mtbdesignworks

However, the real improvement (which can’t be shown in screenshots) is what it looks like in motion while switching dimensions! And other amazing things not shown in this level which I can’t talk about yet!

PAX East went very well. The vast majority of players seemed to just blaze through the introductory levels, and while I was expecting something like that from previous playtests, having hundreds of people play the game over the course of three days certainly gives enough data to be sure. Even then, I was still making tweaks to the game every day, sometimes on my laptop during the show itself!

Notably, Stephen Totilo of Kotaku came by to capture some new footage and discuss the game. Here’s the link to the video.

Sixteen Indie game studios have combined forces at PAX East forming the Indie MEGABOOTH. Twenty games will be packed in one massive central location, and Miegakure is one of them.

I’m really excited to see people’s reaction to the game. The last playtests we did (including at PAX West for a few hours) went very well, and in the mean time I have made the game more “realistic” in the sense that some of the objects in the game (like trees) were being displayed in a way that was inconsistent with the rest of the game.

It’s really important to me that the game be as consistent as possible, even if it’s just a cosmetic change, as I think it helps players subconsciously develop a better understanding of the rules of the game.

Your conscious mind might not know what a four-dimensional world is supposed to look like, but it can somehow “feel” things, and after the change I made it just feels better. Plus it looks awesome. So we will see how that goes.

See you in Boston at Booth #772!

Jonathan Blow and I gave a talk at Indiecade this October. I talk about the design philosophy of Miegakure and reveal a bit more about it in the process (for a change).

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Here’s the summary:

Any system of interactivity can of course be explored: If X happens, what are the consequences? What are all the ways in which pattern Y expresses itself, and to what do those expressions lead? By inspecting the structure of a system in this way, we can find the core ideas of the system, and see how those ideas illustrate fundamental truths of our universe. We present a game design aesthetic that values looking for systems that express these truths in the cleanest possible way. We explain how this is different from more-traditional combinatoric design techniques; we show examples from our games and describe a method for applying the aesthetic in general.

For those of you who came upon this wobsite from xkcd and might not know who Jon is, he is a very intellectual and talented designer, and maker of the indie hit Braid and currently of The Witness. His games also involve revealing interesting aspects of reality, in the case of Braid by allowing the player to rewind time at will. So we have a lot in common and we tried to integrate our viewpoints together in the talk.

Here’s a link to the Indiecade page, on which there’s also a presentation by Richard LeMarchand, and more to come.

Thanks very much to Ida C. Benedetto for recording the talk!

I also did a followup interview for DIYGamer.