Another Awesomenauts – Making a game with a close friend

I haven’t had much chance to make games lately. Lots of leading design jams and student work, but not a project where we make a game and play it. A game we spend some time and energy on, where we try to realize a singular vision. Not in a while. But this last year, in my spare time on weekends and such, I found myself lucky enough to work on a new game. A couple weeks ago, we finished a 1.0 and ran it up the flagpole. It was exhilarating. It felt great to see it come to fruition and put it through its paces. I’d like to tell you a little about this project and where we might start to look for learning and games to come together in ways that can lead far.

My design partner’s name is Alex, he’s 5, and he’s my oldest son. Our game is called Another Awesomenauts.

Minimize Clutter While Notebooking with ARIS

ARIS is most often used to author content for players to experience. But it also holds functionality for you to send players out to experience the world and share what they find with each other and you. This can be data collection, photo mapping, etc. The Notebook allows players to record geolocated media (video, audio, photo, text) and together to build a collaborative record of their explorations. This functionality has broad potential and combining data collection features with the other affordances of ARIS (making games, telling stories, etc.) is a truly unique thing. Being able to richly establish a context for those who you are sending out to do the collecting is a fantastic opportunity.

Buuuuut, if you’ve actually used the ARIS Notebook, if you really had people go out there and collect some pictures, etc. then you know that clutter is a problem, especially when there is a good deal of non-Notebook content you need players to see. After a bit, the map just looks like a mess.

In ChronoOps, by the 503 Design Collective, notes left by players obscure the map and authored content.

Clutter exists because every note is marked on the game map for all players. This can be useful for viewing notes later, but it can really get in the way too. ARIS will continue to evolve, so this clutter may eventually be less of a problem. But there are some things that you can do right now as an author to clean things up for your players.

ARIS Update – Choose Your Game’s Location

If you haven’t made a new game in ARIS in a while, you’ll be happy to know that the long nightmare is finally over: you can now set a default location for your game’s locations!

That’s right! No more moving every single trigger from Madison, WI to your location. Depending on what you allow your browser to know about you too, ARIS will default the above “create game” screen to show your current location, making it even more convenient in most cases.

When you set this location, and make new (location) triggers in the editor, they will start out at this default location. It should save countless frustration.

This feature has been in the beta editor for some time, but today I noticed it in the vanilla editor.

Hooray!

A Short Tour – ARIS Tutorial – PSU Workshop

Last wek I ran a workshop remotely for a class at Portland State University hoping to learn a bit about ARIS with an eye to language learning. Before my workshop, this group took an ARIS based multi-lingual tour on their campus made by Steve Thorne and (some students – sorry, I’ve forgotten your names). Rather than have them build Thief, I thought it would be more appropriate to take them through the basics by making a simple tour.

If it’s useful for any of you, here is the script I wrote for that little tutorial.

ARIS Quick Reference

This is a much shortened version of ARIS – The Manual. This guide is only meant to give you a basic rundown of some commonly used features. My intent is for it to be a helpful reference when making your first game or two.