Casual Games of Assembly

Originally this was going to be part of the same post as the one on Puzzles of Aesthetics: I started out talking about fashion games, in general. But I quickly realized that JoJo’s Fashion Show was one kind of game and all the other fashion games were something else entirely.

So this half of the post is about games like Vogue Tales, Dress Shop Hop, and — by extension — Cake Mania, Turbo Subs, Go Go Gourmet, and the astonishing Golden Hearts Juice Bar. (That’s not a good kind of astonishment.)

There’s not a lot of IF stuff in here at all, really, since the kind of challenge involved is almost entirely about speed, and wouldn’t translate well.

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Puzzles of Aesthetics

A few weeks ago, I complained about the casual game Home Sweet Home that it wasn’t a very entertaining game, being asked to decorate a house to client specifications. (I ragged even more on the “construction” part of the game, which manages to be easy and annoying at the same time, and to bear little or no resemblance to the real-life activity that it is supposed to be simulating.) Other people evidently liked the game more than I did.

Since then, though, I’ve been thinking about this question: how do you design a puzzle or goal-oriented interaction in which the player’s job is to make aesthetic judgments?

I’ve seen a number of different gestures towards this kind of puzzle in recent games.

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Vespers 3D Blog

Michael Rubin heads a project that’s intrigued me for a while: a 3D graphical version of Jason Devlin’s “Vespers”. While it allows the player to navigate a three-dimensional space, Rubin’s version still deals in some textual input and output, and it’s a bold experiment in the form.

If, like me, you find this project intriguing, you may want to follow Rubin’s blog, The Monk’s Brew, in which he talks about some of his design decisions and posts screenshots and project updates on the work in development.

A Plea to IF Authors (which I’ve probably made before)

It’s easier for interested third parties to promote your stuff outside the community (e.g., on indie game blogs) if your game has some cover art that can accompany the review/article. Screenshots of pure text are usable, but not as much fun, and it takes a little more time to set them up and crop them to be the right shape.

The cover art doesn’t have to be fancy, and it doesn’t have to have a picture. The title of the game in an appropriate font, with appropriate colors, still catches more attention than a) no picture or b) a screenshot of text.