Three out of five of Work of Fiction’s puzzles are starting to function.

I’m also considering dropping five puzzles so I have 20 solid ones total.  Four sets of five puzzles instead of five sets of five puzzles.  Once you beat four out of five in a set, you unlock the next set.  This way there’s always at least one other puzzle you can work on if you’re stuck, and all five puzzles are different styles of puzzle solving, so hopefully this is enough to avoid lots of potential ragequits.  Also this means that in order to beat the game at all, you have to beat at least 16 puzzles.

Here’s a few vague screenshots of the first three puzzles.  Keep in mind that these are all pretty abstract, so fret not if you don’t understand what’s going on.  Also they’re pixellated on purpose.

Startling how quickly I’m getting through this project now that I’m just doing it myself.

Also, I got an update on the Company port to the iPhone–It’s starting to work, but the physics are still a bit wonky.  Either way–progress!  I wonder when it’ll be done?  And I wonder how well it’ll do?  I’m a little nervous about it because Company isn’t the kind of game that I think of when I think “iPhone game.”  Stuff like Angry Birds is best suited, where the game is tuned to be playable for very short amounts of time.  Company is only one little experience, and it only lasts half an hour…will anyone buy this thing?

Until today, I had two programmers working on the code for Work of Fiction, but I’ve gotten sick of waiting around for them to respond to my emails (most notably, they haven’t said anything to me in about three weeks), so I’m just gonna do this shit myself. This also means I’ve got a solid opportunity to make the game a little more interesting to play.  Link-A-Pix is a very cool puzzle, but for most people, there’s no way it’d be interesting enough to do 25 times in a row, even if it’s gradually getting harder/more complex/etc over time.

Instead, I’m gonna try to make five abstract puzzle types and have five levels for each.  They’ll cycle, so you’ll play one level of each puzzle type, then play a harder level of each puzzle type, etc.  Five cycles total.

No change in the story, by the way.  Just gonna make it more fun.

Work of Fiction is still chugging along, but it’s in the uninteresting parts of development right now, so I’m not going to waste you time by talking about it.  Instead, here’s some much more interesting babble about Fix.

At this point, I’ve tried three times to make a satisfactory smoke simulation for this game.  The first was bitmap based, and looked pretty good, but didn’t behave correctly.  The second was using a 2D fluid solver (Navier-Stokes equations) to simulate the entire volume of air in the area, and then solve density of smoke separately.  I didn’t get particularly far into it before realizing that the math was a little over my head and the results wouldn’t be consistent enough to be a central game mechanic.  Try out Plasma Pong for a demonstration of this:  It’s fun as hell and really pretty, but it’s way too chaotic to be used in a puzzle game.

This third one isn’t as fancy and doesn’t involve as many hip buzzwords, but it’s definitely my favorite so far.  It isn’t physically “correct,” but it’s already looking fantastic and in terms of usability in a game, it’s damn near perfect.  It’s stable as hell and incredibly predictable.  I’m gonna have endless fun figuring out ways to use this thing as parts of puzzles.

30 fps on my laptop, just like the virgin birth.

I love talking to people who play my games, and while grabbing a copy of the Humble Indie Bundle #2, I noticed that they used a cool little tool called Olark.

Olark is a chat service for websites, and it looks pretty cool.  It’s that little thing in the bottom right corner of the page.  If you wanna talk to me about anything in particular (religion, music, my games, your favorite haikus, etc), shoot me a chat message.

Remember Company of Myself?  Remember the awesome tunes?  David Carney has just released improved and remastered versions of both tracks.  Also included is the piano sheet music for “Kathryn.”

You can buy the soundtrack here.

‘Bout damn time, too.

Play “You Find Yourself In A Room.”

YFYIAR is extremely close to being finished now.  It was sitting on the back burner for quite a while because I couldn’t find a sponsor.  I finally decided to just forego the whole thing and throw in MochiAds.

Expect to see it released within the next few days.

Apparently, Company just barely made the cutoff to be included in the 2010 FGL community awards, so at some point or another I might win an award or two.  We’re nominated in four categories:  Best Story/Ambience, Most Original Design, Best Music/Sound, and Best Game.

Sounds pretty fuckin awesome to me!  I’ll let you know when the results come in.

I know, I know.  I haven’t posted in almost two months.  It’s been a crazy time over here.  I’ve moved into a new house in an old town, adopted a kitten, cured AIDS, commissioned an oil painting of Ludacris for my living room, and found two people to work for me (LIKE A BOSS).  Among other things.

This is a Work of Fiction is almost finished.  It took a while longer than I was expecting because halfway through I realized that I probably don’t need to write code anymore, so I scrapped the shitty, unorganized script that I had written so far and instead hired two programmers to write it cleanly so I can focus on design.

What does that mean for you guys?  It means I’ve got more time to work on the style, substance, and content of the games I make instead of the collision detection, physics, and keyboard input.  And if you’re worried that my games are going to lose some kind of personal touch because someone else is making them now, consider this:  What’s your favorite element of Company?  Is it the control scheme?  Maybe the audio management?  The level data’s compression methods?

I doubt it.  The stuff that made Company memorable had nothing to do with the code.

Anyway, the programmers should be done within a few days, according to their last estimate.  David is working on the music and sound as of yesterday, and he’ll probably take around a week or so (?) to finish.  I’m very close to being done with the writing (just some tweaks and stuff now), and then the last major thing for me to do is make the levels (after the programmers send over a level editor for me to play with, that is).

(Go figure, my “last major thing” is designing all of the actual game content.  Weird.)

I got an email from Google Alerts that somebody had mentioned Company on their blog, so I went over to check it out and thank them for mentioning the game.  They talked a little bit about how people view video games as an art form (or sometimes, not an art form at all).  It piqued my interest, and I ended up rambling on for a while in their comments about how I viewed the subject.  I figure it might be at least marginally interesting, so here’s the relevant stuff.

Part of the problem, I think, is that a lot of people don’t realize how broad the term “art” can be. It’s kind of like when people debate about whether or not alcoholism is a disease. It’s not an infection or a cancer or a virus, but diseases aren’t always infections and cancers and viruses. A disease can be anything involving your body that is out of the ordinary (and generally harmful). So, yes: alcoholism is a disease, and video games are art. Maybe a bit of a dark analogy, but a valid one, all the same.

Another element of it is that even if you ignore the semantics, a lot of people genuinely don’t believe that video games have the same potential as the more widely accepted art forms. Honestly, though, I think the opposite: The more you make the audience do, the more powerful the impact can become. The tradeoff is that it’s a hell of a lot harder to make a piece of art behave the way you want it to when you know, with absolute certainty, that the audience is going to interact with the work. It’s not like a painting where they can only see what you want them to see, and that’s all. When you make a video game, you know that it’s not going to sit behind a banister to be viewed from afar. They’re going to pick it up, examine it from all the angles they can find, and often, they’ll even spend time specifically trying to figure out how to break it. And even so, you have to make sure that the audience still sees what you want them to see.

You can check out the full blog post and other comments at Terminally Incoherent.