Comments on: Blast modern art

By: dbh

dbh — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 22:00:40 +0000

Thanks Patrick– I’m glad that you enjoyed it! Hard is a big step from Medium, but even being able to beat Medium takes quite a lot of thought and time investment. Thank you again for the kind comments, I too hope that your dream comes to fruition some day :)

-dbh

By: Patrick

Patrick — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 00:05:42 +0000

Hey dbh, I really enjoyed your game. I drew me in for several hours as I figure out the optimal banister layout and gun ratio, I managed to beat it on medium, but I wasn’t about to give Hard mode a serious run. My dream is that game design will arrive at a stage of maturity where themes and mechanics will become synonymous, but in the meantime I’m glad there are free games made by clever designers (with a fairly keen sense of satire).

By: dbh

dbh — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 00:47:42 +0000

I can’t help but love this conversation! As Curator Defense’s developer, I now know what Pablo Picasso must have felt like when art critics started discussing the meaning behind his art. Curator Defense was never designed to be a social commentary on the art world in any way. It was simply a game I made in my spare time while being a full-time student and part-time worker on campus to add to my growing portfolio of games (to eventually lead, I hope, to a job in this industry).

To provide another angle… the gameplay mechanic came before the theme (chicken before the egg, so to speak). I came up with the defense-based gameplay first, then slowly started piecing together a “museum” theme for the game. Over time, things grew and grew into what you have today.

Anyway, thanks for the interesting debate and discussion! I’m really glad to see that people are “thinking” about the game… that is quite a statement in itself.

-dbh

By: mark

mark — Sat, 19 Nov 2005 22:55:48 +0000

I agree that it would have been more interesting if it were some more fundamental simulation of the art world’s sociopolitics, but I think the whole point of the game is as a light-hearted parody, not as some deep investigation of how the art world really works. But if you want to view it as a caricatured simulation of art’s sociopolitics, I think it works that way too: A bunch of people throw a lot of crap against the wall, and some of it sticks. :-)

By: Patrick

Patrick — Sat, 19 Nov 2005 18:53:08 +0000

The balancing of the monetary resource and the fire rates and the rest of it is quite well done, I’ve spent at least a few hours glued to the thing in the past couple of hours. As far as making a point goes. all the guy has really done is come up with a well-tuned resource management and deployment game and skinned some modern art models onto the objects. The point would have been better made where the sociopolitical parameters of resitance to change in the art world actually fleshed out, but that would have been a completely different game, one never before seen.

By: mark

mark — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 20:30:35 +0000

Haha, this is pretty nice. Looks like it’s not limited to just contemporary art: Malevich gets in there twice! The gameplay is pretty developed, too; most of these sorts of “making an amusing point” games tend to be more thrown together.