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At GDC this year a “big” game called Gangs of GDC was running. Gamasutra has a postmortem (might need a free login). I’d like to do a big game sometime: urban capture the flag or something. The trick, as the postmortem mentions, is that if you want to use cell phones small clients really are not the way to go.

Most interesting to me was the mish-mash of technologies (Jabber, Asterisk, Java) they used to implement the game. The dissector mentioned, correctly, that RPS is the key mechanic of fighting games. Players at the conference thought the game’s implementation of RPS was slightly flawed, such that there was a dominant strategy (“roundhouse” won more than 1/3rd of the time). This, as always, might have been a nerd-perception bias though, as “roundhouse” was the awesomest move.

In other news I was thumbing through GD Mag today and it reminded me of the 2007 IGF Award Winner for Best Web Game, Samorost 2. I’ve been meaning to check it out since GDC, and here I go…

Written by Jack

May 1st, 2007 at 2:13 pm

Posted in Uncategorized

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8 Responses to 'Gangs of GDC'

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  1. And there’s always the less-great-but-still-good Samorost 1.

    Jack

    1 May 07 at 3:08 pm

  2. Amanita Design. Czech out their site for more games, sites, and animation.

    Jack

    1 May 07 at 3:14 pm

  3. Is this a joke?

    Some of the original ideas for the game involved players finding members of opposing teams via name tags and challenging them to a fight that would play out entirely on their cell-phones. While this had the advantage that the game could be played anywhere we felt that it might not provide the game with enough of a visible presence and that the potential social awkwardness of challenging random strangers could be barrier to people playing.

    It’s a conference. Surely someone is there to network? Techies are hopeless!

    Jared

    1 May 07 at 10:25 pm

  4. Is this also a joke?

    However, we were a little disappointed that we did not see much grouping and concerted team play.

    As far as I can tell, they made no real attempt at rewarding team play.

    What the hell was Jabber being used for? The Gamasutra article doesn’t explain what the front-end client is for.

    And how the hell do you screw up rock-paper-scissors?!

    Jared

    1 May 07 at 10:27 pm

  5. The players were grouped into teams, “gangs”, and you only won with your gang. The problem was that you didn’t need to play with them, just win.

    Jabber was somehow used to communicate between Asterisk and the Java displays. It was just a lightweight network protocol I think.

    You screw up rock-paper-scissors by using damage instead of victory:

    Rock versus Paper: 2 damage.
    Rock versus Scissors: 5 damage.
    Paper versus Scissors: 1 damage.
    Paper versus Rock: 4 damage.
    Scissors versus Rock: 1 damage.
    Scissors versus Paper: 4 damage.

    In a race to 10 damage, you would only ever pick Rock.

    Jack

    1 May 07 at 11:05 pm

  6. Assuming, of course, that no one knew that you were just picking rock.

    Jack

    1 May 07 at 11:08 pm

  7. [...] Jared on Monday, 2009-March-23rd at 2:08 pm Alex has mentioned a few times how rock-paper-scissors mechanics1 are key in game design. In a case of life following art, it [...]

    Rock-Paper-Sex | MentalPolyphonics

    23 Mar 09 at 2:08 pm

  8. [...] From the maker of the Samorost series comes Machinarium. [...]

    MentalPolyphonics » Machinarium

    8 Apr 10 at 10:50 am

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