Tag Archives: sploder

Games Research

Game Making Tools Round Up

7 Comments

Games are about two things: agency and empathy.

Games are made up of systems of rules or constraints and particular goals. When a player explores these systems, they make meaning from the relationship that emerges out of their actions with the possibility space of the game systems. When they start to understand the systems, they gain agency–the ability to make decisions and affect change.

Games are also made up of stories. A designer has a particular story or experience they wish to convey, and a player has a particular history with a game that can be retold and shared. This sharing of experiences, like good books, are the surest way I know towards building empathy.

All this is to say, we ought to encourage gaming literacy with a focus on building these two things. And not just encourage playing games in a critical, reflective way, but also encourage all people to make games and tell their stories.

Luckily, there’s a ton of free game-making tools out there that are easy to use, many of them requiring no programming experience and some of them not even requiring art. It’s often assumed that making games is about the programming and art, but I believe the true power of learning game design is in learning how to plan and design relationships and experiences.

So, here’s a round up of some free tools that anyone can jump right into using. You could try them out over a weekend, during a game jam, or whenever you have free time!

Continue reading Game Making Tools Round Up →

Art, Games, Games Research

#GameAWeek Challenge: Sploder Trifecta – sHMUP bLUFF, Friends Ignore You, and Using Friends

1 Comment

Sploder is nominally a web-based game-making tool, but, actually, it’s more a collection of tools that make different yet somehow all sort of same-ish platform games. I think either different developers made different tools and then one person bundled them together or one developer kept starting and stopping projects and decided to release all of them instead of making one really good tool. They all sort of are meh with inconsistent creation metaphors, inconsistent levels of in-tool help, etc. It’s all sot of haphazard, and it’s hard to recommend Sploder over something like Construct 2 or GameMaker Studio. I basically wrote this in a review for Graphite (not yet published), too.

Continue reading #GameAWeek Challenge: Sploder Trifecta – sHMUP bLUFF, Friends Ignore You, and Using Friends →

Art, Games, Games Research

#GameAWeek (Month) Challenge: sHMUP bLUFF

3 Comments

I’m reviewing Sploder for Graphite.

It’s a web-based game-making tool meant for kids and classrooms. Everything is driven through the web interface and there’s no programming involved. There’s also tons of pre-built sprites with animations and pre-defined behaviors (friendly NPCs, enemy AI, etc.).

The first thing I noticed about Sploder is that when you create a game, you have the option of creating a specific kind of game: a platformer, a puzzler, a top-down shooter, etc., and each of these choices gets you to a particular interface specifically for making that type of game.

And this made me want to try to push Sploder as much as possible, to create games within particular genres that break the genre. For example, what if we (Sandra and I) made a shooter game where the enemy aren’t trying to kill you and instead actually heal you or something?

In trying this out, I discovered that all you do in Sploder is drag and drop art onto a stage. Each object has behavior associated with it that cannot be tweaked. You can’t, for example, change how often and for how much damage a particular enemy ship shoots. You can’t change its speed or anything…

So, I played around with it a bit and came up with the game sHMUP bLUFF, where you are meant NOT to do anything other than watch. But Sploder still has built-in controls, so you could take control of your ship whenever you want. So the game is an exercise in trust… trusting that your wingman is there for you and will protect you. And maybe it’ll succeed and maybe it won’t. And if you take control of your ship, do you break that trust?

And I sort of saw this as a metaphor for living with a loved one who suffers from depression. The player ship is the person who suffers from depression and sometimes just can’t bring themselves to do anything… The wingman is a friend or family member who is trying to protect. (But perhaps this is the wrong metaphor… like often there’s just nothing anyone can do, really… there’s no “fixing” or solving the problems of depression… there’s only coping, so I don’t know how good a metaphor this game is, really, but there you have it… what it can sometimes feel like.)

sHMUP bLUFF

In other news, Ana and Dennis are still making games regularly!

Most recently, Ana made a game about moving called Mover, based sort of on her previous game Paper Pusher. (Grats on the new *house Ana!)

Dennis continues his trend of making small Unity games. Check out Mental Block and Hello, Universe!

And in other other news, we got a session accepted at NASAGA on our Game A Week Challenge!