Fallout

• 2011-10-18

  Contrivance and Extortion: In-App Purchases & Microtransactions

  At IndieCade last week, Jon Blow (Braid, The Witness) used the term “contrivance” to describe all the bullshit we put between players and the game; between players and the puzzle; between players and the system; between players and the experience.  Whether the contrivance is intentional or not is not as important as its mere existence, the fact that it is a significant obstacle, whether the part of the game that is the most interesting is exposed as much as possible to the player.

  Last night I got caught up on some recent and not-so-recent iOS games that I’d been meaning to check.  These games were all official Apple “Game of the Week” or otherwise pretty hefty critical and commercial successes: Forever Drive, Infinity Blade, and Jetpack Joyride.

  I also checked out two smaller titles: Async Corp and Super Crossfire HD.  Super Crossfire is a really solid and simple arcade game (ported from the highly respected XBLIG title of the same name) that takes some of the arena shooter innovations from the last few years and puts them into a Space Invaders game with a cool “warping” mechanic.  Async Corp (pointed out to me by Simon Flesser of Ilo Milo and Bumpy Road) is a strange and wonderful little puzzle game that I am still rolling around in my head, and may write more about later.  Actually, Bumpy Road is rather important to the points I am about to make…

  I want to make three distinct points, which I will elaborate on below.  The first is that developers need to be more cognizant and responsible about something I’m calling the Checklist Effect.  The second is that In-App Purchases violate the sacred circle of play in a profound way.  Games that do both of these things, that abuse checklists and include In-App Purchases, are deliberately contriving their designs in the worst way in order to extort money from players, which is unethical and unacceptable design practice.  Finally, games that intrude on my phone’s home screen with advertisements for other products, using the iOS notification badges especially, though less contrived, are contrived for the same greedy reason.

  The Checklist Effect

  I was originally going to call this the Pokemon Effect, but probably that would be illegal or something.  And besides, it complicates things a bit.  This probably also has an actual neuroscience or psychology term that I should be using, but I haven’t worked out what that would be yet.  Regardless, the Checklist Effect is that subtle and slight psychological effect that seeing a big checklist of in-game items or abilities has on players.  It is usually a subtle push, a barely detectable need to “accomplish” everything on the list.  This could just as well be called the Achievements Effect probably, but that complicates things too.  Checklists outside of games can have a similar effect I think - a slight pressure to check off each item, to be done; mischief managed.

  It is time to acknowledge both that this effect exists, and also that most of the time this is a manipulative and unpleasant thing to do to players, all the more so because they may not realize it is even happening.  I frequently do realize it, and it is a big turnoff for me.  In Simon Flesser’s ridiculously charming game Bumpy Road, players can discover or pick up polaroids or photographs from the main characters’ past life.  As far as I can tell getting these pictures is tied more to time spent playing or distance traveled, more than skill or understanding.  To be fair, play skill and understanding do make distances easier to travel in games like this… but the relationship still stands.  When I opened up the photo album menu feature, to check out the story unfolding in the photographs I’d recovered, I found that after playing for 5 or 10 minutes I had collected only 1 or 2 of what seemed to be a hundred or more photos!  Some quick mental math reminded me that I don’t have that many hours to spend on something that isn’t inherently deep and engaging.

  On the flipside, I have played some iOS games recently that had really interesting achievements or checklists.  Shaun Inman’s The Last Rocket, with a total of four achievements, asks the player to play the game in a new, weird way for each item.  Zach Gage’s Bit Pilot makes absurd and wonderful demands of player’s skill: no single achievement takes more than a minute or two to earn, but requires incredible dexterity and focus.  Some of Bit Pilot’s achievements are limited to fewer than 10 players so far!  In both of these cases, the games themselves stand on their own, and the checklists exist only as bait to lead players to a new epiphany or new understand of the game system.  These are responsible and ethical uses of checklists in games.

  The Sacred Circle

  This is an old idea about games and play, usually credited to Johan Huizinga, the oft-quoted author of Homo Ludens.  The idea of the sacred circle is that it is the boundary between the imperfect, consequence-laden, quantum and random real world we all inhabit, and the perfect, impossible and imaginary world of games and play.  The sacred circle is the line that divides the real world from the ancient, powerful and beneficial world of play.

  The integration of in-app purchases feels like a brutal violation of the sacred circle; it is allowing the real world, and my real money, to intrude on and influence my performance.  To me, this is different than a poker buy-in, and different from deciding to “unlock” the full version of a game from inside a demo.  These processes are in some fundamental way external from the game itself, from the actual state of play.  These “games” may be a pleasurable activity for many but this seems like a profound corruption of millennia of play.

  Together, a Maelstrom of Suck

  When you put these things together, you get “games” like Infinity Blade and Forever Drive.  The moment to moment play is engaging for a few minutes or even an hour, but then we have seen pretty much all there is to see.  The systems themselves are not deep enough to merit or encourage further exploration for their own sake (intrinsically), so an extrinsic system (a checklist) is created to subtly (and not so subtly) nudge the player forward, well beyond when the player has completely explored the system, puzzles or overall aesthetic experience.  That in and of itself is bad design, but games like this push it even further.

  The checklists in these games have been very deliberately designed to require a certain amount of grinding or waiting to advance.  We either have to fight the same fight over and over, or race the same tracks over and over, until we can afford the next item on the checklist, which will enable us, largely irrespective of our own skills as a player, to proceed.  If it was possible to succeed in these games without the checklist, that would be one thing.  But these games are very deliberately designed to ensure that not only do you need the checklist to succeed, but in fact successfully completing the checklist is prohibitively slow and/or annoying to do.

  That’s when they step in, like a mafia godfather, and offer you a deal you can’t refuse: you’re a busy guy, you have kids, you have a job; if you slip me a little cash under the table, I’ll help you level up a little faster, maybe get through that next part of the checklist by tomorrow.  This is extortion in the worst way; this is extortion of the time we have left until we die, the sole resource of consequence for human life.  Developers who deliberately engage in this kind of design should be ashamed of their creations.

  Unethical Intrusion

  Jetpack Joyride, though guilty of the checklist effect, largely sidesteps the aforementioned Maelstrom of Suck by primarily selling totally unnecessary cosmetic items, and providing (to many) a reasonable balance of play-time and in-game currency rewards.  My beef with Jetpack Joyride is not that it is genuinely evil, despite their irresponsible use of checklists (hundreds of items with an average price of $5000, when my first play of the game netted me a mere $300).  My beef came when I decided to try out the next game on my phone only to notice a little notification badge had appeared on the game’s icon on my home screen.

  Intrigued, I opened the game, but couldn’t find the notification on the screen I resumed from.  Intrigued further, I skipped back to the main menu screen and found it on a little tab up in the corner.  Feeling relatively satisfied and still curious, I opened the tab… and discovered an ad for a game made by some other company.  This is a whole other kind of contrivance but motivated by the same greed and lack of respect for players.

  Let’s all remind ourselves, as we build games, commercially and otherwise, that contrivances are bullshit.  If your game is not first and foremost about the player and the experience, then you are not building games.  You are building micro-retail stores, maybe, or greed engines, or something.  I don’t know.  But it’s not a game, and I don’t want it on my hardware.

  Afterword

  If you want to know more about the math and psychology behind how games like Infinity Blade and Forever Drive work, I highly recommend my friend Tim Rogers’ excellent series who killed videogames? (a ghost story).  If you want to check out Async Corp and Super Crossfire HD, a pair of ethical and interesting iOS games, just click their names!  (actually Super Crossfire HD does have in-app purchases but for the life of me I can’t find where to get them or what their purpose is).  You should also check out Bit Pilot and The Last Rocket if you never got around to it, their achievement design is really good.

• 2011-10-12

  

  Pursuing the Infinite: Full Screen Download Available!

  Hey there my most excellent friends and companions!  I gave an experimental unrehearsed talk at IndieCade this weekend about “pursuing the infinite”, featuring an original 60-minute animation of a space launch, accompanied by the ambient tunes of The Inventors of Aircraft, Biosphere, Boards of Canada, and C418.

  I just uploaded a looping version of the animation, sans jams, which you can download here.  This .zip file contains Windows and Mac versions.  Perfect for parties and confusing, depressing presentations to your peers.  Best served with medium-dry space disco, or more full-bodied minimalist tech opera.

• 2011-09-19

  

  Why Brainstorming is NOT Game Design

  As we continue our discussion about brainstorming, I think it would be good to clarify the different activities that fall under the brainstorming umbrella.  Some things that I consider to be integral parts of a “brainstorm” might include:

  • thinking up and writing down ideas, tool-assisted or otherwise
  • discussing ideas (verbally or in written form) with peers or prospective audience
  • imagining and/or doodling some basic visualization of ideas

  I don’t think I’ve missed much, but if I have I am open to updating the list accordingly. Short of any surprising additions to that list, I can define brainstorming as the collecting, formulation and consideration of untested ideas.  Exercising our taste and judgment during the initial phase of a project is a crucial part of controlling the scope and direction of our work.  While I happen to believe that formal brainstorming is usually a waste of time, the process of thinking up ideas is an unavoidable and necessary parallel process to creation.
  
  Brainstorming vs Game Design

  As stated above, while we have the capacity to vet ideas on paper to some extent, at no point in our brainstorming process do we actually test the ideas.  From my perspective, even though brainstorming is both fun and necessary, the fact that they are just unproven ideas makes brainstorming wholly distinct from the act of game creation, and thus distinct from the discipline of game design, even though our game design experience obviously informs the way we formulate and consider our ideas.

  It’s obvious to me from game design literature, education and tutorials that this may come across as a controversial idea, which I hope to clarify here.  First, this is not a value judgment about brainstorming; frequently engaging in brainstorming doesn’t mean you are somehow inferior or not a game designer or anything crazy like that.  Thinking things up and discussing them with friends, peers, and even family is a critical part of how I approach all my game ideas.Second, in no other art form or discipline is the recording of untested ideas assigned inherent value or considered an important part of the actual process.  To illustrate, let’s pretend we are an Italian rennaisance artist, in the year 1500 or so.  Like a game maker, we are multi-disciplinary and interested in a lot of different things: art, science, and so on.  We decide that one of our on-going projects for the next few years will be a painting.  We’ve already got a few things going on the side, but we feel like working on something new.  So, we start thinking up ideas - brainstorming, if you will:

  • sculpture?
  • philosophy?
  • painting?
  • oooo painting sounds good!  what sorts of things should be in it?
  • hmmm, portraiture seems interesting, i haven’t done much of that
  • ok so a portrait - portraits of nobles are cliche, let’s do someone else…
  • i’m thinking a woman
  • ok so it’s a painted portrait of a woman, let’s define some features:
  • palette: browns, yellows, maybe some greens
  • plain features, neutral posture, simple garments
  • pastoral background
  • ambiguous expression

  I would argue that this list of ideas, on its own, has absolutely no value whatsoever (yet). In fact, I would argue that this list never even existed, but that’s probably a discussion for another time.  We can see in this imaginary list how we vetted some ideas to narrow our focus or interest, and made an outline of some of the things we want to see in the painting, and it looks promising.

  But obviously, this brainstorm and the actual Mona Lisa are incomparable creations.  Not only are the ideas in our brainstorm untested and unproven, they are still abstract enough (despite their high level of specificity) that we could paint dozens of paintings based on that outline.  In retrospect, with the Mona Lisa “proven” to some degree, this list of inspirations, if it existed (which it didn’t), would be interesting and even valuable.  But now, before the idea has been evaluated through experimentation and the process of creation, it is essentially worthless.So why bother harping on brainstorming like this?  At the end of the day, what’s so important about brainstorming being separate from game design?  My concern is largely that aspiring designers, practicing junior designers as well as industry/art-form outsiders will all continue to believe that simply writing down some ideas is the same thing as creating an interesting work.  This illusion can only continue to harm the industry and the people who wish to engage with it, regardless of whether they are employees, players, enthusiasts or artists from other disciplines.  It’s inaccurate and not reflective of the way any other discipline, be it science or art, is approached.

  
  Ideas vs ExecutionWhenever the topic of clones comes up, one of the stronger arguments in defense of cloning can be paraphrased “Ideas are cheap; execution is everything.”  As you may have gathered, this is a phrase that kind of clicks with me in a pretty fundamental way.  I can imagine there being some exceptions to this rule, but I can’t think of any at the moment.  But this phrase is used to justify, excuse or otherwise legitimize games like Angry Birds or Ninja Fishing, which provide some surface polish and control adaptations to an existing and successful prototype or game that someone else tested and proved.

  It might sound like, after bashing on brainstorming for the first half of this article, I would thoroughly support this practice; after all, I clearly believe that ideas are cheap.  The problem is that these games are not cases where someone saw some pure ideas scribbled hastily on a whiteboard, and then went out, tested, and proved a specific formulation of those ideas.  These are cases where someone saw existing execution and duplicated it.If someone creates a blog where all they do is write down unproven, untested game ideas, and then cries foul when someone actually develops, tests and refines one of those ideas in a physical prototype, I don’t really have a lot of sympathy for them.  Thinking up those ideas may not have been trivial for them, but they never checked to see if those ideas were valid or interesting in practice.  They never actually engaged in game design.  They made lists of features they thought the Mona Lisa should have.

  Ideas are cheap, then, but prototypes are not just ideas.  Prototypes and finished games are science experiments validating those ideas, and elevating them at the same time.  So when the argument that “execution matters” is used to prop up unethical cloning, I am compelled to remind those defenders that “prototyping matters more.”To illustrate, however simply, the importance of the games that were cloned, and to emphasize how much they matter, consider this: Radical Fishing can and did exist without Ninja Fishing, but Ninja Fishing obviously could not exist without Radical Fishing.  Likewise, Crush The Castle had 30 million plays on just one Flash portal before Angry Birds existed.

  One reason ideas are cheap is because they are easy.  But prototyping and actually making a game idea for the first time, that explores those ideas and figures out how to make them work, is difficult, and the most important part of execution.  Without this step, there can be no polish, no cloning via “execution”.  So, despite my disregard for the inherent value of mere ideas, I place a very high value on proven ideas, and I can’t get behind the idea that execution validates a clone.
  Conclusion

  Of course, we can look at this situation from the science angle too, instead of the art angle, but the results are the same.  Consider, for example, the process of a hypothesis surviving experimentation and peer scrutiny to become an established theory.  Hypotheses are a dime a dozen, maybe cheaper; but a theory that stands the test of time expands our boundaries and our understanding of the world around us.  Having a good hypothesis is an important first step; imagination matters!  But ultimately, the only way to validate or value those guesses is to start experimenting.Writing a design doc for the Mona Lisa should not be confused with painting, nor should formulating a hypothesis be confused with science.  Likewise, brainstorming should not be confused with game design.  Collecting, formulating and considering ideas in our heads or on paper is a necessary, valid and positive process to engage in throughout painting, or science, or game design, or anything else; but it does not in any way represent the core practices of these disciplines, or the ability to create something meaningful.

  However, we would do well to remember that once proven and tested, an idea is no longer just an idea; it’s a work of art, or a scientific breakthrough, or an interesting game, and should be accorded the respect that achievement deserves.  Forgeries, plagiarized research and unauthorized clones should be recognized for what they are, if not by the general public then at the very least by practitioners and enthusiasts.

• 2011-09-18

  Game Design: Brainstorming, Prototyping, Game Making & Marketing

  Lately it seems like there is a lot of confusion over the term “game design” and what it means.  I wanted to quickly (headed out the door at the mo, so very quickly!!) explain why I don’t include brainstorming or marketing under the game design umbrella.  I may update this in the future based on feedback and further reflection, but in the meantime…

  Brainstorming

  Brainstorming is the process of coming up with an elaborating on ideas for projects on paper, in digital word documents, or in digital graphics files.  This is the part of a project where we are writing down ideas about rules or doing concept art for what the game might look like.  Brainstorming is not game design.  Brainstorming is fun, but it is wholly speculative and the results are ultimately worthless.  Brainstorming is not game design.

  Prototyping

  Prototyping, in game design, is the ongoing process of exploring and validating ideas in the context of creating a functional and interesting new game.  Prototyping is the point when we can actually understand and see the value of our ideas, and a functional prototype is the first real, extant instance of a game’s design in the real world, and a functioning, interesting prototype is in many ways invaluable.  Prototyping is very much game design.

  Game Making

  Game making is the process of creating a game, and includes prototyping but also polishing.  Polish is the process of fine-tuning and dressing up the result of your prototypes for mass consumption, and is tantamount to marketing in many ways.  However, all those little holistic changes to the game make all the difference in the world.  I don’t believe that prototyping is a “phase” done before polish, but a parallel process throughout development.  However, I do believe that many games (most?) should be built on a 30% time spent prototyping, 70% time spent polishing type of relationship.  Game making is game design, and vice versa.

  Marketing

  The process of taking a game and presenting it to the world for mass consumption.  Marketing, for me, is not part of game design, and I extend this to include many things that are I think counter-intuitive or controversial.  For example, taking the core gameplay from a popular Flash game like Crush the Castle (30m plays!) and changing the graphics and controls is a process that I consider marketing, not game design.  Likewise, taking the core gameplay from a less popular Flash game like Radical Fishing and adding touch controls and changing the graphics is also marketing.  The idea that these adaptations constitute game design in any real sense, or are somehow worthy of praise and encouragement from a design perspective, utterly baffles me.  These are massive marketing achievements, and should be studied and praised as such, but these are not good examples of game design.

  My point, in the end, is not to somehow denigrate brainstorming or marketing, but it is important to me that we understand that these things, while related to game design, don’t have much to do with the real process of designing games.  Game Design, or as I prefer to call it Game Making, is the process of testing, refining and cross-pollinating our ideas until we have created an interactive system that introduces both sense-pleasure and intellectual engagement.  Neither brainstorming nor marketing has enough to do with these goals to be legimitately considered part of the process in my mind, at this point in my life.

• 2011-09-17

  Game Design: Regaining The Outsider’s Perspective

  

  Between training for the Austin Distance Challenge, being a dad, helping build a secret new iOS game (hopefully out in January!), helping to finish FEZ, working on an unannounced game design book, continuing to explore my own game ideas, both digital and otherwise, contributing to the GDC Advisory Board, and prepping for Fantastic Arcade and Indiecade, I haven’t had a whole lot of time for playing video games.  So last night, as a sort of self-reward for getting half my GDC talks reviewed and half the new book chapter written, I downloaded and played a dozen Playstation Network demos, including:

  • Echochrome - great puzzle design, boring presentation, muddy camera control
  • Ace Combat 7 - awesome airplane controls & flow, awful helicopter controls, repetitive music and gameplay
  • Beyond Good & Evil HD - still an unrivaled classic
  • Outland - good controls, great variety in gameplay, lovely art direction
  • Bloodrayne: Betrayal - good controls, repetitive gameplay
  • Pac-Man Championship Edition DX - good controls, great system, good sound
  • inFamous 2 - inFamous 1 at night
  • El Shaddai - insane presentation, but very repetitive
  • Castlevania: Lords of Shadow - mediocre controls, repetitive fights, great presentation
  • Hoard - awful presentation, neat gameplay system
  • Age of Booty - soul-less, unengaging
  • From Dust - fascinating, beautiful, repetitive, handicapped
  • Motorstorm: Apocalypse - ugly track, lame cars, removed default d-pad steering??

  …and played through them all in one sitting.  It was gluttonous and satisfying, but I started noticing some trends that were turning me off of a lot of the games.  I wanted to record them here if only to help me remember them better, in hopes that I might be as strict and critical of my own work as I was being of others.

  Please note that tese are highly subjective observations, and drawn only from the demos I played last night.  Therefore, some of these games may not be the best examples of these particular flaws or strengths.  The lessons presented at the end of each section are merely notes to myself about my own personal preferences and goals, and not intended as mandates to the game design community!

  Variety

  Most of the games I played presented strikingly little variety over the course of 30-60 minutes of play.  I enjoy (and sometimes make) games that are only about one thing, but it’s important for that one thing to have enough depth and interest.  For the action games in particular, I can’t help but compare them to one of my favorite beat-‘em-ups, Streets of Rage 2.  In the first level of Streets of Rage 2, which takes less than ten minutes to play through, you walk through 3 distinct environments (street, bar, back alley), and fight at least 5 distinct types of enemies (thug, gangster, knife guy, whip girl, boss guy), many of whom are presented with differing costumes and colors.  However, whether it was Castlevania, Bloodrayne or even Ace Combat, the lack of variety and hence sense of uninteresting repetition was severe and pronounced, whatever the inherent strengths of the controls or presentation.  El Shaddai actually had a good variety of enemies, no mobs to encounter in that game; however, enemies took 50+ hits to dispatch, which quickly amounted to feeling the same as fighting 50 guys that took 1 hit each.

  Lesson: I prefer constant engagement, whether I am diving deeper into a single fascinating idea or constantly improvising to handle new challenges.  Once I have solved a problem like “what is the most efficient way to dispatch this enemy” I begin to lose interest in it, and resent my progress being halted to “solve” that problem again, over and over and over.

  
  

  Presentation

  The demos I played were split about 50-50 between engaging presentation and boring presentation.  While only Hoard and Age of Booty were actually unpleasant to look at, Echochrome was very uninteresting.  I got the sense that it was the absolute minimum amount of effort in order to create something both acceptable and clear.  It was functional to that end, but nothing more.  Bloodrayne was full of nice details and flourishes, but the foregrounds and backgrounds were often unclear, and I frequently lost track of where I was in the environment or in a mob of enemies.  El Shaddai was inspirational in its bizarre presentation, but as a result I frequently misjudged leaps over gaps and other simple fundamentals of movement.

  Outland was the only title that really stood out in this category, taking the indie cliche of “silhouette platformer” to an almost PixelJunk level of attention to detail, filling the backgrounds with trees, vines, fog, and lumps of earth or fortress suspended from enormous chains.  Every edge of every silhouette is covered with interesting and intricate detail, establishing an excellent sense of atmosphere whilst simultaneously clearly communicating everything I needed to know about the state of the game and how to interact with it.

  Lesson: Presentation obviously has dual responsibilities - entertaining the sense pleasure part of my brain as well as feeding me hints and updates about the state of the underlying game system.  Traditionally I’ve thought of the latter as being the most important role of presentation, but my tolerance for lazy approaches to the former is… lower than it used to be.

  
  

  Controls

  Nearly every game I played (with the exception of Ace Combat 7’s airplane level, Outland, and of course Beyond Good & Evil) had controls that felt bad: movement that was simultaneously too fast and too slow, unpredictable consequences, and unclear connections between my inputs and actions in the game.  I have always been sensitive to this, and it’s something I obsess over in my own games, and I have apparently lost the ability to cut a game any slack if they haven’t nailed down the most fundamental basics about how I interact with the system.  This is only complicated by lackluster presentation and repetitive gameplay.

  Lesson: Keep obsessing about controls.  It’s still more art than science, especially when it inevitably reaches across the game logic and presentation.  But when it feels wrong it massively detracts from the game experience, like finding a chicken head in your chicken nuggets.

  Made With Love

  This is easily the most subjective (and possibly imagined) of any of these rushed appraisals, but I was finding games that I deemed “made with love” much more enjoyable than the others.  Castlevania and Bloodrayne especially dripped with unnecessary detail and personality, as did From Dust and El Shaddai.  Age of Booty and Echochrome felt like they were built by robots.

  Lesson: Personality matters.  I can tell (or at least I think I can tell) when the folks making the game really cared about what they were doing, and spent some of their limited time on this earth trying to make my limited time on this earth more interesting.  This is a beautiful thing.

  Outland and the Outsider’s Perspective

  

  Of all the demos I played, Outland was the only game (except Pac-Man and Beyond Good & Evil, but I’ve played those before!) that I wanted to keep playing.  It was also the only game demo that presented an engaging amount of both systemic and presentational variety, coupled with tight controls and a sense that the team making the game really cared about every little detail in it.  If I wasn’t working on FEZ and GDC talks this weekend, I know how I’d be spending most of this afternoon!

  Playing all these demos helped me remember a little bit of what it is like to just be a game player, not a game maker.  There are lots and lots of things that are really important to me as a game maker that have little to do with whether a player finds the game enjoyable.  I know for a lot of game creators that “finding the fun” is the ultimate law, and I do think engagement is important.  But as a game maker there are so many other boundaries and concerns for me that that ultimatum is rather moot.

  However, I’ve always believed in and practiced trying to view the games I make as an outsider, as a new player, and trying to imagine what they might feel.  Playing these demos help remind me of the things that interest me when I decide to spend my limited leisure time with a video game, instead of a book or movie:

  • Variety
  • Inspired Presentation
  • Perfect Controls
  • Made With Love

  These are obviously very complex and overlapping concerns from the game maker’s perspective, but as a player these were the things that stood out to me in sharp relief last night.  I hope that the next time you play a game I made that you hold me to the same critical standards to which I hold the games I play, and I hope that sometimes I succeed.

  ONWARD!

  PS: It’s worth noting that Outland was created by Housemarque, the studio most well-known for Super Stardust HD, but also responsible for the vastly superior Dead Nation, an excellent nu-retro top-down co-op shooter available only on PSN.  You can check out the Outland demo on either XBLA and PSN and give it your own critical look!

• 2011-09-09

  Terratri Online, Fatal Flaws & A Possible Solution

  

  Finally, I won a round against Alexander Bruce (AntiChamber).  Then we figured out how.

  First, the good news: enterprising game & software maker Michal J. Wallace created an online, real-time, Google App Engine-based version of Terratri!  It’s super cool!  I whipped up some new artwork for it last night and it’s looking really cool I think.  There’s a minor bug with commands being input twice occasionally, but we’re working on that part!  It’s a good fun way to learn the basics and play with strangers.

  The new art was really easy to paint once I had figured out what to do.  I made a few doodles on the whiteboard to explore some basic ideas for how the territories and forts might look, but then I got stuck:

  

  The designs were too literal and geeky.  So, I took a break to walk the dogs and pick up craps, when, apparently, I do all my best thinking.  I wanted to achieve a few things: keep the design fairly abstract, introduce a subtle theme, and improve playability for the color-blind.  Whilst picking up craps I had an idea about how to solve all these problems at once:

  

  The designs were easy to differntiate even in grayscale, they communicate a fairly simple “modern vs primitive” theme which is in keeping with the gameplay system of territory capture, but they’re not so well-defined as to ram the scenario down the player’s throat.  You can see the finished art up at the top of this post!

  A Fatal Flaw

  However, there is some bad news too: like most prototypes, Terratri has a serious problem.  It has nothing to do with the digital version and everything to do with the way the rules are formulated.  The current rule-set allows for, and even encourages, a scenario we’ve been calling “snaking” or “chasing”.  In this scenario, one player gets adjacent to the other, and waits for the other player to move.  Then they gobble up the tiles behind them.  The only way to “beat” this strategy is to sit there in some kind of Ourobouros infinite snake loop of a stalemate.  It sucks!  To make things even worse, player 1 almost always has a better chance at starting the snake first, with a territory advantage.  It’s pretty lame.

  So, as pleased as I am with the first version, and as ecstatic as I was to find that it had magically become an online game, we needed to fix snaking before the game could resume being fun.  Now, if you already had forts, you could break snakes by running them toward your own fortifications.  But this just meant that whoever built the first fort has a big advantage, which feels weird to me too.

  So, we tried a bunch of things, both online and with my local hard copy, to see what sort of tweaks or additions we could make to the rules in order to eliminate snaking.  First, we tried having the act of placing forts take 2 actions, but that sucked.  Then, we tried having capturing enemy territory cost 2 actions, but that sucked too, and player 1 had an enormous advantage.  Then I tried one of Le Bruce’s suggestions - a “bank” where you could store unused moves.  It sounded promising but played out weird.  Then I tried having the game start with some forts already on the board, but that led to some dumb situations where snakes were still an optimal balance of defense and offense.  I also tried removing obstruction entirely, and allowing players to pass through each other and each other’s forts - just not allowing them to claim those territories.  This introduced a whole bunch of other problems.  We also tried a “ko” rule, where players couldn’t capture something that was just captured the turn previous, but that was complicated and also didn’t help at all.

  Ultimately we settled on two possible solutions.  The most promising solution was to have the player’s actions per turn be based on the number of forts they had left to place.  This was really interesting; the beginning of the game was very aggressive, and it implied a kind of bureaucratic stress in the system, as the more forts you placed, the slower you moved.  However, after a bunch of worst-case-scenario testing this morning, this too proved to have optimal moves degenerate into snakes.  Phenomenally disappointed about this.

  Banking

  So I returned to our last possible solution - banking.  Even though it played weird the first time, further tests showed that it introduced some interesting snake-killing tactics, and doesn’t require any changes to any of the existing rules.  The actual formulation of this new rule has three parts:

  • Players may choose to “bank” their second move, by placing an unused fort on the side of the game board to keep track of their “banked” moves.
  • Players may only bank as many moves as they have unused forts.  For example, if a player has not yet placed any forts, they can bank up to five moves.  However, if a player has only one fort remaining, they may only bank a single move.
  • Player 2 starts the game with 1 move in the bank.

  I dislike the complexity of this arrangement, but the gameplay is proving vastly more interesting than before.  It also re-uses existing game elements, and since it does not require changing any of the existing rules, it can be introduced to players once they grasp the basics, as an “advanced” tactic.  It creates an interesting back-and-forth battle between the two players, and allows more tactical placement of forts by temporarily increasing the player’s movement range.  It even allows a patient player to place more than one fort in a single turn. So massive thanks to Mr. Alexander Bruce for the play-testing help and ideas!

  I have so far only played with this new rule against myself, which is not a legitimate field test.  But I am hoping to maybe get it added to the online version so we can beat on it publicly some more, and see if it really does fix those lousy, snakey stalemates. But, as an added bonus, trying to think of a good solution to this problem also gave me an idea for a weighted rock-paper-scissors territory game that I might start prototyping.

  Onward!!

• 2011-09-05

  Making Terratri: A Minimalist Territory Capture Game

  

  (pronounced like “territory”, only with a Texas touch)

  I have the worst time naming my tabletop games, and an even worse time naming the blog posts, especially since the title is what Posterous will syndicate out to twitter.  Anwyays, while I was walking the dogs this morning a simple game idea popped into my head.  I’ve been playing a lot of Quarrel lately, which is usually aptly summed up as “Risk meets Scrabble”.  It’s really good.  Around the same time that Quarrel came out, this weird new version of Risk came out too: Risk Legacy.  Risk Legacy is a new version of Risk that includes the capacity for permanent changes to the world map and game rules each time the game is played.

  Thus, I’ve had Risk on the brain.  But I’ve also been thinking about AirMech, a new game that is revisiting a lot of the concepts from RTS pioneer Herzog Zwei, in which you have an army and territory but you only directly control a single unit.  Defense of the Ancients and its successors (League of Legends, DotA2) are a return to form in some ways, retaining a lot of the interesting aspects of real-time strategy games but giving the player a specific avatar as a focal point for the experience.

  Anyways, the idea that popped into my head whilst picking up dog craps this morning was a simple territory capture game (not unlike Risk) but where you only control a single unit or army or whatever (not unlike Herzog Zwei).  Initially I was imagining a real-time game, almost like the brilliant Galcon (a fantastic Risk compression), but I had a couple of weird constraints.  First, we were planning on spending the afternoon with our friends, eating hot dogs and hanging out.  This had important consequences: I won’t be on the computer all day, but I will be hanging out with a friend (Josh) who is a really talented strategy gamer and board game fan.  Second, my schedule for the next few months doesn’t leave a lot of room for working out a good digital prototype and arranging digital playtests anyways.  So, with a couple small tweaks, the idea started looking like a pretty good candidate for some tabletop action.

  Building Terratri

  

  That’s the design document, hastily scribbled down after getting back from the dog walk, then photographed with my iPhone.  This is currently my absolute favorite way to sketch and archive game ideas; they’re backed up, so I can wipe the board, but I can also toss the images into photoshop and doodle straight over thumbnails, or just use the phone as a third computer monitor and art reference if I’m redrawing thumbnails.  It’s surprisingly versatile!  Anyways, based on those notes, I made a quick mental list of supplies I needed to pick up on the way to our friends’ house.

  • poster-size foamboard (white)
  • 2x 3mm foam sheets (red, blue)
  • 20x wooden cubes (red, blue)
  • 2x player pawns (red, blue)

  The foam was easy to find, though I ended up getting a cool kind of tan/sandy foamboard, instead of white, to use for the actual game board.  Miraculously we also found a cheap sack of small, pre-painted wooden cubes.  They were slightly smaller than I hoped, but didn’t need to be painted.  For player pawns, we ended up getting a sack of glossy wooden beads.  The cubes were matte, so the different shape and different finish on the player pawns helps them stand out.  The sack of beads included a wide variety of sizes too, which was nice, since I wasn’t sure how big or small the player pawns should be yet.  If I had the time and inclination to actually paint and modify some things, I think I could have gotten slightly cooler cubes and pawns, but these were looking great for a quickie prototype.

  After hot dogs and cupcakes, I opened up the supplies and started putting together the actual game pieces.  After I cut out the game board from the sandy foamboard, I started cutting the territory markers out of the red and blue foam sheets.  Josh had the ingenius idea to bind the territory markers together into two-sided markers, greatly simplifying the actual IRL action of taking over enemy territory during gameplay.  The final territory markers look something like this:

  

  They worked really good too!  After maybe 30 or 40 minutes, and with the help of our friends’ hot glue gun, I had converted the craft supplies into the following game pieces:

  • 14”x14” game board: a 5x5 grid of 2”x2” cells, with a 2” border (1)
  • 2-sided territory markers: 1.5”x1.5”, red on one side, blue on the other (25)
  • forts: 5 red cubes, 5 blue cubes (10)
  • player pawns: one red, one blue (2)

  We still had to finalize the rules though.  The basic idea hadn’t changed much since scribbling down the ideas this morning, but we needed to work out some specifics, especially how many forts the player had to build to win, and how much territory the player needed to hold in order to be able to build a fort.  We ended up deciding on 5 and 5, respectively, after chatting about the design a bit (thus the 5 red cubes and 5 blue cubes enumerated above).  Josh also suggested giving the player 2 actions per turn to help cut down on stalemates and takeback scenarios.  That gave us a ruleset that looked something like this:

  • Players start in the middle cell of opposite sides of the board.
  • Players get 2 actions per turn.  Viable actions are: Move one space (up, down, left or right), or Fortify.
  • When a player moves to an unoccupied territory they automatically claim it, placing or flipping a territory marker to show their claim.
  • Unoccupied territory is any grid cell, claimed or not, that has neither a player pawn nor a fort.
  • Players cannot move onto any tile that is occupied by the enemy pawn or an enemy fort.
  • Players must end their turn on a different tile than where they started if the territories or forts did not change during that turn.*
  • Players may Fortify the territory they currently occupy if they have claim over at least 5 unoccupied territories.
  • Players do not need to use all their actions so long as they do not break any other rules by doing so.
  • First player to 5 forts wins.
  • If multiple games are played back to back, players should take turns going first.

  Finally we were ready to play!

  Playing Terratri

  

  This part always makes me nervous in a good way; board games, especially minimalist board games, are such a wide open abyss from a design perspective.  Should the board be a square grid or hexagons?  Should the player get 3 actions, or just 2?  It feels impossible to make a decision sometimes.  As far as I can tell the best thing is to just playtest the dang thing.  After all, you’re not flying to the moon; the stakes are pretty low.  If there are problems, they’ll probably become pretty obvious pretty fast, and then you can address them as they come.  For example, one of the game rules listed above (the one with the asterisk at the end) wasn’t added until game 3, when we found an interesting stalemate scenario in certain literal edge cases.

  We ended up playing 6 games before we had to head home and put Kingsley, our 7-month old son, to bed.  Here are photos of the final board state from each of those rounds:

  

  See the full gallery on Posterous

  We had a ton of fun playing the game, and haven’t yet identified any degenerate strategies.  Josh beat me 5 games to 1, but with a pretty wide variety of strategies.  We identified some basic formations that seem pretty strong or influential, but actually setting those up is pretty tricky.  Games are fast, somewhere in the 15-20 minute range, which feels really good for a strategy game period.  The crux of the game’s strategy seems to center around what happens about 4 or 5 turns in, when players first get the chance to start chewing up significant portions of the other player’s territory.  There’s a kind of a weird dance that seems to happen in there that seems to be a strong indicator for what happens for the rest of the match, though it’s hard to say for sure after so few playtests.

  Terratri Futures

  I really like this game.  It’s very simple, very easy to learn, and very hard to predict whilst playing (so far).  The next step is to keep playing it, keep looking for degenerate strategies, and fantasize about designing slightly more detailed playing pieces.  I think I have two basic options for how to develop the pieces themselves; I could go for a kind of cool, handsculpted look.  Sculpy is cheap and comes in lots of colors, and it’d be fun and easy to mold a few little towers.  Territory markers could just be spraypainted squares of sealed wood.  I think a cloth board might be neat too, very foldable and simple… it could even be a reversable bag for holding the game pieces maybe?

  Anyways, that’s the game.  This is the first time that I’ve ever thought up, designed, manufactured and then play-tested a multi-player or table-top game idea in a single day, and it was sublime.  I need to do this more often.

  ONWARD!

• 2011-06-20

  The Production Design of Alkali Lake - X2 (2003)

  A friendly chap replied to my previous post about Alien’s cool computer screens with a link to a blog post about cool corridor designs in sci-fi films.  Obviously Alien and 2001 are masterworks of production design, especially for neat-looking corridors, but there is at least one film of relatively recent vintage (2003’s X2, the sequel to X-Men) that did a pretty good job.  Bryan Singer directed again, and re-hired the production designer (Guy Hendrix Dyas) from the first X-Men film (Dyas’ first production design gig ever).

  The Alkali Lake set, built on a massive soundstage in Vancouver, is relentlessly interesting to look at.  I took some crappy photos of some of my favorite shots from the film.  Note particularly the varied materials and textures (the concrete is almost cartoonishly porous), nonsensical but lovely lighting, wildly varying color temperatures, and overriding, uncomfortable green hue.  One thing I noticed taking these shots that I never saw before is the Weapon X lab actually has a morgue in the back.  It’s on-screen for about 2 seconds.

  A lot of these scenes look like they’re right out of Metal Gear Solid (PS1), which also takes place in an arctic industrial facility.  Interestingly, David Hayter (voice of MGS main character Solid Snake) co-wrote the script for X2. Of course, these scenes look a lot like settings from modern video games as well, but I like to think that Metal Gear Solid, inspired by movies, inspired the design of this film, which then inspired more games… sort of incestuous, but then, what isn’t?

  Spillway & Central Chamber

  

  See the full gallery on Posterous

  Concrete Corridors

  

  See the full gallery on Posterous

  Generator Room

  

  See the full gallery on Posterous

  Misc Sets

  

  See the full gallery on Posterous

• 2011-06-19

  Inspirational Visual Design for Computers - Alien (1979)

  Orbital Computer

  

  See the full gallery on Posterous

  Planetary Computer

  

  See the full gallery on Posterous

  Misc Screens

  

  See the full gallery on Posterous

• 2011-06-14

  E3 Aftermath: Downloadable Games vs AAA Games

  Since all the E3 announcements are wrapped up now, I took a little time this afternoon to compile some short lists of highly anticipated video games due to release sometime in the next year (or at least in the near future) .  Then, I collected screenshots of these games and made some notes about which iteration of a given IP they might be.  These lists ignore (at their own peril, admittedly) MMOs and mobile games, as well as iterative sports games.  There is a focus here on modern PC or console games - games for gamers, if you will.  The thing I was curious about, in this particular space, is differences between AAA projects and downloadable games.  Obviously AAA games have huge budgets and huge dev teams, but potentially at the cost of this nebulous thing we call “creativity”.  As budgets continue to grow, this continues to be a kind of hot topic within the industry.  Now, doing a visual or numerical survey of an interactive medium is obviously problematic or even unfair, but I think it is still illustrative of the potential impact that large budgets are having on modern video game design.

  NOTE: I use the term Average Sequel Index to describe the average iteration increment of the game.  I give a range because for marketing reasons the true increment is often obscured.  For example, Modern Warfare 3 is obviously Call of Duty 7 or 8, but that same team was making substantially similar games under the Medal of Honor title previous to Call of Duty, so you could interpret Modern Warfare 3 as the 10th or 11th title.  Final Fantasy XIII 2 is somewhat obviously not just the 14th Final Fantasy game either.  So the range goes from the kindest possible interpretation to the strictest “meanest” interpretation.

  First, 24 of the most hyped AAA games:

  

  Now, 18 of the most hyped downloadable games:

  

  Then I used a simple (but possibly inaccurate) system to average all the AAA screenshots and all the downloadable screenshots into a single image representing each distribution format visually.  You can toggle between the two in the image viewer below.  Not surprisingly, the AAA games definitely tend to be… bluer.  But maybe they’re not all that different:

  

  See the full gallery on Posterous

  However, without Nintendo’s contributions (Mario Kart, Kirby, Zelda), the AAA image is almost satirically brown:

  

  The point here is not to get in some kind of weird fanboy war over realism or violent games or anything.  All I am interested in here is attempting to illustrate the possible effects of big budget, “gamer”-oriented development on actual game production all over the world. I think different people can draw different, interesting and equally valid conclusions from these illustrations.  Maybe independently made downloadable games aren’t quite as different from AAA games as we thought, for example.

  But to me, one thing this year’s crop of AAA games indicates is that they are kind of just different versions of the same AAA game (or maybe two: blue-brown FPS, and lime-green Nintendo). The high cost of development will only continue to encourage that particular kind of video game in the AAA space.  I say continue to encourage, specifically, because it is already happening.  As you can see above, for hyped AAA titles, on average each game is on its fifth iteration.  That doesn’t mean that series don’t reinvent themselves (Tomb Raider, Elder Scrolls, Zelda), or that the games are poorly crafted.  In fact, production values are likely at an all-time high in the industry.  But these talents are focused on such a narrow range of game that at least to my grumpy old eyes it all seems to run together.