Andrew Doull's shared items in Google Reader

A Bundle of Information on Indie Royale [Interview]

2011-10-31T15:29:06Z

Last week, IndieGames.com and Desura presented a new fortnightly event called Indie Royale. For those who haven’t checked it out yet, the idea is pretty simple. A bundle of 4 games are presented for a price of $2.00. As the bundle sells more the price steadily increases. But if users pay more for the game than the minimum the price will be reduced.

It’s definitely interesting to see how the indie games bundle market has expanded since the Humble Bundle started the trend a couple years ago.

Anyway, when Indie Royale first launched I had a lot of questions, as I’m sure you did, about just how the site came to be and what the plans are in the future. Luckily Michael Rose (former DIYGamer.com writer) was able to answer them for me. Enjoy!

DIYGamer: Can you explain a little bit on how IndieRoyale came about and the motivations behind it?

Michael Rose: It all came about when myself and Simon Carless began discussing ways in which we could further support the indie scene (apart from IndieGames.com). Simon got talking to Scott Reismanis at Desura, and suddenly a vague plan was formed. Over around 4 months, we toyed with the idea until we finally thought what the hell, let’s give this a shot! As you’d expect, the last 4 months have been pretty stressful, but now that Indie Royale has launched, we’re totally happy about it.

Our motivation is getting the word out about all the smaller indie titles that most people pass straight over. I think the majority of mainstream gamers think ‘indie’ means Braid, World of Goo, all those indie titles that you and I class as perhaps ‘high-profile indie’. While these games definitely reflect what indie is all about, it’s a shame that so many titles get passed straight over and don’t get much press, especially the real excellent ones. Indie Royale has been put in place to bring those under-appreciated titles to the foreground.

DIYGamer: Inside the announcement email it says that IndieGames.com and Desura worked together on this, but who actually owns it? Who is actually running the site?

Michael Rose: The site is run and owned jointly between UBM Tech (IndieGames.com parent company) and Desura. Running the site is me, Simon and Scott, along with some of the great people at Desura and IndieGames.com, who have been helping out with support and backend stuff.

DIYGamer: What’s the profit split for the developers and for the people running the site?

Michael Rose: As you’d expect, we’re not fully disclosing details on this. That’s not because we’re ashamed of the split we’re giving – far from it – but rather that it’s a sensitive deal between us and the devs. As I’m sure you’ve seen, other indie bundles in the past (and present!) rarely divulge the exact amount that devs are getting too for the very same reason.

DIYGamer: The plan is to have a bundle every two weeks, why two weeks when, at least, the first bundle seems to be only about 5 days long?

Michael Rose: There’s a cooling down period of 9 days between each one so that we can have a sit down and breathe a bit! While this bundle has been on, we’ve been constantly on the edges of our seats, making sure it’s all going smoothly, answering support emails and patching areas up that need fixing. Imagine if we had to do that 24/7 each single week… I personally would explode. So the 9 days is in place to give us time to prepare the next bundle as perfectly as possible.

DIYGamer: What the relation here to the Humble Bundle? Is this simply a way to capitalize on the indie bundle business?

Michael Rose: We have no relationship to the Humble Indie Bundle, although of course, we love what those guys do. They revolutionized the indie bundle idea, and are doing a fantastic job with it. We’ve tried to take some inspiration from them and make something very different – so we’ve got the every 2 weeks feature, the interesting up-and-down money feature, the stats tracking payments going up and down… plus, we’re aiming at an entirely different section of the indie scene to them. As mentioned above, we’re looking to bring the smaller indies to the foreground, whereas the HIB usually relies on ‘bigger’ indie names. That’s not a bad thing at all, it’s quite the opposite! But I think while they continue to put a spotlight on those, we’ll be helping some of the smaller names out at the same time.

DIYGamer: Roughly 35,000 bundles have been sold so far. How has reaction been to these sales so far? Are they below, or above expectations?

Michael Rose: The initial surge was completely unexpected, and we were overwhelmed – indeed, the Indie Royale servers weren’t very happy on the first night! To be honest, our expectations were all over the place, and we had absolutely no idea how well it would do. We’re now looking to fix up all the holes, bang in all the features that people have been asking for, and make sure that that future bundles do even better!

DIYGamer: What’s the ultimate goal for IndieRoyale? Is this planned to be a persistent service or is this a limited run thing?

Michael Rose: It’s going to run for as long as we can keep it going! We’re not planning any end to it as of yet, and as long as people still want to buy great indie games, we’re going to keep providing. If, in months to come, people are saying ‘I can’t believe I never tried any of these games before, my whole perception of the indie scene has changed’, then our goal will be satisfied.

–

Again super huge thanks to Michael Rose of IndieGames.com. As the first Indie Royale bundle comes to a close today with over 35,000 bundles sold I’d say the first was a success. It will be interesting to see how the indie games market changes with a site such as this and whether or not we’ll see more bundles appearing over time rather than games “going it alone” so to say.

[IndieRoyale]

"You know I can't grab your ghost chip!"

2011-10-27T14:51:20Z

A jolly drunk driving PSA from our cuzs over in New Zealand. SLYT.

"We're not douchebags"

2011-10-26T05:00:00Z

I read the transcript of the press conference on Blizzcon. In this, Jay Wilson from the Diablo III team stated: "We're not really concerned about making 1-60 some ridiculously long grind. We're not douchebags".

What? Making players playing being a douchebag? This tells much about the attitude of developers towards gamers. But they are not evil per se. There is at least a loud minority or even a majority to blame for this. This developer believes that players hate playing and only do it to get pixel rewards to feel good about themselves. Or alternatively, Diablo III will be a terrible game, which wouldn't be surprising considering it's free to play. I bet on the first option.

The "boring grind" attitude is surprising even in WoW, where the endgame seriously differ from the trivialized leveling. It's completely possible that someone enjoys PvP or raiding while hate to level up. That's bad design on its own, but here it's not the point. Diablo III "endgame" won't be any different from the leveling. We will be wandering in the same scenarios, killing the same monsters, with the same group size. Obviously the Inferno monster will be harder than the first imp in normal act 1, but this is definitely the same game. If someone enjoys doing it, he will enjoy doing it.

However the Hell Baal runs of Diablo II tell otherwise. Hell Baal was the endboss of the game. If you killed him, you won Diablo II. You even got a nice cutscene. But people kept bashing Hell Baal again and again to gain more levels and especially to gain more gear. They duped in large to get even more gear. Why? Only for pure vanity. After you killed Hell Baal there was nothing more to do in the game. Yet people wanted more gear and levels, just for itself, to show it off to derive a twisted sense of "l33tness" from it.

This attitude explains and predicts lot of gaming design features. Developers don't want to be douchebags, so they won't make the players do anything hard or long to get the shinies. It of course affects us too as we can't play anything immersive or challenging, unless it's under the radar, not providing new shinies, therefore uninteresting to the target audience.

But who are they? No, not the kids. Kids like pandas and sparkling ponies, but don't really care about numerical improvements of their characters. Otherwise they wouldn't be ungemmed, unenchanted and mis-specced. The target audience are the socials who want nothing but being respected and liked by peers. They consider everything status symbol and collect it, in the hope that it will make them special, or at least "not worse" than the "community". Funnily the people actually think of them as no-lifers, since anyone who has something they don't must be playing 40 hours a week.

Remember that the "i got an uber sword lololol" guy is a person in real life. We have to handle these creatures both in game (any game) and in real life. No point fighting them, they are a mindless swarm of zombies. It's much better to abuse their primitive mind. There is a slogan used to this: "I have a Bridge in Brooklyn for sale to them". I have better one: "I have a bunch of pixels for sale in the Diablo III RMAH"!

PS: remember fellow goblins, we are not game developers. When we are dealing with them, we can and shall be douchebags!

"...part of me suspects that someone in Google corporate looked

2011-10-22T11:46:08Z

Shared by Andrew Doull
Yet another reader obituary.

"...part of me suspects that someone in Google corporate looked at the Buzz and gReader communities, looked at Plus’s less-than-vertical adoption & use rates, and concluded that by killing Buzz and gReader’s social elements, these communities would migrate over to Plus.

That is, however, a ridiculous idea. Buzz operates in your Gmail inbox and gReader is an RSS feed reader. The majority of employers don’t block email or RSS feed readers. You know what a lot of employers do block? Self-described social networks like Google Plus...Also, where is it written that because a large number of people form one internet community, that must be how all online communities are organized? I don’t care if Google wants Plus to get bigger, I care about me and my friends who seek to read and discuss the entire internet every day. Is there really no space for different kinds of people to form different kinds of social spaces in Google products? Are they really that fucking stupid about how communities work?"

http://kirbybits.wordpress.com/2011/10/21/wherein-i-try-to-explain-why-google-reader-is-the-best-social-network-created-so-far/

"...part of me suspects that someone in Google corporate looked

2011-10-22T11:45:51Z

Exclusive: Dungeons of Dredmor Sold Very Well; Expansion Announced

2011-10-19T21:45:25Z

Yesterday I spent the better part of an hour speaking with Nicholas Vining, David Baumgart and Daniel Jacobson of Gaslamp Games, better known as the guys who created the really popular roguelike Dungeons of Dredmor that was released this past summer. The guys are very, very funny and they dropped a lot of knowledge about their game and future endeavors during our interview. Unfortunately, it’s going to take me a couple days to fully transcribe and proofread it to the point where it’s actually legible.

As such, I’ve decided to break some news a bit earlier than the interview (which you can expect tomorrow or Friday).

As the title suggests, the first bit of news is that (shocker!) Dungeons of Dredmor sold very well for the tiny indie studio. When asked about the sales the trio wouldn’t divulge exact numbers but did say that with the money earned they’re all able to work fulltime at Gaslamp Games and, get this, they now have a real office!

Here was Nicholas’ exact reaction to their sales:

We honestly sort of expected to release, and fade into the mists, only to slowly pick up some sort of mild following. The fact that we were #1 on Steam when we launched… was mind-blowing.

I think I spent most of our launch window alternating between giggling madly, and then grinding my teeth.

The other big news here is that, yes, Dungeons of Dredmor will have an official expansion. No exact name was given for the title yet, but it seems the three are trying to decide on:

The Realm of Masochism
The Hole of Festering
Somebody Stabbing You With Broken Glass

With varying degrees of joke thrown in for good measure.

The expansion pack will cost money, but for how much isn’t exactly decided. Certainly less than the original though. Nicholas did say it will “redefine value.” Although he wasn’t exactly sure if that would be a positive or negative thing… (again he was joking!).

Finally, the gang plans on releasing mod tools soon which will allow you to mod the game. According to Nicholas with the mod tools you could technically make the entire expansion yourself so for those of you who don’t want to shell out the probable $2-$3 for it, you can just make it yourself!

Again, I’ll have the full interview up later this week and maybe another article or two as I transcribe the interview (it was a big one!). In the mean time, enjoy this small portion of breaking Gaslamp Games news.

[Gaslamp Games, Desura]

Soul Dojo

2011-10-19T16:25:30Z

To mold the mind and body. To cultivate a vigorous spirit, And through correct and rigid training, To strive for improvement in the art of Kendo.
–“The Concept of Kendo,” 1975

I am sure you will die a lot in the game, but the game is designed in a way which a player can learn from his deaths. By experiencing a lot of deaths in the game, I am hoping that a player can find out how he can overcome each difficulty in the game… When the difficulty is high, all the values of things a player finds in the game will be very precious.
–Hidetaka Miyazaki, director, Dark Souls

Most reviews of Dark Souls lead with a lament/celebration of its difficulty. Whatever else we might say about this game’s merits (and there is much to say), we’re fixated on this game’s capacity to bash our brains in. Many players find the difficulty frustrating, and some have suggested only masochists can truly enjoy the experience Dark Souls delivers. But for many of us, this game and its predecessor Demon’s Souls elicit an uncommonly ardent (dare I say reverential?) feeling of devotion that few games evoke. Why?

Dark Souls pushes all my buttons, provoking long, bleary-eyed play sessions; tenaciousness bordering on obsession; audible gasps of incredulity, followed by frustration, followed by profane tirades, followed by warnings from my wife not to wake up our 3-year-old. These behaviors are all familiar to me because Demon’s Souls provoked all the same reactions. I’m left wondering why no other games push me anywhere near those places?

These questions have rattled around in my head since late-2009, when Demon’s Souls sunk its hooks in me. What is it about these games that draws me in so completely? Why do I feel such a powerful compulsion to keep going, despite hundreds of ruinous failures along the way? Is it less about the game and more about me? Am I looking for a way to prove myself as a gamer? Am I simply a glutton for punishment?

Maybe I shouldn’t dismiss that last question so quickly. If the ‘punishment’ dished out by these games feels substantive to me - if it truly has meaning - then perhaps I do behave like a player-glutton. I eat up my punishment in big helpings, ever eager for more. I mean, if the shoe fits…

So, an obvious question arises: what does Dark Souls punishment mean? What exactly do I get out of it? Back in ‘09 I took a stab at that question with Demon’s Souls, and the answer I came up with was pedagogy. These games employ a failure-as-tutelage model that works remarkably well, if you’re willing to trust the teacher. Ultimately, the difficulty resonates because the cumulative impact of many failures is progress - and progress feels like victory in these games.

I believe that assessment holds, but I’ve come to realize it doesn’t fully account for the grip Dark Souls has on me. Something else - deeper and more reverberant - is happening to me when I play this game. I believe it has something to do with training and mindful discipline. Playing Dark Souls intently, over time, is akin to practice, in both the common sense of the word - performing an activity or skill repeatedly to achieve mastery - and in the traditional spiritual sense - deepening our awareness through disciplined focus and effort.

For the correct transmission and development of Kendo, efforts should be made to teach the correct way of handling the shinai in accordance with the principles of the sword.[2]

For me, Dark Souls enables an approach to play that reflects Kendo (i.e. “The Way of Sword”) training, with some of the same benefits imparted to the earnest practitioner. Thus, the world of Dark Souls functions as a kind of virtual Dojo, a stern but playful host for rigorous lessons in persistence, patience, discipline, precision, mastery, and charting an optimal path.

Dark Souls is an exacting master, unsparing in its insistence on thoughtful play. No game requires more persistent mindfulness of my actions, my environment, and my technique. Each new place (and its terrain and inhabitants) will test what I’ve learned. Cautiously entering an uncharted region, I unfailingly pause to take a breath and consider my preparation. Am I ready for this? Do I have everything I need? Am I nimble enough? Am I strong enough? Am I fully focused and undistracted?

If any of these answers are ‘no,’ I will very likely die. If all the answers are ‘yes,’ I may survive, but probably not. The real challenge for me isn’t survival - I mean, the game starts the player as dead and insists on keeping him there - the challenge is mostly about paying attention. Learning the game’s cues, memorizing its environments, and internalizing its systems. Dark Souls doesn't rely on adaptive AI for its NPCs because doing so would disrupt this carefully balanced ecosystem. It would also likely make me shoot myself in the head.

The great misconception about Dark Souls and Demon’s Souls is that they’re designed to kill you a thousand times. In fact, these games are a series of immaculately designed challenge chambers, designed to teach the studious player to succeed, but on the game’s terms. At the risk of cliche-mongering, I’ll suggest that this requires a kind of surrender often described as ‘letting go’ or ‘becoming one’ with the game.

If you want to be given everything, give everything up.
--Tao Te Ching

And so in the Dark Souls Dojo the player cultivates his mind, spirit, and technique through disciplined practice, aiming for “Ki-ken-tai-ichi,” (“spirit, sword, and body are one”) a Kendo term used in teaching striking moves. “Ki is spirit, ken refers to the handling of the sword, and tai refers to body movements and posture. When these three elements harmonize and function together with correct timing, they create the conditions for a valid strike.”[1] This concept embraces a way of playing this game that appeals to me and enriches my time inside the game. I know what a "valid strike" is in Dark Souls. I have felt it.

When I play Dark Souls mindfully, it’s possible for me to experience a fully-unified sensation. Last night, I sustained it through a perfect run of the New Londo Ruins. I executed every move efficiently, with minimal effort and maximal effect. I knew exactly where to be, what to do, and how to do it. I was elegant and precise. It was less like fighting than dancing. It was beautiful.

Zileas' List of Game Design Anti-Patterns - League of Legends Community

2011-10-16T19:12:31Z

I've been asked a few times, "Why don't you do stuff like Rupture (from DOTA Bloodseeker) in LoL?"

I usually respond -- Rupture contains several basic design 'anti-patterns'. I thought I'd post for the benefit of those who are interested what strong anti-patterns I am aware of.

So... Here are a few that come to mind.... Note that you can find an example of each of these somewhere in our game at some intensity level. Sometimes this is just bad design. Sometimes this is because we got something else in exchange. Design is an optimization -- but these anti-patterns are of negative design value, so you should only do them if you get something good in return.

To be clear, LoL has a number of abilities that use these anti-patterns. Sometimes it's because we got something good in return. Sometimes it's because we made design errors. However, we generally avoid them nonetheless, and certainly use them a lot less than other games in our genre.

Note: All WoW examples refer to original and BC WoW, not cataclsym.

Power Without Gameplay
This is when we give a big benefit in a way that players don't find satisfying or don't notice. The classic example of this is team benefit Auras. In general, other players don't value the aura you give them very much, and you don't value it much either -- even though auras can win games. As a REALLY general example, I would say that players value a +50 armor aura only about twice as much as a +10 armor aura... Even though +50 is 5x better. Another example would be comparing a +10 damage aura to a skill that every 10 seconds gives flaming weapons that make +30 damage to all teammates next attack (with fire and explosions!). I am pretty sure that most players are WAY more excited about the fiery weapons buff, even though the strength is lower overall.

The problem with using a "power without gameplay" mechanic is that you tend to have to 'over-buff' the mechanic and create a game balance problem before people appreciate it. As a result, we tend to keep Auras weak, and/or avoid them altogether, and/or pair them on an active/passive where the active is very strong and satisfying, so that the passive is more strategic around character choice. For example, Sona's auras are all quite weak -- because at weak values they ARE appreciated properly.

Burden of Knowledge
This is a VERY common pattern amongst hardcore novice game designers. This pattern is when you do a complex mechanic that creates gameplay -- ONLY IF the victim understands what is going on. Rupture is a great example -- with Rupture in DOTA, you receive a DOT that triggers if you, the victim, choose to move. However, you have no way of knowing this is happening unless someone tells you or unless you read up on it online... So the initial response is extreme frustration. We believe that giving the victim counter gameplay is VERY fun -- but that we should not place a 'burden of knowledge' on them figuring out what that gameplay might be. That's why we like Dark Binding and Black Shield (both of which have bait and/or 'dodge' counter gameplay that is VERY obvious), but not Rupture, which is not obvious.

In a sense, ALL abilities have some burden of knowledge, but some have _a lot more_ -- the ones that force the opponent to know about a specific interaction to 'enjoy' the gameplay have it worst.

Good particle work and sound -- good 'salesmanship' -- will reduce burden of knowledge (but not eliminate it). We still would not do Rupture as is in LoL ever, but I would say that the HON version of Rupture, with it's really distinct sound effect when you move, greatly reduces the burden of knowledge on it.

In summary, all mechanics have some burden of knowledge, and as game designers, we seek to design skills in a way that gives us a lot of gameplay, for not too much burden of knowledge. If we get a lot more gameplay from something, we are willing to take on more burden of knowledge -- but for a given mechanic, we want to have as little burden of knowledge as possible.

Unclear Optimization
This is a more subtle one. when players KNOW they've used a spell optimally, they feel really good. An example is disintegrate on Annie. When you kill a target and get the mana back, you know that you used it optimally, and this makes the game more fun. On the other hand, some mechanics are so convoluted, or have so many contrary effects, that it is not possible to 'off the cuff' analyze if you played optimally, so you tend not to be satisfied. A good example of this is Proudmoore's ult in DOTA where he drops a ship. The ship hits the target a bit in the future, dealing a bunch of damage and some stun to enemies. Allies on the other hand get damage resistance and bonus move speed, but damage mitigated comes up later. Very complicated! And almost impossible to know if you have used it optimally -- do you really want your squishies getting into the AOE? Maybe! Maybe not... It's really hard to know that you've used this skill optimally and feel that you made a 'clutch' play, because it's so hard to tell, and there are so many considerations you have to make. On the other hand, with Ashe's skill shot, if you hit the guy who was weak and running, you know you did it right... You also know you did it right if you slowed their entire team... Ditto on Ezreal's skill shot.

Use Pattern Mis-matches Surrounding Gameplay
I won't go into too much detail on this, but the simple example is giving a melee DPS ability to a ranged DPS character -- the use pattern on that is to force move to melee, then use. This does not feel good, and should be avoided. I'm sure you are all thinking -- but WoW mages are ranged, and they have all these melee abilities! Well... Frost Nova is an escape, and the various AEs are fit around a _comprehensive_ different mage playstyle that no longer is truly 'ranged' and is mechanically supported across the board by Blizzard -- so the rules don't apply there ;p

Fun Fails to Exceed Anti-Fun
Anti-fun is the negative experience your opponents feel when you do something that prevents them from 'playing their game' or doing activities they consider fun. While everything useful you can do as a player is likely to cause SOME anti-fun in your opponents, it only becomes a design issue when the 'anti-fun' created on your use of a mechanic is greater than your fun in using the mechanic. Dark Binding is VERY favorable on this measurement, because opponents get clutch dodges just like you get clutch hits, so it might actually create fun on both sides, instead of fun on one and weak anti-fun on another. On the other hand, a strong mana burn is NOT desirable -- if you drain someone to 0 you feel kinda good, and they feel TERRIBLE -- so the anti-fun is exceeded by the fun. This is important because the goal of the game is for players to have fun, so designers should seek abilities that result in a net increase of fun in the game. Basic design theory, yes?

Conflicted Purpose
This one is not a super strong anti-pattern, but sometimes it's there. A good example of this would be a 500 damage nuke that slows enemy attack speed by 50% for 10 seconds (as opposed to say, 20%), on a 20 second cooldown. At 50%, this is a strong combat initiation disable... but at 500 damage it's a great finisher on someone who is running... but you also want to use it early to get the disable -- even though you won't have it avail by the end of combat usually to finish. This makes players queasy about using the ability much like in the optimization case, but it's a slightly different problem. If the ability exists for too many different purposes on an explicit basis, it becomes confusing. this is different from something like blink which can be used for many purposes, but has a clear basic purpose -- in that place, players tend to just feel creative instead.

Anti-Combo
This one is bad. This is essentially when one ability you have diminishes the effectiveness of another in a frustrating manner. Some examples:
- Giving a character a 'break-on-damage' CC with a DOT (yes, warlocks have this, but they tuned it to make it not anti-combo much at all)
- With Warriors in WoW -- they need to get rage by taking damage so that they can use abilities and gain threat -- but parry and dodge, which are key to staying alive, make them lose out on critical early fight rage. So, by gearing as a better tank, you become a worse tank in another dimension -- anti combo!
- With old warrior talent trees in WoW, revenge would give you a stun -- but stunned enemies cannot hit you and cause rage gain... So this talent actually reduced your tanking capability a lot in some sense! Anti-combo!

False Choice -- Deceptive Wrong Choice
This is when you present the player with one or more choices that appear to be valid, but one of the choices is just flat wrong. An example of this is an ability we had in early stages recently. It was a wall like Karthus' wall, but if you ran into it, it did damage to you, and then knocked you towards the caster. In almost every case, this is a false choice -- because you just shoudln't go there ever. If it was possible for the character to do a knockback to send you into the wall, it wouldn't be as bad. Anyhow, there's no reason to give players a choice that is just plain bad -- the Tomb of Horrors (original module) is defined by false choices -- like the room with three treasure chests, all of which have no treasure and lethal traps.

False Choice -- Ineffective Choice
Similar to above, except when you give what appears to be an interesting choice that is then completely unrewarding, or ineffective at the promised action. An older version of Swain's lazer bird had this failing... Because the slow was so large, you could never run away in time to de-leash and break the spell and reduce damage, and in cases you did, you'd just dodge 20% of the damage at a big cost of movement and DPS -- so running was just an ineffective choice.

Or We Could **** the Player!!1111oneoneone
This is where you straight up screw over the player, usually with dramatic flair, or maybe just try to make the player feel crappy in a way that isn't contributing to the fun of the game. These range in severity, but examples usually are spawned because the designer is a pretentious wanker who likes to show what a smart dude he is and how stupid the player is. I do not respect designers who engage in this pattern intentionally, and encourage any design lead out there to immediately fire any of your staff that does. I do understand that it can happen inadvertently, and that you might cause some of this stress on purpose in an RPG for character development.. And of course, I love you WoW team despite the 'playing vs' experience of Rogue and Warlock, as you DO have the best classes of any MMO, and they look even better in Cataclysm.... But, on Bayonetta, did the developers really think the stone award was a good idea? But I digress...

Very Severe: The original tomb of horrors D&D module is the worst in existence. Good examples are the orb of annihilation that doesnt look like one and instakills you and all your gear if you touch it, and the three treasure chests where each has no loot and deadly traps and no clues that this is the case.

Severe: There's a popular wc3 map in China where you enter a bonus round, and have a 2% chance of just straight up dying rather than getting cool loot.

Situationally Moderate:Horrify + fear kiting from a competent warlock who outgears you in WoW. Guess what? You die before getting to react, while watching it in slow motion!

Mild: Stone award in Bayonetta. So... you barely get through the level for the first time, then get laughed at by the game with a lame statue of the comic relief character, and a mocking laugh. Please -- maybe a bronze award and a 500 pt bonus might be more appropriate? The player might have worked VERY hard to get through the level, espec on normal and higher difficulties.

Non-Reliability
Skills are tools. Players count on them to do a job. When a skill is highly unreliable, we have to overpower it to make it 'satisfying enough'. Let me give you an example: Let's say Kayle's targeted invulnerability ult had a 95% chance of working, and a 5% chance of doing nothing when cast. We'd have to make it a LOT stronger to make it 'good enough' because you could not rely upon it... and it would be a lot less fun. Random abilities have this problem on reliability -- they tend to be a lot less satisfying, so you have to overpower them a lot more. Small amounts of randomness can add excitement and drama, but it has a lot of downsides. There are other examples of non-reliability, but randomness is the most obvious one. Abilities that require peculiar situations to do their jobs tend to run into the same problems, such as Tryndamere's shout that only slows when targets are facing away from him.

Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike: Source, Day of Defeat: Source and Half-Life 2: Deathmatch Updates Released

2011-10-14T10:39:31Z

Shared by Andrew Doull
Hmm... "Dramatic increase in performance for low-level math libraries". I wonder if they're using Ridiculous Fish's fast math library....

Updates to Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike: Source, Day of Defeat: Source and Half-Life 2: Deathmatch have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

Source Engine Changes (CS:S, DoD:S, TF2, HL2:DM)

Fixed an issue with the multi-threaded renderer which could cause a crash on map change
Adjusted whitespace to improve formatting in status command output
Changed stats output to show KB/s instead of bytes/sec, added a connections column, and changed the users column to "Map changes"
Fixed game servers not being able to execute the retry command due to the dependence on the connect command (which is not executable by game servers)
Made sndplaydelay executable by servers
Server frame rate is now based on the tickrate of the active Source mod, not the fps_max convar
Server processing delays have been reduced, especially for servers on modern Linux kernels
Entity processing logic has been optimized to significantly reduce CPU usage on full servers
Multi-threaded server code is now enabled by default under Linux (already enabled on Windows)
An exploit with non-printable characters causing lag on Windows servers has been fixed
CPU is fully yielded back to the system whenever the server is running faster than the tickrate
Dramatic increase in performance for low-level math libraries

Day of Defeat: Source

Removed tickrate command line parameter
Updated the localization files

Counter-Strike: Source

Prevent AWP cycle time exploit using quick switch
Fixed bug causing HUD History to display item pickups from nearby players
Increased sized of HUD History resource to prevent clipping
Changed grenade damage so that it always hits HITGROUP_GENERIC and takes into account armor for damage calculations
Reduced standing and moving accuracy for pistols
Decreased accuracy while moving with sniper rifles
Added additional legacy mode (3) to cl_dynamiccrosshair
Updated the localization files

Team Fortress 2
Manniversary:

Experimenting with a new store interface with a subset of players
Added several dozen community items in celebration of the Manniversary
Added loadout presets -- each class can now store four complete loadouts, including weapons and cosmetic items, and change between them with the press of a button.
Added a new item type that can accept user-applied decals. Take any image off your hard drive, put it on a stick, and then smash people with it! (See the Decal Tool in the store!)
Added new co-operative high five taunt
Class select menu now shows the active loadout for each class
Characters can now equip two misc-slot items at once
Added a new in-game abuse-reporting system (see "Capture abuse report data" under "Miscellaneous" controls)
Non-newly-released weapons in the store can now be tried out for free once per week! This will give you a fully-functional version of the weapon to be used in-game for no cost. If you decide you like it, you can purchase it for a discount during the trial period.
All items purchased in the store can be used for crafting and can be traded after a few days
Added a new startup music track from Meet The Medic
Integrated with the new Steam Workshop to enable the publication and management of community contributed content

Maps:

Added new community control point map Gullywash. Stamps are available in the store to support community map authors!
Barnblitz is now available for offline practice
Frontier: various geometry fixes
Gorge/5Gorge: added team-specific func_nobuild brushes in elevated forward spawn areas

Replay:

New camera shake functionality added for replays that are not sufficiently dramatic
New slow-motion functionality added for replays where even camera shake does not provide sufficient drama
Added support for recording voice chat into replays

Items:

Pocket Medic can now be equipped by the Soldier in addition to the Heavy
World Traveler's Hat and the Connoisseur's Cap are now paintable
Bonk Boy and Foster's Facade are now misc slot items
Fixed The Director's Vision not playing animations correctly for all classes in the loadout screen
The Killer Exclusive is now paintable
When sorting the backpack, otherwise-equivalent items will sort by strange weapon rank and crate series number if possible
When selecting items from the loadout, weapons with different kill eater ranks will all show up
Hat of Undeniable Wealth And Respect animations have been added. Really.
LOD models added to several older cosmetic items

Response Rules:

Reduced the chance of many response lines occurring
Responses related to cart progress no longer play when disguised
Players will now always call for a medic when low on health or when on fire when a medic is under the crosshair, whereas previously the character would ask the medic to follow them
Named base items will no longer trigger responses that were supposed to be for new item variants
Added additional Jarate hit responses
Demoman:
- Added achievement award response
- Removed "I didn't need your help y'know" line if being healed by a Medic
- Saxxy kills will use the same lines as kills from the frying pan
- Taunting with The Pain Train or the Saxxy now plays the same taunt as the grenade launcher
- Added a taunt for The Ullapool Caber
Engineer:
- Fixed a problem that caused him not to say thanks after exiting a teleporter
- Saxxy kills will use the same lines as kills from The Golden Wrench
- Added a previously unused golden wrench kill line
- Added an occasional response when swinging The Gunslinger
- Wrangler taunt now performs the pistol taunt animation
Heavy:
- Added a previously unused fist swing line
Medic:
- Added a line to the response that occurs when doing a battle cry while looking at an enemy while holding a melee weapon
- Taunting with a Saxxy plays the medigun taunt
- Taunting with the Solemn Vow or the Crusader's Crossbow now plays the same taunt as the syringe gun
Scout:
- Removed the response when killing an enemy Scout or Pyro and moved the lines to the dominating Pyro/Scout response
- Added a rare response to double jumping after getting a recent kill
Sniper:
- Reduced chattiness when getting many sequential kills
- Added a missing line to the scoped revenge response
- Taunting with a Saxxy no longer play lines that reference a knife
Soldier:
- Added a line to the getting übercharged response
- Taunting with the Righteous Bison, Battalion's Backup, or the Saxxy now play the Buff Banner taunt

Bots:

TFBots have a percentage chance of noticing weapon fire based on their difficulty level. Easy bots are fairly oblivious, and Expert bots notice pretty much everything.
TFBots now treat certain weapon attacks as "quiet" (Spy knife, cloaking/uncloaking, some melee weapons, fists, etc). "Quiet" weapons can only be heard by TFBots when nearby, and their chance of being noticed is halved if the environment is "noisy" (ie., lots of non-quiet gunfire going on in the area). This greatly improves Spies ability to backstab TFBots without the entire team immediately turning on them.
bot improvements:
- Spy bots are much better about circling around and backstabbing their victims now
- Improved Spy bot target selection in some situations (ie: clusters of sentries and enemy players)
- Spy bots will give up on an attack and retreat if an enemy sentry gun aims at them
- Spy bots now avoid nearby enemies while disguised and/or cloaked so they don't bump into them and give themselves away
- Spy bots now have a simple notion of when their cover is blown" now
- Spy bots lead their target's position as they chase them down for a backstab now
- Spy bots don't go after victims until setup time has elapsed
- Hard and Expert Spy bots avoid looking at their prey until they get close and go for the stab
- Easy Spy bots don't avoid enemies, or try to get behind before stabbing
- Normal Spy bots don't avoid enemies
- Fixed bug where Spy bots would jump against the enemy spawn gates during setup time
Medic bot improvements:
- Medic bots stick much closer to running patients now
- Medic bots stick much closer to their patient if they have an Ubercharge ready, or are deploying their Uber
- Medic bots hide from Sentryguns now, too
Pyro bot improvements:
- Pyro bots are less "pushy" with their compression blast, but will use it against Ubers and to get enemies off of a capture point

Other:

Razer Hydra support can be enabled via "sixense_enabled 1" in the console. See http://sixense.com/tf2 for details.
Added "tf_allow_taunt_switch". Set to 0 for disallowed (default behavior), 1 for old bug behavior, or 2 to allow weapon switching any time during the taunt.
Screenshots can now be hooked up to the Steam Community automatically. There is a new option to control this under "Miscellaneous" in the Advanced Options page.
Fixed gold ragdolls playing custom death animations when they should be locked in a pose
Fixed Buffalo Steak Sandvich not having a cooldown if the Heavy is at full health.
Fixed touching a cabinet while under the effects of the Buffalo Steak Sandvich removing the mini-crits but not removing the melee weapon restriction
Fixed particle effects not showing up on spy disguise items
Fixed spies never using genuine, community, or self-made items as disguise weapons
Fixed demoman weapons primary/secondary being backwards in the loadout screen
Fixed effects on Sticky Jumper grenades
Fixed net_graph not updating server framerate when FPS is greater than 1000
Fixed game servers not being able to execute the retry command
Renamed tf_show_voice_icons to mp_show_voice_icons
Updated the localization files

Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike: Source, Day of Defeat: Source and Half-Life 2: Deathmatch Updates Released

2011-10-13T20:38:00Z

Fixed an issue with the multi-threaded renderer which could cause a crash on map change
Adjusted whitespace to improve formatting in status command output
Changed stats output to show KB/s instead of bytes/sec, added a connections column, and changed the users column to "Map changes"
Fixed game servers not being able to execute the retry command due to the dependence on the connect command (which is not executable by game servers)
Made sndplaydelay executable by servers
Server frame rate is now based on the tickrate of the active Source mod, not the fps_max convar
Server processing delays have been reduced, especially for servers on modern Linux kernels
Entity processing logic has been optimized to significantly reduce CPU usage on full servers
Multi-threaded server code is now enabled by default under Linux (already enabled on Windows)
An exploit with non-printable characters causing lag on Windows servers has been fixed
CPU is fully yielded back to the system whenever the server is running faster than the tickrate
Dramatic increase in performance for low-level math libraries

Day of Defeat: Source

Removed tickrate command line parameter
Updated the localization files

Counter-Strike: Source

Prevent AWP cycle time exploit using quick switch
Fixed bug causing HUD History to display item pickups from nearby players
Increased sized of HUD History resource to prevent clipping
Changed grenade damage so that it always hits HITGROUP_GENERIC and takes into account armor for damage calculations
Reduced standing and moving accuracy for pistols
Decreased accuracy while moving with sniper rifles
Added additional legacy mode (3) to cl_dynamiccrosshair
Updated the localization files

Team Fortress 2
Manniversary:

Experimenting with a new store interface with a subset of players
Added several dozen community items in celebration of the Manniversary
Added loadout presets -- each class can now store four complete loadouts, including weapons and cosmetic items, and change between them with the press of a button.
Added a new item type that can accept user-applied decals. Take any image off your hard drive, put it on a stick, and then smash people with it! (See the Decal Tool in the store!)
Added new co-operative high five taunt
Class select menu now shows the active loadout for each class
Characters can now equip two misc-slot items at once
Added a new in-game abuse-reporting system (see "Capture abuse report data" under "Miscellaneous" controls)
Non-newly-released weapons in the store can now be tried out for free once per week! This will give you a fully-functional version of the weapon to be used in-game for no cost. If you decide you like it, you can purchase it for a discount during the trial period.
All items purchased in the store can be used for crafting and can be traded after a few days
Added a new startup music track from Meet The Medic
Integrated with the new Steam Workshop to enable the publication and management of community contributed content

Maps:

Added new community control point map Gullywash. Stamps are available in the store to support community map authors!
Barnblitz is now available for offline practice
Frontier: various geometry fixes
Gorge/5Gorge: added team-specific func_nobuild brushes in elevated forward spawn areas

Replay:

New camera shake functionality added for replays that are not sufficiently dramatic
New slow-motion functionality added for replays where even camera shake does not provide sufficient drama
Added support for recording voice chat into replays

Items:

Pocket Medic can now be equipped by the Soldier in addition to the Heavy
World Traveler's Hat and the Connoisseur's Cap are now paintable
Bonk Boy and Foster's Facade are now misc slot items
Fixed The Director's Vision not playing animations correctly for all classes in the loadout screen
The Killer Exclusive is now paintable
When sorting the backpack, otherwise-equivalent items will sort by strange weapon rank and crate series number if possible
When selecting items from the loadout, weapons with different kill eater ranks will all show up
Hat of Undeniable Wealth And Respect animations have been added. Really.
LOD models added to several older cosmetic items

Response Rules:

Reduced the chance of many response lines occurring
Responses related to cart progress no longer play when disguised
Players will now always call for a medic when low on health or when on fire when a medic is under the crosshair, whereas previously the character would ask the medic to follow them
Named base items will no longer trigger responses that were supposed to be for new item variants
Added additional Jarate hit responses
Demoman:
- Added achievement award response
- Removed "I didn't need your help y'know" line if being healed by a Medic
- Saxxy kills will use the same lines as kills from the frying pan
- Taunting with The Pain Train or the Saxxy now plays the same taunt as the grenade launcher
- Added a taunt for The Ullapool Caber
Engineer:
- Fixed a problem that caused him not to say thanks after exiting a teleporter
- Saxxy kills will use the same lines as kills from The Golden Wrench
- Added a previously unused golden wrench kill line
- Added an occasional response when swinging The Gunslinger
- Wrangler taunt now performs the pistol taunt animation
Heavy:
- Added a previously unused fist swing line
Medic:
- Added a line to the response that occurs when doing a battle cry while looking at an enemy while holding a melee weapon
- Taunting with a Saxxy plays the medigun taunt
- Taunting with the Solemn Vow or the Crusader's Crossbow now plays the same taunt as the syringe gun
Scout:
- Removed the response when killing an enemy Scout or Pyro and moved the lines to the dominating Pyro/Scout response
- Added a rare response to double jumping after getting a recent kill
Sniper:
- Reduced chattiness when getting many sequential kills
- Added a missing line to the scoped revenge response
- Taunting with a Saxxy no longer play lines that reference a knife
Soldier:
- Added a line to the getting übercharged response
- Taunting with the Righteous Bison, Battalion's Backup, or the Saxxy now play the Buff Banner taunt

Bots:

TFBots have a percentage chance of noticing weapon fire based on their difficulty level. Easy bots are fairly oblivious, and Expert bots notice pretty much everything.
TFBots now treat certain weapon attacks as "quiet" (Spy knife, cloaking/uncloaking, some melee weapons, fists, etc). "Quiet" weapons can only be heard by TFBots when nearby, and their chance of being noticed is halved if the environment is "noisy" (ie., lots of non-quiet gunfire going on in the area). This greatly improves Spies ability to backstab TFBots without the entire team immediately turning on them.
bot improvements:
- Spy bots are much better about circling around and backstabbing their victims now
- Improved Spy bot target selection in some situations (ie: clusters of sentries and enemy players)
- Spy bots will give up on an attack and retreat if an enemy sentry gun aims at them
- Spy bots now avoid nearby enemies while disguised and/or cloaked so they don't bump into them and give themselves away
- Spy bots now have a simple notion of when their cover is blown" now
- Spy bots lead their target's position as they chase them down for a backstab now
- Spy bots don't go after victims until setup time has elapsed
- Hard and Expert Spy bots avoid looking at their prey until they get close and go for the stab
- Easy Spy bots don't avoid enemies, or try to get behind before stabbing
- Normal Spy bots don't avoid enemies
- Fixed bug where Spy bots would jump against the enemy spawn gates during setup time
Medic bot improvements:
- Medic bots stick much closer to running patients now
- Medic bots stick much closer to their patient if they have an Ubercharge ready, or are deploying their Uber
- Medic bots hide from Sentryguns now, too
Pyro bot improvements:
- Pyro bots are less "pushy" with their compression blast, but will use it against Ubers and to get enemies off of a capture point

Other:

Razer Hydra support can be enabled via "sixense_enabled 1" in the console. See http://sixense.com/tf2 for details.
Added "tf_allow_taunt_switch". Set to 0 for disallowed (default behavior), 1 for old bug behavior, or 2 to allow weapon switching any time during the taunt.
Screenshots can now be hooked up to the Steam Community automatically. There is a new option to control this under "Miscellaneous" in the Advanced Options page.
Fixed gold ragdolls playing custom death animations when they should be locked in a pose
Fixed Buffalo Steak Sandvich not having a cooldown if the Heavy is at full health.
Fixed touching a cabinet while under the effects of the Buffalo Steak Sandvich removing the mini-crits but not removing the melee weapon restriction
Fixed particle effects not showing up on spy disguise items
Fixed spies never using genuine, community, or self-made items as disguise weapons
Fixed demoman weapons primary/secondary being backwards in the loadout screen
Fixed effects on Sticky Jumper grenades
Fixed net_graph not updating server framerate when FPS is greater than 1000
Fixed game servers not being able to execute the retry command
Renamed tf_show_voice_icons to mp_show_voice_icons
Updated the localization files

The Gamification

2011-10-13T12:07:52Z

Shared by Andrew Doull
Wow. Just wow...

When Joel Spolsky and I set out to design the Stack Exchange Q&A engine in 2008 -- then known as Stack Overflow -- we borrowed liberally and unapologetically from any online system that we felt worked. Some of our notable influences included:

Reddit and Digg voting
Xbox 360 achievements
Wikipedia editing
eBay karma
Blogs and blog comments
Classic web bulletin boards

All these elements were folded up into the Stack Exchange Q&A engine, so that we might help people create useful artifacts on the internet while learning with and among their peers. You know the old adage that good artists copy, great artists steal? That quote is impossible to source, but it means we were repurposing these elements we liked.

So, what do Picasso and T.S. Eliot mean? They say, in the briefest of terms: take old work to a new place. Steal the Google site, strip down what works (fast load, nonexistent graphics, small quirky changes that delight) and use the parts on your own site. Look at the curve of a Coke Bottle and create a beautiful landscape painting with it. Take the hairline pinstriping on the side of somebody’s car, reimagine it on your print job. Find inspiration in the world you live in, where nothing is truly new so that everything has the potential to be innovative.

Unfortunately, the elements we liked were often buried in mounds of stuff that we ... sort of hated. So extracting just the good parts and removing the rest was part of the mission. If you're lucky enough to have a convenient villain to position yourself against, that might be all you need.

Traditional web bulletin board systems have a design that was apparently permanently frozen in place circa 2001 along with Windows XP. Consider this typical forum thread.

Here is the actual information from that forum thread.

Based on the original size of those screenshots, only 18 percent of that forum thread page is content. The other 82 percent is lost to signatures, avatars, UI doohickeys, and other web forum frippery that has somehow become accepted as "the way things are done". I regularly participate in several expert niche bulletin boards of various types today, and they're all built the same way. Nobody complains.

But they should.

This is the status quo that we're up against. Yes, we fixed it for programmers with Stack Overflow, but why stop there? We want to liberate all the brilliant experts stuck in these horrible Soviet-era concrete block housing forums all over the web. We'd like to introduce them to the focused, no-nonsense Stack Exchange Way, a beautiful silo of pure Q&A signal without all the associated web forum gunk.

There's only one teeny-tiny obstacle in our way. As a great programmer I worked with once said:

It's the damn users. They've ruined every program I've ever created.

Every web forum is the way it is because users wanted it that way. Yes, the design of the forum software certainly influences behavior, but the classic 2001-era web forum paradigm assumed that what users wanted made sense for the rest of the larger internet. As it turns out, groups are their own worst enemy. What groups want, and what the rest of the world needs, are often two very different things. Random discussion is fine for entertainment, but it's not particularly useful, nor does it tend to generate the kind of artifacts that will be relevant a few years from now like Wikipedia does. So then the problem becomes how do you encourage groups to do what's best for the world rather than their own specific, selfish needs?

When I looked at this problem, I felt I knew the answer. But there wasn't a word for it in 2008. Now there is: Gamification.

Gamification is the use of game design techniques and mechanics to solve problems and engage audiences. […] Gamification works by … taking advantage of humans' psychological predisposition to engage in gaming. The technique can encourage people to perform chores that they ordinarily consider boring, such as completing surveys, shopping, or reading web sites.

I had no idea this Wikipedia article even existed until a few months ago, but we are featured prominently in it. It is true that all our stolen ideas about reputation systems, achievements, identity, and vote scoring are in place specifically to encourage the adoption of the brave new no-nonsense, all-signal Stack Exchange Q&A model. Without those incentive systems, when left to their own devices, what you get is … well, every forum ever created. Broken by design.

Yes, we have ulterior motives, but let me explain why I think gaming elements are not tacked on to the Stack Exchange Q&A engine, but a natural and essential element of the design from day one.

Learning is (supposed to be) fun

I've had this concept in my head way before the web emerged, long before anyone coined the term "Gamification" in 2010. In fact, I'd trace my inspiration for this all the way back to 1983.

For programmers, everything we know is pretty much guaranteed to be obsolete in 10 years if we're lucky, and 5 years if we aren't. It's changing all the time. The field of programming is almost by definition one of constant learning. Programming is supposed to be fun – and it is, if you're doing it right. Nobody taught me that better than the Beagle Bros on my Apple II. Why can't learning in every other subject matter be just as enjoyable?

Games are learning aids

There's a long, rich history of programmers as gamers. Oftentimes, the whole reason we became programmers in the first place is because we wanted to move beyond being a mere player and change the game, control it, modify its parameters, maybe even create our own games.

We used games to learn how to program. To a programmer, a game is a perfectly natural introduction to real programming problems. I'd posit that any field can use games as an introduction to the subject matter – and as a reinforcement to learning.

Games help people work toward a goal

It's something of a revelation to me that solid game design can defeat the Greater Internet F**kwad Theory. Two great examples of this are Counter-Strike and Team Fortress. Both games are more than ten years old, but they're still actively being played right now, by tens of thousands of people, all anonymous … and playing as cohesive teams!

The game's objectives and rules are all cleverly constructed to make working together the most effective way to win. None of these players know each other; the design of the game forces players to work together, whether they want to or not. It is quite literally impossible to win as a single lone wolf.

I haven't ever quite come out and said it this way, but … I played a lot of Counter-Strike from 1998 to 2001, and Stack Overflow is in many ways my personal Counter-Strike. It is a programmer in Brazil learning alongside a programmer in New Jersey. Not because they're friends -- but because they both love programming. The design of Stack Overflow makes helping your fellow programmers the most effective way to "win" and advance the craft of software development together.

And I say we all win when that happens, no matter which profession we're talking about.

I feel a little responsible for "Gamification", since we're often cited as an example (even, much to my chagrin, on Wikipedia). I wanted to clear up exactly why we made those choices, and specifically that all the gaming elements are there in service of a higher purpose. I play the Stack Exchange game happily alongside everyone else, collecting reputation and badges and rank and upvotes, and I am proud to do so, because I believe it ultimately helps me become more knowledgeable and a better communicator while also improving the very fabric of the web for everyone. I hope you feel the same way.

(If you'd like to learn more about the current state of Gamification, I highly recommend Sebastian Deterding's page, and specifically his Meaningful Play: Getting Gamification Right presentation.)

[advertisement] What's your next career move? Stack Overflow Careers has the best job listings from great companies, whether you're looking for opportunities at a startup or Fortune 500. You can search our job listings or create a profile and let employers find you.

Applesource?

2011-10-09T11:53:20Z

Did Dropping Acid Make Steve Jobs More Creative? Awkwardly omitted from his many obituaries, Steve Jobs said that "doing LSD was one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life." Was his experience (portrayed in this reenactment) the source of his creativity?

Why All Our Games Are Now Cheaper Forever

2011-10-04T07:03:00Z

Spiderweb Software just started our annual sale. It's ten percent off everything we sell for the whole month of October. That isn't really news. We do this every year, and people seem to like it.

But this year, there is much more. We permanently lowered the prices of everything we sell. At least 20% cheaper (in addition to the 10% for the sale). For some products, much more. The most expensive game we sell is now $20, and that is likely to last pretty much forever.

It's a big mental shift for us, and I thought it was worth blogging about. I write about game pricing on this blog a lot, and I'm not ashamed of it. Right now, most of the huge revolutions in the game biz are in the new crazy pricing models, and there are still a lot of questions out there about the most efficient way to make a game make money.

Why It Took So Long To Lower Our Prices

We released our first game in January, 1995. That is a long time ago, and much has changed. A few helpful comparisons.

Now: Huge distributors like Steam and iTunes sell massive numbers of copies for low prices, and Indie developers make good money on huge volume.
Then: The World Wide Web barely existed and we scraped by on a handful of sales from AOL.

Now: A quality Indie niche game sells on big portals for ten bucks at most. More than that and people think you're crazy and move on.
Then: Most good shareware games sold for $25. It took me a very long time just to realize that that price isn't normal anymore.

Now: Indie developers can make excellent livings selling lots of copies of cheap games.
Then: Indie game developers were called "shareware developers," and everyone thought they were losers and spat on them.

Now: Want to pirate a game? It just takes 3 seconds of searching on Pirate Bay.
Then: Took five minutes of searching instead of three seconds. This actually made a big difference.

Now: Many new games are given away for free and make their money on micro-transactions from a portion of their users.
Then: FREE games? With micro-WHAT? What are you? A SORCEROR?

(The shift to free games is arguably the most stunning development in the games biz in a very long time. My prediction: Within five years, there will be a successful game that pays you a small amount to play it and makes their cash selling better swords or whatever.)

I'm a dumb person in plenty of key ways, so it took me a while to observe the key fact:

A LOT of money is being made by selling games for cheap.

So now , instead of selling our games for $25 or $28 (!!!), we'll sell them for $20 or $15. I know this still seems like a lot, but I haven't backed off on the key thing I've long said ...

People Who Write Niche Games Can't Charge a Dollar

If you're making a pretty, shiny, highly casual game with cartoon squirrels and you think you can find a million fans for it, go ahead. Charge a dollar. You'll have to.

But if you write games like mine? Low budget, old school, hardcore RPGs with lots of content? If I charged a dollar for it, I'd have to sell a copy to pretty much every interested human everywhere to have a chance of making money.

So I still charge an actual price, an amount of money that still feels like money. Maybe I should have taken everything down to $15. Maybe I'm being too timid in the price drop. But, in a sense, that difference doesn't matter.

There are two sorts of prices you can pay for a game: An amount that is so small you don't care, and an amount high enough that you do. Our newest game, Avadon: The Black Fortress, is $20 on our site and $10 on Steam. That's a big difference, but, in a very real sense, they have the same price: an amount of money that actually feels like spending money. We will always charge actual money, as opposed to pocket change. All I have done is slightly tinkered with the level.

Bonus Point: Why Is Our Game Twice the Price On Our Site Than On Steam

I get asked this a lot, and it's a fair question. The answer:

In any place where your game is sold, pick the price that will maximize the profits. This ideal price changes depending on the nature of the place where it is being sold.

Steam is a big, sprawling gaming bazaar where practically all of the games are cheap. People see a game, spend a moderate amount of money on it, and try it out. People experiment there, and you need to charge a price that encourages customers to pick you as their experiment. Also, if you charge $20 for your game there, it will be on a list with ten good games at half the price, so you will get murdered.

Spiderweb Software's web site, on the other hand, only lists our games. It is generally only visited by fans of role-playing games. People on our site are generally really interested in the specific sorts of games we sell, and so the higher price doesn't scare them off.

This sort of logic isn't my weird invention. It's basic business. World of Goo is $20 on the company site, $10 on Steam, and $5 on iTunes. Each marketplace has its own norms, and you price your game to maximize your earnings there.

And that is why games are now at most $20 on our site. Because of the current standards of the game industry as a whole, I think that will most likely increase our earnings overall. It might not always have been that way, but I feel it is now.

(And, yes. I set game prices to maximize my earnings. Of course I do. Astonishingly, some people seem to take offense at this. I don't care. I'm not going to neglect to send my kids to college just so I can satisfy someone's arbitrary standards of Indie cred. I'm too old for that, and children persist in their irritating need to eat food.)

So. Anyway. A Sale.

Our games are cheaper forever, and even cheaper than that this month. We're getting a lot more sales, and I don't feel like the dumb jerk that still charges $28 for three year old games anymore. If you like old school role-playing games, you could certainly do worse.

And it will be a while before I write about pricing again. Believe it or not, I have other things to say (and make fun of). Time to get going on that ...

Triple Town Beta (Now with Bears)

2011-10-03T15:22:00Z

Exciting times. You can now play our puzzle game Triple Town in your web browser. We are releasing it as a beta and the game should evolve quite substantially over time. Huge kudos to Cristian Soulos for making this project blossom after a long winter. You can play it here.

Triple Town is a special game. It has the highest user rating of any of the games I've designed (94%). It is also the only one of my designs that I go back to again and again. Why is this?

On the surface, it is a simple match-3 variant, but after a few games you'll start noticing the strategic depth. The pacing is...uncommon. There's a relaxed mellow rhythm to the game where you casually make dozens of micro decisions. Yet these decisions add up to games that can last upwards of a week for advanced players. After a while you realize you are playing the Civilization of Match-3 games and that you care deeply about what you are building. That burst of strong emotion always surprises me.

The big addition for this release? Bears.

Bears, bears everywhere

Triple Town helped solidify how I construct the world and setting in my games. My inclination is to look for ways of supporting the emotions inherent in the game dynamics. If you've ever played the Kindle version, the design is a rather abstract puzzle game with highly symbolic tokens and mechanical rules. It has only the briefest of settings. Yet as I played the game and watched other play, I realized that it evoked an intense spectrum of emotions. Here were some of the ones that I noticed:

Pride: When you create a great city, you want to share it. People take screenshots. They brag. Pride in what they've built is the primary emotion that drives players of Triple Town.
Curiosity: You want to know what the next item looks like. Some people are driven to get a castle for the first time.
Hate: You learn to hate the teleporting Ninjas. They never attack you, but they end up blocking your plans.
Sadness: You have slight sadness the first time you kill a bear. Then you learn to steel yourself against the emotion.
Irritation: When fate gives you the wrong piece at the wrong time.
Competition: When you notice that your friends are doing better than you.
Despair: When you feel the board closing in and realize that you can't possible catch up to your friends.
Relief: When the board is filling up and then you perform a miraculous move that empties a swath of the board and helps you start afresh.

Games are great at eliciting primary emotions. They don't need the Hero's Journey, they don't need story, they don't need hyper realistic visuals with immersive first person cameras. You can create an emotional, deeply meaningful experience simply by using the fundamentals of system design.

(You can read a bit more on the theory of how games are unique suited to creating emotional experiences in my previous essay on Shadow Emotions and Primary Emotions. I include a small section at the end of this essay on the OCC emotion model that fits nicely with my process. Thanks, Aki!)

Tuning emotions

When I revisited the Triple Town design, the emotions were already clearly evident. However, I wanted to explore how I could more directly shape those emotions to fit my vision of the game.

Emotions are complex to say the least so we need some sort of entry into the topic. There's a general consensus that you can divide emotions into rough categories. For example 'negative feelings toward others.' Then within those rough categories, you see variations that we recognize as distinct emotions. For example, hate and irritation are actually highly related and are typically related to a sense of loss or constraint caused by others. As a designer, how do I push the conditions that elicit a general class of emotion so that I can dial in the emotional variant that I desire?

There are a variety of theories. In Triple Town, I was influenced by the two factor theory of emotion and the somatic marker theory. Like many aspects of human cognition, multiple inputs are necessary to create the final refined experience. The 'taste' of wine is synthesized out of the actual chemical taste and the perceived quality of the wine. A five dollar wine labeled as a 100 dollar wine can be perceived to taste better than that same wine in it's original bottle. Similarly, we posit that our brain synthesizes most common primary emotions out of the following:

An ambiguous physical response (your adrenaline jumping and your heart rate elevating)
The system-derived context of the situation you are in.
Recalled cognitive labels of related past experiences.

Looking at Triple Town, both the physical response and the system-derived context are very much present. I can experimentally validate that I'm getting strong emotions from the players even using a highly abstract game board. However the cognitive labels are underdeveloped. So this analysis led me to try a particular tactic:

If you can evoke a general class of emotions with game mechanics, then you can apply evocative stimuli to label and therefore tune that response to elicit a specific emotion.

Monsters or children?

Consider a very basic example of labeling in Triple Town. The raw materials I was working with was an observation that players felt immense sense of relief when they killed annoying NPCs. I experimented with applying various labels to see how we could tune the response.

Pass 1: During one early prototype, the NPCs were accidentally displayed as small children. Naturally, players felt bad when trapped them and they turned into grave stones. Accidental deaths led to guilt and sadness while deliberate deaths evoked a dissonant feeling of cruelty.
Pass 2: So next we switched them to evil looking monsters. This was a dramatic change. Now players felt righteous glee when they trapped and killed the monsters.
Pass 3: Finally, during this latest build, I settle on bears that have slightly evil looking eyes. Most players feel fine killing the bears, but for some there is a slight edge of ambiguity that makes them uncomfortable.
Future passes: Now that I've explored the emotional space a little, I've set up the bears so that with one simple tweak of the eyes, I can make the bears incredibly cute and bring back many of the feelings of guilt and sadness.

Evil bear & Good bear cognitive label. One small part of an overall emotional experience

In essence, I was balancing and tuning the player's emotional response. Much like Sid Meier using a binary search ("double it or or cut it by half") to narrow in on the correct setting in his game, I was trying out various extremes to narrow in on the appropriate emotion.

Using evocative imagery is a common enough practice, but in practice the labeling of NPCs is functionally quite different than merely putting up a picture or cut scene of a dead child. The bear is not an image for the sake of being an image. Instead you create a distinct label that is only meaningful due to how it builds upon an emotional foundation derived from play. Without the mechanics, you just have a picture of a bear. With the mechanics setting the context and providing the raw emotional reactions, you craft a carefully refined emotional moment.

Avoiding dissonance

With the children images in the first pass, I saw an example of dissonance. It is easy to add a poorly fitted label that confuses the emotions the mechanics are eliciting.

The heart of Triple Town are the strong feelings of pride and accomplishment. These comes directly from the rather amazing investment in extended tactical play that the player exerts when creating their 6x6 city. A well crafted city can represent hours of carefully considered labor.

In the Kindle version of the game, I used the sort of end game tropes that you find in Tetris or Bejeweled. You play the game, you get a score and then move onto the next game. Most designers rely on proven fallbacks to get the job done since it is difficult to always be reinventing the wheel.

Unfortunately, this 'obvious' design choice conflicted rather painfully with the slow and steady building of pride. There comes a point at which the player presses a button and in the act of creating a new game, erases all their hard earned progress. It is surprisingly how many times I've let the game sit on the last screen, not willing to leave it behind. The label of 'its just a game session that you finish and move on from' didn't fit the emotional response that the other systems were creating.

1st pass: The first attempt at fixing this involved added coins so there is some persistent resource you take with you after each city. That helps a little, but not enough. Coins are merely a resource and players weren't sad because they were losing some simple generic token.
2nd pass: The second attempt involved the ability to flip back and look at your city a last few times before you move on. This was quite effective since it lets the player say goodbye. The emotional dissonance was channeled into an activity that let players come to terms with it at their own pace. This still isn't good enough.

Luckily Triple Town is a service, not a game that gets launched and forgotten. As I design future features, I'm explicitly creating them to amplify the feeling of pride. Fresh in my mind is the lesson that even something as simple as how to end the game involves labeling the context. What if instead of ending the game, you are finishing cities?

Deriving the world's metaphor from gameplay

These individual emotional moments form a unique emotional fingerprint for Triple Town. Due to dissonance, you can't simple apply any theme to this set of dynamic emotions and still end up with an emotionally coherent game. Instead, you want a theme that fits the mechanics like a glove where the emotional beats elicited by the system dynamics have a clear connection with the labels you'd applied.

With Triple Town, as with most of my designs, the theme and metaphor for the world came from watching people play. I would observe and note the emotions and then ask questions about the fundamental nature of the experience that was evolving. Is this a game about exploration? Creation? Building? If it is a game about building, what is a related theme that matches the current unique fingerprint? Are you building real estate? A tomb? What are those NPCs doing if that is the case?

Overly on the nose

After playing many hundreds of hours of Triple Town, I settled upon a metaphor that fit all the nuances of the mechanics. Triple Town is a game about colonization. Consider the following common dynamics and how labels derived from the metaphor tie them together in a coherent setting.

You've been ordered by the empire from across the sea to build a new city on virgin territory.
In the process, natives (depicted as less than human) keep showing up on 'your' land. They never attack you, but they keep preventing you from expanding.
So you push them off to the side. More experienced players create small reservations and pack the natives in as tightly as possible.
Due to overcrowding the natives die off en mass.
You use their bones to build churches and cathedrals.
When particularly difficult natives appear that seek to escape your reservations, you bring out your overwhelming the military might and remove the pest so you can continue with your manifest destiny.

The match between the theme of colonization and emotions of the mechanics was so strong, I tuned it back slightly so it wasn't quite so on the nose. Instead of selecting a recognizable group that suffered under colonization, I made the NPCs into morally ambiguous bears. It would have been very easy to present players with a choices that were obviously black and white where players fall back on pre-learned schema. However, I'm more interested in the edge cases in which a player does something they feel is appropriate and then as time goes on they begin to understand the larger consequences of their actions. At this point in the development of the world, player should naively explore the system and due to the dynamics of game, then form a strong justification of their role as colonists.

What started as an abstract game is slowly but surely turning into a rich world. What is beyond the city walls? Long term, the themes of colonization, imperialism and the impact on native cultures will unfold over a series of planned game expansions. With slight variations in labeling, I should be able to tune in a variety of powerful emotions related to the theme of colonization.

Differences from traditional theme generation

I find this bottom ups, mechanics-centric method of theme generation quite different from a traditional process of storytelling. In a narrative heavy game, I think about characters, plot, or message first and foremost and then attempting to fit supporting gameplay into the mix. Often you pitch the world and characters to a publisher and then are expected to come up with gameplay that fits. Consider the implications of these two popular styles of narrative-first development:

Unique mini-games and puzzles used to support narrative: One extreme example of this is your typical adventure game where instead of a core mechanic, you have a series of plot appropriate puzzles. The emotional aspects of the puzzle (frustration, delight) are only marginally related to the emotional beats of the plot. Also, in order to avoid dissonance with the wide variety of emotional beats that the story requires, the style of the puzzles is switched up on a regular basis. It is hard enough balancing one game, but asking the team to balance dozens of tinier games results in shallow systems throughout. I think of this as chopping up gameplay to fit the story.
Generic gameplay that supports the narrative: A Japanese RPG like Final Fantasy repeatedly uses turn-based tactical combat to illustrate story beats. The time-tested tactical combat system usually produce a handful of primary emotions such as loss, victory, relief, feeling powerful and feeling powerless. No matter what story is being told, the same system is called upon to provide emotional support. Such a pattern avoids dissonance the majority of the time, but then when the plot veers into non-combat area, the dissonance comes back full force. I think of this as telling more story than the gameplay can naturally support.

Some of the most painful design rat-holes I've have ever dug myself into followed these patterns. In one project, I created a world based off finding relics from a post-Singularity civilization (circa 100AD) deep in the Mediterranean. In another, I was overly attached to a set of small bobble-headed creatures. For both, I was afraid to change the world. Instead, I desperately iterated upon new game mechanics, hoping to find one that fit my world better. And I rarely found one. As far as I can tell, creating a compelling new game mechanic is hard and success is unpredictable. Yet creating a functional game world's is surprisingly cheap. Any idiot can copy a working game, toss some pirates on top and call it good.

Now I follow a different philosophy that better reflects these costs. Gameplay comes first and the worldbuilding are flow from the dynamics of play. If, as you iterate upon gameplay you make a rule change that breaks the emotional connection with a particular world, you should feel very comfortable tossing that world aside and starting fresh. Create a world that supports the game, not the other way around.

Conclusion

The amount of theming and world building in Triple Town is still quite light. Those of players used to the extravagant productions that burden a game with an overworked story may not even recognize the labels I've choosen as having an impact on your experience. Yet they do and most players will feel the emotional beats of the game quite clearly.

Nothing I've outlined here is new. The important insight for me has been creating the labels and world for a game as a bottoms up process. You start with the mechanics and then find the labels that fit the emotional beats. From this game play foundation, you build the world.

Enough rambling! Go play Triple Town. It is still a beta so let me know what you think.

take care,
Danc.

References

Play Triple Town!: http://apps.facebook.com/tripletown
Original design essay on Triple Town: http://www.lostgarden.com/2010/10/triple-town-released-for-amazon-kindle.html
Introduction to primary emotions: http://www.lostgarden.com/2011/07/shadow-emotions-and-primary-emotions.html
Games without Frontiers: http://acta.uta.fi/pdf/978-951-44-7252-7.pdf

Cheat sheet: Steps for tuning primary emotions

Here's the process for tuning emotions

Create a playful system.
Observe the emotional reactions of the player within that system.
Adjust the system's emotion eliciting conditions to increase or decrease particular raw emotional reactions.
Once you have a rich set of desired emotional responses, brainstorm natural labels that refine the emotions.
Test the labels and see how they elicit specific emotional variations.
Bundle the labels into a metaphor for your game that communicates and amplifies its unique emotional fingerprint.

Note: OCC Model of emotions

Aki Järvinen's thesis "Games without Frontiers" (pdf) pointed me towards a fascinating model of emotion by Ortony, Clore and Collins (OCC). It posits that emotional outcomes are tied to systemic variables. For example the strength of a player's dissapointment would be tied to the variable 'likelihood'

Low likelihood: If the player predicts a particular result, but they know from past experience that it is highly unlikely, they typically won't be overly dissapointed.
High likelihood: Yet the likelihood is high and the outcome doesn't occur, dissapointment will also generally be more pronounced.

By adjusting variables such as likilihood, degree of effort or value of results, the designer crafts a set of 'eliciting conditions'. I love this phrase since it gives us game friendly terminology for discussing emotion without reverting to the fuzzy non-functional handwaving of the humanities. By setting your system variables appropriately, you can create eliciting conditions that spark specific categories of emotion.

There is far more work to be done applying these ideas to game development, but as it stands the conceptual framework is already really quite powerful. I've referenced here several useful OCC Charts that Aki assembled that list conditions, variables, main emotional categories and emotional variants. (I do recommend you read the full thesis. It gives a bit more context and it also one of the more clearly written works and easily consumable works to come out in recent years.)

Emotions resulting from personal well being. pg. 211

(Click to enlarge)

Emotions resulting from events involving the fortune of others. pg. 211

(Click to enlarge)

Emotions resulting from future prospects. pg. 212

(Click to enlarge)

Note: Surrealism in video games

Often the best video games have disjointed, narratively surreal worlds. Mario, Pacman, Katamari, Bejeweled and even a game like Portal take place in distinctly surreal locations that obey the logic of association, but are freed from the logic of the real world. Even more interesting is that despite immense amounts of effort making our labeling systems externally consistent (They aren't 'save points', they are regen tanks), the vast majority of players happily engage in surrealist worlds with nary a complaint. If anything, the unnecessary justification introduces more unnecessary dissonance into the game by asking the player to pay attention to details that don't functionally matter.

I see this surrealist aesthetic as the practical outcome of deriving the world from the emotional beats of the gameplay. The constantly tuning and tweaking of various labels needed to bring out the best parts of your game fragments the traditional narrative process. Why is there a walking turtle? Because it fits the mechanics like a glove. That is all the justification that is required and layering on more burdens both the experience and the development process. In the end, light surrealist labels are a positive thing since they gives you substantial wiggle room to avoid dissonance. And due to the solid fit with existing emotional dynamics, they often yields stronger game-centric experiences.

Cardinal Quest is Free for a Day

2011-10-02T21:00:00Z

This is a pleasant surprise: Ido Yehieli is giving away his commercial roguelike Cardinal Quest for free today. To secure your own copy, just proceed to this BMT Micro page, enter the text "BXZQ00097" into the discount code field, and press the recalculate button to have the total price changed to zero. Then fill in the contact information form, press the 'place secure order button', and the download link will be generated for you. It's that easy!

Normally Cardinal Quest will cost $4.45 to purchase, and the game is playable on Windows, Mac and Linux. A three-level demo is available to try on both Kongregate and at the official site as well. TruePCGaming has an interview with Ido on their site, and you can listen to a discussion about Cardinal Quest in Roguelike Radio's first episode.

who killed videogames? (a ghost story)

2011-09-30T05:39:49Z

who killed videogames (a ghost story) is quite a good read, and insightful about the dynamics of the free-to-play (FTP) model. As I'm working on FTP games at the moment, I also think it's a tad too pessimistic about them, but that's a matter of opinion. As I tell my coworkers, I and, I suspect, most gamers, have spent $60 on many a worthless coaster, and at least we let people explore our games extensively, and indeed let them advance indefinitely without paying, though we strive to get them to pay, to be sure. In other words, all game markets are basically evil, and FTP games are just differently evil.

early CRPG immigration patterns

2011-09-22T22:04:02Z

Shared by Andrew Doull
More games should do this. Very early on, Unangband supported importing regular Angband characters, but since then the two save file formats have undoubtedly diverged.

Some early D&D-type games for home computers allowed the importation of characters from other early D&D-type computer games. Above is an attempt to map some of them. Not all versions supported this features (the C-64 version of a game might support such a feature, while the Apple II version does not, etc.) so this map is at best an ideal. A few interesting bits of trivia:

The earliest version of Wizardry II straight up required you to import your PCs from the original game. Someone eventually figured out that this limited their sales to people who had played the original and a chargen feature was eventually added.
Deathlord is a fairly obscure computer RPG with a mythic Japanese setting. Thieves and fighters imported from other games find themselves transformed to ninja and samurai. Also, if you like overland exploration in the vein of Ultima III and IV, Deathlord's wilderness map is supposed to be much larger than either of those games.
Dragon Wars started life as Bard's Tale IV, but corporate shenanigans ensued. It's supposed to be pretty dang good.
You can't bring your Ultima III characters into your Ultima IV game, but maybe PCs from both adventures can join forces together in Bard's Tale III!

early CRPG immigration patterns

2011-09-19T20:30:00Z

The earliest version of Wizardry II straight up required you to import your PCs from the original game. Someone eventually figured out that this limited their sales to people who had played the original and a chargen feature was eventually added.
Deathlord is a fairly obscure computer RPG with a mythic Japanese setting. Thieves and fighters imported from other games find themselves transformed to ninja and samurai. Also, if you like overland exploration in the vein of Ultima III and IV, Deathlord's wilderness map is supposed to be much larger than either of those games.
Dragon Wars started life as Bard's Tale IV, but corporate shenanigans ensued. It's supposed to be pretty dang good.
You can't bring your Ultima III characters into your Ultima IV game, but maybe PCs from both adventures can join forces together in Bard's Tale III!

The Marginal Advantage // Sean Plott -- TL.net

2011-09-22T13:09:38Z

I recently was involved in a Mancala competition, where the entrants had to code an artificial intelligence program that could play Mancala. It taught me an important lesson about competitive game design.

Mancala is a game in which the winner is the player who “captures” more stones than his opponent. Thus the winner of the competition was the entrant whose AI program bested all others in stone capture. One of the coders devised a computer program that would maximize the number of stones captured in a given turn. Throughout the tournament, he steamrolled his opponents, repeatedly winning by fifteen stone margins and instilling fear and despair in the hearts of other coders. However, his program ultimately lost in the finals by 0-2, and lost each of those games by exactly one stone. In fact, I was shocked to hear that the winning program had consistently won every game it played by exactly one stone. How could the first program, which seemed to terrorize opponents, lose to another program that could only barely squeak out a victory each time?

The results were explained by subtle differences in their approaches to game play. The first player wrote a greedy program, one that would gobble up as many stones as possible. The coder reasonably theorized that maximizing the number of stones would maximize his chances of winning. However, the winning coder displayed even greater insight into the game: his goal was to have more stones after both players had taken a turn. In a sense, after taking the lead, he chose to maintain that lead, rather than extend it. For example, instead of capturing ten stones in a turn, he would capture four, knowing all the while that his opponent could only capture three, and that his lead would thus be extended by one. In a sense, the first programmer’s AI was successful in maximizing the number of stones captured in each turn, it just happened that this was always one less than the winner.

I found this incident to be particularly intriguing, as it reflects the nature of successful competitive game design. I’ve been involved in the competitive gaming community since 2001. Although my primary game is StarCraft, I have considerable experience with WarCraft 3, CounterStrike, Marvel vs Capcom 2, and a variety of other games. Despite the fact that these games function in drastically different ways and demand completely different skill sets, the expert players, the players who consistently win, always share a single commonality: they play comfortably with a marginal advantage.

The marginal advantage embodies the notion that one cannot, and should not, try to “win big.” In a competitive setting, the strong player knows that his best opponents are unlikely to make many exploitable mistakes. As a result, the strong player knows that he must be content to play with just the slightest edge, an edge which is the equivalent to the marginal advantage. More importantly, a one-sided match ultimately carries as much weight as an epic struggle. After all, the match results only in a win or a loss; there are no “degrees” of winning. Therefore, at any given point in a game, the player must focus on making decisions that minimize his probability of losing the advantage, rather than on decisions that maximize his probability of gaining a greater advantage. In short, it is much more important to the expert player to not lose than it is to win big. Consequently, a regular winner plays to extend his lead in a very gradual, but very consistent manner.

Amateur players, on the other hand, try risky, greedy strategies. In CounterStrike, for example, it is not unusual for amateurs to dash out into crowds of enemies trying to pull off a miraculous string of headshots in order to eliminate the opposing team. The majority of the time, this kind of amateur is fragged in a nanosecond. Expert Counterstrike players, on the other hand, patiently and carefully pick off enemies, knowing that such caution and precision virtually guarantee a win.

Moreover, amateurs often have no idea what to do with a marginal advantage once they gain one. I have personally watched countless games of StarCraft in which a player gained a massive lead but later lost the game. An opponent moves out a large force, and the amateur annihilates it with ease. At this point, the amateur has a marginal advantage: he has not yet won, but his opponent has lost his military and cannot apply any pressure for some time. The amateur in this situation will immediately try to win by launching a counterattack and will then crumble to a strong defense. Alternatively, the amateur will expand excessively, overextending his bases to the point where his defenses are too thinly spread. Such decisions violate the law of the marginal advantage, as they allow the opponent to get back into the game. They erroneously attempt to extend the lead, as opposed to maintaining it.

So, what’s so special about the marginal advantage? It might seem that all I’ve done is imply that newbie players take unnecessary risks and experts do not. However, just as playing for a marginal advantage is the hallmark of the expert player, the presence of a potential marginal advantage in a game is the hallmark of excellent competitive game design. The Mancala tournament brought this sharply into focus for me. Building in and allowing for a marginal advantage leads to exciting and dynamic play.

Not that providing for a marginal advantage is the only critical element in competitive game design. I will concede that all reasonably designed competitive games share three basic traits: ambiguity of optimal play, diversity of play, and allowance for skill.

First, there is no such thing as a good competitive game that has an obvious optimal strategy. For example, there is no competitive tic-tac-toe gaming, as two logical players would tie every time. I remember playing an old real-time strategy game called KKND, where one of the units was clearly the strongest unit in the game. Playing against my brother degenerated into a fray where we hurled masses of the same unit at each other until one of us got bored and stopped playing. On the other hand, a superior game like StarCraft presents a completely intractable problem. There is no best race, no best strategy, and certainly no best way to win.

Second, a quality competitive game should have a variety of techniques that can be employed in order to win. That is, if a player performs strategy A, the opponent should have more than one reasonable response as an option. Games frequently have a system of built-in counters. Theoretically, game creators insert such counters to avoid the danger of an optimal strategy. However, these kinds of systems often cause games to be nothing more than a fancy multimedia version of rock-paper-scissors: Unit A counters Unit B counters Unit C counters Unit A. On the other hand, excellent competitive games, such as Marvel vs Capcom 2, allow for huge diversity in response. In Marvel vs Capcom 2, players can elect three characters to form a fighting team. With fifty-six characters from which to choose, Marvel vs Capcom 2 offers over 25,000 combinations of possible teams, presenting the player with virtually unlimited options. At the highest level of play, strong competitive players can be seen using drastically different teams and styles.

Third, a good competitive game should test a player’s skills and minimize the element of chance or luck. Ideally, the probability of a weak player defeating a good player should be as close to zero as possible. For example, in a well-designed game like WarCraft 3, it is highly unlikely that an amateur will be able to control his units or respond to his opponent’s tech patterns as well as an experienced player. In fact, the best way to test a player’s skill in a game is to present the player with more decisions. In WarCraft 3, a player not only has to make major decisions, such as which buildings to make or what hero to choose, but also has to make innumerable small decisions, such as how to precisely control each unit or time an attack. By presenting a player with more decisions, the game offers amateurs more opportunities to make mistakes and experts more opportunities to shine.

However, against this framework of competitive game design, we can understand why the marginal advantage gives a game flavor and excitement for both the player and observer. The marginal advantage not only provides the player with the joy of overcoming obstacles, of finding new and more effective methods of winning, but also allows a player to express himself, to have his own unique style. By exploiting the marginal advantage, the expert player is both a problem solver and an artist. In WarCraft 3, StarCraft, Marvel vs Capcom2, and CounterStrike alike, we see the individuality of the players shine through: some play aggressively, some play defensively; some are renowned for their solid, steady play, others for their unorthodox tactics. We respect the brilliance of their expert skills; we admire their ability to win. Yet, at the same time, we appreciate the aesthetic of each player’s technique, that each player finds a solution that is so different from the next player. If too many decisions are clear cut, the player has no need to discover his own marginal advantage over the field, and the competitive game collapses into redundant, unexciting play, unappealing to master and unappealing to watch. The brilliance of a competitive game is that the designer must limit his role to be the creator and balancer, to allow for the potential of innovation. In this way, each player can uncover his own marginal advantage and become the true pioneer of the game.

In Profundis Progress 9/15

2011-09-16T02:46:00Z

The last time I posted a picture of a game map the region styling code wasn't working properly. Have a look at a random game map now:

Looking at this, I feel excitement for the project building again. For randomly generated platforming terrain, I think this is very good. Keep in mind that fluids aren't even generated in the random maps at the moment, and there will be gasses in the final version too.

Here are some in-game images:

1. This is just outside the "base" area. When done, the player's rocketship will be in this area, which serves as base camp. Notice the character design has changed a bit: her head is more realistically proportioned, and there's now a spaceman's bubble around her head. Also notice the faint colored backgrounds; these are colored from leftover data from terrain generation, so they tend to suggest the platforms are extending from background features. (Well, that's how I describe it. Maybe there's a better way to explain it, but I haven't thought of it yet.)

2. The colors of the walls will be important; they represent different types of stone. Unfortunately they're fairly blocky at the moment. I've thought a lot about how to remedy that without spending extra rendering time for edge effects, haven't come up with a good solution yet though.

3. A tunnel. Currently the background being drawn for out-of-sight areas so long as the player has seen them before; this is a bug.

4. I put some liquid into this image. Note that the blue substance here looks and flows like water but it isn't; it can be stood upon! This is a property of this liquid, generated randomly. I'm not sure what the gameplay consequences of this will be however; what if the player falls into an underground sea, but floating atop that is a layer of "solid" liquid? Should "solid" liquids always be heavier than swimable types? I'm currently thinking that, in most cases, it should.