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http://www.closuregame.com/blog/

DEVELOPMENT IS GOING WELL!

EDIT:
NO THE FLATHEAD IS NOT THE FINAL CHARACTER ITS JUST A PLACEHOLDER i'M USING TILL I GET THE REAL ART

(come on people use some common sense)

http://www.closuregame.com/

http://www.closuregame.com/moths.swf

http://closuregame.com/closureHD.png

UPDATE:

guest star?
http://spamtheweb.com/ul/upload/210409 /79379_Picture_28.png

probably not

UPDATE 2:
http://www.closuregame.com/ClosureCpp.
swf

Whatever could this be??

GDC is this week.

If you're going you should go to this:
https://www.cmpevents.com/GD09/a.asp?o ption=C&V=11&SessID=8994

This will be my first time speaking in public

March 22nd: Flash Gaming Summit
Aether is up for an award
http://www.flashgamingsummit.com/the-m ochis.html
Please vote for it!

I will be attending so I'll finally get to meet YOU PEOPLE who I've always considered just null-terminated strings transmitted through the internet.

March 23-29: Game Developers Conference
I'm gonna be here too. I'm giving a small presentation, more details on that to come.

If you haven't played my most recent project, Closure, I strongly recommend that you go play it. This is the 3rd article I'm writing about the game, and it is on the subject of how to communicate fear.

Now, near the end of Closure's development cycle I started to show the finished product to more people. I had purposely made the game to have a creepy atmosphere, however I wasn't really trying to make a frightening game, just creepy. There's a difference here, in that "creepy" generally relates to a mood and an environment, while "frightening" manifests itself into conscious fear. Yet, some people playing my game said they freaked out at parts, or jumped, or on the edge of their seats- all effects of someone being truly scared rather than just creeped out.

Thinking about why this happened was an interesting experience too. It's a side effect of the mood we created in the game, not necessarily a conscious design choice. I thought about what other games and movies did to try to frighten people. Zombies, gore, screaming, lightning, shape shifting backgrounds, surprises, and somewhat random, loud noises. This stuff doesn't really effect me though. I don't know too many people who are scared of zombies anymore, and people learn to expect what's coming to them in a horror game, therefore you end up with a lot of people disappointed that the game didn't really cause them to be frightened, because their own mind imagined something much worse than the games actually had.

And herein lies the difference between the games that try to be frightening and the games that actually are frightening. Games that try to be frightening try too hard. They do all they can to spell out what people are to be afraid of, through the use of gore, zombies, screaming, and dialog. There's no room for imagination. "I wonder what's going to be around this corner... oh just another screaming zombie *blam* ok he's dead." That's not frightening, that's startling. People often confuse the two because often times fear can cause you to be startled over simple things.

My game, however (and I'm not saying that this is unique to my game or anything) leaves a lot open to interpretation. In addition, nothing eventful happens in my game. There's nothing to be afraid of if you look at it logically- no enemies, no consequence of death. All fear people feel is purely psychological, just like most real fears. People come into the game expecting the type of horror they're used to seeing, and when there is none their minds start imagining it for them. People jump because they think a bush is some demon, they keep thinking something could be following them, they fear something jumping out of the darkness to "get them". Yet none of this happens, and the longer it goes on not happening, the more the mind fears what could happen.

Not everyone gets scared, however the beauty in this is that if they aren't, they won't complain about it "not being scary" because that isn't the main point. I'd rather have a few people be genuinely freaked out than a lot of people complaining that it doesn't do it for them.

In terms of portraying emotions in a game, fear is probably one of the hardest to get right because everyone's been desensitized to gore and screaming. Sadness is probably the easiest, which is why you see so many artsy things have a sad and depressing story to them. Speaking of sad games, Aether was nominated for a Mochi award. I will be there, so wish me luck and good luck to everyone else nominated!

If you haven't played my most recent project, Closure, I strongly recommend that you go play it. This is the 2nd article I'm writing about the game, and it is on the subject of story and art games.

Now, the last console game I really played was Braid last august. It was great and changed the way I looked at games as a medium, and I wanted to create a game that manages to have a really interesting, well developed story and fun gameplay that can stand out on its own, but also provides a metaphor for overarching storyline ("art game" for lack of a better term). Luckily for me, like a week after I was done playing Braid, Edmund McMillen approached me and we began working on Aether. It was fun to work on a game that has meaning to it, and that combined with the influence of Braid sorta stuck me in the mood to make another "art game", of my design this time.

In the beginning of the development of Closure, I had planned to have a large focus on its story, and a lot of text and hidden text all over the place to tell it. I had notes written down for exactly what I would tell the player, what would be left open to interpretation, what the literal level of the story is and what the metaphorical layer of the story is. There was a lot of planning here, and a lot going on in my head about what it could become.

Yet, as the game developed itself, the gameplay aspect of it was emerging to be much more compelling than I originally thought it would be. The graphics and the loneliness of the game really began to set a very interesting mood, one a very fragile mood that could have easily been broken by the wrong text or content. Also, I stopped trying to make the level design fit the story, because I didn't want to impose unnecessary limitations on my designs.

Then it came time for me to write dialog for the game. The levels were done, and they were in the process of being decorated with environment stuff. As I tried to write dialog, I realized that I just can't do that. A couple of the dialog lines fit with the mood and the story and remain mysterious, but the vast majority were bad in one way or another. I scrapped it all, and write 10 short lines (in addition to tutorial stuff) to hide in the levels (and there they remain). They play out, if you read them all at once, like a very short conversation. Each line stands out on its own, while remaining part of the short conversation. This scattered text fit the game a lot better than a lot of cheesy text, and I think in the end, keeping the text to a minimum worked a lot better in this game than trying to go with my original plans.

The main story is still there, just told in a much different way, one that doesn't kill the mysterious, creepy mood that emerged during development. I've seen my fair share of games that try too hard to be "arty" that they lose track of the fact that they could have been a great game if they focused on the mechanic instead of the story. As you realize how interesting the gameplay mechanic is, the focus needs to shift from telling a compelling story to making a compelling game.

P.S. Thanks for the monthly 2nd Newgrounds!