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to Christopher Macker’s CSE380 Webpage!
Here is the Benchmark 1 Game Design Document and
storyboards:
Here are my ten favorite games. You will notice a little bit of a theme going on. I always liked playing games as the monsters, not the heroes:
Defense of the Ancients (DotA): A custom Mod for Warcraft 3 created by Icefrog and company (including me). This game plays more like an Action RPG than an RTS. I like that this is a heavily team based game with a lot of strategy and balanced asymmetrical play. There are currently 93 characters to play as and 107 different weapons to buy as those characters. Games are short and sweet, allowing a player to play a miniature PvP RPG in under and hour. Each team of 5 levels up their characters while attempting to kill off and stunt the growth of the enemy team. Eventually one team is able to siege the enemy’s home base and destroy their main structure, ending the game.
Warcraft 3: Blizzard made game I enjoy because of its deep level editor and mod content. When playing Warcraft 3, I always play as the undead. The competitive play of this game has not interested me as much as Starcraft and DotA, but without Warcraft 3 there would be no DotA.
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Starcraft: Blizzard made game that is completely awesome. The first game I ever played as aliens. Zerg is the only race I enjoy playing. I enjoyed its deep level editor and mod content before I met the more powerful Warcraft 3 level editor, but I still come back to it occasionally.
Left 4 Dead: Produced by Turtle Rock Studios and Valve. A FPS where you fight against or as zombies. I don’t get to play this one much due to college work and my other hobbies, but the gameplay is extremely fun.
Oddworld Series: Made by Oddworld Inhabitance, this game was beyond weird. It is a puzzle platformer where you must save your enslaved comrades by navigating a meat packing plant. By the way, you have the ability to mind control enemies, roll around like sonic the hedgehog, and fart.
Diablo 2: Blizzard made game, so obviously good. I am not as big of a fan as others, as I only ever beat the game as a necromancer. I really liked the storyline and the equipment used.
Heroes of Might and Magic 3-5: Made by 3DO and Ubisoft. An interesting turn based strategy game revolving around controlling fantasy themed armies and powerful magic wielding heroes. I always play as the Undead because necromancy is always awesome.
The Super Smash Brothers Series: Made by Nintendo, this game was pretty much the only game you could play with 3 random friends without leaving anyone in the dust. People of differing skill levels can still have fun.
Demon’s Crest: A really old Nintendo game created for the super Nintendo. This is a platformer where you play as a demon that has lost his powers by way of losing 5 of the 6 crests of power. All he has left is a broken crest of fire he must use to recover the rest and take over the world. This is the main inspiration for my current game project, Half Element.
Alien Versus Predator 2: Created by Fox Studios, this game set the mood for a lot of other games. I always played as the Aliens and usually died to people who took this game too seriously. I was around 11 at the time, so I can’t really blame myself for dying. I really liked that you can crawl around as a “facehugger” which instantly kills enemies it can latch onto.
End of Semester Game Reviews:
City Rain- Building Sustainability
The premise of City Rain is that it is a creative mix of both Tetris and Sim City. City Rain has an interesting concept overall, but not enough of the game was explained in the beginning and the game falls short of expectations. I played for a while, only to have my best buildings destroyed by “a tornado that resulted from global warming”. How was I supposed to know global warming played a role in a society where buildings come from the sky? You’d think if they had that form of engineering power they would have solved global warming a long time ago. Hints are ex post facto, allowing you to ruin your current game so that you have to start over with your newfound knowledge.
One of the goals in this game is getting a high score, so it seems counterproductive to inform players of dangers after they have already caused the damage. Landfills can be right next to rivers in reality because a 4ish foot thick layer of clay retains all the moisture from the landfill. Landfills should not be next to hospitals or schools however due to the high level of human activity. Global warming is not linked to an increase in tornados. Trash should not appear in the sky before I even know the game has landfills. Common sense should teach you how to play, like in both of the parent games.
It was not clear what I had to do to win the level. Aside from my little bars on the left, I had no real feedback on if what I was doing would give me a higher score or not. Only a few of the blocks were Tetris shaped, which limited you to merely picking the best buildings you could. The building types do not stand out enough to be picked up easily. This is supposed to be a mix of Tetris and Sim City, but it loses a lot of what made both games addictive. The game has random events, which harms the Tetris-style action, but doesn’t give you the sense of a thriving city, which hurts the Sim City feel. The game is a really great idea, but doesn’t have enough flare to keep you hooked. The attempt at making the game green informative is a nice touch. It is just that if the facts can’t be reliable, why include the green experience at all?
Osmos
A game of mass, inertia, and momentum, Osmos is very entertaining. Your ability to devour other motes of matter depends on your size, but you have to eject mass in order to move, which shrinks you. Objectives change from level to level, but the norm is to grow in size. This creates a challenge in later levels when you are trying to chase down a particularly evasive “scardy” globule.
This game really plays with your senses. The sound effects are quirky, but interesting. They sound very smooth and mesh with the rest of the game very seamlessly. I am a real fan of the music and background. Both make you feel like a small meaningless creature inside of an endless world. The graphics that make up the foodstuffs and obstacles glow in a very beautiful way. Size seems to stretch infinitely in both large and small dimensions due to the depth of detail in the art.
You can tell what blobs to approach based entirely on how they glow. A deep blue is safe to eat, a slight glow might hint that you might want to conserve mass to reach this glob or go for it later as you might be too small by the time you get to it, while red indicates a mass you should avoid. Globs involved with special objectives are given unique colors and react with their own interesting AI. The controls are intuitive for anyone with basic knowledge of physics, which makes for a very fun game. This game could potentially be used as an educational exercise for high school physics students learning about forces and momentum.
Overall the game is very impressive considering the release I played was merely an alpha version. I can’t imagine what the creators have in store for the remaining levels. I intend to play this again as later builds are released.
