Early Access: Story Beats Part 2
Added 2016-03-15 04:26:14 +0000 UTCHey team,
My time, it's almost 12:30am. I'm really hoping this plan of mine, doing a Story Beats every week in March, isn't going to always involve a 10-14 hour crunch on Mondays. But, at any rate, the new video is done for you. This is the same version that will go public tomorrow (er... later today? Wednesday? when am I launching this thing?). This video is about Limbo and its unsettling use of game feel. It was fascinating watching this go from a ruddy mess into something I'm pretty OK with today. I guess that's one upside of working a long day.
Cheers,
-I
Comments
I *may* have played it for a hot minute at PAX East? Maybe not. I remember the trailers looking super slick but I feel like it just dropped off the radar after it came out. Work checking out, hm?
Ian Danskin
2016-03-17 00:50:30 +0000 UTCIan, have you played 140? It shares a developer with Limbo, and it was produced at the same time as it. It many, many ways, it's a deliberate inversion of Limbo's ideas, but a lot of the same ideas about game feel still come through. Juxtaposing the two games is pretty fascinating.
Chris Larkee
2016-03-15 17:32:01 +0000 UTCI really appreciate your doing long form takes on contemporary games of note. Mainly because I am interested in these games, however as a busy person, I do not have time to sit down with them. Mind you I would if I could easily do so, and just see if they pulled me in. However unfortunately this medium, while it may be second class still, it is long, long past the point where it should've grown into a more practical delivery model. So I can hardly make time for it. If I could tune into the Limbo channel without any commitment (or money down) and see if it could grab/hold me, I probably would, even though the package is not the kind of thing I usually go in for. This feels like a "let's play" for people on a realistic time budget, with just the highlights for the intelligentsia set. Bravo. PS: I don't know if it's physically practical, but as a designer who hews toward the DualShock input model. If I had one wish, I wish the damn thumbsticks could push back or offer some kind of resistance, or even just lock in, so their movement is constrained. I do body "games" mainly. You could call them walking-simulator. I love this term. But I mean it in the sense that every sensation of movement is handled very delicately, at least 50 times more richly than even the biggest budget action-adventure titles do: full range of movement, basically everything you need to travel on peoploid legs to anywhere you can see/want to go to, as if you are in a real world, unconstrained. So when you move through environments this way, you are not like a ghostly 3D cursor. Your body presses up against things, you hug walls, and lean out over things, and things sometimes lean into you. Via the movement you can get a sense of what is happening behind you, if in "first-person" view, however you are translating visual cues into tactile cues. If only those little sticks could stand firm, like the wall you are backing up against, or react forcefully would be even better. For games where you wack things with sticks (lots of games) imagine feeling resistance offered by the body of the thing you are wacking transmitted back up your thumb in the equal and opposite direction. I wonder why something like this is not pursued. I think it would be so interesting, even if you had to constantly change the sticks out with new ones due to wear.
Michael
2016-03-15 15:47:27 +0000 UTCThis is very thoughtful, I enjoyed it more than the last one (probably because I've actually played Limbo, I regret a bit not having played Dear Ester before watching the last one). I've come to notice, through your videos and others, that I'm very bad at examining the way the game mechanics marry to to the telling of a story, or the construction of a world, and I almost never think about the 'feel' even though certainly I do feel things. Watching videos on people who think about this a lot (I think you and Errant Signal are the main ones) is always kind of fascinating to me for this reason. I do remember the 'feel' of pulling those switches, and god, killing the spider is certainly a memorable moment, which I also almost viscerally remember the 'feel' over, even though I would not put Limbo in my top ten favorite or most evocative games. I'm glad for videos on these subjects though, since it's not a thing I'm likely to really put into my words myself even if I do experience it to some degree. And *in* my experience, lacking that language means I experience things less. Excited to see what you do for your other videos on this subject.
AV
2016-03-15 05:07:45 +0000 UTC
