Tim, it’s nice to see you have a blog. Did I just miss it in the past?

For now it’s way off the charts as far as things I’ve got the resources to put together. : (

http://www.gamemakergames.com/index.php?a=view&id=246

“If you’re looking for a surreal experience, try Johnny 2. Because of how carefully constructed yet chaotic things seem to be, I can’t help wondering whether some of the game’s “problems” might be intentional.”

I think if you were to give me a dime for every time I’ve said, “Man, it’s been awhile since I last read sbemails” I’d be at least 50 cents richer. At least!

Yes, there would be indicators. As I had mentioned, what if the ninjas or your own character could only pass through walls when you were temporarily invulnerable after getting hit? In old er games, usually getting hurt temporarily allowed you to move through enemies or hazards. Walking through walls in that temporary state was generally a bug. But if you can’t get hit by an enemy or get harmed by spikes, why not take the logical conclusion that you just can’t touch anything physical anymore?

As for your Pac-man example, suddenly teleporting would be a detriment, I would think. Of course, it might be interesting to try and make a Pac-man clone in which the ghosts could teleport suddenly without warning, but I digress. If the ghost blinked yellow and then teleported, that would be a game mechanic that has similar implementations in other games (an enemy doing something visibly different prior to doing a special action). On the other hand, if a ghost would randomly go through a wall upon touching it, flickering on the way there, it would look like a bug, but it would also change the way you anticipated a ghost’s actions. You couldn’t rely on the walls to protect you all of the time. Of course, a ghost flickering through walls would look mostly like a ghost going through walls, but ninjas? Clowns?

The point of the “buggy” game idea wouldn’t be to do random things without any warning. It would be more about making a game that has its own rules that might not always make sense if you were looking at it as an outsider. A long time ago, games were really abstract. These days, they look more realistic, or at the very least, less abstract. You could put a dot somewhere and it could be a basketball, a warp point, or a wall. Now, you would have an actual basketball, a warp point, or a wall, each with their own images. But why should the basketball, warp point, or wall actually represent what they look like they represent? Obviously to keep players from throwing their controllers (do any of them actually do that?), but what if it was made clear from the start that they are supposed to keep an open mind and not assume anything?

The point would be to do weird things with what you expect to happen. What if you could take down a wall, wrap it around yourself, and have it act as armor? Becoming a walking brick wall would be intimidating and weird. Cartoons would sometimes feature characters paint dark circles on walls, then dive into the “hole” they just created. Others pick up the hole, then throw it somewhere else, and then use it as a hole. It’s a cliche in cartoons, but why stop there? Pick up the phone, and reach into it to pull out a friend to help you fight. Or pick up the phone and find yourself holding a potent weapon.

How about using your voice as a weapon? Or as a tool? Your voice can echo, and each echo would help you get past an obstacle.

It’s all very weird, and maybe it would be similar to the adventure games of old. You usually had to guess the correct words to type in order to get the desired results.

THROW BABY INTO LAKE didn’t work, but PLACE BABY INTO LAKE would, for instance? PUT LAKE AROUND BABY would be even weirder.

Obviously it would be difficult to get right, of course. Usually when you have a tank, you can blow up other tanks or enemies, but somehow the walls on a building, no matter how crumbly they look, will stay standing? That makes no sense in the context of the real world, but it obviously works in a game. Well, what if you could not only destroy whole buildings but also parts of the environment? More realistic right? Well take that, turn it on its head, and now it is possible to shoot a shell into the air and tear a hole in the sky. After all, the sky was just a bitmap, and if you pretend it was a painter’s canvas, it makes sense that a tank shell would rip through it, right? The surprise would be in finding out that the sky isn’t a real sky but a flimsy canvas that just happens to look good.

Some things obviously wouldn’t work, but I don’t think it would be good to dismiss it just because “that’s not how it is done”. There are some good and solid gameplay techniques that have been tried and tested. No, purely random actions without any warning probably won’t result in fun. But who said you couldn’t do something unexpected with an ordinary object? Why do crates explode in some games? Why do they always have keys, ammo, and health? Why not actually have stuff you would put in crates? But exploding crates or crates with ammo are common enough that people expect it.

Well, what if a crate held a smaller crate? Or if it held Your Mom? Or an important note from the game creators? Or stuffed animals? Apples? Apples that moo? A person showering? Two beetles professing their love for one another? Two beetles fighting? An epic war between insects? What CAN’T you find in otherwise common, everyday crates?

Of course, at the moment, I think this is just a fun and creative exercise. How can you take common gameplay elements, twist them around, and make them funny? Wario Ware is a good example of a game that takes standard games and boils them down until you get the basic game mechnic or makes it slightly different enough to poke fun at it.

Players like consistency and predictability. Nobody wants things to be so predictable that they know exactly what’s going to happen before it happens – but they do want CONTROL so that they can “win” the game. Anything that violates what *appears* to be the rules of the game undermines their ability to control the game, and will make them blame the game instead of their own abilities on failure.

They will get frustrated and throw down their controller in disgust.

YOU are the ones presenting the rules of the game. If ninjas can walk through walls that nobody else can, it’s your job to define that rule for your player. Do they walk through the walls all the time? No? Then how is a player supposed to know they are about to take a shortcut through a wall. Do they pause and become blurry? Excellent. Now the player has a way of recognizing the rule being invoked, and won’t blame the game for “cheating” with a “bug.”

Just imagine playing a game of Pac-Man, one of the closest to “perfect” games out there (mainly because it was so focused on a single experience). How fun would the game be if the ghosts suddenly teleported with no warning to your location? Not at all. Now, if a ghost began glowing yellow on-screen, and you knew that this meant that in one second he’d teleport to your CURRENT location (meaning you had one second to get out of there), then this would be a reasonable design decision. It wouldn’t look like a bug. It would be reasonable to players. I doubt it would make Pac-Man a better game (more likely the opposite), but it wouldn’t break the player’s control.