My Games Design

At the beginning of the month CHI Play took place in London, and I think I've just about recovered :-) The papers should be accessible to the public for a whole year from here so make sure to check them out. Anna Cox and Paul Cairns chaired the conference, while I served as local arrangements chair - while there were probably a few challenging moments along the way, it was all worth it in the end. I also learnt an awful lot and promise to never take conference organisation for granted again! The conference kicked off the workshops on Sunday, where I helped run " The false dichotomy between positive and negative affect in gameplay ", co-organised with Max Birk , Regan Mandryk and Dan Johnson . The workshop came out a discussion we had earlier in the year at CHI2015 about the lack of nuance around the concept of negative affect within gameplay experiences. We had a great mix of participants and some intense discussions about why we engage in gameplay we don't alway...

So, as I sometimes peruse various forums, the occasional gem pops up. This is one of the best hidden gems in Open Source gaming. Anticube 2 is a map for Tesseract / Cube 2 that is inspired by the game Antichamber and NaissanceE . If you are unfamiliar with those, that means it is an abstract FPS puzzle game where things are not quite what they seem. Or, as the creator Lord Kv probably better explains: Anticube 2 is a puzzle map for Tesseract. You'll find yourself in an interactive, dynamic, non-euclidean world. Supported by 5000+ lines of Cubescript and GLSL code, this map will do things no other Cube 2 / Tesseract map has ever done before. Here is the trailer: There is also a gallery of screenshots for you to check out. I won't include them here because, to be honest, the screenshots won't mean much for this kind of game. I'm calling it a game, even though it is just a map for a game. You can tell it is worth checking out because of the reactions it elicits from...

Great news for people who like GGGGames ;) The author of the new action roguelike dungeon crawler kind of darwen mayham game Gorynlich was so kind to inform us his game. It comes with this funny trailer (and some great programmer's art :p ): The code is licensed under the LGPL, while the assets are only freeware right now. But the author seems to be open to look into replacing the assets with Creative Commons licensed ones if someone is interested in doing so. Gorynlich is done by the same author as the ASCII game Goblin Hack by the way. Another nice game starting with G, is the awesome remake of the oldie Megalomania, appropriately called Gigalomania ! The author is still looking for improved art asset contributions, but the game itself is already quite playable (even on mobile devices and a bunch of other rare systems!). Also check out the other two cool games by the same developer: Erebus RPG and Conquests (a Civ like game) .