Game Over: A User-Created Game In Home
by tdarb, HSM guest contributor
In the time I have been on Home, I’ve taken part in many community events. Some of my best memories of Home have been in these events, especially Xi. It’s incredible to see groups of strangers come together to solve puzzles and work as a team.
Just after Xi ended, someone started a thread looking for people to help make user-created games. It took us nearly a year, and many membership changes, to put on our first production: King Neptune’s End. It was loads of fun to see random members of Home come together on one night and play a game that we made.
We went on to put on The Horror of Home, which went well. We had a lot of fun doing it, and had the luxury of many wonderful people playing who really made it a great success.
Now, our stories are nowhere near the level of Xi, but next Sunday we are putting on another event. It’s called Game Over. Anamri has created some truly devious puzzles, and the story is quite fun.
If you think you have what it takes, try the text game at http://plairs.net/GO/ad/play.html, or add the PSN ID DetectiveLaw.
We also have a thread on the Home forums here.
Everyone is welcome, so come on out and join us!
August 12th, 2011 by tdarb | 5 comments
tdarb is a member of LAIR, a group that creates user-generated games for Home. He can sometimes be found wandering around Home taking pics and looking at the sites. he likes to write words that say things, and is also quite fond of cheese.
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Very cool! I have wondered if people were doing such things in Home. Great to see users coming together to be creative! Now if there were only a way to get these games INTO home itself with NPCs so that they are a perma-part of Home.
Gideon. It does take place in Home. Our event this Sunday will be all in home. we will be doing the acting, the storytelling, and anamri has made several puzzles that span across a few spaces. You should come check it out. The games usually run between 2 to 3 hours.
In the past we have used extra actors to play the parts of NPCs along side of us.
Info on our past stories are on the forum link, as well as links to the games themselves. The link to the current game site is at the end of the text based game.
Just for funsies, here it is http://plairs.net/GO/
I absolutely love the idea of a community group — in this case LAIR — creating games in Home for the community. Even if you’re not a developer, and even if you have to work within the constraints of what the system allows an ordinary user to do, that doesn’t mean that you can’t come up with something fun and original to enjoy.
Example: one of my favorite TV shows is Babylon 5. Every single episode was produced with roughly half the budget of a Star Trek episode, and so they got very creative with set design, lighting, special effects, and storytelling. There’s a sequence in which there’s an *epic* battle between two of the strongest forces in the show, and you really only see hints of it — because your imagination can fill in the rest, and usually do a better job of it.
As Joe Straczynski, the showrunner explained: “Even if we’d had ten million bucks to do that sequence…I would’ve made the same choice.”
(Source: http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/countries/us/guide/059.html)
It’s much the same with Home. Maybe we don’t have dev kits and cool camera angles and all sorts of nifty tricks, but every single one of us has that same imagination that we had as children, when we hid together in some thicket on the schoolyard and pretended it was Sherwood Forest.
We may be older now, but that imagination is still there. Uncover it and use it. That’s what Home’s all about.
Looking forward to Game Over, and further such games from LAIR in the future.
Thanks Norse. It really does require some imagination, and there are a lot of hurdles to jump. It gets a little easier each time though. It is a lot of fun though, and it’s a good way to meet some new people. We usually hang out for a while afterwards and chat and have fun.
You guys should come check it out this Sunday.
Hey , I think what your doing is Fantastic and Like many of you are developing and designing Games within Playstation Home, Mine is a Play By Playstation Home MMO. sorta Like a off take of the PBEM Type of Game. I am Currently working on the Dr. Who PBPH Rule Book for people to use to make it a way to be uniform across the Playstation Landscape. Im also going to make a PBPH universal Combat system that take’s into account Inventory items abilities, along with item and Avatar stats and turn by turn Actions and combat. PSN ID: joeorc Msg me if you are interested. in Rule book Help or Play testing. That way you can than run games with your own groups and multiple groups can play each other’s games.