Screenshots :.
Sleep is Death
PC
Jay
16-04-2010
"Our own stories were a little... odd."
"This one started in a police station..."
"... and ended up like this. The stuff in-between was equally confusing."
There's certainly an uprising of the desire for games that give the player creative freedom over its direction. Of course, this is understandable with immersion effectively coinciding with our involvement with the game. It's perhaps only technology that now holds us back – not that appreciating this fact ever decreases our expectations of the next triple A title.
[urlex=http://www.ultraninjas.com/articles/?article=573]Heavy Rain[/url] was the most recent reference to this attempt to immerse players in a storyline they ultimately control. However, this is only relevant within its newly generated genre of “Interactive Film” and goes to show that technology currently can only take us so far if we pay less attention to the games ultimate linearity, lack of physics or diversity of control over the character we play (sure, all this said it was still a ruddy good title).
I say all this in the vain hope that I'll cunningly set the stage for understanding a games limitations before you take a look at Sleep Is Death and go “8-bit was sooo last millennia”. OK, at the whopping price of £7 that's not necessarily true, putting it into a price range we might expect from other Indie Games. What is it? Well, it really boils down to being a storytelling framework for 2 players. To a certain degree, you're the ones that create the game or story as you go along. If you're unfamiliar with Jason Rohrer's previous work, then I could only surmise them as experiments with combining gameplay with some of the bigger life topics such as love, life and the universe.
On buying SID you can grab a couple of copies so that you and a friend can play it as it really only works as a 2 player game. One of you will act as the storyteller and be responsible for building the environment, driving the plot and creating various people and objects for the player to interact with. As the player you're solely responsible for moving your character around, interacting with objects or people (through prompts) and talking when the need arises. We certainly found that both players were responsible (or it was certainly more entertaining) to keep the story going by giving the other player something to do. The polar opposite of this situation would be for the player to just stand there talking or the storyteller to create a room with no exit or anything interesting to interact with.
You both have 30 seconds to take your turn from the start of the game, a setting which can be changed in the configs if you need a little more time at first. It's certainly worth getting competent enough to achieve 30 seconds after a few games to familiarise yourself with everything Sleep Is Death has to offer. It'll help drive the storyline, but there can be some hilarious side effects to the creator not quite managing to finish his turn in time – and a decent player who responds to the mistake as part of the storyline. Of course this doesn't always work if you're trying to create a serious story, but that's likely to be something to set your sights on for a later date.
As the storyteller you have a set amount of pieces to begin with for both the environments and objects you can use. When it's your turn you can place any of these as appropriate or edit ones that already exist – say the player breaks a branch from a tree, you'll have to quickly edit the tree's branch to fall to the ground, adding “snap” as a descriptive for added flare should you wish. The player might decide to pick the stick up on his turn, so you'll then have to edit his character to show he's holding a stick. In doing this SID will create copies of these “sprites” to reuse as and when you need to. The perspective for the game is decided by the storyteller as they create the environment, although it's easier to think of it in terms of old school RPG's – top-down, side scrolling etc. It's also worth noting at this point that there's a good reason as to why you should come up with a theme for a game before sitting down to do one. Asset creation can take time, so rather than getting frustrated trying to build sets on the fly you can have a library of sets to call from.
Sleep Is Death reminded me of a certain game they'd play on Who's Line Is It Anyway? where someone else would be responsible for moving a team-mate around the stage. In one of our games I couldn't seem to flip the player to look in the opposite direction when chasing down a criminal – of course this just incited bouts of “When I finally turn around you'd better still be there!” much to my amusement – and through the tears of laughter I finally managed to replace the sprite with one of the originals continuing the story. Hell, it didn't end there. We had random gender changes, loss of clothes or changes to original outfits, all as part of the learning process. Which is why to begin with a parody was a fitting story with what I'd say was a moderately difficult learning curve on the creators part.
Thanks to our game being such a laugh, SID's little frustrations, all centred around creating environments on the fly and the sprite management system, were all brushed aside as only greater hilarity could come of it. Although I could understand this might not be the same for those wanting to avoid these situations. Probably a good reason that a practice mode has been included, so you can spend time creating assets and practising how much you can get done in the given time limit.
The potential scope that Sleep Is Death provides is astounding for what you're presuming to be a simple game. Sleep is death? No, it's fuelled by the stuff of dreams.
[urlex=http://www.ultraninjas.com/articles/?article=573]Heavy Rain[/url] was the most recent reference to this attempt to immerse players in a storyline they ultimately control. However, this is only relevant within its newly generated genre of “Interactive Film” and goes to show that technology currently can only take us so far if we pay less attention to the games ultimate linearity, lack of physics or diversity of control over the character we play (sure, all this said it was still a ruddy good title).
I say all this in the vain hope that I'll cunningly set the stage for understanding a games limitations before you take a look at Sleep Is Death and go “8-bit was sooo last millennia”. OK, at the whopping price of £7 that's not necessarily true, putting it into a price range we might expect from other Indie Games. What is it? Well, it really boils down to being a storytelling framework for 2 players. To a certain degree, you're the ones that create the game or story as you go along. If you're unfamiliar with Jason Rohrer's previous work, then I could only surmise them as experiments with combining gameplay with some of the bigger life topics such as love, life and the universe.
On buying SID you can grab a couple of copies so that you and a friend can play it as it really only works as a 2 player game. One of you will act as the storyteller and be responsible for building the environment, driving the plot and creating various people and objects for the player to interact with. As the player you're solely responsible for moving your character around, interacting with objects or people (through prompts) and talking when the need arises. We certainly found that both players were responsible (or it was certainly more entertaining) to keep the story going by giving the other player something to do. The polar opposite of this situation would be for the player to just stand there talking or the storyteller to create a room with no exit or anything interesting to interact with.
You both have 30 seconds to take your turn from the start of the game, a setting which can be changed in the configs if you need a little more time at first. It's certainly worth getting competent enough to achieve 30 seconds after a few games to familiarise yourself with everything Sleep Is Death has to offer. It'll help drive the storyline, but there can be some hilarious side effects to the creator not quite managing to finish his turn in time – and a decent player who responds to the mistake as part of the storyline. Of course this doesn't always work if you're trying to create a serious story, but that's likely to be something to set your sights on for a later date.
As the storyteller you have a set amount of pieces to begin with for both the environments and objects you can use. When it's your turn you can place any of these as appropriate or edit ones that already exist – say the player breaks a branch from a tree, you'll have to quickly edit the tree's branch to fall to the ground, adding “snap” as a descriptive for added flare should you wish. The player might decide to pick the stick up on his turn, so you'll then have to edit his character to show he's holding a stick. In doing this SID will create copies of these “sprites” to reuse as and when you need to. The perspective for the game is decided by the storyteller as they create the environment, although it's easier to think of it in terms of old school RPG's – top-down, side scrolling etc. It's also worth noting at this point that there's a good reason as to why you should come up with a theme for a game before sitting down to do one. Asset creation can take time, so rather than getting frustrated trying to build sets on the fly you can have a library of sets to call from.
Sleep Is Death reminded me of a certain game they'd play on Who's Line Is It Anyway? where someone else would be responsible for moving a team-mate around the stage. In one of our games I couldn't seem to flip the player to look in the opposite direction when chasing down a criminal – of course this just incited bouts of “When I finally turn around you'd better still be there!” much to my amusement – and through the tears of laughter I finally managed to replace the sprite with one of the originals continuing the story. Hell, it didn't end there. We had random gender changes, loss of clothes or changes to original outfits, all as part of the learning process. Which is why to begin with a parody was a fitting story with what I'd say was a moderately difficult learning curve on the creators part.
Thanks to our game being such a laugh, SID's little frustrations, all centred around creating environments on the fly and the sprite management system, were all brushed aside as only greater hilarity could come of it. Although I could understand this might not be the same for those wanting to avoid these situations. Probably a good reason that a practice mode has been included, so you can spend time creating assets and practising how much you can get done in the given time limit.
The potential scope that Sleep Is Death provides is astounding for what you're presuming to be a simple game. Sleep is death? No, it's fuelled by the stuff of dreams.
8/10
