The folks over at the Experimental Gameplay Project just recently announced their theme for September: the never-ending game. I was intrigued.

Given all the hubbub and ballyhoo on the Internets and Twitters and Fax Machines regarding “games as art,” I decided to throw together something entirely stupid—as per my constitutional rights—and the result is a real gem of a mess.

Behold! ArtLovr, a game thrown together over a handful of hours and a fistful of beers, with a little bit of HTML5 duct tape and Akihabara wizardry to suit the punters.

Yes, it’s Pong. Yes, there’s a finite score.

Or is there?

Well, yes.

But in real terms? Well, the way the game plays, the PONGBALL5000 takes a certain amount of time to cross the screen, and assuming it scores immediately, there is still a pause to display a message on-screen before the next PONGBALL3000 is released.

Now, for the sake of argument, let’s instead pretend that the PONGBALL is moving at the incredible speed of 320pixels per millisecond (the millisecond being the favorite time unit of game programmers and anaerobic bacteria), and that a point is scored every millisecond (we also assume no interim messages). A given player’s score is composed of 27 digits:
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
all the way to
999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999

Therefore, at the rate of 1 point per millisecond (in an increasingly lopsided game), how long until we hit 1×10²⁷ and overflow one of the players’ scores?

31.7 quadrillion years.

Or, in units more familiar to you and me, 2.3 million times the age of the known universe. So, frankly, for our purposes, I like to think of ArtLovr as pretty much a never-ending game.

And there’s my take on games-as-art. Entirely fascinating from a technical standpoint I’m sure, but varying from tediously infantile at times to pretentiously lofty at others.

And my opinion is final and the best, QED.

I made another small, obnoxious prototype-y game, Everything is Wonderful.

Progress on the recently de-titlised procedural stealth game was slow (many random engine refactors), so I took a break to learn the LÖVE2D API, and see if I could throw together a game in a jam-like time frame (two days to a week).

Mission: Potentially Accomplished!

It was vaguely inspired by the G20 Summit, and the fun with nomenclature they clearly had in granting police unreasonable powers under the “Public Works Protection Act.” The rest just came from me being bored at work.

It’s not exactly a very deep or subtle game; nor, frankly, is it that much fun. But it came together on schedule, so I’m pleased. As others have said, putting together even cheap, short, and unpolished games can be a good thing at times.

Instructions

• Use the arrow keys to do everything.
• Don’t leave the designated area.
• Don’t get caught with illicit materials.

Download the game here.

Apple has famously flashed Adobe the ol’ digitus impudicus by abandoning Flash in all of its most recent i{*} products.

What this means from a business standpoint, I’ll leave to more intelligent and informed pundits 1 (modulo a digression later on, methinks)—but what it does of interest to me is throw Apple’s not-inconsiderable weight behind HTML5 for browser-based gaming. Accordingly, Darius Kazemi and Darren Torpey recently uploaded a series of tutorials for Akihabara, a JavaScript API for HTML5 games. While it’s still in its infancy and perhaps not fully-featured (I wouldn’t mind seeing mouse/touchpad input down the line, for instance), Akihabara’s one of the first such APIs out of the gate, and will hopefully encourage devs to experiment some more in HTML5.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve never worked at all with Flash. That’s not to say that I never will (next on my list is to tame the wild FlashPunk), but the Akihabara tutorials popped up right around the time I was looking for something new to learn. To top it off, I’ve never worked much with JavaScript either (notwithstanding some recent tinkering in Unity), while I’ve been getting more and more interested in browser-based cross-platform gaming in general. All I needed was a modest project of my own to code.

Cue KJumpingcube, one of my favorite free, built-in Linux games. It has the mindlessness and simplicity of Minesweeper with a competitive twist, and massive end-game reversals are always fun to watch. Given that it’s horribly straightforward, it seemed a good choice to implement with Akihabara.

After about a week of intermittent coding, the game in its most basic form is available here, dubbed Cube Jumpr! in honour of its main inspiration as well as the vowel-challenged Web2.0 sites that I’ve grown to despise. Fun!

Cube Jumpr! makes use of the arrow keys and the ‘z’ key. Since Akihabara maps the external ‘z’ key to the internal ‘A’, you’ll notice a lot of “Press A to do something or other” prompts that actually require a ‘z’ press. That’s a feature I may be addressing in future releases. Or not. Also to be (potentially) addressed are some improved sprites, as well as possibly adding the aforementioned support for the mouse cursor and/or touchpads.

The rules are thus:

• Players take turns clicking on individual tiles—either blanks or ones they already own—to increment the value contained within.
• When a tile’s value becomes larger than the number of immediately adjacent tiles, these adjacent tiles are incremented and “claimed” by the current player, while the original tile is reset to a value of 1.
• The first player to claim all tiles on the board is the winner.

As I say, the game is extraordinarily simple—my own implementation even more so—but it’s moderately enjoyable, and made for a good first project in Akihabara.

HTML5 gaming is no doubt going to have an uphill battle against the entrenched ecosystem of Flash developers, publishers, and players. To make things even more difficult, being written in JavaScript means (for the moment) that the games are publicly readable, and thus open-source and impossible to market commercially 2. But I’m still looking forward to seeing what the community will come up with, as APIs like Akihabara become more fully-featured and powerful.

1 The Internet: Truly, the natural, logical development of civilised Socratic debate.

2 “But Linux is open source and some people do market it commercially!” Yes, well, you know what I mean.

Apparently, EA just announced Spare Parts.

That’s great for them. I guess it’s just a shame that I ANNOUNCED IT FIRST!

That’ll teach me to finish my prototypes sooner…

Sigh. Well, I guess in the interest of not getting sued immediately, I’ll start referring to my (probably much better) game as something entirely different, like My Graverobbing Prototype. Has a certain zing to it.

Montreal has grown into something of a videogaming hub over the past 10 years or so, with some of the biggest studios setting up shop here to put out some seriously triple-A titles; meanwhile, it still maintains a healthy ecosystem of smaller professional development and middleware companies. Nevertheless—near as I can figure it—it’s never had much of a non-professional gaming “scene.” That is, while there are certainly a number of more “indie” game devs/shops in town1 along with a few fledgling university programs and digital art societies2, there’s never been much impetus to get all these disparate entities and individuals together to chat and make games. Toronto, Ottawa, and Chicago (among others) have groups for the purpose—it felt as though it was time Montreal had the same.

After some back-and-forth on the subject by a number of parties on Twitter, both Mr. Matthew Gallant and Mr. Darius Kazemi independently pointed me in the direction of one Mr. Stephen Ascher, who had been interested previously in starting such an enterprise. And what do you know: a few beers and coffees later, we announced an Amazing Montreal Indie Meetup Extravaganza.

We met up last Wednesday at L’Amère à Boire brewpub (which has a fine upstairs bar equipped with a projector and even a laser pointer). The turnout was, even by my optimistic expectations, fantastic. Truly, as Kevin Costner once said: if you build it, they will tweet about it, maybe. It seems like word got out, and people really only needed a time and a place to meet—the reason and interest already being a given.

No Fun Games (of Pax Britannica fame) got things started demoing their latest: Tea Time Quarrel, created for this year’s TOJam. The night then became a bit more free-form, with developers lining up to demo works-in-progress or just rock out on some cool indie games (with Fez making a surprise and more than welcome appearance), while the rest of the (30+!!!) attendees sat, drank some fine beers, and chatted. Let us peel back the veil of time, and witness it once again in glorious Technicolor:

To shorten this post a tad, I’ll simply say that I was absolutely blown away by the response we received, and by the number of really awesome folks that came out. Stephen and I are working towards coming up with a totally rad (and more official) name for the group and the meetups, and a subsequent website where all future announcements will be made (and to which I’ll link from this site, when the time comes). Until then, I can’t wait to do it all again. Santé, mes ami(e)s.

1 See: Polytron Corporation and the Kokoromi Collective.

2 E.g., Concordia’s CART and CCGD.