SXSW 2009: Games By the People, For the People

oops, I shit my pants and I lost

I beat it! Kind of!

(It is awesome)

I did this little ditty on Game Maker. It's no Zelda...but now I can say I've done a game.

http://batzarro.deviantart.com/art/Smallville-NES-Port-0-1-114558510

SPOILERS::





step 1:remove pants
step 2:fart lightly
step 3:pull door
step 4:go to toilet
step 5:shit

steps 2-5 are optional

I made a game on PowerPoint when I was 12. It was awesome.

You had to click on your enemies (which were slide hyperlinks) in under a certain time or else the slide would transition to your death scene. I think it was something like 300 slides long.

There wasn't really a story. It was just you clicking on stick men and seeing them getting shot.

I sent a copy (on a floppy disk) to Nintendo, but they never got back to me...

werent you allready low ranked in some other thread?

If I had the time (much less the patience) to make a game, I'd get cracking on a match 3 FPS, then sell the rights to Mark Bozon, who in turn gives the IP to WayForward to make it into a DS game, who hires me as a producer on the game to make sure my vision remains in tact from the transition from PC to DS. Everybody wins!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUSjogQW8-U

Is that Carl from Aqua Teen Hunger Force?

If you want to make a game, either learn (a) how to program, (b) how to draw, model, and animate, or (c) how to create music. Then team up with people who know how to do the other two things you can't do.

Don't think you can just be an idea man and pitch your ideas to a team, since they have their own ideas and generally view self-described "idea men" as people who either don't have any relevant skills of their own or are too lazy to do the actual work.

Seriously, if you have a good idea worth pursuing, learn one of those three core talents and become part of a team. It's actually pretty fun once things get going.

"However, our favorite question was easily, 'So should EA games be crapping a brick that all these indie games and developers are popping up?' Sadly, the consensus was 'no,' ..."

Wait, why is that 'sadly'?

"We're at the stage right now where film was when sex, lies, and videotape came out. Indies didn't kill the blockbuster movies, and indie games won't kill big games."

We can and should have both.

This reminds me of when the 'stiq banned somebody for pasting the words to 99 bottles of beer on the wall into the comments section.

Thank goodness somebody pointed out that gameplay is more important than graphics. Maybe the gaming community will actually listen

I really just wanted to see if it would let me spam that... and it will. Sweet.

I was in this since Klik n Play... I made a couple levels of a [really bad] game called "FBI Man," complete with Mega Man MIDI's, ripped Half-Life sounds, and bad photoshop tiles. I never finished any games that I made. I got back into it recently by making like 3 different unfinished versions of an IWBTG fan game.

Then I had the idea of making a Joystiq game, where the menu looked like the website, and you were on a mission to destroy the ultimate trolls. You'd pick your class at the beginning (Wii Fanboy, 360 Fanboy, or PS3 Fanboy), and play through until the ending, when your console of choice won the console wars. LordVesper was going to be a boss, and it would say the most ridiculous things while you fought it. I made a really cool looking menu screen, with menu selections done in the Joystiq style font, and when you selected, it scrolled down to the next menu screen, as if it were the website. Level select was the Featured Gallery to the right. Never made it past the menu and some sprites before I dropped the project. The real nail in the coffin for the game was the site redesign - it would have taken a lot more tedious work to redo the menu and graphics, as I had the actual "Fanboy" banners as the class selection items.

Computer's down right now, I'm on my gf's laptop, and I won't be starting back up until after I get my new PC. But I have a couple more cool ideas, one of which is a sidescrolling 16 bit demake of KZ2. It'll never get finished.

I highly recommend game making as a hobby. You'll spend far too much time in front of a computer, you'll have vitrually nothing to talk about with your friends, and you won't make any money doing it for years upon years. No but really, it's fun :P

All too often we find talented coders and programmers who set out to make a game, and learn that while they're great with computers, their imagination is for shit.

That's how crap like Daikatana comes into being. That's why so many games have exactly the same plot. We have a ton of games that are good examples of programming, but lousy examples of writing. The average game has a plot you'd find in a young adult book... In a bargain bin.

Even "deep" stuff like Halo or Metal Gear Solid is just ripped off from movies, sometimes right down to individual lines (Halo mercilessly borrows scenes and dialogue from "Aliens", MGS borrows shamelessly from Escape From New York, among others.)

Finding the balance between story and playability is tricky, though. The reason I hate JRPGs like the Final Fantasy series and static puzzlers like Myst and The 7th Guest because there's too much story, and not enough enough actual, varied gameplay. When your game is more concerned with showing you cinemas or lengthy narratives, and only drops into real-time game play every few minutes (or that game play consists of no more than a few point-and-click interactions), you've gone too far with story, and maybe should have written a book or made a short film instead.

Rockstar is successful because they have an awesome combination of gameplay and story in the GTA series. You're able to do whatever you want, and there's a fairly entertaining story without being on rails the whole time.

Of course, some people like their games light on plot and heavy on action/puzzles, thus we have a market for most FPS games, and open-ended puzzlers, simulations, and paper doll games.

It's tough to get a decent story into a game. Many companies have tried taking some of the best stories (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, for example) and turning them into a game, and the problem is that once you give the protagonist in any story free will, he'll want to go off the rails of the story. Every time he does that, the story takes a turn away from the source material and thus suffers. It would be no fun just following a book's story from beginning to end with no choices on the part of the player, but you can't let the deviate so far that the game no longer resembles the book, either.

Obviously, they don't take this approach very often.

Worst of all are the game designers who think they're creative storytellers and present us with a deep story that doesn't let the player make any real decisions. The game designer is so hooked on his story that he doesn't want the player to frak it up, so the game stays on rails from start to finish. In this scenario, the player becomes little more than a passenger on the Pirates of the Caribbean amusement park ride. You get in the little car, follow the track, a few pirates pop out at you, you pause occasionally to watch the story progress from a complete outsider's view, and then you proceed until the doors at the end open up and you're thanked for being a part of the adventure. . . Only you really weren't PART of the adventure; You just WITNESSED the adventure.

So what's the right course? Hire better writers? Stop programmers from coming up with story elements? Allow sandbox environments and just let the player wander off the story for as long as they want?

I don't think there's a right answer. The only good suggestion is to keep guys with colossal egos and juvenile imaginations from having control of the story... That way we'll never have to play another Daikatana.

GOTY!