The game in its PC/Mac port.

What’s also interesting is that the game allows itself to be designed as a Free to play game. It is a particularly good example because is indisputably a great game, is accessible for any platform you’d like to play it and we can use it as an example for this thought experiment of making it Free to play.

So here we will discuss a brief overview on how the game can be tweaked and expanded in its design to suit a Free to play strategy, and what would imply doing so, changing from a defined product to an ongoing service. From this point, we’ll assume you have played the game. If you feel like just reading, check here or here (not recommended).

Design changes and expansions

Using the Free to play triangle lens we can discuss three venues for monetization: Skips, Unlocks and Boosts. They are based on traditional “sim management” games, so we can adapt the triangle here to Content, Unlocks and Boosts.

• Content: Pretty much all the game’s content is available behind locks achievable through gameplay and achievements, but the game could include more dungeons, sets of tiles, new achievements, episodic content or new heroes. Also, maybe just selling the music can be a good and simple trick.

• Unlocks: All the locks on things that are accessible through “repairs”, the list of upgrades, access to dungeons, the alchemist potions. An additional element could be putting caps or limits on the amount of resources (wood, rock, coins and XP) that can be had at a time and unlock them through monetization/other resources. In 10000000, you can carry at most 4 items on a run: another potential source of revenue could be selling the ability to increase that limit so players can carry more.

• Boosts: This is relatively straightforward, since when you’re playing you receive weapons, food, keys, orbs and scrolls that you can carry to the next run and act as boosts. All of these can be sold separately.

There are also two key areas for feature expansion. The first is a storage room that can hold any extra boosts the player found while running or purchased at the store. This causes the player to manage more effectively how they proceed on each run. These limits could be expanded through purchases.

Second, the Alchemist room enables a particular effect at the cost of a trade off. This should be changed to a boost fashion in which these alchemist effects can last only for one run, possibly with less strict tradeoffs and also stored in your storage room.

The Alchemist’s room

A third, possibly controversial expansion would be “crafting”. Retention is a huge issue in mobile, and something that could help to promote players to craft a plan to come back can be precisely the tradeoff of time versus money for alchemist effects, in which traditional game resources can be used so their “resource flow” closes. This is particularly important since puzzle/running games might have good retention but low frequency of use per week. Hence, this add-on would allow players to increase their chances to move through an engagement/monetization funnel in a better way.

However, the Triangle suggests to monetize with at most two of the methods, which is sound advice. Given that 10000000 isn’t a place to “enjoy watching an aquarium” such as DragonVale or Hay Day, the clever thing would be to stick with unlocks and boosts.

So that would be it, if we were only considering monetization aspects of Free to play games. As of now, we have discussed monetization venues for in-app purchases (which many paid games include), but free to play games must include social aspects within their designs. In a nutshell, non-paying players can be your best sources of new players (for another more general discussion, see here).

What social features can we include in this game? Endless runner games usually allow players to share their scores as a text on social networks such as Twitter or Facebook, but that’s rather limited given the unique aesthetic of the game, and specially its music. The guys at Nimblebit know this very well with their feature of sharing towers in Tiny Tower, planes on Pocket Planes and now video on their latest game: Nimble Quest, through the Everyplay service. See it at work here.

10000000 is an excellent game to share video replays to feel closer to the excitement of the game itself and sharing amazing feats that can be achieved in it. One additional content tweak would be increasing the animations and “pyrotechnic effects” of achieving chain reactions with the tiles in the running zone. When you’re playing and doing amazing feats, you feel great but you’re focused on the tiles, and when someone else is viewing, it would be nice to have something for other people to watch that is spectacular.

For example in Sonic Dash, they control the pacing of races and allow the player to do some “quick time swipes” for Sonic to breakdance in the air. This looks awesome and also wins some rings if done right.

If we want to go nuts, we can even discuss a room dedicated to store these glorious gameplay images and/or videos so the player herself can revisit them in the game or have it for her friends to see, but that’s a lot of additional work, development-wise.

Execution tradeoffs

We have discussed monetization and social aspects for the game to be considered a Free to play game, is that it? Well, not so much. Free to play games start when the game launches, and operate as a service, not a product. This cannot be stressed enough as it is easy to overlook in practical decisions and prioritizations how to approach the execution of these designs and handling the expectations associated to them.

So what does all this mean? In addition to the elements mentioned above they need to pass a check for game balance from a qualitative perspective and a quantitative one, hopefully informed through analytics -especially when the game is already live. Additional checks must be passed regarding UI, accessibility, and timing of the monetization elements. There’s a huge amount of games that hide away the options to pay more under too many screens, unclear menus or the wrong timing for monetization, making it annoying instead of convenient.

Adjusting the expectations is another important issue. It is fairly easy to fail at Free to play with a great game, even spectacularly. Many times this is because developers fail to see the service aspects and just throw in some IAP without too much thought about them, only to claim foul when they don’t get disgustingly rich overnight.

Then all the work needed with art, programming, balancing and testing needs to be estimated and considered to be split in several iterations that have different tradeoffs on different platforms when they go live. For example, monetization re-designs would allow the game to be set free and include more revenue venues but it would not achieve all of its strength without the social features. On the other hand, working the social features first would put the game in the eyes of more potential players that still would be stopped at a paywall if they’re not willing to pay anyway. However, the social features discussed here can be integrated in the game without making it Free to play at all and it could potentially be a good thing anyway.

In my particular opinion, I would thoroughly design all the aforementioned elements up to a point of actual estimation of the development work needed and consider the tradeoffs with the actual resources available and any other strategic considerations for the game. 10000000 is already present on several platforms and the best course of action would be to set up a minimal analytics service on all platforms to monitor the game’s performance and then decide how to go from there, possibly making it free to play on Android first (and possibly an Asian localization). Then moving these changes to all platforms including the social features, that can be developed for the game to scale once you have data and revenue to support such scaling.

Where do we go from here?

This was a general discussion to a deeper level of how to take an already great game to millions of players through the Free to play model, considering several aspects of the decisions involved.

For more detailed discussions on monetization and Free to play, I recommend to check:

• The Language of Monetization Design

• Monetizing an Infinite Runner

• The Design of Free-to-Play Games, Part 2 (Part 1)

• Managing a Free-to-Play Product: a Publisher’s Perspective

To understand all the nuances involved in the design of a Free to play “casual” successful title, Candy Crush Saga:

• Why Candy Crush Saga is taking over the world

• Video: Candy Crush Saga uses luck in the right places (GDC 2013)

The controversial decision made by Candy Crush developers of not to use a virtual currency in their game and going with direct purchase of boosts draws special attention. This was a risky and bold decision (albeit a good one given the game’s performance).

For expectation handling and pitfall avoidance: 7 Ways to Fail at Free-to-Play. On social aspects, a previous post of mine: Some social game design principles before launch. More resources in general, my previous post: Almost everything you need to know to enter mobile game development on 2013.

In summary, 10000000 is a great game, that includes within itself many options to make it a game that allow players themselves to put a better price on the value of the whole experience -a fun, convenient and social experience. When we analyze the tweaks and additions we can make to the game, we must take into consideration the costs and benefits of each improvement and how they can add value to the whole game incrementally. This will change from a finished, bounded product to an ongoing live service dedicated to its community of fans.

When we started development of Vex Blocks, we set out to create a falling block style arcade game in the vein of Tetris that utilised a device’s rotation.  The job of the player was to chain together blocks on the screen by matching colors, symbols or both and tracing out patterns with their fingers to connect the blocks.  Random blocks would fall into the play area and the job was to clear as many as possible, rotating the device as necessary so blocks would fall into different arrangements.  Once we had created the basic gameplay mechanics, we set about trying to think of how we could change the rules of the game to create different gameplay modes and a “nice to have feature if we have the time” was puzzle mode.

So, as development moved along I ultimately found myself faced with the job of creating various puzzles for our puzzle mode.  I had never set out to create a puzzle before, but how hard could it be?  Start simple, right?

I started by recreating my playing area in Photoshop and went about duplicating the various game pieces so I could simply drag and drop to create the puzzles before coding them into our game.  My next step was to create something aesthetically pleasing before I even thought of how the puzzle would play.  I’d drop in blocks to create geometric shapes and patterns, often drawing inspiration from simple icons as I only had a 5×8 grid to work with.  Once I had a pattern on the screen that I was relatively happy with, I’d start thinking about how it would play.

Here’s where it really started to get fun.  The point of the puzzle mode was to solve the puzzle, clearing all playing blocks from the screen in as few chains as possible, with an upper limit on the amount of chains you could use before the puzzle would reset.  I’d have a look at the blocks in front of me and start tracing out the various options for chains.  If it was too straightforward, then I’d start to throw in obstacles by swapping out blocks that couldn’t be readily chained together, or could only be part of a chain coming from one particular direction.  Or, I’d start with a puzzle and then mimic a few phone rotations to see what I’d end up with.  It was a bit like messing up a Rubik’s cube.  As challenging as a Rubik’s cube is to solve, there’s a certain amount of satisfaction in taking a solved cube and mixing it up for another to solve.  For a few puzzles, that’s exactly what it was like.  Starting with a solved puzzle that was easy to chain together, then scrambling it.  Mmmm…satisfying.

From a design perspective, starting simple was really the only way for this project to evolve.  As I started to become comfortable designing simple puzzles, I’d gradually add in new game mechanics.  What if I add a block that can’t be chained and has to be surrounded?  What if I introduce blocks that stay fixed in one spot despite device orientation?  What if we throw in blocks that explode if you don’t clear them quickly enough?  What about using specific power-ups?  Adding one new gameplay mechanic at a time and exploring that mechanic fully before moving onto the next, then adding them together provided a nice progression in terms of variety and difficulty.  As I became more familiar with process, design started to shift away from the look of the puzzle and instead started with a particular challenge, and then I moulded the look around the puzzle.

Next up I assembled the puzzles in-game and turned them loose on our testers.  I quickly discovered that what seems easy to me after working on the game full-time for nine months isn’t necessarily as easy for gamers who haven’t spent that type of time with the product.  Test, test test.  Who knew?  There’s a fine line between challenging and “Nuts to this” with gamers.  Thankfully, I’ve received some excellent feedback and what was originally a “nice to have feature if we have the time” has become a challenging addition to the title that extends the gameplay options while offering us the opportunity to release additional content if gamers like what they see.

Most of the update is covered in this video, which I’ve recorded on a camera so that I could narrate:

To cover the main points done on the road to improving the system:

• To alleviate the issue of not being able to see where your thumb is on the stick, I’ve added a mirror joystick in the centre of the screen that appears when you’re touching the main one.
• I’ve added a nice orange dot to show you the direction you’re walking in. This was first done by Eric Raue on his own implementation of the original article (Eric also added a web player build of his version here).
• Rotation arrows now appear when you touch the rotate gizmo. This seems to have been the turning point for ease of use: without these arrows people struggled to understand why they were rotating, with them they get it much easier.
• The faster you rotate the slower you walk. This makes it possible to perform much tighter turns, which seems important as a lot of people don’t turn until they’re at the point they want to (unlike myself, who tends to use it more akin to driving a car).

This version has been focus tested quite a bit now, and is showing a lot of promise. Most people get it within a minute, a few take a bit longer. Eased into the mechanic though I think this is very good, especially when compared to the learning curve of dual sticks.

I’m going to keep working on this when I can, but it might be a little while before there’s another update. Which may well be about starting a kickstarter :)

In a  few days, thousands of people around the globe will gather at pre-registered locations, and attempt to make a game with a specific theme within 48 hours at the 2013 Global Game Jam. Game Jams are an amazing place to have fun, make new connections, and learn new skills. And of course, there’s the ever-valuable fact that you walk into a place, and 48 hours later you (hopefully) have a functioning game with YOUR name on the credits. Boom. 48 Hours. Game. Done.

So what can you expect from a one of these events? Well every locale is different, but typically you all meet at the prescribed location at the prescribed time, watch a video, and then get pseudo-randomly assigned to teams (unless you come with your own team). Once the 48 hours is up, an expo is held where everyone shares their games and talks about the process. Once that’s over, some people will continue to punish their bodies by the intense imbibing of spirits. That least bit I can’t recommend, but I do it anyway.

Anyways, the goal is to have fun. The goal is also to make a game, and it sucks when a team just can’t get it together in time. Unfortunately this will happen to some teams, so I’m here to kind of help keep that from happening. So without further ado, here is a small list of thoughts and hard-learned lessons to help you out on your maiden voyage.

Nourishment

I’m not huge on caffeine, but here’s where you’re going to see cases of red bull and pots of coffee all over the place. I personally like to stay hydrated with tons of water, naked juice to boost my energy, and snacks high in fiber and vitamins. I’ll also go through about 6-7 red bulls. That’s just me. You can also get by fine on Bawls, tasty cakes, and bugles, but don’t blame me if you’re feeling gross and your body starts producing neon waste after the 24 hour mark. I also advise that the team at least once physically remove themselves from their chairs, and go for a walk to a nearby eatery. First off, breaking bread together is just great teaming. Second, everyone gets a much needed break and some decent hot food. If you aren’t jamming next to a place to eat, consider ordering delivery and eating in a location where you aren’t working. I go to the Game Jam in Orlando, so we have the luxury of comfortably being outside without bundling up. I know some of you may not be that lucky.

Hygiene

Shower before you go! You probably won’t for two days. Nobody wants you to stink.

Rest

Try to get some rest. Some people can power through for 48 hours and do fine. If you’re one of those people, then good for you. I can be, depending on my mood. I recommend getting some sleep around the 30 hour mark. Maybe 4 or 5 hours. I knew a guy that refused to sleep and around hour 40 started wandering around aimlessly before falling asleep in the cupboard. Fun times. If you don’t sleep, take a break. When I do a Game jam, I get up and go outside for ten minutes every hour. Keeps my mind sharp, keeps my limbs moving, and keeps my energy up.

What should I bring?

-          Your rig, obviously, with any spare stuff you can afford to lug. People are always forgetting cables, headphones, mouse pads – stupid little stuff.

-          Drinks and snacks for you, plus room for it to get mooched on. Don’t be the guy that brings nothing, but don’t be the guy that’s a tightwad with the snacks when the less prepared run out. You’re all in this together, after all.

-          Pillow, blanket, bedroll. You’ll likely be sleeping on the floor, so do what you can to make that a better experience for you.

-          Change of unmentionables, fresh t-shirt, overshirt, and maybe a sweatshirt or hoodie if you want.

-          Toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, meds, etc.

-          Your talent!

Jobs

Well programmer, artist, and audio engineer seem pretty self explanatory, but the designer is a little harder to define. As much as it pains me to say, a designer’s talents aren’t optimal for a game jam, but they can still be super useful. As a designer, I do design work, but I also step into a producer role, a runner role,  and an “oh my god we need three more artists and we have ten hours go find them” roll.

I wouldn’t advise for a team to take on more than one designer, unless you’re working in an engine like UDK or Unity, and all the programming is already done. Just remember designers, it’s not that we’re not useful, it’s that a Game jam isn’t a nurturing environment for us to really get going. Don’t believe me? That’s fine. Just do the game jam before you get on the comments section and call me an idiot.

Making the Game

You’ve got your team. You’ve got your red bull. The coordinator has announced the theme. Here’s some advice. Pick a simple game idea, with one simple mechanic, and get it working. Then figure out how to get your theme to work with that. At one GGJ we went through a list of simple games like pong, asteroids, and connect four. We ended up going with an on-rails platformer where the sole mechanic was jumping. To be fair, it was for the kinect, so you could maybe get a little more complex than that if you’re not putting together a kinect game in 48 hours.

Ideally you should have your game functional and running within a few hours, then spend the rest of the time making it your own and iterating. This is advice I was given for my first game jam by a very smart person. It is really a winning way to ensure you get a game done.

Well that’s it! If anyone out there has any more advice, add it in the comments! Good luck and happy jamming!

Aesop was a person who may or may not have existed, but Aesop’s fables are well known. Even if you’ve never heard of them, you most certainly know one of the tales. The story of The Tortoise and the Hare and The Boy Who Cried Wolf are Aesop’s fables. They’re fun stories, and are great for children because they have good lessons behind them. The story is crucial because it drives the point home. You can tell a child “slow and steady wins the race” and they’ll think you’re a loony. Silly daddy, you’re supposed to go fast to win races! If you go on about the over confident hare and the determined tortoise, then you have planted the seed of knowledge and enlightened that youngster.

You can take a story with a good lesson, and smack that narrative into a game.  There’s nothing wrong with that, but that’s not what I’m looking for. Instead, a game can teach through its mechanics and the choices presented to the player. This is like a lesson on steroids because the player needs to consciously make the correct decisions on their own in order to succeed (let’s pretend gamefaqs.com doesn’t exist for a moment). There is no better teaching tool than that! Think of the saying, “you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink.” A horse must drink to complete a game, and if you design a game well then they will learn to drink on their own.  I’m sure there’s a market for horse drinking games. Part of our art is in making that learning experience better. It’s no easy task, but this is what separates games from other art forms. This power cannot be found elsewhere.

But, with great power there must also come great responsibility!

Teaching the player how to think rather than what to think is the goal. Otherwise, you’re brainwashing, and that’s no good. There are many studies that try to prove games are great for psychological and social development, while others try to convince us that they desensitize us and encourage excessive aggression. It seems like Gamasutra.com has an article about new research every week or so. Studies that try to definitively mark games as good or bad are ridiculous, because it’s impossible to pin either side as the absolute conclusion. The power is in our hands to design a game that is healthy or harmful.

Labeling even a single game as one extreme or the other isn’t easy, either. There are few games I’ve played that have no health benefits.  Those I’ve seen that are trash are found on Facebook.  I don’t mean to knock Facebook games, and I have seen a number that are enjoyable and worth playing. The problem is that most of these games try to make everybody overly happy so that they play the game, and to do that they instill a false sense of accomplishment and never inflict penalties on the player. Even if they sit back and do next to nothing (they’ll probably have to hit a button), players will advance in the game. There’s nothing gained from that except wasted time.  My wife calls these gerbil games because players bring their nose to the tube to get a drop of achievement water.  Water is healthy, but a game is meant to have value in the way the water is obtained.

Some folks may mark violent or vulgar games as unhealthy, but I will not denounce these games.  The target audience needs to acknowledges the same way medicine’s instructions and dosage are.  Such games are not healthy for a young child, but nor is 1000mg of Tylenol*.  They can be useful to adults as stress relief, or perhaps work as a sort of reverse physcology.  As I’ve grown older, I have found myself thinking “I’m sure glad I don’t have to do this for reals” while playing war centric games.  That would be an interesting research topic: can a violent games be designed to encourage people to be less violent?  Regardless,  I will let my little girl sticks with IRL games of cops and robbers and cute games of boyfriend+girlfriend+puppy for a good long while before letting her play adult games.

It’s not inherently bad to allow the player to make “evil” choices in a game, either.  Most RPGs I’ve played recently had a good/evil meter or presented me with choices that were fairly black and white. Letting the player be a bad guy is ok. In fact, it’s the sign of a healthy game because it lets the player decide which path to take. If these games were to make it more advantageous to be a bad guy then it might be unhealthy, but the games I’ve been playing are pretty well balanced and sit in the grey area until the player starts to make decisions. That’s a good spot for games with moral meters to aim for, the neutral bull’s eye.   If instead they were to lead the player to one side or the other, then they would be telling the player what to think. Having the world react reasonably to their decisions gives them the ability to decide how to proceed on their own. That makes a beautiful game.

But back to my task…I need to find a few games now that I want to store away so my daughter can play later. Here’s a few of the games I’ve picked out for my daughter, along with the lesson I think it teaches. Mind you that it’s going to be a few years before I let her play most of these.

Demon’s Souls – always keep your guard up

There were a few points early on in that game where I was reamed and killed with one or two shots from a sneaky demon because I was strolling around observing my surroundings with my shield and sword by my side. I learned quick. Any player who treads new territory without holding R1 is a fool. The lessons I learned in this game stayed with me while I played the sequel, Dark Souls, and I was better for it. This is generally good advice for somebody who is about to embark on their own adventures in the world: stay on your toes and don’t leave yourself vulnerable.

Pixel Junk Monsters – Time not dancing is time wasted

In this game, you build towers to kill dudes who are coming to eat your babies. If you stand in an area occupied by a tower, you dance to give that tower experience so it can be upgraded. If you’re sitting in the middle of nowhere, you’re wasting valuable dancing time that can be strengthening your towers (unless you’re dealing with the hive tower, but you shouldn’t be standing away from a tower for long). And who doesn’t love dancing? It’s fun, good exercise, and you don’t even have to be good at it for those two features to hold. If you are not enjoying what you’re doing, you’re wasting your time.

Resident Evil – Choose your battles

You have two shotgun shells, five 9mm bullets, and no green herbs. You walk up a set of stairs, see a zombie staring at a wall in a far corner of the room. There’s two other zombies doing the same in a hallway you need to travel, and you know that the door on the other end of that hallway is a door that leads outside.  There are probably hunters outside, and they are mean sons of guns. That first zombie can stand there all the doo dah day. He’s not going to bother you. The other two zombies are slow, and you can weave through them no problem. Ignore them, because those two shells will likely be just enough to keep the hunter at bay while you dart through the garden. It’s just not worth taking on every challenge full force, and sometimes you just have to ignore them. Save your energy for the bigger challenges that really matter.

Mega Man – Practice makes perfect

I dare say that in every Mega Man level, something will kill you without warning on your first time through. The game is designed that way. There are some surprises that are meant to knock you down, and you just have to learn where they are and be ready for them next time. Each time you die, you try again and aim to get just a little bit further. Eventually, you build the muscle memory to get through the levels and you can almost perform them without thinking about it or maybe even without looking at the screen. Repeat something enough times, and you will become an expert.

Once Upon a Monster – ???

I don’t know if there’s a main lesson in this game, I haven’t played it yet. But I will get this game because it requires two players, a parent and a child, and puts them together in an ultra co-op mode. In many cooperative games, you can get through with another player without ever really interacting with them. You can just play alongside them (excluding the harder difficulty modes). But Once Upon A Monster naturally has you play together. It’s beautiful really. I can’t believe this game would fail to impress me, because Tim Schafer is dreamy and everything that comes from Double Fine is great.

Braid – ???

I have a tough time pinning a lesson on this one. I’m fascinated by this game because it tells the story through the game mechanics, and that’s just awesome. But, it’s also very abstract and that means its moral can change depending on how you interpret the game. I myself thought Tim was a young man trying to make his mark in the world, and the princess was a metaphor for The Big City. Others thought it was a nuclear bomb. Whatever it is, this game is a shining example of the power game designers wield, and how to use it for great justice. If my daughter is a gamer, she will play this game.

This is only the top of my list, there are many more. I hope these help show how both core game mechanics and tiny details can be used to teach a lesson.

* I am not a doctor. If a doctor tells you that your child needs this dosage of Tylenol, do not cite me as an argument against it.

Read on to see how I went about finding out if such a this is possible…

High Concept

For lots of types of games, touch screens are a fantastic input device. They currently don’t offer any sense of tactile response, though I’m sure that’s coming in time. Today, the games which are most successful on our phones and tablets are ones that use touch screens to their advantage. There is demand, however, to put games that have been very successful on PC and console straight onto our phones and tablets; by which I refer to first person and third person action games.

To date, this has often been done by drawing two virtual joysticks on the screen, one in each corner. These react in a similar fashion to how the physical joysticks do on a traditional console controller, with the left stick controlling XY movement and the right stick controlling rotation and looking up and down.

This approach has two main flaws:

1. The amount of screen space required for the joysticks
2. To hold the device so you can use both thumbs, you effectively remove the ability to use any other fingers at the same time.

In addition, such approaches:

• Assumes that the user is familiar with twin joystick controls from console games, which requires a significant amount of skill and dexterity.
• Often does not offer support for left handed players
• Does not offer support for gamers with reduced mobility

I think these are all fairly well known, but it’s still an accepted approach because there doesn’t seem to be a better alternative.

Or is there?

Initial Concept

The initial concept is to combine moving and rotating into a single joystick. This is something that is only possible on a touch-based device, as the user can be very precise about exactly where they are touching the screen.

The joystick is made up of 3 core elements:

1. The move gizmo
2. The rotate gizmo
3. The nub graphic

Arranged as such:

The Move Gizmo

The move gizmo works the same as in an ordinary two-stick system:

• The centre of the graphic is stored as (x,y).
• The radius of the gizmo is known (stored as a variable, InnerRadius, to allow for tweaking)
• When the user touches the screen, a check is done to ensure they are inside the move graphic.
• If they are, then the touch location is stored as (x1, y1):

• The amount to move the player by is simply calculated by:
  • Position.x = (x1 – x) / InnerRadius
  • Position.y = (y1 – y) / InnerRadius
• This returns a value between 0 – 1, which gets applied directly to the player movement code per frame, where a multiplier is added as a scalar to allow for faster movement if required.
• Because of the size of the stick, there is unlikely to be any need to apply an acceleration curve to this movement. There may be a need to implement a dead zone, to be decided in testing.

The Rotate Gizmo

The rotate gizmo fully encompasses the move gizmo, and has an internal size stored as the variable OuterRadius. The rotate gizmo is only active when the user’s touch position is between InnerRadius and OuterRadius.

To calculate the rotation amount, the gizmo works off angles rather than absolute location of the touch. This is very different to how rotate joysticks usually work.

• At the point where the user’s touch enters the rotate gizmo, the position is stored and a vector is calculated from that position back to the centre of the joystick (x, y):

• The user is now required to keep their touch within the rotation gizmo, and the position they move to creates an additional vector, current vector. The angle, θ, between this new vector and the original determines how much the user rotates per frame:

• If the user rotates clockwise past the initial vector then they turn clockwise, and likewise turning anti-clockwise past the initial vector turns them that way.
• There may need to be a maximum rotation speed, to be determined with testing.
• If the user’s touch moves outside of the OuterRadius then the joystick deactivates and resets.
• If they move their touch back inside the move gizmo, the rotation stops and movement resumes from where the updated touch resides.
• Releasing the touch or moving outside of OuterRadius stops all movement and rotation, and resets the joystick to its initial phase.
• If the user’s initial touch is within the rotate gizmo then the user can look around on the spot.

The key to Single Joystick is this:

If the user starts touching inside the move gizmo and then moves into the rotation gizmo, (x1,y1) remains at the point that they ‘pierced’ the rotation gizmo. This allows for circle strafing on a single touch.

Nub Graphic

This is just a simple graphic that moves to reflect the current touch position, assuming the user is inside the OuterRadius.

Vertical Look

The one downside of the Single Joystick is that it doesn’t have any support for controlling vertical look. There are several possible solutions to this by using additional touches or lock-ons, but for initial prototyping a simple height check slightly in front of the player camera (2m) is performed. If the check is lower than the player height then make the camera look up, and likewise look down if it is higher:

Testing the theory

Writing a game mechanic requires a leap of imagination and, for me, often involves a great degree of holding the input device, closing my eyes and moving my fingers trying to imagine myself playing the game.

This is great, and helps iron out any major flaws with a specification. But nothing beats actually playing it.

As I’m currently freelance, access to programmers is limited. However, access to game engines isn’t: especially with Unity available for free. I already had a licence for iOS deployment, and once registered as an Apple developer I could very quickly build projects and get them running on my iPad. Note: this is not to say the mechanic is only devised for Apple devices, but purely to say that’s what I had to hand and thus it made sense to use it.

So, here’s a prototype of this mechanic running. The stuttering is due to my capture method off my iPad, rather than framerate – as you’d hope / expect, it runs at a solid 60fps currently.

As you can probably see, the concept works to a decent degree but isn’t yet completely robust. I’ve been playing with this for about a week now, tweaking bits here and there. If you’ve read everything above, you’ll notice no mention of the icon that lights up when the touch is inside the rotate gizmo: that came about simply because you can’t see the nub (or, in fact, half of the background) when you’re actually touching it.

What next?

There’s quite a few more improvements to make, but I thought that this project had hit a point where I should write about it and see if anyone else has any feedback. I’ve tested it on a few people, with varying degrees of success – everyone needs to be told how it works, so at the ‘intuitive’ point from the brief it’s not quite there yet.

I’ll hopefully do a follow up post in a few weeks with improvements I’ve made. For now though, hopefully I’ve started to set designers everywhere a challenge: find a way to make touch screen joysticks better.

Before reading on, please understand that my definition of the AAA gaming model is thus:

A game that you go to your favourite store to buy for £45 / $60, take home and play on a console or PC in the comfort of your own home. You expect that there’s a single player component that will last you at least 8 hours, if not quite a bit more, and a multiplayer component that will be polished and fun.

With that in mind:

Is AAA is dead?

Eighteen months or so ago, this wouldn’t have really even been considered. There were signs that the model was struggling, but sales were still plenty high enough on the big hits of the year and there were plenty of rumours that Sony and Microsoft were working away on the next consoles – a sure fire way to inject new life into the fire.

Today though, it seems to quite a few people’s minds. Sony and Microsoft haven’t unveiled any new hardware yet, and it’s costing more than ever to produce a current generation AAA game, which is against what has happened in the past. I’ve previously mentioned that making AAA games is hard, and nowhere is this more evident but in a simple table:

These are averages – naturally there are games that go against the grain, both up and down. If we take the middle-of-the-road for all of these, it took 19 man years to make a PlayStation 1 game, back in 1995. Fast forward to 2001 and it took 124 years to make a PlayStation 2 game. Today, it takes 420 man years. That’s 22 times longer than it took in 1995, yet games still cost £45 / $60 at retail. Thanks to mobile gaming, people are starting to become unwilling to pay £45, even though in real terms they’re cheaper than ever. In fact, people don’t even want to pay 69p – a lot of people expect entertainment for free. Currently, no one expects Assassin’s Creed III on their mobile phone for 69p, but, as the speed of mobile phones increases, so do customer expectations.

The number of copies you’d need to sell at 69p to make a profit on a game that’s taken 420 man years to make is astronomical, and highly unlikely to happen. Something has to change.

Technology will save us

The two most time consuming elements of making a AAA game are making the game engine and then creating the content to go in. A modern day game engine has a lot of boxes to tick:

• Deferred Rendering
• Texture and Geometry Streaming
• Online Multiplayer Support
• Parallax Mapping
• Blended Animation System
• Rigid Body Physics and IK Solutions
• Motion Blur
• Full Body Rig
• SSAO (Screen Space Ambient Occlusion)
• And on..

Not all of these boxes have to be ticked to make a game, but to get anywhere near the visual quality expected by the audience and gaming press your engine is going to have to do a lot. Technical accomplishments will only get you so far of course – your game needs solid art direction and high quality assets, so you’ll also have to spend a lot of money on high calibre artists, animators and sound designers. When so much money is being spent, it’s rare for a team to be afforded the ability to experiment too much with game mechanics: instead it’s safer to tread the well worn path that successful games have already laid.

As a games designer, this feels wrong to me. Thankfully, it feels that the tide is turning.

A lot of this comes down to the sheer power of hardware becoming available. Right now a mobile phone has more processing power than a top of the range desktop from 6 years ago. That is, officially, bonkers. And it’s only going to get even more so – in another couple of cycles mobiles phones will easily be as fast as current generation consoles, and they’ll continue to get faster.

Speeding up engine development

This power starts to give game makers a little bit of breathing space, because it begins to reduce the requirement to squeeze every last ounce of processing power out of the hardware to get the same results. That, in turn, gives you the ability to make more use of pre-written software libraries. In the past, these might have been avoided or rewritten to be tailored specifically to your exact needs and any additional code removed. As well as software libraries, CPUs and GPUs continue to advance and provide specific processing units for performing some of the heavy work on the chips themselves, such as physics, and this frees up valuable coding time down the line.

In addition to on-chip improvements, APIs, software libraries and even off-the-shelf game engines continue to advance at a good rate, as do protocols to bring about a level of standardisation between devices. In fact, these are the two areas that I think can bring about the biggest change in how game engines are made. This year looks like it’s going to be all about new hardware, with Ouya, a Steambox, an nVidia console, GameStick and a handful of others, and that’s before even considering that the Wii U is only just out and Microsoft and Sony might have something new this year too. That’s a lot of potential fragmentation, and I’ve not even mentioned mobile phones or tablets…

How about, instead of buying a specific device to play games on, you just run the platform of your choice on whatever you have to hand. Think of something like DirectX, but imagine it as a whole console layer. Imagine if you just wrote your game for Steam, and let the APIs, libraries and protocols do everything else to make sure that it runs on the device in your hand, from providing the input layer to rendering the graphics. This is a few years ahead, but I think it will happen. For instance, it wouldn’t matter how many buttons a device has, as long as it adheres to the interface protocol. That layer may be physical buttons, a touch screen, a motion sensor or something else entirely. The device would deal with how the user interacts with it, and push that information to the game as a series of standard inputs.

This might sound slightly ridiculous, but this is already how browsing the internet works. The websites you visit don’t know if you’re using a mouse, a touch screen or a TV remote. They don’t need to: the browser on your device deals with the input layer, and also does all the rendering of the data that gets sent back. Could this be a future for game engines too?

Asset Creation

Shorter term, asset creation is going to benefit greatly from more computing power. As with the engine, the requirement to optimise a model to within an inch of its life is reduced if there’s more processing power and memory available. Equally, as engines continue to become more sophisticated, they can offer perfectly acceptable optimisation of models on the fly. The requirement to create multiple LODs reduces and, soon, should disappear. This will save a lot of time.

In addition to this, the tools that create the content will continue to improve. It makes full financial sense: if you put resources into better tools, you need fewer people using them. If, for instance, six coders working on tools could reduce your art team by twenty, surely that’s the best thing to do?

The ability to scan objects in real time and generate models is becoming a reality. Faceshop for Photoshop can take a 2D image and create a 3D head from it. The results aren’t professional quality yet, but in time tools like this will get better and better.

Finally, the way we interact with computers is constantly evolving. There are a lot of UI developments just round the corner, some of which could help massively with content creation. Imagine sculpting a 3D model using a LEAP controller, or sketching out a 2D layout on PaperTab and having a tool turn that into 3D for you.

With all these developments, and many more, combined:

Gameplay becomes king

If development teams aren’t focused on ticking engine feature boxes, and art teams can produce high quality art in a fraction of the time currently required, then the focus will hopefully shift more onto just making great games. This has already been kickstarted by the mobile and independent scene, and it’s where AAA development is heading. But wait a minute… didn’t we say that AAA might be dead?

Well, yes and no. There will always be a market for high budget entertainment, and there will be developers that will cater for that. They may have to seek a different funding model, possibly a combination of a kickstarter campaign, a traditional publisher deal and in-app purchases. With development cycles being shorter and it being sold as purely a digital download, it should be possible to sell a game for less and still make a profit. See the Steam model.

Will technology have an impact on the type of gameplay? Motion controllers and Kinect opened the door to different types of gameplay interaction, and it’s hard not to assume that new interfaces will bring new gameplay experiences. New controllers are great, but inherently create fragmentation. If you look at mobile games, the ones that are successful aren’t necessarily breaking new gameplay ground. In fact, if anything, they’re relying quite heavily on paradigms that made games successful in the 1980s and 1990s. They are very highly polished, and very well defined – distilled almost down to a few core mechanics. Interestingly, too, is that mobile and independent games often offer a greater challenge than AAA games. Getting 3 stars on every level in Angry Birds is not easy at all, yet people who can’t finish the first mission in Halo will happily sit there for hours until they get them. I still haven’t managed to complete a game of Faster Than Light, but I’m having a lot of fun trying. I could list 50 such examples, but this article is already far longer than I originally intended.

The point I’m trying to make here is that there will be a meeting point of polished gameplay experience that looks as good as the top budget games of today: but for a fraction of the development cost. At the point that it doesn’t cost tens of millions to make Call of Duty, people will have room to take bigger risks with the gameplay.

Wrapping it up

Quite a bit has been made of Ingress, a location based game on Android. You go to a real location – predefined as an ‘energy source’ – and hack in. You’ve already decided side you’re on. Currently, I’ve heard (I haven’t tried it myself), it’s not very engaging. It’s currently in beta and an interesting experiment, and a sign of potential directions that some games will take. Coupled with Project Glass (aka, Google Glasses), it’s not hard to imagine that you could be playing games all the time, as you walk down the street or go shopping.

The technology to synchronise data automatically between devices is already with us, as is the ability to connect your mobile phone up to your TV – effectively turning it into a Wii U controller (iPhones achieve this via Apple TV, whereas other manufactures are looking to incorporate Intel’s WiDi protocols).

All of this means that we’ll be able to play games wherever we are, whenever we want. Whether or not that’s a good thing… I’m not sure because it doesn’t take into account why we play games. Partly we play them for a distraction, a way of turning the mundane into something more. But one of the biggest pleasures of any leisure activity is making time for it. You may be meant to be doing something else, but you’ve decided that for the next few hours you’re going to play a game. This is important, and isn’t going to go away.

The great thing is, there’ll be a huge amount of great games for you to play on whatever you’ve got to hand.

I was never around children from the time I left home until nearly 20 years later when I had kids of my own. When I was faced with other people’s children, I often found the experience awkward and a bit uncomfortable. I had no idea how to relate to kids of any age or how to interact with them. Now with children of my own I can hardly remember a time where I didn’t know how to play with children, and in return my kids have opened my eyes to why we find certain things “fun”. I hope I can describe this idea in a way that could prove useful to aspiring developers.

Playing video games in my twenties and thirties I think I lost some of the understanding of why I found games fun to play when I was a kid. Video games to me were about roleplaying or they were about competition and if you had asked me why video games were fun even three years ago, I probably would have described some combination of those two factors but over the years I’d forgotten something. Perhaps not forgotten so much as overlooked. While roleplay and competition can be factors in why games are appealing long term I think what makes video games fun is much more fundamental to the way we learn. Watching my children grow and play has helped me remember what drew me to video games as a child and what still keeps me coming back now. It has to do with learning and the feeling of accomplishment when you finally master a challenging game.

From a very early age, babies love patterns. Nothing quite locks an infant’s gaze like faces and patterns. As they get older it doesn’t stop. We find patterns all around us all the time even when confronted with something that doesn’t seemingly have a pattern. We see shapes in clouds and we instantly look for some sort of familiar arrangement in a jumble of letters or numbers. I watched my son stare at a wooden puzzle, then progress to dumping the pieces and creating chaos only to then restore order. He would continue to play in this manner until eventually it’s no longer challenging to solve that particular puzzle and suddenly that toy is forgotten for good (or until his little sister picks up a piece). He moves onto the next challenge and that’s his day with the exception of naps and meal time.

To me, right there I see two fundamental pieces of what keeps us coming back to a good video game. One factor is some sort of pattern recognition mechanic and the other is a challenge. When I started looking at the video games I enjoyed as a kid and that I enjoyed now they all have, at their core, some sort of pattern recognition element and they all had increasing levels of difficulty. I’d play until I either mastered the game and it became too easy or until the difficulty became such that I grew frustrated and no longer found the experience entertaining. I see the same behaviours in the way my toddler plays. It’s fun unless the task is too difficult, and it’s fun until the task becomes too easy.

When I was a kid I remember spending quite a bit of time on Space Ace, among others games at my local arcade. Space Ace was a cartoon, laser disk based game along the lines of Dragon Slayer. A series of events would play out on the screen and a visual cue would signal the move to make with the timing becoming more challenging as the game progressed. Mastering a game like this in a time before strategy guides and the internet took trial and error, a good memory and a pocketful of quarters and I loved that game. That was, until I beat it. Shortly after I memorized the patterns, I moved onto the next game only occasionally popping in a quarter to feel important when throngs of kids who would gather when they’d see “that kid who can beat Space Ace” start a new game.

Whether it’s timing involved in arcade fighting games or if it’s strategy in an on-line shooter, when you break it down video games are all about recognizing patterns and using them within the confines of the game’s rules.  It’s an understanding of game development that in retrospect I feel I poorly implemented in the first game my team released in our efforts to appeal to a wider audience. Each level of the game was unique, but the challenge of the game, the pattern required to win didn’t vary enough and looking back at the testing, our players enjoyed the game but the question we didn’t ask was “for how long will they enjoy it?” It’s a choice we made in the interest of appealing to a broader base, but I think this choice didn’t do us any favours and by the time we realized this and updated the title with different ways to play our window of opportunity had already closed. It’s something that seems so basic a notion in hindsight but hopefully by bringing this up I can encourage other new developers to take a look at their product differently.

Playing games with a two and a half year old also helped me rethink control schemes as well. My son loves to pick up a controller and ask “Sack-boy, Daddy?” but a Playstation 3 controller and LittleBigPlanet is a bit beyond him currently. However, I sat him down with Angry Birds – Star Wars and within seconds he was flinging birds at piggies and loving it. The same goes playing “Digit Chase” on the Playstation Vita, a quick demo that has users tap numbers on the screen in sequence. There’s something undeniably intuitive about touch screen input as illustrated by how quickly children take to them, but often mobile developers try to shoehorn controller type controls into their mobile games. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with modern game controllers, but controls needs to be intuitive. That doesn’t mean they have to be toddler approved simple, I just think the basic controls should be straightforward. This was a lesson we learned developing our first game and reaffirmed by watching my son play. Just because you have variety of ways to control your game doesn’t mean you should just throw everything in because you can. It’s tempting to do. I know because I did it.

I can thank the time I spend playing with my little guy for bringing me back to the basics and helping understand why we find games fun. It’s not about simplifying the games themselves, but it’s recognizing that under everything we’re always searching for patterns and looking to challenge ourselves, because that’s how we learn. It’s not about making controls dead simple, but it couldn’t hurt to imagine a scenario where your game is being played by a gamer who’s never gamed before. Will your controls confuse or will they help the player become comfortable before becoming challenging? It’s easy to lose focus on basic game-play mechanics underneath everything else that makes up modern gaming, especially for experienced gamers. Watching children play and learn helped me realize this and I look forward to gaming with both my kids for years to come, and I look forward to what they have to teach me.

Usually all game projects emerge from a simple statement that quickly pushes the mind to imagine the possibilities. Depending on your particular tastes, background and peers, these statements can be like: “Ace Attorney, but solving medical cases, like House M.D.!” (Ace House™), “Wario meets Braid!” (Wraid™) , “Starcraft but casual, on a phone!” (Casualcraft™). These ideas can be just fine as starting points, but somewhere down the line the hardest question is: Is this game something worth doing?.

When you work at a game studio and a new idea arises, that’s the first question it faces. And depending on the studio’s strengths, business strategy and past experiences, the definition of “worth” is very, very specific. It usually involves a quick set of constraints such as: time, budget, platforms, audience, team, among others. So for a particular studio that has developed Hidden Object Games and has done work for hire creating art, characters and stories for several other games, an idea like Ace House™ can be a very good fit, something they can quickly prototype and pitch to a publisher with convincing arguments to move it forward. However, in the case of a studio focused solely on casual puzzle games that has just one multi-purposed artist/designer and two programmers, it can be rather unfeasible, much more if all but one says: “What’s Ace Attorney? What’s House M.D.”?

Ok, you might say, “But I’m doing this on my own, so I can fly as free as I want!”. That’s not entirely true. If you want to gather a team behind an idea, all of the team members must agree that the project is worth doing, and even if you do it on your own, you must answer the question to yourself. Having less limitations can positively set you free, but take that freedom to find out your personal definition of worth, not to waste months on something that goes nowhere. Unless you can, like, literally burn money.

The Joker Game Studios

Why is the project worth doing? is the hardest question, and the one that must be answered with the most sincere honesty by everyone involved. The tricky part is that it is widely different for many people working on a game project out of their regular job or studies. It can be to start learning about game development, to improve a particular set of skills, to start an indie game studio, to beef up a portfolio, etc. It is O.K. to have different goals but they all must map to a mutually agreed level of time commitment, priorities and vision. But even if you figured this out, there are still other issues.

All creative projects can be formulated as a set of risks or uncertainties, and the problem with video game development -given its highly multidisciplinary nature- is that is very easy missing to tackle the key uncertainties, and start working on the “easy” parts instead.

So for example, for the Ace House™ project, it can be lots of fun to start imagining characters and doctors, nurses, patients and whatnot; there’s plenty of T.V. series about medical drama to draw inspiration from, and almost surely you can have a good time developing these characters, writing about them, or doing concept art of medical staff in the Ace Attorney style, but, What about the game? How do you precisely translate the mechanics from Ace Attorney to a medical drama? How is this different from a mere re-skin project? Which mechanics can be taken away? What mechanic can be unique given a medical setting? How can you ensure that Capcom won’t sue you? Are there any medic-like games already? How can we blend them? Is it possible? Is this fun at all? Is “fun” a reasonable expectation or should the experience be designed differently?

Let’s talk about Wraid™ now. If Konami pulled off “Parodius” doing a parody from “Gradius”, How cool would it be to do a parody of Braid using the characters from the Wario Ware franchise? Here you have a starting point for lots of laughs remembering playing Braid, and putting there Wario, Mona, Jimmy T. and the rest of the characters on the game, wacky backgrounds, special effects and everything. But: Is this reasonable? Let’s start with the fact that Konami owns the IP of Gradius so they can do whatever they want to it. Can you get away with making a parody of both Nintendo and Jonathan Blow’s IPs? Sure, sure, the possibilities can be awesome but let’s face it: It is not going to happen. What can be a valuable spin-off though? What if Wario Ware games have a time-manipulation mechanic? What if you take Wario’s mini games and shape them around an art style and setting akin to Braid? (Professor Layton? Anyone?) How can you take the “parody” concept to the next level and just make “references” to lots of IP but the game is something completely new in itself?

What about Casualcraft™? Starcraft can be said to have roughly two levels of enjoyment: as an e-sport, and whatever other pleasure the other people draw from it. If we want to make it casual, it should not be an e-sport, should it? If you’re a Starcraft fan and have experience doing stuff for smartphones, you might think “This should be easy, I can make a prototype quickly”, and given that a mouse interface can be reasonably translated to touch, you start coding, and get a lot of fun implementing gameplay features that pumps all your OOP knowledge and creative juices to the roof. But… what does exactly mean “Casual Starcraft”? How can a strategy game be casual? What is the specific thing different from the e-sport experience that we want to bring to a phone? Is it the graphics? Is the unit building-leveling? Is playing with other friends? Which one of those should we aim? Can still be an RTS? What about asynchronous gameplay? Can this be played without a keyboard? Can still be fast? Would it fit on a phone? People that play on a phone: would they play this game?

So, all these are tricky and uncomfortable questions, but they are meant to identify the sources of risk and figure out a way to address them. Maybe the ideas I presented here are plain bad, sure, but they are only for illustrational purposes. Since I started working in games, I’ve seen countless ideas from enthusiasts that are not really too far away from these examples anyway. The usual patterns I’ve seen are:

Not identifying the core valuable innovation, and failing to simplify the rest: It is hard to innovate, much harder to do several innovations at once. Also, people have troubles learning about your game having too much simultaneous innovations and can quickly get lost, rendering your game as something they simply “don’t get”. The key is to identify what’s the core innovation or value of your idea, the one single thing that if done right, can make your game shine and then adjust all the rest to known formulas. And by “key” innovation I mean something important, critical, not stuff like “I won’t use hearts as a health meter but rainbows!”. That can be cute, but it’s not necessarily a “key innovation”.

Putting known techniques and tools over the idea’s requirements: “I only do 3D modeling so it has to be 3D”, “I know how to use Unity so it has to be done in Unity”, “I only know RPG Maker so let’s make an RPG”. It is perfectly O.K. to stick to what you feel comfortable doing, but then choose a different idea. A game way too heavy on 3D might be awesome, but completely out of scope for a side project. Unity can be a great engine, but if all the other team members can work together on Flash on a game that it is completely agreed to live primarily on the web, it can’t hurt to learn Flash. RPG Maker is a great piece of software, but if you can’t really add new mechanics and will concentrate only in creating a story, why not just develop a story then? A comic book project is much more suitable. Why play your particular game when everyone that is into RPG’s surely has at least two awesome ones that they still can’t find the time to play them? Instead of crippling down the value or feasibility of your idea to your skills and resources, change the idea to something that fits.

Obsessing over a particular area of the game (tech, story, etc): This usually happens when the true reason to do the project is to learn. You’re learning how to code graphic effects, or how to effectively use Design Patterns to code gameplay, a new texturing technique, vehicle and machines modeling, a story communicated through all game assets and no words, etc. You can get a huge experience and knowledge doing this. But then it’s not a game meant to be shipped, it is a learning project, or an excuse to fulfill something you feel passionate about.

Failing to define constraints: The romantic idea of developing a game until “it feels right”. If Blizzard or Valve can do it, why can’t you? Well, because at some point, you’ll want to see something done and not feel that your time has gone to waste. The dirty little secret is that constraints almost all the time induce creativity instead of hinder it. So choose a set of constraints to start with, at least a time frame and something you would like to see done at particular milestones: Key concept, Prototype, Expanded Prototype, Game.

Refusing to change the idea: This is usually a sign of failing to realize sunken costs. “I’ve spent so much time on this idea, I must continue until I’m done!”. The ugly truth is that if you’re having serious doubts, those will still be there and will make you feel miserable until you address them, and the sooner you act, the better. It can be that all the time you spent is effectively not wasted, but only when you frame it as your learning source to do the right things.

So if you’re starting a new game project, or are in the middle of one, try asking the tough questions: Do you know why is worth doing? Do all people involved agree on that? Are you making satisfying progress?

Are you sure there isn’t a question about your project you are afraid to ask because you fear that it can render your idea unfeasible, invaluable or messy?

Don’t be frightened, go ahead. If it goes wrong, you will learn, you will improve and the next idea will get to be shaped much better.

A recent Edge piece asked some creative directors and leads the question. Some give honestly insightful answer and are worth a read. Though this question extends to every member of a studio or aspiring developer, not just the creative directors of the world.

Please bear with me for two paragraphs of personal anecdote to help me discuss this issue.

From a young age I was making games, programming BASIC on C64 before the age of ten. At the same time my brother introduced me to roleplaying games. From those early days until adulthood I was passionately creating games, roleplaying systems, writing/directing plays to stage and drawing a web-comic in the early internet days all while earning money doing freelance photography, websites and just so much stuff.

An important personal question was raised in my late teens: If I wasn’t doing what I was passionate about and being my true self what was the point? This lead to separation from my family over disagreements, hard life choices, being broke for 8 years while working full time and putting myself through university, twice in two countries. Always struggling to break into the industry without compromise. Always broke, often living rough and using my holidays to sit exams or go to interviews. I was in debt when I broke into the industry and quickly got a Lead Programmer credit and since then a Lead Designer credit. I now work as a Designer / Programer. Though my time in the industry has been far from ideal with the last three years in three companies in three cities.

Now the amount I’ve created in the last few years as a full time employed developer is less than in the years where I was not. I use this personal story because my hunger to be in the industry diverted me away from why I wanted to be part of it. In my struggle to become part of the industry and do well, most of my energy is focused towards the industry and not my creations within it, and my situation is not unique. The realities of business can often pull us away from games, while they are required they are a means to an end not ends in themselves.

Too often in the grind of the daily job, the crunch of a project or just an eye on the next thing in the industry we lose sight of why we are pushing bits. Though field leaders one after another will espouse the virtue of direction, putting the why before the how. Just sample a few TED talks# or look at creatives you admire, they have purpose and drive beyond the daily grind.

Now why you make games could be to pay the bills, have difficult challenges, work with fun people, self expression, the desire to create or a million other motivations. The most important thing is that you know what you want to do and why.

Please take a moment to answer these anonymous questions, click here, about why you make games. I have a two follow-ups I want to write, one dealing with unlocking the power of your team and other people’s motivations but also about the responses I hope to get.

It’s not an easy question and for me it’s all about what sort of games do I want to spend my life making. Personally it all comes back to the stage for me, I want my audience to share an experience with me, be it political satire, dark comedy or whimsy. To make things that friends talk about over cocktails and coffee. To make things that matter.

# Look at a few of the top talks and publications across the field and the theme of motivation or why is core.

Kickstarter campaign isn’t looking so hot? Well, dang it.

Well, that’s currently what’s happening to our Kickstarter campaign, God of Puzzle. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about what you need to know if you’re planning to start a Kickstarter campaign. This time, let’s talk about when your campaign doesn’t go as planned.

What did we do?

So, first thing that happened after your project is launched is that you’ll get a little traffic from people who goes into the “Recently Launched” page on Kickstarter website. This initial traffic gave us 1 or 2 backers. After that initial traffic, you’re on your own.
So, what’s next? Here’re a few things that we tried after our launch:

1. We started posting in gaming forums and communities. We post to a few places a day, so we could adjust the message to see if we can get better reactions the next day. This include sites such as Reddit as well.
2. We sent email with press-kit to gaming news sites and bloggers.
3. Team members spread the words about the game on their facebook and twitter.

So, what happened?

After a week of spreading the words about the project to almost every place we could think of, almost nothing happened. So, we’ve stopped working on promoting the page because we weren’t doing it right, and it’s a waste of time. Instead we decided refocus our man power into figuring out what went wrong and are taking actions to fix it while there’s still time left before our deadline. The rest of this article is information on what we’ve learned from our own experience trying to breath life into our dying Kickstarter campaign.

Let’s first look at some stats. Kickstarter doesn’t tell you exactly how many people visited your project page. But it does tells you how many times your pitch video has been played, and how many percentage of people that click play watch the video all the way to completion.
We were actively spreading the words about our project for about one week, and we’d get around 80-100 views a day on the video. At the end of week one, we got approximately 650 views on the video with about 20% of them played to completion. At this point, the total number of backers is 18. Scary, right? Very; especially when you know that you need at least 500 backers to be anywhere near your funding goal.

So, what that information, this is the list of things that we’ve learned:

1. Some project is a hard-sell for Kickstarter

Not matter how well you construct your pitch, there’s a chance that your project is still a hard-sell for the Kickstarter crowd. Now, I’m not saying that our pitch is perfect, but we do realize that our target market is pretty niche; maybe a bit too niche for Kickstarter…
According to the stats on our project, out of 600-700 people who viewed the pitch video, less than 20 people are willing to back the project. So, that means, for the people that we’ve showed the project to (mostly hardcore gamers in online communities), our project has 2-3% chance of landing a backer. Which means, for us to get 500 backers, we need 20k views on the pitch video. I have no idea if this number is low or high compared to other projects, but it’d be great if the project only need 2000 views to get 500 backers, right?

So, how do you know if your project will appeal to the Kickstarter crowd? Well, this is a good question, and a tough one to answer. But I can tell you that there are two types of projects that have higher chance of success: projects that already have a large fan base and projects that truly innovate. Unfortunately for us, we failed to show innovation in our pitch and the fan base our project (Puzzle Fighter fans) are not as big as we’d hoped.

2. Forum marketing is very tricky

Before I explain why forum marketing is tricky, let’s look some stats related to forum marketing. And before I continue, I should also say that we did not use any Guerilla Marketing or sophisticated marketing techniques; so teams that are doing more sophisticated marketing stuff are probably going to get different results.
For one week, we’ve posted to about 10 different relatively big gaming forums. Each thread that we started would get around 30-100 views (i.e. people that actually click on the topic to view the content). Almost all the thread have zero or very minimal reply. For everyday that I post on forums, the next day we’d get ~80 views on the video, and anywhere from zero to a few backers. So, a lot of the views on the video is probably coming from our forum marketing, but we’re still way off. To get 500 backers in 30 days, we need at least 17 backers a day, not zero to a few.

So here’s why I think that forum marketing is tricky:

1. Your topic must make people curious enough to click it. Otherwise, not a lot of people is going to see your message.
2. Your topic must generate discussions. If your topic doesn’t generate discussions, your thread is going to fall off the front page within one or two day for a relatively active forum.
3. Your message must make people want to click the link to your project page. Otherwise, you’ll get no action in your project page.

After learning the points above, it became obvious to me that starting a thread to directly ask people to “check out our Kickstarter page” may not be effective enough to get 500 backers.

3. Making your project viral is everything

Your project is “viral” when it effectively promote itself. It’s when you can stop promoting your project because other people are already talking about it everywhere. Basically, if the number of backers for your project grows at the rate that you need, without you having to do anymore marketing, congratulation, your project is viral, and probably awesome.
Unfortunately for us, this never happens. As soon as we stop actively promoting the project, we got absolutely nothing. And because our project isn’t viral, it means that if we want 500 backers, we have to find ways to get them all by ourselves, which isn’t easy, especially if you didn’t plan it in advance.

4. Strengthen your social network and research how to do it right

If you’re at all counting on the power of your social network to save the day, make sure that your social network is a strong one and that you know how to effectively promote on social networks. If you think about the “reach” of your initial post and the chance that your followers/subscribers will share or retweet your post, you can probably estimate how many people is going see your post. But out of everyone that saw your post, how many of them actually click on the link? Your post might just be a short sentence plus an image, but it has to do so much. It has to capture the attention of people who are scrolling through hundreds of news feed, stop them from scrolling past it, and click on the link. There are a lot more to social network marketing, so some research in this area will probably help.

What we’re doing to fix it

For our project, we have one last round of ammunition left, and we’ve been trying to make sure it’ll hit the target. This last shot have to be something interesting enough for people to share and make the project more “viral”. This last shot is our playable demo.
It’s still pretty rough, but we’ve been trying to make sure that it’ll leave a good impression on the people who played it. We’re also revisiting all of our marketing plan, as we didn’t really do it right the first time.
Yes, you could say that it is a long shot, but we got to at least try everything before we admit defeat, right! Oh and a little miracle would help too, I guess…

Of course, I’ve got some issues with this. These guys are graphics programmers, they aren’t AI experts. Thinking that a graphics guy can just up sticks and refocus on AI is effectively part of the cultural issue AI has – it isn’t considered a serious discipline, it isn’t “hard”, it isn’t something people are experts in already, so let’s call in some graphics programmers to solve the issue! Of course, this is completely untrue and shows a bit of contempt for the AI that does exist and the experts who are working on it right now. We don’t need John Carmack to solve AI for us, we need people to listen to the Carmack-esque characters who already exist in AI and who are ignored because “players don’t want good AI”.

However, this minor piece of bitterness aside, what Warren is talking about makes a lot of sense, and it’s something I’ve been saying a lot over the past couple of months as part of a lecture tour that’s taken me to South America, Europe and across the USA. One of the key themes I’ve been talking about is AI outreach and advocacy – helping to explain what AI is and how we can use it to make better games. So, because Warren has set the stage so well by bringing it up, here is the article version of that presentation!

Why So Scared?

AI is seen as a really scary topic by a lot of people. I think a big part of it is that we’ve been culturally conditioned to see intelligent machines as an inherently bad thing. We’ve had decades of books and movies dedicated to the enslavement of humanity, if not an outright apocalypse, all because of robots and AI systems getting a little too smart for our own good. It makes people kind of wary. But it doesn’t have to be that way! All AI really boils down to is the applied science of decisions. There are whole branches of maths dedicated to analysis of decisions, Decision Theory being an obvious one, but also Game Theory and even Economics. These all allow us to theorise about how we should react in a given situation, and after we do all the algorithmic analysis, we end up with a neat result on a whiteboard and we walk away – problem solved. AI is about putting that solution into practice, whether it be in some simulated environment or with a robot.

Why is AI scary? Well, this guy has been our spokesman for nearly 20 years…

But the big question is, where do we see these kinds of decisions? Typically when gamers talk about AI in the context of games you might hear that “The AI did such-and-such”, and what they really mean is the enemy in the game. There are an awful lot of decisions happening there, it takes a surprising amount of sophistication to create characters that can believably run into the player’s field of view and convincingly fall over when killed. And whilst this is what a lot of Game AI focuses on as a discipline – what you might call opponent AI – there’s a lot more possible. People often say that players don’t want better AI in games, this is what they’re talking about. And to an extent they’re right, because what they mean is that players don’t want opponents that can out-think them. Part of my advocacy has been to address this specifically, especially in the academic community where “better” typically means stronger and more capable. If that was truly the goal of Game AI, as Blizzard’s Schwab pointed out at GDC ‘11, we could just make NPCs that were faster, stronger and had more powerful attacks. Making a game more challenging in and of itself isn’t hard. Academics – especially AI academics – like to talk in terms of optimal solutions, so one of the breakthroughs I’ve had is to explain Game AI as AI that tries to optimise “fun”. Some people get it, others then want to pontificate about an algorithmic definition of fun, but that doesn’t alter that as a core concept, this is what we are trying to achieve by using AI in games. What I want to do though is explain to people how we can use AI to do this. I’m not going to deal in technical details, because what I want to do is explain this in a way that designers and producers can follow, and implementations already exist out there.

The Best Game Ever Made

I want to start out by asserting that Dungeons and Dragons could quite easily be described as the best game ever made. It, and the table-top genre as a whole, has endured in a way no video game has to date, and its supporters aren’t growing tired of it, it’s just a bit of a pain to organise compared to firing up World of Warcraft. The great thing about D&D is that it’s not a game itself, it’s a rules framework in which games can be created and players aren’t restricted in what they can do. Of course that means that players will try to do weird and wonderful things, things that could never be predicted beforehand and that’s where D&D can come into its own. The thing that makes this possible is the human Dungeon Master who controls the game. The Dungeon Master is part of the game, and part of the gamer group. Before the game starts they create the world and build up an idea of what the plot of the game will be. It’s important to note that since the players drive a lot of the game, the DM can’t plan out the entire storyline in advance, because as any good strategist knows, “No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy”, and players need to be able to shape the story that is unfolding in their own way. Invariably however, this unfolding process will lead to a combat encounter, which requires a map to be created and populated with creatures for the players to battle. There may be plot devices as part of the encounter or specific elements that foreshadow something to come later which combine to create a subtly cohesive experience for the player. Once the encounter is created and the players are engaged in it, the DM will take responsibility for controlling whatever creatures have been placed into the map. This is a fairly interesting part of the role, because the DM has to balance the need to take believable actions that would make sense for those creatures against the need to make an exciting – and not too challenging – experience for the players. If the players will die from one more hit from a goblin archer, it doesn’t make sense for the archer to turn and fire into the wall. This isn’t a believable action though, and players in general won’t like that there is only an illusion of risk. Schwab described this as “Losing with style”, and it’s a key aspect to this kind of player experience management – we don’t want to be blatantly throwing the game in favour of the player, but at the same time, we don’t want to be insensitive to the fact that they are playing a game and don’t want to be frustrated or have the game end prematurely. One of the most important ways to manage this is to have a good understanding of who you are running the game for, knowing what types of player are in the party and how they will react in certain situations. This allows the DM to have a much better handle on how to stage manage the game to get the desired outcome, as well as tailoring the content to suit particular player types – if you know that players in your group tend to favour finding diplomatic solutions rather than confrontation, you can ensure that the options for this kind of play are available. Equally, if you have a player who is liable to charge at every band of enemies presented, you might like to prepare “surprises” for that player to exploit that they’re going to do something foolhardy.

The Dungeon Master is, in my opinion, a significant part of what makes D&D and games like it so successful. They have a longevity completely unmatched by any other games from their era, and continue to enjoy popularity and a zealous fan-base. To my mind, they represent the “Gold Standard” of what we should be trying to emulate when we make games today – not necessarily in terms of setting and tone, but certainly the design philosophy of empowering players to make choices and have real, tangible impact on the worlds we are playing in.

Of course, the obvious way to do this would be to ship a DM with every game, but I’ve been assured that cramming guys into retail boxes specifically to look over the player’s shoulder and tweak the game in real time would be considered a human rights violation. …Hippies. So instead, what we typically do is pre-bake a lot of the DM’s job during development. We fix the whole plot of the game upfront and reduce it to a sequence of combat encounters stitched together with cutscenes. We play those encounters out in a set of fixed levels, crafted by a designer once and then never changed, no matter how many times a player works through them. And then, we spend the vast majority of our time focusing on controlling the minions within the encounters – to such an extent that this almost becomes the totality of the wider perception of what Game AI is.

Of course, it is so much more than that so I want to close out by discussing briefly how AI can be used to start to replicate the DM’s role, and hopefully create powerful, engaging experiences as a result.

AI For Storytelling

This one is a bit over my head, but we can use AI to dynamically tell interesting stories, to take into account the player’s actions and adapt the story to take this into consideration. We’ve started to see this becoming increasingly mainstream lately, with Bioware being one of the big pioneers of some of the lowest-hanging fruit here with branching narrative. This is more of a 70’s era expert system than what we think of as true AI, but consider a game such as Mass Effect, where your choices at one part of the game are going to influence what happens and what choices are offered later. At a basic level you might think of this as a choose your own adventure book, but even that rapidly becomes pretty complex. Now add the nuances that Mass Effect and the like introduce into dialogue, recurring characters and so on, and the combinatorial explosion on the potential state graph is pretty intense. We can go a stage further though, because not only can we represent an enumeration of potential states using AI techniques to effectively manage this, but we can start to introduce actions within the world that are the AI system steering the player towards certain states in this notional graph. If we specifically want the player to arrive at a particular point of the story, we can push them back in that direction and begin to constrain their choices. If done carefully, we can give the illusion of complete choice, whilst still stage managing the experience. We can also build in concepts from literature to this, and manage the dramatic pacing of the story by modifying how components are shown to the player.

Choosing your own path through an entire trilogy proved to be so engaging to players, that they nearly revolted when this choice was removed.

There’s a strong, and growing, Interactive Fiction movement that has some great resources on this subject. A great place to start if you are able is “Beyond Eliza: Constructing Socially Engaging AI” from this year’s GDC. For those without Vault access, Leigh Alexander wrote a summary of the session on Gamasutra that is a good substitute. For those wanting more detail, you could do a lot worse than check out University of Teeside’s Marc Cavazza who has a lot of publications centred on the theme.

AI For Encounter Design

Procedural Content Generation is one of the latest crazes sweeping through the game development community. At its most basic, it says that creating content, whether that be quests or a varied array of weapons or even levels for the game, is a time consuming process. For a certain amount of overhead, we can instead create an AI process that will make that content for us, and make as much of it as we need. Skyrim demonstrated this effectively with the Radiant quest system, which enabled the developers to create a seemingly limitless range of side-missions without ever having to write one of them by hand. The system could pick, in a mix-and-match style, a location for the quest, a task, a target and then assign it to the player. Tiny Wings is another great example, where every day the levels the player experiences change – without a way of generating these levels algorithmically, it wouldn’t be feasible to do this since it would be so time consuming.

No discussion of PCG is complete without a Tiny Wings reference!

At its heart, procedural content is about creating things dynamically, and may seem to be random, but rarely is. Randomness in general is a bad idea when you are talking about replacing a talented content creator such as a level designer – there’s a reason these folks get paid to make content, and it’s not because they can be replaced by glorified dice. With that said, it’s often possible to capture something of their insight and build that into the generation system, to create the kinds of content that they would. Using Tiny Wings again, each level has a different parametric description, so the overall feel of the level is kept the same and the difficulty progression varies in the same way each time, despite the specific details changing day-to-day.

Procedural generation is something that’s really close to my heart right now as myself and Heather Decker-Davis have been relying on it heavily for a casual title we’ve been working on, and in turn it has shaped a lot of our workflow and tools. You can hear more about our experiences and some tips we shared for working with procedural methods in this presentation, which we gave at the No Show Conference in July. You might also find this article by Notch discussing terrain generation in Minecraft of interest, and again if you have GDC Vault access, the guys behind Spelunky gave a great overview of their approach last year.

AI For Character Control

As I said earlier, this is traditionally an area that gets an awful lot of attention, so I’m going to gloss over it a little bit, except to say that there are a broad range of techniques that you can use to create characters, such as Behaviour Trees, Goal-Oriented Action Planners, Hierarchical Task Networks and even Finite State Machines. Ultimately though, you need to understand what you are trying to achieve – is it to provide the player with a challenging opponent, or an engaging companion? The AI techniques required to die convincingly are separate from those required to create a believable set of responses to the weird and wonderful things that the player might decide to do. If you intend to make opponents, you need to consider if they work in squads, and whether a squad is a loose collection of affiliated enemies, or a well-trained group following specific orders, perhaps from an officer within the group. The Halo franchise demonstrated that small squads with officers could implement a morale system effectively and have squad cohesion disintegrate with the death of the officer.

These design choices are going to have a direct impact on what AI techniques are going to be most appropriate to create the desired feel to the characters in our game worlds, and it can be some of the most immersion breaking moments for players when the characters don’t act the way they expect; they are willing to believe that an alien swarm has taken over New York and the government has ordered the military to kill everyone involved, but they aren’t willing to believe that it’s possible to kill one of a pair of soldiers without having the other react in some way to his companion’s death.

There are lots of resources for reading more about this kind of AI, from AIGameDev.com through to a large portion of the AI Summit held at GDC, available through the Vault. The AI Game Programming Wisdom series of textbooks is also a good source of material, and when it comes to understanding the rationale behind the decisions characters might make in specific circumstances I also highly recommend “Predictably Irrational” by Dan Ariely, which is a book about so called “Behavioural Economics”, or where decisions meet psychology head on.

AI For Player Modelling

Player modeling in games is a relatively new approach that has yet to see wide adoption, but which has the potential to be a bit of a game changer, especially when combined with some of the other techniques already discussed. At its most basic, player modelling is something we’re already pretty familiar with whenever we play a game with humans; we try at some level to get a sense for who they are and how they play. This is most often seen in games like Poker where the stereotypical classifications of players, such as “Tight” and “Loose” have become part of our vernacular. In these competitive games, we use this kind of classification to predict an opponent’s behaviour and exploit this, but again this isn’t really the aim of Game AI – sure it’s great when an enemy opponent adapts to your tactics and challenges you to try harder, but we can use this technique for so much more than this.

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is a great example of player modeling in action. In the opening scene of the game, you find yourself in a doctor’s office undergoing a battery of psychological tests. Unknown to the player however, the scene is set up in such a way that although the character is being given these tests, really the player’s responses to them is what matters. In truth, the testing is being done on the player, and it’s actually a standard psychological profile being built up. Based on this, the player is put into a category, and throughout the game, different content is shown to them dependent on their category. It doesn’t change the overall story of the game, but it does change the tone and feel of the experience.

This is the same scene, as experienced by two different types of player

But what happens when you don’t have the luxury of running a complete personality test on the player as the game begins? Let’s face it, games would rapidly begin to feel pretty dull if they all had to find a justification for doing this! It turns out that just as in Poker we can start to classify players as we observe their playstyle, we can do the same thing with other games. In 2009, Drachen et al at ITU Copenhagen were able to analyse data from playthroughs of the AAA title Tomb Raider: Underworld. What they found was that by applying some machine learning approaches, they could extract a number of stereotypes of players that people would broadly fall into, namely “Veterans”, “Solvers”, “Pacifists” and “Runners”. This was based entirely on ingame analytics, the kind of data we all have access to already.

Using AI systems then, we can learn a lot more about our players and how they interact with the game. But we can also feed that back into our content generation or narrative systems to start customising the experience directly to specific groups of individuals. This is something we’re seeing explored in the academic world through such things as the Mario Level Generation competition that has been running for the last couple of years. It’s something that we’re starting to see come to “real” games a bit, and in particular it’s something that myself and Heather have been working to put into our indie title. For us, it’s pretty much a no-brainer. Our game is based around a simple maze system, and this is broadly what our PCG system creates. If we can detect players who are interested in exploring the maze and ensuring they have collected everything before progressing, then we can adapt our content to prefer to give them more sprawling mazes with a wider range of things to collect. Equally, if we find players are more liable to dart straight to the maze exit and take more risks with the hazards in the maze, then we adapt to suit those tastes too and provide a more action-oriented experience. As with the human DM, understanding the players tastes and desires means that we can cater more directly to specific individuals and get better engagement with them. That means they have a better experience, more fun and means we’re making better games!

The End

I really hope that this post has helped you to understand a little bit more what AI can do for your games – in a very real way, Warren Spector is bang on the money, AI has the potential to be the next big thing in game development but we need to get more designers who aren’t intimidated by it! If you want to learn more, there are some great resources online that can help you get started, and of course every year the AI Game Programmers Guild hosts the AI Summit at GDC which is a great source of more inspiration. And who knows, maybe you’ll run into Warren there!

Awhile back, I argued that making an excellent game should be a game developer’s #1 priority.

I also suggested that in the absence of marketing dollars:

mediocre games usually fail,
good games often fail,
and excellent games rarely fail.

These ideas were a little more controversial than I expected.

There were two common responses.
One of them was: “Who gets to decide what’s excellent? Isn’t beauty in the eye of the beholder?”

So I thought I’d write a followup post to explore what it means make an “excellent game,” and hopefully arrive at some practical applications that will help us in our everyday development.

 The other of the two common responses was:

“But mediocre games make millions all the time!”

So here’s an opening thought question: why is it that we have no qualms about labeling a game “mediocre,”  but the concept of excellence is relegated to the realm of philosophy?

If a game can be objectively bad, can a game also be objectively excellent? Are there no concrete goals and standards we can make for ourselves in pursuit of excellence – or do we really just throw our hands up in the air and say “Just do your best and love what you do!” and then hope other people enjoy what we make?

Before I go any further (and lose anyone who was hoping for a practical discussion here,) let me be clear that pretty much everything I say is through the lens of games as a business. Forest and I have quit our day jobs in hopes of making a living by doing what we love. So, I’m interested in “excellence” in terms of academic thought – but also in practical business terms: what makes a game highly valuable to a paying audience? When I argued that pursuing excellence should be priority #1, it’s because I think this is what makes the most business sense – and is incidentally more fulfilling.

Maybe we just need to be more specific.

So what is an Excellent game? 

In terms of games, I would suggest that Excellence is a transaction that happens between a game and the player.

To put it another way, a game is – by definition –  meant to be played, and a game proves itself to be excellent when an audience finds it to be so through play. You may disagree, but perhaps that baseline definition can get us out of the realm of philosophy a bit, and back towards practical working discussion.

Stephen Totilo recently argued (repeating a definition coined by Sid Meier) that what sets apart “good games” from “bad games” is that the good ones have interesting choices. He added after talking with Dylan Cuthbert and others that good games also have “Merihari,” – a Japanese word that’s roughly translated as a combination of rhythm, balance, and distribution. However, others are quick to point out that games such as Guitar Hero involve little meaningful choice, and would probably be appealing even without the little choice that is there.

I think Stephen is onto something here, but perhaps his definition is too narrow. “Meaningful choice” is a trait that we have come to value highly – but it’s not an essential trait, and it’s certainly not the only trait that matters.

The curious thing to me, is that perhaps there are no essential traits for games that are considered excellent.

Do all excellent games need to have interesting choice?
No – as pointed out already, games such as Guitar Hero are highly engaging without it. Bit.Trip Runner is another great example.

Accessibility, perhaps?
No: Minecraft is certainly not accessible, and people surely consider it to be excellent.

Great Graphics (whatever that means)?
Certainly not.

Challenge?
I don’t think so, although this is a very powerful trait.

For any given trait, someone could point out a game that doesn’t have that trait, but that’s considered excellent by many people.

So what do excellent, highly valued games all have in common?

Well, without exception, they always find something to be really good at.
And usually, these quality traits are both easy to identify, and surprisingly common.

For example, Minecraft is really good at player choice and exploration – better than most other games. It provides an infinite world that’s infinitely modifiable.

Half-Life is arguably very good at pacing, optimal challenge, technical competence, storytelling, and a lot of other things – some objective, some subjective. Some would say it’s “more than the sum of its parts,” and that all these “great” traits add up to excellence.

The point is – nobody ever considers a game excellent if it excels at nothing. And if a game really excels at something, this  can often (as is the case with Minecraft) make up for a multitude of sub-par traits, provided these lacking elements don’t get in the way of the player’s experience too much.

So what’s my point with all of this? This is, after all, meant to be a practical article.

First:

Pick something your game is going to do really well. Don’t settle for “pretty good” in this area, shoot for best in class. Don’t try to be best in class at something that your team can’t pull off – but don’t be fooled into thinking that you can’t be best in class at anything. 

Second:

Think about some of the other quality traits that you and others value in games, and perhaps pick some of these as secondary goals – or at least measure your game’s execution on these traits as a helpful experiment. Maybe you’ll identify an area that’s seriously lacking that you hadn’t really considered, or perhaps you’ll identify a trait that it’s actually pretty darn good at. Ask yourself what would take this particular trait to the next level and make your game worth talking about!

Third:

For Pete’s sake, don’t make a game that you hope others are going to like. You’ve got to either know exactly what you like to play and make that, or you’ve got to be an expert at knowing what others want through years of experience and research. Developers have been successful with both methods, but one of them is intuitive and fulfilling, the other is difficult, expensive, and often unfulfilling.

Common Traits of Excellence

To wrap things up – here are a few traits that I think we as players and developers have come to recognize and value in games, in no particular order. Don’t read this as a list of things to put in your game – read it as a list of potential traits that may or may not be good goals for you to pursue. Some of these traits will make your game appealing to wider audiences. Some will make it more appealing to specific niche audiences. Some will make your game more interesting to talk about to journalists, and some will make it easier to monetize. Some will be more helpful on mobile platforms – others would feel really out of place there. Make no mistake: there is an an intersection of art and business here!

1. Accessibility – the ability for a player to play your game without much instruction or confusion.
2. Technical achievement  - can your game make people ask: “how did they do that?”
3. Resonance in aesthetics – Can your game relate to your audience in a way that brings back memories of their childhood or their everyday life? Or is it made up of abstract elements that mean nothing to them at the outset?
4. Resonance in gameplay  - Do the mechanics and objects of your game behave in a way that people will recognize? (For instance, compare Angry Birds’ slingshot to that of the ramp mechanism in Trucks & Skulls. Which resonates better with you?)
5. Pacing – are the elements of your game introduced properly? Is there always something new happening?
6. Intensity management – does your game have highs and lows, managed in ways that have proven to be effective?
7. Fun  – A big topic, admittedly. But when you play your game, are you “having fun” with it?
8. Social connectedness – For instance, does your game have a chatroom, or level sharing features?
9. Competitiveness – does your game measure the player’s skill against other players?
10. Addictiveness – again very subjective – but also measurable. How long to people play it on average, and how often do they come back?
11. Visual appeal  - do you like the way it looks? Or do you find yourself thinking “well, at least it has good gameplay…”
12. Humor
13. Optimal challenge  - are people completing it? Do you get bored while you play because it’s too easy?
14. Frustration. I added this after playing Spelunky. I think games can taunt a player with their difficulty, and turn this into a desirable trait, provided the mechanics are consistent and learnable.
15. Uniqueness – This can be big in terms of PR and immediate appeal. Does your game give people an experience they’ve never had before?
16. Variety of visuals
17. Variety of player actions
18. Expressiveness –  does the game allow the player to express herself in some way?
19. Creative Gameplay – does the game allow a variety of solutions to the problems it presents?
20. Longevity – how much time can one reasonably spend in your game without getting bored?
21. Simplicity – for example: can it be played with one thumb if it’s a mobile game?
22. Mastery – can one “master” your game if she is skilled enough and do measurably better than a beginner?
23. “Storytelling”
24. Randomness  - this can be a strength if used properly, and can affect longevity, challenge, etc.
25. Emergence – do the elements of your game combine in unexpected or unpredictable ways?
26. Fairness – does your game ever make the player fail despite the player’s perfect execution? (this usually results in a “bad” type of frustration.)
27. “Tightness” – see Daniel Cook’s article on the subject.
28. Emotion – does your game have characters or elements that humans will relate to in an emotional way?
29. Interesting choices – is the player asked to make decisions, where the “right” choice isn’t always the same one?
30. Use of Rhythm
31. Use of Reflexes
32. Use of puzzle-solving – is the player asked to think about how to solve a problem?
33. Use of Memorization
34. “Polish” – this is a fuzzy one. Experience helps.
35. <enter your own here!>

—

I hope this was helpful. The goal is to help us look at our games through more objective lenses. Of course, “Excellence,” like beauty, is ultimately in the eye of the beholder and will defy explicit definition. But I think it’s critical to our success that if we want to make games that are worth talking about, worth buying, and worth remembering and playing 10 years from now, we need to identify the quality traits that each of our games will excel at.

So – what is your game excellent at?

One of my current projects is heavily reliant on character replays. I’ve written several replay methods in past projects, and knew how much work it ended up being. I never want to have to go through that again, so decided to roll my own, generic, adaptable record/replay system for Unity. It went…OK…

(For anyone interested, but not enough to read about it, the script is on Github)

Past Experiences

I think the first time I had to record something in Unity was for the beta of LO&VE , made with Robert Yang for a gamejam at Babycastles. It’s an arcade style game with novel controls, and needed some sort of attract mode/tutorial. At first I tried recording a movie with Fraps or something. This never worked, to make the quality high enough meant the frame rate took too much of a hit, not to mention that tacking a 40Mb video on to a 3Mb webplayer game was kinda overkill. In the end, I just decided to take down the positions of the two players each frame, and when replaying just snap them to the recorded positions. Simple, and as long as you didn’t look too closely or have a really bad/good framerate, pretty robust. It was good enough for a gamejam, anyway.

Another game that Robert and I worked on for a while was Muckraker, about investigative journalism. This involved ‘filming’ certain events, and replaying (even editing) them, so some sort of in-game recording system was needed. I quickly rigged up a system where you would drop a ‘Recordable’ script on each gameobject you wanted to record. When the player started filming, a master recorder would take down the position and rotation of each Recordable object within the cameras view. Our recordings were all short, and we never got too far into production, so this system worked well enough. However it was unwieldy, completely frame-rate reliant, and inflexible. I couldn’t have two different recordings at once, and couldn’t easily take down any other events.

All rather dire. The next time, I vowed to do things right.

The VCR

More recently, I started working on No Architect, a cooperative FPS platformer/short story/dull-party-adventure. I wanted the coop part to be available offline too, but it still needed at least some of the quality of live players. Recorded playthroughs could also be easily shared, so I could still have people playing with each other, without having to rely on enough players to keep live multiplayer going.

I decided to only record inputs, and deal with the expected inaccuracies at runtime. Mostly because syncing the position and rotation of an object every frame takes up a lot of room, precious on web based games. However it also gives me the flexibility to mess with the playback. If, say, a wall has appeared, a recorded agent will get stuck against it, rather than clip through.

I set up a basic script (InputVCR.cs, for those of you playing along at home) where the user chooses which named buttons/axes to record from those already set up in Unity’s input manager. Each frame, the VCR will record the status of these inputs, along with the position of the mouse. (As an aside, I set up my own recording format, but in hindsight should have just used JSON). Now, you can give this recording to any InputVCR, and it will spit out the same inputs in the same frames. Let’s painfully stretch the VCR metaphor. Say user Input is the signal from an aerial. You can plug this input into the VCR so gameobjects(TVs) can get their inputs from it rather than the direct user feed. A Gameobject now doesn’t have to know whether it’s getting live input or not, and a VCR can record, pause/rewind, or even swap recordings(VHS tapes) with other VCRs, all without having to care about what uses its output.

Pretty simple, and except for replacing static calls to Input ( like Input.GetMouseButtonDown() ) with a reference to an instance to an InputVCR, you don’t have to change existing scripts.

Of course, this didn’t work out so smoothly. Over my recordings of around 2 minutes, the characters would slowly drift off course as framerate differences started to add up.  And in a game about making long jumps onto small platforms, there’s not a whole lot of wiggle room. I added timecodes each frame, so that playback could slow/speed up if the recording frame times didn’t match the playback times. This helped somewhat, but if there was a spike during recording or playback, the character would still freak out. For short recordings, or those less reliant on physics calculations, this might be enough, but I needed some sort of position syncing.

I added the ability to record position/rotation information with any frame (as well as arbitrary information). For many uses, this would be all you need. Sync the position every second or so, and interpolate back to the desired location if the playback goes off kilter. Unfortunately, I was playing recordings in a changing environment, and still needed the real time character to override the recording if, say, a platform disappeared from under their feet. There’s also a bug in Mono that makes StringReader.ReadLine() impossibly slow, so parsing all that extra information was really unpleasant (I fixed it eventually, but at first thought it was just the large file size). I got around this by recording what platform (if any) the recording was meant to be on, and syncing the location each time the playback landed on the ‘correct’ platform. If a platform was missing during playback , the controller wouldn’t sync and would be allowed to fall, as expected. There are still some inconsistencies during framerate spikes, but at least they won’t kill the character.

Lessons

Recording stuff is a pain! And, unfortunately, there is no all-knowing solution for every game. Syncing position/rotation of an object in guaranteed to be accurate, but the playback is stuck on rails and a changing world won’t affect it. Recording inputs allows for interactive playback, but in many cases won’t be accurate over time.

I found the best solution is to start with a recording of the input only, and add syncing until the playback is accurate enough for you. If there are events that rely on the playback, you can record them separately from the input to ensure they still happen. InputVCR still does the heavy lifting when dealing with recordings, but I’ve had to accept that you’ll always need a decent amount of human input to get the results you need.

Check out the source on Github, or the Asset Store(older version). If you use it or make any changes, I’d love to hear what you did!

Note: Reposted at my own site, grapefruitgames.com

Do you understand Dot product? No, I mean really have you sat down with the math and do you remember it? I thought I had but recently while using Unity on a home project I naively called two functions in separate loops. One to find which side of a plane a point is, the other was how far from the plane the point was. Filtering the points by side and then calculating the distance in a follow-up step.

Moments later while debugging an unrelated but nearby piece of code I looked at the two functions and a brick of memory flew from a lecture of the past and knocked over my stupid forgetful self. Those familiar with the math have already facepalmed and laughed at my mistake, the math to figure out which side of a plane you are on is the same as that used to calculate the distance. The “side function” merely throws away the distance and returns the sign, leading to a leaky abstraction.

It should be noted that in the documentation of these functions, names or a surface level inspection you are not able to discover this fact. In a world where more and more layers of complexity are being shielded from us we are in great danger of not only throwing away useful information but repeating work already done. Increased battery drain, cloud server costs or wasted cycles being the symptoms of this ailment.

Designing for motion or futuristic inputs suffers a similar problem. Too often we see people using keyboard or keypad events with little understanding of the device delivers that from electrical signal to interrupt into a OS message pump or state then exposing that to our program. Often poor understanding introduces additional latency but this issue is magnified when we start using more complex input systems which we see as magic boxes.

The Sony Move controller uses gyroscope, accelerometer and camera feed to derive the position of the controller. The camera using the visible size of a known object, the ball, to do a distance calculation. Accelerometers are inherently noisy. What many people who use the system naively forget is that the data is pre-filtered and sampled over an interval. The default value reallying quite heavily on the visibility of the ball.

This filter step does introduce latency to the user control and in the cases where the ball is obscured the data can spike or drift in certain ways. Certain settings, or approaches can cause an undocumented increase in latency. What should a motion designer be concerning themselves with here you ask? Well when designing gestures where the ball tracking is lost or even partially obscured for a frame is harder than say the Wii or Six-Axis controller. One previous title I worked on around the launch window of the Move, the primary control worked better swinging about the six-axis controller than the Move.

Following this trend at Dare to be Digital last year we saw and impressive use of Kinect but every team was almost entirely relying on skeleton based systems. This is the “3rd stage” of Kinect processing and the system with the highest latency. Many of the control systems they were using could have worked off raw depth data feed, which could have been evaluated faster. Though in Microsoft’s defence they do a brilliant job of exposing the raw feed and stages of processing to developers for optimisation or use where you only care about simpler, faster motions.

So to come full circle from point/plane math to futuristic input systems we will be increasingly surrounded by layers of abstractions from both a coding and a design view. It is important we continue to “de-mystify” these systems, in order to better use them. Though in a call to developers of frameworks, middleware and similar products I have an old and familiar request.

Document your leaky abstractions, publish your process and enable your developers.

All they will do with that information is make you look good.

(Note: this was originally posted on Flippfly.com)

I questioned the wisdom of writing this, since as of yet, I’ve not released a highly successful game as an independent developer since quitting my day job back in April. Forest and I have high hopes for Flippfly, but aside from our moderately successful Monkey Drum Deluxe, there’s really not a lot of inherent credibility to my words that comes with having highly successful products to back them up.

But there’s a trend of beliefs and focus among some indies that’s really kind of discouraging to me.

Namely: I think many have forgotten that the most important factor to success as a game developer is making an excellent game, and started to believe that financial success is either random, or mostly due to factors outside of the game itself.

Now – keep in mind that I said excellent (as opposed to decent, good, or even great) and that when I use that word, I mean: fun, appealing, polished, and accessible (and  don’t take accessible to mean casual or broadly appealing.)

Recently a tweet from Jon Blow (developer of Braid) made me think on this issue again:

This Gamasutra article just kind of makes me angry. I should learn not to care: gamasutra.com/view/feature/1…

— Jonathan Blow (@Jonathan_Blow) June 29, 2012

This was in response to a business-centric postmortem about a game that sold 7 copies titled “congratulations, your first indie game is a flop.”

Jon went on to explain:
“He made a game that there’s no reason for people to want, but acts like he is entitled to have people buy it / press cover it.”

Now to be fair, I think Jon’s take on this was harsh – I  found the article in question to be informative, and as pointed out by Michael Brough, talking about failures is important. The developer acknowledged mistakes, and ultimately showed no regret at having done something he loved and believed in.

My concern is that people seem to have an expectation that their game will do reasonably well as long as they get all their ducks in a row, and if this doesn’t happen, often the last thing they focus on is the game itself. Time and again I’ve seen people reference their 75% or so ratings and then go on to talk as if these are “great” reviews and that they just need to get their great game in front of people.

I think this kind of thinking is a big mistake.

Hear me out: it should be a self-evident fact that if you expect to succeed financially, you’re going to need lots of eyes on your game, especially if you’re charging a couple bucks or less for it. This can happen in a variety of ways, but it mostly boils down to two: either you spend money on marketing, or you make a game that is so good that its quality and value make it impossible to ignore. You want people to play it, share it, tweet about it, talk about it at work, review it, and feature it, not because of a great icon or an attractive promo video, but because it’s unquestionably just that good. You want it to be the game about which people say “you really have to play this!”

You should be able to think of your game like a dry pile of sticks doused in gasoline, that just needs a spark to ignite it.

It’s tempting to look at counter-examples: all the good games that somehow get passed over, and all the mediocre games that somehow manage to sell millions.

But in the absence of big marketing dollars, I would argue that:

Mediocre games usually fail.
Good games often fail.
Excellent games rarely fail.

Every other case is just noise.

So am I saying that marketing, PR, great icons, promo videos, a great website, social features, killer screenshots, and personal connections are unimportant?

Of course not!

But if your game is less than excellent, then all this stuff is like trying to push a rock up a hill in today’s market. That’s not a fulfilling way to spend your life. And the weaker your game is, the more time you’re going to spend trying to make all these supporting factors make up for it – a really bad cycle to be in when time is your most precious asset!

What’s cool about setting out to make excellent games, is that in addition to taking so much of the randomness out of your success potential, you’re going to enjoy a much more fulfilling career!

Now I feel I should make a point to say that sales isn’t the only type of success – and there is certainly room for every type of game, as Rami Ismail of Vlambeer points out. It’s a big space and not everybody in it is trying to make a living at it. We actually just submitted a little toy to the app store called “Creepy Eye” – an experiment using face-tracking and the gyroscope that we hadn’t seen explored before. Making an artful experiment or a cool diversion is a reward in itself. But my concern is when people start to feel a sense of entitlement or surprise when these experiments and “pretty good” games don’t garner any attention or sales, with sometimes lengthy and publicized business-focused analysis of where their monetization strategy failed, or scary-sounding warnings to other would-be indie developers.

If you want to sell games, and you don’t like throwing dice with your financial future, you need to be determined to produce excellence.

So do yourself a favor: take a break from your monetization strategizing, video-editing, press-emailing, buzz-creating, and icon-tuning for a minute, and ask yourself:
 

“Is this game Excellent yet?”

Dev Bot has a formula for The Game

Several weeks ago, triggered partly by work events and partly Diablo III release I started really thinking about why I play[1]. What is Play to me and how can I make games that speaks to my soul and are worth my time in crafting? Sounds grandiose, so let’s simplify it.

Which games do I enjoy playing and feel good for having played?

I force myself to purchase, play and dip into the latest game for research and to stay on top of the curve like a responsible designer. At first I thought my lackluster enjoyment was simply gaming fatigue from the industry, but then I started questioning gaming as a past time.

Examining films, television and interactive storytelling such as Pottermore and HomeStuck. Why do I feel enriched by certain novels but feel dirty when logging off a few hours of Diablo? Why does sketching for hours feel satisfying, and building a blocky Minecraft world with my partner fill my heart with joy?

After dissection of games which I personally enjoyed and connected with there were two groups which stood out to me: Personal Pieces and Emergent Experiences.

Personal Pieces which I enjoyed were almost all short, light on gameplay and the creative work of a single person or small team. These pieces must be completable in a single seating and not frustrate or block me at any point. Using touch mechanics, gentle mouse interactions or single button the gameplay should enhance the storytelling and not break it. Less is more.

Studio productions fail at these personal pieces because they are too often meddled with, pulled in different directions and stretched thin to pad out a required length of play time. A good film parallel often mentioned is Citizen Kane, where Orson Welles famously controlled every frame[2]. Authors should also be conscious in this medium that gameplay is secondary and only serves to reinforce the story and that this is totally okay. The key to this group is a personal connection to the audience, a fearless display. As a designer you need a story to tell and the ability to express yourself as a creative force.

The second type scares producers and experienced game developers like the willies. To quote a recent colleague, “I don’t know how to design this”. Well you can’t! Sorry but you need to have an idea, let it loose and ride it like a raging shark whale bear sliding down the mountain. The trick is gently guiding the design and pruning wayward branches. These games have systems, and rules which interact in ways the developer cannot predict and provide a unique unbalanced experience for each player.

Also in these games while a goal or direction may be provided to the play, it should allow the player to explore their own space. These games are also truly social, not flaying Facebook but instead moments which we share with our friends. The Minecraft world we prize, the X-Com team death moments after leaving the ship and physics based explosions of doom.

You are not going to be able to boilerplate produce these games or stamp out several carbon copies. Middleware and established engines will not help you but instead hinder you in the creation of these creative emergent games. You need to inherently understand the rules and game systems and be willing to experiment with them. As a designer to create these games you need to be able to prototype and understand these systems. This is where the programmer designer will flourish even if your code is only prototype, see Spelunky.

Well I hope you enjoyed this little look into my mind and exploration of why games matter to me. It’s a personal exploration and not intended to be a grand exploration on the theme, but instead a single viewpoint. If you’re not making games which matter to you personally then is there any meaning to your creation?

If we are to continue to make games meaningful we need to explore new game structures, systems and not be afraid to be personal and fight for every frame.

[1] The irony of this posting slot falling on E3 does not escape me.
[2] I’m not going to get into the game which makes you cry, I think we already have brilliant games but Citizen Kane is a great example of a big production under the tight control of one person.

The problem is the nagging feeling at every corner, that I haven’t made the “right choice”. That I have missed something or I will not get the full story because of a wrong decision. Of course the game tries very much to reinforce the idea that there are no wrong or right decisions, yet the feeling is still there. To be fair this is not a unique problem. Many games, especially RPGs, play similarly. What makes is that much more noticeable in The Witcher, is that your choices do not only affect a few side quests and the chance to get a special item, but they fundamentally affect the main plot and how the game is unraveled. There are, for example two completely distinct paths through the game, with as many as 16 different endings depending on various decisions made throughout the game (a monumental task by the developer to be sure).

Perhaps I’m in a minority, to find all the different possible decision points frustrating in a way. Perhaps most people enjoy, and are comfortable with, having to make these decisions in the game and being content with their consequences. Then again maybe not. A friend recently was telling me how as a child they found “Choose Your Own Adventure” books frustrating because they wanted to know the alternative outcomes. I therefore decided to dig a little deeper and think about what the source of this frustration might be. I came up with a few thoughts, and would love to hear more from you:

Human Factor – Nature

Australian Band, Human Nature

It doesn’t take a psychologist to figure out that as human beings, we have a core need for resolution. If we leave something unfinished at work, we often still think about it afterwards. We can’t wait to see the next episode of our favorite TV series because of the cliffhanger from the last episode. Another good example is how we look for, and find pleasing to the ear, Resolution in music. There are in fact theories that suggest the reason for dreaming is to act out expectations that were unfulfilled during the day.

Perhaps this is going a bit off-topic, but what I mean here is that when you are going through a game that offers you many choices, you will feel a lack of resolution on many fronts, be it a quest that is not finished, a dialog path that is not experienced, or an ending that’s not reached. This goes against our nature to want to (eventually) obtain complete resolution.

Human Factor – Nurture

Of course as human beings we are deeply affected by our environment, as much as we affect it. Without wanting to open a can of worms, I’ll point out that many educational systems around the world, especially during primary and secondary years, do not widely encourage choice. We are presented with information, we learn them, and then we repeat them back. Examination and tests consist of a series of right or wrong answers. I feel this is the very reason why a good number of people (at least several that I know of) have a hard time deciding what they want to do once they finish high school. They might enter university just because it’s something to do. Often they’ll jump from course to course, and might even drop out eventually. Why? In part I think it’s because they have not learnt how to make decisions, and more importantly being comfortable with and sticking to those decisions! Suddenly after years of being told what subjects to study, or what the expected answer for a given assignment is, they have a sea of options open to them. They don’t even have to show up to class if they don’t want to. And many of their assignments require actual research and open thinking, with no predetermined outcome.

Another example is film. Many Hollywood movies (certainly not all) are known for giving the audience a well-explained and resolved ending. And the audiences have in turn become accustomed to that. Games are no exception, then, as we are not used to playing “what if”.

Design Factor – Knowledge of the Alternative

Too Much Information…

Alright, so our nature and our environment leads us to want to have things laid out in a straight-forward way, and not have to think about the alternatives that we would forgo. But wait, that doesn’t sound quite right either. I mean, as human beings, making decisions is THE thing we do. We do it many times each and every day (to be fair making decisions that determine the fate of a people is a little less frequent…but you get the idea). So why does it seem more awkward and frustrating within a game?

I think one issue is the fact that in real life we make decisions without often realizing what the alternatives really were. We do it in an intuitive and implicit way. This is different in a game like The Witcher in two ways. The first is the knowledge we have of it outside the game. As part of its marketing campaign, the game is advertised to be full of choices that change the outcome of the story. It is further advertised that the game can end in one of 16 possible states. Going into the game for the first time, this very knowledge had me second guessing every decision I made, thinking about how it might affect the outcome.

The second way decision making is different in this game as compared to real life, is how the choices are presented to us. Or perhaps the very fact that all the choices are presented to us. I can best describe this with an example: Let’s say you meet a character in your journey who is asking your for help, to try a new drink they have been experimenting with. The dialog options you are given might be:

• Sure, I’ll give it a try
• Sorry, I don’t trust you… it’s probably poisoned
• That’s going to cost you 100 coins

Looking at this, you are immediately in an awkward position. On the one hand you might be trying to stay true to your character in your choice. On the other hand you are trying to figure out what’s the “best” answer to get the most out of the game, in form of experience points, coins, story, etc. So by presenting all the possible choices, the decision making process has become somewhat unintuitive.

Now let’s imagine the exact same scenario, but in a futuristic game engine, with an AI system that is capable of understanding your voice and responding accordingly. In this case, without being shown any options, you simply say “That’s going to cost you 100 coins”. You’ve still made a meaningful choice, but because you are not aware of all the possible directions you can take, this is a much more comfortable decision to make.

Of course meaningful voice recognition is not something we can expect from games today. But there are other ways to present decisions without it being a multiple choice. In fact The Witcher does do this in many cases. Looking through some walk-throughs I realize that I have made certain choices without realizing it, and those are really the best kinds of choice. Sometimes it’s clever wording in the dialog that makes it less obvious that you are making an explicit choice. Other times you are relying on actions rather than the dialog system (e.g. whether or not the player draws their sword and attacks a NPC).

Design Factor – By Choice, But Not My Choice

No Comment

This is something which is discussed often, but is worth mentioning here. Of course, The Witcher is based on a well established character and draws a lot of its charms from it. It is a fully realized character with his own background and personality traits within the game world. As such I did feel at times, when a choice was presented to me, I would be thinking “Now what would Geralt of Rivia do?” and the result didn’t always match what I wanted to do.

This one is on the fence for me. I am a huge fan of involved stories and narratives in games, and based on my experience, you can’t reach the same level of engagement in the story when the player character is simply a shell; something that games like Diablo utilize. But when it comes to decision making, this can backfire.

Speaking of which, I should probably try Diablo III…

Is this the Point?

As I was writing this post, a very different thought occurred to me. What if this “frustration” I felt in the game when having to make decisions, is the very reason I found the game so engaging? So much so that I finished it in a just a few days? I honestly can’t prove or disprove this theory…something to think about.

Last week, I got together with three other designers for a four-day intensive design retreat known as the Depth Jam. The other attendees were: Chris Hecker of Spy Party, Marc ten Bosch of Miegakure, and Daniel Benmergui of Storyteller.

This event was an experiment. Chris and I had been discussing the idea for a while, but it took us a couple of years to get around to it. One of my personal goals in setting up this event was to find a new way to stimulate my professional development, because the old ways were not cutting it any more.

The Depth Jam was designed in reaction to shortcomings of other game-related events. In order to explain the design choices behind the Depth Jam, I will speak critically of these other events, in order to highlight the problems that the Depth Jam is meant to address. If you are a fan of these events, organize some of them, or otherwise identify closely with them, then this will be uncomfortable. The best I can do here is to assure you that this isn’t attack-style negativity; it is criticism that comes from years of carefully considering these situations and thinking hard about how to make things better.

Conferences

When I first started working in video games I learned a lot from conferences and lectures. The few days I spent at the Computer Game Developers’ Conference in 1996 were eye-opening, even though I wasn’t comfortable enough as a game developer to know how to make effective use of that time. As years go by and we get better at what we do, a natural shift occurs: in the beginning, we are mostly deriving benefit from other attendees and presenters; later on, we are mostly providing benefit to other attendees, getting little out of it ourselves. I have been to the Game Developers Conference 17 times now. I find that I still do get something from attending, but it really takes a lot of work and there are very few people I can expect to learn from.

All the smart programmers I know complain about conferences and consider them basically useless (except for the smart programmers who are also on conference advisory boards). I certainly developed this kind of frustrated “there’s nothing good here to see” attitude in the early 2000s, but to mitigate this situation I shifted into being much more of a conference presenter than an attendee. A lot of creative energy went into planning new conference sessions and making them good. This helped extend the useful life of conferences, because I was learning a great deal by running sessions. After about eight years, though, this ran its course and I had gotten the bulk of what I was going to get from this arrangement.

Game Jams

In a typical game jam, developers gather for 2-4 days to do a working sprint, the goal being to produce a finished game entirely during the event. I was lucky enough to be around for the Indie Game Jam, which probably started the game jam trend (though I was often too busy working on last-minute GDC lectures to make jam games, sadly!)

From the first Indie Game Jam. Pictured: Brian Jacobson, Sean Barrett, Ken Demarest, Charles Bloom, Jonathan Blow, Brian Sharp, Doug Church.

The Indie Game Jams were very different from the jams we see today. The IGJ was founded on the idea of exploring the design ramifications of a crazy technical question; we would provide attendees with some code to accomplish some technical feat, then they would see where that would lead in terms of design. For example, the question for the first IGJ was “Graphics hardware is pretty fast now; what will people design if we give them an engine that can draw 100,000 little sprite guys on the screen at once?” We were picky about who we invited: attendees had to be designer-programmers who were actually good at programming, because dealing with new technology on a short timeframe can be very challenging.

Also from the first Indie Game Jam. Pictured: Art Min, Charles Bloom, Robin Walker, Thatcher Ulrich, Brian Jacobson, Zack Booth Simpson, and ... I don't know, Justin Hall? Charles Bloom again?

In contrast, contemporary game jams are more open. The idea is that it’s great to make a game, any game, and that even if you don’t manage to finish, you were still part of a community. This community spirit is often upheld as the best part of a game jam.

I think these jams can be really nice for beginners, to show people that making a game is something within reach, and to help them meet other people interested in making games. For experienced developers, though, I think these jams are not so good, because the jams are part of an overall social context that supports stagnation.

Experienced developers would do well to continually hone their craft and push beyond their comfort zone, but jams celebrate low expectations and provide Warm Community Feelings that create a comfort coccoon. “You made a game that is not very interesting? You didn’t finish a game at all? Well, you are still part of a community that likes you because you are participating in a game jam, and that is what is truly important.”

I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with desiring a feeling of community, but we must take care to separate the notion of participating in the community from the notion of success. Participating in a game jam is not an indicator of success at game development — nor is attending the Independent Game Summit or Indiecade. I think that nice feelings are nice, but you want to build an ecosystem where the nice feelings coincide with behavior that will make developers robust and powerful and interesting in the long term. You don’t want nice feelings to act as a soporific. Activities that are good for beginners are often stagnant for intermediate developers.

What to do about this? I think if there were a category of game jams with higher expectations, so that advanced jams were differentiated from beginner jams, that would be a nice start. The IGJ model definitely asked more of participants, but I don’t think the IGJ is the right thing going into the future, because even if you are playing with challenging technology, the time-limited format prevents you from going deep. IGJ was nice in 2002, but today it would just contribute further to the problem outlined in Chris Hecker’s rant Please Finish Your Game. We see lots of wacky but shallow game designs all over the web, and it feels like a problem, or at least a vast sea of potential unreached.

As Chris says in his write-up about the Depth Jam, “game jams are shallow by design.” Because they are shallow, I don’t feel they are the right place for me to develop as a game design practitioner.

Retreat-Like Gatherings

There have been a few retreat-like gatherings for forward-thinking game designers: see for example Project Horseshoe and Phrontisterion. I have never been to these. I like the basic idea behind these kinds of events, but the execution seems to have endemic problems. I know people who have been to both of these events, but when I ask, they do not recommend attending the events. Certainly I have found Project Horseshoe’s written reports unhelpful.

The obvious problem with these events is that they are mostly just a bunch of talking. When people get together for a bunch of talking, most of them just say a bunch of bullshit (here I mean bullshit in the Harry G. Frankfurt sense) that is unfocused and untethered to reality. If it is not of critical importance whether what people say is right, then most of it is not going to be right.

I really like the retreat model as a basic template. Over the past few years I’ve been to a number of retreats, mostly for things like meditation or silent existential contemplation. There’s a lot good about going to a far-away place where you are not bothered by the concerns of everyday life. But looking at Phrontisterion and Horseshoe, the question arises: how does one design a retreat like this that is not just a bunch of talking?

I knew some of the answer, because I’ve seen success in dealing with a similar question in a neighboring realm:

Local Developer Meet-Ups

Many cities around the world have regular meet-ups; once a month or so, game developers get together at a bar or something, and just chat and be social. I generally don’t go to these because bars are antagonistic to interesting conversations and because attendees tend toward the neophyte side, which means we have the same problem as at conferences: there’s little benefit to be had for an experienced developer. But these events also have the Horseshoe problem, in that the conversation is not focused and doesn’t really matter, so people just say a bunch of nonsense. If all you want is to get drunk and be social, these events are fine, but they don’t do much for professional development.

Two years ago I started a series of monthly developer meetups in the San Francisco Bay Area; the idea was to keep discussion quality high by (a) holding the meetings in quiet places conducive to good discussion, like someone’s house (b) inviting only active game designers [this was not a "game industry" meeting, it was a "thoughtful game designer" meeting], and (c) starting each meeting with one of the attendees presenting their own work. After the presentation, we discuss that work specifically for a while; then at some point, the discussion naturally dissolves into separate, more-general discussions.

(I have been to some developer meet-ups that also began with presentations, but which to me did not manage to establish a culture of quality. One example was the Austin IGDA meetings back in 2002-2003. I think there were many subtle things preventing quality from rising, mostly having to do with intention of the event: the goal of the meeting was to drive attendance, not to be deeply interesting; also, they were “game industry” meetings, with all the associated issues. Also, scale matters: the Austin IGDA meetings were bigger, and they occurred in offices or at places like Dave & Buster’s, which did not encourage a personal connection to the presentation or the other attendees).

The meetings in the Bay Area were very successful at keeping discussion quality relatively high. The situation wasn’t perfect, but it was much better than your typical bar meeting. (I would have attended these regularly even if I were not involved in organizing them). Other attendees really enjoyed the meetings as well. After about a year, though, I stopped arranging the meetings because we seemed to have exhausted the supply of people willing to present, and I didn’t want to start having meetings that were not kicked off by solid presentations. Because everyone had a good time, there’s a reasonable probability that in the future we will pick these up again. I think we might be able to improve the discussions further by reducing the presenter-vs-audience asymmetry somehow (see the Depth Jam section below).

Key to the success of these events was having specific, concrete issues to talk about: a specific game being presented, so that discussion could be anchored to the details of that specific game. It’s also important that the game was being presented by its author; if the session is just someone talking about someone else’s game that they liked or didn’t like or just want to say something about, it is too easy for the discussion to be useless bullshit.

It seemed like this model could be applied to ground a retreat so that it would not just be a bunch of talking.

The Depth Jam idea

Now, we come to the actual Depth Jam. We settled on the basic idea very quickly: the jam would occur in a relaxing retreat-like environment. There would be a limited number of participants; four seemed like a good number. Each participant would have a good game that he has already been working on for a while, and which presents some deep and interesting problem he would like to solve; this problem serves as a focus for discussion. The fact that every particpant has a game under discussion means that every participant has “skin in the game”, which keeps discussion tethered and unfrivolous.

I’d like to emphasize this last point because it can be subtle but it is crucial. Suppose some people are showing their games and being criticized and generally having a rough time due to all the stress that happens naturally when having one’s creation dissected; and meanwhile, the people who are criticizing do not have any obligations, and they are just tossing in comments from the peanut gallery. This situation creates a weird imbalance. The comments and criticism will not be as thoughtful as they could be, yet they will be taken very hard by the people showing the games.

If everyone is having their creations dissected, there’s only one class of attendee instead of two. It is easier to empathize and avoid unnecessary harshness. People are going to be more careful that their ideas and criticisms are thoughtful, because they are acutely aware of wanting careful input when it comes to their own game.

The Format

Our first proposal for the Depth Jam had us spending one entire day on each game, so that we could dive into each game at maximum depth without context-switching. However, as the idea churned, we decided it would be beneficial to allow some iteration. Why not split the day into two time slots, so that each game gets half a day and we cycle through the four games twice? This would allow time to modify the games based on the discussion, which would give the discussion even more teeth: now we’re not just talking about a particular problem in a particular game (with some kind of tendency to wax philosophical), we’re actually figuring out how the author will address the problem here at the retreat, with the results of that approach to be plainly visible in the next session.

In our pre-jam planning meeting, we decided to go even further this way, breaking each day into four slots, cycling through all the games four times (so that each game had a two-hour slot each day). This seemed to work pretty well and it allowed a lot of iteration, but it might have been excessive. Daniel thinks there was too much context-switching and he might have been able to think more effectively if given more stability. My impression is that the talking was great for the first couple of days and degraded in quality toward the end (but was still worthwhile even then). At least two attendees did not have a problem with this, though, and found that the final discussions were very valuable for them.

For the next jam I would propose a mixed format: we’d start with two 4-slot days, just like we did this time, followed by a day with no-talking, all-working-and-quiet-and-taking-a-walk, followed by a final 4-slot day. (Or, perhaps I would lengthen the retreat to 5 days and put the rest day in the middle.)

The nice thing about the 4-slot-per-day format, which would not have been true of the 2-slot-per-day format, is that it gives us the maximum amount of calendar time for ideas to stew between iterations. I have long been appricative of the role of calendar time in good design. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how many hours you pack in trying to get things done; the good ideas will arrive unpredictably, and maybe you just need to allow time for this to happen. I was curious whether this principle would also be true on the timescale of a 4-day retreat. For me, at least, it was; I got my best idea in the shower on the morning of day 3, in response to discussions we’d had on day 2. During my session on day 3 we discussed and refined the idea, and on day 4 I showed an implementation of it.

Creature Comforts

We spent some money renting a nice beach house and ordering catered food; the cost for the event was around $5000. Chris goes into more detail about this in his write-up. You don’t need to spend any money on an event like this, but if you can afford it I recommend spending some money to help create a nice environment that minimizes stress and factors away concerns like “what are we going to eat for dinner” and “who is going to do the dishes”. The purpose is twofold: first, it helps you focus on the subject at hand; second, the minimization of external stresses helps you deal with the potential added stresses of working really hard and disagreeing with people all the time.

If you think that the Depth Jam will help you make more headway on even one deep problem than you would have otherwise, and thus make your game better, it’s easy to think that the game will also sell a little better and that costs in the neighborhood of $1250 per attendee are easily justified.

Attitude

Discussions can easily turn into arguments, or at least energy-sucking disagreements. As peoples’ energy gets drained, they become more irritable, so there’s a feedback loop lurking here. A little bit of this happened at our Depth Jam, but we saw it happening and course-corrected, so that the final day’s discussion was reasonable.

Prior to the jam, though, we had not thought much about this. I think it would be helpful in future for the attendees to go in knowing that irritability is likely to happen; the mere fact of this awareness probably helps the situation, and anyway, a little bit of psychologically-aware pacing at the beginning would have gone a long way.

Games and Attendees

It’s very important the attendees be capable both of participating in good discussions and acting on the discussions to improve their games within a short timeframe. This latter requirement basically limits attendees to being competent designer/programmers. If someone can’t program, it’s hard to see how he can participate meaningfully in this style of depth jam, because it would be very hard to iterate. Possibly if someone is a level/world/puzzle designer who can build scenarios quickly in UDK or Unity or whatever, it can be made to work, but I still think that person would be feeling the limitations of being unable to make algorithmic changes.

I don’t think that having teams of people would work, at least not for the format described here, because it would dilute the energy and bog down the iteration process. If you have one designer and one programmer trying to do the job that the other people are doing as single designer/programmers, your duo is probably going to have a hard time keeping up. If the jam is made up entirely of duos, it’s going to make discussions a lot messier and lower-energy (twice as many people talking about the same number of games). At least one of us felt that four people was already too many for high-quality discussions, because you keep having interesting ideas but have to wait for other people to stop talking in order to say them, and by that time the discussion may have moved on to a different topic.

We have tossed around some ideas about how to scale the jam to larger groups, but haven’t come up with anything that is fully convincing yet.

It’s important that the games be high-quality efforts that pose problems that everyone will be interested in. We were fortunate to have four very interesting games: Miegakure, a puzzle-platformer in four dimensions; Storyteller, a game about building stories through character interactions; Spy Party, a heavily player-skill-oriented game about subtlety and deception in human behavior; and The Witness, a first-person puzzle game with a heavy emphasis on nonverbal communication.

If time permits I may do a detailed write-up of the issues we discussed for each game and the resolutions we reached (though care must be taken here, as we don’t want to disclose aspects of these games that the designers would rather keep secret).

Conclusions

I am happy with the way this first Depth Jam went. I think we can certainly tweak the format to improve it, but already it is a useful tool in my further development as a game designer. I got much more out of this four-person, four-day event than I do from attending a conference. It seems appropriate to me to do a Depth Jam every six months. Provided we are organized enough to get the next one together, we’ll adjust the format and see how it goes!

See also:

Chris Hecker’s write-up
Daniel Benmergui’s write-up
Miegakure web site

(This article was crossposted to the Witness Development Blog.)

Kompu gacha, or “complete gacha”, is a system that strongly incentivizes the gacha monetization method. Gacha is similar to a prize vending machine at a carnival: you pay a small amount of money to receive an item at random. Kompu gacha expands on this mechanic by offering players an extremely valuable grand prize for completing a set of gacha prizes. Since the gacha prizes are awarded at random, it’s very hard to get these grand prizes. If you do the math, they can be worth hundreds of dollars each on average.

This means big money for Japanese social game companies, whose monetization metrics have long been the envy of their Western counterparts. Kompu gacha and the utilization of random rewards play a big part of GREE and DeNA’s record revenues. The extent of this reliance can vary by game (competitive games rely on it much more than casual games), but the overall ARPU lift is clear to see in the graph above. However, kompu gacha as a monetization method isn’t evil: in fact, it’s one that players overwhelmingly enjoy. Kompu gacha mechanics are incredibly popular among players, who enjoy the thrill of possibly winning that grand prize. The use of these mechanics has often been viewed as a win-win for developers and players. Which begs the question:

Why was kompu gacha made illegal?

Kompu gacha is essentially an extension of the core “gacha” mechanic, which gives the player the ability to pay for a chance at a random reward. Random reward schedules area powerful driver for freemium game monetization, and this method is not unlike the “mystery box” mechanic commonly used by American social game companies. The reward is virtual, so this is not explicitly gambling, but the virtual items often have a virtual currency value that can be to a real-money amount. This method has escaped regulation in the past because players can never take their money out of the system, so whether they spent the money “gambling” in game or simply purchasing virtual goods was irrelevant.

However, while gacha itself is not being made illegal, kompu gacha compounded the issue because it has a much lower chance of a much higher payout. This made kompu gacha mechanics feel too close to gambling for Japan’s Consumer Affairs Agency, which banned the practice on May 18th. In addition, concerns were raised that the mechanic exposed gambling gameplay to children under the age of 18. There were two extreme, well publicized cases where a middle school boy spent $5,000 in a month, and one younger student spent $1,500 in three days. While GREE and DeNA have specifically enacted their own consumer protection agency to combat these issues, the government still decided to take additional action.

The kompu gacha scandal teaches two key lessons. First, players love real-money betting on both virtual and real rewards. And second, that social game companies should create a safe, self-regulated environment to prevent excess and restrict players under the age of 18.  Many social games’ similarities to real-money gambling mean that it should be given the same care and attention that gambling companies give their games. All reputable gambling companies, including Betable, are required by law to provide self-exclusion features for gambling addicts and vigilantly restrict players under the age of 18. As social casino gaming explodes onto Facebook and iOS, it’s increasingly important that game companies act responsibly, lest they succumb to a similar fate as kompu gacha.

This was also posted on the Betable Game Monetization Blog.

I also really love having a cerabal cortex, so I left the studio life and learned biz magic.

I make a really good living in biz, I LOVE doing what I do now; I get to work with amazing people, I get to talk to amazing people. For the love of god, I spoke to the creator of Fruit Ninja tonight to have “chat”. How cool is that? Dude totally rocks btw.

My gig allows me to talk to my heroes. Seriously, I love playing video games that much.

The most common thing people say to me is “….wow, you are a business guy and you love playing video games?”

When I stepped out of the studio, I made myself the pledge that I would only work on titles that touched me deeply. I would only work on games that I personally wanted to play. I would be way richer if I just kissed ass and decided to suck it up for the lord, god, almighty dollar!

If I do say so myself, I was pretty decent on the creative side of things too, but to be brutally honest; I was running a studio that sucked at business.

So one day I stopped. One day I decided that I would step out of the studio. I put a 22 year old in charge of it and for 7 mobile games -feature phones- he was shit. Then he just flipped the page and was brilliant.

Recently, I met a guy called Jason Brice. He sent me @ messages constantly, he was really cool and then one day I seen the maps he made in an FPS.

OMFG

They were great!

I looked at them -I hated the crane on the harbor map- BUT I loved the game itself.

Jason was creating the game that I wanted to play.

His view was that there were way too many layers between the player and AK47′ing another guy in the face.

He had me at “hello”.

So as I play this game, I talk about it, I reveal things about it and then I talk about it again.

Simply put, THIS IS GAMING!

I listen to an average of 14 game pitches a week, this was one of the first game pitches that I have seen that melted my resolve. Here I thought that I knew everything and these noobz are teaching me how to love video gaming again.

I want to be fair, I want to be honest and I do not want to be a prick.

BUT I am sick of the modern day FPS titles or as I like to call them “We just came up with another feature that allows us to get you to buy another sequel”………….. ok that is a long title.

I am sick that on NPD day that we all shiver with anticipation at how many people bought our game. Here is a novel fucking idea, I am sick with anticipation at the thought of how many people enjoyed our game.

The game is ReKoil BTW. BUY IT PLUX

I am my most vulnerable when I am sitting in front of a metrics screen looking at the numbers, asking, wanting, no begging video gamers to like my title.

That is weak sauce, I want them to like me. I want them, no I crave that they like me!

It is the vulnerable essence of every video game maker. It is that vulnerability that allows me to exist.

This very insecurity, allows me to make games that I want to play, this insecurity allows Jason and the team to jump off a cliff and trust the fact that someone on the team will catch him.

Guess what? When someone that you consider a blood friend jumps off a cliff; you always catch them.

I am proud of what we are making today, I love that we are participating in the conversation! Will we beat Black-Op’s 2? God no! Their budget is 60X what people say that we are worth, but we will be participating in the conversation.

We are basically fighting the good fight, we are throwing punches and getting the shit kicked out of us. BUT we are Marty McFly and we will knock Biff the fuck out.

Am I desperate? FUCK YEAH!

Just tonight I sent this email:

From: Kevin Dent [mailto:kevin@XXX.XXXX]
Sent: Thursday, May 10, 2012 8:50 PM
To: ‘Andy McNamara’
Subject: Front cover

Hi Andy,

Who do I have to screw to get the front cover for ReKoil?

Cheers,

Kevin

As of today, we are not on Kickstarter, we are totally self-funded and we are totally throwing ourselves under the bus in an attempted to make a better game.

Let me be clear, Andy is an amazing person and I love him dearly. He is smart, contiencious and endearing. BUT Game Informer is owned by Game Stop and those dudes are hardcore publisher fuckers, there is zero chance of us getting the cover.

There is no way that, me, you or your freak parents will get us on the front cover of GI and nor should it. Brilliant games get on there 12 a year at least.

That said, it was worth a shot, we are living in the era of the indie.

There has been so many amazing titles in the last twelve months made by people with way more talent than me.

I rejoice at the next gen of game creators.

I am humbed by them.

But the truth is, that Jason Brice, asked me to jump off a cliff and I made the leap.

Who will catch me?

Kevin

The TL;DR of John Cleese’s talk

Closed Mode

Purposeful Highly Productive, but not creative. Good for getting things done. Default Mode at Work.

Open Mode

Playful, Curious, Fun, Humorous, Relaxed, Contemplative without goals.

I had a lot of takeaways from that but my biggest takeaway was what could I do to be more open and enable openness around me. In the past I’ve drawn mostly from my dramatic background and improv lessons, always saying yes. See Lisa Brown’s brilliant article on that topic.

Humour and Time are key to being in the Open Mode. Also Goals, Hierarchy and Authority are not conducive to the Open Mode. An interesting thought for those of you who read the Valve Employee Handbook floating around the net at the moment. The key thought this lead me to is simple…

You Can’t Play by Proxy

Too often I espouse the brilliance of the programming designer. The real magic is simple, you cannot play by proxy. A designer who can’t play (and change) with gameplay is like a chef who gets someone else to taste the food and describe it. An artist who cannot change the appearance of something in-game without someone else is like painting on canvas by instructing a monkey holding a paintbrush. A programmer who cannot go outside the spec is like a dancer in a straight jacket.

You need to hold the ball in your hand and feel it bounce. Always ensure your source control, build server and other tools do not stop someone’s experimentation.

The Open Mode is Unachievable in Crunch Time

A common example of the open mode in game development: someone has just implemented a system which due to an amusing bug is glitching out or not behaving in the designed fashion. In a crunch time, i.e. closed environment, a bug is filed, profanities are hurled and the bug is squashed. In an open mode and a lighter environment, possible earlier in the project, the group plays with the bug and says something like, “Isn’t that interesting…”

Now to be clear, most times nothing immediately comes from that comment though at times a brilliant idea or mechanic emerges. Often these moments lend themselves to interesting gameplay moments. For a prime example of game development project by open mode style thinking, look at Minecraft. Many gameplay features started as bugs or unintended behaviour which in a traditional environment would have been eradicated but the players enjoyed it and Notch left it in.

In order to achieve things we need to be in a closed mode. Though it’s easy to get stuck in that mode and with tunnel vision run down our path missing all the brilliant opportunities that are being thrown up during game development.

Playful Tools

When designing or creating a tool or pipeline think about how your tools enable playfulness, experiment and toy around with your tools. A willingness to create without fear. Observe how playful we are with pens, for many of us our primary tool.

Two Developers, one creating a scene in notepad with fragile .xml, the other drawing a blueprint in photoshop. The drawing based solution is more fluid and open to play. The developer can draw a “humorous shape” and see it in game without fuss. Leading to greater comfort and competence, discovering creative uses of the tools.

Nothing can frustrate and break playfulness more than a deep pipeline or frustrating tools. A buggy or frustrating tool ensures you’re in the Closed Mode. As in the Closed Mode we are less likely to make mistakes and can follow rigid guidelines.

While being Creative Nothing is Wrong

We live in a digital world of hacks and cheats, we care for results not method. The thing which appears on screen is a beautiful lie. So if your engine is refresh sensitive and those silly European televisions are giving you trouble, well, just turn up the earth’s gravity*. Remember the product is the experience, not the game.

Too often a professional artist, designer, programmer or otherwise will dismiss or stamp on a comment because it’s patently silly. They insist on saying it’s too complex or saying it’s daft. Now please, respect the professional skill for which the individual was hired. Though at no point should someone be crushed or demotivated by the HAMMER of authority.

Jam, Jive and Jiggle

Encourage people to take time out to play in fixed time periods to jam, jive and jiggle. I write this after having just finished a weekend of Ludum Dare fun. The result of the Jam is less important than the time to play. The time to ponder and play with an idea. If you have a sprint structure try to take some time out after a sprint or a whole sprint, WITHOUT GOALS! Just play. See what comes from it.

People need to feel free to play with ideas, in order to have great ideas.

* A real humorous example of an engine hack seen in the wild.

Procedural Generation is definitely in vogue, and I personally have believed that it is the way forward in video gaming for many years now. Using procedural generation in games is nothing new of course, as fans of games such as Elite or The Sentinel will know that we’ve been seeing it in games for a good 25 years.

Older titles made good use of it due to the memory constraints of the hardware of the time. It was simply more efficient to have generated levels rather than hand crafted ones, but that is no excuse for games not to make better use of it now that we have better specced hardware.

Fans of the RPG genre will no doubt remember The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, which had one of the largest in-game worlds ever seen, and still to this day tramples almost every RPG made in terms of world size. I recall reading somewhere that the in-game world of Daggerfall was equal to twice the landmass of the British Isles.

That is a heck of a lot of world to explore, and – from a game design perspective – a nightmare to recreate by hand. Through clever use of procedural generation, however, it is easily possible, which is what Bethesda Softworks did with Daggerfall. The settlements and towns were hand-crafted, with the wilderness in between being generated by the game.

But why stop there? Why have world borders at all? Procedural generation code hasn’t changed much in the last 25 years. People are still stuck using fractals and diamonds and blobs to do everything, which becomes repetitive and quite simply looks like procedurally generated content. To any programmer looking at it, it virtually smells of procedural generation. On top of all this, if you get it wrong, it will end up VERY wrong. The indie crowd seems to do it best, with titles like Dwarf Fortress generating MASSIVE worlds with lush histories and more world than you could ever hope to explore. But still, they aren’t pushing the envelope. My aim was to fix that by making it work. An infinite game world should be possible, and indeed it is.

The Idea

Just over two years ago I began assembling a team to make the first truly infinite, fully 3D fantasy RPG, entitled Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox. It was to be played in a style similar to the classic grid-based, first person RPGs of the late 80s and early 90s such as Might & Magic, Eye of the Beholder and Dungeon Master, but set in a literally infinite world. We had originally thought to make it a planet-sized world, but in the end decided on the story being that the game’s world was being created within the imagination of a sentient sword, which would act as a way to “explain” the infinity of it.

After much experimentation and very complex math, we got it working, but all in raw data. Nothing really playable. But we had in front of us an infinite world filled with infinite dungeons and infinite cities filled with infinite NPCs. We then worked to get a game working in such a world (some of the efforts of which, you may have read about in my last post)

Now, just to confirm, this world wasn’t being randomly generated. It was both infinite AND persistent. Without going into too much detail, this is achieved by making the world dynamically affected by the passing of time. Every part of the world is identified as either affected by time or timeless. The lay of the land with its hills and caverns… That’s all timeless, and never changes. Because those parts never change and cannot be affected by the player, they only need to be loaded into memory when the player can see them (or if they are needed to generate quest information, etc). However, if an object is affected by time (for example, the contents of a chest), then they have a time coefficient applied to the procedural algorithm that generates them. This means that a chest in a dungeon, for example, will have different items in it depending on WHEN the player opens the chest. If the player was the clear out that chest, that act is stored in a database of player changes, but then re-set when a certain amount of time has passed. This ensures that the database of player changes to the world never exceeds a certain size (which is estimated to be around 250mb at the very most, but more realistically around 50mb)

This generation accounts for almost everything in the game. Spell creation, item creation, weapon creation, potion creation, NPC dialogue system, even the spell effects that happen on the screen. Due to this, the world that the player explores will be ever-changing and infinite. They won’t keep finding the same old weapons or items, there will be no end to the number of spells they can find or use, they won’t even keep having the same conversations with NPCs. This is necessary to keep a player interested for long enough in an infinite world.

Public Acceptance

Back when the game Elite was first being worked on, it was planned to have around 282 trillion galaxies with around 256 star systems in each one, but their publisher, Firebird, were worried that such a large in-game universe would be intimidating to players and put them off. I have to say I had wondered at that, and was interested to see how the public would react to an even bigger in-game world.

I was surprised at the results.

We’ve been quite public with our development process for the game so far and generated a small cult following on communities such as IndieDB, but very few people seem to quite grasp the scale of an infinite world, despite our thorough descriptions of it. We had put up renders of the world generation data, showing just a tiny fraction of the world:

And then, we showed them this:

That inland sea is around the size of the entire in-game world of Skyrim. Funnily enough, the largest response we got from this information was disbelief. Many called us liars and that it simply wasn’t possible. Others began to believe that the world size of Malevolence was the entire above image, rather than infinite. Only about 20% of people really understood.

So, from a marketing perspective, it’s been a bit of a nightmare to have an infinite world. We’ve even had many suggest that Malevolence is just a rip-off of Legend of Grimrock, despite the fact that Malevolence was started about a year before. But that’s always going to happen, no matter what the game. What happens upon release will happen, and that’s just how the cookie crumbles with game development. Funnily enough, that hasn’t been the hardest bit. The hardest bit has been the math involved in making a world like this one.

The Math

Being infinite, procedural AND persistent, most of the mathematics behind Malevolence is theoretical math – that is, mathematics with few or no fixed/known values acting in a volatile space. But we’ve broken the world creation down into multiple layers.

The first layer is the one you saw above. A large world segment is generated which covers an area of about 400x400km. This is the only layer of the game that uses a standardised procedural generation system (perlin noise)

That is then broken down into chunks that are around 3x3km, calculating the biome information within that area, like so:

In the end, all of these steps need to be completed when each new world segment is generated in order to turn the raw data into this:

That is just for the overworld. Every world segment that is VISIBLE to the player (as in the view above) is given a unique code, generated by the procedural algorithm. If there is a dungeon entrance in that segment, the dungeon is generated using this unique code, ensuring that every time the player returns to that spot, the same dungeon will be there:

This same method is used for town generation, graveyards, ruins or anything else that the player may encounter. And this goes on forever. If a player was to turn off collision and hold down the ‘move forward’ button, it would take them just under three weeks to walk from one end of a world segment to another, and then they would simply move to a new world segment seamlessly, and then another, forever.

The biggest question we have been given is how we have dealt with the data type limitations on player co-ordinates, but unfortunately we can’t give away all our secrets :) But I can tell you that Malevolence doesn’t suffer from the Minecraft world-edge issue, it just keeps going on and on.

Conclusion

Using procedural generation in your game can be a rewarding experience, but definitely don’t rush into it. It takes good planning, clever usage and most of all it needs to feel seamless, otherwise the public simply won’t accept it.

If you’d like to read more about Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox, you can check out these links:

Game Design

Game design is always about looking back before looking forward. Sometimes this is done consciously, other times it is done unconsciously, but it always happens. Every great new idea is built on improving an one or more old ideas, and the best game designers are well aware of this. One of my biggest pet peeves is when someone says to me “don’t reinvent the wheel”, which they often quickly regret saying as I begin to lecture them on how if no-one ever reinvented the wheel we would never have tyres, suspension, alignments, treading, etc. All things which have made the wheel more efficient, smoother and just generally better.

A great design for a reinvented wheel

But for a wheel to be reinvented, one must start with a wheel to begin with, and that is what we are always doing in the games industry. A good example is the recently successful iOS game, Jetpack Joyride, from HalfBrick studios. An excellent game, and quite obviously modelled off of those Amiga/Commodore-era “don’t touch the sides of the tunnel with your helicopter” games. They took that solid idea, and evolved it with pickups, achievements, special gear you can earn, etc, and made a great game out of it. They reinvented the wheel and it worked.

An example screen from Jetpack Joyride

Does it Always Work?

No, it doesn’t always work. Some past ideas weren’t that great, let’s be honest. But some have not only been ridiculously successful, but have also done the unthinkable and withstood the test of time. Two good examples in relatively different genres are Quake 3: Arena (1999) and Diablo II (2000). There are many more, of course, but these are my case studies for this particular article.

Well over a decade on and these two games are still being played with distinct regularity, are favourites at private LAN parties and have graphics which still stack up fairly well against their more modern competitors. Why is this and what can modern game developers do to make a game that withstands the test of time so well? The answer lies in how the button is pressed.

…The Button?

I mean this metaphorically, of course. But let me explain with a story. In my day job, I am quite involved in the gambling industry, and as such am exposed to many new products before they hit the market. One such product came about which was a “re-launch” (as it were) of the old-style “one-armed bandit” poker machines of yesteryear, which fell out of use in Australia decades ago.

What the pokies used to look like

In an attempt to latch onto the “retro rush” that seems to be going on… Well… Everywhere, people thought that re-releasing a classic-style one-armed bandit machine would inspire people’s nostalgia and that they would be a viable new product. I was quite excited when I heard the news as I remember my grandfather having one under his house back in the 80s and I loved the feel of the flywheel revving up as I pulled down the lever. I loved seeing it kick the spinners into gear and watching all of the colourful fruits lock into place on the wheeled display.

Needless to say, when the first units came into the test room, I was excited to feel that little piece of nostalgia again. The machines certainly looked the same, if not a bit more modern. The digital displays had even been replaced by the classic wheels with the printed artwork on them. It was in test mode and ready to play, so I grabbed the lever and pulled. The wheels started spinning and the lights started flashing, but it was all wrong. It felt so wrong that I thought perhaps the machine was broken… It wasn’t, of course, it worked perfectly well. But the machine was no longer clockwork, obviously, and the lever arm was simply a spring-loaded arm which pressed a small button when it was fully depressed. There was no sense of “winding” the machine up. No sense of having some sort of influence over the device and no sense of being connected to its operation in any way. It was a jarring sensation of being completely disconnected. What was once – for lack of a better term – an intimate interaction experience had now become somewhat cold, clinical and disconnected.

I voiced my concerns at this, and was – of course – laughed off. I even went so far as to suggest they could build a small flywheel mechanism into the arm that has no functional purpose other than generating that “feel” when you pull the lever. They ignored my counsel and released the product anyway. Needless to say, it was very unpopular and never really took off. The official reasoning was that “people don’t like the ‘retro thing’ in gambling”.

How is it Relevant to Video Games?

How does this relate to video games such as Quake 3 Arena and Diablo 2? Well, think of that “button” as being the interaction between the player and the game. It has to feel good, just like the poker machine arm. There are things you can do to the button to make it feel better, and be more intimate, or there are things you can do to the button to make the user feel disconnected from the machine, and they both come down to a deep level of design.

When beginning a game project, try to describe the game in a short, concise sentence. Once you’ve got that sentence, every single thing you add to the game which complies with that sentence will make the game “cleaner” to play, but the more you stray from that sentence, the more disjointed it will seem.

Quake 3 Arena:

Take Quake 3 Arena as the first example. It can easily be described as “Fast-paced, sci-fi, multiplayer deathmatching” and nothing else. The reason that game was so popular for so long, was twofold. Firstly, it was built on a very beautifully made engine made by John Carmack, which was powerful enough to drive MANY other games for the next decade (RTCW, Jedi Academy, Call of Duty, etc) and secondly, it followed a clean design based on a simple concept which could be summed up in that one sentence. Every aspect of the game conformed to it. There was nothing confusing, or particularly intricate about it. When you played it, you were immersed in the game. No part of it “fought” against you or detached you from the experience. You had four movement buttons, a jump button and a shoot button. A control system which could be replicated on a classic GameBoy. The player movement was swift, smooth, consistent. The game never slowed down, or became badly paced at any point, yet still gave the user enough freedom to develop their own style of play and put it into the game.

Conversely, a later id Software game, Doom III, was not quite as smooth. The gameplay was slower and more disjointed. It was still a great game, yes, but things such as having to stop to punch numbers into a keypad or having to put down your weapon to pull out a torch disconnected the player from an otherwise immersive, cathartic experience.

Diablo II:

Diablo II is another fine example of this. Fans of the series will know that it has an incredible complex control system consisting of one button… Oh, yes, you can use the number buttons on the keyboard as well if you like, but there is essentially the left-click button and a couple of others which you use occasionally. The entire game is about as non-confrontational as you can get, and anyone can pick it up. It is also paced beautifully, with the first area being almost impossible to die in, yet still giving you enough of a sense of risk to keep you engaged and on your toes.

A typical scene from Diablo II

It had very simple multiplayer, a beautifully crafted procedural item and level system and enough replayability to ensure people would be able to play it for years, and indeed they did. Blizzard, in true Blizzard form, found all of the features of Diablo I that left the player feeling disconnected and removed or remodelled them, making a game which is clean, simple, elegant and extremely replayable. They followed a simple design sentence of “Explore, kill and loot while progressing character” and every aspect of the game reflects that. Nothing gets in your way, nothing slows the progress. There are no repetitive cut scenes or cloned combat encounters or scripted events, all of which can make a procedural game lag something awful. This “neatness” has ensured the game’s continuing success both in the single player and multiplayer worlds and place on game store shelves over a decade after it first was released.

So What are you Saying?

When designing a game, before doing anything else, describe what you want it to be in one concise sentence. After that, with every decision you make or feature you go to add, check to see if it fits neatly with that short description. If it strays too far out of that, or the description ends up being too long, you will end up with a convoluted game and the player will feel disconnected from it. Remember that games are a form of escapism, and the player should forget that there is even a keyboard or other controller between them and the game. The graphics help, yes. The story helps, yes. But it’s the FEEL of the game that will ensure a captive audience. It’s just like the one-armed bandit. The aim of the poker machine is to pull the lever and get the wheels spinning, but if you just focus on making the lever spin the wheels, people won’t play it. They need to enjoy the act of pulling the lever and pushing the button just as much as the result of that action on the screen.

Anyway, thanks for listening to my little rant :) I hope it helps to inspire all of you other game developers.

First though, some reader interaction… dig out the schedule for your current project and look through it. Is there a task anywhere on it titled “localization”? If it is on the schedule I would put good money on it being close to the end of the project usually within five tasks of the Alpha build.

If you have a task titled “localization setup” in the first half of your projects development cycle then you or someone on your team has probably already been through the pain of localization and is already preparing for it.

Location, Location, Location

What most people focus on primarily with localization is usually the language and although it is important it is only half the equation. The “Location” is the other half and this is where things get subtle and you need to become a little culturally aware.

Let’s consider this post, you might initially be unaware that I have localized it for English American. I am from England and I am British which means that I learnt to spell color as colour, localization as localisation and I pronounce ‘Z’ as “Zed” rather than “Zee”. These differences come about not because of the language but because of the differences in culture.

Keeping localization in mind during development means that when issues arise they can be fixed quickly rather than waiting until the end of the project and trying to fix it with a hack.

I do not profess to be an expert on these various countries and cultures, what follows are issues that I have experienced during the localization process. By sharing them I am hoping that you will firstly have a clearer idea of what to watch out for but also I would encourage you to share your own experiences in the comments section below.

Hand Gestures

Animators use hand gestures to breathe life into the characters, unfortunately there are quite a few hand gestures that can cause problems when dealing with localization. The “Okay” gesture, the “Thumbs up” gesture and the extended hand with palm outward are just three gestures that I have seen removed from various games due to how different cultures react to them.

You could go down the route of generating a different animation tree localized for each country but that does increase the amount of data to be maintained and also the likely hood of a bug being introduced in a specific country.

A quick internet search can produce some good descriptions of various gestures that can be problematic, this one even showed gestures I was unaware of before writing this post: Telegraph.

In game visuals

Imagine that in your game there is a wall upon which scribbled in a marker pen is a message that is important for putting the player on the right track. Now image that Portuguese is your language, unless that texture has been translated into a different language you have just made it extremely difficult for those players to progress.

Apart from doing a texture swap based upon the selected language you might also consider adding a language trigger where if the player gets close to the wall it will pop up a translation.

The Language of Color

Color plays a huge part in our emotional and physiological state even though for the most part we are completely unaware of it most of the time, what is really interesting is that the specific colors actually change from one culture to another. For example in Western countries black is used to represent mourning however in South America the color to use would more appropriately be purple.

I am mentioning this here more for completeness since I can only remember only ever once changing a game color for localization. The specific issue was relating to the color that a map of Germany had been painted.

This is quite a useful and interesting chart:  informationisbeautiful.

Violence

Germany has very strict laws about violence especially where humans are concerned, as a consequence there have been a few games where the red blood has been changed to (robot) green. Or in the case of one of my projects the characters were to be tortured for information, in the German version we simply covered the animations up hiding the offending visuals from the players in Germany.

Adult Content

Worth remembering that not every country believe that games are for adults, one such example is Australia which at present does not allow a rating of 18+ for games.

Have a look of this list on wikipedia of banned games in different countries, useful to know why a game was banned since it isn’t always about violence and adult content.

Audio

Another facet of the localization process is obviously to make sure the correct spoken speech / dialog is triggered in game in the correct language. It is easy to look through an excel document and see when translation text is missing however it is a lot harder to check the audio which is why I try to encourage artists / engineers / designers on different platforms to spend time working in the different language and locations as early in a projects development as possible.
Hopefully you have finished reading this and there wasn’t anything new that you didn’t know already, if anything here was surprising and new then you probably should kick localization up your schedules to do list.

(Mini warning: this post turned from a simple idea to a fairly epic 2500 words.  Get a cuppa and a chocolate biscuit before attempting to read.)

To answer that, we need to look at what the current constrains actually are. There are lots of small issues but they nearly all fall into one of two categories: cost or artistic desire.

Cost

It’s a sad fact but the cost of making AAA games has sky rocketed. On average, on the original PlayStation, a team of about 10 people could make a 60$ game in about a year. For the PS2 that went up to more like 30 – 50 people for two years. For this generation of console there is no average – it’s as many people as you can get for as long as you can get. 100 people taking 3 years is fairly normal, but it’s also common for teams made up of many more. If the price of games reflected the increased man-year development time, they’d now cost about 1800$ each.

Why?

As a very broad stroke: all those pretty images take a lot of developing. The quality of the art in games is far higher than ever before, and the code bases that drive everything are far larger and complex than we ever imagined they’d be.

The biggest single factor slowing us down, and thus costing us money, is our tools and pipelines. Turnaround for an idea has slowed to an almost archaic crawl because of the time it takes to create content in a AAA game right now. The knock on of this is that it has a detrimental effect on the quality of the games we are making, and people don’t want to pay 60$ a pop anymore, let alone 1800$. There are two ways of fixing this: as an industry we need to invest in finding a different approach to creating content or we need to develop better tools.  Or, preferably, both.

Different approaches to creating content

Once upon a time, coders creating everything in the game.  Art was a means to an end.  Nowadays we have teams of artists sat at desks across the globe, all beavering away on the small details.  That nice crumbly wall in Uncharted 3 probably had three different artists working on it: one for the basic collision mesh, one for the render mesh and one creating the texture and normal map in the first place.  Throw in a lighting artist or two, and a particle effects guy to make the nice clouds of dust when it gets shot.  Oh, and a guy to make the impact sound effects.  Let alone the coders required to make all these systems work together.

Back in 1993, a role playing game called Dungeon Hack came out. It wasn’t unique by any stretch, but I mention it partly because of how movement systems used to work. The dungeon, as with most games of the time, existed on a grid. Each move you took moved you to the adjacent square, assuming there wasn’t a wall there. The world was rendered in first person, but you had no freedom to look around at anything other than 90 degrees, and move one square at a time. (Completely unrelated to me writing this article Legend of Grimrock, which uses this movement system in a modern game, has just been released.)

From a top down view, a dungeon looked a bit like this:

The main reason I mention Dungeon Hack is because of how the dungeons were actually created.  If you look again at the image above you’ll see that it’s possible to create the layout by using just four files, rotated into position:

By using a pre-defined set of tiles and an algorithm running a randomly generated number to lay them out, a unique dungeon was created every time you started a new game.  Rules then layered on top to place items and enemies.  In theory, there were limitless combinations and once the system for creating the content was up and running new levels could be generated almost instantly.  If user control was desired, an editor allowed players to make their own layout.

Tile based generation still exists in games like Civilisation, but it has proved very difficult to create modern 3D games with such a system, partly because of the demands on artistic quality and partly because of the desire for unique locations to visit.

Prefabs

Prefabs are a more modern way of generating content, and in essence work in a similar way to tiles, except they are stand alone units rather than part of an interconnected network.  Humans are very good at spotting repetition though, which reduces the effectiveness of using this system. Houses fairly quickly get spotted as clones, and players tend to lose interest in discovering new places if they think they’ve already seen everything there is to offer.

Procedural Generation

This is based heavily on maths and simple data structures.  The best example of what can be achieved with this method is still the demo scene:

As with the randomly generated dungeons there is a set of rules controlling the overall scope of the images here.  Similar methods can easily create large scale environments.  There are limitations though, the main one being creating areas that flow well into one and other.

On their own then, none of these approaches really gives us the flexibility or quality that we desire.  But by combining the three methods into a toolset we could help open up new ways of creating large scale content, rather than just relying on adding more artists into the equation.

Character Creation

Every story needs characters, and in this regard there are already tools that allow us to create a lot of unique models quickly.

I’ve used this video before because it’s a great example of what can be created given the right motivation and time.  We can also do very similar for animations: with a base set we can quickly add variety by using additive animations, such as a limp, or letting physics code take control.

The tools are the game

Another way is to give players the ability to create content themselves.  Creating levels for Doom was the reason I got into designing videogames in the first place, more recently Minecraft created a game that was, initially, a tool where players could create their own content.  There’s a huge demand for this type of game, where the editor is effectively the game: FarmVille and DrawSomething are other examples. They are very different types of game from the Mass Effects of the world, but it feels like there should be a way of learning from their methodologies to enable us to improve our content driven games too.

Clint Hocking has already done a very in-depth series of posts on convergence like this, and  in far more detail than I am here.  In his eight part series he suggests that other gamers could provide the context for the story, a sentiment that I agree with but relies on playing online.  EVE Online does this to a degree and some of the stories of conspiracy that come out of it are great reads.  There’s a flaw with this method though: even with relatively small player numbers (compared to World of Warcraft), each player feels like a very small fish in a very large pond.  Your influence on world events is minimal.  The reason people like playing the hero is because of the feeling of power and fantasy it gives them, and single player games give you this ability.

So, we can no doubt create worlds and characters much faster than we currently do, but that doesn’t solve the main issue I’m trying to tackle with this post: is there a way to create a story this way?

Story as a mechanic

Glance back up the page at the diagram of the dungeon for a moment.  There’s another way of showing its layout, and that is to instead show each square that requires a change in direction as a node, and the route through as connections:

If you read my previous article on content this should look familiar: this is, more or less, how we currently move through stories in content driven games.

In games today we take freedom of movement for granted: if we want to go and spend time looking at a blade of grass, we can. This is because movement systems have developed from the very simple set of rules Dungeon Hack et al had, to a complex mechanic. An almighty array of things are happening in the background to grant you that freedom of movement, from how to respond to the amount you’ve moved the analogue sticks through to how the scene behind that broken window renders.

Can we take the same steps with story? Can we create sets of rules that allow the player to drive the available story events at their will? Possibly even the freedom to create their own stories? It’s not going to be easy, and it’s not going to happen overnight, but I think we can.

How?

Firstly, take the steps required to make content creation faster and cheaper.  Then we need to understand what a story actually is. It’s well documented that all stories fall into one of seven types, which seems like a good place to start:

Overcoming the Monster: The hero learns of a great evil and goes on a journey to destroy it. Star Wars qualifies. Braveheart. Jaws. Any movie with Nazis in it. Some of the Rocky movies. (Is it obvious I am a guy?)

Rags to Riches: A sad-sack beginning that leads to a happily ever after. A lot of Dickens’ stuff fits here. Disney princess movies. Harry Potter. Most every rom-com.

The Quest: Everybody loves a quest where the hero goes on a journey to find something, which can be a Lost Ark (literal of figurative), a body (Stand By Me), or even something unknown and unseen, which is known in Hollywood as a MacGuffin. Sometimes the hero brings his entourage, too. A lot of epics are Quest stories. Like The Goonies. Some of my favorite biblical stories are quests, like Abram and The Wise Men.

Voyage and Return: Like The Wizard of Oz, where Dorothy goes to a weird place with weird rules but ultimately returns home better off. I suppose I like Oz alright, but I’d rather give props to Back to the Future, because I’m of that ilk.

Comedies get their own category, too. For some reason, two people can’t be together, which creates all sorts of antics. They eventually figure it out, though. Again, most every rom-com ever, like When Harry Met Sally, or The Money Pit. (Note: you can make anything into a comedy. For example, Monty Python is a funny Quest movie, but the category here refers to a specific kind of plot, not just anything with humour.)

Tragedies are like riches to rags, where the villian gets it in the end. MacBeth and King Lear are classic examples. Or most slasher pictures if you go for that sort of thing.

Rebirth is like a tragedy but where the hero realizes his error before it’s too late, like in It’s a Wonderful Life. Which makes me wonder, are there any slasher movies where the bad guy cleans up and catches a ray of sun at the end?

(source http://lenwilson.us/seven-stories/)

The story outlines that most single player games use falls into ether Overcoming the Monster or The Quest which is something else that we ideally will address as the medium matures.  Aside from that though, these seven rules of thumb give us a great basis for the forming of a mechanic.  How so?  Well, a mechanic is really just a set of rules, and each of these seven categories has a very definable goal for each story category.  This means that we can create a fairly simple set of IF statements to set the story goal based on the category chosen.  Whether that category is chosen by the player or randomly doesn’t matter.

Of course, a good story requires much more than that: it also requires structure. Typically these are defined into sections called Acts. Act 1 introduces the audience to the characters and scenario, Act 2 fleshes everything out, and Act 3 has the conclusion.  More rules, which means we can add another layer of complexity to our mechanic.

The numbers of main characters, their traits and motivations: all these can be defined to some level either by the player or with weighted random selections (which is where you guarantee at least one of type X and so on).

Would a story generated in this fashion be any good? Well… probably not. The missing touch is, of course, humanity. This, then, is where the player really comes in: their decisions and actions influence the actions and motivations of the computer-controlled characters alongside them. The game would adapt on the fly, so if the player decides to be friends with the bad guy for instance, a new enemy or threat would have to emerge. But the player could have the freedom to influence the story as they move through it.

The thing we still can’t do very well is to create dialogue: both in the writing of it and in the audible generation of it. Computer generated voices still sound horribly robotic, and that instantly ruins any sense of immersion or belief. (Unless, of course, you’re doing a game about robots.)

There’s another problem as well, which is the second of the issues I mentioned at the start of this article:

Artistic Desire

This is the biggest problem really: what story do we want to tell? As shown above, the general structure of a good story is always the same, and Act 3 is the conclusion. Without closure you don’t really have a story in the sense that literature and film define them. As humans we like telling stories, we like crafting them and we like the warm feeling inside that we get when we, the the hero, reaches the end.

Unless, instead, we turn our game into something more akin to a soap opera.  They have moments of closure as story arcs come to an end, but the world in which those arcs exists continues to persist and expand.

Can we do the same with a game?

Do we want to?

UDK

http://udk.com/

Most are familiar with the Unreal Development Kit.  It’s a proven engine that’s been used in a tonne of AAA titles, but how does it fare for indie developers?  The first thing you’ll notice with UDK is the learning curve.  It’s steep.  Developers I’ve spoken to have all expressed this same sentiment, and my own experiences with UDK left me feeling that UDK seemed needlessly complicated.  I had taken a few courses using the UDK in the past and while practice makes perfect, even when I became more familiar with UDK I found I simply didn’t like using it compared to other alternatives.  The second strike is the need to learn Unreal Script.  It’s a fairly straight forward language in my opinion however just that you need be confined to Unreal Script can take away from valuable development time when you’re starting off.

UDK is capable of delivering high quality graphics out of the box but it seems geared towards First Person Shooters (much like CryEngine).  I’ve heard some complain about the difficulties involved in trying to bend UDK to other genres.  FPS games developed with UDK also have a tendency to end up feeling like Unreal Tournament clones.  UDK now supports iOS development in addition to Windows but don’t expect to port your projects over to anything else.

UDK is free for non-commercial use.  Plan on selling your game and you’ll need to fork over $100 with no royalties to worry about until $50,000.  After that, expect to pay a 25% royalty, which when you consider IOS development and the 30% Apple takes, can certainly add up.  UDK is a bit of a sacred cow for some in the development community, but for indie developers it’s big, unwieldy and just limited in supported platforms.  If you’re looking to add your shooter to a saturated shooter market, UDK may work for you but I wouldn’t recommend for smaller teams of developers.

Notable title:  The Ball

Shiva3D

Though within these sepia dreams and old memories live viable mechanics which when re-examined and explored anew provide exciting areas of creativity.

Among the games of my youth three digital games stand tall, in order played: Hero’s Quest: So You Want to be a Hero^[1], X-Com: Terror from the Deep and Shadowrun on Sega Megadrive. Now some of these games have seen reboots or attempts at reboots which quite frankly angered fans and often missed the point. Thankfully through Kickstarter for Shadowrun and Firaxis for X-Com these two titles are getting a modern, caring treatment and re-examination.

X-Com Squad Turns

Many people passed over the unique quality of team-based turns. There have been many other games in the tactical genre but few have explored this idea of “I move all my units, then you move all your units”. This concept of moving multiple units simultaneously thus requiring a session of planning which manifests as a massive investment.

As control is taken away from the player, breaking a golden rule to strengthen this mechanic, a high point of tension is created as the plan unfolds.

Of interest to modern designers is that this investment, planning and then tension as you take away control from the player. For a modern interpretation with a different angle I suggest looking at Frozen Synapse. The turns are simultaneous and you plan 5 seconds increments but once again, control is taken away from the player as they watch the consequences of their plans.

Golden Rule Broken: Taking Control Away from the Player

Shadowrun Hacking

Almost a fully fledged game within the game but with deep seated roots in the core gameplay. So often “hacking” or another core ability is thrown in as a tangential mini-game. With limited or no interaction with the core-gameplay other than a binary outcome of success or failure. This follows the premise of not creating a game mode shift for the player and avoiding a development investment in what is essentially a “second game”.

Older games were much bolder in this. In Shadowrun hacking you hunted down better hacking decks with a whole subset of stats which could be upgraded. The camera shifted from isometric to third person over the shoulder with new UI and controls. You built contacts and went on missions to acquire that “better piece of software” or that “underground deck”. Your decker’s point of access, which related to hacking difficulty, is determined by their physical entry point into the system. Individual nodes on the hacking map relate to camera systems or subsystems of the physical security system. Triggering the alert system or disabling it, affect the real world alarm systems.

That massive investment in an alternate game mode layered on top of the primary mode added massive levels of depth to the world and further fleshed out the game. Looking for modern alternatives I was unable to find a good modern execution of this concept.

Golden Rule Broken: Avoid Gameplay Mode Shifts
Alternate Expression: Focus on a consistent experience.

Time Based Gameplay

In Quest for Glory many moments of interaction were determined by time of day or the day of the week. This occasionally meant as a player you were running around waiting for an event to happen or cleaning out the stables to earn some coins and some time. While some modern games have integrated NPCs timetables much more complex than their predecessors, they have been made insignificant by removing their game altering potential and turning them into minor points of flavour.

The depth of gameplay this added to the world was significant. You had to work around a real world. As a side note the fact the game required you to grind some monsters or chores like stable sweeping to earn your coin allowed you to effectively use your downtime. In Skyrim I can wake up a town blacksmith and purchase armour, removing all gameplay impact of the town schedule. This mechanic lives on in many modern games but in our fear of inconveniencing the player it has been neutered. I encourage designers to look at the gameplay affecting elements this play style offers.

Golden Rule Broken: Never Inconvenience the Player
Alternate Expression: Never waste the players time

Mixing it Up

Quest for Glory additionally mixed combat, role playing, adventure elements while providing multiple solution paths gto many problems. Environmental storytelling, usage based levelling and many other elements which have survived into modern design lexicons.

X-Com famously mixed the tactical and geoscape layer in a very complex interwoven gameplay. Though as Brendon Chung‘s GDC talk into his trouble with Atom Zombie Smashers highlighted this is not a simple task. I’ve also already talked about the Shadowrun hacking element as another example. For modern designers still bravely exploring mixing of genre and mechanics you do have to look outside mainstream metric focused development. Though I worry that their lack of polish and budget in many cases restricts their ability to smooth out the seams and truly integrate genres.

Golden Rule Broken: Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS)

Conclusion

As many of these older mechanics show, breaking what we consider a golden rule today can sometimes be key to development of an interesting mechanic. These are just a few picked examples from these games. Many other elements exist in these older games which have been gathering dust.

Many of these older mechanics first came about due to technical limitation and were discarded with the limitation. Our Golden Rules were not forged by the gaming gods but discovered through trial,error and exploration. Some of them may lead to an evolutionary dead end in design, an appendix when no longer needed. I encourage you to mine old games. Not for the IP, nostalgia, or history but for the game. Uncovering the hidden machinery of the past, broken paths and discarded branches of game evolution for old and interesting ideas that can be made new again.

[1] Later renamed to Quest for Glory: So you want to be a Hero to avoid confusion with another game, Hero Quest.

Understanding

It seems to me, from the way the petition is worded, that despite investing hundreds of hours in the trilogy many gamers don’t understand the logistics involved in creating a videogame.  It could be argued that they shouldn’t need to – we watch films without knowing all the intricacies involved in getting the image and sound to the screen, so why should gamers need to know about the blood, sweat and tears that go into making games?

While some films do spark huge reaction towards the director from fans, those fans often find other outlets for their reaction, with alternative endings turning up on youtube or comic strips or even novels.  There are rarely the tools made available for alternative endings to be made for videogames, which in turn leads to fans putting pressure on developers.  Funding issues aside, there’s a big reason why a game driven by content cannot have infinite endings: it’s simply not possible to create and test that much content.

To expand on that statement, the way the Mass Effect trilogy melds the experience to the player’s actions puts a phenomenal sense of power and creation into their hands, and this naturally gives the impression that the game is crafted specifically to them.  Unfortunately, it’s not.

Exhibit A

To give an example of how a content driven game is designed I’m going to have a quick look at Dragon’s Lair. If you haven’t played it, the premise is very simple: a beautiful animation plays out and, at a pre-defined point, something happens which the player needs to react to with a button press. This is a video of the full game being played all the way through:

The playthrough doesn’t show many of the player deaths because the player knows what they’re doing. But behind the smooth flowing animation is a system that’s waiting for a player input. If the player misses the window of opportunity the game branches, and the player dies.  If they hit the window, they progress.

Different companies refer to these as different things – nodes, branches, gates.  They’re effectively all the same and, for this post, I’ll stick with the latter.  This example is the simplest gate required to create player choice.  Each and every sequence has been hand crafted, and the game planned out in intimate detail.

To design Dragon’s Lair and sketch out the flow it probably took a few weeks, though actually creating the content took 7 months and 1 million dollars (source).  That was in 1983, so in today’s money that’s a lot more.  And all this for a game that can be completed in just over 10 minutes, as shown in the above video.

Testing

As well as creating the content and code, it all needs to be tested.  Test plans come later down the development line, when the framework of the game and the main mechanics are close to being locked.  Once that happens it’s possible to create a list of tests and expected results.  From here the test team can do regular checks to ensure the game is behaving as intended.

A test plan for the the diagram above might look something like this:

One sequence with a single gate therefore might lead to eight tests.  Possibly even more.  For now though that’s enough to highlight why testing is one of the most difficult parts of making games.  It stands to reason therefore that in a game more complicated than Dragon’s Lair there’s going to be far more possible outcomes.  At any one point the player could have done one of a hundred things, let alone the thousands of small inputs they’ve made to get to where they are.  If a bug surfaces the developer then needs to find a way to recreate it so that they can understand what’s going wrong and then, hopefully, fix it.

I should note at this point that something like a shooting mechanic is very different from gated content, because that’s a system that has a set of defined rules.  When the player does certain things (such as presses the fire button) the rules determine what happens, not the content.  So the test plan doesn’t have to account for pressing the fire button at every possible position the player can get themselves into.  The sort of gates I’m describing here really only come into play at big story points, such as the ‘choose route’ type option presented to the player in Gears of War for instance.

Scaling up

Now we know the level of detail required for a single gate, we should now look at how we cope with multiple gates.  In Mass Effect each conversation often has a few possible outcomes, especially when they’re with key characters.  The interaction required by the player is very different from the reaction-heavy animation window system employed by Dragon’s Lair, but the underlying system is very similar:

Suddenly we’re facing a bit of a crisis – one conversation with three possible outcomes, each with just two more attached to them has led to six unique paths.  And the game design wants over a hundred conversations…  There’s no real way that we can create that many unique gates.  So, instead, we create paths that feed back into themselves further down the line:

You’ll notice that by using this system it’s entirely possible that the player won’t have to go through every gate to get to the end – in fact it’s desirably to do this to try and encourage replays.

Choke Points

You can keep even more control over the number of possible outcomes by creating larger, single, gates that the player has to go through to complete the game, but where they’re free to choose whatever route they desire in between:

The orange boxes in this case are choke points.

With a game like Mass Effect there are multiple choke points, but the entire game is constructed of so many that the player doesn’t have to go through every one to get to the end of the game.  In fact, there’s very purposefully a great deal of routes through the game.  But every single route has been planned, designed and has had content created for it.

This type of design method isn’t just limited to stories, but can be used for level design or ability trees too.  A good example of a game that uses this method for all of these systems is Bioshock. Several levels give you objectives that you must complete to ultimately move forward, but you can do those objectives in whatever order you desire.  Equally the story feels to develop around you, the player.  It’s up to you whether or not you delve deeper into the myth and seek out the audio diaries, and of course there’s the choice of how to deal with the little sisters.  Layered on top of that are you abilities and upgrades, all at your choice.  It works really well, all the way up until the point where you meet Ryan.  At that point all players must go through a single choke point with only one outcome.  Thus their choice is removed.  My protest with Bioshock was simply to stop playing – I still have no idea how it actually ends.

Mass Effect 3 has obviously created a similar reaction, though a much stronger one than my silent protest.  Throughout the trilogy players have been making what they believed were unique decisions, and the games responded accordingly.  The achievement by Bioware is staggering, and from an external perspective very inspirational.  Logistically though, there could never be enough endings to satisfy every possible outcome, and hopefully this post has gone some way to showing why not.

Disclaimer: I don’t work for EA or Bioware, and wasn’t involved in the creation of Mass Effect at any point.

First, I’d like to say I understand some fan disappointment.  Without going into spoiler territory, Mass Effect has always been about choices and the choices the player makes throughout the game brings with it a very personal connection to the characters and events as they play out.  It’s the interactive nature of our media that differentiates the consumer experience of videogames from that of other media such as movies or television.  Bioware has never been shy about discussing and promoting the impact of the moral choices in their games, however those familiar with the series know that when it came to player decisions versus main plot points, plot points won out every time.  This should not have surprised anyone when it came down to the series conclusion.  Criticisms regarding plot holes and the lack of a satisfying ending may be warranted, but the fan reaction seems completely out of proportion.  We’ve all been disappointed by the ending of something or another and the more complicated a plot, the harder it is to wrap everything up into a neat little package.  This may come as a shock to some fans but you can’t always get what you want.

Good stories have a beginning, middle and end.  Not “ends.”  I feel it is unrealistic to expect writers to create a strong, complex plot and then be expected to create multiple, satisfying endings.  I’m happy with one satisfying ending but many would argue that Mass Effect didn’t even give players that.  Many also think the ending was just fine.  I feel the gamers being the most vocal need to ask themselves, what would actually make you happy?  If there was an update tomorrow and when you replayed the game the ending was completely different, would that erase the memory of the original conclusion you received and leave you satisfied?   If the new endings still didn’t satisfy a certain amount of fans would you demand they do it again?  What are the rules on how many fans need to be vocally dissatisfied with an ending before you feel a company should be forced to change their artistic vision for a game?  What consideration is given, if any, to those happy with the current ending and what gives you the right to change the experience for those gamers?

You can’t please everyone all the time.  Whenever anything becomes popular, there will always be a subset of fans that find a reason to hate simply because they can.  There is no pleasing them.  It doesn’t matter if it’s videogames, music, movies or television you’ll always have a vocal minority that will hate what you’ve created just for the sake of hating, especially if something becomes popular.  We saw fans turn on Rockstar after their masterpiece Grand Theft Auto 4 was released; we’ve seen a backlash against Infinity Ward despite consistently shipping an excellent product.  We’re seeing it now with Bioware.  To cave into these vocal fanatics sets a dangerous precedent and takes creative control away from the artists to see their creative visions realized.  I firmly hope Bioware doesn’t touch the ending.  All it does is teach the entitled among us that if they scream and cry long enough and loud enough, they can get their way and as a parent I can attest, that’s a recipe for future disaster.  Give in and it will never end.   Bioware needs to stand by their work and continue their strong stand against those targeting their staff directly.  If gamers don’t like it, let them vote with their wallets.

Fans have often influenced their favorite series and if a writer wishes to remain popular it is important to listen to fans to an extent, but ultimate creative control needs to reside with creators.  Sherlock Holmes appeared to be famously killed off only to be resurrected at a later point due to fan demands.  Spock met his heroic end in Star Trek 2, only to be brought kicking and screaming back from the dead in the terrible, terrible Star Trek 3 but some Mass Effect fans are asking for a complete do-over of the ending.  Bioware has commented that they were willing to possibly have loose ends addressed in upcoming DLC (and I support this move as should fans) but imagine Star Trek 2 edited so Spock makes it out alive and pops out of his coffin at the end to yell  “Hiyoooo!” because it would be more pleasing.  Expecting Bioware to simply rewrite their ending is carpet chewing mad and Bioware shouldn’t even entertain the idea.  Already we see Hollywood taking fewer and fewer risks with story-telling trying to cater to everyone.  The end result is often bland and generic.  This happens to an extent currently in the games industry with developers and publishers erring on the side of caution in an attempt to protect the massive investment associated with developing big titles.  Gamers always rally against this effect but here the message Mass Effect gamers are sending resoundingly to the game industry is “Don’t take risks and don’t upset us or we’ll turn on you in a heartbeat.”

I have your new ending to Mass Effect 3 right here.

I’ve heard others draw parallels with Stephen King’s Misery where a crazed fan holds a writer captive and submits him to numerous tortures because she’s unhappy with his recent book’s ending.  She forces him to write a follow-up novel bringing the main character back to life to continue the story.  I don’t think this is a fair comparison.  Even in her madness, Annie Wilkes never expected the author to rewrite history and change the ending as some Mass Effect fans are demanding.   For the good of games as a truly creative medium, this movement needs to be squashed.  #ChangeTheEnding

*WARNING: SPOILERS*

If there’s a group of people on this planet that have mastered the art of storytelling, it’s John Lasseter and the crew at Pixar, and I firmly believe that opening to Up represents the pinnacle of their storytelling abilities. In the first 10 minutes of the film we learn everything we need to need to know about about Carl and Ellie’s relationship without a single word of dialogue being spoken. In a matter of minutes we see Carl and Ellie go from a young couple in love, to a couple devastated by an inability to start a family, to them overcoming their grief and moving on with their lives, and the pain Carl goes through as Ellie passes away. We know from the opening montage that despite the gruff exterior Carl displays in beginning, he is a loyal and caring man to those who are closest to him. We understand why he went to such extreme lengths to journey to Paradise Falls and what reaching his destination really means to him, and we understand the full emotional gravitas of his decision to sacrifice his journey in favor of saving Russel at the end of the film.

On the other end of the emotional spectrum is Ruin, which unlike Up isn’t trying to tell an emotional story, so that makes its job a little easier. Like the intro to Up, there isn’t a single word spoken throughout the entire course of short, but we learn everything we need to about the world the story is set in. From the opening establishing shots we see Ruin is set in a future where nature has begun to reclaim what was built by humans and has been at it for a t least a few decades. We’re then given a brief taste of how far humanity had progressed before its downfall with the introduction of the main character. We see him capable of creating a link with certain types of technology and controlling said technology with a mere thought. We’re shown brief hints of the possible downfall of man through quick flashes of a warning about a quarantine. Without a single word being uttered, we know everything we would need to know about this world.

Now, these are just two examples of the “Show, Don’t Tell” principle, and for every good example there are just as many, if not more, bad ones. I will be the first to admit that it far easier to apply this principle in a visual medium, such as animation and film, than it is in literature, but the principle still applies none-the-less. By showing your audience what you’re trying to say you help create a richer and deeper experience that will stay with with them long after they’ve finished watching, reading, or playing.

A rapidly growing market
It’s no secret that there’s been a ton of interest in social casino games in the past 6 months. Two social casino game companies, Playtika and DoubleDown, were recently purchased at massive, 9-figure valuations. Everyone from EA to Zynga are getting in on what is expected to be the next hot social game genre. Kontagent also commented that their fastest-growing customer segment has been social and mobile casino games. But what does this all mean for game developers looking to get into the space?

First of all, if you’re not sitting on a pile of cash, don’t bother looking at Facebook. The viral channels that made Facebook a great platform for indie game developers are dead, says Dave. While this is true for Facebook in particular, competition in the social casino games genre has driven up CPA prices on all platforms. You should expect to be at war from day 1. Many newcomers are looking at cross-platform development solutions so they can spread their eggs across multiple baskets.

When being born into wartime, it’s important to pick your beachhead early. For poker, skill-based and sports-based games, Dave recommends targeting a young male audience. For slots and other chance-based games, the audience remains primarily older females (typically 65% of slot players are female according to Dave) but is starting to drift closer to an even gender ratio. This drift is due to the changing nature of how slots are presented to the player: men can try the game for free, play for home, and play online. These changes make slots-type games more appealing to a broader audience.

Furthermore, these changes make casino-style games more appealing to a broader audience across the board. If you look at the difference in growth curves between FarmVille style games and social casino games, casino games show more consistent, wider growth curves. This shows that casino games keep players engaged longer and are less reliant on a huge launch for success.

Lastly, Dave warned social game developers that real-money gambling games are going to be launched in many if not all major platforms in the next year. Facebook is already looking into allowing real-money gambling in the UK, and the few mobile gambling apps that already inhabit the Apple and Google app stores are experiencing meteoric growth. Real-money gambling games are going to be tough to compete against because these companies can afford a much higher CPA than virtual currency game developers. However, real-money gambling companies come from a world where each player is a paying player, and aren’t as familiar with the freemium model. If you’re intelligent with your user acquisition and optimize your free-to-paid conversion, you can compete with these giants.. for now.

SlotSpot Case Study: Build, learn, iterate
Blitzoo built SlotSpot in just 6 weeks with a single-minded focus on a Minimum Viable Product, or MVP. The game had no friends bar (a staple of Facebook games), no quests, no gifts, no achievements, and only 3 slot machines to play. The game did have levels and XP, but there was no reward for levelling up. Instead, Blitzoo focused on cranking out new features each week to fill in the gaps in their product. By cultivating customer feedback via their Facebook page, they were able to quickly prioritize the most important features on their product roadmap. Then, through live A/B testing of their game, they were able to test these assumptions about what features the audience was really interested in. All in all, Blitzoo used Eric Ries’ Lean Startup methodology to impressive effect with their first social game (more on this in a later post).

When building his MVP product, Dave highlighted the importance of analytics and metrics. You need metrics for every piece of the game business:

User Acquisition. You need to segment your inbound users and see which creative, which demographics and which countries converted most effectively.

Free-to-paid Conversion. Which trigger got players to purchase? Which offer got that finicky player to finally buy? What creative was most effective?

Game Balance. What is the average session length? How many spins does it take until they are out of money? How does this change as they level up?

Player Temperature. This was Blitzoo’s own measure of positive vs. negative player feedback.

As you are building your game, you should always be asking yourself: what do I need to know? The answer will help you determine the metrics that are most important to your business.

SlotSpot Case Study: Maximizing revenue
When looking to maximize your revenue, the first step you should take is to identify your high value players. For the social casino genre, there are two types of high value players: whales and evangelists. Whales are the players that spend the most, typically spending over 10x more than the typical ARPPU rate of your game. These players can spend over $1,000 per game and make up a substantial portion of your game’s revenue. Evangelists are players that love your game. They invite their friends, are active on forums, and give you valuable feedback. Catering to these two groups is of utmost importance for any social casino game.

To appeal to these high value customers, you should segment them internally via your analytics and present them with unique offers. You should also track their playing habits and retention so that you can optimize your game to keep these players around. When dealing with their support or feature requests, take a little more time to write a custom response. Small tweaks like these can create the best experience for these players and keep them coming back.

Your second step when maximizing revenue is a no brainer: maximize your revenue from all of your players. Run A/B Tests and experiments on players, using the Lean Startup as a framework. Notice how in the graph above, the revenue spikes get larger and larger. This is because the A/B tests are improving the promotions’ effectiveness over time.

When running these experiments, be sure to segment each test by player type, whether it’s a whale, evangelist, first-time buyer or someone who has never purchased. Dave says that 90% of players on Facebook never pay, 5% will typically pay, and 5% will maybe pay. The key to maximizing the amount of players that do pay is by running these experiments. Test different offers, such as coin bundles, sales or referral promotions, to see which copy performs better. Be sure you test one thing with each test: the copy, the collateral, or the offer itself. However, never test yourself into having only one “optimal” offer. Dave’s advice is that a variety of offers always performs better than one “best” offer. Also, be sure to vary your delivery method of the offers, whether it’s from an interstitial ad, a banner ad, or an in-game graphic.

SlotSpot Case Study: Analytics as an immune system
The last key use for analytics is as an early warning system for bugs or problems with your game. Use your analytics tool to track errors, customer service requests, ARPPU, free-to-paid conversion, virality, average bet size, and anything else that is a mission-critical function of the game. If any of these numbers spike or drop dramatically, your canary is dead and it’s time to troubleshoot the coal mine. For example, Blitzoo had a problem where their overall revenue suddenly dropped. From their analytics, they could see that they had seen a significant increase in free-to-paid conversion rate, but an even larger decrease in ARPPU. It turned out that a promotion created by their marketing team was too aggressive, and undercut their price significantly. Once the error was spotted, fixing it was simple and the situation was resolved (damn it, marketing! :P).

Mobile: The Next Frontier
To conclude his presentation, Dave talked about Blitzoo’s upcoming transition to mobile and how they planned to adapt SlotSpot to the new space. He reiterated analytics’ importance on mobile because there are even more factors to a mobile player than a social player. There is no “single solution” for social sharing on mobile like there is on Facebook, so you need to incorporate and track a variety of them. Also, customer acquisition is done on a per-deal basis rather than run all through Facebook, so there’s a lot of segmentation there as well. Finally, customer onboarding is incredibly important to building a successful game on mobile and A/B tests are the key to optimizing your initial onboarding flow.

Dave pointed out that you simply cannot port a social network game to a mobile platform and expect the same results. For one, there’s a much shorter session length: mobile players spend 3 minutes per session on average while social players can spend up to 20 minutes. This requires a complete overhaul of game balance and the willingness to take an ax to your feature set. Offers are responded to differently on mobile, so you will need to start your in-game marketing testing all over again. Lastly, engagement is king on mobile. It’s much harder to keep players engaged with a mobile game and re-engage players that have been lost. Making all of these adjustments has been key to Blitzoo’s preparation for the mobile launch of their SlotSpots app.

Wrapping up
Thanks again to Blitzoo and Kontagent for throwing a great webinar. I’d recommend getting on their webinar circuit by signing up for their mailing list, each one I attend keeps getting better.

The social casino space is on fire right now, and one can only expect the fire to spread to mobile. If you’re looking to get into this space, move quickly and buckle up, because it’s about to take off. And while you’re busy fending off incumbents, trying to keep distance from the newcomer nipping at your heels, and avoiding the real-money giants, you might want to look into Betable. We’re the first and only platform that lets you add real-money gambling to games, and it might be the weapon you need to win in the social casino game space.

You should be drawing

Why does that phrase hold so much power? Does it do more harm than good? What is so important about drawing anyway?

The best answer I’ve ever heard¹ in regards to that question is “Everyone draws when they are a kid, and then most people grow out of it. I just never grew out of it.” For me, that perfectly sums up why I should be drawing. It is creativity and fun in its purest form.

Drawing is a tool for play and communication. And an incredibly powerful tool at that. It can be academic or it can be entirely free form. It can be permanent or fleeting. It can be beautiful or it can be crass. It can be honest or it can be deceiving. And best of all, it can be done by anyone, at anytime, anywhere.

This is inevitably the part where someone says, “Sure, but all I can draw is stick figures.” So what, that hasn’t stopped others from being successful. Stick figures are action figures that can never break. Skill level isn’t important. Even your meeting doodles are incredibly valuable.

What is important is that drawing affords an outlet that requires only the most basic of tools and technology, which can then scale infinitely to the artist’s wishes. Drawing allows you to cut through any technology or large production constraints and get right to the heart of execution. All you need to do is approach art like you would game design.

You should be playing

Drawing, at its core, is play. You are given an open world with a set of tools and only one core objective. Make your mark. Which probably explains why kids love drawing and adults are terrified by it. The only structure that exists is what you bring to it, and adults bring so much ridiculous structure when they are given the chance to draw that they just freeze up. So, the first step towards enjoying drawing again is to let go of those preconceived notions of what is good and what is bad and just play.

So to let go, approach drawing like you would design a game, which are the tools at hand and any rules you want to add to them.

Start with some tools that encourage energetic mark making. Finger paints, vine charcoal, chalk. Tools that get you messy and have an inherent level of imprecision are the rocket launchers of art. They are inherently bright, loud and able to make anyone hit their target at least in a small way. Then, as your precision with the rocket launcher gets better, you can move towards a machine gun, like water colors. Pencils, Charcoal, Conte, etc are the sniper rifles of art. Starting with those can quickly lead to frustration as they inherently force a steady hand. It isn’t until you’ve used them a lot that you feel comfortable no-scoping them.

Oil paints are a genre able to be scaled amongst themselves based again on the tools. You have access to the entire dev panel with oil paints. Painting only with a palette knife vs a fine sable brush is like God mode with confetti headshots vs one hit kills.

This leads naturally into wanting to create some rules to play with. Draw some random shapes on a page, and then like staring a clouds, turn them into whatever you think they look like. Try drawing the image upside down. Or with your alternate hand. Or with your feet. Or with your eyes closed². Find rules that allow for you to stop thinking about the physical act of drawing and transport your mind into pure creation. You want rules that foster a sense of fun without the concern that you will be judged. Because once being judged is added into the equation, it requires dedication and becomes work.

You should be growing

Judgement is adding difficulty settings to your game of drawing. It is adding weight to the win/lose conditions of the rules decided upon when you begin to play. Inherently, judgement itself isn’t a bad thing, you just need to set it to a level where your work to success rate isn’t frustrating. Essentially, you need to balance your drawings.

Just like balancing your game, you need to be aware of the intended players and their skill level. If you set the difficulty too high, you are going to rage quit. If it is too low, you are going to get bored and lose focus. Just like with anything, honestly examine what you want out of the experience and then turn the dial up one more notch to push yourself without breaking yourself. Do you want to learn how to design more appealing characters? Do you want to learn color theory? Do you want to learn how to paint environments? Choose a specific goal or objective, like you would in a game, and work towards that. Simply saying, “I want to draw better” is the equivalent of starting a game with the only objective being “Save the world.” Without a specific task or direction, most people, like most players, are just going to wander around aimlessly. Unless you have your difficulty setting high, this probably isn’t an approach that will work well for you.

When you start to feel good about what you have, play test your work. There are countless online forums and communities that gladly give honest critiques and tips to aspiring artists of any skill level. Local colleges or schools often have life drawing classes available to those interested. The artists in your studio might even have draw nights at a local pub or coffee shop. These are your lifelines towards leveling up and having gone through the same process, will gladly lend their eye and focus to give you the honest feedback you need, appropriate to the difficulty level you have established for yourself. Find groups that approach their artistic community like a game of co-op, there to get everyone’s back. And then once you are ready, and are capable of the occasional rocket jump, search out a team deathmatch art group to really have your skills put to the test.

If your difficulty level is set appropriately, you are going to fail sometimes. But that is fine. You have endless continues. Just click restart by picking that pencil back up and making a note of what knocked you into that pit last time. So when you come up against it again, you can jump on its head and knock it out. Because as much fun as just playing a free form game with no difficulty can be, there is nothing quite as rewarding as overcoming that tricky obstacle that kept knocking you down.

You should be doing

This obviously doesn’t have to just be about drawing. It could be about weight lifting. It could be about cooking. It could be about gardening. Ultimately, what it comes down to is opening your eye towards observing the world around you and then honing those observations into something you can communicate successfully. It is about taking your ideas and crafting them as only you can. It is about play. Sometimes with a purpose.

So what are you waiting for?

You should be drawing

_________

¹ I believe that quote belongs to Joshua Middleton, but it was told to me second hand many years ago, so I could be wrong. But regardless of who said it, the answer is still brilliant.

² I came across the by limb experiment by way of Ty Dunitz. I love how energetic and loose the lines are as each step moves forward. Makes me realize how much I need to relax my main hand during the initial sketch. Fun fact, it seems our most capable drawing foot coincides with our most capable drawing hand. The more you know.

Now, I’m not sure whom I’m directing this to. It may be for a more entry-level perspective, but maybe I will be throwing some new concepts out there for everyone to benefit from. If anything hopefully I am tossing some old thoughts around in a fresh way.

They tell me that Level Design is an entry point into the industry for fresh-faced designers. I wouldn’t know much about that, as my first (and current) job has been centered on a more rounded design platform, as opposed to one specific discipline. I suppose if I had to hammer down what I focus on most, it’s probably a combination between usability and fun – then again, shouldn’t that be every designer’s main pursuit? Shouldn’t those two things be infused in everything we do? I should probably move on, before I get too philosophical.

Anyways, let’s gain some relevance in regards to the title of this post. Last week, I had the benefit of spending a lot of one-on-one time with quite a few of my teachers at GDC – none more than my current teacher, Tom Long. Chilling at Golden Gate Park, we were chatting about the “Why” of what we do in a level. In comparison to “How” and “What”,  “Why” seems like quite the sticky wicket. Why should the player follow a certain path? Why are the weather conditions the way they are? It may all seem like aesthetics, but it’s a carefully calculated choice. But it’s also aesthetics. I hope that isn’t confusing. Aesthetics have the ability to put the player into a specific mood, which will alter their playstyle or emotional state in the level. This in turn alters the mechanics of the actual level. We mustn’t forget that we can’t just put things in a level because they look cool or seem clever – this is where our restraint needs to come into play. An exercise I have been taught, and frequently practice, is create a pen and paper level, then “zoom in” to the nuts and bolts of it – the actual playable space. If it doesn’t benefit the level in some way, shape, or form, then it doesn’t need to be there.

I think a great example of a level designed with constraint, yet with a seemingly large scope, are the “All Ghillied Up” and “One Shot, One Kill” levels from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. The actual landscape that the player traverses is vast and imposing, yet play happens on a very small scale. Even the frantic chase scene at the end through an entire city seems large, yet encounters are set in very specific pockets, giving the player a feeling of chaos when in fact the pacing is very controlled and deliberate. No space is wasted in that level, and what we are left with is an example of Level Design that is still referenced glowingly today.

Finding the “Why” and answering it may be a bit difficult at first – hell, I’m still wrangling with it myself, but through practice, study, and constraint, we can tackle that question head on.

So let’s go back to the park, where we were discussing the “Why” of Level Design. Once that bit of conversation was over with, we started discussing “Swipes”, or “Swipe Files”. If you aren’t aware of this yet, then you’re really going to love it. A swipe is a collection of items meant to enhance our designer’s toolkit – mostly it’s in the form of pictures, but it can also be samplings of schematics, sketches, audio files, scents, and actual materials like rocks, fabrics, soils, etc. You can use your swipe to be a better designer.

When we think of a level, we paint it with broad strokes. Like we’re going over something with a paint roller. The gist of the concept is there, but it’s missing all the details and trim work that make a level real. Players aren’t stupid – even if they don’t know anything about anything, they will know if something isn’t right with their virtual world, because it’s based off a reality they live in. This is even true with levels outside our known reality, because everything is based off of our own implicit human knowledge.

Once you have painted the broad strokes of your level, you can use your swipe to get down to the details. For instance, I was working on a pillar last night and thought it felt a little lackluster. Looking through my swipe, I found a cathedral that used three pillars together to form one giant über-pillar. It looked awesome, so now that’s in the level. Since I started my swipe, I’ve felt much more inspired than I have in months. As soon as I learned about it I started a San Francisco Swipe – literally the moment I heard I pulled out my phone and started to work – and it has benefited me greatly. I have set pieces that are as huge as an entire city overlook, shots as intimate as a bistro in Little Italy, and details as minute as the grain and pattern of a concrete slab to use as a material in the editors I work in.

Going through my things, I also put together swipes from places I’ve been before – a Lisbon Swipe, a Northern Ohio Swipe, a Central U.S. Nature Swipe, and more. I think these things are great, because instead of looking at pictures online and formulating my work from those, messing with my swipes brings me to the moment in time when I took them, and I suddenly remember the smell in the air, the direction of the wind, the sounds of the area – all of it. It’s more real because I’ve been there, and I took the picture. All it does is help me fill in some blanks – plus it makes every trip I take into a business expense!

Looks like I’ve diverged from the initial point of this post, but I think everything I’ve said is relevant in a way. Looking through my SF Swipe, I was kind of thunderstruck by how Level Designers really aren’t Level Designers, or Builders, or whatever industry term one wants to use. Level Designers are Architects! I never really knew what a flying buttress was before I started Level Design, but I sure do now – granted what I thought they were beforehand was far funnier and immature, but that’s beside the point. I didn’t know what cresting or an oriel was, but now I do – and if you don’t, you really should look it up.

The more of an architect a Level Designer is, the more realistic the level will be. More realism equals more ambiance, more immersion, and more credibility. Don’t forget that when I say “realistic”, I don’t mean that every game needs to be realistic in that Battlefield 3 kind of way, but realistic in “there is an internal logic to the workings of this world that is congruent with our opinions and knowledge of how things work”. I hope I’m clear on that; kind of a “learn the rules to break them” sort of thing.

So I’ve decided, when I wear my Level Design hat, to call myself an Architect. In fact, I told that to an old lady at the bus the other day. She asked what I did in games, and I said that I do this and that, but lately I’ve been focusing on Level Design. I puffed my chest up a bit, and then said “Actually, I prefer to think of myself as more of an Architect”. Unfortunately I busted out laughing through the word architect, because let’s face it – it’s kind of pretentious and douchie, but that’s ok. Maybe we need a bit of pretention to make us feel good.

It’s as simple as that.

Behind the goofy dialog, sweet ass round house kicks, mysterious teachers, cruel dojo masters, muscle bound heroes, and beautiful dames beats the thunderous heart of pure awesome; a heart that will guide you, mold you, and train you — if only you would listen. Thankfully, you have me, and I’m here to impart the great wisdom that I have learned — in between sessions of breaking bricks over my face and climbing trees to karate chop coconuts. Read on and, for maximum effect, do read each section with the accompanying video.

Taking a Chance, Risking it All

[Youtube] Rad – Thunder In Your Heart

A lot of what we do is about taking a chance. We take chances on a feature, take chances on a puzzle, but most of all, we take chances on ourselves. Little known fact: when I first started out as a designer, I thought I was pretty terrible. So terrible, in fact, that at one point during Chains of Olympus I took my lead aside and told him that I was thinking of giving it all up. I was going to throw in the towel. I was taking my ball and going home, which for me meant going back to being a programmer – shock! awe!

Look: meetings with talented, smart people is incredibly intimidating. Ideas are popping, and when you finally work up the courage to contribute, your ideas can be ripped apart in mere seconds; it’s sorta like that scene in Jurassic Park, where they feed the velociraptors. Except, ya know, in a conference room.

Don’t get discouraged!

Don’t lose that feeling
Don’t ever stop believing
There’s one more moment of truth and you’re gonna face it

No one ever got where they are being being 100% right all the time, and I am so thankful to my lead for giving me the courage to suck it up, stick it out, and learn from my mistakes. In the end, I realized that they weren’t ripping my ideas apart through any kind of malice, but because they respected me enough to teach me the things I needed to know. And I can assure you, once you get that taste of the glory, you won’t ever be turning back. You need to have that thunder in your heart.

I’ve Worked Hard Every Night And Day

[Youtube] Stan Bush – Fight to survive (Bloodsport)

I worked hard every night and day,
so i can plan to make my way.
Mind and body are the perfect team,
nows my chance to live my dream.

If you wanna be the best, then you gotta work hard. What free time I have is spent on tempering myself into the best game designer I can be. I say temper, because that’s what it takes: the heat of passion pounded against the anvil of determination. There is so much wisdom out there, and most of it is not trapped inside a game console. But you know what? I’ve seen a lot of talk about how game design is all about “like, game design is everything man – go and live your life”. This bothers me.

Here’s the thing: I too, at one time, gave advice like this, and while on the surface it seems like good advice, it now rings as fluffy and directionless to me. Directionless, because advice like this doesn’t actually point you to anything that really teaches. Put yourself into the shoes of a young game designer. All you want to know is how to be the best that you can be. But is the phrase, “just, live your life man” going to honestly tell you anything of value? It might get you out from behind your controller (a good thing), but it also doesn’t point you anywhere.

Living life, to me, is less about being on a path to knowledge, and more about being a key to the subconscious. Pick up any book on writing, and you will see advice on how to crack through writers block. These books will almost always include advice about going for a walk; of stepping away from your work, and just letting your mind wander. This is good advice, but it only works when your subconscious is packed full of win. First, before anything, you gotta stuff that mind to the brim with all sorts of great knowledge, so that when you do access the vault of your subconscious, you find it overflowing with a bounty of precious gems.

[Youtube] Willie Hutch – The Glow (The Last Dragon)

My great fear is that designers out there are reading directionless advice like this and feeling that it frees them from the responsibility of doing their research, so let’s fix that right now. You need to be reading books on economics, and books on psychology, and books on story writing, and books on cinematography, and books on architecture — oh god, so many books! In order to get the most out of just “living life”, you would do well to seriously consider and digest the following books:

• Design of Everyday Things
• Universal Principles of Design
• Elements of Style
• Paradox of Choice
• Predictably Irrational
• Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
• Architecture: Form, Space and Order
• Synthetic Worlds: The Buisness and Culture of Online Games
• Film Directing Shot by Shot
• Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting

And hey, don’t stop there. I cataloged this list from looking to my left and picking the books that were literally on my desk at work. That doesn’t even count the ones I keep at home. You gotta train that brain, if you wanna step into the ring. Because nows your chance to live your dream.

The Best of The Best

[Youtube] Best Of The Best – To YOU I am Coach

You can work. You can sweat. You can train. You can dream, and never be better than good. But when the right people come together at the right moment they can become… the best of the best.

Guess what? Games are made by people. Sometimes a lot of of people. In all probability, a shit ton of people. Even if you have the heart of a lion, and even if you are pushing it to the limit, going the distance, or reaching your upper limit, if you don’t support those around you (and they you), then you are never going to be better than good. You must support your team.

When something goes wrong — it will — don’t let the first words out of your mouth be, “well, that’s not my problem.” Get lost. The best of the best don’t give a shit about who’s problem it is, was, or should be. The best of the best stick out that hand and help their buddy back up when his face hits the mat. Every conflict on a game should be resolved in the beefiest, manliest, helping handshake in the history of man kind. Sorta like this, but with more explosions.

[Youtube] Push (Too Many Pencils) to the Limit

A team is not a team if you don’t give a damn about one other. When was the last time you went and thanked someone for the work they did. When was the last time you went out of your way to find some extra reference materal for that concept artist. When was the last time you put the extra effort into that feature list. You’ll be surprised how imparting a modicum of respect to your fellow man will be returned in spades. If you want to be the best of the best, then you gotta work together.

Never Surrender. Never Say Die.

[Youtube] Kickboxer – Never Surrender

Making games is hard stuff, but if 80′s films have taught me anything, it’s that if you want to beat up that 8 foot tall guy who kicks like a mule, then you can’t give up. And before you even say it, I’m not even talking about Crunch.

As much as I love making games for a living, the daily grind of looking and thinking about the same problems day in and day out is not as pleasant as it seems. It’s draining. It’s frustrating. And something that I continually struggle with is the amount of effort it takes to bring something from 90% complete to its ultimate conclusion. It sounds so easy…

Mike, it’s just a measly ten percent. How hard can it be? Incredibly, my friend. And man, it is so easy to give up. SO easy. I know this, because I’ve done it numerous times; but, thankfully, I had the good fortune to work with people that don’t give up. People that pushed me to take it further, to make it cleaner, to push it over the wire.

[Youtube] Hold on to the vision (No retreat no surrender)

You have to hold onto that vision in your eye — not that vision of the product, but that vision of yourself. That’s the trick to I had to teach myself. When the going gets tough, I ask myself why I’m doing this, and I say, “I’m doing this for me”. For this kid that I used to be, who wanted nothing more than to get his grubby little hands on the next best game. To tear into it with that gleeful abandon that I no longer remember. You hold onto that vision as hard as you can, because damnit you don’t retreat, and you don’t surrender.

And when someone asks the phrase, “Who’s going to notice something like that” – “Who cares about this” – “Why do you care”. Damnit, you look them straight in the eye and you say, “I care”.

You care, my friend, because you’re the best… and nothing’s ever gunna keep you down.

[Youtube] Karate Kid Montage – You’re the Best

1. Apply artificial Constraint
2. Design within Constraint
3. Remove Contraint
4. Analyze

That sums up a little bit of advice I’m going impart as to how I defeat these monsters. I’ve used this model in various ways and below I’ll give some examples of this simple piece of advice.

One Button

The modern gamepad (or keyboard/mouse) provides a massive subset of control options. Too many in most cases. As a programmer I often just find myself going “bind” crazy because its easy to bind to a key. This leads to terrible interfaces; original Blender UI anyone ;)

As a designer I often force myself to only have one button and one stick on a gamepad, or maybe just mouse interaction. I force myself to use less buttons than I think I need. Then I will often find ways to contextualize or simplify a mechanic or control. Leading to a more elegant control solution.

This also means I can often later in a project arbitrarily say something like, “Okay we will map that Global button to Shoulder button, they aren’t used anywhere”. Which is great when in crunch or a great feature occurs late in development.

Box It

Often when doodling an idea I will just draw a box on the page. Then draw only inside that box. This only really works for visual designs but I find it works really well to focus once I have a set boundary.

Coin Toss

Have two options?

Do a blind coin toss, and then before revealing the coin if you find yourself wishing for heads or tails you know your answer.

Three Point System

When constructing a narrative it’s easy to lose sight of the overall structure or lose detail. One trick I use is what I call the Bullet Point System. The system that forces groups of three means your always forced to find that third thing but also that you often self prune. Some of my best ideas come while reaching for that third point to fit. I also find that often something sounds great but then I can’t flesh it out to three points so I discard it.

Rules

• Write 3 lines
• No line can go onto the next line
• Always write 3 lines
• You can expand a point with exactly 3 sub lines

Story of Lost Boy

• Boy Gets Lost
  • Follows Butterfly
  • Goes into Cave
  • Can’t See Butterfly
• Boy Wanders
• Boy Finds Way Home
  • Mother Asks where he has been
  • Boy Gives Silly Answer
    • Don’t Retell Story
    • Child’s Vision
    • Doubt the Experience
  • Butterfly Lands on Boy

Pick It

Alternatively called the F it system this is for when often I’m uncertain or given too many options. If there are 6 different ways we can go and we can’t be sure which to go well then just throw hands in the air, F-it, and pick one.

Most importantly I document the choice!

I will force myself to finish the design or complete going down the path, no regrets. Then if possible when we have more time I go back to that fork in the road and re-examine the choice. Though to be frank it’s rare that you find yourself going back and re-evaulting.

Conclusion

Keep It Simple Stupid! This is all very basic advice that I was hesitant to post but then I recall watching a 30 minute cooking show on cooking Potatoes and thought well sometimes simple advice is very useful. ;)

“It looks like a grave yard” 

Itzy3D was always about creating from the beginning.  The central idea that the entire game was based on was that users like to create things, they like to draw, they like to make patterns, and they like to feel like they have an impact on the game world they’re part of.  In Itzy3D’s case we gave the player the opportunity to create spider webs of various shapes and sizes, enough to complete a level and advance in the game.  However our core group is made up of programmers, not artists and as we looked at other indie games like Feist, Limbo and Pixeljunk Eden, we liked the idea of a muted or shades of grey color scheme and the plan was to bring color to the levels with multicolored fireflies and spinning multicolored webs.  The webs were quickly ditched.  They looked awful.  Rainbow spider-webs seemed so good in my head, but in reality it just didn’t play out.  Add to that, our 3D, shades of grey layout made it nearly impossible to distinguish the background from the foreground which made it hard for users to figure out just where they should be making their webs.

Itzy3D Before

Itzy3D After

“Give me a way to kill those buggers”

Another idea we had from the onset was that Itzy3D should be a relaxed, casual and user-friendly title.  We didn’t want users to feel they had failed playing the game.  We wanted each play through to be fun, but relaxed fun rather than hectic fun.  One of the main enemies in the game is the wasps which zoom around each level before spotting Itzy and attacking.  Rather than take away a life or lead to a game over scenario, we simply had them knock Itzy down if he wasn’t hidden and remove a portion of his available web.  So we threw in an enemy that could never be defeated, much like the old Qix arcade game that had inspired Itzy.

We had no idea just how frustrating gamers would find this decision until our demo was released and we started to receive feedback about the inability to mount any offense whatsoever.  And it was from this feedback that Itzy received a system of power-ups based on the color of large fireflies caught.  Now, aside from other power-ups such as improved speed and web stretch, Itzy could also freeze his enemies in place, listening to them buzz furiously or actually take the fight to the enemies for a limited time much like Pac-Man powering up, but instead of eating the wasps he incapacities them temporarily with his mighty, Kung-Fu Punch!

“Monkey Factor 5”

I had the opportunity to sit down for coffee with a game industry vet and ex-Bioware employee who offered up this piece of gaming wisdom that has stuck with me.  When discussing game controls, ease of use is king.  While we thought our controls were simple enough, he asked “Yes.  But are they Monkey Factor 5 simple?”  The answer was a resounding no.  For the sake of variety we built-in a few different moves for the player to interact with Itzy’s world.  One problem, that was pointed out to us more than once was that we had two different controls for web spinning.  A swipe started Itzy spinning a web strand; a tap on Itzy anchored the web strand.  Watching people play Itzy, what we thought was straight forward always seemed to trip up players.  They would swipe to start and then swipe, expecting it to anchor the web to an object.  Or they’d swipe, then figure out the tapping, but then try tapping again when starting a new web.  There was no reason to have two separate motions for web spinning.  The two moves seemed simple enough, but they certainly weren’t “Monkey Factor 5” simple.  Now, spinning webs is easy.  You simply tap Itzy to anchor the web strands, stretch them out and anchor by tapping again.

“I’ve been playing for a minute already and I haven’t even seen your main character”

We struggled with the tutorial.  Like the controls, we thought our game was simple enough yet realized that we had a lot going on that needed to be explained somewhere.  We originally weren’t even planning on including a tutorial, but no one would read our instructions included and ultimately would play the game without any idea as to what they were meant to do.  So we included a small tutorial level that the player needed to complete to move on to the meat of the game.  We included our instructions as slides within the tutorial and we felt the need to explain absolutely everything.

We realize now, there were so many things wrong with that idea.  No one likes to read walls of text, first off.  They just skip through so we might as well have not had anything.  Secondly, it’s not a game at this point.  As a helpful developer offered, when you begin the game you’re immediately hit with walls of text.  Games should make an impact immediately and our game had you reading text before we were even introduced to the main character.

The tutorial never satisfied any of us but we just couldn’t put our fingers on what was wrong and through the feedback we revamped the tutorial to encourage the gamers to explore and learn the game mechanics through play, not through walls of text.

We’re indebted to our fans and to the developer community for their continued feedback on our games.  Time is a valuable commodity for everyone, so it means a lot to us to those of you who have offered your time to help us create better products.  Cheers!

Role playing games have a tremendous amount of content, each piece with multiple parameters that define what they do in combat. Damage dealt by a sword, bonus granted by a skill, total health of a level 23 bandit, etc. It’s not too hard to tune content when you look at a single game zone or a fixed character level – you can playtest that area and tweak values until the game feels right. However, trying to tune values for a giant world with 100 levels of content and multiple classes is much more complicated. How do you choose values for RPG content without playtesting and brute force tuning every type of character at every level?

Many factors increase character power as they level up in games like Blizzard’s Diablo III.

A computational approach can help you quickly generate first pass values for these massive amounts of content. The method is to calculate how each piece of content affects a character’s effectiveness in combat and express that “power” in terms of a universal unit. That allows you to compare very different types of content in a mostly apples-to-apples way, enabling you to do a variety of powerful things:

• Compare different classes and tune them relative to each other.
• Identify items or abilities that are likely to be unbalanced.
• Determine what stats enemies need to be a good challenges for characters.
• Solve for the parameter values of a skill or item to make it as powerful as it should be.

That last one is especially important. Not guessing. Solving. (then tweaking)

It’s not an exact process. It requires a lot of estimating and approximating, and it can’t be done for certain types of content. However, where it does work, you can use it to rapidly generate parameter values that will be about 80% right.

The Method

Here are the steps:

1. Implement your core minute-to-minute gameplay. Creating a progression of content won’t help If the game doesn’t play the way you want it to, and you’ll have to redo the work after you fix your core gameplay. Create a vertical slice of your game that plays the way you want.
2. Design the stats that define the “base power” of a character of level X. “Base power” is defined by the stats that improve steadily as a character levels up and which are not influenced by player choice, such as health, base damage, expected armor, or THAC0.
3. Identify other game content that magnifies a character’s combat effectiveness as he levels up. This can include systems like item modifiers, skills, WoW’s ability glyphs, or LoL’s runes. These combine to give the character’s “total power”.
4. For each piece of content, determine how to express its value as a percentage modifier to a character’s base power. For instance, a 2% damage bonus increases a character’s power by 2%. “Percentage bonus to base power” is the universal unit you’ll use to compare different types of content.
5. Choose what impact you would like each type of content to have on total character power as the character levels up. Should each skill point increase a character’s base power by 5%, so they’re twice as powerful after spending 20 points?
6. Given each piece of content’s intended effectiveness, solve for its parameters. If you know the intended bonus to base power you want a piece of content to grant, and you know how to calculate its power from its parameters, you can work backward to solve for its parameters.

Base Power

Defining base power is something I struggle with because it’s so specific to each game. The best definition I’ve found is that it’s the combination of all character stats that increase automatically as a character levels up, without involving any choice by a player. Examples include things like character health or THAC0 in D&D. WoW characters get a fixed set of stat points when they level up, and skills increase steadily in effectiveness.

Expected damage per second and armor are also part of base power. Though these don’t increase automatically (the player has to find new gear), game content tends to be designed with the expectation that players are maintaining up-to-date gear. Games like WoW assume that players are using items with base stats that are appropriate for their level, so unmodified item stats are part of base power.

Power Magnifiers

Power magnifiers are pieces of content that modify a character’s base power in combat. Their significance to his overall power generally grows as he levels up. Here are some examples:

• Skill Points or Talent Points. Each point increases character power by a percentage.
• Item Modifiers in tons of RPGS. They get more numerous / significant at higher levels.
• Materia in Final Fantasy VII. Players get more powerful Materia and can use more at once as they progress through the game.

The impact of Materia on FFVII character power increases as they gain more slots and more powerful Materia.

Players generally get to choose which power magnifiers they want to take to customize their character, and different classes use different power magnifiers. They key to balancing classes against each other is to ensure their available power magnifiers have equivalent effectiveness.

Power Magnifier Value as a Percentage of Base Power

Express the value of a power magnifier as a percentage of a character’s base power. “Percentage bonus to base power” is the universal unit to use to compare different types of bonuses. Since all power modifiers are relative to base power, I like to define base power at any level as 1.0, for 100%. An unmodified level 1 character has a base power of 1.0, and so does an unmodified level 54 character. If a power magnifier increased a character’s effectiveness by 5%, it would have a value of 0.05.

To translate a bonus to “effectiveness”, calculate how much it increases the damage a character does in a fight before he is killed. So, a bonus that keeps him in a fight twice as long would double his effectiveness and have a value of 1.0 (because it is a bonus of 100%).

A particular power magnifier generally becomes available at a certain level, and is tuned to be appropriate for that level. For instance, see the “Affix Level” values in this chart of Diablo II item affixes. Determine its percentage value relative a character’s base stats at the level it is intended for. Some examples:

Percentage Damage Bonus

Imagine a skill that increases character melee damage by 1%. Since this is presumably a skill for melee characters, assume they always get its benefit; so it has a value of 0.01.

Conditional Damage Bonus

A sword has a modifier that gives it a 5% chance to deal 30 bonus damage on an attack. This is an average of 1.5 damage per attack. If base damage per attack is 100, then its value is 0.015.

Percentage Health Bonus

A 10% bonus to health increases the time that a character stays alive by 10%, thus increasing the damage he does in a fight by 10%, so it has a value of 0.1.

Armor Bonus

Say an armor bonus would improve a character’s damage resistance from taking 75% damage from an attack to taking 72%. This means he is taking 72 / 75 = 96% as much damage as he was before, multiplying his survival time by 1 / 0.96 = 1.04 times. Thus, the bonus value is 0.04.

Total Power

Each power magnifier that a character gets adds to his base effectiveness in combat. His total power is equal to the sum of his base power and all those magnifiers:

Total Power = Base Power + All Power Magnifiers

Power is relative to character level, so it’s more precise to write:

Total Power at Level X = Base Power at Level X + All Power Magnifiers at Level X

Remember, base power at any level is defined as 1.0. Thus, a level X character’s total power is the number of times more powerful he is than an unmodified level X character.

Planning a Progression of Total Power

Total power is what designers care about when tuning stats for content that opposes players, like monsters. As a designer, choose what value you want your game’s various power magnifiers to add to character effectiveness over the course of the game.

Systems can add power at different rates. A skill system might add 1% to total power each level. Unlocking a new ability might add a big chunk at a specific milestone. Players will focus most on content that has the biggest impact on their power, so assign systems value based on how central they are to your game design.

Here’s an example of how a total power progression could look. At level 1, no power magnifiers are in effect, so total power is equal to base power:

Total Power at Level 1 = 1.0

At level 10, the player has 9 skill points, each worth 0.01. He also has bonuses from item modifiers that increase his power by a total of 5%.

Total Power at Level 10 = 1.0 + 0.09 + 0.05 = 1.14

At level 25, the player now has 24 skill points, his item modifiers are now worth about 27%, and he’s unlocked a super power that increases power by another 20%:

Total Power at Level 25 = 1.0 + 0.24 + 0.27 + 0.2 = 1.71

In other words, a normal level 30 character is 1.71 times as powerful as a level 30 character with unmodified gear, no skill points spent, and who doesn’t use his super power. We can even chart out his total power over time:

In this chart, skills add a linear bonus to power, item modifiers add a gradual quadratic bonus, and ability unlocks add chunks of power every few levels. The purple line shows the total power of a character at each level, and that’s what monsters should be tuned against.

Solving for the Value of a Power Magnifier

Now that you’ve defined the expected power progression for characters in your game, you can look up the intended power value of any particular piece of content. For instance, if a level X character should get a 0.05 * X bonus in power from item modifiers, and is likely to have 10 modifiers on his equipment, then a level X modifier should increase power by 0.005 * X.

Once you know the intended power of a piece of content, do the math backwards to solve for parameter values that will give the content the intended power. Here are two examples:

Conditional Damage Bonus

A level 10 sword has a modifier that gives it a 5% chance to deal X bonus damage on an attack. Say the intended power of a level 10 modifier is 0.06, and the base damage per attack is 100. Thus, it should deal an average of 0.06 * 100 = 6 bonus damage per attack. Divide by the chance of dealing damage to find X. X = 6 / 0.05 = 120 damage.

Armor Bonus

A level 10 helmet has a modifier that increases armor. The intended power of a level 10 modifier is 0.06. For an armor bonus, this means the character should survive 1.06 times as long. Therefore, he should take 1 / 1.06 = 0.94 times as much damage with the modifier as without. Assuming a base character takes 75% damage from an attack, the modifier should be high enough to reduce damage taken to 0.94 * 75 = 70.5%.

Caveats / Where Doesn’t This Method Work?

This method is best suited for PvE combat in RPGs. Though it can be applied to other types of games, there are some game designs for which it’s simply not a good fit. For example, it would be difficult to apply to action games where damage taken and received vary dramatically with player skill. Imagine an RPG where combat is based on regularly stunning or knocking away foes. It may not be possible to make sufficiently accurate value estimations in those games.

It can also be difficult to apply this method to game content whose value is not easily enumerated. Examples include bonuses to:

• Projectile weapon or spell range
• Movement speed
• Healing power
• Total mana.

In the case of bonuses like the above, you can either make a sophisticated mathematical model to get an accurate value estimate, or just guess and test, and go with what feels right. Either method can work great.

Good luck and have fun! As always, feel free to post questions in the comments, or comment me at @DanielAchterman or danielachterman@gmail.com.

For those in the dark (which I’m willing to bet is most of you) Construct 2 is a game development IDE that is easy to learn and very powerful. Construct is unique in how it goes about working its magic because Contruct 2 uses a proprietary system for the back end. Instead of using a traditional coding/scripting language like C, Javascript, or Lua, Construct 2 is based around an event system that takes the place of normal code. While people from a heavy coding background might view this as a handicap, the developers of Construct  have done an amazing job of creating a system that can accomplish just about anything.

A huge plus with Construct is that it exports created projects as HTML5.  This allows content creators to quickly get their games out there for the world to see. It also means you don’t have to create different versions to run on different operating systems. This one-size-fits-all approach streamlines the game development process, taking a huge burden off the shoulders of the developer.

The biggest plus of Construct is that it is a perfect platform for people just starting out in game development. The user interface is centered around drag-and-drop functionality, allowing you to quickly block out your level design with basic colored blocks. This combined with preloaded behavior types, such as platforming and 8-directional movement, allow for simple prototypes to be created and tested in a matter minutes. The event system is also incredibly intuitive for anyone with event the most basic understanding of game/programming logic, allowing for the rapid creation of additional functionality.

Whether you’re a student or AAA dev, Construct 2 offers something for everyone and is constantly updated and improved upon by its creators. In an effort to keep the engine as up-to-date as possible, the two men behind Construct’s creation release updates every couple weeks, which means bugs get fixed quickly and new functionality is added often. So, go show a little gamedev love to an amazing product and download the free version at Scirra.com and play around with it a little, and if you like it, download the fully licensed version to help fund an amazing product.

EDIT: Construct is currently available on PC only. While this does suck for people who own Macs that are interested in the program, you must keep in mind that the program is being developed by only 2 guys. Last I had heard, a Mac port was on the agenda but wouldn’t be a reality until they had the time/resources to dedicate to it.

I had recently hooked Jason up with a little Behringer mixer and some spare M-Audio BX5a speakers. He immediately transformed into the Maxell guy. The one sitting in the chair. Google it. He felt my pain. He had been experiencing the sound in our games in a way that transcended his previous Labtec lifestyle, and he yearned for others to share in that experience.

So, we decided to buy all the designers headphones. Nothing too fancy, just some reliable, closed-ear Sennheiser headphones. There are a lot of designers at Volition, so it wasn’t going to be cheap no matter which way we sliced it. It turned out that it was easy to justify, though. How?

Story time! This is a dramatization, this did not really happen, but it could. It totally could.

It’s down to the eleventh hour. Only two months before submission. An overworked system design hero is hunched over his computer, the outline of his spine practically ripping through the back of his shirt. A bare light bulb dangles over his head, the hot, oppressive light illuminating the beads of sweat on his scalp. A cigarette dangles loosely from his lips as his fingers punch his keyboard to tweak the handling of a motorcycle for the fiftieth time that day. CLAKKETY-CLAK CLICK CLICKETY CLACK. He threads his hands between his glasses and his eyes and grinds more sweat into his corneas. He is numb to the sting. He’s done. It’s time to test. He runs the game, hops on the motorcycle and drives. He drives and drives, far away from this place. He is happy. He checks in his work and falls asleep in his chair, snoring loudly for three hours before he has to wake up again.

Next day, it’s time for a multi-discipline group review of vehicles! Yay! Even the producer is there! Team Audio bounces on their tails into the conference room. One audio hero is particularly excited to hear his new motorcycle audio in action. He had spent a good five hours last week making sure that all the loops were smooth and that each gear sounded more aggressive than the last. He was proud of it. The game is loaded up. The motorcycle is mounted. And then BARRFFFFFF. It sounds awful! It doesn’t sound anything like it did last week. Producer mad! PRODUCER MAD!!! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES. Producer chases audio designer around the building with a chainsaw to the theme from Benny Hill.

So, what happened? I’ll tell you what happened. Vehicle designer changed the handling of the motorcycle but didn’t listen to hear how the handling totally botched the audio, and then he checked it in.

Now, to be fair, audio hero screwed up, too, so to any design heroes reading this, I’m not trying to pick on you. A smart audio hero knows better than to spend five hours tweaking vehicle engine audio when the handling isn’t finished. That’s why I chose this dramatization. Besides, the only thing that’s even remotely realistic in this dramatization is the behavior of the producer. I’m kidding! (I’m not kidding).

So, we bought all the designers headphones. And we didn’t just buy headphones and throw them at the designers’ desks and swagger off, either. I sent numerous messages to the entire design team offering my personal assistance in hooking things up however they wanted. Want to be able to switch between listening to the game and listening to your PC with one convenient swap of a cable without crawling under your desk? I can do that for you. Want to be able to listen to Hey Ash, Watcha Playin’ on your PC and listen to the game at the same time? I gotcha covered. Want to listen to your PC, PS3, 360, PSP, and iPad at the same time? Okay, that’s annoying. Not doing it… Oh, alright, I’ll hook you up.

I’m not going to lie. It’s not like every single designer is listening to the game at all times. That would be amazing, but it would probably drive them insane, especially since audio tends to be in this weird, ramshackle state until about three days after release to manufacturing. And just buying headphones for designers doesn’t replace relentless communication and real rapport. But it helped. It really did. Designers were coming to us with audio issues before the group playtests, and we were able to fix those issues before the producer had even finished marinating his garotte in botulinum toxin.

All we had to do was describe a handful of these scenarios while groveling obsequiously at the feet of our finance hero and boom, headphones for all.

So, to all the Team Audios out there, if you find yourself in a situation where nobody is listening to the game, take some time to make your case to your buddies in studio management and finance. Ask to earmark a little bit of money for some listening pleasure for your colleagues. If you can’t afford it, at the very least you can spend some time informing and educating your colleagues from the other disciplines about how their changes can affect your work. Work with them to coordinate your changes in a way that makes sense. Invite them into your world. Because in the end, it could mean saving a life. I’m looking at you, producers. Wait, who, me? No, no, I wasn’t looking at you. I was, uhm, I was admiring your coffee cup. <nervous whistle>

This post is the continuation of my last one: A functional definition of Beauty

Today on the menu:

• Beauty is identified in novel things which resemble familiar things, and not in familiar things: we know the things we know aren’t perfect. We don’t know how perfect this new awesome thing might be. Beauty is the unrealistic size of this possibility space, which is only reduced after we have taken the time to analyze this new thing and find its limits.
• Beauty is fantasizing and imagining how awesome this new thing is going to be.
• Beauty is fantasizing about how much more fun we’re going to have with this new thing that has been really awesome up to now.
• You have to promise a lot, keep your promises, KEEP promising stuff, KEEP delivering, up to the end.
• Since beauty is mostly identified in new stuff that resembles familiar stuff, you can’t just fork out the same stuff over and over, you have to make up something sufficiently familiar but sufficiently new. As far as I know, this has been confirmed by psychologists and other relevant people.

In my last post, I described how beauty is strongly linked to familiarity and the comfort  zone of the audience, and concluded by saying that people only identify stuff to be possibly awesome if it fits their existing knowledge of what awesomeness is, which is based on the things they already know, i.e. what they’re familiar with.

Now readers pointed out something I had missed. I had in fact wrongly assumed that it meant that we considered familiar things to be beautiful. I basically confused the comfort zone and the set of things that are familiar to us, when in fact things probably look more like this :

So what about things that are familiar to us which we don’t like then ?

This is where it gets interesting.

You see, one other thing I didn’t take into account, was things getting expelled from the comfort zone. You know, sometimes you like a thing, and a couple days later… meh.

I think we can safely identify two phases: identifying potential, and analyzing value.

Simply put, you see a thing X which looks promising, and you’re really excited about it. Then when you actually spend some time with it, you realize it’s not as great as you thought it was going to be.

Why were you excited about X in the first place then ? Because you only identified potential from the surface.
Why did you stop liking it if it was supposed to be nice ? Because you learned more about X by spending time with it, and you discovered it had flaws and limits. You basically came back down to earth.

Example: ephemeral art. It works because we just won’t know how much more awesome it could have been, and because we didn’t have time to analyze how much less  awesome it  would actually have been, which is the point really, to wonder about possibilities.

Why is that, then ? Well, it only seems logical to me that we would always want to find better things for ourselves: we compare new stuff to old stuff, and try to identify possible benefits of replacing the old by the new. Well, the “replacing” part isn’t really important, the “finding awesome new stuff” however is where the magic happens.

I’ll go ahead and claim that beauty, is perceived at the moment we start analyzing something on a surface level, and it looks reaaaaally awesome and promising: the positive possibility space of X is immense and full of awesome possibilities if all we have seen from X up to now is perfection. It takes time to discover the flaws and limits of things.

The most important part is how unrealistically large the potential of X is perceived to be, based on how much of X has matched our criteria of what perfection is up to now.

People only identify stuff to be possibly awesome if it fits their existing knowledge of what awesomeness is. Now like I said last time, the important part is familiarizing people with things iteratively.

Hopefully coming up with incrementally new stuff isn’t necessarily too hard. Creating 100% new things is practically impossible, and not technically a good idea anyway. Like atoms and molecules for new chemicals/materials, good pre-existing ideas is what makes up new good ideas.

Want to make your game not boring ? You have to use this psychological property to your advantage. Unless I’m mistaken, I think Mike Birkhead named that Asymmetry in a recent post. You can think of this as diversity vs variation. Well, pacing isn’t really what I want to talk about right now, I’ll come back to this in a later post. Still, as far as I know, this “new is bigger” effect is what good diversity is based on – note: I’ll talk about a diversity vs consistency paradox in a later post too.

If you can promise stuff and deliver, that’s not enough, you have to keep promising stuff, and keep delivering. One example I know of this is the Death Note anime. It’s just  massively solid for a really long time. I honestly had trouble watching it a second time without pausing every five minutes because my brain was melting from how awesome it is. More precisely, it’s a police investigation story with a twist. The main characters all have their motives, and the story is almost plothole-free. What drives the story is the  investigation, the leads, hints and opportunities followed by both sides. They plan  everything several moves ahead so the story is consistently surprising: expectations, promises, and the situation are re-evaluated all the time.

I’m getting a bit off-track aren’t I ? What does writing an intricate and solid storyline have to do with beauty you may ask. As a matter of fact, I am getting off-track with beauty. I’m more talking about awesomeness in a more general fashion here. But what it does tell us, is that beauty really kinda stops at the “This new object matches my criteria for  awesomeness” thing. But in an iterative way. And this iterative way is the useful part.

So, What problems are left ?

What people actually want: what the criteria are.

Apart from that, most of what awesome works do, is promise things, and give them to the
audience. I’ve talked about that in my first two posts about Interweaving and Exploitation of Perimeter.

I know I don’t have much credibility compared to professionals, but I do what I can, I’ll get
there eventually.

Anyway, thanks for reading, have a nice week-end n_n

As a part of Betable’s community outreach, we decided to ask indie developers on the IndieGamer and TIGSource forums to weigh in on how they balance gameplay with monetization. The response was overwhelming, and lead to some interesting insights into what game developers find to be appropriate versus abusive monetization.

While opinions differed, I think we can agree that all game developers want to put food on their tables. The problem and opportunity raised by monetization in modern social and mobile games, especially freemium games, is that making money must be integrated into the game itself. For game designers, this means that their decisions will impact not only the user experience, but also how much money the game makes. Instead of getting paid $50 upfront for a game, your game’s monetization hooks translate directly into revenue.

Often times, this means game designers have to make trade-offs between gameplay and monetization. So how do you monetize your game effectively without tarnishing your game’s creative vision? When it came to discussing this question, opinions were strong but largely reflected the same principles:

Content is key
If you’re creating a game, the majority of what makes that game worthwhile is content. If you are making a freemium game, there should be enough free content to make the game worth downloading. Asking users to pay for new content is perfectly acceptable.

Be honest
One respondent wisely stated that “each payment should purchase a system that was designed with the best intentions to provide the experience promised.” Simply put, if you make your customers pay for something and it doesn’t deliver what you promised, they won’t give you a second chance.

Sell experiences, not upgrades
You can charge to unlock Knights or Clerics, but it’s a terrible idea to charge for “Knights that do more damage” or “Clerics that can heal more”. Not only does this break gameplay balance in multiplayer games, but it will give you major headaches when balancing single-player games too.

Make it unique
When creating new content to be sold, you should be selling something interesting rather than a rehash of something old. Notice how each group of new levels in Where’s My Waterfeature new gameplay challenges and environments.

Limit the treadmill
Your game shouldn’t make paying the only alternative to a miserable, boring grind. To this end, one method of managing grinding was highlighted by Roger Dickey on our blog. It’s called Grind vs. Spam vs. Pay: to obtain pieces of a special item, players can grind, ask their friends, or pay. This gives the players more options for obtaining an item, and they can buy the item at a discount if they get tired of grinding part-way through.

Avoid obnoxious ads
Like low-rent industrial zones in Sim City, quick and dirty advertising tactics are both the easiest way to make money and the quickest way you can pollute your game’s environment. This includes immersion-killing full-page ads, distracting banners in gameplay screens, and even promotion of in-game paid content. Instead, regulate ads to non-gameplay screens, like the inventory screen, and only include full-page ads if it fits with a natural disruption in gameplay, such as between turns in Hero Academy.

The Golden Rule: “Don’t be a dick”
Put on your player hat and ask yourself, what is reasonable? If you make these games, you probably play them too. When playing, make a note of when a monetization hook frustrates you and (more importantly) when it doesn’t.

The struggle here is that everyone wants to make money, but opinions differ greatly on how much you should have allow monetization to encroach on gameplay. While monetization will always be a bitter pill for some game developers to swallow, the above principles should help you make money from your game while preserving gameplay.

I do Marketing at Betable, the first ever platform that lets game developers legally add real-money play to their games. Honestly, one of the reasons I joined Betable is because it gives developers a way to monetize that doesn’t sacrifice gameplay. If you’re interested, shoot me a tweet at @davidtyleryork or @betable.

The Theme

The Ouroboros – but no explanation was given.  We just showed the jammers the image and it was up to them to interprete it.

LOTR Body Snatching

Rock, Paper, Scissors with body snatching!
Avoid or possess enemies to stay alive and win.

Low Power

In order to survive Low Power you must consume yourself (like the Ouroboros) to survive.  You control a robot whose battery is constantly draining but there are valuable energy cores scattered throughout the level that will sustain your life.  There are all kinds of dangerous environmental hazards that unless you enable your sensors/abilities (lights, shield, ground sensor, microphone) you’ll never survive.  However enabling the different systems will drain your battery even faster!

Parasite

You are a Parasite that leeches off battle ships. Enemies will constantly come in formations to destroy the ship you are occupying. Using the possessed ship, you must defeat your enemies! However, as you leech your ship it slowly dies, you will constantly need to take control of and leech of another ship. With out a ship for protection you are helpless!

Planes on a Snake

A rift in spacetime has resulted in a large number of World War II era planes getting stuck on the world snake.  Join the frequent fliers club of Ouroboros Airlines, racking up points while taking advantage of the torus nature of your new environment.

Roller Snake: The Quest for Chili Dogs

Control “Hardy the Hoop Snake, Jr., III, IV, and V” in his quest to eat as many chili dogs as possible while winding through ‘Catastrophe Canyon’

Snake Run

You are the snake’s guardian, you must ensure that balance is maintained.  Let enough creatures be eaten by the snake to ensure he doesn’t starve, but not enough that he frenzies and destroys everything.  All the while outrunning him!

Global Game Jam 2012 Wrap-Up @ nickdarnell.com

Can we blame the audience? The game community is known for its outspokenness, and studios have to work under the watchful eye of a legion of fans. Try to make a more accessible PC game and be accused of pandering to consoles. Make a sequel that departs too much from the original(s) and no one buys your game. The fickleness of audiences, and studios too willing to pander to them produces an industry afraid of change. This is hardly a new statement, but people seem to accept it. The mainstream game industry is in serious danger of following the same route as comic books. Readers became so averse to new series that publishers stopped making them, instead making countless crossovers that sold well, but were of no interest to non-fans. Today, comics are most definitely a cult industry, with the top-sellers only popular due to film/tv adaptations. We can only avoid the same fate if gamers become willing to spend their money on different games. Smaller, different games can still sell well (obligatory Minecraft reference) so is the audience really so afraid to try new things?

Something else is holding developers back. The ‘art’ or ‘Art’ debate is tiring now, but many of the popular ‘Art’ games cited are those that dissect other games. Bioshock as comment on gamers’ lack of narrative control, The Stanley Parable as rant against traditional narratives in games.  The audience might find it interesting, but in the end, players don’t care about theories of game design, they just want a good game. There is a danger of creating a culture that just wants to talk about itself, like some unintentional parody of post-modernism. Repeating a statement about game mechanics isn’t noteworthy, you have to use it to help another statement. Shadow of the Colossus uses gamers’ urge to continue to make a tragedy, the player realises the horror of what they are doing, but is unable to stop. I just watched The Artist, and although at first I thought it was exploiting the style of silent films as a gimmick, it plays with the format to enhance the story. It uses this knowledge of film techniques to make something new, interesting beyond a pastiche.

So where does all this come from, and why can’t we stop? Perhaps we can blame the stereotype of the ‘gamer nerd’. Games have been looked down on for most of their existence, maybe we’ve just given up trying to reach out to new players. We turned to the art world in an attempt to justify all this to ourselves. A museum is a terrible place to put games, yet we parade them there to get the approval of ‘real’ artists. But we don’t need them, we have the attention of the wider world and it wants to play games, as Zynga has shown. We need to stop looking at the magic mirror and make games for everyone else.

Note: This is reposted on my blog, if you’re into that sort of thing

“Add things until it starts sucking, take things away until it stops getting better”

Good systems find a balance between keeping the player guessing and keeping things simple; this means both knowing how many options to provide the player, and knowing when to say no to something regardless of how cool. It involves things like how many weapons to have in the game, how many talent trees, or how many monsters to spawn in an encounter.

Situations like this rarely have the perfect answer, and that limitless possibility shuts my brain right off. That first brush stroke on a blank canvas can be the most difficult, so I always try to constrain my options.

You are probably familiar with the Fibonacci sequence from your college math classes, but if you need a refresher it looks like this:

1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, …

There are two applications of this sequence that I apply to game design: the Rule of Three (extended edition), and the Golden Ratio.

The Rule of Three (extended edition)

The first use of Fibonacci game design is the Rule of Three. The number three is a special number in game design — in everything, really. It crops up everywhere: three talent trees, three rounds, three party members, etc.

I don’t care what you are designing, if you can break things down, divide things up, or cut things out so that it gets you down to threes, then it is a good decision. Your game will, in all likelihood, be better for it. That’s a promise. It will feel rough, I know, and you will mourn the loss from something from the game, but the player doesn’t know what you cut from your game, they only know the product.

The Rule of Three is so universal and applicable that it will probably be the greatest trick in your toolbox for a long time. People will marvel at your ability to create simple, clean, elegant systems, and little will they know that all you did was focus on that little number three. Look: I’m not crazy. The number three is just super powerful. You can see it crop up in all different kinds of fields:

• Photography – Rule of Thirds
• Writing – Rule of three
• Economics – Rule of Three
• Project Estimations – Even how you estimate your time if off by a factor of 3

But I admit, at times it won’t feel right to break things down to threes, and that’s where his two friends come into play: two and five.

There is just something about systems in twos, threes, and fives. They just feel RIGHT. You feel like you have choice, but you are not overwhelmed. You will notice, of course, that these are Fibonacci numbers — 2, 3, 5 — which is NOT a coincidence.

Here’s why: once you provide five options to the player it can be super easy to say, “why not six?” Sure, why NOT six. Well, because it bloats the game, dummy. More is not always better; in fact, it is almost always worse.

When I think about adding something to the game I constrain myself within Fibonacci’s beautiful sequence, for it forces me to REALLY commit to “just one more”, as now it is NOT just one more, but in fact several more. If, for example, I currently provide five options, then I would have to upgrade it to eight; for eight, thirteen. The choice to increase the player’s options, as you can clearly see, gets heftier and heftier: THERE’S A LESSON THERE.

Do this, and everything you design will turn up golden.

Golden Ratio

How much experience should the player need at level 50 versus level 30? How much at level 20?

You will face and solve this problem at least once in your career. Probably more than once, if you become a system designer, and it is another of those blank canvas problems. The experience caps you set can be almost ANYTHING. It’s simply a matter of how you want your game to scale, how you want to control your gains, and the feel you want for the system. Of course, certain choices you make can make your life more or less difficult.

Now, me personally, I prefer systems that grow exponentially. They just FEEL better to me. I like gaining levels really fast in the beginning, so you can get that Pavlovian reward system going.

But HOW do we grow something exponentially, and at what rate? Enter the Golden Ratio.

Take any number N from the Fibonacci sequence and divide it by the previous number in the sequence N-1. As N approaches infinity, the number you get from the division approaches the Golden Ratio. Ah HA, you say! You wondered when this would tie back to that Fibonacci fellow. This is interesting, but how is it useful?

Link: The Short form to solve for the Golden Ratio

The Golden Ratio, like the rule of three, crops up all over the place.

• The proportions of the human body
• The spiral of a nautilus shell
• The spirals in the arms of a galaxy
• The rectangular shape of light switches

Link: Vitruvian Man compared against golden ratios

From the very small to the very large it shows up, and there is something about it that we find pleasing. Where am I going with this? Anyone that has done this already knows where I’m headed, so let’s catch you up. Our goal is to create an equation to calculate how much experience the player needs at any particular level, and we want it to grow exponentially. Here’s an example of something I have used in the past as a starting point (Coefficient and Exponent are constants).

Reward = Coefficient * (GoldenRatio ^ (Level + Exponent))

Things usually deviate from this, especially when systems start interacting, but it’s usually a nice starting point with pleasing results. OK, you say, what about a real world example of how to use all this Fibonacci game design? Let’s take a look at MK9.

Example Applications

When I was designing the Challenge Tower for MK9 I was faced with a compelling problem. The player should have 300 completely different missions, they needed to get money for beating them, they should be able to buy their way passed missions they didn’t like, and it needed to all fit into the larger picture of the entire economy.

The first question was how to break up the missions. I decided on blocks of 5 missions that focused on the same character. This way I could ramp up the difficulty on a player, and they are given enough time to familiarize themselves with how that character controls. Between each block would be a minigame, which breaks up the gameplay to keep things interesting.

I also had some special or funny missions that I wanted to showcase, and doing it this way meant I could have a cool mission every 30 missions.

Once I had everything broken up into my mission blocks, I began the next phase of the process, which was to systematically rank them on how difficult they were on a scale of one to five. It is difficult to do this kind of estimation in a vacuum, by the way, so make good use of other people. You are always going to be the worst judge of your own difficulty spikes.

Link: A Screenshot Of The File I Used

As an aside, I was also tracking the kind of gameplay gimmicks being used, how many times different characters occurred, what arenas it took place in, what kind of ring knockouts used, etc. Missions were constantly being shuffled around, and keeping this file maintained was a full time and commitment heavy job, but it was so worth it.

Finally, now that I had all the missions organized and categorized, I was ready to start assigning reward values to them, which, using the 5 point difficulty scale I already created, was output from the following formula:

Reward = 50 * (2 ^ Difficulty)

This gave me nice round numbers that started off at 100. The final outcome looks random, but you can see that at every step of the process I was making meaningful calls about how things were organized, and, more importantly, you probably noticed the constant appearance of 2, 3, and 5 in the design. That was all on purpose.

Bottom line

“When forced to work within a strict framework the imagination is taxed to its utmost — and will produce its richest ideas. Given total freedom the work is likely to sprawl.” – T.S. Eliot

Designs with no structure tend to sprawl. It’s something that we all understand, but it can be very hard to follow that advice. Being a designer means you have the heart of a dreamer, or you wouldn’t be doing the job in the first place. We like adding shit, because we traffic in a world of cool. Isn’t it better if we add more? Probably not.

The numbers two, three, and five are not magic missiles, however, and they won’t suddenly make your designs super clean; what they WILL do is help keep a structure to things and, like I said, a little bit of constraint can be very helpful when staring down the barrel of the blank canvas.

Look back to the original task I was given on the Challenge Tower: 300 missions of various gameplay. That’s it! Just 300 missions, go take care of it – gulp! I love tasks like that, though, and you probably do too; yet, such freedom can easily cause you to baulk. How do I start?!

Me, I immediately apply my Fibonacci structure to the process; not because it limits to my imagination, but because it allows my brain to focus on what matters: giving the player a good experience.

The same will be true for you. Fibonacci game design is a total Ace up your sleeve. You can apply it to almost every single system you ever attack, and people will marvel at your ability to create clean, simple, fun systems.

Psychophysiological Measures

So what are these things?These measures receive input from various places of the human body. Usually, measures that fall under this category are eye-tracking, pupilometry, electroencephalography (EEG), electromyography (EKG), and galvanic skin response (GSR). To understand these, I will present each measure together with its related technology, and what that technology actually measures.

Eye Tracking

Eye Tracker

Eye tracking allows us to see where the users have looked over a certain time period of working with a program. This technique used to involve having users restrain their heads with various types of restraining devices, so that their eyes’ positions would remain stationary over the course of an observation, but now these restrictions are gone. This technique is difficult when using on a game that has rapidly changing visual structures, because eye tracking shines at showing where users look at most of the time. Thus, it is mostly used for website evaluations, and in marketing research.

However, all is not lost for eye-tracking. There are certain places where examining what our players look at is extremely helpful. For example, Key Lime Interactive used it to examine how players use the UI elements of their games (the UI is usually static over the course of a game). Read more about how they performed their study here.

Pupilometry

Another measure that could be used during game evaluations is the measurement of pupil dilation over the course of playing a game. Pupils dilate as a response to emotional arousal, attention, and cognitive load (i.e., the amount of information a person is thinking about). Thus, this measure could be used to understand where players find things difficult, to the point of feeling like giving up. Usually, pupilometry can be performed with instruments that are found on good eye trackers.

The two measures together provide a good way of exploring games in terms of game analytics, and examining where players have problems that can turn an otherwise great game into a challenge nightmare, leading to players dropping the game and expressing dissatisfaction because of the game being too hard!

Elecroencephalography (EEG)

EEG together with EMG and GSR are more exotic (!) measures that require much more expensive equipment than eye-trackers. However, there are some limited functionality, affordable gear that may be used for EEG. The results from the EEG are brainwave data that voltage fluctuations resulting from ionic current flows within the neurons of the brain.

Measurements from the EEG can be used to examine the psychological state of a player, without resorting to the think-aloud protocol that tends to interrupt the thinking process, and distracts the player from the game. Thus, once more, this type of usability evaluation may not provide too much about usability problems in the game, but it will provide clues about how the player feels about our game. The other plus of the method is that the data are taken live during play, not through distracting the player, and not after the player finishes the play session.

Electromyography (EMG)

EMG is another exotic measure, used to measure muscle tension. EMGs for game evaluation can be used to measure the tension of muscles on the face, which tense according to specific emotions. For example, we can measure muscle tension in muscles that tense when the players smile and frown, thus gaining significant insights about when the players have problems, when the players find the game funny, and when they are challenged, again during the play session.

Galvanic Skin Response (GSR)

One last measure that is used to gauge the emotions of players is GSR. The measurement of skin conductance provides us a way of looking at the players’ emotional arousal, and more specifically their happiness level. It seems that the skin gives a different measurement when we are happy and when we are sad. Therefore, GSR is another way of getting live readings during a play session of the player’s emotional state.

The evaluation techniques and measures that were presented in this post are more technically oriented than in my other posts. I hope that this post has shined a little more light into the obscure world of emotional measurements and eye-tracking, and has provided at least some ideas about how to receive more feedback about our game designs than those that are given verbally by game testers.

I’ve been holding off posting for about two months because I either didn’t have time to post, or I didn’t feel my posts were solid enough.

Now that both those problems have been fixed, here’s my new post about beauty.

In my last post about open-mindedness I hinted at the importance of the comfort zone, and I’m going to talk about it in this post, amongst other things.

I’ve also promised a post on education, and a post on game design. Both are coming, and will be pretty nice as far as I know, but they’ll come later.

So, a functional definition of beauty, and how it relates to the audience’s comfort zone.

But let’s start with ugliness. Ugliness is a subjective characteristic attributed to some things by an observer, based on whether these things match or don’t match certain criteria: a thing is judged ugly by a certain standard or set of standards. What the criteria are isn’t important since they can change over time. What’s important is that we judge things by association. The fundamental idea of ugliness vs beauty exists for a reason, i.e. it is a heuristic used to assess whether something is good for us or not, based on what we already know. The things that look like good stuff we already know probably are things that are good for us. The same goes for ugliness: what looks like bothersome stuff probably is bothersome stuff. We treat ugliness like a problem that needs to be solved. A few solutions include keeping away from ugliness, keeping ugliness away, destroying ugliness or changing it into something else.

Now what about beauty. I think beauty can be achieved through three axes: clarity, positive evocation, and familiarity. Which all revolve around the same thing, i.e. the comfort zone. We accept beautiful things into our comfort zone, or more probably, we consider the things in our comfort zone to be beautiful. What isn’t in our comfort zone but looks like things in our comfort zone will be accepted in it more easily, and will therefore also be considered beautiful. Put more simply, “good for us”<=>”beautiful” and “unknown”<=>”cannot be accepted into the comfort zone” (One does not simply walk into the comfort zone).

Clarity or simplicity is an important aspect of beauty: if something isn’t familiar to us, but is a good thing and needs to be seen as such, the faster the people realize that thing is good for them, the smaller the chance they will run away from it. If something is excessively complicated and obscure, it will take longer to see beauty through all the irrelevant stuff. If something can be instantly recognized as good for us, we won’t run away. If it takes too long to identify something as “good”, the greater the chance of us mistaking it for either something “bad” or “background noise”. Basically, Clarity is the speed at which we can familiarize ourselves with something.

Positive Evocation is basically how things that aren’t in our comfort zone get accepted inside it by looking like stuff that is already in it. If a new thing reminds us of something good we already know, we’ll associate this new thing with the one we already know and accept it in our comfort zone. Basically, remind people of things they like (positive evocation) in a non-ambiguous way, and people will love what you do (note: I said we should do that. I didn’t say that there isn’t anything else to do. Because there is).

We learn how to appreciate things iteratively. We like A. We don’t know B but it looks like A. So we’ll accept B. Then there’s C, which looks like B. Since we have accepted B, we’ll also accept C. Do notice that we wouldn’t have accepted C if we had come across it without having come across B previously.

Example: why do heavily-stereotyped movies sell more than intricate works of art ? Well, because people are simple-minded (I said simple-minded, not stupid: kids are simple-minded, and whoever doesn’t get educated, stays a kid), and prefer watching things they already know they will like after watching the trailer. Note: There’s something else going on here, I’ll talk about rationalization and why critics find badly stereotyped things terrible in a later post.

Still: we gravitate towards beauty. We also gravitate towards familiar things. Well, because they are both the same for us: we can only like things that match our criteria of what beauty consists of. Except, we could ask ourselves, can “Beauty” change our current standards, maybe in a “love at first sight” way ? I wouldn’t say “change” as much as “rearranging our existing criteria regarding one another”. For example, we might not have considered combining trait A and trait B, but the result is really nice.

Example: why we should introduce art to people progressively. People have to be able to relate to the artworks. They have to understand what is beautiful about the artworks. If your audience isn’t used to certain things, they won’t be able to accept them as easily. The thing here is, there isn’t really a clear difference between “familiar” and “unfamiliar”. Everything is more or less familiar, has different traits, some of which resemble things we know, while others are new to us. Take music genres for example. Most people have at least listened to Rock at least a few times, and probably like it. Well, Metal is somewhat related to Rock, since the same instruments are used. But someone who listens to Rock doesn’t necessarily listen to or even like Metal, because, well, obviously it isn’t Rock. But if you listen to Punk Rock or Melodic Metalcore, you might have a hard time differentiating them in certain cases. That’s because they have common traits. As far as I know, to appreciate something new, you just need to see it as a further variation of something you already know and understand.

Example: why are people xenophobic ? Because we do not know what foreigners might do differently from us. “Foreign people -> maybe there are some unknown differences -> we can’t accept them for sure -> we need to keep away from them”. That’s the xenophobic line of thinking at least. The problem here is unfamiliarity and suspicion: we don’t want to take risks. We need to study the risks from far away (but not too far, we need to still be able to observe what they do). Keeping away but keeping an eye on something is called familiarization. Even in the first second of coming across something familiar but unexpected, our brain will freeze during the time it is analyzing this thing, before finally determining there’s nothing to worry about. We just want to keep away from ugliness :].

To conclude: Beauty is subjective, and people need keys to unlock the beauty in things they’re not familiar with yet. You could say that the comfort zone is like a key holder. And the different keys on it are the criteria from the standards used by people to assess the beauty of things.
The ability to look for beauty in everything is called open-mindedness. I’ve talked about that last time.
The speed at which the beauty of something can be unlocked is called clarity and simplicity. We find beauty faster in things that evoke things we already like.

So take away these three axes – Beauty is:
-Clarity
-Positive Evocation
-Familiarity

Well, everything went better than expected n___n
I wasn’t certain to manage to write this post without sounding too pedantic or vague.

Anyway, thanks for reading, have a nice day/evening :D.

See you next time n____n

Indie developer Nimblebit dropped a PR bomb on Zynga yesterday with it’s letter addressing the similarities between their hit iPhone game Tiny Tower and Zynga’s upcoming release, Dream Heights. This galvanized the gaming community, with thousands of people, from prominent bloggers to gamers on Reddit criticizing the company.

However, just after the new year, Atari ordered the removal of Black Powder Media’s Vector Tanks, a game strongly inspired by Atari’s Battlezone. This galvanized the community in a similar way, except this time, gamers were furious that Atari shut down an indie game company that made an extremely similar game.

Unfortunately, the line between inspiration and copying is incredibly blurry at best. The one thing that’s certain is that copying is here to stay. Copying has been present in some form since the dawn of capitalism (if you need proof, just go to the toothpaste isle of your local supermarket). The game industry is no stranger to this trend: game companies have been copying each other for years. Given it’s repeated success, there’s little reason to think that this practice will stop. Indie flash game studio XGEN Studios posted a response to Nimblebit, showing that their hit games were also copied:

Some would even argue that the incredibly successful iOS game Angry Birds was a copy of the popular Armor Games flash game, Crush the Castle, but then Crush the Castle was inspired by others that game before it. Social games even borrow many of their game mechanics from slot machines to increase retention. So what is copying, or more importantly, which parts of it are moral and immoral? Everyone seems to have a different answer, but it’s safe to say that people always copy the most successful ideas. The one thing that those in the Zynga-Nimblebit conversation seems to have overlooked is that everyone copies others in some way.

Of course, while imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, it doesn’t feel good to be imitated when a competitor comes after your users. In this case, people may question Zynga’s authenticity and make a distinction between inspiration and outright duplication. But at the same time, Zynga’s continued success with the “watch, then replicate” model shows that marketing, analytics, and operations can improve on an existing game concept. Or just give them the firepower to beat out the original game, depending on how you look at it.

I want to hear your thoughts: Should game companies be encouraged or punished for taking the best ideas from other games? Where do you draw the line between inspiration and duplication? Sound off in the comments.

State Changes

A state change is when a character changes from one set of animations to another by some sort of trigger. These are most often used in combat to change from the standing idle and suite of animations to the combat idle and the attack suite of animations. In this case, the trigger is either a button press by the player or some form of combat engagement of the NPC. This then plays a transitional animation of the character drawing their weapon or putting up their dukes. Pretty standard fare that is built out of necessity and function more so than personality.  Certainly the personality of a character can be reflected in their combat state (proud, aggressive, timid, etc) but it is when state changes are applied to other triggers that a real life and awareness can be breathed into a character. State changes give characters a purpose and outline a goal or objective they intend to overcome and that is what drives the entirety of life.

I was recently posed a question: why are movie boss fights superior to game boss fights. The question was framed through the stance that movie fights are, in general, more visually (and I would add, emotionally) satisfying. Yet I am sure, at this very moment, you are conjuring up your favorite video game fights; and, chances are, you are well on your way to skipping this entire post in order to rail me with examples – just hold up. If I took the stance that all video game boss fights are bad, then that would be an untenable position, yet that is not what I am saying. What I’m saying is that movies are just so damn good; more importantly, they achieve their greatness with higher consistency, which is what we want, isn’t it?

So, after much thought, I realized we had the wrong question, and the real question is thus: how do movie boss fights satisfy the audience with greater consistency than games? A difficult question, but one I think we can answer. The journey starts by learning what movies are trying to accomplish.

Movie Boss Fights

Nothing moves forward in a story except through conflict

- Robert McKee

Movies are a visual storytelling medium. Stating the obvious, I know, but the path to unraveling their consistent mastery starts by first understanding their intent: tell an honest story.

Cinema always strives for asymmetry; meaning, movies want visual diversity. A movie must not repeat itself — visually, or otherwise — because repetition is boring, and a bored audience is a lost audience. More than this, though, is the fact that opportunities to deepen, or enhance, a movie’s storytelling in a visual manner must be taken — MUST. A character cannot simply “overcome” a situation. No, he must act in a way that is honest to his character, or the illusion is lost.

Clip: Big Trouble in Little China, Jack Burton vs Lo Pan

There is a reason that this has the title “Quite Possibly the Best Scene Ever Filmed,” and I would add, best boss fight ever filmed. Jack Burton’s character acts in a way that is completely honest to his character: both overly confident and utterly hopeless, yet still managing to get things done in a bad ass way. Compare and contrast that with Egg Shen’s battle with Lo Pan earlier in the movie.

Clip: Big Trouble in Little China, Egg Shen vs Lo Pan

Ignore, for a moment, that the two battles are completely different in terms of execution and focus on Egg Shen’s battle. Notice that Egg Shen controls his avatar through a crystal, whereas Lo Pan does not; both do mythical battle, but their methods of evocation are visually different. As you can see, these fights with Lo Pan provide mountains of information about people involved, and the net result is that you know these characters.

Stomping out boredom and cliche from your movie is about being honest to your characters, but it is also about defying the viewer’s expectations; or, what Robert McKee would call Defining the Gap. This is an important point to understand, because boss fights are the ultimate gap — and, when combined with asymmetry, defines the complete picture of a movie boss fight:

• present a conflict – the Big Bad
• defy expectations – have the Big Bad appear to a great advantage
• maximize asymmetry – have the protagonist overcome this adversity in an honest and visually unique way

Movie boss fights are so satisfying because they take this list of three goals and do everything to maximize their impact; which is to say, they maximize their visual storytelling. Cool camera angles, bad ass stunts, the hugest of explosions, witty lines, and unexpected turns of character are all paths to this goal. The writer, director, composer and cinematographer do everything they can to make the boss fight as mighty and honest as possible.

What does all of this have to do with Games? Well, games need all of these things, too, but they have their own concerns that change the dynamic.

Games vs Movies

Participation is our double edged sword. It is our greatest strength, yet it is also our greatest weakness. In the right hands, participation enhances our attachment to the game, for we realize that we are not being told a story, but instead becoming a story.

However, if you treat participation like a crutch, then, like a stubborn child, you will slam that square peg into that round hole until the player’s interest shatters into a million pieces. Instead, you must embrace participation, and to do so means motivating the player — either extrinsically, or intrinsically — while avoiding two major pitfalls.

Compulsion and Extrinsic Motivation

This is the dark side. Its power is great, my friends, and it will tempt you with its ability to keep the player participating. But users of extrinsic motivation must always be wary of its partner in crime, the Justification Effect.

That article makes mention of an interesting study, wherein they gave prizes to children who chose to draw during free time, and what’s so fascinating is that weeks later, when given free reign, the children showed a sharp decline in their interest in drawing. Humans are so crazy!

The takeaway, to me, is that giving planned — that’s the key, remember — rewards to people for things they already like doing kills the enjoyment. It distorts their user story. Don’t you see how that can be potentially damaging to your game? Please, people, think of the children.

Look: I’m not saying you must remove compulsory rewards in your game. Hi, I love Diablo just as much as the next person. What I’m trying to tell you is that extrinsic motivators have a downside; a very powerful one, and you can not, should not, dangle carrots in front of every single part of your game.

If you keep asking yourself, “BUT THEN WHY WOULD THE PLAYER WANT TO DO X?” then, well, I’m going to go out on a limb and say you have bigger problems in your game. Designers that constantly worry about trying to compel the player through their game have stopped asking the right question, which is, of course, wether the game is any damn fun at all. (Chances are the answer is no, and you are afraid to admit it).

Accomplishment and Intrinsic Motivation

The righteous path is usually the harder path, and leaving the player feeling accomplished is difficult work. It is the ultimate result of a pyramid of factors, but it comes, most of all, from allowing the player to make meaningful choices in how she resolves her conflicts. The thing about accomplishment is that it is addicting, right? Mastering new things, as Daniel Pink tells us, is one of the three big motivators in our life, and once the player feels like a complete bad ass, is she really going to stop right there? No! She’s going to find that new hill to climb, and climb the ever loving shit out of it, so to speak.

In my design process, fun and accomplishment are interchangeable concepts — if I’m having fun, then I am probably accomplishing something, and vice versa. Despite their interchangeable nature, I spend less time thinking about fun than accomplishment, for I find levels of fun harder to quantify; consequently, when playing the game, I often ask myself, “do I feel like I’ve accomplished anything,” which usually provides a very stark answer: yes, or no.

These are the two major paths to keeping the player involved, and they are complicated topics in their own right; for this discussion, however, I must move on, as I have a lot more to cover. As stated, motivation is great, but there are also two major pitfalls that must be avoided, or everything will come to naught.

• Repetition – Repetition is just as bad in games as it is in movies, for repetition not only fosters boredom, but also dampens accomplishment. A sense of wonder is critical to continued involvement, and wonder cannot exist in a repetitious world, for if I know what comes next, if I know that all my actions are preordained, then I very much stop caring.
• Complexity – Nothing sucks me out of a game faster than complicated control schemes and abstruse functionality. Movies certainly don’t face this problem, and it is a very important one, because even if you nail everything else, if it is too complex, then it becomes a barrier to the rest of your experience.

We have covered a lot so far, so let us review. Boss fights in games are satisfying when, like movies, they maximize their intent, and our list of requirements is similar to what we wanted with movies — but with some differences.

• present a conflict – the Boss
• defy our expectations – the Boss must appear at some unique advantage
• overcome adversity – hopefully in an honest and visually unique way
• engender participation – entice the player with extrinsic, or intrinsic motivations — and no damn cutscenes
• avoid complication – do not introduce new mechanics, abilities, or control inputs in the boss fight

Our list of requirements is longer, but I would argue that it is not necessarily harder. It is just different. Viewed in this light, though, we can clearly spot where most games fail. We rarely, if ever, allow our characters to act in visually unique ways, unless it is in a cutscene; yet still more damning, we far too often introduce, or shoe-horn, functionality into boss fights that complicate the experience.

Clip: Uncharted 1, final boss fight, an example of how not to do it.

I find that avoiding complication and requiring participation are problems that, once aware of their need, make for easy bed fellows. This leaves asymmetry. It is clear to me, and maybe to you, that one of the greatest hurdles in this list is the goal of overcoming adversity in honest and visually unique ways. Which brings us to one of the greatest problems we face in game development.

The Problem

Our oldest foe has always been that of content. I know it, you know it, most everyone knows it; and, if you don’t know it, then you are one of those unfortunate people that screws whole teams over, so you BEST learn it. All too often in my career, when discussing certain ideas, the worry has been about the One-Off: work that is not duplicated. It is the greatest crime you can make in a world of constant reuse, for we must stretch our content as far as we can in games — to the breaking point, honestly.

Every seasoned designer has grappled with the One-Off problem. You have a great idea, but your engine doesn’t support that exact kind of gameplay, or the enemy doesn’t have that animation. Therefore, regardless of the quality of the idea, it must be rejected. Both the time requirements and quantity of content in a game dictate that one-use content is a waste of time. This is our reality, right?

One-offs are not inherently evil, though; I am here to tell you that, when used appropriately, they can inject that much needed variety. But you must do it in a way that neither explodes your content, nor overcomplicates the experience. In short, you must learn the Art of the One-Off.

The Art Of The One-Off

The art of the One-Off is all about planning, compromise, and clarity. If you go into your designs planning for one-offs; if you know exactly when, where, and how to use them; if you understand that you will have to compromise on certain things; and, finally, if you ensure that everything is expressed to the player in a clean manner, then you are ready to introduce very meaningful One-Offs into your game.

God of War is riddled with One Offs, but the goal is usually to hide their simplicity. In Chains of Olympus, for example, we had a few world interactions where we wanted Kratos to knock over large columns, or other large objects. With poor planning, these might have easily exploded into tons of unique animations for the character. Instead, we used planning, compromise, and clarity to ensure that we had the best experience.

Clip: Chains of Olympus, interaction one

We created one shoulder pushing animation and ensured that it would be used in any world cases, planning; since he would be using the same animation, this prompted the world interactions to be slightly adjusted, compromise; lastly, all interactions use the same button to activate, and they are all indicated with twinkles in the level, clarity.

Clip: Chains of Olympus, interaction two

This is a pretty simple example, and all of this is easier said than done, I know, so let’s study a more complete and fantastic example of what I am talking about: Mega Man X.

Mega Man X

Mega Man X is an awesome game. More than that, it was a transformative game. It blew minds, people, and it has more than earned its place in my All Time Favorites. If you have never played it, which would be a CRYING SHAME, then I shall direct you to this wonderful video — Ridin’ on Cars! — that fully captures the awesome of this game.

Mega Man is a series designed around boss fights, so it makes for a great test case. The stages are constructed to train you — which they do, masterfully — for the skills that you will eventually use to defeat the bosses; additionally, all five major actions you can perform in the game are simple:

• Move
• Jump
• Dash
• Shoot
• Switch Buster

That’s it. The key awesome part here, the part that makes this the great One-Off win, is the brilliance in allowing the megabuster to steal attacks from the bosses, and then coupling that with bosses having a unique weakness to specific weapons.

That feeling when you use just the right weapon on just the right boss… exquisite. Check this shit out. Watch Spark Mandrill get totally owned by the player’s use of Chill Penguin’s ice cannon.

Clip: Mega Man X, Spark Mandrill fight

That’s what I’m talking about, people. How do you not scream at your TV, “I GOT YOU,” the whole time that is playing out? It never feels cheap, by the way, because you worked to get Chill Penguin’s gun, and chose to use it on Spark Mandrill. I know, you’re sitting there all like, “damn, Mike, that is kind of bad ass.” But dude, just wait, because it gets even better.

Every boss has a cool unique intro; and, like any good movie, none of it is wasted. Each intro tells you a little something about the guy you are going to be facing. That way, when they use their cool little tricks — always give your enemies a trick — you never feel cheated, because you say to yourself, “yeah, fair enough, I saw you do that.”

Clip: Mega Man X, Boss gauntlet run

I know, now you’re sitting there all like, “Mike, seriously, I can’t handle this awesome.” BUT WAIT. After their intro, every boss does his little pump-up stance, and we get to see his health bar fill all the way up. This is important, as it is the final piece in the puzzle. It very clearly makes a statement about the boss’s initial health advantage.

This all sounds awesome, but let’s compare it against our goals:

• present a conflict – the Boss shows up in some kind of unique fashion, which is usually a hint to a trick they have.
• defy our expectations – the Boss’s health bar filling up is showing us exactly our difference in health. It is a powerful message of, “check out my huge life bar, asshole.” Additionally, the boss’s arena tends to be unique, and they usually employ some kind of trick we’ve never seen before (that they clearly showcase BEFORE the fight).
• overcome adversity – each boss is weak to a specific weapon, and a lot of them react in a powerful way that changes how they act (armadillo’s armor comes off, spark mandrill freezes solid, and flame elephants trunk comes off).
• engender participation – the game doesn’t hold your hand, nor does it show you doing anything cool in a stupid cutscene.
• avoid complication – one, the Bosses all hint to their tricks before the fight starts; two, the levels are all built to train you for the kind of skills you’d need; and three, you never need anything other than the tools you’ve had all game.

Look at that laundry list of ownage. Nailed it.

Point being, they could have easily designed all of those fights without all that One-Off work (unique intros, unique boss rooms, and unique weaknesses). But the fights would not be anywhere near as satisfying, and that’s what matters.

As we said in the beginning, the art of the One-Off is in knowing when the benefits outweigh the cost, and in knowing how to avoid complication. In the case of Mega Man X, since it was a long running sequel, they clearly went into it knowing that Mega Man was going to be stealing and using powers to kick Robobutt, and it shows in the quality of the boss fights. Read that sentence again. Here, I’ll highlight the important part: “…they clearly went into it knowing…”

Roll that around in your head, because you’ll realize there is nothing that prevents us, too, from crafting such cool boss fights. All you need is good planning.

The Six P’s

My grade school teacher made me constantly recite the Six P’s: Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance. It drove me crazy. Maybe she was on to something, though, because it’s forever burned into my brain. I hate it when teachers end up being right.

In our case, seemingly, a piss poor performance is a crappy boss fight, and prior planing is our documentation, right? Well, as you are probably aware, game developers are rarely stricken with sparse documentation, and often we find ourselves laden with pages and pages of laboriously stipulated notes. Been there, done that. But that’s not working, obviously, so clearly documentation — at least, the kind we’re doing — is not the kind of planning you really need.

GRIP for Boss Design

Writing a boss document, marking off a spot near the end of the schedule and labeling it “boss fight” does not cut it. Good planning starts from well crafted goals that are clearly stated; and, understanding your goals is the first of four cycles — GRIP: Goals, Research, Implement, Polish — that all systems go through, even boss fights.

Define Goals

Thankfully, understanding and defining our goals has been the plan throughout this entire post. It has guided us every step of the way, and we know the right goals for any boss fight:

• Define the Gap
• Engender Participation
• Incorporate One Offs
• Avoid Complication

These goals, like most things I talk about, are not hard rules that you must follow. They are a tool that allows you to ask the right kind of questions:

• What is this boss’s trick?
• Should we add extrinsic motivation behind killing this boss?
• Do I feel like I’ve accomplished anything when I kill it?
• How can I incorporate something the player has never seen before without adding new mechanics?
• How can I hint at his tricks in his intro?
• Should the boss be weak to a specific mechanic, and how am I going to train that mechanic in this level?

These, and others questions, are just starters, but asking the right questions will help you help you to narrow in on the Intent of your boss. This is important, as you will see when we get to Implementation, but for now, we are only concerned with putting it to words. Intentions, in general, are the specifics of how you plan to accomplish a goal. For example, my goal may be to brighten up a room, and my Intention would be to flip on a light switch; I could, however, achieve the same goal by yelling loudly and getting my roommate to flip the switch. Same goal, different intentions.

Therefore, in our case, we know our goals, and the Intent of our boss is the specifics of what we are trying to accomplish. An example:

Chill Penguin: a boss that emphasizes wall sliding and is weak to the flame attack.

What is important to note is that there are a lot of ways to implement that boss and still maintain the same Intention, but we will get to that in a second; meanwhile, having a solid understanding of your boss’s intention is the best way to hit the ground running when you hit the next cycle in the process, Research.

Research Other Bosses

I swear to you, there is not a single boss idea you can come up with that has not already been done. Unless the underlying mechanics of your game are totally wacky and new, chances are damn near 100% that you can find a good example of what your want in another game. Do us all a favor and check it out. Note: If your company gives you crap for playing games at work, then you are probably working at the wrong kind of studio.

It is in this phase that you, and I, usually end up with some wonderfully crafted excel file that lists all the moves, frame windows, damage numbers, and all the other data in their perfectly organized and number-crunched beauty. This is great, and necessary, but get ready to leave it behind.

Implementation Is About Feel

You are about to become the best friend and worst nightmare of both the animators and programmers; but, since we’ve already nailed our goals and done all the necessary research, we are way ahead of our contemporaries. You will discover a world of difference in how people react to you when you approach them with a good head on your shoulders, and the first step is in understanding that implementation is all about Intent.

This is where our hard work from before pays off, because I guarantee, as soon as things start getting implemented, your carefully laid plans will divert; however, since you understand the Intent of your boss, you are ready for one of the most critical parts of being a designer: handling the flux of development while maintaing your intent. I can’t even begin to tell you how important that is to your job, but I’m trying. It’s super important!

Things divert because it’s hard to know how something is going to feel, and that, in the end, is what this phase is all about: things have to feel good. Which is why, by the way, most documentation is so inadequate, for it rarely discusses intent, and feel will always distort your original plans.

Polish With The Right Questions

Vocalizing your thoughts on the feel of a boss is difficult, so I like to ask myself the following questions, which I get from the principles of animation:

• Is there good anticipation on the attacks?
• Is there good staging?
• How is the timing on the windows of opportunity?
• Can things be exaggerated even more?

These won’t do your job for you, obviously, but they are great questions to ask. Generally, if you feel like something is missing, then you can usually find the problem through asking those kind of questions.

Closing

Games are not movies. It’s such an obvious statement, but it can be very easy to find yourself caught in that mind loop; consequently, from what we’ve discovered, it is the reason why some video game boss fights lack satisfaction.

To return to the original question, I feel that if our greatest problem was a lack of visual expression, then we would solve that problem. We totally would. Game developers, as a group, are pretty damn smart people, and when they collectively put their mind to a problem they find the solution. Games have different goals, though, and we have to give up that battle in order to achieve some of our other goals; namely, avoiding complexity.

There is no sure fire formula for a great boss fight, unfortunately, but greater consistency is something that we certainly achieve. Great boss fights are achieved through good planning, and good planning comes from a strong, clear understanding of the goals, from clearly stating and understanding the intent for your boss, from researching bosses in other games, from successfully handling the inevitable deviation in your design, and from asking the right questions to nail the feel.