Huzzah!

For all those who wanted to get their grubby little paws on the source code for The American Dream (and who wouldn’t?), now’s your chance!

I’ve made the code available for download along with the rest of the project, here.

The source is horribly hard-coded and likely contains a lot of unnecessary fluff, so by no means should you take this as a lesson in game programming “best practices.” But I’ve swallowed my pride and put the code out there, not for me, but for the internets…OF THE FUTURE!

Excelsior!

PS: Yes, I know, no Mac version as of yet. I’ll get on that as soon as someone wants to buy me a Mac Mini for development.

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Clint Hocking recently wrote a great post on the problem of didacticism in game design; I enjoyed both the post itself and a number of the subsequent responses (even got one of my own in there). One commenter brought up the issue of non-essential NPCs in Clint’s Far Cry 2, and their (the player’s) own emotional and moral hesitation at the possibility of killing those NPCs. I was rather satisfied with my response to that comment: it was something I’d been meaning to discuss for a while anyway, and so I reproduce it here (with slight modifications).

Just to play devil’s advocate: I could argue that precisely *because* many of the kill opportunities in FC2 are “not necessary to the mission or story,” they become meaningless and bereft of moralising impact.

I keep coming back to Randy Smith’s MIGS talk, primarily because it perfectly articulated so many ideas that have been nagging me for ages. He spoke of the conflict of interest between Player Goals and Character Goals: what might be a morally devastating decision for a game character is actually a completely trivial gameplay decision for the player—e.g., “Do I murder my wife or my best friend? Well, my best friend gives a perma-buff to health and mana, doubles my inventory slots, and packs a rocket launcher; my wife provides nothing and only carries a wildly inaccurate pistol. And so goodnight, my dearest, and God bless.”

I don’t think a game player is ever *not* aware that they’re playing a game, that they’re trying to *beat* a game, and that all the elements *within* the game are simply there to either hinder or advance that game. For players like that—like me, I guess—”useless” NPCs are then reduced to simple art assets somewhere on the game disc, that do nothing to advance or detract from the story, or the mission. And this is regardless of the detail of their physical 3D model, or how deep their background story/dialogue tree may be. I shot most of the useless NPCs without hesitation because I was bored and wanted to see the ragdoll engine at work. That, and—judging by a few instances—anyone I left behind had the potential to pull a gun out of nowhere and shoot me in the back. I was better safe than sorry, and so murder was a matter of no consequence.

I don’t mean to sound snippy of course, or to imply that I didn’t enjoy FC2 thoroughly. It’s just that I felt the supposed “morality” of dealing with “useless” NPCs wasn’t really reflected in the gameplay in any way.

What *did* deeply affect me was the first time I lost a partner. I did everything within my power *inside the game’s rules* to undo that loss: repeated re-tries, attempts at Rambo-style wild destruction, attempts at more defensive play, attempts at playing bodyguard. Nothing worked, and in the end the final gunshot of the mercy-kill felt like a huge “Fuck you” from the game world, and a huge failure on my part. There was serious Achilles-mourning-Patroclus rage after that one. Not because I was projecting humanity on an arbitrarily-designed art asset, but because the game itself had conspired to rob me of a highly beneficial resource in which I’d invested quite a bit of time.

Which leads me to…

THEOREM
If an art asset is useless to the player, only a select few will feel emotionally invested or morally affected by it. If it is intrinsically linked to the player’s goals, its behaviour and treatment will be more deeply affecting.¹

Obviously, the examples I gave above were somewhat extreme, and anyone justifying actions like that in real life would—rightfully so—be deemed psychopathic. But games are meant to be played, and while I’ll never say a videogame can’t be emotionally- or morally-affecting, I don’t think this has or can or will be done by having clichéd and tired old tropes being enacted on characters or objects of no consequence to the player.

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Well, long story short: The American Dream was not accepted as a GAMM4 finalist.

There are still a ton of positives, though, despite the obvious disappointment. When I went and posted The American Dream on the TIGSource forums, I did so just out of a sense of completeness: everyone was uploading their game, and I figured I should do likewise. I’ve said it before, but given the somewhat primitive nature of the game, I was absolutely convinced the game would be ridiculed and passed over.

I underestimated the Tiggies.

I got a ton of positive feedback (or at least 1000% more than I expected) on the forums, and even got featured on IndieGames.com. To top that all off, I apparently made it through the first elimination round, when I thought the game would be dismissed outright. So, I’d say that the response has been about as overwhelming as the Sun is more massive than Phobos. So, like, a lot overwhelming.

Random thoughts:

• I <3 the Tiggies.
• I love how people anthropomorphise their playthrough of The American Dream. I mean, it’s kind of hard not to, I suppose—but it’s fun to see nonetheless.
• GAMM4 received a massive number of entries, and they’re all bloody brilliant. I’ve started a Master List on the TIGSource forums, where (hopefully) we will round up all the games into a convenient one-stop-shop for future reference/enjoyment.

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In my last post, I post-mortemed the crap out of my crap submission for the decidedly non-crap GAMM4 competition.

The game—all 10 or so screens of it—is now available for purchase. I say “purchase,” when in fact I should probably say something like “I couldn’t give it away.”

It’s free, it’s online, it’s available here:

THE AMERICAN DREAM: Are We Not Drawn Onward to New Era?

PC and Linux versions are available immediately; I’ll get around to compiling/testing/uploading a Mac version just as soon as I find an Apple computer on which to perform compilation wizardry.

And if you really feel up to it, swing on by my forum and discuss the game. Please, stick to constructive criticism; that is, presumably, things along the lines of “well, it didn’t technically crash.”
[edit] I’ve actually removed the forums from my site. I think it would either end up as too much work for me, or none at all and thus mooted. Instead, hop on by the TIGSource forums, as Matthew pointed out in the comments below, where there will be a more lively (and centralised!) discussion. My announcement for THE AMERICAN DREAM currently resides here. [/edit]

Cheers.

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In early December, the folks over at Kokoromi announced the GAMMA 4 game design challenge, which I generally refer to as GAMM4 because I think that’s infinitely more awesome, and makes both dollars and sense.

This year’s theme is “One-Button Games”: that is, the program can accept exactly one button as input, being in either a “pressed” or “released” state. No D-pads, no joysticks, no Wiimotes, no balance boards, no Powerglove—just a single button. Well, I suppose if you only read a single Powerglove button as input, you could use that and look pretty dapper while doing so. But you get the idea.

Here, then, is the story behind my own meager submission, and a correspondingly modest postmortem.

The Reveal
Without further ado, let me be the first to announce (and who else would do it?) my GAMM4 entry: THE AMERICAN DREAM: Are We Not Drawn Onward to New Era?. Pretty pictures!

To be brutally honest, yes, I’m aware that the game looks horrendous. Laughable, even. Play it, and you’ll see it also lacks a certain amount of polish. But I’m not sure that I mind. Let’s find out why.

The Background
When GAMM4 was first announced, I had no idea what kind of game to put together, so instead I started by thinking about the different inputs one could get out of a button. As Homer Simpson once put it: “This is the light switch. It functions in both the ‘On’ and ‘Off’ mode.” What a wise lesson indeed—that light switch is a lot like life; or, more to the point, like our one button. Obviously, all you can physically get out of it is BUTTON_PRESSED and BUTTON_RELEASED signals, and the magic comes from how you put these together. So I jotted down what I called various modes of button presses: single tap, hold, release, quick taps (think Mortal Kombat’s “Break the Block” minigame), rhythmic (one-button DDR, e.g.), and so on. I drew various square wave diagrams of these different modes, just to imagine the patterns of up-ness and down-osity.

And that’s when inspiration struck. You could interpret these square wave patterns one way, then flip them and run them backwards and inverted. I started to think about palindromical gameplay, where in one mode, say, you’re pressing a button rhythmically, until there’s a mode-flip, and instead you’re now releasing the button rhythmically, exploring the Mirror universe of the first mode. The bemonocled idea I had was to use these inverses to “explore the dualities of life,” in terms that my English teachers would have loved, but which are physically painful to write. My GAMM4 submission would be a minigame collection, with candidate pairings such as love/loss, tragedy/triumph, work/play, solitude/friendship, and so on. I came up with a few very rough ideas for minigames, and started moving ahead with the coding.

The Design
I knew from the start that I wouldn’t have the time to do something overly ambitious. I do work a full-time job, and smack-dab in the middle of the GAMM4 production period were the Christmas holidays—one would think this would be a boon, but in fact it meant spending so much time with my family (time I enjoyed, obviously, but during which I could not work on my game). Because of this, and because of my artistic talent (exactly nil), I decided to go the Rohrerian route of low-fi graphics and simple mechanics to examine a single theme (or collection thereof). I took an art design cue from my Atari Flashback 2 and Pong: black and white, and rectangles only.

Somewhere along the line, I had the idea for a ticking clock main menu (see image above). Life is a lot like a ticking clock, you see, because it’s round and has twelve notches in it. The “meat” of the game, the LIFE mode, would be a random succession of the various minigames, running for all of five minutes (the GAMM4-specified time limit). LIFE would be placed at the top of the clock, “Quit” at the bottom, and in between would be 10 minigames, each one set across from its “emotional opposite.”

Unfortunately, coming up with five known life dichotomies, or ten themes in total—ones which could be translated into short, quickly-understood one-button games—proved the greatest challenge. The game’s framework (loading and randomly switching between minigames) was coming along, but eventually I hit a hard wall: I had no actual minigames to design and implement. I tried paring the list down, writing the list over from scratch, browsing Wikipedia’s list of human emotions, but nothing was coming. I knew I liked Work/Play (WORK was the first minigame implemented, as it’s the simplest), so I tried building on that. I eventually realised that Birth/Death should also play a part, since the game was about life after all. And somehow—I think perhaps in reading just those four concepts in sequence to myself (Birth, Work, Play, Death)—it started to reveal itself as the American Dream; or at least, a cynical bastard’s view of it. With that guiding principle finally fixed, and after freeing myself from the arbitrary constraint of strict life “pairs,” a number of other themes/minigames presented themselves, and I was on my way.

The Game
A download link is forthcoming. If it wasn’t already obvious, the game is extraordinarily simple and unrefined. Select one of the themes to the left or right of the main clock, and you play a tutorial version of that minigame. Select LIFE, and play through the five-minute parade of North American mediocrity, gaining points along the way. It’s fun for the nuclear family.

I think I did manage to capture the spirit of these activities well enough, at least for a beginner at this sort of thing.

• BORN is a struggle and, of course, a requirement for all the rest.
• WORK is arbitrary, repetitive, imposed, and boring. But it makes you the most points.
• PLAY is more improvised than work, and is simple to understand, but I hope moderately challenging. I tried to find some way of achieving flow; it was originally going to be a puzzle game, but this one just occurred to me as more natural.
• SHOP is an endless stream of random products of trivial distinction. And it can make you fat.
• FUCK is about synchronization and attentiveness. Max out your points by maintaining equal levels of arousal.
• KIDS requires you to lead a somewhat unpredictable sprite through various obstacles. Allowing the parent-sprite to absorb the hits loses less points than the child-sprite.
• PRAY is a meditative break from the other minigames. With the promise of huge points in the after-LIFE.
• DEAD is inevitable. Hold on all you like, but it will make no difference. Also, I needed to enforce the five-minute limit.

The Good
And so we move on to the traditional “Say X good and bad things” segment of any good postmortem.

• Some constraints are good. Initially, each minigame was to have its own unique visual “style”, and take up the whole screen/window. I quickly realised, however, that time was fleeting, and that I shouldn’t waste time on superficial visual flair. I settled on a “miniframe” inside the main window (see WORK screenshot above) which would surround each minigame, and allow me to post HUD elements around the outside. This unified “look and feel” gave me a system within which to work, and simplified some of the visual decisions down the line.
• I kind of like the games. WORK and PLAY are, I believe, particularly effective at getting their theme across. The games are perhaps obvious or lacking in design subtlety, but I think they’re playable at least.
• It’s a finished product. Nothing is more important in game design, they say, than finishing your project. And so, here it is. Just another notch on my bedpost.
• It’s not a Canabalt clone. It’s fairly evident that the GAMM4 theme was heavily inspired by Adam Saltsman’s massive one-button hit. More than anything, I wanted to avoid doing something similar, even though, for a long time, my concept for the PLAY minigame was going to be platformer-based, as no other ideas seemed to be forthcoming. I’m glad the final game moved away from that entirely—not a single platform is to be found.

The Bad

• Productivity. I’m a horrible procrastinator. Honestly, a dedicated/experienced programmer would have designed and implemented this game in a week or less. Only as the GAMM4 deadline loomed close did I establish a rigid schedule for myself. I must do so much earlier next time. But at least part of the delay was the result of…
• Designing on the fly. As noted above, my original theme list was much more abstract and difficult to actually turn into minigames. I managed to spend some time coding the underlying framework, but without even so much as a concept for some of the minigames, my work lacked direction. Things become much easier once I’d pinned down what each minigame would be.
• Some constraints are bad. As a corollary to the last point, trying to force myself to come up with a given number of perfectly opposing, abstract themes was crippling. The idea of dichotomies was interesting and helpful to begin with, but it put too much pressure on me to come up with legitimate, easily-implemented pairs. Moving away from that constraint was the biggest boon to the project; I only wish I’d realised it earlier.
• Bonus fail: No shiny polish. I wanted to add such things as leaderboards, proper “game over” screens, interesting game transitions, and more. By the end of the project, though, I was pressed for time (see “Productivity”…) and just focused instead on the main minigames. Unfortunately, that did take a toll on the overall polish of the game…if you can even say that it has any. But, look to the future! More planning, more time in the design phase, and more consideration of those small details will certainly benefit my next project.

The Ugly
Well jeez, just look at it.

And now the conclusion
This postmortem may be a bit verbose for such a simple game. I certainly don’t expect THE AMERICAN DREAM to be selected as one of the GAMM4 finalists played at the upcoming Game Developers’ Conference; this year received a record number of submissions, the majority of them from people with much more experience and talent than I.

On the other hand, this game is a completed project. The goal was to make a low-fi, slightly satirical collection of minigames, and by the power of Greyskull, I think I’ve succeeded in that much at least.

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