So for our sixth and final meeting we were one down, but Patricio sent his completed game URL so we could play it.

Bungee Fisher had come a long way, with a sound effect, fish to eat and bottles to evade. We suggested there be more sound effects, such as when a fish was hit or a splash for the dive. The 4-heart health bar was neat, but not accurate enough to provide feedback — maybe they could be quartered for each mishap? It was also noticed that the randomness of the bottles appearing seemed unfair and too random, and then it was discovered that this could be countered just by clicking the fisherman back to the top if a bottle appeared beneath him. Should there be a whiplash penalty? Everyone was impressed that it ran on the web, as Processing compiles to Java files.

Then came Mouse Police v2, which had the beginnings of a terrifying new level. After the player, as a cat, gorges themselves on 12 mice, the cat explodes and splatters the screen with gore.

Then the player becomes a maggot feasting on the entrails while avoiding the deadly beaks of huge crows. Peter explained that the game dynamic will be that the maggot gets more nutrition from the lighter entrails, but that it’s also easier for the crow to kill them there, which we thought sounded good. He had trouble with getting rid of the original scoring mechanism from the first level but we all thought it looked great covered in blood and guts and encouraged him to leave it.

Cupcake Challenge, Susan’s game, was very different from her previous version as she ran into many difficulties with buggy collision detection with Game Maker. Still using her hand-markered cupcake, she put her drawings in a maze setting instead.

If you finished the level you got a neat close up of the drawing before the next level.

It had music but we thought it needed sound effects too. Some of the images were too small to make out. But all three levels were playable and fun, as evidenced by everyone playing the whole game. Susan said that the little girl enemies were supposed to have better AI and follow the cupcake but they were too predictable.

Next up was my Baby Runs This Mofo. I’d made a title sequence that reveals the concept in a series of thought bubbles, which people liked (though it was noted that the title should get its own “space” somehow). The mother’s text had been replaced by (too quiet) audio, and the video ending was much better quality having been reshot on a DV camera. People said that the ending should definitely have a close up of the baby’s face looking sinister. It was suggested that one or two of the controls should be pointless but fun, maybe something sticking its head in the window, as most of the other controls had a point. More animations — such as for the fireplace — would draw more attention to the changes each thing is creating in the room.

Rosemary got swamped with high-profile comix work and didn’t progress on Albacross, but her good feedback on the games and a pledge to get it done for the April open house assuaged the outrage of all attending.

This is Patricio and this week is my week to write.

Our session was off to a shaky start when we received news that Peter was unable to attend. But the snacks laid out on the coffee table soon made us focus on the task at hand: kicking up the heat on our little games. Our assignment was to create a few levels of difficulty.

Susan wowed us with fast cupcakes and faster toppings. She modified the initial game by making it the goal to get the falling toppings all changed to cherries. We identified some possible improvements including: progressively smaller elements as the levels get higher; have a half-made cupcake that gets filled with falling toppings, get the right filling (cherries for instance) and accumulate filling or else lose filling (and points too) if you get the wrong filling (cream for instance).

Another addition that Susan thought would be interesting is the addition of a memory aspect that tests the player’s recall of the combination ‘flashed’ to the him/her at the beginning of the game. Basically, the user needs to recreate the combination.

Rosemary perfected her albatross game significantly. The vertical scrolling game was much refined by using a very retro and totally fun pixel look. She added shadowy fish schools in the water that extend the player’s life (with a great ‘fish in mouth’ indication). Icebergs now cause the bird to lose power. Rosemary is going to great lengths to make this game accurate so that we all learn something of the life of the albatross by internalizing the game logic. For instance, icebergs are a major hazard since these birds glide close to the water and make use of the air pressure above the waves to generate lift. Wow, it works! I didn’t know that before I played this game.

We arrived at some bleak philosophical questions when our scrolling game sea world finished and a endless black section began (a current bug in the game). Where is the end? Where is the beginning? Who am I? Finally, we mused that this could represent an underwater section or even a night version of the game.

Rosemary was worried that the way the player (bird) turns left or right is a little annoying since it turn directly left or right but rather on an angle. We reasoned though that birds probably turn straight left or right by reducing speed and ‘banking’ left and right. This is probably more accurate to bird flight anyways. Rosemary seemed convinced.

Jim’s baby brain continues to work on “Baby runs this mofo” making the interaction swifter and more gratifying. A baby arm is now a cursor inviting the user to mess with the whole room! Susan’s character now emits word balloon’s. Susan, when provoked by baby, tells us that she is busy trying to finish a crossword puzzle. Since we’re a baby genius we realize the word she’s looking is ‘whale’ so we push a toy whale on the floor to her feet.

The scenario, shot at Jim’s mom’s house is great for this version but he thinks that he might reshoot it at home. This would give him the opportunity to load up the game with more interactions. There was one suggestion that he could switch the baby interface so that Susan’s head on the right and the lamp on the left get activated by pushing buttons that are respectively on the right and left (rather than how it is now). Also, Jim is considering making the speech bubbles into sound rather than text (closer to a baby’s world).

I totally shifted gears with my game. I started working on my game using Greenfoot, a Java for beginners interactive programming environment, which should some promise. After trying to make a game with it I starting realizing that although it had a good interface it had crappy documentation. On top of that when an error occurred it didn’t actually tell you where that error was. So I turned to Processing, a Java-like programming environment for artists and designers. I knew Processing but not for game programming. It’s not really made for that but I figured that I might be able to figure it out.

So, rather than doing Ants at a Picnic, I began working on Bungee Fisher. I used a physics software library in Processing to simulate a bungee diver bobbing for fish. I drew the artwork in Illustrator and used Photoshop to export them as PNG (a good format for overlaying sprites since they have a good transparency channel). The slog is a little tougher since I have to write the collision detection and score keeping and health monitoring by hand but for this reason I kept the game logic simple.

The session ended with some talk of an open house in April where we could show our stuff and get other people to show what their currently working on. We also talked about forming a group to do TO Jam.

Then the talk degenerated into puns: first with ‘getting off the ground’ (Rosemary’s albatross), then ‘diving head first’ (my bungee diver), then to ‘icing on the cake’ (Susan’s cupcakes), then ‘shedding light’ on it (Jim’s lamp switcher), then ‘milking it’ (Sidney was breast-feeding at the moment), then keeping abreast (Rosemary’s contribution), and finally having a whale of a time (Jim and Susan tied for this one). We were clever for about 6 minutes then quickly disbanded.

This is a great site for indie games: intelligent commentary, industry-connected but broadminded, and a great mix of brand new and older worthies. Plus a boardgame component, which is a neat back-to-basics touchstone.

I, Rosemary, was late to this session because I got the plague, and much of the meeting is a blur, so blame any inaccuracies of reporting on the viruses playing a real-time strategy game with my immune system (and pwning it).

We started this week by demolishing some tasty snacks and talking about our homework.

The first part of this week’s assignment required us to refine our Scratch games from the previous session. Some of us had made some neat improvements to our games, but the clear winner of the revision challenge was Peter. His game from last week, “Mouse Police”, featured a cat eating some mice with plenty of realistic sounds and gore. For his revision, he broke the cat down into several chunks to make the movements more realistic, and added an effect that made the cat get fatter and fatter with every vicious attack.

For the next part of the assignment we had to pick one of a handful of free game-making programs, import some graphics and other elements, and get one interaction working.

Patricio chose Greenfoot. Greenfoot is a specially made Java development environment that’s mostly designed for teaching programming (thanks, Wikipedia!). Patricio’s game was about ants at a picnic. You played as a worker ant, and your task was to lead your ant friends towards food without crossing paths and making things confusing. We talked about where the game could go from here — whether to include things like pheromones or threats. It reminded me of SimAnt, which was one of my favourite games as a kid (mostly because the “random” button occasionally made the spider shoot lasers).

Peter chose to use Game Maker. His game involved an asteroid hurtling towards the viewer, and a very convincing and pretty Battlestar-Galactica-style tracking grid. People tossed around some ideas about where to go from here, including whether Peter should focus on an expansion of his mouse/cat universe. By this point I felt pretty dizzy from the plague, and I can’t remember whether we really did discuss cat and mouse armies bringing their eternal struggle to outer space.

Then it was my turn. I decided to use Game Maker, too. I made the start of the albatross game I had been talking about making during the first session. So far the albatross moved over the ocean, and some improbable palm islands drifted past in the Antarctic sea below. We talked about how I could handle the challenge of building a convincing, long game map for the albatross to fly over.

Jim picked Adventure Game Studio. He presented an early version of “Baby Runs this Mofo,” his disturbingly realistic vision of flailing babies disrupting the very fabric of reality. He used actual photographs to simulate changes made in an ordinary living room by the baby protagonist – the baby touches a toy and a lamp across the room turns on, for example. Humanity can only cower in fear as each Artsy Games Incubator session reveals a strengthening of Jim’s baby’s horrible power.

Susan’s presentation began the way every presentation should, with delicious cupcakes. In keeping with Susan, these were Science Cupcakes, with melted chocolate somehow baked into the middle. We ate these improbable yet delicious cupcakes while she showed us her game (also a Game Maker creation). In this game you are a cupcake, and you bounce against various cookies, changing them into other desert items. This mechanic suggested some unique and interesting future gameplay. We talked about whether the final game should play like the old board game Mastermind(tm), which would see the player trying to bump the treats until the correct configuration was attained.

Finally, we talked about the new homework, which is to create three “levels” of the games we had started to build.

Then it was time to discuss more of our favourite indie games. Jim showed off Aquaria, a beautiful prize-winning underwater game with lovely art that reminded me of the PS2 game Odin Sphere. Jim and Patricio talked about the old favourite Samorost. I showed a video of the gorgeous, puzzling game by Q-Games called PixelJunk Eden.

Then, humbled by the independent games brilliance yet fortified by cupcakes, we headed back out into the frozen wastes of Toronto, some of us more steadily than others.

We began the AGI evening, or as Rosemary dubbed it, “cute baby night” with some of Calgary’s own Grasshopper beer and a smorgasbord of trail mix and chocolate covered goodies courtesy of Peter. Then we jumped right into Scratch to check out the games we modded based on the program’s pre-made examples.

First we played “Mouse Police” by Peter based on FishChomp (where a fish swims around eating smaller fish, with a chompy sound). In Peter’s version, you play his cat who runs around in a bed of long grass trying to catch mice, whose movements are unique to each mouse based on its algorithm. When you catch a mouse, and you have to catch it for a long enough time since it can still wriggle away just like a real mouse, you’re rewarded with a growing pool of blood while the kitty looks up at you proudly. The game also rewards you by keeping a running total of ‘kills’ within a 3 minute time limit. All this to a soundtrack of Jethro Tull’s “…And the Mouse Police Never Sleeps”.

Next up was Jim’s game, “Meconia”, based on Scratch’s Doodle (where a stick man moves past obstacles across a sheet of paper on lines drawn by you). In Jim’s game, the floating face of an adorable baby must make its way to an engorged, cartoon booby by traveling on meconium ((mi-koh-nee-uhm) n. A dark green fecal material that accumulates in the fetal intestines and is discharged at or near the time of birth) placed by you. But be careful – the baby can get stuck in the sticky, tar-like substance. The game has four levels with increasing difficulty. The first allows a clear path to your milky goal, but in the second you must avoid a spinning, knife-weilding, bloody teddy bear. In the third, you must avoid two killer teddy bears. In the third, a ninja star is added – an homage to our first assignment, N? The lullaby rendition of Radiohead’s ‘No Surprises’ plays in the background amidst baby coos and giggles.

Then we played Rosemary’s game, Squid, which was also based on FishChomp. But in her version, you play an artfully drawn, purple squid that must swim around and eat equally beautiful, golden fishies with a satisfying “chomp”. But beware! Some of these fishies are not what they seem! Some are actually the lappets of anglers and when they succeed in luring you in to eat them, their ghostly forms appear for one second with a chilling electronic sound bite. You’re rewarded with points per fish eaten, but lose points for eating ‘bad’ food. A dreamy, underwater soundscape accompanies your gastronomic glide.

My game, “Flu Season”, based on the Scratch game Trampoline (where a girl named Jodi jumps on a trampoline), was our final game to be played. In a background composed of microscopic extracellular space you play a virus which must bind to the receptor imbedded in a plasma membrane in order to infect the cell. You must rotate the virus until you get the right fit with the receptor, after which you’re automatically transported across the membrane. Your successful infection is rewarded with the program’s “Space Ripple” sound effect and the prospect of viral replication. A techno music loop accompanies this immune system nightmare.

Patricio couldn’t make it tonight, but promised to delight us next time with his Greenfoot modded game. Way to keep up with the AGI program on your own Patricio!

Our second piece of homework was to revise and post our N levels on NUMA. Jim, Patricio and I had posted our levels for the world of N to judge. Because I mentioned with mine that it was the first level I’ve ever designed, I received some encouraging feedback from the N community and got rated by five people (3/5!).

Our homework for next time was to revise and post our Scratch mods to the community and to spend time getting to know some other game making programs, such as Game Maker, Inform 7 and Adventure Game Studio. Thinking about the original games we want to make, we should create and import some sounds and graphics to be used in our game and get an interaction working in our tool of choice. See Session 4 on the assignment page for links and such.

Looking forward to interacting with all of you next week!

And morning came, and evening came, the second day. And Lo, right out of the gate this session rocked for four of the Chosen Five, who did dig right in with the drinking of beer and the snarfing of banana chips, not to mention the lacking of concern for their missing fifth member who, having inadvertently debarked from the wrong subway station — and who then, through no fault of his own, started walking the wrong way — and who was also, by the way, breaking in a new pair of work boots with the new “Belt-Sander Fit” that literally flayed the backs of his heels down to the fucking bone with each agonising Baptist step, and who was staggering heartbreakingly along Bloor, stabbing random numbers into his cell phone in the forlorn hope that nine of them would happen to form Jimsan’s home number before he died of hypothermia in the -25C wind chill—

But in the warm cozy hobbit-hole of Jim and Susan, all was comfy chairs and soft light and endless merriment. And when the Missing Fifth finally, heroically pulled himself up the stairs, dragging his ruined bloody legs behind him, the others barely noticed as he inserted himself into a corner and took stock.

Obviously these were replicants, bereft of human empathy. And they looked like this:

But they suspected nothing.

These then, were the levels of N that the Chosen Five had concocted (and which took, by the way, considerably longer to develop than the optimistic “two, two-and-a-half hours” that Jim had lulled us to sleep with the week before). Each of us could take three shots at completing each of the levels, which meant 15 attempts per player and 90 attempts total. If I remember correctly, one of us succeeded in completing a level. Once.

First came Rosemary’s “Evil Whale”, a kind of Haida-inspired “Fintastic Voyage” in which the ninja travels through the GI tract of the titular whale.

Note the attention to anatomical detail: the squirminess of the intestine, the allometry of the nasal sinuses (vital for the production of echolocation clicks, as first reported by Kellog back in 1964), the laser-beam eye that fries you whenever you get too close to your goal. The chain-gun drone, placed strategically just above the anal sphincter, was especially effective at turning any Gere-hamster-wannabes entering via that avenue into explosive diarrhoea. The only real fault with this entry was that it made some of the others look pretty lame in comparison. (Oh, and the fact that the whale only had teeth in the lower jaw, a feature peculiar to the sperm whales. But this is obviously an orca, or at least some kind of dolphin.)

Next up, Susan’s “B-Level” — another needlessly-stylish, almost artistic endeavour, deceptively simple once you twig to the fact that your ninja can, in fact, scale sheer walls of any height.

This also was a big hit. Its only real drawback was the physical impossibility of actually completing the level, since the only way to trigger the exit is to trap yourself in a cul-de-sac behind an approaching zap drone. On the plus side, your body makes many entertaining rag-doll flips and flops once crushed to a bloody pulp. The physics engine in this thing is really better than you might expect.

Third in line: “Pachinko Death”, a gravity-fed wood-chipper of a level courtesy of Patricio, and inspired by some kind of cultural artefact out of Japan. (Having seen “Iron Chef”, I find this last part easy to believe.)

To complete the level, one must trip the trigger directly below (and in direct line-of-sight of) a pair of satanic laser-shooting eyeballs. Fortunately said eyeballs tend to wander around after a while, although by that time your ninja has probably already fallen to ground level and will have a tough time getting back up. I think this may have been the level that someone beat, but I can’t swear to that since I was nearly passing out from blood loss by then.

Jim’s “Cattle Call” was a bitch and a half.

At first glance it looks about as challenging as a game of tic-tac-toe with a five-year-old (i.e., basically you punch out the five-year-old, and you win). These cows, unfortunately, hit back, and the only way to unlock the exit is to let them out of the cage they’re trapped in at the start of the run. Oh, and did I mention that even when you do unlock the exit, the exit doesn’t open? We’re pretty sure that Jim didn’t plan it that way, but he’s still trying to sell it as a feature not a bug.

Finally: “The Mel Lastman Memorial Rubbie Dodge”, by me. At first glance it looks inelegant next to the other entries, a haphazard mishmash of random shapes with neither the artistic gastrointestinal aesthetic of “Evil Whale” or the in-your-face “Saw-3” sadism of “Pachinko Death”.

In its defence, however, it has the deepest plot structure of the lot, and even a modicum of character development. Your ninja must navigate a warren of downtown buildings from the subway entrance to his place of work at City Hall, while avoiding panhandlers (who tend to hang around ATMs, and who kill you without remorse if you don’t give them change). (This is a game with a strong local flavour.) En route, you must pick up your morning coffee at a local Starbucks — and then, when you’re right at the front door of your destination, you discover you’re missing your key card and have to go all the way back to the subway to retrieve it. There is also motion-triggered vehicular traffic (the “thwumps”), who will grease their axles with your blood if you cross against the lights.

This level also came preloaded with the requisite glitch; while most panhandlers merely circle aimlessly, there’s always one who, the moment you make eye contact, locks on and tracks you like a T-100 on Sarah Connor’s ass. I had one of those, but it just kinda sat there.

“Rubbie Dodge” kind of killed the conversation. After everyone made the requisite failed attempts we all just sat there, shuffling our feet* and staring awkwardly at the empty banana-chip tub. Not a word was spoken for upwards of five minutes. Then Jim showed us a short documentary he had made with taxpayer’s money, focussing on the couple who had created N. They seemed cool. They had a silver tabby DSH. And I have to hand it to them: I’m used to getting lost in Half-Life and BioShock, but after having dicked around with N for a while, it’s far more addictive than it has any right to be. Things were starting to look up.

Then Jim ruined it all by giving us homework. Two pieces of homework.

The bigger piece consists of familiarizing ourselves with a rudimentary object-oriented sprite-driving app called “Scratch”, which is aimed at people who are, shall we say, somewhat younger than those who were assembled that evening. We will take a pre-existing game of our choice from the Scratch community and mod it into something more suited to our own tastes. Evidently there’s no end to the various attributes one can assign to these “sprites”. And you’d be amazed how many hi-res jpegs Google serves up when told to search for “bull testicles”.

The other homework assignment is to take our N levels and submit them for public critique by the fanatical online N community, which is, as Patricio already let slip, “harsh to the point of cruelty”.

Right. Like that’s going to happen.

* Those of us who still had working feet, I mean.

We started the session with introductions. Patricio Davila is a designer and interactive artist who’s made a simple game using Scratch about communication. Susan Bustos is a biochem phd candidate and musician who last made a game when she was a kid by typing in the code into her Tandy. Rosemary Mosco is a web comic artist who has done pixel art for games at TOJam. Peter Watts is a marine biologist and science-fiction novelist who coded games when he was young and also worked on the narrative for Relic Entertainment. Jim Munroe, the coordinator of the group, didn’t need to introduce himself as everyone in the group knew him, but for the record he has made two games, a text adventure called Punk Points and Space Invader.

Jim went on to read the founding principles of the group and invited discussion.

Then it was time for us to present what we’d come up with for assignment #1. Jim went first, attention hog that he is, and presented something he called:

The game has you playing as a baby in an activity saucer, except instead of doing nothing (besides, pff, stimulating development) the doohickys actually affect what’s happening in the room. Push the horn button, the light goes on. Twist the crank, the lady knits faster. Jim said that he intends it to be a kind of a toy-type game but thinks that it might be fun if the light makes the lady knit faster and knocks over the cup… a puzzle type of thing. Someone suggested that the goal of the game could be to get picked up by the lady.

Peter went next and described a narrative story type game where it begins with a suicide watched through a grainy videofeed. As the game progresses you learn why, and that you’re a kind of synthetic intelligence that can only perceive the world through security cameras, telephones, and other technology. Patricio suggested it might be fun if it was a live thing with actual actors playing out the scenes.

Rosemary showed a sketch of a top-down game where you play an albatross circumnavigating the arctic circle. You have to avoid fishing lines and keep well fed enough to find your mate. Since what inspired her to use the albatross was that she felt an emotional resonance with it, Jim suggested she check out Passage, a great one-person game that can be played in five minutes.

Susan showed us some slides for Viral Invasion, a game where you can play either a virus or an immune cell to either protect or attack a biological organism. She showed us some of the ways that the interactions could be dynamic and compelling-looking (she found the image below as an example) and mentioned that it could be a 2 player game as well. People said that it would be a fun way to learn and Peter mentioned that little boys would love to be a bad virus.

Patricio showed us a sketch for a game that would be played in 3D space in a gallery. There would be a paper mache model of the Andes mountains, and the game would be digitally projected onto the surface. As the player moved around the mountains collecting gold they would have to physically walk around the mountain model to see where they were going. He liked the idea of this required movement and even potential interactions with competitors. Peter brought up the idea that if the mache was instead fabric, projections could come from within the model rather than over top.

After we discussed all the game ideas, Jim gave a brief demo of the N level editor, which will be used in Assignment #2. He said he felt like the monotone guy in You Suck at Photoshop. Then we played Jon Mak’s Everyday Shooter. Soon after we broke for the night. Great first session!

Torontonian Matt Hammill has made a game called Gesundheit, a stylish puzzler that had me late for a party last week. Its got a naif art style and a booger flicking game mechanic that’ll appeal to the kid in ya. Despite its simplicity, there’s a lot of thought in the details: the sound and animation combine to make the monsters pretty scary when they’re on your tail.

The music and level design have a European flavour, which is weird but a nice change from the usual set of influences. Also of note is that it’s made with Adventure Game Studio, most commonly used for point & click adventure games which this game is not — neither is the recently released Art of the Theft, another mighty fine game made with AGS.

Montreal art game makers Kokoromi Collective put out a call for games made 256 pixels square and then threw a party. A great example of: constraint + time-based event = productivity. Download the games here, including TOJam‘s Jim McGinley’s Mondrian Provoked pictured below.

I was pretty excited when I heard about a Half-Life 2 mod set in Toronto. It actually tipped me into buying a new graphics card after having fried my old one a few months ago. Now that I’ve played it for an hour or so, I’m less excited. It’s really awesome that the George Brown students who made it completed it and got attention for it, and as an exercise I think it’s great: it’s hilarious to see the photorealistic shots of the subway and the bike rings. But I have two problems with it so far.

On the micro level: but the first time we hear the word Toronto — ostensibly from a native who greets you as you teleport in — he pronounces both Ts. We pronounce it “torawno”. Kind of a big thing.

On the macro level: What made Half-Life 2 great and distinct is that instead of a cookie-cutter North American city like a lot of shooters it’s set in a beautifully decaying European city. I love Toronto, but it’s a fairly boring city architecturally, so to make an visually interesting game here requires thinking beyond obvious landmarks. I’m all for people setting their work in their own regions, and God knows I got my share of attention for doing that with my first novel, but Mel Lastman Square and Dundas Square are just not interesting places. They are recognizable to locals, and thus people are flattered and pleased, but they don’t stand on their own as game environments. I got pretty bored with dying in Mel Lastman Square, and I grew up in North York for crissake.