Storyteller has a simple interface: you drag actors into panels to give form to a story, but you don’t directly control how each character behaves. Each actor reacts according to his nature, of which there are several: villain, lover, hero, amnesiac, etc. All living characters have a common behavior: they all suffer when someone they care about dies, are abandoned by someone they loved, and other common-sense rules.

The challenge of each “story” (or level) is to figure out how to make actors do what you want, how to fit that in 3 or 4 panels AND somehow match what the story is expecting to happen.

In example above, Tim is missing Lucy because he fell in love with her the first frame. Lucy, however, is playing a villain so she is not only uninterested in Tim but also annoyed at his crush on her. What happens between the first and second panel is that Lucy left for some reason and Tim is still in love with her, thus him missing her. This is called closure, the core of what makes Storyteller work. Another, simpler example:

Adam here dies because the story solver concludes that since there’s a tomb in the second panel, and only Adam was in the first, he must have died. That’s the nature of the tomb in Storyteller.

Each one of the stories check if its conditions are met, but often they are not very specific, so you can find multiple solutions to the same story:

Some stories actually detect some interesting variants and hints you of their existence!

Right now, I am trying some new submechanics, like flashbacks:

Storyteller has been picked as finalist for the Nuovo category by the Independent Games Festival, one of the biggest and well-respected festivals of the world. I’ve been on a trip for the past 20 days so I am dealing with all this just now, but these news are exciting and morale-boosting.

During the next two weeks I will finish the new version of the game, where I have rewritten the whole story-building algorithm, allowing me to write rules that give players more freedom. Now “The Lover”, who can fall in love with anybody can do some new interesting things:

(click to view fully enlarged)

Storyteller is a new game I started a few months ago which takes an idea I prototyped a while ago (unfortunately also called “Storyteller”… I wish I didn’t do that), and explores it much further.

It’s more “gamey” than Today I Die or I Wish I Were the Moon, and the mechanics borrow heavily from comic techniques of storytelling like closure, points of view, captioning and frame transitions. Each “puzzle” is a story that must be built. I will write a bit more about it on future posts.

This is going to be my most ambitious project and I want it to offer a very high quality experience. I am still at the point of exploring variants of the core mechanics so there’s still a long way to go! I will probably also hire someone to help me with the visual aspect of the game, which is totally programmer-class right now.

I am planning for the game to take me around a year to finish it!

My initial target platforms are PC, Mac and iPad.

Today I Die *Again*, a complete rewrite of the flash game with new scenes, overhauled audiovisuals and revised gameplay has launched on iTunes recently at $0.99.

I want to thank Thomas Hahn and everybody who sponsored this release of the game… Thank you!

Today I Die was selected as a finalist at the IGF (Independent Games Festival), one of the most prestigious events of the world regarding indie development.

The category it was selected into was “Nuovo”:

The Nuovo award honors abstract, shortform, and unconventional game development which advances the medium and the way we think about games.

I always dreamed about being an IGF finalist. The happiest thing about being a finalist is that I can forget about chasing the award. I want to fully focus on my craft.

Meanwhile…

note: fonts used in this prototype were developed by Anna Anthropy (sorry about not linking to this before, Anna!)

Last month I took a trip to Los Angeles to attend Indiecade, an independent game developer/artist festival that grows bigger each year. I Wish I Were the Moon, Today I Die and Storyteller were picked as finalists (packed as “Moon Stories”), together with lots of very good games like Osmos, Closure and Tuning.

It was a four day event, comprised of several lectures, presentations and social events. A quite varied (albeit small) audience attended, but the greatest takeaway from the event was the opportunity to meet up with other indies and industry celebrities in an intimate environment. GDC has grown far to large to be able to offer this, so I was very happy to discover that the trip to Indiecade exceeded all my expectations on this front.

So I am grateful towards the organizers for making all possible efforts to get me there, and even host me for one of the nights. I definitely recommend attending this event if you are looking for a reason why being indie is so much better than the mainstream industry.

Some highlights:

VIP Opening Party

The first night a party was thrown that featured food, drinks, and all finalists presenting their games in 3:12 minutes each:

Indiecade 2009 Awards

Moon Stories received the “Jury Award”! In this picture: John Sharp, Brenda Braithwaite, me and Jonathan Blow.

Brenda Braithwaite, Eddy (Osmos), Tyler (Closure), and Andy (Osmos).

Closing Party
Last night of the event Robin Hunicke boldly invited the whole bunch of us to a closing party at her place, which was one of the best thing that happened during this trip. Robin is the ultimate social hub of the industry:

All in all, I very happy to have attended this event and made me feel even more confident about the future of the indie universe.

Today I Die and I Wish I Were the Moon were selected as finalists for Indiecade 2009, an independent games festival at Culver City, California.

I will be attending the event, participating in a Pecha-Kucha style presentation (12 powerpoint slides, 16 seconds each) and a presentation about “Games and Emotions” that sounds very exciting, provided I figure out what it really means.

During the event, I will be showing some prototypes I’ve been working on, and make an interesting announcement related to Today I Die.

I will try to keep things updated through Twitter (http://twitter.com/danielben).

Update: I am including the list of finalists, following Edmund’s lead:

Aether, Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel
Akrasia, Team Aha!
Classic Night, Akarolls
Cogs, Lazy 8 Studios
Closure, Tyler Glaiel & Jon Schubbe
Dear Esther, The Chinese Room
Deep Sleep Initiative, The, ARx
Eliss, Steph Thirion
Everybody Dies, Jim Munroe
Global Conflicts: Latin America, Serious Games Interactive
Gray, Mike Boxleiter & Greg Wohlwend
Maw, Twisted Pixel Games
Mightier, Lucas Pope and Keiko Ishizaka
Minor Battle, Andre Clark
Moon Stories, Daniel Benmergui
Nanobots, Erin Robinson
Osmos, Hemisphere Games
Papermint, Avaloop
Path, The, Tale of Tales
Radio Flare, studio radiolaris
Ruben & Lullaby, Erik Loyer
Shadow Physics, Steve Swink & Scott Anderson
Sowlar, Odd Man In
Spectre, Vaguely Spectacular Team
Train, Brenda Brathwaite
Tuning, cactus / Jonatan Soderstrom
You get me, Blast Theory
Zeno Clash, ACE Team Software
Modal Kombat, David Hindman

I am very happy with the repercussions of the publication of Today I Die… as with I Wish I Were the Moon, I had no idea how would everyone react to the game beforehand.

The reaction was beyond expected… I keep getting mails each day from people who found the experience of playing it important to them. Even though I can’t answer every single mail, or comment in every blog that talked about the game, I think I read pretty much everything that google could find out there, even on very foreign languages!

I kinda distrust the stats of my hosting, but apparently the game got more than 400,000 gameplays, and counting.

The game is self-published in an serene, clean website, and it can be played for free.

But in order to fund my next game, I decided to accept donations and allow regular people to become my sponsors. They will have the chance to know about my next game before everyone else, and will be listed in the game credits.

So far there’s enough for me to live for a couple more months working exclusively on my own games, so huge thanks to all of you!

The game was positively covered by Kotaku, JayIsGames (apparently it’s one of the best rated games there), RockPaperShotgun, Destructoid, TIGSource, Offworld, AV Club, and Jeff Vogel himself (I play his games).

There’s a walkthrough, thanks to Tasselfoot.

I’ve just updated the game to version 1.1:

• Game translated to Spanish, Portuguese (Janos Biro), Czech (Jarnik), German (Kirill Gettmann), French (David Callé and Guillaume Patrux) and Italian (Elisa Di Fiore).
• Some small changes to improve on the meaning of the game objects.
• I installed a bot that helps me collect statistics on how many times the game is played, since I don’t trust the logging of my hosting very much…

In the future I will make another version of this game with deeper changes I already know will make the game much better, but I’ll let some time go by so I can have a perspective on it.

Also, Leticia Vilela made a wallpaper:

Finally, Today I Die is now released and you can play it here.

You might notice it’s actually self-hosted. I built a package including I Wish I Were the Moon, Storyteller, Today I Die and its soundtrack, which you can download from the downloads page, where you can help me by donating!

This was not an easy game to make, and I involved a lot of people I want to thank. I’m sure I’ll forget someone… remind me at daniel@ludomancy.com!

Tembac for the initial idea of playing with poem words is his. Him, Egar Almeida and Patrick Dugan for the initial feedback. Edmund McMillen for his obsession with helping me out, Jason Rohrer, Terry Cavanagh, Ian Bogost, John Sharp, Martín Sebastián Wain, Heather Kelley, Darius Kazemi, Anthony Burch, Juan Becerril, Jonathan Blow, Nick Montfort, Gregory Weir, Chris Hecker, Stephen Lavelle, Mike Treanor, PixelJam, Marco Mustapic, Rod Humble, Anna Anthropy for their critical feedback.

Guadalupe, whose handwriting you can see in the game.

And very special thanks to the “sponsor” of this game, who went out of his way to make it possible for me release the game in a quiet, ad-free website.

Enjoy!