The Hunger Games: Girl on Fire is the official teaser game for The Hunger Games and is available now, for free (no ads!), on the iTunes App Store.

Thank you first to the Girl on Fire team: programmers (and designers) Kevin, Mark and Guy, lead artist Paul, composer Danny B, the sound engineers at Ozone, and Kert for the sweet trailer you see above. There is no math sufficient to describe how impossible this would have been without them!

Thank you to our team at Lionsgate, who were, all things considered, extraordinarily patient and dedicated: David (who thought this crazy project up in the first place), Jessica, and Eric. If David hadn't looked me up this thing would never have existed, so thanks guys :)

Thanks also to Suzanne Collins for creating such a wonderful story in the first place, and for her help with making sure the game had a place in that story. Finally, special thanks to the friends and family of the team for all their support throughout this project, especially my wife Bekah.

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After the third book in The Hunger Games trilogy finally came out I set aside a little time to read the whole series. I happily devoured all three books in as many nights. The Hunger Games is the story of a teenage girl who makes a kind of extraordinary sacrifice, helping (sometimes inadvertently) to change the world. Suzanne Collins presents us with a world full of ambiguity and brutality, and characters forced to choose between something bad or something even worse. It is a compelling and honest work of fiction that resonates with me.

(A quick note for those of you who may have arrived here from someplace other than my twitter feed: my name is Adam Saltsman, and I am the creator of the popular arcade games Gravity Hook and Canabalt. Welcome to my humble blog!)

When Lionsgate approached me this past October about maybe creating a game to go along with The Hunger Games film (opening March 23rd!), I was skeptical. I get at least one email a month from a well-meaning account executive for an advertising or media firm. They are, to a person, uniformly professional and friendly, but their assignment is to acquire a version of Canabalt that replaces the runner and the rooftops for their property, which, while flattering to a degree, is something that doesn't make a lot of sense to me for a lot of different reasons. And so, most of these negotiations end quickly and amicably.

Lionsgate was different though. I made it clear to them right up front that while I was a big fan of The Hunger Games, a copy of Canabalt was out of the question. I pitched them on an original touch-based action game instead. It does feature a running character, but the focus of the game is more on marksmanship and strategy... but we'll have more to say and show about that later! It's a small idea, but a tight one too. Almost like a teaser game, in the same way there are teaser trailers. This is usually the part of the discussion where my prospective clients say "ah... I see. Well, if you change your mind..."

Lionsgate said "Great! When can you start?"

And so, I am happy to announce that I am collaborating with Lionsgate and a kind of indie dream-team to make The Hunger Games: Girl on Fire for iOS. Mark Johns (Tap Tap Dance) and Kevin Coulton, the minds behind Doomlaser (Hot Throttle, Space Barnacle), are fleshing out the design while they program the game from scratch. Paul Veer (Super Crate Box, Serious Sam: The Random Encounter) is the lead artist and animator. Daniel Baranowsky (Canabalt, Super Meat Boy) is composing an original soundtrack inspired by the film. Ozone Sound & Music (Max and Al's Heavy-Duty) are handling the sound effects, and the one and only Kert Gartner (Winnitron) will be putting together our launch trailer. It is a genuine honor to get to work alongside these fantastic people, and this project would not be possible without them.

The Hunger Games: Girl on Fire is coming soon to your iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, timed to theatrical release.

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After hearing Nathan Vella's talk at Indiecade this year, I reorganized my personal website into three distinct categories: creator projects, collaborator projects, and contributor projects. Contributor projects are projects that don't really reflect my vision, or whatever you would call it. My input was limited to simply helping it exist somehow. The team or project was missing a piece, and I could fill that role, or complete that section, and help realize someone else's vision.

This is something I used to do a lot of, but as a freelancer. There was some satisfaction there but it was different than what I've been doing lately. For the last few years, I've had the opportunity to work voluntarily as a contributor, or "pinch artist", on some high-profile projects, most notably Polytron's much-anticipated ambient-exploration platformer FEZ, but also on the iPad port of Aquaria that my company published (and a bunch of other small things too). It has been a massively rewarding experience, even though the work itself is not always particularly thrilling.

Adam helped us out in a lot of small ways. After Paul Robertson was done with the big batch of animations we contracted him to do, we'd still come up with new details we'd need animated. things like waterfalls, caustics and additional effects and character movements. Adam offered to help, we quickly agreed to a super amicable deal, and that was pretty much it. Since he wasn't a full-time team member, i'd just ping him a few days in advance, asking if he could make time this week for this or that, and then he would! It was really nice to have this kind of "casual contractor" we knew we could count on whenever we needed something new animated. (Phil Fish)

What is a "pinch artist" exactly? To me, it means a few different things. One, I am bringing all my skills to bear on this project, and all my sensibilities as an artist, but my goal is to realize someone else's vision. Sometimes this means emulating or manipulating another style (Derek's gorgeous backgrounds and sprite work in Aquaria), or helping to design a new approach to something that suits everyone involved (like square water for FEZ). But the pinch artist is there as an assistant, a facilitator, an enabler. A pinch artist is not a critic, and a pinch artist never makes a suggestion they don't want to personally commit to implementing (unless they are specifically asked for feedback of course).

A pinch artist is not a full-time contributor. A pinch artist may not even contribute a full person-month of hours even at the end of a multi-year project. A pinch artist may not be an "artist" in the traditional sense at all - maybe they are a web guru, or a database genius.

As with most game designers, I've got reams of ideas that I'd love to see implemented.  In some cases, time constraints prevent those ideas from coming to fruition. In other cases, a lack of artistic or technical skill will stand in my way. But when Matthew and I sat together for a day or two, some of those ideas have suddenly become possible.  Matthew is an expert with Unity and database technology, and working with him we created some tech just for the sake of building something fun. In one case, we built the database backend for a collaborative level editor that would allow for a number of concurrent users never seen in a game before. Building tech or even small games in these rapid development settings is often the best way to evaluate whether a game idea, or a piece of tech is worth investing real blood and sweat into. (Andy Schatz)

A pinch artist may not even be a "specialist", even if that's their role on your project. But generally speaking, the pinch artist is a part-time helper with a specific focus and a specific ability that helps get the project into the air with just a little less friction and terror, and a little more quality and attention to detail.

There's two benefits to having someone contribute to your project. First, work gets done and you don't have to do it. This sounds super simple, but when your pushing to finish a project and time is at a premium, one less component to worry about is a godsend.

The second is less obvious but much more important. It adds another fresh set of eyes & a fresh perspective to the project, often when you're utterly burnt out and have lost all your perspective. Games are a medium where one little idea can push a project from good to great, or from great to greater, and sometimes subbing in a pinch hitter will provide that. It could be as basic as a redesign for a small piece of art or an additional sound for a key moment… or as big as a design concept that adds a ton.

On #sworcery, Jim Guthrie's music was the hallmark piece… but one song & one set of sounds came from Scientific American (aka scntfc). The moon grotto song, and listening station sounds really added to #sworcery. Not just in a "hey this is cool" way, but in a tangible, "the game is actually better with them" way. (Nathan Vella)

Part of the power of being a contributor is the 80-20 rule, or the idea that sometimes a lot of the value or appeal of a finished work can be created with relatively little time and effort. Inviting contributors to work on your game or getting the opportunity to contribute to someone else's game improves the likelihood that you'll find more of those little gems that have a big impact.

In games, though, maybe the most common manifestation of the 80-20 rule is that the first 80% of a project takes just 20% of the overall effort, and the last 20% takes 80% of the effort. Pinch artists can help chip away at that latter 20% in a way that is psychologically and objectively meaningful, remaining fresh and excited about a project that may have lost some of its luster for the core team.

Haha, this is starting to sound like a public service announcement isn't it? "Help change a life; become a pinch artist today!" That makes it sound like charity work or something, which isn't quite how it works or feels. But it is a scale of collaboration that was new to me a couple years ago, and I've been noticing more and more is a really positive thing, especially for smaller studios. Even as a relative control freak obsessed with my own ideas, I've really enjoyed making contributions to my friends' games over the last couple years.

For game makers who are looking for a way to blow off some creative steam, donating a little bit of your time to helping someone else's game exist is a great way make the world better and still expand your own gameography and experience at the same time.

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I posted one of these last year, though in a slightly more timely fashion. Before I completely forget about these films I wanted to repost them here, as they should be either getting limited US releases or becoming available on netflix (or getting easier to bt!) sometime soon.

My #1 film of the festival this year was  A Boy and His Samurai, from the team that brought us the marvelous fugitive film Golden Slumber last year:

I particularly loved the main conflict in this film had to do with trying to figure out what a modern family is, and how that works, logistically and psychologically. I feel like films ignore this but that it is just a huge part of life in the modern world. Wonderful!

My #2 film was the small but surprisingly vivid slow-burn sci-fi Carre Blanc:

Carre Blanc didn't floor me, but it was so tight, and tidy, and meticulous, and cold, and funny... if A Boy and His Samurai wasn't so absurdly adorable and sweet Carre Blanc would have been my favorite film without question.

I also thoroughly enjoyed the following movies and can recommend them without reservation. Many of these films contain... adult content, in one form or another, just a heads up! In no particular order:

Bullhead

Sleep Tight

Melancholia

How to Steal 2 Million (brilliant low-key South African noir - lead actor is so charismatic!)

You Said What?

Snowman's Land (if you dug In Bruges definitely check this one out)

I also want to call out one film in particular, Milocrorze, but primarily for one scene, involving a super slow-mo single cut sequence of a samurai crashing through a brothel in unbelievable style that went on seemingly forever, with visual cues from the almost abstract renderings of ancient samurai you see on scrolls in museums. It's an incredible scene. The rest of the movie does not compare!

And finally, the festival offerings I most sorely regret missing:

The Yellow Sea (the new film from the South Korean crew that created The Chaser!)

Extraterrestrial (from Time Crimes and Oscar-winning 7:35am director Nacho Vigalondo)

Beyond the Black Rainbow

[aw man I couldn't even find a trailer for this!!]

You're Next (pulled from the festival after securing distribution after the first screening. That's how good it is. Criminy.)

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UPDATE: Gamenauts responds in less than ten minutes. Holy smokes, "extreme hypocrisy" indeed.

Last night, a representative of Gamenauts sent me this message on Twitter, completely out of the blue:

Wait a second here, let's back up a minute. We need some context: do you remember the Ninja Fishing controversy from this summer?  In case you don't, here's the TLDR version: a studio called Gamenauts (their slogan is "Exploring new frontiers of fun!") plagiarized Vlambeer's Radical Fishing (right down to the names and effects of powerups in the in-game shop!), added a dash of Halfbrick's Fruit Ninja, then contracted successful PR firm TriplePoint to orchestrate their app store launch, subsequently making it into the top 10 best-selling apps during launch week.

[Aside: recently when asked on Twitter how they approached marketing, Gamenauts explained that it was mostly word of mouth. Weird that they just forgot to mention they hired the PR team behind Lego, SEGA, and some of the most successful iOS apps!]

Despite Vlambeer's objections, Gamenauts refused to delay the launch of Ninja Fishing until Vlambeer's own port, Ridiculous Fishing, was ready to ship. I encourage you to draw your own conclusions, but it seems to me that Gamenauts was making a money grab. Vlambeer had done all the prototyping work so Gamenauts didn't have to; they could just rush it to market and grab that lucrative iOS audience. And it worked!

OK, so there's some context for who Gamenauts is.  Next up, this @chardish fellow! During the controversy this summer, an indie game maker named Evan Jones, who is also a senior programmer for a company called Lolapps, wrote a blog post about how blatant plagiarism in games is maybe not a great thing. Then, sometime in the last week, 6waves (the Chinese publisher that purchased Evan's employer Lolapps) announced their new mobile game Yeti Town. Yeti Town, according to every comment and review I've read so far, is a pretty blatant clone of Spry Fox's successful Kindle and Facebook game Triple Town.

I can only conclude based on the message I received from Gamenauts last night that Gamenauts believes that Evan Jones is a hypocrite, and that I am obliged, according to the 2012 Internet Fairness Ordinance, to publicly condemn him personally for his involvement, despite the fact that Triple Town is a successful social and mobile game with an active and growing fanbase on multiple platforms. Radical Fishing is still a relatively unknown Flash game.  This is an important distinction: players who find Yeti Town on the App Store are much more likely to recognize it as a blatant clone (reviews and comments on Yeti Town and Ninja Fishing bear out this observation).

Yeti Town has not, by any measure, become a success. This could change, but as it stands, they are definitely not charting toward a top-10 sales position.

[Aside: Triple Town was a Kindle game long before it was a Facebook game. Thankfully, no one cloned it to Facebook before Spry Fox had the chance to port it themselves. They changed and improved the game, bringing it to a huge new audience in an improved package, and were rewarded for it. Just saying.]

Is it awkward for Evan to be so strongly anti-plagiarism and still work for an employer who commits blatant plagiarism? Of course! But Evan's a grownup. I think he can make his own decisions. Plus, he's a senior programmer for Lolapps; not their game designer, not their CEO. It is extremely unlikely that the higherups at 6waves approached Evan personally and said "we need a game idea!" to which Evan responded "AH HA I know just which game to copy!"  However, Stanley Adrianas, a well-known defender of cloning and CEO of Gamenauts, did exactly that when he "created" Ninja Fishing.

So, unknown, unnamed representative of Gamenauts, that is my comment for Evan. Now, my comments for you: first, you are not being treated unfairly or selectively. Yes, cloning happens all the time. No, Yeti Town is not the same situation as Ninja Fishing.  It's funny; when you defend cloning, you are very eager to see it as a gradient or spectrum with a lot of gray area. But suddenly, when you want to come out against clones, you see it in black and white! A clone is a clone is a clone, eh?  You can't have it both ways.  The games, audience and business models in question are all drastically different, so expecting people to react the same is, well, ridiculous.

Second, even if you were being treated unfairly in this case, I could not possibly care in the slightest.  Scorn from an informed audience is just a risk you take when you blatantly clone the work of beloved creators.  That's your tradeoff; you can either take on the risk of creating something new and interesting (coming up with different answers to the same question, in Rami Ismail's terms), or you can take on the risk of being villified for encroaching on the opportunities of small studios trying to make new things and stay in business.

Anyways. That's what I think about that.

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Earlier this month I got to spend a few days in LA, speaking at IndieCade and having some really inspirational conversations with friends I don't get to see much.  It was humbling and overwhelming in a lot of ways.  I wanted to share some of the ideas I picked up from the trip with you, and record them for posterity before I cleared off that part of my whiteboard.

I should stress that I did not think these things up myself, nor am I certain that these are somehow universal truths.  These are things that came up in the course of conversation with some people for whom I have an immense amount of respect, and the ideas struck me as thought-provoking or inspirational in one way or another.  I hope you'll read these in the same spirit of thoughtful consideration, and whether you ultimately agree with them or not I hope you find them interesting or useful.

NOTE: I have attempted to credit the folks who turned me on to each idea, but I have also paraphrased these ideas for this brief transcription. Anything about the formulation of the following ideas that seems wrong or bad or whatever is almost definitely my fault, and not theirs at all!!  Nor am I claiming necessarily that these ideas are deeply held beliefs of the credited individuals.  But these ideas are somehow connected to these individuals in my head, and I'd like to at least thank them for that.

Tabula Rasa: If you live someplace or work in an industry or study in a field that is relatively new, it is easy to feel like the lack of foundations, history or tradition might doom our existence in those spheres to be somehow less rich or less valid than life in a more traditional or historically rich space.  But what if the opposite is true?  What if tradition and history choke innovation and strangle evolution?  What if we can invent our own traditions and our own standards?  What if we can learn from the traditions of everything around us and use those ideas to build our own rich culture, full of the best of everything from everywhere else, but free of some of the crippling constraints? (Kazu Kibuishi)

Power of Focus: Picking one thing and sticking to it and obsessing over it forever can change the world in impossible, unimaginable ways. (Kazu Kibuishi)

Service: A lot of people like to talk about providing things "as a service" these days, but maybe it's more interesting to think of "service" less like a commercial or retail system, or more like the religious and/or civil connotations.  Maybe the art we make is a service in that sense.  Something we owe humanity in exchange for being human. (Kazu Kibuishi)

Making Mainstream Art: As an indie game dev it is really easy to settle into a kind of comfortable disdain for mainstream games or mainstream gamers or the amorphous and vaguely threatening mainstream itself.  It's really important to remember though that a lot of the things we perceive as mainstream in games (Call of Duty, Halo, etc) aren't mainstream for humans at all.  Maybe thinking of "mainstream games" as games for humans, instead of games for gamers, is a more interesting and valid pursuit. (Kazu Kibuishi)

Experiential Systems: One of the great strengths of video games has nothing to do with "gamey" systems, and everything to do with atmosphere and that certain sense of place and mystery and isolation and connection.  However, I think it's common for people to think of these sorts of videogames as being somehow less system-based than more "gamey" experiences.  I guess what I'm saying is don't underestimate the systemic complexity of a good Not-Game, or "open" game.  It's quite possible that "gamey" games are the easier systems to build. (Kris Piotrowski)

Folk Games: Folk games (JOUST, Ninja) and folk game design is totally amazing and ridiculously fun.  Folk games may be to tabletop what tabletop is to videogames.  Badly want to put on some Austin game jams now that don't involve computers even a little bit, Flixel be damned. (Doug Wilson)

Infinite Truths: Designing games that explore and illustrate surprising truths about systems is a worthwhile and satisfying alternative to "fun" or "addictive" game design, and perfectly suited to the strengths of videogames. (Jonathan Blow)

Collaboration & Contribution: Work with as many people on as many projects as you can.  Everyone is amazing and including them in your "work" in whatever capacity makes sense just enriches everyone all the time forever. (Nathan Vella)

The Big Picture: We spend a lot of time solving small problems in game design - balancing, tuning, and so on.  But it rarely feels like we tackle longer-term, almost meta-problems in our designs.  I'm having trouble explaining more than this without giving away things I can't give away, but I am concerned that our expertise at solving short- and medium-term problems is distracting us from considering all the advances that could be made in communicating long-term goals, and I think this can have a huge impact on our new audience of truly "mainstream" players. (Jordan Mechner)

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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.

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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.

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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 Execution

Whenever 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.

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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.

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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!

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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!!

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(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!

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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

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Concrete Corridors

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Generator Room

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Orbital Computer

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Planetary Computer

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Misc Screens

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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:

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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.

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Illustration by Bengal.

DISCLAIMER: This is not a general game design article, but an enthusiastic exploration of specific fighting games from a player's perspective.  This means this article may make no sense to you, in which case, you may not be interested.  Just a heads up!  Also, I am not a great Street Fighter player, and only really started playing when SFIV came out.  I have no doubt that I would be reviled and laughed at at tournaments as being "one of those XBLA players"!  Finally, this article is intended for beginners or hobbyists, and likely will have nothing to offer for people who actually know how to play this game already!

0. Introduction

I recently switched from Dhalsim, a fairly dominant character in SSFIV, back to Ibuki, who is a good character in her own way but much less obviously dominant. You rarely see Ibuki players in the finals at any tournament, major or minor, and the best Ibuki players in the word (ClakeyD, Acqua, Iyo, among others) get trashed by "higher tier" characters pretty regularly, if YouTube and tournament streams are evidence.  To play Ibuki and have fun both with friends and with randoms online, I have had to step up my fundamentals.  Dhalsim is all about fundamentals, but he is such a strong character, and he engages opponents in such a weird way, that my understanding of fundamentals was plateauing.  As Ibuki, even SRK-spamming XBLA shotos could totally destroy me, which was immensely frustrating.

Also, being a small business owner and a dad, I don't really get a lot of time to play.  Usually I squeeze in a few hours on Saturday while our son is taking a nap, or sometimes a few rounds as a break over lunch during the week, but that's about it.  This isn't a complaint, and I think it may even help, since I generally spend more time thinking than I do playing.  So what little time I do spend playing SSFIV, I spend testing out all the things I've been thinking about during the week.  Also, I am fairly analytical by nature, but as pretty much everyone knows, being analytical before the start of a match is good, but being analytical during the match is not so good.  So everything that follows here, you can assume applies primarily to training mode or free brain cycles outside the match, and should be "automatic" during an actual fight.  However, I will talk about that sort of thing more as I go!

So, before I get started here, I wanted to give a little overview of these sections.  During my last play session, I finally started to have a bit of a breakthrough - not against awesome ground players with great footsies (more on that later), but a sudden, drastic improvement against exactly those players that used to frustrate me most.  And these improvements had nothing to do with Ultras or FADCs or 1-frame resets, and everything to do with fundamentals.  However, fundamentals is a pretty broad thing, and encompasses pretty much everything outside of focus attacks and special moves, and so it's not that useful to me to remind myself at the start of a match "remember your fundamentals!"  It's like saying before a math test, "remember your maths!"  It's a pretty wide spectrum, and I needed some specific principles to focus on to cross my skill plateau and keep climbing.

The idea that began to develop yesterday, that actually made a difference in how I was playing, was to think of fundamentals as a hierarchy of priorities in the match.  This is because different aspects of fundamentals are dependent on other facets of fundamentals in order to be applicable at all.  For example, it's very hard to play good defense if you are in a position where the other character can do a special-throw mixup.  That is, if you are in a block-string, and you don't know if your opponent is going to end with a throw or a special, you have to guess.  This is, generally speaking, not a position you want to be in.  Approaching fundamentals as a hierarchy of priorities seemed to help me stay in situations that were to my benefit, and which played to the strengths of my character.

1. Spacing

Spacing, i.e. managing the distance between you and your opponent, appears to be the single most important and most complex facet of fundamentals.  Everything is dependent on spacing.  If you are the wrong distance from your opponent, then you have fewer, if any, options, and your opponent is in control of the match.  Spacing is itself dependent on a lot of things that are part of the basic game state, like the matchup (which characters are used) and meters (do the players have Ultra, which Ultra is it, how much EX do they have, etc).  While the actual implementation of spacing is complex, and requires a lot of practice, I think there are some helpful, simple questions that you can ask yourself to see if your spacing is on point or needs work:

1A - Do I get crossed up (players jump over and hit you from the other side) a lot?  This could be a sign that you are maintaining the wrong spacing.  Against opponents with short jumps, you probably need to back up a bit.  Against players with long jumps, you may need to play closer.

1B - Do I struggle up close?  Ibuki can't really go toe-to-toe with characters like Boxer, Chun Li, Guile or Dictactor, since their normal moves are so good and so fast.  Plus, these characters all have great block-strings that can lead to a mixup - will they end with a special (which must be blocked) or a throw (which must be teched)?  Keeping just out of range of their normals proves to be hugely important in surviving these matchups.

1C - Do I have time to cope with long-distance special moves?  If you find yourself getting pressured by close fireballs, or you don't have time to react to tatsus, you might need to give those opponents a little more room when you're able.  Many players with a good close game have specials that allow them to close distance and get in your face very fast.  Knowing what to do about those moves, and having time (i.e. space) to do something about it, is critical to maintaining advantageous spacing.

1D - Are you too far away to do anything?  I see this a LOT with beginner players, and I used to do it all the time.  You've probably seen the XBLA shoto who jumps back into the corner, throws a fireball, and then jumps forward 3 times just to get back to where you are.  There are very few characters in any edition of Street Fighter who are at their best from the complete opposite side of the screen.  Even if you have a special move that can cross the whole screen (Honda, Ibuki, Blanka, Dictator, etc), good opponents will have plenty of time to dodge or counter even the EX variety.  So stay out of the corner unless you have a very, very good reason for being there. Of course, even if you aren't all the way back in the corner, you might still be too far away to effectively approach your opponent.  While going on the offense is, for me, a low priority, spacing yourself so you have the opportunity to do so is a critical part of distance management.  In Ibuki and Dhalsim's case, this is actually a pretty wide spacing, as Ibuki has a super jump and a good dash, and Dhalsim obviously has projectiles, wiggly arms and teleport, so he can be spaced even wider.  Players with great normals (shotos, Chun, Boxer) or players with good pressure strings (Cammy, Ibuki if you play her that way) might be most effective at a pretty close spacing in order to optimize their offensive opportunities.

1E - Do I get stuck in the corner a lot?  Spacing is not just about how far you are from your opponent, it's also about being conscious of the boundaries of both the screen and the level or arena.  Most characters are at a distinct disadvantage when they are "put in the corner", and even defensive/zoning characters like Dhalsim are at a strong advantage when their opponent can't retreat.  This is of course related to opponent spacing; if you can only move in one direction, then your opponent controls the spacing, and cross-ups/traps are sure to follow.  Stay out of the corner!

Obviously, both characters are trying to get spacing that works in their favor, so this isn't as simple as figuring out what distance is right against which opponent, which in itself is not that simple.  Projectiles are one of the main ways that players use to manipulate spacing, especially slow fireballs which the characters can use as a shield for a ground approach.  This means that in SFIV and SSFIV particularly, learning to absorb projectiles using a Focus Attack is one of the most important moves in the entire game, and one which I still struggle with (the equivalent in SFIII is to parry projectiles).  To compensate, I tend to play characters with "slide" moves, that can pass under fireballs, giving me more direct control over my spacing in projectile matches.  Neutral jump can be a great tool for controlling spacing and negotiating with projectile players as well.

But in the end, the point of spacing is simply to always maintain an advantageous distance from your opponent.  This is what enables the rest of what we lump into "fundamentals" and in my experience makes a huge difference against opponents of any skill level.  I want to emphasize this point again: spacing affects every other part of your game in a major way.

2. Anti-Air

Anti-air in Street Fighter refers to how you deal with jumpins, or opponents jumping toward you.  If you are maintaining the correct spacing for that matchup, then your opponent cannot (or can only rarely) cross you up, which means you can anti-air their jump.  If you do not anti-air a jumpin, and you were able to do so, then you have made a mistake.  Here are the risks of not effectively using anti-air: free command-throws for grapplers (most of which can't be blocked or teched), free block-strings for shotos (leading to special-throw mix-ups), complete loss of control over spacing (shutting down options to effectively anti-air a follow-up jump), risk of blocking wrong (leading to free damage, an easy mistake to make against characters with air chains/target combos), and so on.

Most (all?) characters have just one or two "main" anti-air normals.  These are non-special, upper-cut style moves, from either the standing or crouching position.  Most characters also have a wide range of strange, auxiliary anti-air moves that are great for very specific special cases, but should be used with caution.  For example, Ibuki's standing roundhouse is effective distance anti-air, but can't be linked to anything.  Likewise, Blanka's slide can be used as anti-air from a distance if it's timed right.  Most anti-air normals have to be done quite early, so it can take some practice to get them to work reliably, especially if you are playing online.

Most characters also have at least one anti-air special, like a special uppercut. Some characters can even juggle out of an anti-air special (as long as they do the right power at the right time) into another special, a super, or an ultra.  A few characters have air throws, which can be used as anti-air moves in some cases as well.  Many anti-air moves result in knockdowns, and all of them ensure that you are able to maintain control over your spacing, which is your highest priority.

Not all anti-air options are counter-attacks though.  Back dashes, slides, full-screen specials, and focus attacks can use a jumpin as an opportunity to reset the spacing and get you out of a bad situation.  Whether your opponent is trying to cross you up, or you're back in a corner, using an opponent's jump as an opportunity to escape can help put you back on terra firma.

The point of Anti-Air, to me, so to think less about remembering to block high, and think more about turning a tempting situation for your opponent into an advantageous situation for you, whether it's punishing a predictable leap, or resetting the spacing in your favor.  Actually, this is a good time to clarify that "think" is maybe the wrong verb.  For example, for me personally, anti-air is basically automatic for me now.  While spacing is still something I have to remind myself about pretty frequently, I have practiced anti-air enough that against many players it's basically a reflex.  Ideally, I think, all of these things will work that way - I'll just kind of "know" what spacing is right, and I won't have to think as much about which combo to use as a punish in which situation.

3. Defense

Of course, you don't always have time to counter-attack or escape a jumpin.  Most anti-air moves have some vulnerability and some startup frames (especially if you're out of EX meter), or maybe you're just waking up from a knockdown.  And, chances are, after successfully deflecting a couple of lazy, desperate jumpins from your opponent, they have opted to approach on the ground instead of through the air.  In any of these cases, your next priority is defense.

Obviously, defense means knowning when to block high, when to block low, and what direction to block in.  It also means knowing when to tech, like when your opponent is just walking toward you after you successfully blocked a combo, or an opponent has a habit of throwing after tatsus or pokes.  It means knowing which characters have air chains or "target combos", like Chun Li and Ibuki, which can hit twice from overhead.  It means knowing that Cammy's roundhouse Spiral Arrow/Cannon Drill can hit low twice.  Many characters have a close, standing overhead attack which they are eager to pull out on crouch-blocking characters - try to learn when to expect that (especially from Ryu and C. Viper).  Abel's Rekka-like special string has a mix of high, low and throws that can be a very effective mixup if you don't know what to look out for.

If you're maintaining the right spacing and managing jumpins, then blocking and teching are some of the last things you'll have to worry about.  Your goal should always be to simply be out of range of such effective mixups.  Absorbing projectiles and pokes with a focus attack or simply neutral jumping over projectiles will prevent chip damage and keep you out of block stun, giving you more opportunities to punish and allowing you to maintain control of your spacing.  But in the inevitable situation where your opponent gets close to you, knowing how to block and tech and survive until you can turn the situation to your advantage is obviously absolutely crucial.

4. Punishing

If you are maintaining your spacing, keeping your opponent from getting free jumpins, and playing good defense, then you will have ample opportunities to adminster serious punishment for your opponent's mistakes.  Anti-air is actually your first opportunity for punishment, since as we mentioned before many anti-air moves can be linked or juggled into other specials, supers, and/or ultras.  Ibuki has at least 3 different ways to connect an anti-air to her super, none of which are terribly difficult.  Her BnB anti-air of Agemen linked to Command Dash into close standing roundhouse into either her flipkick or a super jump cancel is a pretty brutal answer to a predictable jump that doesn't even use up any meter.  Many characters can do even more damage than that, whether they have meter or not.

Likewise, playing good defense will often leave you in the advantageous scenario of standing close to your opponent while they are still recovering from some blocked special attack.  While many characters have moves that are "safe on block", most specials are not, and are very open to punishment.  Learn to recognize these moves, and when you see them, do not hesitate to use that combo you spent 3 hours memorizing in Training Mode!

One other thing to remember about punishes is that most punishes exist on some kind of gradient, where exposure and damage are proportional.  That is, you can attempt to do a very damaging punish, but it is riskier, and more prone to mistakes, than perhaps an easier punish that is less risky.  Know your options, and know when to rely on each.  For example, if you are fighting a shoto and you just blocked a medium punch SRK, do you have time to start your big punish, or should you just anti-air them on the way down?  If you have a good anti-air punish, that will be much less risky than trying to punish them during the sparse recovery frames your opponent will spend on the ground.  However, if it was a fierce SRK, then you probably have enough time during their recovery frames to dish out your riskier counter-attack.

Finally, given the opportunity, in SFIV and SSFIV specifically, a Focus Attack is a really brutal way to capitalize on an opponent's mistake.  Getting a good crumple is essentially a free 200 damage, and for some characters, it can mean a free Ultra.  Knowing what moves break armor and how fast your opponent recovers are key parts of using a Focus Attack as a punish.  For example, most SRK-type moves don't actually have armor-break as a trait, they just land two or more hits in a close window.  So an opponent who relies on the fast recovery of jab SRK (which only lands once) might be exposing themselves to some serious Focus Attack punishes.  

5. Footsies

This is a pretty elastic term, and it is sometimes used interchangeably with fundamentals.  I prefer to use it to describe the ground game only, and particularly the normals and pokes that are so crucial to effective ground play.  However, there have been extensive, thoughtful, and more qualified articles written about footsies, even on the character-to-character-specific matchup level, so I am only including it here to indicate my belief that having good footsies is essentialy useless unless you are watching your spacing, controlling jumpins, playing good defense, and punishing your opponent's mistakes.  Also, footsies between Street Fighter titles can change dramatically, based on the core set of moves available(i.e. focus attacks versus parries and UOHs), and so is somewhat less generally applicable than ideas like Spacing and Anti-Air I think.  Most importantly, I just don't have good footsies and so could only hurt more than help a discussion about this topic.

6. Offense

This again is a general, elastic term that I use here to mean rush specials, approaching your opponent, performing jumpins, and so on.  Like footsies, there are much better guides already, in the form of videos and articles and SRK threads and other things, than anything I could possibly write here.  And like footsies, this is here mainly to illustrate the idea that until you are successfully managing the other parts of your game, having a good offense is an essentially useless tool, and an opponent with good fundamentals will bully you to pieces if you don't have your other fundamentals under control.  In fact, I might even argue that playing offense is actually outside the realm of fundamentals and thus is well outside my own experience and the scope of this article.

7. Conclusion

As stated in the disclaimer, I'm not a great player, and this information is intended for other beginners or what I tend to call "hobbyist" players - players floating a bit above "noob" or "scrub", but well below the tournament regulars.  At various times over the last couple years I know that I've read articles that talked about the importance of spacing, or the importance of defense, but it wasn't until very recently, when I started thinking about these things as a hierarchy, where each layer enables or makes possible the layer below it, that things started to feel kind of different to me as a player.  In its simplest formulation, good spacing enables anti-air, good spacing and good anti-air enables effective defense, and good spacing, good anti-air and good defense all enable you to punish effectively.  With this foundation, I find myself much more capable of engaging a wide skill range of players, and more importantly, I'm having a lot more fun when I play, since I find myself in better situations more often.

So rather than remind myself at the start of a match "remember your fundamentals!" I think "watch your spacing!"  If a match is going sour partway through, I try to figure out what part of my fundamentals isn't working against this opponent.  Do I need to manage my distance better?  Am I failing to effectively anti-air my opponent?  Did I miss some obvious punish opportunities?  These are pretty simple questions, but they're really helping me a lot, and can even help me turn a match around mid-round.  Phew, ok, that's enough Sunday morning noodling - time for breakfast!  See you guys online :)

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Whilst Skyping with Mr. Hedborg on I think Tuesday, we jokingly happened upon a card game idea which would revolve around growing progressively more powerful and more specialized mustaches.  Naturally, I wrote up a ruleset and made a prototype deck as quick as I could, and I'm actually kind of excited about it now.  The game, called Mustache Tycoon for now, features 12 different mustaches, including the Hipster, the Handlebar, the Pancho Villa, and the Fu Manchu.  It's silly, but I think there's a decent system beneath it too, which is always nice.  I wanted to share one specific thing I did that I'm happy with in the design, and also one general lesson that I hope to apply to future designs.

Growth

Obviously, beyond their inherent ability to render you a more productive and/or more attractive human being, maybe the most important part of a mustache is the fact that you have to grow it.  You can't just suddenly HAVE a mustache (usually).  It's a premeditated act; proof of its own existence and the wearer's patience and dedication.  I wanted to make sure this made it into the game somehow, so I ended up dividing mustaches into three separate tiers.  The Level 1 Mustaches include the Hipster, the Pencil, the Toothbrush, and the Two Piece.  Level 2 Mustaches include the Imperial, the Hungarian, the Natural, and the Chevron (think Magnum PI).  Finally, at Level 3 we have advanced mustaches like the Walrus, the Fu Manchu, the Pancho Villa, and the Handlebar.

In Mustache Tycoon, you have to plan your moves ahead of time, similar to maybe Bang! or Castle Panic, and there are limits to how quickly you can transition between mustaches.  Any lateral or upward movement (e.g. Level 1 to Level 2, or Level 3 to a different Level 3) takes a full turn.  You have to lay down the mustache you're planning to grow, and you can't reveal it until next turn.  Players cannot grow a Level 3 mustache from a Level 1 mustache, but must first grow an intermediate Level 2 mustache.  Finally, players can shave for free, and drop from a Level 3 mustache to a Level 2 mustache in order to take advantage of specific strengths and opportunities.

I'm really excited to test this out, as I think it adds a nice strategic element that is very much in keeping with the fiction or scenario of mustache growing.

Range

The more general lesson that I took away from this prototype is a really big deal for me.  While I "designed" board games when I was much younger, most of my adult (as it were) life has been spent designing video games, where you can kind of do anything.  Variables can be stored as massive floating point numbers, plugged into very complex algorithms in order to yield exactly the desired balance and behavior.  Obviously, if you're designing a board game, working with numbers like 489.35 and 10,928 kind of sucks.  Generally, board games and card games tend to only work with single digit values, and frequently only use values of 5 or less.  Games that have double digit values frequently only tally those values at the end of the game, or use beads or other counters to visually represent the quantity.

However, something I "discovered" on accident in this prototype has me very excited.  As a designer, I've definitely been struggling with only using values between 1 and 5.  The reason this is tricky is the gap between 1 and 2 is much greater than the gap between 4 and 5, relatively speaking.  For example, a card with a power of 2 is TWICE as powerful as a card with a power of 1.  This has been a pretty big stumbling block for me in a lot of my prototypes and thought experiments.  What I realized while working on Mustache Tycoon the last couple of days, is that as a systems designer, I actually have access to a range of -5 to 5, not just 1 to 5!  This is probably really trivial/obvious to a lot of you, but it's completely changed the way I approach non-electronic game system design, and I'm very excited about it.

That's about it!  No cool pictures yet or anything - looking forward to giving this design a playtest and seeing what happens!

PS - I definitely have not given up on Islands, but I'm struggling with some fundamental design issues that are taking a while to work out. I'm reading a lot of adventure stories (fiction and otherwise), and hopefully some of the stuff I learned on this proto can be applied to that one too.  Definitely not a dead idea, just taking a break until I can figure out how to get over the fundamental flaws!

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I'm working on a big project that I will announce more about soon I hope, but there is a topic related to the project that I haven't really found much research material for.  One of the topics for the project has to do with the design question of "how much is enough?"  As in, when have you hit the right balance of complexity in a design?  For board gamers out there, the simplified version of Matt Leahcock's Pandemic, his other game Forbidden Island, definitely loses something in the more binary and streamlined changes to the game systems.  That's an interesting design question that we are already exploring.

However, there may be a big parallel theme or topic to this discussion that has to do with the actual design process and it's a topic that I have a really hard time even thinking clearly about so far.  I'm just not using the right words or something.  But the gist is this: when I start designing something, you can imagine my design as a kind of network of nodes.  I imagine it to be a kind of spiderweb made out of yarn.  I can tug on this node over here, and it will pull on all the other nodes, and change the shape of the whole web.  As the design progresses, I anchor, or pin down, specific nodes that I have decided are in just the right place.  That way, that part of the web stays fixed while I manipulate the other portions.

What I'm interested in exploring in this topic is: are there methodologies or guidelines from other fields that would inform this process in the field of game design (not just video game design either)?  For example, on the first topic, "how much is enough?" it's easy to find ideas about managing noise and complexity in audio design, visual design and systems design.

My question is where would YOU look for guidance on this process of deciding what parts of your design you WON'T change, versus what parts of your design are fluid?

(I am also very open to the idea that this is simply a poor metaphor or even a bad process, but it's been on my mind a lot lately and I'd like to know what you think!)

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