An Apology?

I don't need to make an apology for taking an interest in games on Linux. Do I?
I feel like I do. I mean, I am interested, genuinely. And I do think that platforms like Ubuntu on Linux should be where the next great wave of indie games (at least) is coming from.

It's got everything, hasn't it? It's free to use and you can get right under the hood to tweak things. There's no China-like Super-State mentality that dictates your games have to conform to this standard, or that they have to be distributed in this way, costing developers this much.

So surely homebrew coders should see it as a comfortable home. But.

But.

There's a theme that runs through a lot of the games developed and promoted (for want of a better word) on Ubuntu. They feel like tech demos. It's great that you've worked out how to make a chess game, but there are already a glut of them. It's great that you had a go at making a multiplayer platform shmup, but you forgot to tell me how to play it, and your user interface is leaving me lost, or it's good that you've made a game you feel you can charge money for, but yo've forgotten to talk to me like a customer, and you're not really telling me what I'm going to get for my money.

It seems to me that one of the reasons Linux games aren't on fire right now is that they're not being made in the right way. The focus should be on fun, and if you're going to ask me for money, the focus should be on me.

So let's see if I can stop being a negative Nancy for a moment and start giving some of my own ideas to the mix, after all, what good is criticism if it's not constructive.

1. Why are you doing this?
If you're making a tech demo to see if you can get some sort of physics model, or logic algorithm to work then great. Do that. That's the kind of thing that leads to a good game. But remember the game! Portla, for instance, uses pretty good physics to create a world where things fall, slide and bounce as they should, but a game is not a game until there is a goal. Once you've got your tech demo sorted out talk to people who can write a story around it, or wrap it in beautiful art work. It doesn't have to be complicated, in many cases simple is beautiful. Just remember that while you should rightly be proud that the object you've got recognises the floor and the walls and what not, you need to give me a reason to bounce it, to throw it, to care about it.

2. How do you want me to use it?
Let's put aside the hurdles that come with PC gaming. The computer I'm writing this on isn't the same as the one you're reading it on, so if we're going to play the same game I accept that I may have to tweak some settings. That can't be helped.

However, I shouldn't need to tell the game where my graphics card is, or even what type of graphics card I have, and if I need to join a network, please don't make me have to psychically guess a server address. Show me what servers are available. That kind of thing.

3. Let me win!
A game is generally best enjoyed when it presents a challenge but is ultimately achievable.
Think about the time span you want me to set aside for such a game. An hour for one level/round where I can't save my progress or at least suspend the game isn't going to drag me back too often. Make a goal, allow me to reach it, present me with a tougher goal, and so on.

4. Give it a soul.
A game that has character and soul is a joy to play, most of the time. Consider how you could make me feel more invested in the task at hand. How can I care about my avatar, or my foe if they are a bland as the Linux penguin or as undefined as 'You Vs Them'.

Personality works wonders for a game. Even a game that's very simple indeed can be lifted by some back story, or some personality traits.

5. Make sure it's finished.
This might be the simplest rule of all, and it's so often over looked. If something isn't quite finished in your current build, leave it out and put it in an update. You'll need the bare bones of the game to start with, at least, while you put your alpha out there and let people play test it, but if you have an option to do something that doesn't actually work then I will struggle to see this as a future benefit and will more likely see it as a current failing.

Games aren't job, for the player at least, and they aren't diy kits. Unless your game is a diy kit job simulator, of course. Remember to create your world with 'sealed edges' where you can't accidentally press the 'Y' button and crash the entire thing.

I'd like to finish this post by saying something utterly positive. It's incredibly important to me that you get your game out there, because games are great, and yours might just be the next cult classic that I fall in love with, but please, please, remember that you're making it for me.
Even if you don't expect to get money for your game, I expect to get enjoyment out of it.

Good luck champions of dorkish pursuits on unpopular formats.
You make the world a wonderful place.

Liquid War

Fittingly the first game I want to feature is the first one I downloaded when I discovered Ubuntu.

Liquid War!

War! With liquids!



The aim of Liquid War is to absorb your opponents and dominate the play area. It's a cute idea and for the most part it's play mechanic holds up well.

There are a large number of maps to choose from, with different obstacles requiring a different approach to annihilating you foe.

You don't control your liquid army directly, however, using your cursor you give a direction of advance for your little puddle to follow.

Although the game is rather unpleasantly presented with an acid green user interface with blurry pink text, and a set of sounds that will make you think about going to the loo slightly too often, the game has charm. There's something about the straightforward nature of the play that is, well, not exactly addictive, but does bring you back for more.

The battles themselves can be fought against real people online or against up-to five AI players.
I've never managed to get a game going online because no one else seems to be playing this game. I think that's going to be a common theme with games on Ubuntu.

The AI do a passable job at keeping you busy, but they don't seem to spot opportunities to strangle you, or indeed spot you creeping up behind them, so the overall experience tends to follow a pattern: dominate the field, corner the enemy, grind away at wearing them down.

I seem to spend most of my time prising them off of obstacles and out of hiding places pixel-by-pixel. This formula means that while the game could be potentially quite interesting against humans, against the AI it's more a battle of will than anything else.

Imagining, for a moment, and this is pure speculation, but imagining I'd played against other human opponents I can see how the game is incredibly well balanced. You can snatch victory from the jaws of defeat with a relatively modest army, and because of the way the game decides who's absorbing who, you can give a much larger liquid army the runaround for a while until they make a mistake. But that's pure extrapolation based on my lonely, lonely singly player game.

If the game was spruced up and reinvigorated with some online play I can imagine it being something to come back to, but as it is, in it's current state, it's a passing curiosity.

Worth a look but don't get your hopes up.

Details:
Price: Free
Available from: Software Centre (search Liquid war)
Developer website: http://www.ufoot.org/liquidwar/v5

Welcome

Hello,

Firstly let me apologise for the hideous name. It seems that all Ubuntu related names have been taken on Blogger, so I'm officially "UK Games Ubuntu". Great. Thanks.

So, what is this?
This is my collection of reviews, interviews, news and not-news about all things gaming and ubuntu related. Well, not all things, just the good things.

To set the tone I'd like to share with you my vision.

I like games. Games are fun. And I like computers. Computers are great.

I think the natural home for games on computers are consoles, but everyone is writing about those these days, aren't they? Yeah.

So sometimes I play games on computers. That's nice. Computer games are nice.

I used to have a Mac, you know. I like it. It was good. It broke. I broke it.
Macs are expensive, so I got myself a sturdy little laptop to watch telly on and check facebook, and look at porn. But it had windows on it. I don't understand windows. I don't really like it either.

WE ARE NEVER HAVING THE MAC vs WINDOWS vs LINUX CONVERSATION. EVER.

So I had this laptop that was struggling with an old copy of Windows and I thought, you know what, why not give Linux a try? My friend Ross uses it, so if I get horribly confused I can phone him and he can help me out.

I had a look around and by far the least demanding/confusing flavour of Linux seemed to be Ubuntu. So I set up my laptop with that.

At first I faffed about with it to make it look like a Mac, but that seemed disingenuous, so I decided to try to be true to the whole Ubuntu experience.

I've been using Ubuntu for a bit over a year now and I'm happy with my lot. It's relatively stable, most things get finished eventually (like the ability to change the volume while watching full screen video and not having the whole thing freeze up on you). Yeah, Linux is alright. Ubuntu is alright. I like it. It's nice.

But...

But I want games. Fun games. Games that cool kids play. Alright, games that cool dorks play. I'm a bit of a dork, but I like to think I'm a cool one.

So yes, games... games... games...

That's where this blog comes in. I'm going to explore the world of gaming in Ubuntu and I'm going to be brutally honest about it. Brutal I tell you.

I'm not a mean man, so when things are good I'll celebrate them, and encourage you to celebrate them too, but when things are bad, I think it's worth pointing out. Because if games aren't fun, what are they? Together we will explore the heights of gaming ecstasy and the lows of not knowing what to do with a command line prompt.

Come with me now, as we begin... ukgubuntu.
Yeah. I need to fix that name.