By JohnEvans
In honor of Halloween...Urban Dead is a web-based persistent world game; your character is either a "zombie" or a "survivor", two factions eternally trapped in an urban warzone. You gain experience by fighting, you buy skills when you level up, you have "action points" that accumulate over time.
That much is easy to say, but there are surprising depths to Urban Dead. It's worth playing for a while, and it's even more worth seeing how other people play. There are some interesting aspects of the game when you start out, like: Which skill should I buy first? How do I survive as a newbie zombie? But many players have all their skills bought, and that's where you start getting into the really interesting strategies.
If you read about game design at all, you'll eventually come across something about "second order design". The idea is that game designers create experiences indirectly; they create rules, the rules delineate the players' actions, and those actions lead to experiences that are engaging in some way. The designer attempts to create rules that lead to the kind of experience they're trying to engender. A related concept is "emergent behavior", which arises when rules interact to encourage new actions.
The designer of Urban Dead, Kevan Davis, has set down a number of simple rules delineating what someone could do during a zombie apocalypse. The persistent nature of the game implies that there have to be some times when you're logged off, but your character is still around. Zombies roam the city searching for survivors, so if you're a survivor, you want somewhere to hide. Therefore, survivors hole up in buildings and barricade them. If a building is at all barricaded, a zombie cannot enter it; they can attack the barricade, but success is dependent on a die roll and tends to take a lot of AP. Survivors can enter buildings unless they're "heavily barricaded" or above. Therefore, newbie survivors roam about looking for buildings that are barricaded well but not completely.
From the other point of view, a zombie wants to find a likely building, tear down the barricades and feast on the brains of those inside. However, if you're one zombie against a building with 10 survivors, they're likely to blast you with a shotgun and repair the barricades as soon as they log in again. You could get a dozen friends together and coordinate in real time to break into a survivor safehouse; players certainly do that. But there's another, more interesting way...
When a zombie is face to face with one or more survivors (which usually means they've broken into a building), they can use the skill Feeding Groan. Everyone within a radius of several blocks will hear the groan and its position. Zombies that hear this groan know that someone broke through a barricade--that the survivors are, for that moment, vulnerable, and that a fellow zombie is asking for help.
The result is decentralized organization. Like ants or slime molds, the zombies swarm in where there's a vulnerability. Nobody said "Attack this building"; even throwing 10 zombies at a building might not work if it's heavily barricaded, or if there aren't any survivors inside! But Feeding Groans allow the zombie hordes to organize themselves without a central authority. Each zombie is acting on its own initiative, but for the greater good (in a zombiecentric sense).
From a survivor's perspective, one zombie breaks through and starts groaning--and suddenly a huge fucking zombie horde bursts into the room and totally tears shit up.
Sounds kind of like a zombie movie, doesn't it?
(And hey--those 10 friends coordinating their invasions through IRC or messenger? If they start groaning, they can attract huge numbers of zombies into their little crusade.)
There's more to the game I haven't even touched on. For example, if survivors are killed, they rise as zombies...and some skills let survivors resurrect zombies into survivors. This has fascinating implications for how you play your character; Do you like being a survivor, or a zombie? If you die as a survivor, do you try to be the best brain-eating zombie you can, or do you try to get resurrected? If you're a zombie and someone revives you without your consent, do you just jump off a building to "die" and become a zombie again?
If you're at all interested, you don't even have to play the game, you can poke around the Urban Dead Wiki. It's filled with strategy suggestions, roleplaying tips, humor and all sorts of crazy stuff produced by the (extremely passionate) UD community. Just skimming through will show you what can grow out of a few simple rules.
 
 
By Simon Carless
 [One of the first of a host of neat Tokyo Game Show interviews conducted by Christian Nutt, we managed to speak to ICO and Shadow Of The Colossus creator Fumito Ueda on his inspirations and creativity - and here's the oblique but fascinating result.]
What makes the director of Shadow of the Colossus tick? Drawing Fumito Ueda out on the subject isn't precisely easy -- on inspiration, he says, "I've gotten this question many times, but I actually don't intentionally think about inspiration."
The Sony-based creator is known for his careful approach to gaming, as seen in his trilogy of titles - ICO and Shadow Of The Colossus for the PlayStation 3 and the upcoming, much-awaited The Last Guardian for PlayStation 3.
As referenced, there's obviously a very deliberate method to Ueda's style of game design. And with that in mind, Gamasutra spoke in depth to him at Tokyo Game Show to try and get a handle on that process, in a rare interview: All the games you've worked on are centered on a really important relationship, like with Ico and Yorda, or with the boy and the creature in The Last Guardian. What do strong relationships mean to you in your games?
Fumito Ueda: Well, there's a significant relationship between the main character controlled by the player, and then the AI character -- Yorda for Ico, the Colossi, and also the horse in Shadow of the Colossus, and in Last Guardian it's the beast -- but I don't have an intentional plan or some big concept, or anything like this.
But I think, maybe, I'm thinking that there's something that can be said about relationships, between the AI and the player, that can only function in the computer entertainment world.
A lot of games try to tell a story in a way that's very typical to other media, like film, whereas the interactive nature of the game allows you to build an emotional relationship with the character without telling it in a linear narrative...
FU: You're exactly right -- I exactly agree with you. I think that I tried to sort out within myself what exactly can be done only through video games. I think one way to use the computer is to use it like dice in The Game of Life, or something like that.
But I don't think that's the most effective way to use the computer; I think it's having AI, or having characters that have some sort of personality to them. I think that's the way to use computers.
Many of your games have a really young protagonist, too. Children are vulnerable, not quite so strong, whereas most game characters are strong people. What interests you about creating these vulnerable characters to play?
FU: It's not that I particularly like younger characters, or something like this, but I think it's really trying to figure out a cohesion with the game design, and what would be the most persuasive form of expression. And having a younger age was the answer that I reached.
What are you trying to get across, then? What kind of emotions are you trying to evoke in your games?
FU: Of course it's different for each title, but something that they have in common would be that to really illustrate or communicate that the world that you see is real. That it's a really existing world, and to actually have this reality to the world that's in the screen.
A lot of works that have really well-developed worlds have a lot of background data, and the background data never makes it directly into the product, but the creators know about it. Is that part of your process?
FU: It's not that we don't do it at all -- create this background setting -- but I think that perhaps compared to other teams, we don't do it as much. So I think maybe you're referring to background setting situations.
But really, compared to the amount of data information of the setting, we actually have more information about the actual details contained in the particular scene, or particular screen shot; in order to create this actuality, reality, tangibility to the screen. So, less background setting, more detail in the actual image.
So it's more about creating a world that has architectural believability, and the details that make sense, rather than saying that you know the history of the country, or something like that.
FU: That's exactly correct. I think somebody said that "God is in the details," and that's really what I'm looking at.
Where do you draw the visual inspiration that's the foundation of that -- the details that make the game believable?
FU: I've gotten this question many times, but I actually don't intentionally think about inspiration. Meaning that I don't really value or cherish it, inspiration, and specific sources of inspiration; rather, the reason why it looks the way it does is because of game design, and the necessity of game design -- the constraints of level design.
So, what comes first, then? Is it something like building a level, testing it, seeing how it plays, and then saying, "Okay, now I see how this is, and I see what it is, formally..."
FU: It's what you said. Actually building it, and seeing how it looks -- and then also looking at if it's a place that players would easily get lost in, and place some kind of landmark, or some kind of guide post, or something. If it's a dark setting, then open some windows. And also, then, to make it visually, aesthetically enjoyable, and pleasing.
It's easy for me to speak about Ico, and the castle; some of the areas in it were like set pieces. Do you think "Oh! I can do a gameplay design that will work in this environment!" and this is how you do it, or do you think, "Oh! This is a logical room, and what can I build out of that?"
FU: Actually, that is true, that sometimes we do have a visual image first, and then go into the level design -- I mean, what you described. But actually, for Ico, all the stages were made as individual, separate spaces, and then they were compressed together, and somehow made so that they had some compatibility, cohesiveness.
The PS3 will soon have motion control -- and it made me think about the closeness of interaction in your games, particularly between the characters, and I was wondering, does motion control appeal to you? In the way of bridging the gap of distance between the characters?
FU: I do have an interest in motion control -- just the technology itself -- but I don't think that perhaps it is most compatible for the themes that I'm looking for now. So, the motion control is a new, involved form of input to the game, but I actually have a stronger interest in what enhancements can be made to the output, so...
Does the power of the Cell processor allow you to have more complex AI, and more complex behavior from the beast character?
FU: Actually I don't really feel the enhancement of the PS3 through the AI, because we don't really use such complex AI. Actually I feel more the enhancement in the information density; how much information can be put onto the screen, in terms of the details, and how much more we can have. 
By Simon Carless
 ['@ Play' is a monthly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]
We've discussed the information-heavy balance of the game Nethack before. How, once the player learns enough about the nature of the game world, all of the difficulty turns out to be front-loaded, before the player has had the chance to build up experience levels and equipment.
Recently, a couple of variants have arisen in order to remedy this perceived problem. Two years ago was the release of Derek Ray's Sporkhack, and only this past month saw the release of another, UnNethack, created by Patric Mueller.
Nethack's mysterious Dev Team is presumably aware of the problem, and though it is known that they're still around, updating bugs and answering email, and thus we assume are still working on the game, it has been a very long time since the last version. It has been over five years since the release of Nethack 3.4.3, the latest version of the game.
A rising current of opinion on rec.games.roguelike.nethack is that the Dev Team has abandoned the game. Even if they haven't, a few of the more irksome characteristics have survived for multiple versions, long enough that it begins to look like the Dev Team is perfectly happy leaving them in.
Both are games that, to the many characters who die in the earliest regions of the dungeon, seem almost unchanged from the original game. While not any unfriendlier to a new player than vanilla Nethack, most of the changes in these games are aimed at the experienced hacker. Unlike uber-variant Slash'EM, neither seems to be interested in radical reinvention of the game. The idea of a expert-foiling balance patch has actually been around for some time. One of the most popular variants of 3.1.3 was Stephen White's Nethack+, which also took it upon itself to correct some balance issues. Unicorn horns in that version, for instance, degrade with use.
So, what are the things that they balance? Quite a lot, really. Following are just two of examples. This list contains spoilers, of course, but the effect of these changes is to make the game harder for players who are already spoiled. Still, you should probably move on if you care about such things. We'll probably pick this thread up again later, after UnNethack has had some more development time.
Balance fix #1: Loosening up the "ascension kit."
This is particularly a focus of Sporkhack. In Nethack, nearly all players who aren't actively avoiding them for some reason strive to build up a certain set of equipment which make success all but certain. Nearly all ascensions not only contain some form of dragon scale mail, due to its light weight, non-hindrance to spellcasting, unequaled protection and special protection based on color, but in practice it's only three colors that are even used: gray, silver, and, coming up distant third, black. One way this is done is through the addition of a fractional resistance system. Permanent intrinsics from eating resistant monsters don't immediately go to 100% upon success, but must be reinforced through several such meals. This makes equipment-based sources, such as from the off-colors of dragon scale mail, more useful.
Related to this is the place of magic resistance in the game. After poison resistance (and in some ways surpassing it), magic resistance is the most essential intrinsic in vanilla Nethack 3.1-3.4, nullifying a wide range of dangers through the acquisition of one characteristic. Vanilla Nethack balances this by making equipment the only way to gain it, and few items grant it: basically, to get magic resistance, the player must wear a cloak of magic resistance, a suit of gray dragon scale mail, or hold one of a few quest artifacts, which must either be wished for or the matching class must be played.
Sporkhack's solution is to make magic resistance both less needed and less useful. Magic resistance is essential because of the high-level monster spells of Touch of Death and Destroy Armor, both most-often cast by opponents who are able to teleport after the player and are thus difficult to escape without fighting them, and thus taking a few spells. They may even decide to use one immediately after a teleport, giving the player no opportunity to avoid a potentially deadly attack. Magic resistance protects against both states, and so it is of great value in a game of vanilla Nethack.
No, more than that: because the player's whole game can be ended, or grievously harmed, by a single unavoidable moment, magic resistance is an essential characteristic. If you don't have it by the time teleporting liches start showing up (usually the Castle), then you are subjecting your character's life to the whims of the dice, and as we covered before, high-level roguelike play is about eliminating such risks wherever possible.
Sporthack makes Touch of Death do high physical damage and max HP drain instead of killing the player outright (think of it as an "aging" attack....). Magic resistance helps reduce this penalty but doesn't eliminate it. It also makes it so that the Destroy Armor isn't outright blocked by magic resistance.
Balance fix #2: Make the game's levels more unpredictable.
This is a focus of UnNethack primarily, which merges in more versions of many special levels. It gets its levels from other variants and patches. Both it and Sporkhack also fold in Pasi Kallinen's "flipped levels" patch, which sometimes mirrors a special level on its X or Y axis. Sporkhack also contains new code that allows more doors to be randomly placed, in order to keep long-time players on their toes.
The level additions are made possible by the fact that most of the game's important locations are not random in layout, but come from a level file, a utility file created from a source definition during the compilation process. This setup was developed in order to allow more coding-friendly hackers to modify their game dungeons, but it also allowed the Dev Team, eventually, to make multiple versions of the most important special levels, which are randomly selected for inclusion each game. This makes it relatively easy to add new levels to the game, so many variants feature them.
Both Spork and Un add in some level variants, but more in order to liven things up by presenting more options for those levels that are chosen from pre-made templates. One of the biggest sources of new levels is Pasi Kallinen, who has written a range of patches that include new versions of levels such as Sokoban, Medusa, Castle, and other levels. Some of these versions post new challenges; word is one of the new versions of the Medusa level must be travelled carefully to avoid catching sight of its star monster before engaging in combat with her.
Unnethack also brings in the "Heck2 patch," a radically reorganized scheme for what most players consider to be the most boring area of the game, Gehennom. It also has variants for the demon lord lairs, and additional lairs for previously-neglected lords. It also includes a Very Special Guest Star subbing in as Amulet guard for the High Priest of Moloch....
Basic Nethack has four primary level generation systems. Dungeon levels are those found throughout the main dugeon, Cave levels are found in the Gnomish Mines, Mazes are generated in the deep dungeon and Gehennom, and the Rogue level has a unique generation scheme. After some plays, these schemes, while suitably chaotic for new players, can become fairly familiar to an experienced hacker.
UnNethack livens the early dungeon up a bit by adding in the "town" generation scheme from Nethack Brass. Sporkhack tries to mix up Gehennom a bit by randomly changing its maze walls to other types, such as lava, a rude surprise for players used to leaning on direction keys to hurry through. Both games also do away with one of the most frustrating aspects of Nethack's ascension run, the "mysterious force" that sometimes random teleports players downward while carrying the Amulet. 
By costik
Dadaists Gone Wild is a surrealist platformer. That is, much of the time it's a typical platformer, but quite often you encounter a "powerup" that changes the nature of the gameplay drastically for some time.
For example, the next time you jump after getting the "hat" in the image above, you fly upward indefinitely, and must maneuver to avoid obstacles along the way -- and to get to the powerup that changes the game back to normal play.
The surrealist nature of the game is compounded by the nonsensical text (e.g., "I am Hat, here me roar" does nothing to impart information about what happens next) as well as the oddness of the obstacles you encounter -- weird snake-like things, floating eyeballs, invisible platforms, and the like. There's also a Messhof-inspired truck level.
In its own peculiar way, Dadaists is everything an indie game, or at least a certain style of indie game, should be -- unpolished, primitive, offbeat, and curiously charming.
 
By Simon Carless
Here's another PSP game that snuck out in Japan while I wasn't paying attention -- Silicon Studio's Onore no Shinzuru Michi wo Yuke (loosely translated as Conquer the Road of Your Beliefs). As you can tell after a minute into this trailer, the game plays a lot like Nekogames's Cursor*10, the creative but hard to explain Flash puzzle game that has players directing a cursor around a series of stages, working with past playthroughs to find an exit for each level.
Onore no Shinzuru Michi wo Yuke replaces the cursors with ninjas, adds Ukiyo-e-style art, and also throws in enemies for the ninjas to attack together. Other than that, it's pretty much Cursor*10. That makes sense, considering Nekogames' Ishii Yoshio, who created the web game, also worked on this PSP title.
Unfortunately, no publisher has announced any plans to bring this stateside yet. But considering the nature of the game, I imagine that importers won't have much difficulty figuring out what to do in the game. You can watch Onore no Shinzuru Michi wo Yuke's stylish opening movie below: 
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