Recommended reading on Gamasutra about games for social networking sites. From the designers point-of-view:

Part of the draw of games on social networks is that their asynchronous nature is highly inclusive. Friends on completely different schedules still have a sense of playing together, and essentially groups can participate just by showing up:

The average user belongs to more than one social networking site, but devotes the majority of time to only one. As such, users have different participatory rates, logging in to one social network every day, another every once in a while, and yet another, only if an e-mail beckons the user to come back.

These different participatory rates translate into different play patterns. Some players have limited time and need a game that can be played quickly whereas others are willing to spend hours on a game. In fact, depending on the day or the social networking site selected, the same user may exhibit different play patterns.

Read on the whole feature.

Glum Buster is a strange jewel. You will need a little time and patience to explore the world of this game. It is even hard to describe, what type of game it is. It contains elements of many different kinds of games: puzzle, adventure and a little shooting. Game-elements are crafted carefully, leaving a path of strangeness behind. One possible comparison would be eventually Leisure Suit Larry or the other old games from Sierra, because the overall goal of the game is to collect xxx of 275 points. The rest is up to you.

The game “Glum Buster” also seem to have a little bit of an interesting history. It took four years in the making. The developer Justin Leingang (aka CosMind) was only involved in a little community, foremost the EO-community, that always release extremely interesting indie-titles. About the game Justin says, that it is “a collection of my constant, thick-as-brick daydreams”. Can be simple as that. In an interview with GameSetWatch he said something really, really interesting:

“Glum Buster was primarily inspired by the initial play mechanics of the prototype that I built. From there, bizarre as it may sound, it was continually inspired by itself. I was constantly fueled by the development of each component – be it play mechanics and dynamics, graphics, sound effects, functionality, etc. As a result, inspiration begat inspiration. It was a pretty gratifying reciprocal process, really.”

Sounds cool, huh? Let’s check out the game. Head over to the Glum Buster website.

Today I found something really interesting. It looks esoteric, but the hack should work (although I haven’t tested it myself). If you use a floppy-disk for recording and replaying audio, you will get an “floppydisk-reverb-effect”. Interesting things. You can look at the webpage of FatManAndCircuitGirl for more esoteric, creative technology hacks. (via)

Now this is a hard one. Because is it so radical. Nintendo continues with its most radical game design so far – the Wario Ware (please correct me on that one, if you know it better). It is a collection of mini, or better micro-games, that loosely connect into one big play. Or better playability.

The next thing, that can be seen on the horizon already, is WarioWare: Made in Ore. The game will be basically the same as Wario Ware, but multiplied with one more measure of new radical creation of content. Because, the user will be able to add own mini-games to the Wario Ware channel. The microgames can be created and customized with the Nintendo hardware and the editors, that come along. Nintendo is planning make some sort of online-shop named “Game Shop Ninte” available, where you can upload own levels, as well as download, share and remix things other users made. Also the best levels of the month should be picked. Now say what?

Enough theory. Here is some evidence.

Absolutely at the roots of Super Mario, with that spacial dash of microgames.

Create graphics and basic animations

Create “Cart Art”

More videos of this i.e. at Offworld.

The Pragmatic Bookshelf is about to release a new book with the name “The Passionate Programmer” by Chad Fowler. It may be not as inspiring as the masterpiece “The Pragmatic Programmer“, but a perfect read for entry-level programmer and people new to lean, agile and pragmatic thinking. I highly suggest the reading of this demo-chapter (pdf), about “incremental development”: Just be a little bit better, than yesterday. From the chapter:

“You also need to be happy with small amounts of “better”. Writing one more test than you did yesterday is enough to get you closer to the goal of “being better about unit testing”. If you’re starting at zero, one additional test per day is a sustainable rate, and by the time you can no longer do better than yesterday, you’ll find that you’re now “better about unit testing” and you don’t need to keep making the same improvements. If, on the other hand, you decided to go from zero to 50 tests on the first day of your improvement plan, the first day would be hard, and the second day probably wouldn’t happen. So make your improvements small and incremental but daily. Small improvements also decrease the cost of failure. If you miss a day, you have a new baseline for tomorrow.”

E-book download is already available for purchase. The printed version will be shipped around the 10th of May 2009.

The Webzine Gamasutra released a great article on “what makes a game sticky and persuasive”. A recommended read for anyone making games. There is always time to think about this issues, and always new things to explore. One thing for example is this. Try to reach: “Familiarity, not Simplicity!”

Pacman physics is a Pacman remake. Or better a deconstruction of the game. If we already talk of “games as art“, there could be nothing better than this game, to show some aspects, that are at least important to me.

Pacman Physics short after start of the game.

A Korean developer made this fun version of Pacman. He applied all static elements of the regular Pacman game with gravity. That means, that walls, pellets, ghosts and pacman itself will fall to the ground. The ghosts are still chasing pacman. Pacman still have to collect all pellets. One difference was made with the wonderpills. The do not make the ghosts eatable, but changes the direction of gravity. Good, that’s for the concepts. But… what about gameplay? What about fun?

I think that is the biggest drawback in the game. The concept, design and implementation is quite good. The result you will definitely consider as art. But for my very taste, art games also have to be fun at playing. That is what gaming is about, isn’t it? What do I need a game, that is fun to look at, but does not have a replay value? I think this is a new, if not the new area, that art has to come for. To get into. Just besides pixelling retro-characters on walls or paintings. But… to give respect to the developer: Pacman Physics was made on one day, so everything is fine in the end.

Try it out: Download Pacman Physics

Unless you like to fiddle with this Korean website, until you find the green download-link, you better take on with that mirror-file of Pacman Physics.

(via Indiegames)