Mark Cooke’s G-Mixer

This year I signed up to be a judge for the Independent Games Festival (IGF). We’ve just finished judging the finalists and I must say I played a lot of excellent independent games! The IGF is a yearly competition where independent game developers enter their creations to be recognized for their talent as well as to increase public awareness of the games which may otherwise go under the radar. I really appreciate independent game developers since they can often take ideas that would never fly in main stream game development and run with them. Sometimes the games stink but often you may find something fun that you would have never expected possible. The winners will be announced at the Game Developers Conference this year in March but I wanted to highlight some of my favorite games that I played throughout the competition. For a full list of this years finalists, click here.

Tube Twist is a puzzle game where you attempt to move “Macroton” particles from one part of a machine to another. When a level starts out you find yourself looking at a partially complete Macroton moving machine. To move the Macrotons from their start point to their goal, through the tubes, you have a palette of tube pieces – straight, curved, straight but accelerates the Macroton, etc. – which when connected to the existing tube framework change the course of the Macrotons. Some of the puzzles become quite difficult in the later stages of the game, it’s definitely a brain bender! The production values are quite high too, I definitely recommend this game if you are a puzzle fan.

I didn’t really know what to think of Strange Attractors when I first played it. The game only used one button – the space bar – and my first reaction was that you couldn’t really make a game with one button control only. Well, I’m happy to say I was completely wrong. Apparently there is a community dedicated to developing “one switch” games that can be played by not only regular people but also people with disabilities which might otherwise prevent them from playing today’s fairly complicated (control wise) games. In Strange Attractors you control the motion of a ball through outer space by activating gravity when you press the space bar. The ball is affected by various other objects in the environment depending on their size and material of construction. You have to move your ball into a specific goal only using the gravity caused by the objects around you. It’s quite addicting! It’s a free download too, so please check it out.

On the surface, Braid seems like a quite simple platformer where you can move around a 2D board and jump on the heads of monsters much like Mario before it. Soon you will find that it’s actually quite cleverly designed and uses a time rollback feature to create some interesting puzzles. Unlike Prince of Persia, where you can rollback time just to resurrect your player from death, Braid uses time for all kinds of different platforming and exploration puzzles with no limit on the number of times you can rewind time. Their design goal was to create something unique while not including things which waste a players time, such as game over screens and having to re-load your game at the main menu. It’s really quite refreshing. Unfortunately I don’t believe Braid has a website yet and is not in general distribution. Hopefully it will be released soon!

This only scratches the surface of the great games to come out of the IGF this year. I hope this shed some light on some good games and that you will check out the other IGF finalists.

One of my top games of 2005 was Shadow of the Colossus (SOTC) on the PS2. The developers at Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) in Japan really took the PS2 to its limit. Features like HDR rendering – albeit somewhat faked due to hardware limitations – and extensive use of inverse kinematics in their animation controllers really gave the game an advanced look on the aging platform. Here is a great article on the development of some of the main features in the game along with developer interviews that was translated from a Japanese website:

Making of Shadow of the Colossus

Of particular interest to me was how they handled collision detection between the player and the colossi while the player was mantling around all over their body. Instead of using highly simplified collision models like spheres, cylinders, or boxes as in most games, the colossi used a hidden simplified secondary mesh that mostly followed the outline of their body. The bones that were driving the animation of the rendered mesh were also weighted to the vertices of the collision mesh allowing it to transform perfectly along with the colossus. Here is a debug rendering of how the collision mesh is layered along with the rendered mesh:

I thought this was a very clever way of using the bone transforms to also control the collision. The whole article is very interesting if you are interested in game development or just SOTC itself. Check it out!