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Play as a Tourist in a Glitched-Out Video Game World

Meet the Werner Herzog of video games.

One of the wonderful things about Unity 3D is is how it has become an imaginative enabler for independent video game designers. Compatible with various electronic devices, its presence can be felt in games such as Drunken Robot PornographyEndless Space, and The Room. Perhaps it's time to add the glitched-out Error City Tourist video game to that growing list of visually striking indie titles.

Designed by the anonymous founder of Strangethink Software as part of Game Jolt's Glitch Jam game design challenge, Error City Tourist allows players to navigate a world dominated by glitchy skies, clouds, walls, and baddies that look like bovine-esque phantom automatons. While that might make it sound like a toss-off effort of sorts, the game is a visual treat to behold.

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The game's designer (who asked to remain anonymous) told me that Error City Tourist came about while on break from another video game project.

"I needed to take a break from the project I was working on and noticed that there were 24 hours left in the Glitch Jam," he said. "So, I decided to make something as a 'programming holiday' from my main project."

Always at work on multiple prototypes and ideas, he is slowly constructing what he said is his own vocabulary of video games. Under his experimental rules, Error City Tourist grew into a short, concentrated expression of where he was in the process of developing this gaming vocabulary.

"The moment that defined the design of the game was when I decided to not use fog or tricks to disguise the draw distance or pop in new city sections," he said. "The city quickly occupied a strange space between feeling like it had a life of its own, and feeling like a creepy stage set. That in itself felt like enough of an achievement, so I really just continued to refine that."

The designer couldn't name any past games that utilize glitch in their design and gameplay. And instead of making the game's glitchiness all about the artwork, he emphasized that glitch lives in the game in a much broader way.

"It can be found in the way the world is generated and in the way it behaves," he said. "It's about systems that don't quite work perfectly, because I wasn't interested in designing game mechanics that simply use the language of glitch."

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One such glitch grew out of the game's monorail, which players can chose to ride. He'd heard from one player that they couldn't get on the monorail because all the ramps were blocked due to unlucky city generation. A glitch he didn't build into the game, but a glitch nonetheless.

When he plays Error City Tourist, he tries to climb to the highest level of the city or find a secret trap room. But, he noted, there are no easter eggs in the game; only strange occurences that came about because of the design limitations.

"There are some strange quirks in the programming that can conspire to produce some interesting things to look at," he said. "Collision detection only works for the city tile the player is standing on, so distant monsters can walk through walls. And if a building generates on the edge of a tile, then the player will be able to walk into a building through a wall that lies on the edge of the tile."

"This only works one way, though, and sometimes you can walk into an enclosed room and then be unable to escape," he added. "If you are standing under the tram it's sometimes possible to see the signs that point to the tram flip direction as you move from one side to the other. It's also sometimes possible to start the game trapped in an enclosed room."

The designer describes his games and style as both psychedelic and a "wild thrashing," all in an attempt to discover an aesthetic that satisfies him. This runs from the programming straight through to the visuals.

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"Computer games seem to be very tied to well-worn trends, a vocabulary, a language that gamers understand when it comes to visuals," he said. "There are double-jumps, crafting, waypoints, screen shakes, character traits, faked danger, levels that funnel the character where they need to go, and dramatically-scripted events that happen just as you look at them. And they're always saving the world."

"I'm not satisfied with them, and I'm happy to fail, but I've got to try," he added. "With Error City Tourist, I actually tweaked the look until I found it borderline disgusting and annoying. I guess what I am trying to do is similar to what Werner Herzog means when he says that he 'invented cinema'."

Still frame from forthcoming video game 'Electric Pilgrim'. Image: Strangethink Software

The designer said that he wants to start from a naive position, and clumsily reinvent computer games by following his own experiments. If he could wipe everything after Doom from his memory, he would be happy. Ideally, his games should feel like starting over again after a nuclear war or some other catastrophe.

And he prefers to think of Error City Tourist as a "virtual alien world." For him, part of what makes the game exist in such a strange space is that it "violently tries to reject computer gamesiness while at the same time magnifying the computeriness of everything and shoving it in your face."

Initially, he let players escape Error City by monorail. And, if they travelled for awhile on it, the world would start to disintegrate, leaving gamers traveling through space as the game came to an end. He later disabled it when he decided that he preferred a world in which there was no escape.

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What's great is that all of this comes from the mind of a game designer without any training in video game design. In fact, he only started creating games about six months ago. And though his inspirations are diverse, science fiction is a big influence, as are OMNI magazine covers.

Still frame from forthcoming video game 'Electric Pilgrim'. Image: Strangethink Software

While Error City Tourist was only recently released, the game's designer is already hard at work on three other video game projects. The first, Qixulbib, is a short game set on an alien planet, where the player is "processed by a government agency in order to be properly assimilated into an extra-dimensional being called Qixulbib." He hasn't yet finalized the game's look, but he said he's after some sort of "Inca-Futurist" aesthetic.

After that game's release, he plans to release Electric Pilgrim, due out this September. This game, he said, will cover vast areas of strange dimensions. As part of a religious order, the player must set out to explore and gather "discarded electronic items and bring them back to the monastery for use in weird rituals."

And, in late 2014, he will release Goodbye Solid Ground, a game about living on a spaceship and rescuing alien cats from a mysterious cataclysm that is destroying their home planets. Cats, you say? Hell, the whole internet will be in on that action.