Above 49

Stabbing Everyone, Everywhere, Always

2012-02-08T10:30:00.000-08:00

Klei's latest game, Shank 2 is out on all platforms today! You can get it (or the demo) for XBLA here (as in your can start downloading it directly to your console via the website), for Steam here (again, including demo) and for PSN, well, on the console's store (but there's a PSN info page here, at least).

I didn't work on the game much beyond some level concepts very early on; in the Ruins and Tanker levels, I can still see the skeletons of those original concepts. But the Shank team totally took it well above and beyond anything I could have imagined and really pulled off something fantastic. Oh, and I think I implemented the wild boar too. I still love that pig.

In basically every way, the game really is an improvement over the original Shank. Similar Left 4 Dead or Assassin's Creed, there were a lot of things the team wanted to improve upon from the original and couldn't pass given the chance to do so. Despite wearing my biases flagrantly, I'm absurdly impressed and proud of what my frighteningly talented coworkers achieved with Shank 2.

And that's enough shilling, I'll leave you with this trailer where a great many 2D people are stabbed, sawed, gored, pierced and otherwise have bodily harm done unto them.

The Best Beast of 2011 2: Best Rising

2012-02-06T10:30:00.000-08:00

You know what's really, really time-consuming? Make a video game! I've just been absolutely sodding inundated with making our game and while I think it's starting to very much come together, there's still a lot of distance between here and the finish line. And it's distance that's got to be covered sooner rather than later. So this post won't exactly be heralding in a new spate of writing from me; I'm just trying to assuage my shame over posting a part 1 without finishing it up.

Oh, but as a positive aside, we're going to be announcing our new game as soon as sometime this month, and I'm really, really excited for people to finally get an idea of what we're working on.

But now, back to the awesome games I played in 2011.

Best (Repeated) Use of the Word "Boner" - Shadows of the Damned

While a brief glance at Shadows of the Damned might leave one feeling like it's shallow, sophomoric humour and blasting demons, even a little time with SotD reveals the game has a lot more going on. A collaboration between Goichi Suda and Shinji Mikami, the game proudly carries its parentage. The prevalent presence of all things "boner," the absurdly wonderful and horrible world and three profoundly bizarre but hilarious cautionary pseudo fairy tales (also showcasing the protagonist's meager literacy) all smell sweetly of Suda. And the shooting is tight and gory, easily an equal of Resident Evil 4 (but perhaps lacking RE4's setpieces and diversity in enemies).

I wrote more about SotD back here and I really recommend you find or borrow a copy. Of all the games released in 2011 that feel like hidden gems, Shadows of the Damned is the game whose inclusion on various year-end lists I really hope propels more people to check it out. People like you!

Best Spiritual Relation to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - The Stanley Parable

One of, if not the, most brilliantly self-aware pieces of video game writing was a Half-Life 2 mod finally released this year, called The Stanley Parable. You play the eponymous Stanley and in typically game-like fashion, a disembodied narrator dictates your actions. And honestly, I don't want to even say more than that. Just grab the mod and play it, because it's both brief and brilliant. And for reasons I still can't entirely put my finger on, it feels a lot like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. If a modern H2G2 game ever gets made (sigh), I'd want it to feel like this.

Oh and when you're done playing, you can go read some awesome words Kirk Hamilton strung together about The Stanley Parable on Kotaku.

Best Cyberware - Deus Ex: Human Revolution

I think a lot of folks, myself included, had a bit of anxiety about the new Deus Ex. One of PC gaming's most venerated games, it has inspired countless designers and for some, it's still the high water mark for emergent gameplay. Giving that franchise to a brand new team, in an era when seeing a beloved franchise get a modern update is usually a cause for great disappointment, well, I can see why people were nervous. But then Deus Ex: Human Revolution came out and it was good. Maybe it's just a case of managing expectations, but the game just felt tremendously right. The game's design was lifted almost wholesale from the first Deus Ex, but that in and of itself demonstrates seriously significant dedication and confidence, both on the team's part and the publishers. Giving that game to almost any other studio would almost certainly result in a game heavy on spectacle and gunplay, and light on meaningful choice, customization and emergence (you know, the things people love about Deus Ex).

More than anything else, I love that DX: HR not only demonstrates these kinds of games are financially and critically viable, but there's an underserved audience very hungry for this kind of game. I'm hoping Arkane's Dishonored offers up a similar buffet when it comes out this year.

Oh, and the other thing to learn from DX: HR? Never, *ever* outsource gigantic progress blocking boss fights in your game. Just ... just don't. Ever.

Best Spaceship Arm- Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet

I didn't buy Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet when it first came out (I tried the demo and it didn't grab me), but then I was assigned to judge the game for this year's IGF. I played it through to completion and was actually struck by how much I enjoyed it. Beyond the striking visuals that clearly bear Michel Gagné's mark, the game itself is actually a pretty freaking tight little Metroidvania. The various tools almost all have a great feel, especially the little claw arm the ship can use to heft, drag and throw objects. The perfect size for a downloadable game, it very well scratched that explore -> upgrade -> explore more itch. And it made me kind of want to make a Metroidvania game ... hmmm ...

And it appears that ITSP was nominated for an Annie Award (Animation's Oscars, basically) for best game animation. Shank was actually nominated last year, but Limbo took the award home, which was fair enough. And I'd say that if ITSP or Rayman: Origins doesn't take home the statue this year, something ain't right with the world.

Best Emo Vikings - Skyrim

This one is cheating a little, since I technically haven't finished Skyrim yet (but I will ... someday!). And really, I'm not sure there's left to be said about Skyrim that someone hasn't already said. It's gorgeous, it's sprawling, it's diverse and it supports so many different kinds of play. Sure, it has its flaws, but the sheer scale of the game and the joy one gets from exploring it make that almost not matter. (Although Shamus Young's takedown of the Thieves Guild questline took me from ambivalent to also actually very disappointed as soon as I thought about how many gigantic plot holes there are, and I generally love any sneak-y bits!)

So yeah, Skyrim is fantastic, especially once you install the mod that gives the game an actual, usable inventory. Actually, the fact that when so many games are shipping with ever-increasing restrictions, seeing Bethesda's whole hearted support of modding of Skyrim continue (and in fact, via the Steam Workshop, become possibly more prolific than its ever been) is something I could not be more excited about. I'll always be a PC person at heart and things like this are a big part of the reason why.

So those were some of my favourite games of 2011. Now back to making ours, so hopefully it can show up on at least a few people's lists this time next year.

The Best Beast of 2011: Origins

2012-01-09T10:30:00.000-08:00

While I think there's some fun to be had in ranking a year's best games, the practice does feels both too definitive (these are really the best?) and amorphous (how do you even begin evaluating "best" anyway?). So in a total cop out, I'm just going to write about some games I really, really enjoyed that I played in the last year. And they'll be delivered roughly in chronological order.

A couple caveats: 1) I'm only considering games I played and finished in 2011. I suppose this precludes the persistent games that can't be finished, but I didn't play any of those in 2011 that I hadn't played in years previous as well (e.g. TF2, L4D2). If there was something of that ilk, I'm sure I'd just consider "finished" to mean "I played a lot of this, to the point of solid understanding." 2) I'm counting games I played in 2011, not necessarily those that were released in 2011. Granted, most of these are still recent, but some were technically released in 2009 or 2010 and I just didn't get to them until 2011. There are ten games in total, five here and five more in the near future.

Without further ado:

Best Protagonists for Hugs - ilomilo

Seriously, just look at those guys. Just listen to that music. It's almost impossible to imagine something more heartwarming and adorable. In a continual parade of games seeking to be more gruesome, dark, gritty, visceral, insert-"over-the-top"-adjective-here, it's wonderful to play something that's trying to be, well, cute. But ilomilo does so without becoming saccharine or mawkish. The story is actually a bit sad if you really think about it. And despite its cute exterior, the puzzles become truly fiendish later in the game. If you're curious, the demo can be downloaded here.

Best Gravelly Russians - Metro 2033

It's important to note that being dark and gritty isn't necessarily a bad thing. I was actually turned onto Metro 2033 almost a year ago exactly, when it started showing up in a number of year-end conversations. A convenient Steam sale later and Metro 2033 became one of my favourite FPSs in quite some time. As I noted here, it manifests an almost "Natural Law" design aesthetic that a number of Eastern European developers seem to possess (see S.T.A.L.K.E.R., The Void, etc.). It's not that the game is crushingly difficult in a Super Meat Boy way. Rather the game world's rules are enacted almost without any regard for the player and if you want to survive, well, it's on you to do so. In an era where at times I worry some games are walking dangerously close to instilling serious learned helplessness in the audience, games like Metro 2033 are absolutely refreshing. I hope that in this year's sequel, Metro: Last Light, 4A and THQ don't lose sight of what so many people loved about Metro 2033. At $20, the game is a steal. Oh, and make sure to play it with subtitles and Russian dialog.

Best Funny Robots - Portal 2

Lots of good words have been etched about Portal 2, with it ending up on many erudite's folks year-end lists/conversations. Rather than replicate their sentiments (yeah, everything about Portal 2 is pretty bloody great), there's one observation I'd like to make: the way humour manifests in the two different modes of the game. As someone who's helped make a couple funny games and might just like to make more some day, Portal 2 proves an interesting case. In the single-player, the comedy is delivered through the game's authored content. The writing is as sharp, if not sharper, than Portal and both Stephen Merchant and J.K. Simmons are brilliant additions to the cast (not to mention the ubiquitous Nolan North's cameos).

But what's interesting is the way humour tends to manifest itself in the co-op portion of the game. Pretty much across the board, I felt the writing in the co-op was weaker. The "playing the partners against each other angle" became one-note pretty quickly. Additionally, I'd be talking to my partner while the jokes were playing out, so we'd either have to stop talking or miss the lines. However, I'd say the co-op is still as funny, if not funnier than the single player simply because of all the situations you and your partner can end up in. Accidentally switching the wrong portal and sending them tumbling to their death never failed to produce a laugh. Waiting just a few extra seconds to drop that portal, while their head is smashed again the ceiling again and again by a jump pad. Accidentally (or purposefully) hitting the switch that crushes them, rather than moves their path. And that's not even to mention the havoc one can wreak with the laser cubes. The humour in co-op comes largely from the players' interaction with the content, rather than the content itself.

Dan Cook of Spry Fox wrote a bit about authored vs. procedural humour in games, and I added my two cents on there. It's an interesting conversation and definitely something I'd like to think/talk more about in the future. If you some reason you don't own Portal 2, I have a couple Steam coupons that make the game only $15. They expire at the end of January, so if you want one, contact me soon!

Best Acoustic Frontier Trip-Hop - Bastion

Like Portal 2, there's been a lot of year-end talk about Bastion. And frankly, it's all well-deserved. The game is gorgeous, plays great and sounds even better than that. The look, story and sound of Bastion are fantastic, but in some ways, it's the gameplay that I actually appreciate the most. Having made a couple actions RPGs, I promise you, striking the right balance between meaningful choices and depth is not easy. The Diablo/Torchlight style of action RPG is the number crunching, spreadsheet-y way to do it, but I'm very interested in other ways of providing meaningful ARPG decisions without turning it into columns of figures and procedurally generated loot. Bastion beautifully demonstrates how to do that. Greg, Amir and everyone else wholly deserve all the recognition they are receiving. I want more small games that are still rich and interesting and if they're even half the game Bastion was, I'll be happy. You can get Bastion on Steam, XBLA or even in your Chrome browser.

Best Indigo Trading & Carpet Weaving - Dawn of Discovery (Anno 1404)

The oldest game on this list, Dawn of Discovery (known as Anno 1404 in Europe) technically came out in the summer of 2009, but I didn't play it until the middle of last year. And I cannot believe I waited that long. A real-time town building simulation, Dawn of Discovery is everything I loved about old city building sims like Caeser. Mine this, harvest that, grow this and trade it here; you can set up freaking automated trade routes to take your wine here and pick up indigo there. It's a particular game for a particular type of person, but if you're that type of person, dear god, it's so, so good. And the game is also absolutely gorgeous. The sequel Anno 2070 was released just a few months ago and I've got it on the docket for after I finish a few more games. I strongly suspect it will show up on a similar list to this a year from now. Due to some nonsense with Ubisoft patching (or rather, not patching) the game, it is not currently available on Steam. But one can still get it on Direct2Drive and other sites.

That's it for the first half, the next shall follow before too long. Until then, what games did you play last year that shined with special brilliance?

Now With Video!

2012-01-02T10:00:00.000-08:00

If I haven't mentioned it here before, one of the best things that happened to the Vancouver game dev scene (at least in my realm) was the Full Indie developer meetup really gathering steam. And at the last meetup of the year, I was asked to pull out a small section of my MIGS talk and deliver it to the assembled indie masses. And one of the organizers was kind enough to tape and upload it.

I ended up expanding the section where I talked the development of TV as a medium for creative expression. Basically, TV used to be awful. Really, fundamentally awful. Now we've got things like The Wire, Madmen, Battlestar Galactica, Arrested Development, etc. and they're really good (I think I actually prefer a good serial TV show to most new movies at this point). What changed? Well, watch the video and find out!

A lot of this is drawn from Steven Johnson's book Everything Bad is Good for You. If you haven't read it, I heartily recommend it.

Also, I'm finally going to stop blogging (exclusively, anyway) about this talk now. I've got a year-end games post I'm going to pull together this week. I won't be anything as definitive as a "Best Of 2011." It's more just things I played that I really enjoyed, found surprising, etc. So stay tuned! (Get it??)

Flappin' Mah Gums

2011-12-05T09:05:00.001-08:00

Once again, Scott and Jorge were kind enough to have me on the Experience Points podcast (which still remains the consistent gaming podcast on all the internet), talking vaguely about the things I covered at MIGS. It included a lot of good insight from them and some things I cut from my talk for length, so it's actually kind of a director's commentary or something.

I highly recommend checking out their site in general, tons of great writing on a suspiciously regular basis (I suspect their both at least cyborgs, if not full-on androids. Perhaps even Cylons).

MIGS + Kill Screen

2011-11-29T10:30:00.000-08:00

I realize all I've been writing about for months here is MIGS, but it's hard to not mention an excellent recap of the event over at Kill Screen. It includes a few quips from yours truly and a bunch of other folks. Great perspective from Lana, who was a very interesting person to meet and talk with general. Kill Screen sure does know how to pick 'em.

I'd like to get back to writing more regularly here, but I'm currently swamped with work, judging for the IGF and a dozen other things. Soon ... I hope.

MIGS Slides and Talk Text

2011-11-08T10:30:00.000-08:00

I'm back from MIGS! It was actually a really fantastic trip. Montréal is an awesome city and MIGS is a great conference. Small, but small in a good way. Got to hang with some awesome folks, hear some awesome talks and eat some awesome poutine. The insane photo above is me playing some weird exercise biking through bloody veins game at The Prince of Arcade, which was put on by the Mount Royal Game Society.

I also gave my talk about 2D platformers, indie darlings and meaningful games. I thought it went well, although I think I burned through it at a pace even more horrifying than when I rehearsed. I believe the audio for the talk will be available soon (heh, if you don't mind your ears catching on fire at the rate of my delivery) but in the mean time, I thought I'd post my slides and the text I used to prepare the talk. I cannot guarantee that the text is the same as the words that came out of my mouth on the day of (in fact I promise it's not), but it's close enough to be well representative. Heh, it's actually probably more thoughtful and composed that whatever I burned through that day.

You can download a zip of both here: http://bit.ly/nelsmigs

There's a Word .doc and a .ppt. There are bolded words in the .doc and those are the "advance the presentation" markers. If you had any thoughts, feedback, whatever, I'd be delighted to hear it!

Thanks to everyone that came and to the organizers for setting up a wicked conference. Hopefully I'll be able to enjoy some more Montréal in the future.

PAX, Paste and Mad Scribblings

2011-09-14T10:30:00.000-07:00

The piece about PAX that I wrote for Paste is now online! It ended up being about the connections that are formed and rejuvenated by the event, both between fellow gamers and between players and creators. It ended up being a bit more upbeat and feel-good that I was anticipating, but it felt like it couldn't help but end up that way. Maybe that means it accurate captures how the show feels. PAX is by no means perfect, but I find it really hard to deny the atmosphere conjured by the event.

On a meta-level, seeing PAX from the media angle was absolutely fascinating and it definitely increases my empathy for anyone who writes about games for a living (seriously, you all endure a lot). No question the experience altered how I'll interact with media going forward, hopefully to the benefit of everyone.

As I mentioned before, major thanks to Kirk Hamilton for setting this up and Garrett Martin for editing/running it.

I'm quite curious to hear your thoughts and if you like the piece, please share it with any like-minded individuals!

L'annonce

2011-08-31T12:00:00.000-07:00

That announcement I mentioned a few weeks ago, well, it's announced!

On November 2nd, I'll be speaking at the Montreal International Game Summit! My talk is about the iconic indie 2D platformer, systems literacy and how those indie darlings are actually pointing the way toward creating more meaningful games. It's building upon some things I wrote about previously.

It's my first hour-long talk to my peers, so that's definitely a bit nerve-wracking. And given that I've got to fill almost an hour of talk with something other people actually want to hear, well, I need all the preparation time I can get. Hopefully the hiatus makes sense now.

While unlikely, should any of you happen to be attending MIGS, I'd love to meet up. And should be interesting in hearing my flap my gob about some things, well, I'd be quite grateful. For those that can't, I'll post my slides and notes after that talk and maybe MIGS will even make a video available. Until then, it's heads down in preparation (and, you know, making a game at work every day).

Vive le jeu!

Game Journalist for a Day (or Three)

2011-08-25T13:59:00.000-07:00

In the past few years, some notable game journalists, like Shawn Elliott and Greg Kasavin, have jumped the fence into development. Always a contrarian (or something), for one PAX-filled weekend, I'll be leaping the other way!

As his final act as Paste's games editor (not really, but it sounds more dramatic this way), the illustrious Kirk Hamilton put things in place for me to write about the show for Paste. It won't be standard coverage with specific game previews or anything, rather it will be more general impressions of the show like Kirk did last year. So yeah, that's the legacy I have to follow. No pressure or anything.

Heh, this all assumes whatever ramblings I compile are actually fit it print too, of course. But already it's been very interesting seeing the show from this angle, so I think I'll be able to put together something hopefully worth reading.

This isn't the exciting news I mentioned a few weeks ago, but that should be coming soon. In the mean time, if you'll be at PAX this weekend, drop me a line!

Hiatus

2011-08-12T10:30:00.000-07:00

A brief hiatus is upon us, I'm afraid.

I've got a very exciting announcement to make in a few weeks, but the cause of such excitement also necessitates a great deal of work. To augment that, a) things at Klei becoming ever-increasingly busy and b) a design I've had in my head for a while and I'm really excited about is starting to come together, but truly needs proper attention. With all that, I know there's no way I could maintain writing here regularly at a level of quality I'd be happy with.

It's entirely possibly I'll still drop a random post here and there, but it won't be on the weekly basis I've tried to keep since I started this over two and a half years ago (holy hell, it's been that long?). I'm actually pretty sodding proud of putting out 155 posts in that time, with only a few skip weeks here and there. But rather than try to juggle all the above and put out half-baked posts just to stay "on schedule," I'm just going to power things down here for a little while. I won't stay away forever, but for the next little bit, energies are needed elsewhere.

But have no fear, you'll be hearing plenty more from me soon enough. So thanks for reading these mad screeds thus far, and don't worry, the screed engine will be firing up again before you know it.

Sometimes, You Build the Bastion ...

2011-08-02T10:30:00.000-07:00

and sometimes, well, it builds you."*

(*I haven't finished the game yet, but if this quote or something like it actually appears in the game, I'm high-fiving Greg Kasavin the next time I get the chance.)

Bastion demonstrates some of the best things about "Single A" games. It's simple but not oversimplified ("elegant" seems a good term). It's beautiful without requiring bleeding edge rendering tech. It makes decisions that fly in the face of conventional, big-budget industry wisdom but ultimately produce a much better game. It was made by a small team that clearly cared about creating a holistic, purposeful experience.

And it could not be a $60 retail game (or doing so would require fundamental changes that would ultimately make it a lesser game). Like Braid, World of Goo and dozens of other unusual independent games, Bastion is a success story for both the distribution model of Single A games and the audience that has grown up to support them. I see Supergiant very much as kindred spirits and their success is absolutely fantastic to see.

But what's also so enlivening is how it's clear that Bastion is the game Supergiant wanted to make. There's love in this game and it shows. This wasn't just turning the crank on another annual franchise, or a crude copy of another game's success. Rather than discuss it broadly, here are four seemingly small but actually very significant characteristics that, in aggregate, make Bastion work so well.

Small Details: When The Kid blocks a fire attack with his shield, the fire particle transforms into water. This effect is completely unnecessary. A simple "tink" sound effect would have been totally sufficient for communicating that the block was effective (as it's quite obvious when you're being hit or not). But it makes the game feel tangible and real. There are countless tiny details like this, including various moments in the narration where it's clear the game is listening for a very specific set of circumstances to play a particular line. Again, it's hardly necessary and I imagine a lot of teams would have scuttled the details at the first sign of looming deadlines. That Supergiant made these details such a priority, especially considering how small of a team they were, is remarkable.

Embracing simplicity: Bastion manages to be simple without being condescending. Given their loose action-RPG structure, it's very easy to imagine the temptation to add the usual complexities- a modal inventory, skill points, complicated weapon choices that differ only in minute detail, etc. Having made an action-RPG or two, I can confess that the kind of graceful elegant Bastion manifests is not easy to achieve. And again, it's the small details that make the difference. Whenever you run over an HP potion but you're already full, it automatically fills up your HP bar. If that's also full, you get a small XP reward instead. This encourages players to not agonize over item pickups or backtrack halfway across a level for a potion that was "left behind" after one of the stock was finally used. This decision, and many more like it, keep the game moving and flowing gracefully, without the character spreadsheet micromanagement that bogs many RPGs.

Less is more: Much has been made of Bastion's narration, so I won't dig into this too much. But what's commendable is in two narrated sentences, you've more to think about than in the five paragraphs of dry, dead exposition that characterize the world building in most games. Supergiant realize that games almost always work best when enough information is provided to engage the player's imagination, without providing so much it becomes oversaturated and drifts into autopilot. You're left curious, wondering what's going on. It's a wonderful minimalism and keeps the game moving without feeling shallow.

Grind ain't grind: Normally, I find micro gameplay goals pretty distasteful, usually because they seem like arbitrary (and obnoxiously obvious) padding. Bastion's work for me though, at least partially because they're quite a bit into the game and integrate into the game's aesthetic. You aren't nailing three creatures with a single arrow because the game arbitrarily told you to do so, it's memorial for the city's archer wardens, The Breakers. Again, it's a small thing, but it makes it obvious Supergiant actually took the time to think out those goals and bring thme under the same tent aesthetically as the rest of the game, instead of just slapping in a crude pop-up UI that says "4/15 Complete."

Similarly, the game's difficulty is managed by the player in a very interesting way. You can turn on optional difficulty modifications that change various facets of the enemies. I've only seen a handful so far, but they're relatively diverse, not just swelling them with HP or more damaging attacks. Being successful with those options activated provides a bonus of XP/currency, but they're totally optional. And they're also given an aesthetic treatment of being Herculean tasks undertaken in honour of the gods, not just checkboxes on a level load UI.

Bastion is absolutely worth your attention. It's a game that manages to hit all the details and become far more than just the sum of its parts. You can get the game or download the demo right here. Or, if you're waiting on a PC version (as I am with another Summer of Arcade release, From Dust), hopefully Supergiant will be able to release that version soon. But really, if you're at all passionate about unusual games that value a tight, purposeful and holistic experience over a laundry list of features, give Bastion just a bit of your time. I'm sure it will be worth it for you, for Supergiant, for other developers of Single A games like myself and for the audience that wants these kinds of games to exist.

Skip Week for Cynocephaly

2011-07-25T10:30:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, my wife and I adopted a rescue dog. That's him and he's bloody adorable! Supposedly he's all/mostly Formosan Mountain Dog or perhaps Pharaoh Hound, but since he was a rescued stray, nobody is really sure. He was hit by a car and abandoned when he was pretty young, but someone found and brought him to a vet. They were able to repair the damage to his hips and, except for a streak of white fur above a wicked scar that the ladies will totally dig, he made a total recovery. He lived with a rescue organization for a little while, until he came to be with us.

Fear not, I don't plan becoming one of those folks that regales the denizens of the Internet with "fascinating" pet tales, so this may the last strictly dog-related post. But he's the canid justification for no writing this week (plus being extremely busy at work). Although in brief, if you haven't bought Bastion yet, you really should. Two clicks here and it's done (or you can at least download the demo). And if it's that easy, what are you waiting for?

Microscopy

2011-07-18T10:30:00.000-07:00

I was in Seattle last weekend for Go Play Northwest, an indie tabletop RPG convention. It was a great time and I appreciate the friends that encouraged me to go. The focus is on small RPGs with unusual mechanics, aesthetics or settings, almost always created by an individual author or small team instead a big organization like Wizards of the Coast or White Wolf. It's a scene resemblant to independent digital games in a lot of ways.

I think I've mentioned this before, but I think all digital game designers should spend time with tabletop games, both RPGs and European style board games. There's a lot to learn from them about balance, providing meaningful decisions, the marriage of theme and mechanics, etc (see my frothing adoration of the Battlestar Galactica board game, which has only increased since I finally started watching the show). So I went to GPNW as much to look for interesting designs as simply to enjoy the games.

And pleasing to say, I was not disappointed. Nearly everything I played had some interesting feature, even if the game wasn't something I'd want to play on a regular basis. But the most interesting "game" I played was Microscope by Ben Robbins (who was actually at GPNW). More akin to an improv game than most tabletop or digital games, Microscope is a collaborative world-building game. I'll try to provide a quick overview, but if it's muddling, the important thing is: the game is awesome, play it.

The players do not control any particular character or group. Rather, the game begins by selecting a very broad theme, e.g. "Howard-esque low fantasy" or "hard, near future sci-fi." After that, they establish two events that begin and end of some portion of a great historical timeline. Those bookend events can literally be anything appropriately grand, from "The Rise of the Southern Empire : The Fall of the Southern Empire" to "Mankind Develops Spaceflight : Alpha Centauri Becomes Dominant Human World." These events are written on index cards and laid on the table. The players decide whether the bookend events are considered good or bad by those looking back upon history. This decision is signified by a black or white circle on that index card. The last step is to select Adds and Bans. The players, in turn, add or prohibit specific elements given the theme. Once the players are satisfied, play begins.

Proceeding in turn, each player can add a Period, Event or Scene to the timeline. Similar to the above, these are all labeled as good or back in the perspective of history. Periods are long, distinct eras, like the Renaissance in western history. Events occur within a Period and would be analogous to, say, the painting of the Sistine Chapel. Scenes involve actual characters during some event, like Michangelo speaking with the Pope. Scenes are defined by a Question and the Answer is either dictated by the player who created it or is role-played by all the characters until an Answer is reached. It's more complicated than that, but that's the gist.

The only additional bit of structure is each round, one player is the Lens and they define a Focus. The Focus is a broad theme for the next set of turns. It could be a person, place, trend, etc. It can be very general, but each new Period, Event or Scene must be at least tangentially related to the Focus.

That's basically it. There is no failure or set end conditions. Play continues for as long as the players wish, but two or threw hours can easily go by without dragging at all. Microscope provides just enough structure for successful collaboration and encouraging creativity, much like a good improv game. It has a very similar feeling of building upon others' ideas while still going to unexpected but excellent places.

The closest analog I could think of is the collaborative building that takes place in multiplayer Minecraft. Although the players are literally building structures, it can similarly have that very real sense of working together while still being surprised by your partners' contributions.

With "creation as gameplay" being the underpinning of some of the most successful games of all time (SimCity, The Sims, Minecraft), it seems like the notion of shared creation is ripe to be more broadly explored. Although, in keeping with the maxim of The Internet Ruins Everything, the face-to-face nature of Microscope does prevents griefing and similar derelict anonymous Internet asshole behaviours. Still, given how astonishingly satisfying just a single session of Microscope was, it feels like there are real opportunities to explore here. A digital game with similarities would allow for more persistence and easier sharing compared to the analog tabletop version, and that's just to scratching the surface.

The other thing that occurred to me was that Microscope would be a brilliant tool for world-building. Anyone creating a fictional world with a significant history, be it for a game or media, would served by considering Microscope instead of purely freeform brainstorming. I'd wager the results will take you places you'd never expect, in a good way. Even if it's just a throw-away world, it would still be great exercise for thinking in terms of connections rather than despirate events.

I can't recommended Microscope and similar indie RPGs enough (this seems like a good place to start). From a game design perspective they're often very interesting and usually, they're quite fun. And if that ain't a win-win situation, I don't know what is.

Peals of Beautiful Madness

2011-07-04T10:30:00.000-07:00

Shadows of the Damned is exactly what the creative offspring of Suda 51 and Shinji Mikami ought to be. The hyperactive yet genuine irreverence of the former and the gore-spattered gunplay of the latter are both proudly on display. And make no mistake, the game is insane. But more of the spastic madness of No More Heroes than the surreal Killer 7. To cross the media boundary, it's equal parts Takashi Miike and Robert Rodriguez (Dusk 'Til Dawn, not Spy Kids). And god dammit, if I don't love it.

It's not flawless in its execution and I can see how its aesthetics woudn't be to everyone's taste. But I'm loving Shadows of the Damned because it delivers an increasingly rare commodity in games these days- surprise. It may sound trite, but it's so refreshing to be genuinely surprised by what Shadows of the Damned delivers. It refuses to let itself be predicted.

Coming across a giant blue demon, complete with curled goat horns and an apparatus of lamps? eyeballs? on his back, I'm expecting a setpiece combat encounter. Instead he's a hillbilly merchant of sorts, happy to chow down on your currency of white gems and vomit up items in exchange.

The "voice in your ear" companion is not the proverbial attractive-yet-aloof, supportive-yet-nagging communications officer. Instead it's a talking, floating skull named Johnson (wait for it ...). He's remniscent of Morte, except he can also transform into a burning demon-bludgeoning torch, your motorcycle and a gun called "The Boner." (Johnson, boner, skull, get it? Layers upon layers, I'm telling ya)

The game's antagonist is a demon named "Fleming" with a skull head and glowing red eyes. Except on top of his skull, is another skull. And on top of that? Another god damn skull. It's absurd, it's quite intentionally ridiculous and I never could have predicted it.

I can just sit back and let whatever insanity Suda, Mikami and the rest of Grasshopper planned wash over me. With the lion's share of AAA games this year (and the next) demanding you stare down iron sights at grey-brown ruined buildings while listening to gruff men with buzzcuts grunt about their dark past and/or the badness of their communal asses, Shadows of the Damned is an honest relief.

And that 'honest' bit is important. I want to talk about that facet of the game more, but I'd also like to play a bit more first. But thus far, the game manages to be both fantastically self-aware and irreverent without ever seeming crass. Unlike Resident Evil 4, which I could never tell if it was meant to be taken at least somewhat seriously, Shadows of the Damned knows it is absurd. And it takes every amazing liberty it can.

Oh, and the sound design/soundtrack are awesome. But with Akira Yamaoka (composer/sound design for the Silent Hill series), nothing less could be expected. As if you need another reason to be interested though, right?

Exaggeration

2011-06-25T11:50:00.000-07:00

One of the things I like most about working at Klei (and not to be a douche, but that is a pretty long list) is working with some incredibly talented animators. All of our animators come from cartooning, and the perspective they bring is something I find consistently interesting and refreshing. It has had the side effect of turning me into a horrible animation snob and I find myself noticing poor run cycles and ugly poses where before it just would have been unremarkable (not unlike when I started noticing poorly designed doors everywhere after reading The Design of Everyday Things). I'm sure I'll manage somehow.

I've been getting our team together for informal lunchtime talks every couple of weeks. It started with me talking about MDA & Amnesia, and has broadened from there. A few weeks ago, one of our animators talked about the 12 Basic Principles of Animation. They're basically the canonical guidelines for animation, derived from 50 years of work from leading animators at Disney and elsewhere. While I was aware of them before, hearing our animator explain them and then seeing how they're applied in the animation in our games was quite illuminating.

Interestingly, with a slightly different perspective, some of those same principles can apply to design. I may talk about more of them in the future, but today we'll focus on Exaggeration. In the context of animation, it means magnifying characteristics while still remaining connected to reality. Animation that tries to perfectly replicate life ends up dull at best, and often downright disturbing (e.g. creepy Tom Hanks in The Polar Express or all those mocap animated features that somehow think they'll be the ones to beat The Uncanny Valley). There's also a more general lesson in here for the drab and uninspired conclusion that awaits the legion of grey-brown manshoots that hold "realism above all else" as their holy grail.

In the context of design, what does exaggeration mean? It means providing clarity in individual mechanics and contrast between mechanics in aggregate. The role (purpose) of a mechanic is clear. Obviously from the player's perspective there may be experimentation, discovery, etc. But from a design perspective, what purpose a mechanic serves should be clear and should be distinct from other mechanics.

To illustrate, Klei's founder and I were having a discussion about the weaponry in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood. There are a half-dozen different kinds of melee weapons in AC: B- longswords, greatswords, daggers, axes, spears and hammers/maces. The differences between these categories of weapons are clear and immediate. Different sets of animations, different timings; basically, they feel distinct. They are well exaggerated.

But in any individual category of weapon, each weapon has three properties (damage, speed and deflect) rated from 1-5 in each. One kind of axe may have damage 3, speed 2 and deflect 2 while another has damage 4, speed 1 and deflect 3. The distinction between individual weapons is not exaggerated. Aside from saying "it has more," I imagine the vast majority of AC: B players could not explain the difference between a sword with a deflect rating of three and one with four. It's not even clear if the ratings are relative to that category of weapon (i.e. does damage 4 mean something different for a sword vs. damage 4 on a spear?).

And the further complication is most people want to play optimally. If I get a new weapon that looks interesting, but its ratings are poorer than the weapon I've been using, I'm disinclined to try the new thing I got. At the very least, I know I'm making a decision that is an intentional handicap. The player's desire to express themselves (through selecting how they appear) is now at odds with playing the game "well."

Our founder's contention was that having these properties allow the developers to add more content without needing anything more than a new weapon model (quite cheap) and a new line in a spreadsheet somewhere. While I understand the purpose of this quantification is to give a sense of progress, I said AC:B would probably be better served by finding another way to accomplish that goal.

In a Diablo-esque game (or most RPGs, really), where the game is fundamentally about equipment and the stat differences between different pieces of gear, this kind of granularity is well suited. But Assassin's Creed isn't about that. It's about Ezio and what he can do. The fluidity of his movement, his ability to parry and counter, to outmaneuver his opponents. The game isn't strongest when the player is asked to make micro comparisons between different pieces of gear.

The ability to recruit and dispatch apprentice assassins fits well. It makes Ezio feel like a leader and provides the sense of being connected to a larger group of people. Pushing more of the progress into that system and leaving the weapon selection well exaggerated and more open to player expression would probably suit the game better.

Jamie Griesemer gave a talk about this at GDC '10, in the context of the sniper rifle in the Halo series. He's been posting it piecemeal on his blog and it's a very good, in-depth look at the topic of role and contrast in designing mechanics.

This is a relatively minor quibble in the context of Assassin's Creed, but it's been far more impairing in other games. Especially since the designers understand what the distinctions between different features are, they're likely to see the contrast as being larger than the players will. It's vital to be mindful of this. How something feels is usually far more important that what the differences might be under the hood. Ensuring those two things are in alignment will result in a clearer design and ultimately, a game that better realizes its intentions.

Skip Week For Riots

2011-06-17T10:30:00.000-07:00

Sorry folks, no time to talk about video games because I was busy looting Sears!

What took place last night was actually pretty heartbreaking. The douche featured above got exactly what he deserved. Tragically, there weren't sufficient flashbangs for every crotch involved. I wasn't affected personally, and seeing the clean-up and outpouring of support this morning was pretty heartening. Still, it's almost impossible to put into words how frustrating it is that the hundreds of thousands of awesome people that live in Vancouver couldn't do anything to stop a few hundred assholes.

Also, we moved last weekend and only today is our place finally unpacked. So yeah, no post this week. I've got something rattling in the braincage for next time though, about positive and negative design space. We'll see if that makes any kind of sense when proper rigor is applied to it.

In the mean time, watch that video again. It really is something quite amazing.

Love Your Niche

2011-06-09T10:30:00.000-07:00

"Sometimes, the customer isn't always right. Sometimes the customer is an asshole." I lifted that from some site linking the above video, so I can't claim credit. If you haven't seen it, it's brilliant and hilarious (although it's got some NSFW language). If you can't watch it, basically the Alamo Drafthouse threw out, without refund, a patron that wouldn't stop texting during a movie. The exceptional part isn't that the Drafthouse did this (they're apparently vigilant about enforcing their no talking/texting policies), it's the ejected patron's frothing response.

But equally exceptional is the Drafthouse themselves for actually enforcing this policy. As I'm sure anyone that's been to a movie in the last half-decade is aware, this is something you'd almost never, ever see in a chain megaplex. Not only would enforcing this kind of policy at a big theatre be difficult at best, but it's not at all in the theatre's interest. They're basically the default movie destination and rely on accessibility and volume. The Drafthouse could not be more different.

Rather than attempting to compete with the giant megaplexes, they're trying to cultivate a very different audience. Single screen theatres, holding hosts of special events, good food and drinks standing in stark contrast to $4 sodas and greasy popcorn (seriously, look at this bloody menu); the Drafthouse is trying to be everything a megaplex is not. And that includes throwing out undesirable customers who would disturb the type of patrons they're actually trying to court.

Essentially, the Drafthouse knows their niche and they're creating an experience that supports it almost exclusively. Rather that trying to beat billion dollar corporations at their own games, the Drafthouse decided the best way to win is not to play. And that, three of a half paragraphs in, is why this is very relevant to games.

I look at this year's E3 coverage and I see titanic corporations throwing tens of millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of man-hours all trying to creating the best experience of shooting some men. And don't get me wrong, I love to shoot me some men every now and again (and a few, e.g. Bioshock Infinite, appear very genuinely ambitious), but they can't all be the best. And more importantly for me, there's effectively no way for a smaller developer to compete with that.

So I ask, why even try? Working on smaller downloadable games almost by definition means you're making a game for a niche (and in the great scale of culture and entertainment, games are already a niche). The more successful downloadable games sell maybe 300,000-400,000 copies. The towering successes, of which there have probably been less than ten, just break a million. For most AAA games, 1/3 of a million sales is an unmitigated disaster. Smaller downloadable games are afforded tremendous freedom because they are small.

In terms of actual development, much as the Drafthouse can toss unwanted customers, smaller games can afford to be inaccessible to some players. If you need to move 5 millions units, you have to appeal to a broad swath of players, with different skill levels, goals, etc. If you need 1/20 of that, it's far easier to say, "This game just isn't for them."

All too often, I hear talk of "the player" (and I fall into this trap myself) as if there's some Platonic player that all games should be made for. The truth is, you need to understand who your target audience is as well as who they are not. There are a variety of techniques for this, e.g. user stories, but it's really about having a clearer understanding of who you're making this game for beyond just "the player."

I groused about Frozen Synapse's poor tutorial last week, but the truth is, if a trichromatic, asymmetrical turn-based squad shooter where every level looks literally identical and you can control your squad's actions to the tenth of a second sounds appealing, you've already self-selected. I'm not sure how many folks are on the fence there.

Small downloadable games have tremendous potential to do things that larger games simply cannot do, because the experiences hit too small of an audience. And the Alamo Drafthouse will never grow to compete with Cineplex (or whatever theatre chains exist in the States, I don't even remember now). But they don't really intend to. They know who their audience is and they just want to ensure they're well served and they keep drawing in like-minded souls. Keeping that lesson is mind is something I intend to do so more and if that means kicking out some insane lady for texting, so be it. If nothing else, it sure does result in a lot of Internet fame (beyond, you know, just being so totally badass).

Cold As Ice

2011-05-31T10:30:00.000-07:00

Frozen Synapse is a indie game in just about every sense of the term. It has a stylized abstract aesthetic, it's a style of gameplay rarely seen in mainstream titles, it has an extremely steep learning curve, it's extremely rich and deep, its servers buckled from traffic come launch day, it has a built-in IRC channel and its tutorial is terrible. All but the last make the game fantastic (well, the servers being bunged up ain't great, but it means a lot of people are playing the game, which is awesome for them).

If you haven't heard of Frozen Synapse, it's a turn-based tactical squad shooter developed by Mode7 Games, which I believe is only three guys in the UK. If you took just the combat from Jagged Alliance or X-Com (except Frozen Synapse deliberately makes your soldiers faceless), this is basically what you'd end up with. It's the kind of game that self-selects quite a bit, but if this is up your alley, it's really up your alley.

In addition to being built upon a very solid foundation of game, Frozen Synapse goes the extra mile in handling multiplayer. All matches are conducted online and complete asynchronously, meaning you and your opponent can be issuing turns hours apart and the servers simply process and report each turn's results next time you log in. While not quite as deliberately paced as an online wargame like Warlight, I can imagine easily handling a half-dozen or more games of Frozen Synapse at once.

The tricky bit is understanding the game enough to want to play a half-dozen matches simultaneously.

In an all too common refrain, where Frozen Synapse falls down is its tutorial. In indie game fashion, the tutorial is just a handful of very canned micro-missions that tell you what to do and then have you do it. The problem here is threefold. One, all you are asked to do is perform rote mimicry. The dialog prompt says to click here, drag there and twist here, and you do it. It breezily explains what that all meant, but as long as you're able to translate text into simply mouse/keyboard input, you can pass the tutorial. The problem is, you're never required to demonstrate any kind of understanding. The scenarios aren't presented as "explanation-then-demonstration."

Without being required to demonstrate any kind of understanding, you're merely following prompts without realizing why doing so is important. And then the first time you're dropped in a proper mission, you have little recourse to understand why your dudes keep getting their heads emptied all over nearby walls.

The second problem with the tutorial is that it's all frontloaded. You get a deluge of contextless information, being presented with the "how" well before the "why." Without any kind of proper mental model for the game, it's very hard to synthesize the information you're being bombarded with. And the worst part is, this wouldn't be that hard to fix. Rather than a bunch of canned explanations, providing simple missions meant to teach a specific skill would likely ease players into Frozen Synapse far more successfully. The challenge scenarios in Starcraft II do a pretty good job of bridging the gap between the duvet coziness of singleplayer and the Russian prisonyard of Battle.net. Imagining something similar for Frozen Synapse isn't hard at all.

And of course, the final issue with the tutorials is they're just missing information. Probably the most important mechanic in the game, how combat between two characters is resolved, isn't explained in the tutorial at all. The rules that govern these outcomes are actually quite simple and involve just four simple factors: direction, stillness, aiming and cover. But I didn't get that from the tutorial, I got it from a supplemental tutorial video.

Not to give the wrong impression, I like Frozen Synapse quite a lot and I can easily see it being the lunchtime go to game at work for a while. But yikes, if I had to introduce someone to the game, it would come with some caveats.

The ideal way to learn to play Frozen Synapse seems to be: play the tutorial (it ain't great, but it's a start), play a few singleplayer missions and then watch this YouTube video tutorial. The video clarified a ton of things for me, but it probably won't make much sense unless you've played at least a few matches.

Given that Frozen Synapse isn't meant to have broad appeal (not multi-millions, anyway), these problems certainly aren't damning. And it is a bloody brilliant game. But with changes, I imagine those first five minutes with the game could be exquisite, instead of just bewildering.

I quibble about the tutorial only because Frozen Synapse is an excellent experience with (for some people) a big ol' wall around it. Pulling out a few of those bricks would open the game up to folks who would just walk away shaking their heads right now.

Oh, and note that in multiplayer, you can issue your opponent's men faux turns to test out possible scenarios. Work great for visualizing outcomes, not so great if you confuse which dudes belong to who, issue your opponent's guys bunk turns and fail to do anything with your own. Doing so in your first multiplayer match ever leaves quite the taste of shame broth upon your lips. Don't be like me, and we'll all be better for it.

And if you want to order your dudes to shoot my dudes, drop a line! I've been playing on the UK3 server, but I think the plan is to collate all the servers soon anyway. I'll hopefully be seeing you on the Plains of Manshoot.

Rapier and Hadouken

2011-05-26T10:30:00.000-07:00

For the last 9 months or so, I've been taking classes at a fencing school here in Vancouver. Back in undergrad at the University of Colorado, I did a few years of kendo which I rather enjoyed and wanted to seek out something similar up here. What the school teaches isn't Olympic sport fencing though, it's Renaissance era swordplay. Basically drawing on all the sword masters mentioned in the fight between Wesley and Inigo in The Princess Bride, especially Capo Ferro (although the actual fight choreography in the movie has almost nothing to do with what those masters would have taught).

Having practiced for a little while now, it's interesting noticing some game-like properties of what we've been learning. Being that it's not sport fencing, there aren't strictly defined rules per se. The "rules" (beyond the stipulations explictly for safety's sake) are just the techniques that work well and help you not get stabbed as much. But there are still things that emerge out of the constraints of what your body can do and the desire to not get stabbed. Obviously a duel-like swordfight is not dissimilar from fighting games, given that's what those games meant to simulate anyway. Some of things I've learned in swordfighting are directly analogous to things in 2D fighters, but they can apply more broadly as well.

In Capo Ferro's fencing manual, he discusses a notion of "tempo" which basically describes opportunities to strike one's opponent. There a four tempos described by Capo Ferro.

First Tempo (primo tempo): As the opponent is first entering range or generally before they've taken any action.

Half Tempo (mezzo tempo): During the preparation of an opponent's action, our attack finishes before his can become threatening.

Counter Tempo (contratempo): As the opponent attacks, we respond at basically the same time (but with a slightly faster action and superior positioning or strength).

Two Tempos (dui tempi): An attack that takes two actions, the first of which constraints or inhibits the opponent somehow.

In the context of video games, obviously things like attacking an enemy while they're in the wind up for an big attack is something that's been done for ages. But these same actions can easily exists on a high level of tactics. A contratempo response to an advancing enemy force in Starcraft II would be to force the engagement onto a ramp where your forces have a superior position. Or to allow your forces to engaging their main attack host, but quickly slip Stalkers into their resource line, crippling their economy and rendering any possible success of their main attack moot.

One of the common challenges I find in design is finding ways to provide good structure to the the game's mechanics. Structure provides patterns and models, and those make mechanics easier to teach and learn. An action or strategy game that provides meaningful ways to act in all four of those tempos would probably have enough depth to be interesting.

I suppose the broader point is find ways to structure your game's mechanics and be open to seeing structures in places you might not expect. That structure could prove to be tremendously valuable, not just for developing your game's mechanics, but for conveying them to someone who doesn't possess intimate knowledge of them (and this is honestly one of the biggest design challenges for any game).

And if you live in Vancouver, come check out Academie Duello. You can try any class you want at no cost. Certainly more enjoyable exercise that hefting metal disks, at the very least.

The Joy of Stasis

2011-05-19T10:30:00.000-07:00

Our project continues to be tremendously busy (positively so, but still, great labours), but I did want to put down some thoughts about Dawn of Discovery. I continue to find the game tremendous satisfying and I want to parse out more of why I feel that way. I think I've got it identified and in a word, it's stasis. Dawn of Discovery is about bringing systems that, left untended, will trend toward chaos back into balance. Obviously a great many sim games, from SimCity onward follow this model. But Dawn of Discovery in particular has made this readily apparent.

Dawn of Discovery structurally is familiar to anyone who's played a game of this ilk. You have a home island, money and a population. That population pays taxes (income) and has certain needs that must be fulfilled. You construct buildings to fulfill those needs (sometimes indirectly, like need a field for to grow hemp and a separate structure to weave it into clothes) and to gather resources for building more structures. Once you have a happy and large enough population, you unlock a new tier of buildings/needs/resources and continue. Obviously there's a lot of nuance here, but at a high level, that's the basic progression.

The interesting dynamic in DoD is to grow, you have to put your economic system out of order. Buildings cost money to maintain and growing you city means more overhead, both in terms of your population's needs and simply the amount of money required to keep them. Your singular most valuable resource is (effectively) a balanced budget and you have to nudge it back toward the black once it's too much toward the red. As soon as your economy is humming nicely, you'll expand further, again putting your system out of balance and it will need to be corrected again.

The satisfaction really comes from keeping the machine running smoothely. Building some more lumberjacks here, adding another mine there, building a few more houses for tax revenue- it's all about making small changes, seeing their effect and further tweaking accordingly. It's a big balance sheet and it produces a kind of satisfaction rarely found in other games.

Games focusing on 1st/3rd person avatar control isolate your input to a very small aspect of the world. But at the same time, almost always, that avatar has a total monopoly on agency in the world. If you don't act, nothing changes. The world is in stasis until you do something. No matter how suspensesful or dramatic the game wants to make a situation seem, until you touch the mouse/controller, nothing will change.

In contrast, Dawn of Discovery continues marching along with or without you. Your job is just to keep things pointed in the right direction. It creates a feeling that you're really very much in control of things, in that you genuinely must act to shape the outcome of the world. The world doesn't wait patiently for you to come to it. Its gears will keep turning with or without you, which means you must act to make a difference. I'd love for that feeling of consequence and importance to be manifest in more avatar-based games, but it's obviously a bit complex to incorporate. But that's not an excuse not to try. Even the harsh progression of time in the first Fallout added great weight and consequence to your actions. It just really sucked to end up on the wrong side of consequence.

Like many economic simulation games, Dawn of Discovery augments that core satisfaction of keeping things balanced by ensuring there are lots of levers to tweak and no optimal decisions to be made. To raise capital, it's at the player's discretion to grow cash crops and sell them or advance quickly to attract more citizens who'll pay higher taxes. Having the ability to make meaningful decisions that directly and obviously impact the state of the world is exactly what I want, at least from this kind of game. Add a fantastic olde timey setting and I'm sold, hook, line and sinker.

Games are interesting because they are made of systems. Simulations like Dawn of Discovery create a truly potent feeling of agency and consequence in the player by allowing them to be an agent within those systems, rather than transcendental being that the game's systems simply exist in service of. That feeling is a profound one, and impossible to reproduce in nearly all other media. It's a tremendous asset for a designer to have at his disposal and one we ought to utilize any chance we can get.

Skip Week for Indigo

2011-05-12T09:08:00.000-07:00

It's a mulligan this week. I was hoping to write something this week, but inundation with work continues. Turns out creating something that nobody has really done before is complicated and difficult! A true ephihany, I know. It's still tremendously satisfying and I couldn't be doing it with a better batch of people. But yes, consuming.

And those few spare moments I have that aren't consumed by thinking about our current project have been consumed by trading indigo. I'd heard The Thumbs espousing the virutes of Dawn of Discovery (aka Anno 1404 in the olde worlde), and I purchased it on a holiday Steam sale, but hadn't actually had a chance to play it until last week. Now all my days are consumed with thoughts of spice routes, glassworks and breweries. It's a real-time city building game with a heavy emphasis on economics. One of my coworkers remarked that it was a "PC-ass PC game" after I explained it to him. A wonderfully accurate assessment, I think. It reminds me of Caesar III, which I played the hell out an era ago, except Dawn of Discovery is sodding gorgeous. Unfortunately, due to Ubisoft apparently not patching the Steam version of the game, it's not available to purchase on Steam currently, but it is on Impulse and Direct2Drive. Heartily recommend it.

I'll try to get the writing back on schedule this weekend. Assuming I can stop trading rope for indigo, at least briefly.

Those Other Indie Games

2011-05-05T10:30:00.000-07:00

I've mentioned before that I'm hugely fond of non-digital games. There are a lot of interesting mechanics and types of interaction that don't get explored very often in digital games. Unlike video games, where the presentation elements can sometimes compensate or at least obscure what's going in the game itself, analog games are basically game laid bare. These games live or die solely by their merits as games.

These analog games include complex and interesting board games (*cough* BSG *cough*), but I think there's also value in looking at tabletop RPGs. Wizards of the Coast's D&D is obviously the one everyone has heard of, or maybe White Wolf's Vampire or Werewolf games. While certainly interesting, these types of RPGs tend to be presented in encyclopedic multi-hundred page tomes, thick with graphs, tables and formulas. They can be plenty enjoyable, but they're a bit difficult to get into unless you really have someone already familiar guiding everyone else.

However, much like digital games, there's been a recent upswell in indie table RPGs. Simpler games exploring novel new mechanics and offering experiences that don't really exist amongst the old titans. I've got a group of friends that get together for weekly gaming and we've been chewing through a bunch of indie RPGs lately. Some thoughts on four that were particularly notable.

Lady Blackbird: The most similar to other tabletop RPGs, Lady Blackbird is commendable for being tight and streamlined without feeling hollow or anemic. The entire game, everything for the players and the GM both, is maybe 15 pages long. Mechanically, the player characters each have a collection of "Keys." They're basically rewards for acting in a way appropriate to your character. It's an interesting way of using the game's systems to reinforce characterization from the players.

The other thing I really like about Lady Blackbird is it only provides the roughest skeleton of a fiction. It's roughly a sorta steampunk version of Firefly. It's enough constraint to get people thinking, but it's almost completely open to where the players and GM want to take things. It's also really easy to imagine adapted the rules to almost any setting and fiction. If you've played other tabletop RPGs, this is an easy leap to make and I'd highly recommend taking a look (and the entire game is free on their website in PDF form).

Ocean: Ocean is a GM-less game, meaning no one player is responsible for setting the stage, providing a challenge or anything else. Because of this, playing Ocean feels as much like an improv game as it does a tabletop RPG (as I mentioned before, improv and games go well together). The conceit is everyone wakes up wearing hospital scrubs with complete amnesia in some kind of facility. You soon discover the facility is underwater and there are some kind of hostile creatures in the facility. The players' communal task is to discover who they are, what the facility is and what those creatures are. Oh, you know, and then escape with their lives if possible.

Overcoming challenges (or failing to do so) provides other players with "credits" they can cash in to reveal a clue about one of the above three unknowns. And by reveal, I mean make the entire thing up. Getting three clues reveals the truth of the thing and answering all three questions means the survivors, if any, can attempt to escape. Because it truly is collaborative storytelling, it really is like improv where you have to say "Yes, and ..." to the other players' contributions. Pulling everyone's disparate ideas together can be a bit tricky, but we managed to pull it off more or less in the game we played. That sensation of taking someone else's idea and building upon it in your own way is very interesting and satisfying. Vaguely reminiscent of shared construction in multiplayer Minecraft except it's stories instead of structures. More abstract than other tabletop RPGs, but also uniquely enjoyable.

Fiasco: Another GM-less game, Fiasco is set up to create small-time capers that go horribly wrong. Think Fargo or Burn After Reading. The difference being each month the designers put out a whole new setting for the game. They range from being aboard a Transatlantic steamship in the 30s to the Reconstruction era American South, from a simple university campus to a sunk WWII submarine with something scratching upon the hull. The play goes simply by describing scenes about one particular character, with the person playing that character being able to either a) describe how the scene is setup or b) control whether the scene ends well for them or poorly. The entire point of the game isn't to "win" or survive, it's just about telling an interesting story. Halfway through the game, the Tilt occurs, which basically means some number of things go really wrong and now those consequences have to be dealt with.

The most interesting part of Fiasco is the game begins with providing a handful of adjectives that describe the characters and the relationships between the characters. Similar to Lady Blackbird, it's just enough of a fictional skeleton to start providing characterization and get people's creativity in motion. All the games are supposed to be played in a single 3-4 hour session too, so there's no expectation of weekly continuity that must be maintained at length.

Dread: There is only a single mechanic in Dread- a Jenga tower. Dread is a horror RPG where the players (there is a GM) accomplish almost anything by pulling blocks from the Jenga tower. If the tower falls, their character is "removed from the game." This usually means dead, but it could mean being driven mad by horrors from beyond the stars or simply being arrested. They are never obligated to pull, and if they don't their character won't die, but whatever they were trying to do will fail. Tension in the game increases more or less in-line with the teetering Jenga tower.

Character creation is done by answering a series of 10-12 of customized questions for each character. In what is a reoccurring theme now, there's already a vague notion of a character, but it's more to get people thinking than telling them who their character should be. We only have played one game of Dread so far and it was a bit abbreviated, but I liked the direction it was going on.

For brevity's sake, I'll spare a lengthy epilogue. But if you're at all interested in tabletop RPGs, I heartily recommend checking out any of the above. There are a lot of good design lessons to be had in addition to generally being a novel and enjoyable way to spend an evening. And come on, how can anyone say no to a game of Jenga where you die when the tower falls over?

Creatures of Contradictory Impulses

2011-04-28T10:30:00.000-07:00

I'm writing about Swarm today, so that means prelude. I wouldn't want anyone to get the wrong impression, and the usual caveats of these views are mine and mine alone, etc. apply.

Swarm is Hothead Games most recent XBLA/PSN title, and honestly, it's an interesting game. Now, I didn't work on Swarm at all and left Hothead before it was released. I played the in-development version a couple of times and gave that team my feedback, but that was about it (I was all 'Spank, all the time). Anyway, point is this isn't to be taken as a review or some judgement. It's an observation of one specific mechanic and the implication it has. Already, enough preface.

Swarm is about controlling a horde of 50 little blue guys at once. You lead them through hazard-strewn levels of roaring saws and crackling Tesla coils. Periodically, clusters of azure nodules allow you to restore any lost swarmites. And that's basically it, pleasantly simple and understandable. The only caveat is that your performance is scored. And that score is really important.

The basic scoring structure in Swarm is you earn points for collecting small objects in the levels. At the same time, as soon as one of these is picked up, a multiplier appears and begins counting down. Its countdown resets when another object is picked up. However, the countdown also resets whenever one of your swarmites is killed. When the timer finally runs down, your currently score is cashed out, multiplied and added to your cumulative score for the level.

Aside from the truly old school glory of having your name next to the highest score on the leaderboard, score in Swarm has another very important function: it's the sole way you progress through the game. Each level has a score target and if you fail to meet it, you cannot continue to the next level until you do. Full stop.

In design parlance, I'd call this a "hard gate." A hard gate is an element that prevents progression without a specific condition being met. Hard progress gates like this are dangerous, simply because progression in the game now hangs entirely on getting that balancing and tuning of those gates absolutely, completely perfect. I don't know if it's possible for that perfect balance to exist. You can't reliably know the skill level of players approaching your game. Do you balance it for a player of moderate skill? Then you're frustrating anyone below that threshold. If you're tuning it for players with very low skill, what's the point of having such gates at all?

Hard gates are especially dangerous for a linear game like Swarm where there's literally nothing else to do in the game should you be unable to achieve the gate's unlocking condition except throw yourself against it again. Even Super Meat Boy and its brutal difficulty had a simple progression goal of completing a level by any means necessary. A+ times were available for players that chose to seek them out, and these A+ times gated the extra difficult "Dark World" levels that were even more insanely difficult (and those also had A+ times). But to progress, only completing the levels was necessary. And even then, within any world, the levels could be played in any order. Plus, if you die in Super Meat Boy you respawn in about 2 seconds.

And that is what's most particularly frustrating about Swarm. Swarm has a checkpoint system where if all 50 of your swarmites die, you'll respawn all 50 at the last checkpoint you passed. Any "cashed out" points are saved and restored when you respawn. However, your running points and score multiplier will not. What this really means is that if you die, you'll almost certainly be in a much worse position score-wise when you respawn.

Especially in some of the later levels, it's the case that if you lost your entire swarm more than 1/3 of the way into the level, your chances of unlocking the next level are basically zero. At that point, it's better to simply restart the entire level rather than press on only to discover you're a couple hundred thousand points short of your goal when you finally reach the end.

Compounding this is the success conditions are difficult to discern. E.g. you have 300,000 points banked and an active tally of 36,400 points with a x14 multiplier. You need 1.2 million to pass the level. Quick, tell me how close you are to unlocking the next level! Now imagine doing that calculus when your multiplier is counting down and you're trying to lead your swarmites through a field of beartraps. The worst surprise one can get from finally chewing through an entire level is to get to end, see they're 100,000 points short and effectively being told, "Whelp, do it again. And better this time."

Now to reiterate the prelude, the point of this isn't to say Swarm is good or bad. I bought it and finished it and I'm genuine in saying there's a lot of interesting stuff going on in the game. Plus, everyone I know that worked on it is a god damn awesome person. I highly encourage you to check the game out for yourself (you can download the 360 demo right here and there's a PSN demo too, once Sony burns out the infection anyway).

But obviously I don't think the effect Swarm's progression had was intentional. I think it's informative to take a look at why that is and see the serious risks in having hard gates that are strictly tied to performance, especially when that performance isn't clear to the player until they're basically done with the task.

Of course, there's a wide gulf between this and L.A. Noire saying you can skip straight to the cutscenes if the game is too hard. But we'll save that for another day.

Deception, Betrayal in the Cards

2011-04-18T10:30:00.000-07:00

If you've talked to me recently, you know I'm quite enamoured with the Battlestar Galactica boardgame. If you haven't played it, you really should. It's one of the best games I've ever played, digital or cardboard. It's a game about paranoia, suspicion and betrayal, which are disappointingly rare experiences as far as games are concerned. It evokes those feelings with both excellence and ease. And perhaps most importantly, it does so exclusively through the game's mechanics.

I've never seen the Battlestar Galactica show (I know, I know, I'm planning to watch it as soon as my wife and I finish Rome), so the feelings the game evokes are not due to the game's fiction. Although by all accounts, the game does replicate the feeling of the show quite well. But the BSG fiction is just a supporting element and a way to tie the game into something people are already familiar with. The feelings the game evokes are entirely due to its design.

I'm going to try to break down specific mechanics that help the game foster the atmosphere that it does. For those that haven't played, this likely won't make much sense. But hey, that's just another reason to go play the game. As I thought about this, one commonality is how much depth many of the mechanics have. Even once the mechanic is understood, clever players can find unexpected ways to utilize it and, especially if they're a Cylon, find ways to manipulate the perceptions of other players. So without further ado:

Anonymity and Randomness in Crisis Skill Checks: Cards played in skill checks are played face down, and two random cards (of a finite deck of two of each kind) are added (unless a special card is used to force them all to be played face up). Unless there are three negative cards, the humans cannot assume the skill check has been sabotaged by a Cylon.

If there are more than three negative cards played, which players can draw those colours comes under scrutiny. If all the negative cards are green and yellow, suspicion is going to fall on the Political characters. Of course, there are ways to get colours your character cannot draw. So the behaviour of characters for the past few turns comes under scrutiny. Has someone been playing a lot of Consolidate Power cards, getting two cards of any colour? What were those colours? Has someone been spending a lot of time in the Press Room, drawing yellow cards? A clever Cylon might have encouraged someone to hit up the Press Room, just to then spike a skill check with yellow cards and try to cast suspicion on them. In short, the anonymity and randomness in the skill checks end up not only allowing for higher order thinking, but suspicion is almost always the outcome if they go wrong.

Character Access to Skill Cards: The types of cards characters have access to creates interesting depth in how they can affect skill challenges. In some ways, Pilot characters (and Giaus Baltar) have the easiest time of sabotaging skill checks. With access to three or four types of skill cards, it's more difficult to pin them down as playing against a skill check. But with limited access to leadership and politics cards, it's difficult for pilots to participate in the shipboard skill checks of sending someone to or freeing them from the brig, and changing the presidency. Also they won't ever start the game as president or admiral.

Voting: Since it's difficult for any one person to accomplish a skill check, many skill checks (especially those involving the Brig or the presidency) end up seeming very much like votes. Whether a character participates or abstains can potentially shed insight into their true nature. This has the secondary effect of potentially creating alliances between players. If I helped keep you out of the Brig, you're probably at least a little more likely to trust me. Similarly, moving the Presidency from one character to another (rather than to yourself) has essentially created one ally and one enemy.

As a Cylon player, the ideal situation is to keep the humans factionalized. By allowing for "voting" in the skill checks, not only are player's motives called into question (creating suspicion), but alliances can potentially be formed. Should those alliances then be betrayed, and it's very much in the Cylon player's interest to do so, the feeling of being mislead is inevitably heightened.

Players being forced to make decisions: Certain Crisis cards give the option to either attempt a skill challenge and risk a very negative outcome, or simply choose a slightly less awful outcome without any chance of success. Other cards simple force the current player, the admiral or the president to choose between two unpleasant options. By forcing players to make a decision with real severe consequences, it creates stressful moments where that player's judgement is called into question. It provides the opportunity for a Cylon player to make the obviously worse decision if it's really damaging to the humans.

But most importantly, it plants the seed of doubt in other players' minds. If you're suspicious of someone, you don't want them to have an opportunity to do grievous harm. Putting them in the Brig means they'll not draw Crisis cards and they'd lose the Admiral title. But putting someone in the Brig unnecessarily can do major harm to the humans' chances of success, so it's not a decision to be made lightly.

Positions of Power: Beyond the decisions they're forced to make in the above circumstances, the Admiral and President also have two very important roles. The President has access to the Quorum cards, which afford a number of powerful abilities, including sending someone to or free them from the Brig without needing a skill check. The Admiral decides where the Galactica goes when it jumps, which can greatly help or hinder the humans. These roles are not balanced with respect to the other player's abilities.

This means it's very important to make sure the Admiral and President are trustworthy. I can tell you first hand that if one person is both the Admiral and the President and they turn out to be a Cylon, the humans are in a bad way. The Admiral and President end up heavily scrutinized, but the humans have to be very careful about changing those roles, lest they change it from a human player to a Cylon.

Cylon Reveal Abilities: Should a Cylon reveal themselves and not be in the Brig, they get to deal extra harm to the humans players. This encourages the Cylons to play subtly until they can position themselves for a devastating reveal. Engaging in a scorched earth policy from the outset will get that Cylon dropped in the Brig. As damaging as the Cylon can be, it's distrust and suspicion amongst the humans that will do the most damage. A good Cylon will foster that distrust, ideally sowing as much dissent as they can without revealing themselves. And only then should they pull the ultimate reveal. Without the advantage of reveal while outside of the Brig, Cylons would be less penalized by openly sabotaging the humans' efforts.

Imperfect Information: Fundamentally, Battlestar Galactica is a game of imperfect information. Whenever the Admiral looks at the destination cards, he isn't allowed to share their contents. If he selects something harsh, it's up to the other players to believe when he says the other thing was worse. Players can occasionally look at another player's loyalty cards, but again that information is for their eyes alone. When they claim that person is a Cylon (or not), the other players can act on that information or not depending on how trustworthy they feel that player is. The only time any perfect information is ever allowed is when a Cylon reveals themselves. Otherwise, it's just trust. And having to rely that much of trust means suspicion is an inevitable consequence.

This is by no means thorough. But it does reveal some trends (build mechanics that result in suspicion, making trusting other players dangerous) that fosters the atmosphere of paranoia and tension that makes BSG such a novel experience. I really encourage anyone who hasn't played it to find a way to do so. Given how well established certain experiences in games are (as excellently as they may be implemented) the feeling of a good game of BSG is really quite novel. Plus, it's hard to offer higher praise than saying it's almost guaranteed to make you hate your friends, in the best of ways.