why not games
Nikhil Murthy Talk About The Quiet Sleep, His Favorite Games, And Game Development In India (Interview)
Nikhil Murthy is the mind behind The Quiet Sleep, a fascinating Indie game that combines tower defense and city building ideas. The twist is – you’re developing your mind, and tackling real life events as simple as talking to others and as complex as overthrowing a local government. We’ve been playing The Quiet Sleep over the past few weeks now, and wanted to hear from Nikhil about his inspirations for the game, and his thoughts on the game development scene in India. Tell us a bit about yourself. What got you interested in video games? (and what was the first game that you remember)? I’ve played video games since I can remember. As a kid, I played Batman, Duck Hunt and Super Mario Bros on the SNES and Civ2 and SimCity on the PC then. When I was 8, I got a Game Boy ...
The Evolution of Emotion in The Quiet Sleep
The Quiet Sleep (out now in Early Access on Steam) is a city builder/tower defense game that is set in your mind and so emotion was naturally always a key part of the game. Just as naturally, the representation has evolved significantly over the course of the game and I thought it would be interesting to go over the changes. First Pass The first pass of the game as a whole was pretty far removed from what I have now. I had the idea to cross The Settlers 2 with a Tower Defense because of how nicely the two cover for each other. The Tower Defense adds interactivity to the simulation that it would otherwise miss and the simulation adds depth and meaning to the tower defense. This seemed like it would form a solid mechanical foundation for the game and also seemed like a reasonably small techn...
Designing Video Games For Self Expression
Letting players express themselves in a game can be a very powerful tool. It can allow players to tailor a game to their whims, whether aesthetic, beliefs or even playstyle. Methodology The key to self-expression is giving players the ability to make meaningful decisions that are decided by their whims. From this, we derive the following Multiple Acceptable Choices In order for players to make a decision according to their whims, it is necessary for there to be a decision point with multiple acceptable answers. When you decide what number to put into a square in a Sudoku, there is no scope for self-expression as there is only one correct answer, but when choosing clothes for your avatar, there tend to be many acceptable choices with no gameplay impact and so players can choose the one that...