- Freeware Game Pick: My Divorce (Brett Douville)
My Divorce is a take on Rod Humble's art game The Marriage, but from a different angle - namely, the divorce angle. Presented with abstract circles and squares, you must figure out for yourself what it means and what to do.
You begin the game by swiping down the middle of the screen. The blue cir...
- Jon Blow's The Witness Makes Secret Public Debut At PAX
If you didn't know that Jonathan Blow, creator of acclaimed XBLA puzzle platformer and IGF winner Braid, brought his next title, The Witness, to last weekend's Penny Arcade Expo, it's through no failing of your own -- its debut was unannounced, unmarked, and hidden at SpyParty/Monaco's booth.
Kot...
- The Psychology Of Games: Jam and Game Reviews
[Continuing his regular GameSetWatch column, psychologist and gamer Jamie Madigan examines how research on jam reviews, of all things, might have surprising lessons for video game reviews.]
For every one of us, making decisions is part of hour daily human existence. Most of them are of little conse...
- level design lesson: miss and hit
let’s talk about player psychology: predicting what the player is going to do and then designing around that. catacomb abyss, a 1992 first-person shooter by gamer’s edge (the sequel to the earlier catacomb-3d by the id bunch), displays a fairly keen sense of design intuition.
the very first cha...
- Free Love Weekend
No, nothing like that. It’s Eskil opening up his minimally-multiplayer shooting and building game, Love, to everyone, just for this coming weekend. Being co-op down to its procedurally generated soul, it’s a game that is best played with chums, so why don’t we get on there and have a RPS love...
- COLUMN: @Play: Introducing Mayflight - Using Roguelike Design Lessons in a Non-Roguelike
['@ Play' is a monthly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre. This time, John uses this column to introduce his first-ever game project, Mayflight, which uses Roguelike concepts in a platform game.]
NOTE: I've fixed a few bug...
- 32 Finalists Announced For IndieCade 2010
Organizers for IndieCade, an annual international festival devoted to independent games, has revealed 32 finalists for its awards, including titles like Limbo and VVVVVV.
Now in its fourth year, the IndieCade festival aims to provide exhibitions, conferences, and curated attractions that "encourage...
- Defying Design: I Have No Mouth and I Must Save the World
['Defying Design' is a bi-weekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Jeffrey Matulef analyzing gaming conventions and the pros and cons of breaking them. This week's column is about silent protagonists done right.]
"It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open one's mouth and rem...
- A Probabilistic Multi-Pass Level Generator
I recently participated in the CIG 2010 Mario level generation competition. My submission utilizes a multi-pass approach to level generation in which the system iterates through the level several times, placing different types of objects during each pass. During each pass through the level, a subset...
- Experimental Gameplay Project's Forty 0-Button Games
Earlier this week, we mentioned the Experimental Gameplay Project's "Zero Button" challenge when we featured Nicolai Troshinsky's excellent UFO On Tape, but now organizers have posted all 40 submissions from the monthly competition for you to play for free.
Though there are a few titles that brok...