Wonderland

Papa Sangre

Papa Sangre is an iPhone game without graphics. An auditory game, developed by Somethin' Else (with the help of Margaret Robertson, Tassos Stevens and pals) and funded by Channel 4's 4iP.

You’re in Papa Sangre’s palace. His palace is in an afterlife that takes the form of a malevolent, unpredictable carnival: imagine a Mexican graveyard on the Day of the Dead — with the lights off. You’re the piñata for a host of partying monsters. They probably look a lot worse than they sound. You should count yourself lucky it’s too dark to see them.

Get out. Save the one you love. Do the right thing.

 

Check out also the fullpager in this month's Wired (UK):

There's young @benoonbenoon in his headphones and matching shoes. Interesting note there by Wired that the game's build has caused joy at Apple HQ due to the complexity of the idea.

Papa Sangre is a video game with no video. It’s a first-person thriller, done entirely in audio by an award-winning team of game designers, musicians, sound designers and developers. We’ve created an entire world using the first ever real-time 3D audio engine implemented on a handheld device. Which was BLOODY HARD.

...says the game's site.

Out April 29. I've bought an iPod Touch just so I can play games like this.

5 minute MMORPG

As found by Rock, Paper, Shotgun, the Five Minute MMORPG:

 

Apparently it has "procedurally generated lore". And why not, given the usual standard of MMO lore...

Programmer's Aid Cart clock

 
There's a whole range of these Canadian-made geek clock wonders, too.

Pac-moon

Pac-Man found on Saturn's moon, Mimas...

 

It's the strange daytime temperatures distribution pattern of Mimas that produces this image, as seen through a composite infrared spectrometer. Wakka wakka wakka.

Mario furni set

I love the shelves. Very clever.

 

(Thanks Daniel!)

Ada Lovelace Day: Margaret Robertson

It's Ada Lovelace Day: the day we celebrate women in technology and science.

My post is about Margaret Robertson, videogames genius. Margaret is yet to be topped as the person I know "who knows most about videogames". There is nothing you can throw at Margaret that she doesn't have an insightful, knowledgable, clever or funny answer to.

 

(This is Margaret, about to pound you in Werewolf - but you wouldn't know it...)

Margaret used to be editor of EDGE magazine, well-understood to be the best games magazine in the world. She's a journalist, an analyst, a designer and a consultant. If you ask Margaret what she does, she often hesitates slightly, because she does so much within this huge field, and all of it so well: from games design itself, through to story architecture, troubleshooting, team design, strategy, business analysis, conference organising... you name it. She's also very modest.

She's a regular fixture at GDC, and her talks are always - rightly - packed. Don't miss those, is my advice. You can also catch her at Brit events like Game City, or Develop. She's the little Scottish lady with bunches, and a Bristolian accent (it's a feature, not a bug), usually found on a sofa surrounded by Famouses, hanging on her every word...

We at Channel 4 buy a lot of her time in order to fulfil our educational remit, and our grand plans for making amazing games that just happen to be good for you. She's our secret weapon. And she doesn't get nearly enough credit for it.

So thank you Margaret, for everything you do for us, and for lending us your planet-sized brain. Thank you too for being an inspiration to all and any women considering, perhaps, a career in or around videogames. You're the greatest!

Master Chief fluffy pillows

It's the fringe that makes me chuckle. Composition!

 

While we're at it: Halo Grunt felted plushies, made to order. So squishy and fuzzy.

Jane McG: Games can make a better world

In case you haven't seen this plastered all over the internet already :-)

Wolf Rider Cub

Check out my new plush swag with an ingame-pet-code attached to his ear.

Thanks Jonnie!

GDC (&EngageExpo) 2010: post-event feelings.

Extraordinary times we're living through here, just wild. This year's GDC was amazing, and weird, and different. Being in the North & South halls instead of the giant, cavernous West hall was just the starter (something to do with a scheduling mixup): this year's GDC - and this year's Engage!Expo - can absolutely be summed up as "the year of Facebook games frenzy".

I say Facebook games as a point: technically we're talking social games, and there were plenty of companies present shouting about how they were opening up their APIs, how they have millions of users playing social games - MySpace, Hi5, Orkut - but all eyes are still on Facebook. Facebook and Zynga, too. Playfish, Playdom, RockYou, and friends, were mentioned here and there... but not so much as Zynga.

Zynga and Farmville's 80m monthly players. $250m 2009 revenue. A valuation at something short of $3bn. The VCs only want to talk about social games, so everyone's rushing in. Farmville took 5 weeks and $50k to produce! Or $100K! Even at 100K, that's like, less than a mobile game! LET'S GO.

So everyone's talking of going. Or they're going already. And anyone can go: the amount of middleware now means that mobile payments, affiliate deals, virtual currency, prepaid cards, all that stuff - all taken care of by someone else. You just need to come up with some decent IP, sign a few -30% contracts with the same people that everyone else is signing with, and off you go. 

Naturally there are some then who think it's too late to head in, that the market's already saturated, that the Facebook crowd only want braintraining, fishtanks and farms - even the head game designer from Zynga said this, words to the effect of, you can't alienate granny with your fancy game designs.

Personally I think that's wrong: Facebook games seem to be giant training-wheels for the mass populace. Where 9 months ago (Farmville is only 9 months old!) people were happy with a watering can and 6 types of vegetable, now there's tiers, levels, layers, subtleties - and they're playing Fishville, Hotelville*, Hospitalville* and Dungeonville* at the same time. Synchronously. Multitasking. Fill that cognitive surplus!

* give it time.

What Facebook has done is not turn the masses into "gamers" as such, but brought games away from black boxes with fancy controllers, or boxed retail games purchased at great expense, and back into your immediate social milieu. Right under your nose. Facebook added real friends to crap casual games, and everyone's leaving the original crap casual games in droves, added to the last newbies who've finally succumbed.

So where next for these new players?

For one, I think City of Eternals is on one right track: take Runescape in, and variations on that theme. Simple, browser-based MMOs, which are just another way of saying browser-based more-complex social games. A bit more complexity. Have experiences that can be played in a browser, or on a smartphone during travel-time.

Meanwhile, AAA games, iPhone games (mobile is all but gone?) continue in the background. MMOs and casual games have dropped away a bit, or been drowned out. Or no-one cares during a gold rush. This will pass. After some high profile Facebook failures, perhaps things will calm down a bit and level back out again - or the spotlight will swing over to something else. Like maybe Android: apparently hard to develop for (multiple instances of 'droid) but then again, no 30% skimmed off by Apple and no DRM, either. And far less competition right now.

Meanwhile...

Indie games. The indie game track was adorable, and I mean adorable: the number of times I heard the words "love", "support" and "share": could it get less macho? Wonderful stuff. Artistic, enthusiastic, creative-led; young. And here's the Indie Fund, funded by Indies. It's a lovely antidote to all the commercial frenzy: slide away for a bit and hang out with people making games just because they love them. And before you think, oh small time, the quality at this year's Independent Games Festival was shockingly high. Some beautiful work coming out of that.

=^-^=

Don't miss @nachimir / David Heyward's writeup on this year's GDC.