Some more images from the game in progress, showing gameplay power-ups. The winged sandal speeds up play, but gives a score bonus; the staff of Hermes arranges the letters in a sorted pattern, making them easier to use; the Gorgon’s head just freezes them all in place, which is also useful, though less good than the sorting.
(Some game design notes from mid-project, in case anyone is interested, and for my own future reference.)
Did a bunch more work on my Greek teaching game the last couple of days. (No new screenshots, though — most of the changes have been improvements to the complexity of gameplay, but not visible in a shot.)
I’m sure my ActionScript is annoyingly naive and that I will hate it once I’ve done a few more projects. I’m so used to Inform, and being able to envision exactly what I need to write before I start typing anything, that it’s novel to go back to a context where I have to laboriously piece out how to do something, figuring out each step in turn. (Well, it could be worse. There are a lot of basic universal programming concepts that don’t have to be figured out from scratch.)
At the same time, it’s awesome finally to be able to construct my own Flash game. I’ve played so many of these things over the years that it’s like I’ve been mutely listening to a language and am now finally able to try speaking it back.
I’m still futzing with the gameplay.
…from an in-progress Flash game designed to teach Greek vowel contractions. It’s a bit of a break from my usual thing, but I’m having a good time learning some Actionscript. It’s also a lot of fun designing game mechanics around an existing thing I want to teach, rather than a system invented for the game.
It has a long way to go yet in terms of polish — I wanted to get the gameplay in place before I started going crazy with the art, for instance — and I’ll need to test the levels with students to make sure that the progression makes sense.
On Fatale, a treatment of Oscar Wilde’s play Salome.
TIGSource is running a game contest in two parts: participants in the first part submit music and art assets, which participants in the second part can then incorporate into whatever kind of game they can imagine.
…is on “The Path” by Tale of Tales. This is a weird, brilliant, frustrating, sometimes dull, sometimes terrifying, sometimes incoherent piece of work, and it’s already been written about by a number of other people (I link some other reviews from the beginning of the column). But Tale of Tales is doing some of the most interesting boundary-pushing work out there on interactive storytelling. (I also have a discussion of their shorter, more recent Fatale coming up.)
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 