Words by Hamish Todd.>

Portal has the best-designed first-person puzzles I’ve ever seen. They’re surprising, focused, and concise. They are also designed very perceptively, and we can learn a lot from looking at this perceptiveness. Read on for an analysis of Portal’s level design, and some lessons about what learning from it can do to improve game design.

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I’ve spent most of the week thinking about Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs. I finished the story at the weekend and spent the last five minutes of the game with a huge grin plastered across my face. Not the reaction that a horror game might hope to elicit but thechineseroom’s cleverly concealed secret, hidden behind the dark curtain of that title, is that in some ways they haven’t really constructed a horror game at all. Thankfully, they’ve made something far more interesting instead.>

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We got an email from Valve! It says: “We have three announcements to make beginning with the first one on Monday morning.” What are they about? Well they’re about “the steps we’re taking to make Steam more accessible on televisions and in the living room.”

So probably a Linux-based Steam box, then. The three announcements are going to appear here. How exciting. Well, it would be if I could ever claim the living room back from family members. Sigh. Don’t worry, desktop, I’ll never (be able to) leave you.

Have you ever wanted to dive out of a window to avoid an explosion, while throwing a sword at a ninja? I tried it once but landed badly and ended up with a nasty crick in my neck. It’s the kind of antic that might look amazing when performed by a sinewy star of the silver screen, but my body just isn’t made for that kind of showboating. Even my beard and the confetti in my hair weren’t cushion enough to break the fall. Perhaps that’s why I enjoy playing an action movie archetype in Arrowhead’s multiplayer murder ‘em up, The Showdown Effect. My own feeble frame remains safe, even as my avatar slices, dices and explodes. If you’ve steered clear but have an interest, now is the time to try. Free this weekend and currently discounted to £1.99.

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Many, many star-splashed moons ago, there was a Jaws videogame. Despite being a third-person chomper in which you played as a shark>, it somehow turned out terrible – entirely failing to capitalize on the opportunities for rich character development Jaws himself presents. This brand new Jaws text adventure, however, makes no such mistakes, painting the rampantly feared Great White as a wayward, lonesome soul. Also a hungry one who craves sweet, sweet leg meats. This is the inherent paradox of his nature.

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Level With Me is a series of interviews with game developers about their games, work process, and design philosophy. At the end of each interview, they design part of a small first person game. You can play this game at the very end of the series.

Richard Flanagan is the main designer on FRACT, a first person exploration puzzle game and/or electronic music studio. He collaborates with his producer and/or wife Quynh as Phosfiend Systems, based in Montreal, QC — they’ve also been working with indies Henk Boom and Devine Lu Linvega. (more…)

It would be fair to say that – before today – we knew almost nothing about former Bulletstorm lead Adrian Chmielarz and co’s “weird horror” departure into the land of indie-dom The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. Now, of course we’re in the dark on Ethan himself. He’s vanished! Like a magician or your phone when you’ve removed it from your pocket and freak out because you have no idea where you left it and it’s in your other hand. The whole point of the game is to figure out what happened to him. But it’d be nice to know, well, how> we’re going to scare up some clues from the game’s cast of “haunting and macabre” characters. That aaaaand mooooore> [chains rattling, bats, spooky ghost sounds] below.

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I really like it when videogames are beautiful. Not just in the “OMG graphics so realistic that I must existentially entertain the notion that the entire universe could just be a hyper-advanced computer simulation” sense, either. I’m talking about games that create a glittering maw of sights and sounds that licks its lips and proceeds to swallow me whole. These overwhelming visions of other worlds – places I’ve never even dreamed of, but now desperately long to live in. Aer, if I’m very, very lucky, will turn out to be one such experience. It’s a gorgeous sandbox adventure set in a strange, naturalistic, old sky world. You play as a girl who can transform into a bird at will, as we all secretly wish we could.

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Developer Duangle have set up a crowd-funding effort – via Humble Store – for their extraordinary first-person abstract life sim, Nowhere. I implore you to go and watch the pitch video, which I’ve put below. Even if it doesn’t convince you to back the project, you have to see this>. I won’t say any more, because this is one of those moments where a developer does something that speaks entirely for itself, and you just have to know about it. Go look. (more…)

There’s no Flare Path today, with Mr Stone being delayed until the weekend. To keep in the spirit of 1300 on a Friday, however, I wanted to point you towards the Spintires tech demo. Have you played it? Holy cow, that’s some good off-roading. Throwing this mad Russian ATV into a heap of mud is quite the thing.

Spintires had a successful Kickstarter a while back, and should be materialising as a full game pretty soon.