• Rebuild 3: Plus one Sara

    Remember the farm blight that you had to research pesticides to prevent..?
    Remember the farm blight that you had to research pesticides to prevent..?

    We’re adding another artist to Team Rebuild 3: Sara Gross (aka Two Bit Art). She worked with me last winter on Word Up Dog, my whimsical hiphop spelling game that nobody played and whatever, I know y’all are just here for the zombies.

    Sara will be working under direction from me & lead artist Adam Meyer, starting with illustrations for the copious random and not-so-random events of Rebuild: Gangs of Deadsville. Here are a few samples from the new game:


    The infamous twerkin bunnies
    Sara’s twerkin bunnies. Will you decide to eat them, or keep them as pets?

    It won’t all be bunnies and happyfuntimes I assure you. Yes, there will be blood.

    Sara’s best known for unfinished indie games and her beautiful webcomic Menagerie. You can follow Sara on twitter, check out her sweet draws on tumblr and occasionally you can even watch her live while she draws Rebuild 3 characters.

  • Aztez Improvisation

    AztezLogo

    Asset2-200x300I am very interested in Improvisation in games. One of my favorite things in games is knowing its systems inside out and then being able to play with them in unique ways. To be presented with novel problems I have never solved before and using the tools the game gives me to overcome them, preferably under time pressure.

    It’s no surprise that a lot of my favorite games strongly rely on improvisation; being able to quickly digest new situations and devise a novel solution to it. A list of my favorite improvisation-forward games might include Starcraft, Spelunky and Panel de Pon. These are games I love deeply. Games I have dropped hour upon hour into and never felt guilty about. Games that I am proud to be good at and still have room to grow.

    But today I want to talk about Improvisation specifically in the light of  Ben Ruiz and Matthew Wegner’s upcomming brawler Aztez. Aztez is still a ways away from release but Ben and Matthew stayed with us for a few months in Mexico so I have had the joy of playing early versions. Before Aztez I had never really played brawlers before (I don’t count River City Ransom, fun but shallow) and dropping into Aztez has been like discovering a new unspoiled continent for me. It’s very good at improvisation and I want to discuss why.

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    Broad Tools

    First Aztez offers you a lot of inputs, a lot of tools. I’m not going to enumerate every move in Aztez but in terms of variables to work with it has: damage, reach, knock-back, knock-to-ground, knock-to-air, stun, grab, parry, lead-up-time, cool-down-time, combos, foward movement, move to air, move to ground, etc… etc… Ben takes these variables and crafts moves out of them which in turn make up your complete tool set. These tools are varied and balanced, they each play a different role in solving the problems the game will present you with.

    Combinatoric Problems

    Asset1-300x298This is the beating heart of an improvisation game. What use are tools without problems to solve? Games that use randomness or unpredictable complexity are great at giving players a vast set of unique-but-simmilar puzzles. Aztez has different types of enemies but lets take a case where you are fighting four guys of the same type. Now how many problems do these enemies present you? Very many. The case of on being to your right and three to your left is different from all on the left, the enemies may or may not be attacking, they have different spacing, they have different amounts of health, they may be stunned, they may be on the ground, they may be in the air. The number and state of the four guys defines your current puzzle. Now you decide which tools to use.

    I call these problems combinatoric because they are a combination of many simple states. Each single state is easy to understand and the correct response to it is known. But it is their ability to be combined that is their strength. Not only does this generate many new problems for the player but, and this is important, they are all simmilar states. On the face of it this might seem like a disadvantage. You might think you want as much breadth as possible but if you were generating very different states then players wouldn’t get to use the things they have already learned. You want to present them constantly with puzzles that are simmilar to problems they have solved before, so that they have some idea of how to solve them, but problems that are still different, so that they are forced to improvise a slightly new solution.

    Many Possible Answers

    Asset3-257x300Think of improvising in music, there is no correct jazz solo, although some solos are better than others. This is part of the joy of improvisation games. By allowing a large number of possible solutions you maximise the player’s chance of finding one. Obviously this has to be balanced with challenge. In Aztez there are always many actions that solve the puzzle but there are many more actions that lead to death. This also leaves room for style. Different players will tend towards different types of solutions. In Aztez you might focus on controling the enemies or on being hard to hit or just brute-force dealing brutal amounts of damage. Players will naturaly develop different skills depending on what tactics work for them early on.

    Time Pressure

    You could have all of the above without time pressure, but time pressure adds a beautiful flow to the game. Without time pressure there is a temptation to spend forever maximising your solution, to sit and stare and calculate. With time pressure you are forced to focus on the bigger picture and to rely on trial and error to figure out the details. This is more fun, why? Who knows, that’s  the way the human brain is built. Time pressure frees your frontal cortex from the minutea.

     

    Incredipede, Fantastic Contraption, and the game I’m working on now don’t really use these principles, many great games don’t. But I want to start making games that embrace improvisation. Games that allow players to be artful. I’m even learning to play the flute so I can have a better understanding of improvisation. I hope in the future to make games that let you be a virtuoso every bit as much as Aztez does.

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  • Rebuild 3: Genders for Everyone!

    rebuild3_whitemen

    It’s a delight every time I add a new piece of Adam’s art to the game. Today the new survivor “coins” got a makeover. In Rebuild: Gangs of Deadsville you’ll be able to start missions by dragging and dropping these little portraits instead of scrolling through the long list of survivors.

    After watching the newest edition of Anita Sarkeesian’s Tropes vs Women in Video Games I am acutely aware of the lack of female characters in the current build. The survivors are a bunch of strong-jawed white dudes right now (well, except that one guy with the face mask), but rest assured there will be diversity.

    Adam’s getting started on the women just in time. Here he is sketching one of the possible sets of features and clothes for the new “tall and strong yet still feminine” body:

    Next he’ll trace over the whole thing in Illustrator and add color. Like the men, there will be 3 female body types in Rebuild 3: the hungry waif, the buff & curvy, and my personal favorite the “big momma”. No doubt she has the best scavenging skills of the three and I can imagine her kicking ass with some sort of BFG or flamethrower.

    Base Short GirlBase Fit GirlBase Big Momma

  • Rebuild 3: Maptastic new cities

    Rebuild 3 rivers
    Temp art for Rebuild: Gangs of Deadsville showing new rivers and oceans. The walled-in blueish areas are the forts of NPC factions.
    I’m adding some exciting new features to the cities in Rebuild: Gangs of Deadsville.

    Well exciting to me, since playing with the map generation code is pretty fun. There will be coastlines where you might find a boat to help you escape the city, and rivers that make great barriers because zombies can’t cross them. Zombie mobs have to do some pathfinding to get around now. I know zombies shouldn’t be that smart, but it’s pathetic to see them bumping into a river over and over.

    Rebuild 2 small map
    A typical small, square city from Rebuild 2
    Oh and cities aren’t square anymore. One of the best strategies for Rebuild 2 / Rebuild Mobile was to beeline for one of the corners and build your fort with two safe sides – useful but not realistic. The new cities will be round and unevenly shaped, with denser urban areas in the center and farmland around the outside. Your fort will usually start in a balanced area, but some maps might be all farms, all suburbs, or all downtown core.

    Rebuild 3 map creation
    Map creation command line output. ^ are forests, ~ means water, Xs are forts and the numbers indicate urban zones.
    The cities in the main campaign mode will use predetermined random seeds, which means you won’t be able to keep restarting until you get a layout you like. For better or worse you’ll be stuck with the same city for however many tries it takes to save it.

    I’ll also include a skirmish mode where you can jump into a city with a random seed and whatever settings you want just like in Rebuild 2 / Rebuild Mobile. Giant size, easy difficulty, winter, with a coastline and two rivers? You got it.

    Rebuild 3 giant maps
    Zooming out on a new GIANT sized map
    Yes and I’ve finally added zooming, which honestly you’re going to need with some of the new giant sized cities. They average around 1000 squares, whereas in Rebuild 2 the max was 256.

    That oughta keep ’em busy.

  • Rebuild 3: Paper dolls

    Rebuild 3 survivor concept

    Adam’s been busy making mix & matchable characters for Rebuild: Gangs of Deadsville. They remind me of the digital kisekae dolls I used to collect. We’ll have thousands of unique survivors by the time he’s through, from cops to road warriors to half-starved hipsters and every hybrid thereof.

    They’ll have unique personalities too: some are greedy, some lazy, others heroic or ridden with guilt. The longer you know them, the more their backstories will be revealed.

    I’m adding a second inventory slot, so survivors will be able to equip both a weapon and a tool. I haven’t figured out which slot chainsaws go in yet…

    Rebuild 3 survivor conceptRebuild 3 survivor concept
    ColinGas MaskRetiree

    The three male body types: skinny (does he look familiar?), bulky, and heavy. The third type will be rare – staying overweight during the zompocalypse isn’t easy, and you probably don’t want to know what they’ve been eating.

    Rebuild 3 survivor conceptRebuild 3 survivor concept
    Rebuild 3 survivor conceptRebuild 3 survivor concept