Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
wounded or unable to fight, narrowing the space of possibilities and increasing the feel of
resistance.
The Banner Saga
's story complements this grueling feeling, set in a frozen northland
where food is scarce and communities must constantly stay on the move to avoid extinction.
Between battles, the player is faced with other kinds of choices—during dialogue with charac-
ters who may support or abandon you in future battles, as well as in events that happen along
the constant journey and affect your supply of food and able-bodied warriors.
Platform:
Windows, Mac, Linux
Price:
US $10. Free trial also available.
h t t p : / / s t o i c s t u d i o . c o m /
Scenes, Resistance, Story
Candy Box
paces the player's experience in an interesting way: it starts off by showing the
player that she has a pile of candies that increases at the rate of one per second and gives a
single verb: “eating” the candies. If the player waits, more and more choices start to unfold, and
the game is revealed as a mixture of “farming” candies to produce more resources (candies and
lollipops) and going on adventures to fight enemies. All the resources needed to progress are
generated over long periods of real time, much as in games like
Farmville
that rely on patience
and rote grinding. Interestingly,
Candy Box
is entirely free and doesn't offer players paid short-
cuts past grinding; instead, it gives players ways to optimize and improve their pace of resource
generation, keeping a steady pace through more and more surreal adventure levels. Eventually,
the story becomes a meta-narrative in which the player challenges a “developer” for control of
the code that underlies the game itself.
Platform
: Web
Price
: Free
h t t p : / / c a n d i e s . a n i w e y . n e t /
(Merritt Kopas, 2013)
Verbs, Resistance, Story
What does it mean to choose violence as part of a game, or to make a choice at all?
Consensual Torture Simulator
presents a very different kind of violence than that suggested
by the conventional-wisdom notion of “violent videogames.” In this game, the player chooses
