Press on mindful xp Student IGF

Posted by

cards

Hey everyone! With IGF next week we’ve been fortunate enough to give some thoughts about mindful xp with a few places. We had a nice interview with Polygon two weeks ago where we went over how mindful xp started and some thoughts about our process. And today Gamasutra posted their Road to IGF 2013 on mindful xp where we had a chance to talk some of the lessons we learned with our project.

Next week at the IGF pavilion we’ll be part of the IGF Student Showcase. We’ve printed out some nice business cards showing off the different games that make up the mxp volume. Feel free to drop on by Wednesday thru Friday and grab one (or all 8). We’ll be hanging around to talk with everyone and hang out with all the other awesome IGF teams.

We’re in the IGF 2013 Student Showcase!

Posted by

igf

Wow! The mindful xp volume (a collection of our games from the mindful xp project) has been chosen for the IGF 2013 Student Showcase. We are honored and humbled to be selected by the judges for IGF 2013 and we’re looking forward to being at GDC and the IGF pavilion with all the other awesome student winners.

Thanks to everyone who supported and gave us advice throughout this project including, but not limited to Jesse Schell, Ralph Vituccio, Drew Davidson, Paolo Pedercini, Andy Nealen, Ian Bogost, Craig Adams, Walt Dessler, Adam Lederer, Luke Jayapalan, Chris Bell, Aubrey Hesselgren, the fine folks at Meaningful Play, the awesome dudes at Experimental Gameplay Project, our fellow students at the ETC, everyone who played/shared/commented on our games, and many more!

We’ll see everyone in SF!

mindful xp at Meaningful Play 2012!

Posted by

During the summer we’ve been busy submitting our work to various conferences both industry and academic, and we’ve happy to announce that we’ll be featured for both a speaker session and poster at Meaningful Play 2012, at Michigan State University! The conference is from October 18-20th, and our session will be directly after the keynote on the first day, the 18th. Our session is titled “The mindful xp experience: Developing meaning through rapid prototyping“, at 11:00-12:00 in the Tower.

The full program schedule is here.

If you’re going to the conference, please be sure to check us out! (as well as spread the word!)

Moving Toward the Heart: Get Closer Postmortem

Posted by

[As part of our project, mindful xp is committed to documenting our progress – part of that is creating post-mortems for our games. Post-mortems are very candid about game details, so if you don’t want a game’s experience spoiled before you play, reading these might not be in your best interest.]

Get Closer was the final game created for the mindful xp project. It was an individual game created by myself about the difficulty with trying to get close to someone. As the last project in our semester, it was a pretty straightforward process to develop the game.

Development:

Get Closer is an offshoot of a previous game idea I was working on for the Ludum Dare 48 competition this April. The theme of the original Ludum Dare was “tiny planet” and the original game was called A System of My Own. In the game you controlled a planet trying to navigate around various solar systems and find the right orbit. However while the design for that never quite came together, I did take the main orbiting mechanic and adjust that for Get Closer.

Continue reading →

Lost Alone: Collect Postmortem

Posted by

[As part of our project, mindful xp is committed to documenting our progress – part of that is creating post-mortems for our games. Post-mortems are very candid about game details, so if you don’t want a game’s experience spoiled before you play, reading these might not be in your best interest.]

Collect was the end result of a long process developing my own individual round game. Initially I had hoped to develop an entirely different game based on an experience that was very personal to me. In the end though I was not prepared to develop that experience into a game that I felt could clearly communicate everything that I had hoped. Instead of releasing something that I felt was substandard I instead changed tracks and released something less personal and could be realistically achieved within the time constraints of our project.

Continue reading →

Going Through the Grind: Scott Told Himself Postmortem

Posted by

[As part of our project, mindful xp is committed to documenting our progress – part of that is creating post-mortems for our games. Post-mortems are very candid about game details, so if you don’t want a game’s experience spoiled before you play, reading these might not be in your best interest.]

Scott Told Himself was the 3rd game we developed for the mindful xp project. Or at least the 3rd we started. 1 month later we released Scott Told Himself after we developed two more game projects and finishing it during our spring break.

So what happened? Why did we stop Scott Told Himself in the middle of development? A lot of went wrong with Scott Told Himself could be filed under typical mistakes made while learning how to work together as a team. Thankfully though we as a team learned to grow through these mistakes and learn how to effectively work as a team going forward.

Continue reading →

The Path Taken Postmortem

Posted by

[As part of our project, mindful xp is committed to documenting our progress – part of that is creating post-mortems for our games. Post-mortems are very candid about game details, so if you don’t want a game’s experience spoiled before you play, reading these might not be in your best interest.]

The Path Taken is a prototype developed in Flashpunk over the course of 11 days (originally planned for 7 days). In this game we wanted to model the feeling of regret and “the grass is greener on the other side” mentality. You play as Ward, a boy going through a rite of passage in a dungeon and learning a few things about life along the way.

Development

When we were brainstorming we went over a few ideas and eventually came across the idea of choosing multiple paths. However when choosing a path the player would have to make a hard choice and whatever the player choose it would have to seem like the wrong choice. We thought we could literally do this by having the other path visible but inaccessible so the player would be able to see what they had missed. We also wanted the game to have permanence and every time the player chose an action even if they started the game over the choice would persist.

Continue reading →

Controlling Postmortem

Posted by

[As part of our project, mindful xp is committed to documenting our progress – part of that is creating post-mortems for our games. Post-mortems are very candid about game details, so if you don’t want a game’s experience spoiled before you play, reading these might not be in your best interest.]

Controlling is a flash game made using the Flixel in less than 48 hours for the Ludum Dare Game Jam 23 by me (Dan Lin). The art was done in Gimp and the sounds and music was done in OpenMPT Tracker. You play as a guy in this puzzle platformer. The main mechanics involve the absence of jumping, wrapping around of the stage, and being able to move around blocks and placing them using the mouse. The player progresses through the levels.

Development

Because this was a Ludum Dare Game, the theme for the game jam was “Tiny World.” This worked out for me as I already had some ideas that fit in nicely with the theme. I wanted to make a game about someone who could only rearrange what he had and never create something new. In terms of the theme, this meant that this person’s perspective was limited and that even though he could control everything he had, he would never be able to see what was outside of this. Hence, from the outsider’s perspective, they could said his perception of the world is tiny. The idea for this game arose from discussion with a friend and my own personal experiences. Continue reading →

MARCH Postmortem

Posted by

[As part of our project, mindful xp is committed to documenting our progress – part of that is creating postmortems for our games. Postmortems are very candid about game details, so if you don’t want a game’s experience spoiled before you play, reading these might not be in your best interest.]

MARCH is a first person exploratory game I made roughly in 4 weeks, for the individual works round of the mindful xp project. MARCH is an intensely personal game, an autobiographical work depicting my thoughts and feelings about breaking up with someone recently. The game was catharsis to develop, as the entire affair weighed heavily on my mind for a long while after it occurred, and it was something I “needed to get off my chest.”

Continue reading →