The Quixotic Engineer

While I’m not typically a shmup player, lately I’ve been enjoying a great indie shooter called Jamestown. It piqued my interest with its colonial Martian setting and beautiful pixel art. However, the game’s lasting appeal rests in the strength of its peculiar Vaunt mechanic.

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SpaceChem is a remarkable puzzle game about fake chemistry. The game challenges you to build a factory in order to transmute the given input molecules into the given output molecules. While chemistry is the theme, on a mechanical level it has more in common with programming. The methods used to tackle challenges in SpaceChem are akin to real techniques used by computer programmers. I’d like to elaborate on these manifold similarities, as well as explore how games like SpaceChem could be used to promote procedural literacy.

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If you follow me on Twitter or elsewhere, you may be aware that I moved from my native Montreal to Austin, Texas last year to work for a new studio called LightBox Interactive. We’ve been requisitely tight-lipped about our project until this last Friday, when we finally unveiled Starhawk to the community.

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I’m still not quite sure what to make of Deadly Premonition. Everything you’ve heard about it is true: it has atrocious combat, compelling mystery, laughable graphics, memorable characters, inappropriate music, etc. The game is full of fresh ideas and has stuck with me for months, but I still wouldn’t feel comfortable broadly recommending it. I would, however, like to examine one particular section of the game that I think was both absurd and oddly well-designed.

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Few online multiplayer games have become as habitual for me as Team Fortress 2. I’ve returned to it every few months since its release back in 2007, usually to plumb the strategic depths of a handful of familiar maps. In August of 2008, the Heavy update introduced Steel, a community map created by Jamie “Fishbus” Manson. Its complex layout and objective structure immediately intrigued me, and after hundreds of matches it has become one of my all-time favourite multiplayer maps.

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