One of the achievements this year was to build a game using aggregated data. After Friday’s video keynote and kickoff meeting, the first idea I pitched was a trading card game where the deck is built from the list of people you follow on twitter. While that game didn’t gain enough traction to win a team, other jammers did grab on to the idea of twitter integration. My friend Ryan came up with a pitch of his own, and a platformer originally pitched as TwitAssassin came to life as @TwitApocalypse!

TwitApocalypse has a pretty silly premise: You are the grim reaper, and you have overslept the end of the world. Upon waking, you must use twitter to find and eliminate the survivors. Based on the idea of culling the people you don’t care about from your twitter list, the goal of the game is to traverse a platformer level and gruesomely destroy your friends. The game tracks who has tweeted most recently, and gives you a ‘Kill List’ of recent tweeters—These are your priority targets, and you get a bonus for taking them out. Killing somebody not on your list results in a penalty.

We had an awesome group of people working on this project: Ryan Kahn, Darius Kazemi and Imran Malek handled the programming; Shervin Ghaemmaghami served as our voice actor and narrative designer; Vytenis Krukonis and I took care of the art; and audio genius Akash Thakkar came on mid-Saturday to help us with sound and music. It was a great group, and I hope to continue working with this team on future projects.

Just as last year gave me an opportunity to stretch my musical skills, this game jam saw me doing my first ever pixel art animations. While previous projects had involved some pixel art, I’d never tackled anything as complex as our grim reaper player character. Despite my lack of experience I am extremely happy with how it turned out, and I will post an animation demo of the character soon. In the meantime, you can check out some of @Death’s poses there to the left.

During SOS last weekend I opened up my space at the Little House gallery, located off Summer street between Union Square and Davis Square. As I build a gallery page to display the work I exhibited, I thought I would share a panorama of the studio space I share with Emily Garfield. More thoughts and another photo after the jump.

Although it got a little warm on Sunday, it’s a great space. I’m much more productive while working there—in no small measure due to the lack of internet, I am sure! As an added bonus, we share the studio with Joe Keinberger, one of my local artistic heroes.

The other side of the room:

However engaging a movie or a painting can be, it doesn’t depend on interaction. Though Sands defends himself from accusations of Chess snobbery, it is reasonably accepted that Chess is one of the most perfect games ever invented. A child can learn it, but a lifetime can be spent in search of mastery—no video game is so finely balanced. Chess is the standard to which games should be held, not a narrative, cinematic experience like “Citizen Kane.” I don’t mean to fall into the Narratology vs Ludology war, I just believe we should celebrate games for those elements that make them unique—and which make them last. Smith points out that cinematic experiences are technology-dependent:

Cinematic experiences in games last only as long as the makeup and technology hold. I may love Wing Commander IV for what it accomplished at the time, but do I really want to go back and play it still? Does the game itself actually hold up?

I began writing a post to this effect recently after I revisited some of my favorite games of the mid ’90s. I still enjoyed them, but the low-res textures and blocky models stand out more in comparison to modern titles. Some graphics hold up better than others (the Myst series comes to mind), but with my eyes jaded by current-gen titles it was much easier to see which games truly shined as games, with interesting mechanics and complex dynamics outlasting stunning cut-scenes. Thank you to Mr. Sands for deftly articulating what I was thinking when I returned to games like Jedi Knight or Half-Life:

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having a broad spectrum of games that approach the medium from countless angles. That’s part of the flexibility of the platform, and a concept I champion, but I also think we lose too much time trying to be something [cinematic masterpieces] we are not….

In the long run, it has always been the games that unapologetically embraced the idea of truly being a game that seemed to last. Maybe that tells us something.

Well said.

*“Artistic Acceptance” here seems to be defined as “A pat on the back from Roger Ebert,” which is a whole different can of worms.

The last year was great, but whether 3D animation, games, wire sculptures, or pastels, I haven’t made nearly enough. It’s even been about four months since I’ve done any significant damage to my sketchbook. This had to change.

Step One was to reboot this blog. Welcome to Version… 3.0, I suppose, measuring from complete homepage re-designs. All my blogs have been consolidated, all the old content is down, and it is time to start fresh. I’ve chosen to adapt Khoi Vinh’s Basic Maths theme, a clean design with lots of room to grow and a license conducive to installing my own modifications down the road.

Step two was to sign up for Somerville Open Studios, a great event in my town where artists all over Somerville throw open their studio doors for a two-day art sale. While at present I have neither a studio nor a standing body of work, I have three months and a lot of inspiration, so see you at the SOS community space at The Armory on May 1^st.

Step Three was to sign up for the Global Game Jam, a topic I will discuss more towards the end of the month.

I think it’s going to be a good year.