Forbidden.exe

April 2nd, 2007

My April Fools’ joke worked like a charm. The Divorce managed to fool some of my regular readers, most notably Bill of the2bears.com, who actually blogged about it 🙂 And I also got an much needed extra day of development for the Forbidden.exe.

So here’s my real 8th done-in-under-7-days experimental game, which is a bit different from my usual style. It’s an experimental horror game. So be warned, there’s harsh language, violence and other fun forms of violation. One could say that it’s an experimental violation game.

The idea for the gameplay came from my talks with Daniel Benmergui at the GDC. After the Nuances of Design session, we talked about the idea creating a game (for the Eerie Horror Film Fest), where the gameplay would communicate that feeling that you get from watching a good suspense / horror movie. So here’s a elaborate prototype of that idea.

Forbidden.exe

Screenshot of Forbidden.exe Screenshot of Forbidden.exe Screenshot of Forbidden.exe

Download
Forbidden.zip (8,7 Mb) (Release 1)

Instructions
I recommend you read the readme.html.

Credits
Game Design, Code & Gfx: Petri Purho ( petri.purho (at) gmail.com )

Music is from Brainsaw’s Music for the Paranoid Schizophrenic -album. The following tracks were used: 02. Gulag (Welcome to Hell – Part 1), 04. Gulag (Welcome to Hell – Part 2) and 06. Program Intermission. Big thanks to the guys for creating such a great and atmospheric music.

The songs are licensed under the: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike.

The track level_01.ogg which is played in the background of the games first level is based on cymbal_lo05.wav by schluppipuppie. It was used under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus 1.0 License.

The shriek sound effects are from river otter or weasel 2006-09-17.mp3 by stackpool and are also used under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus 1.0 License.

Thanks
Thanks to Daniel Benmergui for helping me with the design and encouraging me to do the game in the first place.

Inspiration source: Experimental Gameplay Project.

Forbidden.exe uses: SDL, SDL_Image, SDL_Mixer and SDL_RotoZoom

The Divorce

April 1st, 2007

Update: Don’t take this too seriously. This was an April Fools’ joke 🙂

Here’s my 8th experimental done-in-under-a-week game. I was inspired by Rod Humble’s The Marriage and decided to create my own abstract art game, where I crafted the rules of the game to communicate how I felt about my parents divorce.

The Divorce

Screenshot of The Divorce Screenshot of The Divorce Screenshot of The Divorce

Download
Divorce.zip (49 Kb) (Release 1)

The Games meaning
I recommend that you make your own interpretation of the games rules and their meaning, but here’s what I had in mind.

The bats are of course my parents. My parents are very long and thin, so this is represented by the shape of the boxes. The ball is an unwanted child of their marriage. I was quite young when my parent’s divorced so, that is represented by the size of the ball. Goal of the game is to score 10 points in court to ensure that the child doesn’t end up living with you.

Credits
Game Design, Code & Gfx: Petri Purho ( petri.purho (at) gmail.com )

Thanks
Physics model is based on Markus Ilmola’s tutorials.
Inspiration source: Rod Humble’s The Marriage.

Rod Humble’s The Marriage Released

March 20th, 2007

In efforts to sharpen my rapid blogging skills, I present you something that happened less than 24 hours ago.

Rod Humble has just released his experimental game The Marriage for public. The game can be download from his website and it run under Windows 2000, XP and Vista.

The game was presented at this years Experimental Gameplay Session and for me it was the most interesting game presented there. It was also presented at the Nuances of Design session, where we actually got to play it.

The Marriage is an art game, so be warned. It’s gameplay isn’t geared towards the fun (in the common sense), but it’s meant to express how Rod feels about his marriage. It’s very abstract and Rod provides on his website an explanation of the symbols in the game. I don’t recommend you read them. If you don’t know anything about the game, try it out and try to find the meaning to the game yourself. And if you really don’t get it, then go and read the descriptions.

[Via: Arthouse Games].

Quick GDC Report

March 17th, 2007

Yes I’m alive and back home from the Game Developers Conference. I’m still suffering from a horrible jet-lag (I woke up today at 05:00 AM), and my computer broke down on me (I feel like I’ve lost a family member) and the credit card bill just landed in the mailbox. On top of that I’ve been really busy trying to catch up on all the things I had to postpone because of GDC. So this week’s been really sucky. I think it’s a karma thing, I had too much fun in San Francisco and now karma is punishing me for it. If the conference would have been any more fun, I would have probably died this week.

My presentation at the Experimental Gameplay Session went well in the sense that the audience enjoyed it. I noticed that people tend to share the presentation slides on their blog. So here’s mine: egs_slides.ppt. There isn’t all that much useful information in the slides. I basically put them together to let the people know that the games I presented, could be download from this site. And since your reading this, you probably now that already.

I was going to write about the other people’s games presented at Experimental Gameplay Session, but people with faster blogging skills did that already. I really suck at this rapid blogging of events happening right now. I mean the session happened over a week ago. I blame the jet-lag. Anyway Gamasutra has a brilliant coverage of the event, but unfortunately they missed some games. You can read about them from joystiq and from And Maw! This. And also check out these videos recorded during the session (thanks Louis).

As for the conference, it was great. It was my first GDC, and I really enjoyed it. I got to attend some really great lectures, like Chaim Gingold’s Spore’s Magic Crayons and Raph Koster’s Where Game Meets Web, but my favorite was easily the Nuances of Design session by Jonathan Blow. At the Nuances of Design session we had our own laptops there and we played the games as the designers talked about them. I really hope there will be a Nuances of Design session at GDC 2008.

Other thing I really enjoyed about GDC, was the fact that I got meet all these like minded people, creators of my favorite games and people I look up to as great game developers. Everybody seemed very down to earth, passionate and willing share their ideas. Luckily for my safety I didn’t bump into any grumpy old game developers, who would have no doubt strangled me for my enthusiasm. One of my personal highlights was the fact that I got meet and hang out with Kyle Gray and Kyle Gabler of ExperimentalGameplay.com. They are two of the four guys who inspired me to start creating experimental games in the first place. They’re like my idols, so meeting them was really great.

GDC was such a fun event that I promised already to everybody that I’d be there next year also. I really have to start saving up already, since I might not be as lucky as I was this time 🙂

A Crappy Excuse For The Lack Of Posts

March 1st, 2007

I’m sorry for the lack of posts in February. I’ve been really busy and I was lucky to get the game out in time. But being busy, is not a valid excuse for lack of updates. Fortunately February has traditionally been a slow month for all the game development blogs, usually because of the Game Developers Conference. And up until this Tuesday I wasn’t sure if I could use the GDC as an excuse for my lack of posts. But luckily I can.

Long story short: I’m going to GDC and I’ll be presenting my games at the Experimental Gameplay Session. And yes I’m very excited about the whole thing, since it’s my first GDC. And I really have to thank Darius Kazemi for the whole shenanigans, since he was the one who encouraged me to send my games to the EGW. And Frozenbyte (game development company I work for) for sponsoring my trip, I really couldn’t have afforded to travel there with out their financial support. And the boys and girls (they are actually all older than me, so maybe I should call them grandpa’s and grandma’s) of Experimental Gameplay Workshop for having me there in the first place.

I’ll try to make at least some kind of notes about the other games presented at the Experimental Gameplay Workshop and post them here, since there are some very cool games there. I know since I’ve seen the schedule of the session.

Edit: If any of you who read this blog will be at the GDC this year, drop by and say hi after the session.