I'm sitting in a huge hall at the Game Developers Conference, trying to explain to you the wild ideas being shown at the Experimental Gameplay Sessions. I'll keep updating this post with new ideas until the session ends or my head hurts too much.
The Unfinished Swan - First-person painting game. The player is a young boy chasing after a swan. The graphics are primarily black and white. From a first person perspective, black balls of paint are fired into a white environment. The splatters of the paint reveal the structure of the world: trees, lakes, swan tracks and more. The developer is starting a company to make this game for unannounced consoles. Giantsparrow.com
Shadow Physics - A 2D shadow character can interact with 3D objects via their shadows. The character is a shadow cast on the wall and is controllable in simple 2D ways. He can move the shadows cast on the walls by the objects in the room. By pushing and pulling them, he moves those objects in the room. Gameplay twist: by moving the light source in the room, the shadows move. Imagine a ridged column, then move the light to the right so that the column now casts a shadow on the wall that looks like a staircase. The shadow character can climb the staircase.
Miegakure - This is a 4D platformer. I cannot explain it well. But I can explain a simpler demonstration of the game's mechanic rendered in 3D. In the 3D version, the character (a red square) could only move on one flat plane that intersected the 3D environment made up of blocks. The 2D plane could be moved so that it intersected the 3D world in a different way. That would give the 2D object a new 2D landscape across which it could moved. That 4D version of the game involved changing the landscape from one 3D slice to another. This one was very hard to understand.
Spy Party: This game, developed by Chris Hecker ("Spore") has a character doing suave and subtle things in a cocktail party, trying not to get spotted. One player is the spy, whose animations are a little different from everyone else's, and who has to complete a few stealthy missions like bugging an ambassador. The other player just watches, looking for subtle animation tip-offs. They are the sniper. Their one move: to shoot the spy. The game looked like a cocktail part of characters from "The Sims."
Storyteller, Fate and Today I Die: All three games are from developer Daniel Benmergui. "Storyteller" is a three-panel digital comic, in which each panel represents a moment in time of a story of wizards and princesses. (You can play this game here).
The "Fate" game was shown as a riff on "Super Mario Bros." in which all of Super Mario's possible positions that he could take based on one run-through of one screen of his game are all displayed at once. Picture. a row of Marios across the bottom of the screen. But any of the Marios can be moved, say, to define a jump. So a row of Marios becomes a bump of Marios. The goal is to move Mario's trajectory so that he grabs stars floating in the air or clears enemies. The gimmick is that "fate" won't allow Mario to die. So objects in the level rearrange themselves to ensure that all of Mario's jumps are safe. Imagine a block moving to block Mario's possible descent into a piranha plant. The player is charged with manipulating Mario's path so that stars can be grabbed in the world. The game never runs in motion. It is always static, showing Mario's path through a screen's width of a level.
The final game shown from this developer was "Today I Die," which was a riff on "Storyteller." Players change words in a poem to affect the condition of the on-screen character which the words describe. The game begins with the character falling, but changing one verse from "Today I die" to "Today I shine" makes her radiate and float.
Achron: A real-time strategy game with time trvel. All players and units can travel through time freely. You can use units in the future, build them then and send them back in time. You can find enemies in the future, scout who is there and then go back in time to stop that enemy from setting up his forces. The game is described as a "race to the past." The player is restricted with a finite supply of chronal energy which can only be recharged in the present and limits the amount of manipulations players can make in the timeline. This game include the ability to "chrono-frag," which appears to mean bombing enemies in the future. Also nutty: the player can see his unit in the future and keep looping and populating the world with more versions of that unit. All those "same" units have the same health bar. So if one is hurt 50%, all of those that are old are do as well. More info can be found about it at achrongame.com. The game is 10 years in the making.
Closure: This game is inspired by dark levels from classic games. The 2D platformer's main mechanic is that its character can only walk on what is illuminated. Most of the screen is back. If the character walks up to a wall that he needs to pass through, he should move a light source away from the wall so that the wall is covered in darkness. And then he can jump through that darkness and land on a nearby illuminated platform. This game can be played online now.
Where's My Heart? Great looking 2D platformer with a key visual innovation. It's not a side-scroller. Instead, every subsequent "screen" of the game is visible at once in part of one giant collage of screens that are all shown in a big collage. Imagine a full length of a side-scrolling game chopped up and placed as panels on a giant comics page.
(I had to leave before the last two games were presented in full. Sorry about that. Folks, apologies if I couldn't convey how interesting these games all were. Look them up. Lots of great stuff here.)
Comments