Heart is finished. It is a short, bleak game that questions one particular human ideal/cliché.

Play Heart (Flash)

The game was created originally for the Ludum Dare competition, and polished during the following week. Coded in Actionscript 3, using FlashDevelop as IDE and compiled using the Flex SDK. For the graphics I used Photoshop and Illustrator, and for the audio I used LMMS and Audacity.

I was originally going to take advantage of the circumstances to force me to learn Python, but that didn’t go anywhere, and I ended up relying on the more familiar Actionscript 3, for better or worse. The theme, ‘advancing wall of doom’, wasn’t very inspiring, but I was still able to cook an idea pretty fast (the first night). I believe I had the Superbrothers in mind when I came up with the visual style, and it is still pretty apparent from the final product. I like making very low-resolution pixel art, because of the forced geometrization and simplification that it entails, and also because it’s quick to make in a computer, saving me time to devote to the coding, my main hurdle. I’m not a very fast or experienced coder, so I ended up using up most of the time on that part of the process (as it is apparent in the video). I still enjoy coding, and particularly randomizing (procedurally generating) things as part of the process, so instead of hard-scripting everything, I left most to chance. This allowed me to concentrate on the general aesthetic rather than on the strict sequence of events, the latter of which I burdened the player with stitching together in his head.

As opposed to my previous flash game, Viewpoints, this game’s different playthroughs are cumulative; that means that there is no or little contradiction between one playthrough’s events and the next’s. The more the game is played, the more a player can piece together a story out of it. At one point I thought of letting the story unfold procedurally, by me creating much more random lines of text, thus allowing more varied and incoherent interpretations; traces of this idea can still be found in the competition version, but I’ve removed those lines since then. The idea of glitching up the graphics came from this, but I liked the effect enough that I left it in, as it also contributes to the pathetic and distraught aesthetic that I tried to convey.

At first, the game was going to have a ‘proper’ ending; the character was going to face another character. At some point I even thought of having him meet a mirror of himself, but I didn’t know where to take that. The ending that I left in was chosen both due to the time constraints and to my wishing to make the message more subtle. So, it’s a non-explicit resolution that the player can interpret according to his own experience in the game.

I’m pretty happy with the audio. When thinking of what the most appropriate kind of music for this game would be, my friend Matt suggested something like Laura Palmer’s theme from Twin Peaks. I love it, but it was too sweet, too melancholy for my game. I still kept it in my head, subconsciously, when I composed the song, but I made it a bit dissonant, and a bit disjointed. Part of the original plan was to also have two other songs and switch between them at random intervals, but I didn’t have the time to make the other two. In the final game I did go through with this idea, sort of, but much more subtly, and thus, I think, it proves to be more effectively unsettling.

The resulting game is something that I’m happy about. It’s also probably the most ‘designery’ game I’ve made thus far, by which I mean the attention to style that I put into it (I really devoted a lot of time to that title screen). It’s still too early to say whether I was able to communicate what I wanted to with it, but at least with the compo version I got the kinds of responses I expected, of which I’m glad. I hope that this new version was not made in vain.

I came across a definition for game today, by Corvus Elrod. It is the most elegant and explicit that I’ve found so far. Here it is:

Game is a set of rules and/or conditions, established by a community, which serve as a bounded space for play.

Where play stands for “the self-guided exploration of possibility within a bounded space”, which is a definition I feel to be accurate. I believe that Corvus is forcefully nudging the ‘community’ element into the definition, though (where is the community if one person creates a game for himself alone to play?), so I would actually simplify it into this:

Game is a set of rules and/or conditions which serve as a bounded space for play.

I can’t think of a single game that this definition does not embrace, including board games, sports, playground games, and, yes, video games. It also suggests that games can be entertaining or not, challenging or not, involve goals or not. By this definition, exquisite corpse is a game, which rings true to me.

The definition speaks nothing of the amount of interactivity that is to be expected of a game, but the mention of rules and conditions implies that choice needs to be present. In Heart, the player is required to explore, as the game does nothing without their input. They would discover that the right arrow key makes the character move in that direction. And the opposite key? It triggers a response in the avatar: he cannot go back. It is part of the process of discovery. In Heart, the player is the force that drives the character forward, for without their input, he would stay in place forever. Nothing would happen, the game would not be played, the character would not confront his fate. Is it not a meaningful choice that the player is making, then?

I didn’t mean this post to be in defense of my game, though it looks like it turned out that way. This subject is something that I consider to be relevant, as I don’t see enough game makers thinking about where to lead video games, so I feel the need to touch upon it. I hope to spark debate in some circles, frankly!

What you see above is my computer screen during the past weekend (each hour reduced to 2.5 seconds), as I make two games for two events that were held concurrently. One is a competition called Ludum Dare, on which, during the 48 hours of its duration, participants are expected to create a game by themselves and ‘from scratch’. The week prior, participants vote on a theme. ‘Advancing wall of doom’ won this time, which is not one I’m too fond of, but I did participate and make a game. Or two, in fact, because for the other event, my usual two-hour Klik of the Month, I made a game based on the same theme.

Heart is the name of my Ludum Dare entry. The game is not final, and neither is the name, so let’s say it’s the competition version’s name. It was inspired by Stephen Lavelle’s Defect. It was made for Flash, using the Flex SDK and coded in Actionscript 3. I’ll probably post more about it in the future, when I decide that the game is finished.

Hope! is what I called my Klik of the Month. It was made in Construct, so it’s Windows only. You will need the latest DirectX to run it.