Gamasutra interview with Susan O’Connor

There’s an interesting interview over on Gamasutra with Susan O’Connor, who has written for a number of major games, including BioShock and Far Cry 2. There’s a wide range of stuff in there, including her personal background and some observations about the industry, but what struck me as especially notable for readers of this blog were her comments at the top of page 3 (too long to just quote here), in which she talks about managing how much of a gameplay conversation is about conveying gameplay mechanics and how much is about story.

More Flash Progress

Some more images from the game in progress, showing gameplay power-ups. The winged sandal speeds up play, but gives a score bonus; the staff of Hermes arranges the letters in a sorted pattern, making them easier to use; the Gorgon’s head just freezes them all in place, which is also useful, though less good than the sorting.

(Some game design notes from mid-project, in case anyone is interested, and for my own future reference.)

Learning and Games and Learning Games

Did a bunch more work on my Greek teaching game the last couple of days. (No new screenshots, though — most of the changes have been improvements to the complexity of gameplay, but not visible in a shot.)

I’m sure my ActionScript is annoyingly naive and that I will hate it once I’ve done a few more projects. I’m so used to Inform, and being able to envision exactly what I need to write before I start typing anything, that it’s novel to go back to a context where I have to laboriously piece out how to do something, figuring out each step in turn. (Well, it could be worse. There are a lot of basic universal programming concepts that don’t have to be figured out from scratch.)

At the same time, it’s awesome finally to be able to construct my own Flash game. I’ve played so many of these things over the years that it’s like I’ve been mutely listening to a language and am now finally able to try speaking it back.

I’m still futzing with the gameplay.

Screenshots

…from an in-progress Flash game designed to teach Greek vowel contractions. It’s a bit of a break from my usual thing, but I’m having a good time learning some Actionscript. It’s also a lot of fun designing game mechanics around an existing thing I want to teach, rather than a system invented for the game.

It has a long way to go yet in terms of polish — I wanted to get the gameplay in place before I started going crazy with the art, for instance — and I’ll need to test the levels with students to make sure that the progression makes sense.

Latest HiS

On Fatale, a treatment of Oscar Wilde’s play Salome.

Latest Homer in Silicon

…is on “The Path” by Tale of Tales. This is a weird, brilliant, frustrating, sometimes dull, sometimes terrifying, sometimes incoherent piece of work, and it’s already been written about by a number of other people (I link some other reviews from the beginning of the column). But Tale of Tales is doing some of the most interesting boundary-pushing work out there on interactive storytelling. (I also have a discussion of their shorter, more recent Fatale coming up.)

What I’ve Been Playing, iPhone edition

Some held-over iPhone reviews, mostly in fact from before the comp games came out.

Latest Homer in Silicon

On Fable 2 (part of my slowly ongoing mission to play more of the must-play interactive storytelling list).

Clockwords: Prelude

Clockwords is a word/defense game by Gabob, who previously did Now Boarding (mentioned here). This time, they’re using a story that I wrote to go with their gameplay concept. I’ve really enjoyed this — it’s exhilarating seeing what the artist has done with my suggestions, and fun to work on something a little different from my usual format. The core gameplay lets you build words, but (in contrast with most word games) in a way that doesn’t absolutely restrict you to a set of letters on the board. If you’re the kind of person who gets frustrated by all the great words you can ALMOST make in Boggle or Scrabble, Clockwords might be up your alley. What’s more, as you play you gain the ability to manipulate which letters are available for future use.

This installment is just the Prelude; future installments will contain a lot more of the plot, and more variations on the core play.

Guilty pleasures

After hearing about it for a while and thinking it basically sounded like a silly gimmick, I finally tried Achievement Unlocked; and I have to say that it actually is fun, as well as being a goofy send-up. Its sequel/relative This is the Only Level is not bad either, though some of the mechanics were irritating in practice; it struck me as a good sort of mental exercise for the designer (what are all the different twists we can put on this one simple challenge?) but less awesome to play.

These days I mostly don’t play time management games unless they’re sent to me for review, they’re demonstrating some new mechanic, or they show hints of having a more interesting storyline than average. The first few were fun, but I’ve now pretty much been there and done that. But I made an exception for Burger Shop 2. The first Burger Shop was simply very well constructed; and number 2 won my heart and my registration with its goodnatured jokes about casual games in general. The game opens with the protagonist of Burger Shop having mysteriously lost his empire and needing to rebuild it (the question that most time management sequels have to answer somehow or other, usually hamhandedly). One of the first things he does is to hire a detective, but the detective is useless and keeps bringing him pointless objects, in a screen that spoofs hidden object games. Other casual game styles are sent up in later screens.

There’s no great depth here, just strong design and a perky self-awareness that many casual games lack.