Benedict’s Babeldom

Don’t Look Back

Braid

Passage

Judith

Gravity Bone

I was going to write short summaries of these games, but I think it’s really best if you go play them. The unifying characteristic of these games is that they are short (with the exception of Braid), beautiful, and convey a narrative that wouldn’t be as effectively delivered in any other medium. These games really affected how I think about video games, and what can be done with them.

The last time I heard of Heavy Rain was when it was first shown, as we were first entering the current generation of hardware. Today, Jerry Holkins from Penny-Arcade linked to two videos where the game’s executive producer, Guillaume de Fondaumière, talked about the game. Here’s a great quote:

I think, personally, that game overs are a thing of the past. Heavy Rain is not about failing or succeeding, Heavy Rain is about the journey… not to replay, but to continue the experience, whatever [the player's] choices… The four playable characters can be in great danger sometimes, and sometimes they can die. But when you lose a character, this is an information that the game takes on board, but the story continues… You bear the consequences of your actions. I think, personally, that game overs are a thing of the past. Heavy Rain isnot about failing or succeeding, Heavy Rain is about the journey… not to replay, but to continue the experience, whatever [the player's] choices… The four playable characters can be in great danger sometimes, and sometimes they can die. But when you lose a character, this is an information that the game takeson board, but the story continues… You bear the consequences of your actions.

In Heavy Rain, the player is in control second to second, he tells the story through his actions. All this is done in a very fluid, seamless way, with no cut scenes, no big flashing sign to make decisions, and this is what makes the game really unique… Heavy Rain is not a videogame anymore in my mind, because it breaks with most of the traditional paradigms, but it’s fully interactive.

This shit didn’t come from the marketing department, I’ll tell you that much. This guy is a fucking wreck – he’s barely making it through the day. The clutch of the creative process, as experienced by Cage, is indistinguishable from a mental illness. Heavy Rain is a symptom of his condition, and he is expelling it from his mind piece by piece in an effort to save his own life.

I uploaded a small chrome extension this evening. It’s a small game called Avalanche. I coded the game together with my friend, Alex Langenfeld (who is a genius). It’s based off the classic avalanche game that everyone enjoyed on their TI-82s throughout high school and middle school. As it says in the description, the game is based on code from this tutorial, and uses an art asset from this forum post.

The platformer code from the tutorial provided the basics for animation, collision, asset management, and game state management. First we boiled the game down, taking out extras we didn’t need. We then added code for the falling icicles, code to generate the icicles, score management, and a couple other things. The worst part was dealing with the pixel art and animations. Overall it was pretty simple, and fun to develop!

The best part of making a chrome extension was how simple it was. All we had to do was include a simple json file with some metadata, and chrome did the rest! The process of adding it to the chrome extensions website was also extremely simple and rewarding. Check out the source code if you’re interested!