Right now I’m working on a game I’m calling Get X, Avoid Y for a Make Game pageant. It was a bit of a match made in heaven for me because the pageant is about making a series of interrelated games and for quite a while I’ve been wanting to make a kind of hyper-simple in which I could play around with just one or two features of its “gameness”. Originally this was going to be a slow degradation of mechanics, but in this case I’m actually going with an experiment on visuals.
So the “point” of the overall game is about exploring the ways in which simply changing the (visual) assets of a game can change a huge amount. The obvious thing that can change is the “meaning” of the game (e.g. clicking on squares is different to clicking on televisions is different to clicking on buildings). So that’s one line that I’ll take with this one (I have a “popes” level for instance).
But it’s maybe less obvious (to at least some of us) that particularly if you leave certain elements open in the code such as the size of the visual assets, you can hugely affect gameplay just by swapping pictures. Assuming the images are for sprites that move around on the screen (which they are in this game) then a long, thin sprite behaves very differently to a square sprite. it moves differently, it’s different to try to click on it. So there’s absolutely a mechanical difference in that case.
And there are interim versions of this too. Consider the alpha values in an image – more transparent is harder to see, and therefore probably harder to accurately click on, despite having identical dimensions, perhaps, to a fully opaque image. This can be taken further if you think about ideas like a sprite that is camouflaged against a background by design, maybe literally camo patterns, maybe glitchy aesthetics, etc.
And then there are also “just” the aesthetic effects of what things look like, semantics and mechanics aside. In fact the big reason I was keen to do this project was to break away (a bit) from a feeling of “sameness” about a lot of the games I’ve worked on lately with their very pixelly looks (with some exceptions like Junior Mint and the upcoming Abramovic Method Games). So part of the point here is just to try to make each game distinct aesthetically, to try to produce a whole bunch of very different visual styles – if I can. I may not be able to, but the idea is to try.
So Get X, Avoid Y is nice in combing a few different lines of thinking I’ve been considering lately. It’s also nice to attempt to be part of one of these online community affairs with Make Game, which is a lovely place to hang around and is full of very supportive types. Can’t ask for much more than that, can you?
(You can’t.)
(Well you can, but you shouldn’t.)
I swore to myself today that I would start a series of posts on Get X Avoid Y that I’ve been meaning to write for approximately three months. The idea was just to pick up on some thematic “stuff” that the game does (in my opinion) as a way to explain a bit better why I think it was interesting – because it was one of those games that didn’t necessarily have much written about it by The Press (thanks for nothing, The Press), and so there isn’t much interpretation out there. So let’s see…
Let us recall that the core of Get X Avoid Y is that it’s the same code every level, but with different graphical assets. The “game” is that you’re trying to click one kind of rotating, moving thing, and you’re trying not to click another kind of rotating, moving thing. And there are particle effects and backgrounds.
One of the things I played around with was the idea of (tongue in cheek!) “cloning” other games by simply replicating their imagery in the game. (This was initially spurred on by hearing Tale of Tales say in a talk that nobody would ever clone one of their games.) More broadly the question being asked here is whether you can also somehow squeeze the “spirit” of these other games into the very simplistic mechanics of Get X Avoid Y. And you kind of can. And you kind of can’t.
Luxuria Superbia is maybe the funniest one (to me) because in some ways it could be considered the closest to approximating the game it represents? But also totally not. One particular thing about the aesthetics of that version that I liked was the approach of doing a “bad job” by literally taking photos of my iPad’s screen and then putting them into the “clone” – I think that gets at something about cloning that’s funny: because normally you’re being lazy about the code, but fastidious about the graphics, and here it’s just lazy everything. The animation loop is awful. And yet, weirdly, I think there’s some of the joyousness of the original game in there – though I think this says more about how Tale of Tales made a simple game with very impressive aesthetics. (This all also relates back to a game I wanted to make called A Theft [which I could still do?] which involved stealing someone else’s game in the laziest way possible. I was going to steal one of Michael Brough’s though.)
By way of contrast, perhaps, the Problem Attic level is much less successful at even remotely being like its originator. I do like that this is another one that leverages the foreground property of the game, which really didn’t get used very much otherwise. In this version you’re supposed to “get” the avatar and “avoid” the male and female characters in the game. It’s unclear to me how to interpret that – what is this version of the game saying? Is it, like the LIM version, that we’re taking on the role of the “AI” in these games and trying to capture/defeat/destroy the avatar? If so, that’s quite nice as I do like the idea of more games where you end up on the (maybe quite boring) side of being the NPCs. Also intriguing to me is how the Problem Attic level it kind of does capture some of the spatial distortion of the real game (through obfuscation with the foreground layer, and even includes wrapping, both of which feature in the original) but none of the real experience of deciphering space that is so central to what Problem Attic does.
Finally, I’m weirdly attached to the Counter-Strike level of the game because I think if you wanted to provoke (and annoy #gamergate types no doubt) you might claim that there is “no difference” semantically between this game of clicking on terrorists or counter-terrorists, and the actual game. That is, the game could be seen as a kind of derogatory statement about how lame it is to be playing “click to kill” as countless millions are, even as I write these words. Stop all this click to killing!
That’s it. I wrote a thing.