Sunday and shareware games

[jack]

On sunday I relished having a bike, read a lot of Confusion (the second volume in the increasingly accurately named Baroque Cycle trilogy), played a few interesting shareware games, did a lot of washing and up, etc, had a lie in alternating sleeping with drinking lots of water, and did some organising of the cts fresher's fair.

Is there a name for genres that distinguishes between action puzzle games like Tetris, where everything is in the game rules, and action puzzle games like Repton, where the games rules share importance with level design[1].

Anyway, I was playing some old and some new interesting games of the latter sort, which is what I like to write. Though the former has the advantage that it's as fun for the programmer to play as anyone else.

There was also Gish. Chronic Logic made a number of interesting physics-moddelling games, like Bridge Builder/Pontifex, which are great fun to see things modelled well, but a bit lacking in *gameplay*.

Gish is great. You control a blob or tar which is genuinely malleable. You can make it sticky, or firm and heavy, or slick, and everything happens in a truly malleable fashion. In short, they obviously modelled things at a lower level than normal, and much of the control is emergent behaviour. There isn't a "throw" or "pick up" button: you roll over a block, go sticky, roll until it's on top, squish down, and expand.

[1] An early incident. In a history class, the teacher said foo wasn't the only effect, bar was also necessary for the thingy, and in driving this home -- most people would assume foo was the major one -- said the thingy was a sum of foo and bar. I immediately queried -- surely product would make more sense, since if either foo or bar were zero, nothing would happen.

OK, I tend to take metaphors too far. But on the other hand, it is unhelpful to choose metaphors deliberately bad in the way you wish to emphasise. Speaking of which, why is "How high?" considered a good response to "Jump!"? Surely that's way too peedantic? I suppose the message is there on another level -- don't say 'how high' just because Sarge said to say it, just do it, but it seems peverse. I am amused at the vision of having got your paratroopers lined up in the plane, passing over the landing field, and suddenly having a literal reply to "Jump!" :)

Comments

[miss-next.livejournal.com]

Oddly enough, I have a friend called Gish. She's Native American, which is how she gets a name like that.

Must tell her about blob-of-tar game. :-)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Employ tact :) OTOH, his girlfriend, who has tediously been kidnapped, is a fairly good representation: she's cute and chubby and GOTH, and all in all, does look like a human equivalent of the tar :)

[senji.livejournal.com]

No, no, jump first then ask how high! :)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

High enough?
No, a bit higher... a bit higher... just a bit more... too high!

[mair_in_grenderich]

Nice bike? Where from, in the end?

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I refer the honorable lady to my answer in the previous post... Sorry, we were doing that a lot yesterday. Townsend's aka Light Blue Cycle Centre, on Chesterton road. It seems nice, has levery gears, etc, but time will tell if it doesn't fall to bits, and if paying more was worth it.

On the other hand, the man did seem helpful. He was rather brusque while giving advice, but seemed to care about getting stuff right, insisted everyone come back for a one-month tune up, gave me a free starwars bell and a couple of allen (sp?) keys, and there was a bit of a manual.

[mair_in_grenderich]

am I an honorable lady? ooh! *bounces honorably*

they're less likely to fall to bits if you look after them properly, I find...

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Actually, I thought "honorable gentleman/lady" was used normally ironically in parliament, like <gritted teeth>Thank you, *partner*</gritted> in bridge. OK, I exagarate, but it means "member of the opposing party" and is generally used when someone asks a repeated question...

they're less likely to fall to bits if you look after them properly, I find...

Good advice, thanks. I plan to start looking after it by (1) not ploughing it into the ground at 50mph and (2) not riding it drunk, but what else should I do? Just take it to the shop periodically?

[mair_in_grenderich]

oh, goodness. I'm a member of the opposing party and being gritted at? I think I'll go and lie down...

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Oops, sorry, I sent that before I'd finished.

So I do think you're a very honorable lady, but nothing I said in the previous (now previous but one) post should indicate that :)

[calamarain.livejournal.com]

I don't think there's a specific term to distinguish the two - often what one has to do is define them in terms of other puzzle games e.g. you can define something as a Tetris-like puzzle, or a Repton-like puzzle.

On the note of repton, you do know it's been re-released for PC by the original company with upgraded graphics/sound and they've added levels to it too :)

Superior Software

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

True. Except Repton-style normally means games that use nearly exactly the same tiles as repton, or at least a tile-based game relying on pushing things round and collecting stuff. An original game with the same philosophy doesn't seem covered.

I would say "like repton or [other game, eg. chip's challenge]" but I can't think a well known game sufficiently different to make the point :)

Ooh, cool. Maybe I should get -- I'm sure I've played repton in emulators, but it's not quite the same.

[edith-the-hutt.livejournal.com]

O_O REPTON!

YAY!!!!!!!

I wonder if they'll be resurecting Clogger...

[simont]

That distinction can apply to non-real-time puzzle games as well, of course. There are a number of games which are good fun and I'd like to add to my puzzle collection, but for which I've so far been unable to come up with a means of generating credible random levels; my puzzle framework doesn't currently lend itself well to storing lists of hand-designed levels, and in any case I'm not entirely sure I want to get into the business of maintaining them. Examples include Sokoban, Klotski and Vexed.

To some extent, also, it's a bit of a continuum. Nikoli feel strongly that hand-designed Sudoku are far superior to computer-generated ones, for example; obviously one has to take that opinion with a grain of salt since their entire business model relies on people believing that, but since people are still paying them money one can only assume there's something in it. So is Sudoku a game which relies on level design? You certainly can play it without a human level designer, so it isn't entirely dependent on conscious design, but at the same time it is claimed that it benefits from it, and I'd guess that there are at least some people who'd be unwilling to play it without. Perhaps it belongs somewhere between the two positions.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yes, thank you.

I will avoid looking at those links: I think it would kill my time for too long :)

True, the action-ness is mainly on another axis, it just so happened that the games I was thinking of were action as well. And here is a continuum for games like repton or DROD (or, ineed, tile-based stragtegy games) are logically the same whether it's "everythnig moves every second" or "everything moves when you hit a key", but it affects the gameplay dramatically.

Bridge is an interesting example of hand-designed-ness. It's designed to be random, but in a tournament, you can hand craft more 'interesting' hands.

[satanicsocks.livejournal.com]

Rule puzzles and level-based (or adventure) puzzles?

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Mmm, yeah, that was my thought; I like the term adventure puzzles, but seems to suggest Monkey Island more than Repton. Yes, perhaps "Slightly to the MI side of Repton" is how i want to describe mine... :)