I already have one that does that I made a breakout clone with, but this one will be better. If I ever get it to that stage that is. I want it to use an embedded Lua interpreter for all the game logic. I also want it to use guichan for the gui. It’d be nice to be able to load the Gui from Lua scripts. That sounds pretty ambitious, so maybe I wont get that far. I definitely want to have the game logic for each level run from Lua scripts though. Some objects could have scripts attached to them that run when something happens. eg. triggers, or OnDeath scripts for various characters or whatever.

I’m thinking of the way nwscript does it or metaplace will do it. Metaplace got me motivated to experiment, since it’d be nice to learn Lua, so I can be ready to toy around in it when it hits open beta.

So far I’ve got a bare skeleton of an engine, it loads SDL and paints any game “objects” from a list. Objects so far are sprites and text.

It’s really really fun and funny.

There are significant improvements though, the graphics effects work really well straight out. They look great and aren’t over the top. Things seems snappier. The support for non-free binary drivers is improving. Plus support for non-free formats like mp3s, etc is smoother again. It really is Linux for everyone is that respect. One of the less mentioned and most useful improvements is the inclusion of the complete ntfs-3g drivers. So now if you’re dual booting an ntfs drive with winxp or vista (probably most people choose to do this), then you don’t have to worry about how to transfer data across the drives. It use to be that you could read the ntfs drive but not write to it. Obviously windows doesn’t even know about the ext3 linux partition. Now linux can safely and flawless write to the ntfs drive.

If you’re installing from scratch this will probably be setup by default, but if you’ve upgraded from 7.04 and you’ve previously setup the ntfs partition to be mounted you just need to edit your /etc/fstab file and change the filesystem from ntfs to ntfs-3g.
I use the options: defaults,locale=en_US.utf8

*spoilers for Portal follow*

It would be lovely to know more about Chell, but what really makes Portal is GlaDOS. Personally I’d really like to find out more about when GlaDOS first flooded the enrichment centre with toxic case. The time when the red phone’s cord was cut (the commentary says the phone was to be used if GlaDOS became too aware, in which case she’d be shut off or something).

Something that would be cool, is finding out more about Aperture Science’s relationship to Black Mesa. I’d like to play out some sort of conflict between them, a lovely twist would be having GlaDOS helping you throughout, yet somehow you realise at the end that you’ve provided her with the trigger for her awareness and subsequent madness.

If aperturescience.com is to be taken as canon Aperture Science started off making shower curtains for the military (not sure which military), then the man in charge left 3 directives for the future of the company. The first 2 were absurd nutty things, the 3rd was to make a bio artificial intelligence lifeform operating system or something, which was really an aside as he hadn’t put much thought into it. Obviously the 3rd ended up being GlaDOS.

No matter what Valve does, Portal will be a hard act to follow.
They absolutely much keep the same voice actress for GlaDOS, she’s wonderful.
Just another 3-4 hours puzzle game would be fabulous too though.

The cake is not a lie!!

Portal is a parody on gaming, the developer is GlaDOS the player is Chell. It’s a struggle of freedom versus control. As the bugs (in GlaDOS) creep in thoughout the game it becomes clear that the ending for Chell will not be a satisfactory one. She’s been told by other players along the way. For Chell and her game with GlaDOS, there is certainly no cake. The cake represents whether a game has a satisfactory ending for the player or not.

She escapes the confines of the game and destroys GlaDOS, if a player could break free of the confines of a buggy murderous game, they might do the same to it’s developers. A commentary on tension in the relationship between gamers and game developers.

It’s also a commentary on the tension between the players desire for freedom in their gameplay, and the developers need for control and constraint (to make it practical), the player wins this round, but the joke is on them. Portal, while it is an excellent example of a game that doesn’t throw a narrative down the players throat, it’s also the perfect example of why linearity and constraints in a game can be excellent. In the end even the flight for freedom part of the game is also linear, but the player doesn’t care.

Additionally GlaDOS is attempting to program and train Chell to play the game, just as games do to us. GlaDOS is perhaps too successful, but that’s why she is pleased at the end of the game. This completely mirrors the actual gameplay of portal, for which we are slowly trained and programmed. The learning curve is so perfectly tuned, Valve has every reason to be pleased with themselves.

The story mirrors our experiences with gaming. It’s an affectionate in joke on gaming that gamers relate to (knowingly or not), yet non gamers still enjoy. That is Portal’s cake, that the ending is so satisfactory.

Portal isn’t just a well made and clever game, it isn’t just art… It’s science.

…and that is it’s triumph.

Portal is a masterpiece. Well duh… but hear me out.

Portal is a parody on gaming as a whole. It’s the supreme gaming in joke. It’s subtle, so I think most gamers that played it aren’t even aware of it. Maybe even the developers weren’t aware of it, but I think they were. I think it was very deliberate, at least with the story side of things.

Maybe I should just get on with it.. Think about the age old debate about on rails versus off rails gameplay, basically cutscenes versus don’t take the gameplay away from the player. This has been discussed in a number of places recently. I agree cutscenes suck, but it it’s not just about cutscenes. After playing a promising, but disappointingly limited game, we’ll say we want more freedom, non-linearity and control. Developers on the other hand can only ever provide the player with the illusion of control. Even if the illusion is a sandbox GTA style game.

There is a direct analogy of this tension between developers and players in Portal. Chell is the player, GlaDOS is the developer. The puzzles GlaDOS puts Chell through is Chell’s game. Throughout the whole game GlaDOS controls the player, funnelling them through the various puzzles, placing her in more and more danger with no concern for her well being. She pretends to praise Chell’s progress, but all the while not so subtly mocks her. As the trust of GlaDOS wanes escape is the goal.

Then of course there’s the constant promise of a reward at the end. There’s always the promise of cake in a game. Every game promises something, a grand story arc completion, the final boss battle of doom etc etc. Yet how often do we reach the end of a game and find the ending a let down? There is no cake…

Portal’s ending is without a doubt one of the most satisfactory endings in any game. Why is the ending so good though? What is it about it, really?

Maybe this is getting too analytical, but I love this stuff so here I go…
There are people working towards developing a body of gaming design theory. Games are starting to get serious attention in the academic world of media studies. Recently Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture published it’s first issue. The article Translating Narrative into Code – Thoughts on a Technology-Centric Model of Digital Games as Programmable Media by Werning, is highly worth reading. It goes into the various attempts at game analysis so far (such as attempting to adapt theories from other mediums to games), then goes onto expand on the most promising one.

I might be massacring the concept here, but an emerging paradigm is the idea that the player’s relationship to the game is as a bodily extension of the feedback loop dictated by the gameplay. That is, the player essentially interacts with the game as programmable device. So the player is getting programmed by the game. This seems natural since the task of at least the early stage of most games is to train the player to learn how to interact with the game. Werning expands on this idea and suggests that games can be best analysed within an object orientated model. He calls this Object Orientated Narrative (OON) as analogous to Object Orientated Programming. The cool thing, as he suggests, is that ultimately perhaps games really are just a mirror of their makers. If a programmer could create art, what would that art resemble? A program of course.

The developers relationship to the player is thus far more direct then we like to believe. No wonder they don’t really appreciate the players telling them how to make games. The developer doesn’t just program the game, they program the player. This seems to me a pretty powerful concept, it seems the core of the reason games are special. It’s pretty clear things don’t always go to plan though, people aren’t easy to program and they aren’t direct either it takes iteration. I don’t think it’s a one way street either. In a good game the player doesn’t feel like they being dictated to, they feel they are doing the programming.

Back to Portal, it’s clear that GlaDOS isn’t just experimenting on Chell for the sake of it, she isn’t just trying to kill her. She is fundamentally trying to do science, she is programming Chell (i.e., the player) to perfect a method of training for the use of the Portal gun. It’s like valve took the idea that the developers are programming the player and embedded it directly into game as the story.

When GlaDOS starts going awry, it’s like when a game starts to break down into noticeable defects and bugs. All in all though the training goes rather well, except for the fact that there is ultimately no cake. Chell has been warned by other players that the game she is playing doesn’t end well, it’s best not to finish it. She’d like nothing more than to escape the confines of her game to explore and do as she pleases, obviously taking the bits of the game she likes with her (the portal gun). Just like we demand of developers to give us the freedom to explore the world with all the cool bits left in tack (is this stretching things?).

When Chell escapes, she (we) tracks down GlaDOS and destroys her. Which is perhaps what would happen to developers if they adhered to the whims the players? See, it’s a parody of the relationship between the players and the developers of games. Laughing at the tensions in the industry has got to be a healthy thing.

This is why I think everyone loves Portal so much. We’ve all already been programmed to play games in certain ways, we recognise certain themes in the industry subconsciously. It’s not just a clever twisted play on the ubiquitous science lab seen in so many games. In essence all games are lab experiments, and we’re the rats that have been convinced to enjoy them Yet Portal has so much symmetry that it’s also appreciated by people that wouldn’t really consider themselves gamers.

It’s also pretty cool that while the narrative of Portal is that of striving towards freedom, Portal as a game is in fact the years supreme example of why a linear, constrained and controlling game experience can be a excellent (and the best thing for us). That is Portal’s cake and it’s triumph!

One last thing. I’m convinced that this theory of games as a programmable media was at least in some way embedded into the minds of the people who wrote the game. Thus the important conclusion is, Portal isn’t just a work of art, it’s science…

Please comment on anything at all. I may have spent way to much time thinking about this, but more is always better.