different from how your Shepard does. Hell, they might not even be the same gender as your character. The player is too deeply invested in their character (and rightly so) for the writer to risk ruining that investment by putting a version of them down on paper that the player doesn’t recognize.

Transmedia’s great when it works to expand a story. It might work with non-linear storytelling but it will need more care and nuance than is being given to it at the moment if it’s to seem like something other than a story that exists to expand on the life of some secondary, background dressing character (did we really need to know that Dexter Jettster found a Kaminoan saberdart?) and spin money for the developer and publisher by exploiting your fans. A lot of people can see through meaningless tie-ins from a mile away. The more games use advanced storytelling techniques, the harder these transmedia tie-ins will become. They’re valuable to have in terms of helping build fandom and an active community that want to support your game but they can’t just be easy cash ins and they can’t detract from the value of the core experience.

Just when you thought writing for games meant that you would only have to worry about coming up with a dozen funny NPC barks...

#transmedia #assassins creed #mass effect #dexter jettster #gameswriting #fandom #spin off

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sionsionsionsion · 10 years

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The Coming Singularity

I recently attended the story writing in games talk at the Glasgow Film Festival where there was a selection of games writing luminaries speaking about a variety of subjects to do with games writing. The whole event was great but there was one thing that really stood out to me as needing further discussion: There seemed to be a strong feeling that the majority of games are still being treated in a linear way; that games are there to be beaten, rather than experienced. The idea of speedrunning Gone Home came up as a topic – like flipping through a novel, getting to the end and wondering what all the fuss is about.

Games like Gone Home and Dear Esther don’t really have states where you ‘beat’ them. There isn’t a target, so much as there is there’s an experience that provides a capstone to what’s gone before it. There isn’t anything that really says ‘the following sequence exists to remind you that this is a game’ – there’s no high score table, no boss fight, no power ups. Nothing that stands out as especially ‘gamey.’ These more ambient, narrative driven titles are (at the moment) in a deeply weird place as far as mainstream games go and uncertainty about them abounds (go check out the Steam tag wars for these games. Defining these two in particular seems to have been something of a challenge.)

There’s a couple of terms that need defining here:

Ludonarrative - that weird thing that you can’t really measure that talks about how well a games story and its gameplay reflect on each other. Ludic means game. Narrative means narrative. It’s a word that tends to be used in conjunction with the word ‘dissonance’ and it’s also a word that tends to be used by blokes with beards and blogs. There’s a great writeup of Ludonarrative as a term by Campster here.

Game – “A [good] game is a series of interesting choices.” - Sid Meier. If it’s good enough for Sid, it’s good enough for me.

Gone Home and Dear Esther both know the story they wish to tell and both have game mechanics that support it – the sense of detachment, isolation and loneliness that comes from Dear Esther’s walk on the beach or the sensation of missing a part of yourself and how you’ve become unhinged from the rest of your family and their lives in Gone Home, conveyed mostly by the fumbling through different objects in the vain hope that something provides you with an answer. They’re both supported by a strong, but simple, set of mechanics. They both ask you to make choices (Dear Esther, arguably, asks you to make the choice to keep playing, thus completing its rampage through meta-textual fun) and are, by the definition above, both games. They exist in harmony with their story. They are, for want of a way to say this in a less pretentious manner, ludonarratively perfect.

On the other end of the development spectrum, in the deep blue ocean of AAA development, hundred and fifty person teams and eye watering budgets, you have the games that are experimenting with some of the real fundamentals of narrative from their angle. The story of most indie titles are small, tightly written and self contained – Hotline Miami is about one character, Gone Home takes place in a house and Dear Esther only really moves in one direction. AAA development has far more scope.

Assassins Creed, for example, may be linear and told mostly through the medium of stabbing people, but its story is bonkers – I wonder how much of its time hopping insanity will make it to the big screen in the inevitable adaptation. Old gods, genetic memory, romps through classical and modern history, the meta inclusion of the Abstergo logo right after the logo of the ‘real’ publisher of the game all add up to prove that things really are moving forwards for storytelling in games, from both ends of the spectrum. Hell, Call Of Duty is experimenting with unreliable narration and branching storylines.

So, how can these two things live together?

In order for there to be a meeting, people will have to be more ready to think about games as something that you experience, rather than as something that can be beaten. There will always be games where there’s an obvious win state. There’ll always be games where things are more ambient and less mechanically focused. A meeting in the middle is what’s needed. There probably won’t be a CoD game where you occupy a city and then bring in NPC diplomats and the next title from the team behind Gone Home is unlikely to have a nuke blowing up LA in it.

I have a feeling that the meeting in the middle will happen in the online space. Multiplayer games are great places for players to make their own story; to take the tools, elements and building blocks placed there by developers and move them into bigger and better things. Online narrative is something I could write plenty about (and may in future) but this blog’s run on long enough.

Thanks for reading.

#AAA #beards #gameswriting #gamey #indie #narrative #steam

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