Finally, in the center, is Major Fairchild. She’s the resistance commander/project overseer. She’ll relay relevant information and commands from HQ. She’ll also be the one keeping you at your best.

This is half the planned team. The other three will be extremely important, but you won’t be talking in depth with them, they’re secondary and in-game support. On that list is the ground commander of your slime fighters. He’ll take orders directly from you. Also your automated defense coordinator (robot pilot), and of course, ‘The Chief’ who’s running the whole operation.

Thanks to everyone who’s been following the project on Facebook. Every new comment or ‘like’ is a fire under our asses to get this thing done faster!

Back next week with new in-game gadgets for your slime fighting needs!

-Weston

Brian here, Weston has been doing a great job with the art concept updates every week, but it’s hard to keep up with that pace so he asked me to fill in this week.  These are my thoughts on my trip down to the Game Devloper’s Conference this year.

I went down to San Francisco to attend GDC this year, or really rather to socialize with people who attended GDC.  In the process I met some amazing indie developers and had a deep experience with a game demo that took me completely by surprise and knocked me on my ass.

My takeaway from the conference is largely philosophical which is less expected than it should be.  When I talk to other seasoned developers, it usually doesn’t go too deep in a technical direction because most technical issues in terms of small games have either been solved (done) before, or aren’t super difficult to figure out.  This is a sign of a maturing artform - we don’t need to grind our own lenses anymore like early photographers did.  We can focus on the artform itself which still has a ton of interesting things to figure out.

Many of the discussions I had were relating to how games are just now becoming a lasting part of mainstream culture and not just a throwback to 80’s arcade/console nostalgia.  The reason in my eyes is that we are finally seeing a critical mass of the population that is “game literate”.  Games are not a passive experience, they require interaction and in the case of core games, quite a bit of hand-eye coordination, spatial awareness and skills like mouselook which can take time to develop as a player.  This creates a barrier that has excluded many people from playing games, much less understanding them.  That barrier is quickly being eroded by the smartphone.  Smartphones have probably done more to generate “game literacy” than any other device ever created.  This is because of the thousands of games that are available on the phones and also the necessarily simple nature and interface of those games.

Speaking of game literacy, Roger Ebert passed away the other day.  I have mixed feelings about Roger.  Partly because of his stout resistance to recognize games as an artform, but also because I am now seeing all kinds of people I respect talking about how passionate, open-minded, and knowledgeable he was.  He clearly was an intelligent man, and saw beauty where even other critics did not.  So why could he not see that games are clearly an artform?  I believe it’s because he was not game literate.  He could not get past the clunky barriers that can obstruct the deeper nature of the artform.  All he saw was the blurry, scratched lens and grainy black and white image that games are today.  Granted, we don’t have our Ansel Adams yet, but we will soon.  It’s too bad that he died before he could realize how wrong he was.

Another (big, important!) sign that games are maturing is that the content is becoming more about basic human struggles in day to day life rather than larger-than-life power fantasies.  Many indie game developers are taking this challenge head on and I have to give a big tip of the hat to them because they are taking risks and pushing the artform itself in ways that mainstream games are not even attempting to do.

Which brings me to getting knocked off my ass.  I had the good fortune of meeting Ryan Green and Josh Larson at a party and they are working on a game called That Dragon, Cancer.  The game is a very personal expression of Ryan’s struggle with his son’s terminal cancer.  Knowing his situation and having met him really brought home the gravity of the situation when I started playing the demo.  Within about 2 minutes I was crying and could not continue.  Reading Ryan’s poetry and hearing his voice in-game really affected me and I was overcome with sadness.

It’s taken me a while to process this experience.  I was not expecting to react as I did, and I was embarrassed that I had broke down in a room full of other developers who I have a tremendous respect for.  I was unfortunately more concerned with not appearing to be “that emotional guy” than I was with connecting with what I experienced and connecting with Ryan, who was right next to me and comforting me.  I can only imagine what he has gone through and what he and his family are going through with his son.