Video Game Legacy

Why this action game dev made a visual novel

2016-06-17T12:00:00.000+02:00

I just add these pictures for prettyness

I got into gaming because of Sonic the Hedgehog for the Sega Megadrive and Gamegear, I love myself a fast-paced arcade racing game, with Trackmania, Extreme G and WipEout as some of my favourites and even in modern gaming I can have my adrenaline fix whilst racing in a GTA-like game or any faux retro arcade game. Imagine my surprise when I was staring at my own design for a scripting engine and thinking: "You know what? I should make a visual novel!"

What brought me to this wild conclusion? Let's back up a little. Even though I finished a computer sciences degree at university, I make my games in Unity. I could make my own game engine, but why re-do something that has been done better by others before? With Unity as an engine base, I can make even more awesome games than if I had to build the graphics part myself. Unity is very suitable for 3D action games and that's why it is my engine of choice. With standard assets and scripts you can build a prototype within the hour.

But, as with any existing engine, Unity can not be tailoring to every possible kind of game you might want to make with it. What I was missing was a decent way of scripting. Sure, Unity has a great object-oriented scripting system, which is great when you want to handle many pieces in a game environment, but a story script does not work that way. Many things working at a time makes a story confusing. What you want is something more monolithic, guiding the program and player in a certain direction. What you want is something called a structural scripting language, something like BASIC.

More pretty pictures!

"Whaaaat?! Surely you jest, claiming BASIC is better than C-sharp!" You might be right in most cases, but story-wise it's a different matter. Object oriented scripts have other problems when it comes to writing stories. First, if you slip up in its syntax, your script won't compile. This is devastating for your flow of writing! A structural language, on the other hand, has more room for errors, which benefits the writing of the story. Second, if you want to make your story even slightly non-linear, you want to jump around between lines. Sure, there is a 'goto' command in Unity, but suffice to say you'll go to coder-hell if you use the C command we shall not speak of.

Fortunately, Unity has an asset store that can get you any kind of asset, script or functionality you desire. Unfortunately, none of them felt right. There's a lua framework, that mostly focuses on moddability of games and there are several visual novel toolkits that do little else. However, none give me any tools to script events in a game field, which, as an action-fan, kind of saddens me. The final level on the spaceship in Sonic 2 would be less impressive if you just teleported there, the scenes in Tomb Raider with Miss Natla made the spelunking feel extra mysterious and anyone who played Final Fantasy 6 (or 3, maybe not an action title) will remember how awesome it was to see that asshole Kefka be blown apart bit by bit in the end. Also, yes, I am excluding over-scripted games, so I can make my point.

So, with all the existing systems being unsatisfactory, I set out to make my own scripting system. These were the requirements I had for the system:

Portability to every platform Unity provides, so everything had to be built from scratch
Modularity, it should be easy to expand and easy to use for multiple purposes
Easy localization for text and speech
Communication with the playing field, start animations etc. at given times in the script
GUI handling, let the new script handle menus, because Unity's GUI handling is so atrocious, it needs a complete post of its own.

I call it: the Story Engine.

What could all these pretty pictures be for?

If you've done it once, building a scripting system is pretty easy, provided you consistently keep using modules and functions the way they are supposed to. To put it in proper English: I blatantly copied the insides of a computer: I made a C script to store values (memory), a C script to execute commands (processor), a C script to handle the GUI (monitor, mouse and keyboard), a C script to hold and interpret my custom scripts (HDD?) and connected them withing unity like you would with a real PC. Add to this that the scripting language I botched together was based on assembly and it's a surprise IBM did not come knocking on my door. Luckily, this design is older than computers have been around, so I was in the clear.

The scripting language was the main focus for the system. A script for the system consists of a CSV or "Comma Separated Value" file. For easy parsing, I interchanged the commas with whatever this vertical line character is called: "|". That way I did not have to worry about quotes and commas in text. Another benefit of CSV files is that you can edit them in Excel or any other alternative.

Basic design of the system

The first row in the CSV file tells the interpreter what every cell in every column does.The top line of a typical script would be:

label

cmd

arg0

arg1

arg2

arg3

txt_en

txt_es

txt_fr

spk_en

Every row in the Excel sheet holds 1 command. I won't go into too much detail, but these are the basics:

There are several possible commands possible for the cmd column. All commands are eventually handled by the 'processor' module.
Arguments for those commands can be put in the arg0-arg3 columns, if you want to use a command with more than 4 arguments, just add a column in Excel
The label column depicts labels for the goto and gosub commands to jump to.
The txt_xx column sets the text for any GUI element, like buttons, story-text or subtitles. A locale command can switch the txt column used for text with the language code used for xx.
spk_xx, for when spoken text is needed, holds the name of a sound file. Also switchable with the locale command. In this case, the budget only allowed 1 spoken language :(.

A little girl with explosives.

It only took me 2 days to design, implement the bare basics and have the first prototype running. However, a prototype is barely the beginning. If I wanted to use it, I needed to test it with something bigger and that's where the idea for a visual novel sneaked into my mind.

I have not been kind to the dating sim, the sibling of the visual novel, comparing it to a screwdriver to my eye, but I have always had a certain respect for the visual novel format in a story-telling kind of way. Text based stories easily break the "show, don't tell" rule, while on the other hand visual stories need to have everything shown, even dull conversations, or it breaks immersion. A visual novel can show a lot without description, while still leaving room for the imagination of the reader.

Also, a visual novel is perfect to test your scripting system with. Even though I did not know much about visual novels, I was happy to dive into that world and I met a lot of nice people along the way. If those people are reading this: you know who you are, you're awesome!

So, I made the first prototype of a Chapter in 1 day (12 hours in 1 day, so technically one and a half work day), a proof of concept demo with actual artists in a month (released as a demo much later) and today, as of writing, we release the full product. Introducing:

The logo of Detective Hank and the Golden Sneeze

Detective Hank and the Golden Sneeze is an interactive whodunnit visual novel with a different culprit on each playthrough. It uses almost all capabilities of my scripting system. Localization and voice acting are pending. As for now, I will keep on polishing the engine, as after release a lot of people are bound to bump into fringe-bugs.

It's getting crowded in here.

The fun part is: everything can be added in a matter of seconds (if you don't count actually making the extra content) and the code I wrote for this system can also be used for other purposes. Every module is interchangeable due to use of inheritance in C-sharp and can be linked to different parts of a game field. In other words: the code that moves the pictures on screen can later be expanded to move 3D models through a field or do all kinds of things.

Building this visual novel was a fantastic test for my scripting system. I found out a lot of parts did not work as I intended them to and, because the system did not need much expansion, the bugs were easy to isolate and fix. As I wanted more functionality for the novel, I got to experiment with inheritance and see if expansion of the base-code worked. And it did!

For the sake of just making a visual novel why didn't I just go with Ren.py or TyranoBuilder? I could have, but the pieces of code I hold now are so modular, I might just use them for every game I am going to make for the next couple of years. It was fun to build a visual novel to test both my engine coding and story writing skills and it definitely made me a better game developer. That's why this action-loving dev made a visual novel... and it might not be his last.

As of writing, Detective Hank and the Golden Sneeze is still awaiting the Steam Greenlight process, but it is already available on itch.io over here. If you want to try it out first, we have a demo available here.

Gley Lancer, the coolest game with the weirdest name

2016-03-01T14:32:00.002+01:00

When I first came across Gley Lancer I played it on an emulator and how could I otherwise? It was released exclusively in Japan until it got released on the Wii in 2008. Now, this isn't going to be one of my "Oh, what a shame" posts, because its developer is still in business and still making money off of this game. This post is going to be an "Why haven't you played this already?" posts.

Gley Lancer might just look like any ordinary side-scrolling shooter and, in a way, it is. You move left to right and shoot bad guys until you get to the boss and shoot him to pieces. Yet, slowly, but surely, its awesomeness starts creeping onto you. Let me take you on the trip I had when I started playing this back in 1999.

Memory lane

When I first booted up Gley Lancer I was taken aback by the large intro. This intro was really, really long, but also very relatable: girl's father gets kidnapped, girl is sad, girl steals space ship to rescue father, you know, the usual. I didn't speak Japanese at the time and since I learned to, I haven't taken the time to translate the story, but I recon that's what the pictures meant. And then there was the first level.

First level and you get stuff thrown at you.

Gley Lancer features spoken text and its first line is "Stick to it and believe in your power." That first line sets the tone for the rest of the game. I played this in 1999 and spoken language was so common that its presence did not impress me. Yet, I was blown away by Gley Lancer's first level. The brilliance of Gley Lancer is not in its technical abilities, but its usage of its aesthetics. The designers of Gley Lancer knew that the human mind can not block the brilliance of certain sights and that's why the first level has you flying through the ring of Saturn.

At first it looks like you are flying through an asteroid field, but then Saturn comes in from the right. It's a very simple level to learn you the basics of the game. Enemies come in gently, becoming more and more during the level and around the middle, you get asteroids thrown at you. Saturn fades away to the left and you arrive at the boss, which appears to be literally throwing the asteroids you encountered mid-level. It's a nice pay-off for a gentle beginning. The game is full off satisfying build-ups and pay-offs and the first level is just the beginning of a fantastic adventure.

LIGHTSABERS!!!

LIGHTSABERS! (insert SPACESHIP! reference)

While Gley Lancer has great pacing, it's not even its best feature. No, the best feature is that your plane can have FRIGGIN' LIGHT SABERS! Sure, the lasers, spread bombs and even flame throwers are awesome, but come on man! LIGHT SABERS! Nothing I can say can add enough to that. Gley Lancer has different ways of gun movement, one of which is a constant roll around your plane. In my first play-through I combined the roll with the light sabers and EVERYTHING EXPLODED! I was 13/14 at the time, it was the coolest thing I saw in games at the time and since then I've seen very few things surpass that.

And its awesomeness doesn't stop there. The game does its best to make you feel like a true hero. In the second to last level you have to save a ship from an alien attack. The boss of that level is shooting at a starship and you have to kill the boss before the ship is demolished. I have never seen the ship explode, but it can lose a lot of parts. It has 2 engines, a couple of middle parts and an escape pod, all of which fall off as you take longer to shoot down the boss. At my first play-through I (supposedly) saved the ship just barely, leaving just the escape pod. And when you do save the ship, a fleet of space-jet-fighters come in and congratulate you on your accomplishment. The best part? The higher you set the difficulty, the bigger the fleet.

Not for the faint of heart.

Kill it! KILL IT!

The game is not without its flaws. First of all: its art is not very consistent. At one time you fight aliens, but in one of the later levels you fly through ancient Greek architecture, which was a bit confusing. Also, the gun modes I mentioned earlier, there are 7 different modes: normal, reverse, auto-aim, 2way, 2way reverse, shadow and roll; but you can boil them down to 2: 'auto-aim' and 'why haven't you picked auto-aim?' Also, what is a 'Gley Lancer'? Usually I can re-translate Japanese errors in English, but I haven't got a clue what this should have been. (Grey Lancer? Grey Ranger? Glee?)

If its difficulty is a strong or a weak point is up for debate. Gley Lancer is easy in the beginning, but gets HARD around the third level and that might be off-putting. You will run out of lives FAST. On the other hand, some like it hard and 13 year old me didn't care, we had save-states in emulators in 1999. If you ever finish the hardest difficulty, you get a code at the end of the credits to unlock mania difficulty. At the fighter-fleet level, there will be so many fighters congratulating you, you can't see yourself or the ship you were supposed to save.

Have you played it yet?
So, have you played this game yet? Yes, it has some flaws, but it's one of the best I've played. I haven't even mentioned the music, which is awesome. It is still available for sale and if not to you, an emulator is never far away. Even if great gameplay doesn't convince you, let me just remind you: IT HAS LIGHTSABERS!

Sonic 3 would have been the best in the series, if not for this one mistake

2016-02-16T01:00:00.000+01:00

Don't worry, this is not a fanboy post. Yes, Sonic is my favourite video game character. Yes, I am of the opinion that Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is better than 2, Adventure and Generations. But, I am perfectly aware that Sonic 3 had a certain problem and that is what this post will be about.

From the start

ZOOM!

Let's take a look at the beginning of the series. Nintendo had a lot of success with Mario for almost 6 years when Sonic came around. If you remember the loyalty wars between Sonic and Mario fans, you can imagine that Sega did a great job designing Sonic to make people doubt the leading video game protagonist for 6 years running.

The first game for the Megadrive (Genesis for those across the pond) was pretty sweet. Sonic ran really fast, but you could see in some levels that the level designers did not know how to implement speed. They improved on this in Sonic 2, there were longer stretches to run in and jumping did not feel slow. The best idea they had was adding the sidekick, Tails the flying fox, as an immortal playable character next to Sonic as player 1. This was the best implementation of couch multiplayer I've ever seen, because anyone could just pick up a controller and play along without player 1 being too annoyed

And then came Sonic 3. They took everything and improved even more. Tails could now lift Sonic to places he could not reach before. There levels were even faster and the theming was better thought through. To top it all off, Sega release Sonic and Knuckles, with which you could play Sonic 3 AND Sonic and Knuckles back to back with Sonic, Tails or Knuckles. As a little kid, my mind was blown.

Bring on the classics!

This place has its own expletives.

And yet, if you ask, most Sonic fans will almost never cite Sonic 3 as the best in the series. Almost no youtuber (at least not my favourite ones) has made a Sonic 3 video and someone makes one, they are just walkthroughs. Why?

I will now give you 5 words that strike fear in the heart of any Sonic 3 player: Carnival Night Zone's Spinning Drums. For all the things Sonic 3 did well, there is 1 great mistake that undid all of them. Somewhere in the second half of the Carnival Night Zone level Sonic is locked in a small room with nothing but a spinning drum in a hole where you supposedly need to get through. You can not evade going into the room. You will enter and you will spend there more than 10 minutes. After those ten minutes, Sonic dies of a so called 'Time Over.' The torture is slow and the carnival music makes it all the worse.

These spinning drums are not a menace on their own, they are scattered across the level and sometimes Sonic will land on them and they will bounce. When you get locked in that room, that is what you are going to try: jump on the drum and try to get it through the hole. This will not work, you can get it halfway through and you will be able to make a huge jump, but you will not be able to get through.

No reason for this screenshot,
this game is just beautiful

If you want to enjoy Sonic 3, I've got 1 tip for you: use the up and down arrows on the gamepad. That is what you are supposed to do. The stupid thing is, the game does not give you ANY visual cues on it. Sonic does not bend his knees and at first the drum only barely moves up and down, but surely and steadily it will move 3 screens up and crush Sonic on the ceiling, if you are not careful. Why did Sonic Team put this in the game and why implement it like this? Everything else is intuitive and sleek, except for this part.

What happened?

Of-course, I haven't got the answers, but here is my speculation: it's a mix of things. First of all: the drums follow a complicated rule using a kind of acceleration we associate with standard physics nowadays. By locking Sonic in the room, the creators made sure you could not see past this complicated piece of game engineering.But that does not explain the lack of visual cues.

Pics or it didn't happen, am I right?

Let me sidetrack a little. I've got a portable Sega Game Gear in the attic that I got for my 7th birthday. The screen is burned and I keep it for parts for when my second Game Gear will finally break. On this Game Gear is a sticker I put under the screen when I was 10. On that sticker you can still see the number of the Sega Mega Phone. It's a telephone number you could call if you got stuck in a game for 1 Gulden per minute, about 0.45 Euro/Dollar cents.

And that is what went wrong. Those days, the internet was not yet widespread and what was on it, usually did not involve walkthroughs. Several 'information hotlines' sprung up during that time to help you with your games if you were stuck. With that information being hot business, it helped that new games would bring in money for them too. I will not say that the spinning drum room was deliberate, but with a game bound for release and thinking the info will be readily available, Sonic Team will probably not have wanted to fix that mistake either.

Except, nobody called those numbers as our parents would not let us. Most people just gave up on Sonic 3. Buying Sonic and Knuckles and combining it with Sonic 3 did not help much, because Sonic would still get stuck in the spinning drum room before you could get to the Sonic and Knuckles level set. The Knuckles level set did not contain the spinning drum room, as if the developers knew.

One tip to the perfect game

The spinning drum mistake should not have been made, it's a stain on an otherwise perfect game, but it does not have to spoil your enjoyment. If, despite my rambling, you still want to try out Sonic 3 with the Knuckles expansion, remember this: use the up and down arrows when you are stuck and you are in for one of the most awesome games in history.

The Playstation 3 that never really was, was so awesome

2016-02-09T06:00:00.000+01:00

BTW: this is not the 60GB. Can't you tell?

Imagine a Dutch boy going to a game store in a neighboring city, anticipating his new console and finally meeting the grandiose that is the Sony Playstation 3 60GB. "I had go through a lot of trouble to get this thing," he says. "I know," the shopkeeper replies, "we even get people from Groningen (far side of the country), just to get this model." Now imagine that boy nearing his 30's and this event happening last year, because that is me.

Although I hate the stereotype of us Dutch being cheap, I did not want to shell out the 800 Euro's required to purchase the system on launch. I was happy with my PS2, but I had mostly be playing PC games before that and I did not mind going back. Unfortunately I missed out on the awesomeness that would be the PS3.

It has been almost 10 years ago, but do you remember all the features that would be in the original PS3? Backwards compatibility spanning back to the PSX era, communication with the PSP, Linux installation and it's possibility to play Blu-ray make it an absolute behemoth of a console.

Unfortunately these features did not only come with a price tag. Sony had to do them right in order for them to stick around and they let that one slip. They had to cut down on features to save on costs, not only because of the material used in the product, but also to save on labor. Since I finally got my hands on the original PS3, let me break down some of those features on why they are awesome and what went wrong.

The backwards compatibility

All playable on the 60GB version

Let me start by telling you that the backwards compatibility on the PS3 was awesome! Remember that the PS1 released in 1994, so on release of the PS3 you already had a library of games 12 years big. With the PS3 not yet at its end of life, that accumulates to 21 years today! Also, these games are possible to view over HDMI and the PS3 takes care of the image scaling for you. With the wireless PS3 controller you add extra play comfort. I would play all of my old games on it, if not for one of several major drawbacks.

You can't load your saves from the previous playstations. Yes, the PS3 60GB has a memory card slot, but somewhere along the design line something was misinterpreted and that slot was changed from a PS2 type to one of those multi-card readers you find on those (now) old PC's. You also cannot connect any old PS2/PSX controller. I can perfectly imagine why this happened, cutting costs among others, but it does not end there.

The PS3 is region free (perfect slogan), but the PSX and PS2 are not. Probably for commercial reasons, they kept the region locking. It makes perfect sense to make a console region free: you make 1 type for all regions, but if you design your backwards compatibility to keep the region lock, you are still building different consoles for different regions.

It is obvious why the backwards compatibility was scratched first, it was the most expensive, but it is such a shame. If they had taken a better look at the design, they might have kept it. Then again, if you know a bit about computer architecture, you'd know how hard backwards compatibility can be, but I'll save that for another post.

Linux compatibility

I am out of puns, insert punguin here...

You might not care to remember, but the PS3 had the possibility to install the Linux operating system. I have not tried this myself, since I did not want to jeopardize my collectible PS3, but I have played enough with Linux to be really excited to try it on another PS3 someday.

Although it was cool, this feature really gave me the idea Sony wasn't really thinking in the design phase. Mainly for these 2 reasons:

Practically no gamer uses Linux
Any OS, but especially Linux, gives the user full access to your hardware.

It wasn't a surprise the Linux feature was the leak that eventually made the PS3 crackable and Sony even removed it with a system update. It's a shame, because the PS3 processor had some new stuff not common in PC's. There's a lot to say about that, but I'll save that too for another post.

Communication with your PSP

We take the PSX hardware and make it portable.
What shall we call it?

Has anyone tried this? Did you know you can play games on your Playstation Portable from your Playstation 3? No? Well neither did I. You can also swap out savegames from your PSP to your PS3, so you can continue a game at home on the big screen after you've played it on the road.

I got my PSP last year too and I had that thing soft-modded before you could say "hey, isn't that be piracy?" The irony of it all is that I only play legally purchased PSP and PSX games on it, the PSX games being the original disc softwarematically mangled on a PC to be stored on the PSP memory stick. This last feature was never fully developed by Sony, because a hacker group found out before the release of the PS3. Again, it's a shame, because it works so well.

Then there is remote play. Long before Valve's Steam had a streaming function, you could stream your PS3 contents to your PSP. Yes, you heard that right, you can go to the little men's (or women's) room and play Playstation games on your PS3! You can insert a PSX disc in a PS3 60GB and have it streamed over Wifi!

Unfortunately, Sony thinks the PSP does not have enough sticks and buttons, so the PS3 downright refuses to play most content, including PS2 and PS3, but also Netflix and any other app you might have installed, which leaves remote play to be nothing more than a remote PS3 savegames-manager. Then, there is the problem of the PSP not being able to connect to WPA2 wifi (most modern routers) and its chip is barely fast enough to stream. You can play an RPG, but do not try a racing game, the delay is just a bit too much. Add to that that Sony never really pushed remote play for developers and you will therefore probably never use it.

Enjoying the PS3 nonetheless

Even though Sony did not polish a lot of its features, the original 60GB is a hackers dream come true. The amount of features is a rabbit-hole I'd love to dive in some more and I definitely will. To end on a high note: although most of these features did not come out as much as we'd hoped, at least Sony has learned from it. They now know better what works and at least they continued the remote play feature to PSvita and PS4. I haven't had my hands on a vita yet, but it seems it can connect to a PS3 as well. Just to keep a combo going, I'll save that topic for another post.

Heavy Gear: a franchise in need of love (and maybe a genre)

2015-08-31T00:00:00.000+02:00

Heavy Gear's box art, courtesy of Activision

Everyone has that one special game nobody has played except him/her. Heavy Gear is not one of those games for me, but I do wish I knew of people who have played it. In all my life, I have not met one person who played it and did not borrow my copy. I haven't even been able to buy (or pirate) a copy of the sequel. I did, however, see a crappy 3D animated episode of a series years after I finished this game, which was kind of an odd experience.

Heavy Gear is a first-person, open-field war game and in that sentence is where its first problem arises. Probably only one of those genre depictions has made sense to you and it was about the camera angle. Here's the thing: even though Heavy Gear does not do anything ground breaking, it is still hard to point out in which genre it is supposed to go. Sure, you can describe what you can do in the game, but that does not solve the problem. You can build your own robot, but is it a robot builder? The prefabs work just as well. You are a soldier, but is it a military shooter? As long as you don't shoot humans in the face, people get confused. You pilot a giant robot, is it like MechWarrior? Thank you for drawing attention to the competitor! Let me expand on what I mean.

Mech building
As said, you can build your own robot from the ground up. The original game I got came with a single language manual of 100+ pages explaining every part and pre-configured robot (or 'Gear', as they call it. From legs and engines to guns and rockets, everything was documented on what it did and what its stats were. I spent hours comparing torso's and then adding parts to the INSIDE of that torso, to get the optimal result. Let that sink in: you can not only choose parts, but every leg, arm, torso and head has individual sub-parts you can add and remove. It is vast! It is awesome!

The kodiak model. Every prefab bot has
a picture of this quality in the manual

And then you find the pre-configured bots. They work just as well. An entire building system rendered useless. The thing is, the differences between all parts is marginal at best. Also, you only need one gun: the medium assault rifle, the one in the title picture, but more on that later. In any case: Heavy Gear is not depicted as a mecha builder.

Combat and gameplay
The gameplay is awesome. The Gear really feels as gear. You run around over a field in a very fluid motion and you have fast control over turns. It does not feel as vehicular as MechWarrior, even when you are in vehicle mode. That mode feels like you are on roller-skates, which they are and they are soooo handy! You have a vast environment to zip through which even for its time (1997) was very big. This is war, it feels like it and you are the soldier that is going to bring a lot of damage.

And then the sensors come in... Don't get me wrong, there is a lot of choice and all but one of them do pretty awesome things. All but one... That one, when activated turns off all graphics and only shows a blue wire frame for every object. Textures: Gone! Skybox: Gone! Explosions: Gone! Immersion: RIP. The worst part: it is by far the best way to find and destroy the enemy, because it has camouflage colors. Strafe and shoot 3 shots to the chest with the medium assault rifle on any enemy and its gear flings away in separate pieces. There might be an explosion in there, but it isn't rendered when the sensor is on.

OK, graphics aren't that great, but imagine
a sensor rendering even less

But we were talking about genre depiction and not about its gameplay quality, which makes it all the sadder. It does not play like MechWarrior and not like a military shooter, which were not as prominent at the time, but already a presence. Heavy Gear had a very unique gameplay ruined by 1 little thing. It did not fit into an existing genre and its own gameplay had a fatal flaw, so it did not make it earn its own genre.

Also, the AI is stupid, there was nobody in multiplayer and therefore the not-part-of-story-campaign missions were boring. I did not know where to put this, it just adds on a detriment to the gameplay, but speaking of story...

Story
YOU GUYS! THE STORY IS AWESOME! This game meshes story and gameplay perfectly using everything that can be used in a videogame. There are live action movies (which you can skip, but I didn't), extensive texts building the world (which you don't have to read, but I did for this game) and scripted events that do NOT INTERRUPT GAMEPLAY. I wish more developers played this game to take note on how you tell a story. Mind you, the actual story and the acting could be better, but its presentation was so good, my suspension of disbelief was through the roof and I didn't even notice.

As for the Story: On a distant planet, there is a war between the North and the South. You are a Northern soldier on a giant desert-crawling frigate and it gets marooned in the badlands between North and South. In itself this is not such a big problem, but there is also a Southern frigate somewhere and so both frigates are in a kind of Mexican stand-off, but with whole platoons instead of guns. Both sides are too far away from home for support and there is a chance neither will go home alive.

Either an actor that doesn't know Heavy Gear or
a Heavy Gear fan that doesn't know how to act.

The whole campaign has this brooding dread spread through it. Where is the other frigate? Will we survive? Through the campaign you get captured and characters die and defect. Every death and defection gave me a little sting, because this was not a war between North and South, this was up close and personal.

Then there is the moment when both frigates finally meet and mayhem ensues. Even though it was a difficult mission, I turned off the lame sensor to watch both frigates blast away on eachother. Yes, even for its time the graphics did not make it look as majestic as this description, but I did not care. I was zipping around on my roller-skates, trying to spot foes between my friends and generally not get killed.

And all the reviewers ever did was comparing it to Command and Conquer, an RTS no less. C&C had campaigns for both factions, Heavy Gear had only the Northern campaign, thus the reviewers claimed it fell short. And that is all they ever wrote about it! How can you compare a military shooter story (of which there is usually 1 in a military shooter) to two RTS stories? Personally, I prefer 1 great story to 2 mediocre ones, but I guess quantity outweighs quality. Again a point where its lack of genre profile cut the game short in reviews.

In the end

Assault: more Graphics, more color, more love?

Despite its shortcomings, Heavy Gear is a lot of fun and it is such a shame reviewers did not really know what to make from it. Sure, on average it got around 80% in reviews, but remember that only games above 90% can make a difference. With customers not knowing what it was, nobody bought it, nobody played it, except me.

Before I got to writing this post, I went on to do a little research and little did I know it was actually based on a universe for a tabletop game and a role-playing game! (That explained the late, 40 episode, crappy TV series I came across) They even kickstarted a new videogame (Heavy Gear Assault) and it did not reach its target, moving on to early access (which I never heard about) to be released in 2016. I haven't tried it yet, but I think I will when I get the opportunity. Hopefully this franchise will get the love in videogames it deserves.

I hate social media

2014-05-02T18:15:00.000+02:00

So, for those few who follow my blog: Sorry for not posting so long. I've been through a lot of things, but I can say the result is worth it: I am now making games. Not as much as I would want to, because I need to put bread on the table with my day job, but I am effectively working on games 1 day of the week. If this goes well, I might be able to transition from making games as a hobby to making it my day job. Yay!

I don't know all of these logos, I am getting old.

But before I get to that point, I need to know EVERYTHING about making games. That includes not only programming, art and music, but also marketing and financials. While I am quite apt with the first and quite fair with 2 and 3, I have still a lot to learn on the last two. I have the financials quite straight now, because my games are free and I get food with my day job, but to make my games popular I really need to get my marketing straight. Thankfully social media should make this job easier than a decade before... should...

This is where the titular opinion of this post starts. I hate social media; Not because it is hip to hate Facebook, but because I never got the hang of being likable on the internet. In real life, I make friends without even trying and I have no problem speaking for large groups. To the contrary, I live for meeting new people and I love to improvise a class lecture in front of a random crowd, but online? Online I am worse than the shyest kid you've ever met. You probably never met me online.

It's not like I haven't tried. I have accounts on multiple sites, including reddit. I have tried getting some attention making this video clip and when it felt right, I even tried making a whole internet series a couple of years later. While it was fun to make the videos and I feel informed reading opinions from everyday people, it is not as fulfilling as actually meeting people and talking about your opinions/videos.

Here's the thing: to me, being online is not the same as actually being in someone's vicinity, being actually able to, but not needing to, touch someone's personal bubble. First of all, the reactions are not spontaneous online. Most interaction is done through text. I might not be dyslectic, but I am a very slow reader. I hate reading and the only reason I do it, is because I need to get the information or the cool story that is hidden within the text. I like writing, but it takes me a lot of effort to get the meaning right, while face to face I am able to make my point almost instantly clear using not only words, but also intonation and gestures.

Apart from that primary gripe, when I actually do get to the online interaction, NOBODY LISTENS! I might have had a couple of reactions, but if you are not on the first page of a forum post or the front page of someone's youtube, all you get is crickets chirping. If you want a reaction, you have to stalk your sites, waiting for a moment that someone makes a post, pounce when they do and hope the post goes big. Rinse, lather, repeat. Stalking takes time, a lot of time which I'd rather spend on making games.

Quick, altogether now! AAAAAAH!

So it's a kind of choosing between 2 evils. If I spend a lot of time online stalking, I am not able to make some games. If I spend my time making a game, I do not have the time to make a lot of posts to get feedback with. Without that feedback, I don't know what I made was approved or disliked. Though sites try to fix this with upvotes and likes, when I get a score, I don't know if I am liked by the people that matter to me. To me, there is no interaction online, only screaming into the void.

Social media should make marketing more easy. You can post anywhere, then it should go viral and you will be rolling in the dough. The internet is plastered with success stories that couldn't have happened 20 years ago. A couple of examples are Gangnam style, nyan cat, goat simulator and every month there will be one more to add to that list. I like those stories, but for every viral video there is "100 hours of video [sic] uploaded to YouTube every minute" that do not get that VIP treatment.

This is where the whole package starts to look futile. The whole internet is telling me to advertise my games in between a lot of content that is equally screaming for attention. Furthermore, you can not post on one place and then be done with it, you have to go to Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Reddit, 4Chan and many more and then still not everyone has heard about my game. Nobody cares, nobody tells anyone and your marketing is dead. If I would, say, wear a clown's nose and spread flyers all over town while drawing everyone's attention, something I'd love to do, by the way, I might not market to a big area, but people will remember me and tell other people about my game ("Look at this flyer, Margaret. I got it from a guy wearing a clown nose! He made a game!").

But, I have to catch up with the times. People nowadays want a lot of information, all the time. The least I can do is updating any interesting events, or at least the ones I want people to know about. I can do the clown-thingy anyway and maybe someone will tape it and it becomes a viral video. I am going to set stuff up on as much social media as I am comfortable with and market and repost as much as possible. I am now reviving this blog for such purposes. Maybe if I keep my posts short and maybe more frequent that once a year, people might even take a look at it.

But I won't go on Facebook. It is too intrusive and it saves me a place to post updates to. Also, it is hip to hate Facebook.

A gamer's guide on how to install linux

2012-12-16T13:57:00.001+01:00

Summary: You do not have to read everything in this guide, just the summaries.

Although he's the Linux mascot, I've never
seen this guy on a distro image...

With Steam coming to Linux, the open source platform is becoming ever more attractive to gamers. I was able to figure out Linux, mostly because I studied computer sciences (I had to) and I have enough patience to actually read all the manuals out there.

A lot of people are not in my position and therefore do not try Linux. It's scary for them, because they do not know what they are getting themselves into. There is no need for them to sink that much time in trying to learn Linux, because they can just as easily sink money in Windows and Mac to have a working computer. This is a shame, because Linux can be easily explained and learned.

I made this guide to be as complete and clear and yet as short as possible with the focus on gaming. I did this for 3 reasons: (1) We gamers are not known for our attention span, (2) when I started out I was annoyed by the walls of text and slow youtube movies that wasted my time trying to help me with very simple actions and (3) when you've finally got something to work, you'd want to wind down with a game, right?

Not counting the intro, I've divided this guide in 4 parts: getting, installing, using and gaming (in) Linux. I summarized every part in a small "Too Long; Didn't Read" at the beginning of every part, for when you just want to 'get on with it'.

This tutorial assumes you know how to burn a disc image to a DVD, how to change the boot order on your motherboard and what a hard disk partition is. We will focus on making a Linux-Windows dual-boot, so that if you are having trouble getting your games to run on Linux, you can always switch back without reinstalling.

0 - Before we start: Is Linux for you?

Summary: Take some time to dive into Linux.

Let's take some game analogies to see if you are fit to use Linux. As with anything in life, Linux is not for everybody. You have to be prepared to tweak your system a bit to satisfy your needs, as no distro will cater exactly to what you want. Fortunately, you can also do this in games.

If you are an avid Minecraft or World Of Warcraft player, do not think twice, you are probably going to like Linux. These games are pretty console-line heavy when you want to enjoy them to the fullest. If you have used the console in ANY game without too much trouble, you have tackled the biggest Linux hurdle: the terminal.

You do not need to be very command-creative to be able to like Linux. If you've ever made a custom level or tweaked your game's files to cheat a little, you've still got the right mindset. Linux will not try to sell you its features Instead YOU have to actively search for them. You need to want to try stretching what you can do with your operating system.

Do NOT attempt Linux if you are scared of exploration and the accompanied potential failure. Learning Linux comes with trial and error. You will probably ruin a computer (or virtual machine, more on that later) when trying out Linux. If this is the case, let me fix that for you: don't be scared, mistakes are normal. There, now everyone can try Linux.

1 - Getting Linux

Summary: Download an Ubuntu disc image here. If you tried it and don't like it, move to another distro. Check for an overview of other distro's at distrowatch.

The current Ubuntu logo

My first mistake with Linux was expecting I could type "download Linux" in Google and start right away. There is not just one Linux (although technically they all have the same kernel). There are countless different distributions (distro for short) and versions. They all have a different community and their composition can vary A LOT. If you thought the difference between Windows 98 and XP was large, just wait until you compare Arch and Debian.

This list gives you an idea of what you can expect.

Ubuntu; You'll hear most about this one. It has the biggest marketing campaign and claims to be the most user-friendly. It has great support, but as of writing people are not being too happy with the new interface. That's okay, since there are a lot of different versions with a different interface, like Kubuntu, Xubuntu and Lubuntu.
openSUSE; A linux distro especially made for the corporate world. It's nice but you will notice it assumes your computer will be used by more than one person. It will ask for your password more often than Ubuntu and its community is not very focused on media and gaming.
Arch; For the more experienced Linux user who wants to do anything to his/her distro, this one keeps it down on the safety-mechanisms. If you've got leading edge and cutting edge, Arch is bleeding edge. It comes with the warning that you should not update 24 hours prior to a moment when you really need your computer. An alternative to Arch is Gentoo.
Fedora; Fedora tries to be a bit more safe with the bleeding edge. Every version of Fedora has a stable core and tries to test new bits on that core. If something is broken, wait for the next update and it should work again. It's a lot of fun if you want to try new stuff, but do not want to get stuck fixing everything yourself.
Sabayon; Some distro's want to be original, some just take an existing distro and dump it full of packages to give you a complete out-of-the-box experience. Sabayon is one of those distro's. It has 3 versions of every kind of program you could think of and is mainly a big pile of packages. Other distro's in this genre are Poseidon and Ultimate Edition.
Puppy; Some times you need a small OS for a small hard drive. That's where minimal distro's are for. Puppy linux is not the smallest and definitely not the prettiest, but still the most popular with just 100MB needed for install. Other examples are SliTaz and Damn Small Linux.
Mint; I currently use Mint to write this post, so I can't leave it off the list. ;) It's based on Ubuntu (which in turn is based of Debian) and focuses on having a stable OS with a nice interface.

I have used all these distro's at least once, but there are a lot more available out there. Check distrowatch for more distro's and experiment for yourself! If you want to know which distro's are similar, check this distro map from wikipedia.

2 - Installing Linux

Summary: Try out your distro in a live environment and practice installing Linux on an empty partition next to Windows on an old computer or in Oracle VB. When you use it on your main or old computer, burn Ubuntu on DVD-RW, boot from said DVD and follow instructions on screen.

It's not the installing of Linux that is the hard part, it's the preparation. Before you even think of installing Linux to your main computer, I recommend you practice on an old computer. If you do not have or want an extra computer lying around, you should practice on a Virtual Machine, like Oracle Virtual Box.

VM's are nice, because you can install from a disc image straight to a virtual computer. Unless you are using a VM, I suggest you stock up on some rewritable DVD's and burn some of your favourite distro's on them. Re-use the discs of distro's you don't like or are out-dated. Do not use recordables, I found out you will run out of them very soon.

It's also possible to burn a distro image to USB stick, but be aware that not all distro images can be booted when burned to USB and that not all (old) computers can boot from USB. Most distro images are hybrids (USB and CD) and there are ways to get disc-only images on USB drive (like LiLi and Pendrive linux), BUT save yourself a hassle and just burn to DVD.

Before you start to install Linux next to Windows, make sure you've got an empty partition. It will be wiped. Back up all the data from that partition. Next make sure your computer or VM boots from your DVD drive before the hard disk. Now you're good to go.

IMPORTANT PART: Installing Linux is relatively easy: Insert disc (or load image in VM), wait until the installing environment starts up and follow the signs saying "Install <distro name>." Note that most distro's have a live environment in which you can try out the distro without installing.

Usually Linux installs make sure it can be installed next to Windows, Windows doesn't, so make sure Windows is installed first. You can still fix the Master Boot Record if Windows is installed first, but save yourself the trouble.

3 - Using Linux

Summary: Linux is not Windows. Be prepared, but if you read only the summaries, have fun exploring! No, seriously, have fun!

If you think you know how an operating system works because you know Windows in and out, you might get yourself in a pinch. Windows is not like Linux, but you can still learn to use it without too much trouble. Go explore for yourself, it's fun. If you want me to hold your hand, here is a list of things that are a bit different.

Interface; Where Windows has just one kind of point and click interface per version, Linux has room for more than just one per install. If you don't like the interface of your distro, just install another one and select it when you log in. The most used ones are KDE and Gnome, but if you don't like them you can go to XFCE, LXDE, Cinnamon or MATE.
Terminal (command line); A common story about Linux is that you have to use the terminal. This is not entirely true. You do not have to use the terminal, but if you know your way around with it, it saves you a lot of headache. It is the difference between strolling through menus searching for that one button that solves your problem (visual interface) and just telling the computer what you want (terminal). Here is a list of useful commands and if any of them don't work, try 'sudo <command here>'.
Directory structure; Forget everything you know about drive letters and the windows directory structure. Chances are your data is cluttered around it on stations, like D:\, E:\, and so forth and your OS is installed in C:\windows\ and all other stuff . Linux on the other hand is installed in /. Your 'my documents' are available in /home/<user name>/. Your other drives with games and movies are only available if you 'mount' them to a directory. Usually these drives are mounted to /media/<drive name> or /mnt/<drive name>/. Note that Linux uses forward slashes for directories instead of back-slashes.
File system; Just so you know, Windows can't read the Linux file systems (ext2, ext3, ext4), but Linux can read Windows's (FAT32, NTFS). That's also why a partition gets wiped when you install Linux on it.
Installing software; Linux works a bit different with installing new software. These are the 3 main ways of installing software ordered by ease of use.

Repository; Think of an app store on your smartphone as a paid-for repository. Note: Linux had repositories decades before Apple came with their app store. The repository holds an online storage of all packages that have been compiled especially for your distro. You can use a package manager, like synaptic or pacman, to search and install packages from your repository. They will not always be up-to-date, though.
Binaries; If the (version of a) package is not available from your repository, you can download binaries from a website. Depending on your distro, these are files with a .deb (Ubuntu and Debian based) or .rpm extension (for distro's like Fedora, SUSE and other Red Hat based). The package manager will handle them and needed dependancies for you.
Compile from source; This means you get the program's code and build it for your distro yourself. Use a terminal for this! Download the code, unzip and execute the soon-to-be familiar dance of "./configure; make; make install" in the code's main directory. Make sure you can satisfy all dependancies yourself!

Drivers; As with the terminal story, the driver story is partially true. Not every piece of hardware is compatible with Linux. The newest hardware always takes a while before it is usable in your Linux distro and some developers do not even bother with Linux. That said, since the switch from Windows XP to Vista a lot of hardware suddenly is not compatible with Windows anymore. However, the hardware that was compatible with Linux has stayed compatible. I've already found some (not even that) old hardware that works instantly with Linux, but not with Windows 7. If you want to know if a piece of hardware, like a printer, is compatible with Linux, google its driver before buying.

4 - Gaming on Linux

Summary: It's like modding, just a little bit different.

This will be your best
friend when using Linux

Since this is a gaming blog, I will not go into detail with utilities like LibreOffice or GIMP. Most utilities will be pre-installed with your distro or available in your repositories anyway.

I have to be honest here. Gaming will not be as easy on linux as it is on windows. It is possible to run all your windows games on linux after some fiddling about. However, if you want to wind down and enjoy a new game, you might not want to tweak with linux for an hour. Here's where a lin-win dual boot might come in handy. That said, the Linux games market share is growing very fast since Desura, Steam and indy developers are more and more releasing their games for linux.

Here's a list to get you started on running games on Linux:

WINE; Wine is an abstract program interface that lets you run MS Windows programs on linux and mac. Just open any .exe with wine and it is most likely to run. Wine is usually available in repositories, but it might be better to get the latest version from their site. Be careful! Some cheat detectors in multiplayer games might classify Wine as a cheating program of sorts.
DOSBOX; Your favourite DOS emulator works just as well in linux as in windows. Play almost all DOS PC games released ever!
SCUMMVM; Play all your favourite old point and click adventures.
Desura; It's quite rare to find games released natively for Linux. This site does not cater to Linux games exclusively, but it has quite a lot of native Linux games.
Open Source games and engines; Some games are paid, some are completely open source. You repository is full of them. These are some notable open source, moddable games.

Sauerbraten; The Unreal engine of Linux. First person shooter with quite a community
Spring Engine; A RTS engine based on the design of Total Annihilation. Many mods are available giving you quite a couple of RTS games to play.
Doom; Look in your repositories, the original developers at Id left you a present. You need the original files to play.
OpenRA; Command and Conquer on Linux. It even works with the files of the original C&C and Red Alert.
OpenTTD; Transport Tycoon Deluxe, updated with a community, multiplayer modes and HUGE environments. Original files not needed to play, but still optional.

Console emulators; Console emulators are in a bit of a moral gray area, since console published games were not meant to be copied. Still, it is your right by law to do with your old games as you like and luckily Linux has enough emulators to let you play thousands of games with little effort.

Mednafen; An emulator that successfully emulates almost every console up to 1995 plus some more. Most likely to be in your repository.
Gens; One of the better Sega Genesis/Megadrive emulator
ZSNES; If you've emulated SNES in windows, ZSNES will be familiar to you. It's in your repository.
Mupen64; Great Nintendo 64 emulator. Not in your repository.
PCSX/PCSX2; Emulate Playstation 1 and 2. If they run slow, make an image of the disc.
GMAMEUI/Advance MAME; The Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator is available on linux in many forms. These two versions were easiest to use for me.

Steam; Valve's Steam is now available for Linux. Some avid Linux users don't want it on Linux because it is a kind of DRM and it would close down the system. While they might have a point, I still like Steam's service and it will bring games to the Linux platform, so it is on this list.

5 - So now what?

Summary: We're done, go enjoy your system

If I missed something or things have changed since writing, please let me know in the comments. Most of this post is quite general, but I will try and update this post when necessary.

And that's about it. This should give you enough pointers to work with Linux and install games on it. If things don't work out, remember Google is your friend and someone somewhere might have had the same problem. The communities are big, you will not be left out.

We should play more REAL simulations

2012-10-29T21:44:00.000+01:00

With Medal of honor: Warfighter coming out, the discussion about games being bogged down to one genre and being less interactive has fired up again. IGN has flamed the new MoH installment and Total Biscuit uses the new MoH to show what has gone wrong with the FPS genre. I will not say the internet is in great peril, but game fans are not tranquil either.

A medal of hono(u)r. Shiny, but I would
not want to go through the trouble
getting it...

The problem with the internet is that, when people are disgruntled, everyone is pointing out the problem, but not giving an active solution. Sure, "Do not buy MoH: warfighter" might be a good solution, but it is not active. If people buy it accidentally ("ooh, 90% off!"), the solution is lost and the evil corporation grows stronger. An active solution would be "burn all copies of MoH:WF!" This doesn't work, because that means you have to buy all copies before you can burn them, giving the evil corporation more money in the process. Fortunately, I have an active solution that might just work. You just need to look at the bigger picture.

Go play simulation games. Yes, even Street cleaning simulator. I know what you're thinking: "Why? What would it do? How does it help?" It's a difficult dilemma, but let me answer in one sentence: "WHY CAN'T YOU PEOPLE ASK ONE QUESTION AT A TIME!?"

Let me back up a little; I am not a big fan of simulations or simulation games. They miss rules that make me feel I achieved something. I have never really played Minecraft and Terraria ultimately seemed pointless to me. I like games who go nuts on action and occasional wackiness. Transformers: war for cybertron and Saints row 2 are some of my favourites , but I don't stick to action, as the Final Fantasy series and Okami are also on the same shelf in my collection. What these games have in common is that its creators know how to make a nice game by applying rules to a certain environment.

See? Can easily win gamespot's GOTY award.

What games like MoH:WF do wrong is that they mix up rules of the game with rules of an environment. This is not a weird appearance, since both sets of rules need to be determined by the designer. To illustrate: Risk has a different order of taking turns than football (soccer AND rugby variant included). You don't go kicking around pieces on the Risk board and you don't say to the football opponent it's not his turn to kick the ball. These are both obvious, since the abstractness of risk facilitates turn-taking and the closeness of football makes you take the ball from your opponent. MOH:WF gives you a realistic environment and then tells you when it is your turn to do something. Total Biscuit said it best: "As an elite operator I'm immune to bullets. What am I not immune to? Uneven tiled floor!"

This is where simulation games should come in. Simulations are just the environment and a setting. You have to make up the rules. A good simulation does not judge you for going out of bounds. When I played DCS A10-C warthog, I could do whatever I wanted. If I did a quick and dirty startup or made a 180 barrel roll, the simulation did not care. I got the washing machine flying without breaking it, so that was OK. The fact that a 180 barrel roll in a simulation is way more difficult than in an arcade game makes it all the more awesome. Also, Train Simulator 2013 did not judge me for making the biggest train ever (and I want to show it off):

When a person is in an environment with nothing to do, a funny human psychological element starts to kick in. They start to make their own rules or do whatever they want. This is what separates playing a video game from actual human play. It is also the reason why minecraft got so big, you can build whatever you want. People train their abilities and have fun. I stated earlier that fun and learning are closely connected. This also explains why MoH:WF is not fun: you are not training, you are just doing as told.

DCS A10C warthog... I meant to do that, really!

What I'm trying to explain is this: games should be environments with loose rules in which they let the player do their thing and occasionally reach a goal. If games do not meet this requirement, they do not engage human play and they are not games. Simulations are here to remind us what the difference is between environment and game. You want to shoot your gun, fly that plane or race that car without someone bothering you.

Also, if you buy more simulation games, this genre becomes more attractive to develop, giving the market more reminders on how an environment should be made. This makes restrictive games less attractive, because statistics will show simulations are sold more. You don't have to play your collection of simulations for this to have effect. You will have tweaked the statistics and have something to fall back on when you see the next FPS disaster coming along.

Panic and fear come from not being informed. Fear turns into anger and that is what you see at every big release of game schlock that still seems to sell. People don't know why it is popular and can not give an alternative for it. That's why you have to buy and play simulations. You'll have knowledge of what is wrong with the schlock, you'll immediately have an alternative and you cranked manager's statistics more favourable to intelectual classiness. If you miss flying games, play DCS A10-C warthog, if you hate Call of Duty, go play ARMA2 and DayZ, and if you want to know how you REALLY make a zombie game, go play Trains vs Zombies 2.

For Science! For real!

2012-10-19T22:01:00.000+02:00

If you are reading this, you are probably from reddit or the Escapist. I am pretty sure, since this blog does not get much monthly hits and the hits I do get are usually image searches for a philips screw driver. Let me say welcome and thank you. Thank you for helping me in my research on educational games, or more specifically: "How to teach software design in the form of an educational game."

Arthur, the mascot

So, how did it go? Well, I was just minding my own business, trying to write my thesis and then suddenly I have to present my research in Switzerland and I win an award in Austria for best gamification paper. I'll admit it sounds better than it actually is. Switzerland was just a poster presentation in the hallway at the end of the conference and the paper for Austria, although it mainly described my own research, was mostly written by one of my superiors. Nonetheless, I am proud of the achievement. Thank you for making it all possible.

If you know what I am thanking you for, you've only seen the tip of the iceberg. If you don't know what in blazes name I am writing about, let me explain. A couple of months ago I released a freeware game, called "the Art of Software Design". With it came 2 surveys, one to be taken before the game and one for after playing. This was part of the research I needed for my paper, but that is not the only thing I did. For a full research you need some preliminary reading (I look at A), a hypothesis (I think A gives B), you need to test the hypothesis (I'll do A), the test will give data (Ooooh, I now have C) and from that data you can draw conclusions (I say C is B, so I am right).

I am going to tell what all the other things I did for my research were . I am going to try to put it in very simple terms. If you are not interested, stop reading, accept my thanks for your cooperation and go read something else. If you want to see the full research, software and extra papers, go here. If you are still interested in this blog post you can, ofcourse, just read on. Ready? OK, go!

What did I first know?
My teacher wanted me to make a game that teaches software design, because software design has a big dullness stigma. A game might spark some interest in people who don't know what they want. I wanted to make the game fun. To do that, as a scientist, I had to find out what 'fun' actually is. The few people who have read my blog might remember my post about 'addiction does not equal fun.' Back then I ranted about the fact that game developers make a game as if they make a maze for rats. Instead of giving the player the possibility to do their thing, they want the player to do everything the way the designer intended. I said once before that games like NFS most wanted are rigged. The best part of research is that you can really dig out a subject you personally want to know about, even if it is not completely in sync with the demanded research. Just like an ice-cream man can serve himself some ice-cream, I served myself some information.

I'm learniiiing!

When making a game, most developers only look at the addiction part, but not at the learning part. When you play a game, you learn the controls, mechanics and features and you want to get better in those. People want to create their own style when playing. Even if the information is not useful, they still learn from a game. My problem starts when what you do in the game does not matter anymore. A lot of games make you lose on purpose and on that moment you are not learning anymore, you are just pushing buttons because a screen tells you to. If you ever wondered why quick-time-events are so annoying, this is the explanation. Pushing buttons when told does not make you learn, you don't practice a style and therefore you are not having fun.

My game was to be fun and educational. So I wanted my players not to become rats in mazes, I wanted them to learn and create their own style with software design. If you start researching the essence of learning (or just read this link) you'll find that in order to learn, the student/player has to have some kind of emotional connection with the thing he or she learns. In other words: if the teacher is entertaining, the kids pay attention. This is why an educational game, when done right, can teach a lot to the player. This is also why learning things, when done right, can also be fun. Education is not necessarily dull at its core. People want to do and learn things, just for the fun.

Long story short, I condensed the essence of fun and learning into 3 points that need to be balanced when making a (educational) game. They are:

Tolerance; Don't punish the player too hard, but don't be lenient. Too little tolerance (or too much punishment) makes the player want to stop playing the game. Too much tolerance and the player does whatever they want and nothing is learned.
Variation; Don't give too much similar situations to the player, but don't give them something completely new every time either. Too little variation makes the game dull, too much variation and the player does not understand what the game (or learning subject) is about.
Deviation; When the player gets stuck, they need to be able to go to a different problem, solve that and get back to the earlier problem to solve it with the new knowledge they got. With too little deviation, they get stuck, don't play on and don't see the rest of the game. With too much deviation they will avoid parts of the game, because they don't feel like doing that one difficult part.

With this information I knew how learning could be fun, but I did not know enough about software design to actually teach it. I dived into a big pile of books, picked some subjects that would be possible to implement and build some mechanics around them. If you want to know what the subjects are and what they do, go play my game already. It is way easier and faster for you to play the game than it is for me to write it all down here and make you understand.

How did I do the science?
With all information and expectations in place, it was time to make the game and test it on people. This is easier said than done. Making a software design model is easy to translate to an environment. Some concepts are easy to translate, like coupling, some concepts are challenging to put into a game, like data flow, and some are so vague I needed 3 different takes on the subject before I got the mechanic right (cohesion). If you don't know what I'm rambling about, again, play the game.

Eventually I was able to make a game. This was not the version you got to play. I first tested it on some people in so called 'speak out loud' tests. These tests are as weird as they sound, people played the game and had to actively say what they were thinking whilst they played the game. It's weird, but very effective. I was able to fix a lot of bugs and counter-intuitiveness from the game.

After I fixed the game, it was ready for global release... or at least on reddit and the escapist. I made a pre-game and a post-game survey which players had to fill in before and after playing the game respectively. In the surveys I would ask questions about the subjects and the idea was that after playing the game people would know more about the subjects after playing the game.

I just forgot about one factor: the average attention span of a person on the internet. Barely one out of five people who did the pre-game survey pushed through to the post-game survey. It was a set-back, but luckily I could still use the data and I already had the speak-out-load results. It was time to make something out of my findings.

And then?
The whole thing with science is that you can not know what the results will be beforehand. If you did, you probably tweaked your results and you would be a lousy scientist. This is why it is so hard to get research funding and why you should never trust research funded by companies when it says that those companies are right on some subject.

For Science! Muhahaha

As with all research, also with mine things went wrong. There were still some nasty but rare bugs that broke the game on some points. This might explain why a lot of people did not do the post-game survey and not everyone could recall all subjects after playing that game. In hindsight, I should have implemented some netcode in which I traced people's actions.

Then again, netcode would have taken a lot of time to make and, as with all things in life, my paper had a deadline. The game was already hard to make as it was intended. I wanted multiple solutions per puzzle (variation) and a nonlinear way of going through puzzles (deviation). This meant i needed to put a lot of time creating and testing every puzzle and also that I needed a lot of puzzles. Let's just say I did not have a lot of time to do anything else besides level creating when I should be doing sciency stuff.

How did I smugly say I was right all along?
With all things considered, the research was a success. Why? People DID learn software design. At the speak out loud tests people started talking in software design terms within a couple of puzzles. When looking at the surveys the more advanced subjects were not always learned correctly, but that was because they were not practiced enough within the game. Most people were positive and we were able to reach out to people interested in software design and computer sciences, which was our main goal.

The best data I got from this research is signs that the puzzle structure was right when looking at the point of deviation from earlier. At the speak out loud tests people got stuck on certain puzzles, solved another one and returned to the previous puzzle to solve it. Note that I only saw signs, but can not claim that it really works, because for that I need to speak-out-loud-test much more people.

My research was presented at 2 software design conferences. One presentation was done by me, the other by one of my teachers and he got the award. In the end the research was a success thanks to all you fine internet people. Thank you for playing my game and I hope you enjoyed learning about software design.

Also, keep an eye on the art of software design website. There will soon be an expansion of 3 big puzzles and I will also publish the source code.

Orcophobia, or why 40k's Spacemarines are wusses

2012-08-11T20:52:00.000+02:00

Let me sing my all to favourite song: I do not have a lot of money, I don't pay for games full price and I tend not to pirate my games. As such, I only play games when they are not so recent anymore. I only get to play recent games when they get a heavy discount soon after launch. This usually means there was something terribly wrong with the game. Imagine my surprise when I got to play Warhammer 40,000 Spacemarine.

This hedge needs some trimming.

Warhammer has a vast universe and a lot of dedicated fans. Dawn of war is one of the most beloved strategies of all time and Warhammer 40K has the honor of introducing the first Spacemarines before DOOM even came out. That last fact was probably the reason they created the 40K Spacemarine game into a shooter. Why did the original Spacemarine fail, even though it is a common staple in current game pop culture? I will not beat around the bush: the Spacemarines are total wusses in this game.

There is a lot more wrong with this game, but pussy Spacemarines is the biggest problem. It all stems from paint-by-number game design they probably copied from gears of war. Mind you, I have never played gears of war, I've only seen it, but it looked pretty similar up to the camera angles. To sum up the numbers of gears of war, a shooter needs:

Strong men in oversized armor
A dehumanized enemy
A mission to somewhere
Drama
Gore

And that's about it. For the dehumanized enemy the designers went straight to the orc race in the 40K universe and did not bother to check if that was a viable option. I know from the dawn of war series there are the Eldar and some religious fanatics, which I found fascinating, but apparently the designers did not. Again, I haven't played it, just saw a friend play it and even I know more than the designers, since they only threw orcs at me for the entire game. It's not that they wanted to restrain the player from slaying humans. The game has a PEGI 18 rating, you can do anything you like with that, but I'm still only slaying orcs. Nonetheless, lack of variety does not have to break a game's immersion, but then other things start to fall apart.

In a game the player and the protagonist need to have the same motivation, in Spacemarine it is a motivation for killing orcs. Orcs have broken through some borders and are now wrecking everything in sight. There were people on the places in the areas of the game, but they were all wiped out by orcs. If there still are people, you are usually to late to save them. You might gain a bit of ground in the story, but you might just as well lose it in the next scene. This hopelessness is meant to make you hate the enemy. If it was done right, it would, but let's compare both sides, shall we?

The Spacemarines or Ultramarines:

Motivation: "We fight for the honour of the emperor!"
Fly around in advanced ships
Full, heavy body armor
Well organized and strategic
Developed a perpetual energy source.

The Orcs:

Motivation: "Waaag!". No seriously, they call their motivation 'waaag'
Fly around in jet propelled meteorites called 'Rok'. Again, this is actually in the game.
Armor? A stove is good enough
Strategy: "Oi wont SHINY! Get Shiny! Spoicemarine not get shiny!" This is screamed at you during a scene in the game.
Research department: "Red paint makes stuff go faster." Actual upgrade in dawn of war.

Waaag! Mind you, spell it with 3 a's.

It would be nice if it was played silly, but they throw in constant drama with a "this is serious, you guys!" mentality. How, in all that is holy, did the orcs get the upper hand in this war? Strength in numbers only gets you so far. The Spacemarines are superior in strength, research and individual intelligence. The only reason you can be on the losing hand is shear incompetence and that is when the game starts to fall apart. Ever been rooting for the monster in a horror film when it's running after the damsel in distress? This is that situation!

Things get on their worst when the game tries to remind you how brutal the orcs are. In a flying scene, orcs take some of the aircrafts in your fleet down. Allegedly, a lot of men die. Tragic, if it weren't for the orcs flying by a rocket attatched to their backs and banging on the planes with wrenches. Everywhere else in the game you walk through devastated buildings, which are apparently raided by orcs. They could've done that, but the audiologs that are lying around also state that the workers weren't able to work together. They might've broken the stuff before the orcs came, you know.

Then there is the awkwardness when you find out that all the labourers you were meant to protect were practically held there as slaves. This is briefly brushed upon and it is meant to be normal. It's OK, it is all for the emperor! By the way, I never got to see the emperor. He's this unseen entity which justifies slavery and war. Living in a democracy, if I played for the glory of Kim Jong Un, I might have felt less awkward.

To make the marines look more incompetent, we have the jetpack sections. Someone thought it was a good idea to include jetpacks, since that game mechanic does well in polls. The jetpack sections are pretty awesome, but every section ends with the marine dumping the jetpack casually with a weak excuse, like too little room to fly or it suddenly being out of fuel. The protagonist can kill hordes of orcs with a single jetpack blow, but does not hold on to it, because it has just run out of fuel. You don't dump such a mighty weapon! You hang on to it in case you can get more fuel!

The incompetence reaches new heights when the Spacemarine party infiltrates one of their own facilities. In the base, turrets are shooting anything that moves, including you. Even though he is lower in rank, the scientist in your party orders you to go to a certain room where he can access the control systems. He turns of the turrets, which was unnecessary, since I blew them all to pieces. Destroying turrets was a pretty tedious task, since they don't come near me, being turrets and all. The scientist assures me all turrets are deactivated... up until this room. The next room is still full of bloodthirsty turrets. That was when I stopped playing.

The Tyranid is made from the same stuff as nightmares

It baffles me how a designer can get so much so wrong. When researching warhammer, I stumbled upon the Tyranid race. Those are scary! Why weren't they in this game? The box tells me I can "Experience the rich & violent brutality of the Warhammer 40,000 universe." It's not really rich, since only 2 races are in this game. Also, the box told me I can be a fearless Spacemarine. The Marines are not fearless, they are stupid and incompetent, because they got run over by some green men.

Whenever a gamedesigner gets to finish his work, s/he needs to take a look at the bigger picture and seriously consider if the "show, don't tell" rule can be applied. No matter how fearless you say your protagonist is or how evil the antagonist should be, if you reel a bunch of whiny brutes against a bunch of bloodthirsty clowns, you end up with Spacemarines looking like wusses. That's why your game is discounted.

Despite innovation, games have become less accessible.

2012-06-10T19:02:00.001+02:00

There's this massive multiplayer online game called "All Points Bulletin" or APB for short. It started out as a pay to play game with a paying pattern similar to that of World of Warcraft. Unfortunately it didn't sell too well, the creator went broke and the assets were bought up by someone else. Who that was, I didn't care to research. This party then made APB free to play, with buyable aesthetics, which was a great way to open it up to the big crowd and get back their investment. At least, in my opinion that is.

APB has a Grand Theft Auto like gameplay and as you might recall: I love that kind of gameplay. I stumbled into it a couple of days ago and I thought to give it a go. This is what happened:

I install the game and wait for a good half hour to download it completely through Steam. When that's done, I have to create an account at the studio's servers, because I can't use my steam account in this game. Mind you, my Steam account is eventually linked to the studio's account, but this is not the same as using the Steam account to log-in. To do this, I have to start up the game again. I am finally at a menu to start a game and now I have to choose a server. When I choose the server, I get the message that my "character will be permanently linked to this server." I don't know what it means, but the game gives me a character to create, so I do that. I get a confusing map which gives me possibilities to spawn in the GTA-like city, so I click away and nothing happens. It seems I can only spawn in very tiny indicated places on the map. My bad, now let's begin. Then there's a loading screen of 2 to 3 minutes.

After an hour of fiddling around since I clicked install, I am finally in the game. I get spammed with a lot of messages, barely half of which make sense to me. The game wants me to join a group, but I want to save that for later and check out the game mechanics. According to the story of the game, I am part of the criminals who wreak havoc through the city, so I steal a pick-up truck and do just that.

I gain up speed, jump around a little over bridges and then the inevitable happens: I accidentally hit a criminal. He didn't look where he was going and didn't see me coming when he crossed the road. Insert dead chicken jokes here. I shrug it off, just like in GTA, and drive on. Then the loading screen comes up and after a minute I get a message.

I was kicked from the server.

I checked, this wasn't on my back

I didn't die, someone decided I didn't play the game properly and prohibited me from playing it. If I were to call their imaginary help desk, I would have been made fun of. I should have read the manual or follow the extensive tutorial. Through my years of gaming I have learned that that is the sensible way to approach a game.

Yet, I got a nagging feeling: is it stupid of me not to comply to the game's expectations or have the game and its creators stupid expectations of me? The reason I ask is because, although APB is free to play, the majority of games seem to follow the trends it is modeled after.

For the argument, let's compare the start-up of APB to Nintendo's Super Mario Brothers from 1985 or any Atari game from before that. You go to the store, buy the game, insert it in the console, hit the power button and BAM! You're in the menu, select start and you can play. If you're a PC gamer add "insert floppy, type the program name" to the list and you've probably got the same result. In Super Mario Brothers you walk, jump and shoot, just like in APB (adding a car to the mix), only Mario got you started faster. The first time playing any game from that era probably made you die faster than I got kicked from the APB server, but I can still make the following point.

Games are heavily inaccessible nowadays. Games from the 80's and 90's also were in a way, but for very different reasons. Games from those era had heavy game-play and interface issues and were not fully accepted as a medium back then. Today we have those issues practically worked out and the medium has become more and more accepted, but some new issues came up by making these games more innovative.

Step by step, these are the issues we as gamers face today which we didn't have before:

Digital Rights Management

Very accurate description, too bad of the spelling.

It's a cliché to start with this one, but it had to come up anyway. You can't borrow or lend a game anymore. If someone is interested in a game a friend is playing, s/he must buy it, provided the store carries it and the price of up to 60 dollars is not too steep for him/her. With borrowing, a game gains a member to its community, but the publisher and studio don't see any money for it. I understand why it is there, even if 1 out of 10 or maybe even 50 is willing to buy a game full price instead of borrowing it or buying it second hand, the creators make more money. It's a pity they gain less fans, but in the end, they need to pay their mortgage.

If it were about movies, you show your collection to someone and if they have interest in one, you let them borrow it, provided they are a good friend. You can't do that to games anymore. Codes have locked your game to a specific account that is tied to you personally or to your PC or console , which brings me to my next point...

Everything wants you to have an account

Not that there is anything wrong with the concept, but as the audience's experience learned, everything is hackable and no form of security is air-tight. I am not comfortable with every game to ask me to make a new username and password.

The problem is that you can't be sure what happens with the information. Am I being monitored for terrorist behaviour? Will I be harassed by commercial third parties? What happens to my credit card information? I am trusting random people, who I have never met, with things I wouldn't trust my second next-door neighbour with. This is not something I have to get used to, this is just asking a lot of trust from the player just to play a game.

A lot of paid, and practically all free-to-play games, want me to make an account, even if I got them through Steam. I'm a computer scientist, my environment consists of people who are comfortable with using a computer and they all like to game. I am the only one with a Steam account, apart from one friend who studies psychology. Even if the game is free to play or the people are willing to shell out the money, they are not eager to give their personal information to anyone, even if it's just a username and password. I know these account systems exist to enhance multiplayer, but nobody in my direct environment wants to go through the dedication of making an account to do that. This brings me to my next point.

Multiplayer with people you don't know and no-one else

So if they all play Diablo 3, they all call Blizzard instead
of eachother

This is what I call the fake social aspect of a game. Multiplayer used to include giving a second controller or half the keyboard to a friend or playing over LAN. So called couch multiplayer has never been widely implemented over all genres, but is now practically extinct. LAN playability is also disappearing and you can only play with other people over the provided servers nowadays. As I said above, the bar to participate in a game is pretty high due to the DRM and mandatory account creation, so the people you are playing with are probably not your friends from your direct environment.

Let's say your mom, grandfather or less dedicated gamer friend wants to play a game with you, just to see what's up. If it's Super Mario Brothers, you give them the Luigi controller in less than a second. If it's Red Alert, that came with 2 gameplay disks, you set up a second computer and set up LAN in a minute. If it's APB, good luck setting up a new account and asking their credentials and all.

The idea to let the creators handle the multiplayer is to make software pirates buy the game to gain the full experience. The problem is that by doing so, they unnecessarily take away work from the community. This costs them extra money and by the time the game has run for a couple of years, the servers are shut down and the multiplayer is lost forever.

Granted, they make more money, but they reach less people. Mario was easily accessible and is recognized even by people who don't call themselves gamers. World of Warcraft, for example, makes tons of money, but there are also a lot of hardcore gamers who actively choose not to play it and therefore will not recognize even the most played characters.

I must admit I might be biased. I am cursed with not being able to actively connect with people on open chat rooms. I have no trouble in real life emotionally connecting to people, but on-line I am ignored or I tend to accidentally scare people into timidness. My real life friends don't seem to have this problem (I asked), but I usually have great difficulty adjusting to an online community. There is never someone around to teach me the ropes or to start a co-op mission with, so I generally get bored or annoyed and leave the game. This is an awkward segway into my next point.

Overly long instructional levels at the beginning

Yeah, this is an integral part of gaming nowadays

I couldn't fit this one in around the other three points, so now it's last. If you have the time, take a look at this video. It's a "let's play" of the game "Bulletstorm", a game that rewards the player not by how many kills s/he gets, but in what bizarre manner the player kills their opponent. Somewhere around the 8 minute mark the player says something along the lines of: "So when can I get to style-kill?" This is a very typical exclamation that comes with most games these days. A game has a certain selling feature, but the player doesn't get to it before a significant amount of time has passed. In this tutorial time the player is introduced to all features of the game at once.

I could try and succeed in writing a whole book on why these tutorials are so long, what went wrong and how to fix it, but I'll try to summarize it. Anyone, gamer or not, is familiar with the mechanics of moving, jumping and shooting in a game. Everything else must be found out in a way, be it in a short tutorial or manual or by the player randomly smashing buttons. It goes wrong when the tutorials are way to elaborate or when they are explaining basic things like moving, jumping and shooting.

By the time the tutorial gets annoying, something is wrong in the game design. The designers tried to sell their features as too exotic, too many useless features are added or something else entirely came up. The reason 'why' is not important, the effect is that the player needs some patience before s/he can play the game. If the tutorial is too subtle and its introduction comes with too long movies, the player feels s/he is playing a different game from what was promised. Patience takes dedication and the more dedication is needed, the higher the accessibility bar.

So what now?

The game industry, and especially the triple-A studios, are not going to change their market model soon. The way it is structured now brings them more money than when the community was self-supplying and less observed. There might be a way to get some tasks back to the community and with it the accessibility, but it has to be done effectively in a way that also makes money. Seeing that the restricting model only works effectively for big studios and publishers, I think a nice indie developer will soon come with a good model that works in the communities favor.

Until then, I have to try and get the hang of APB...

Diablo 3's marketplace is pointless, stupid and makes the world a worse place to be

2012-05-21T23:49:00.000+02:00

As the title doesn't suggest, I am all for innovation and new ways of experiencing games, but what the title does suggest, I don't approve of everything that passes as an innovation. The marketplace of the recently released Diablo III is one of them. I haven't played it and I never will, because supposedly your character can find items in the game and then you can sell it in a marketplace for real money. This, in my opinion, is utterly pointless to a level that I don't want to be any part of it. Why? Well...

Girls! I've come to devour your boyfriends!

Let me first point out what I DO approve of. I approve of a game being enhanced with new, different parts. I am happy to pay a bit extra for downloadable content, if that broadens my experience of a single game. A lot of people are negative of the so called DLC, but back in the 90's, when I started gaming, physical expansion packs were hot items you really had to search for. Making them downloadable is good for the customer, so s/he doesn't have to search, and more money goes to the studio instead of a greedy publisher. Granted, it's unfortunate sometimes DLC is already on the purchased medium, but this generally happens with publishers I never wanted to purchase from.

I wholly approve of a community making its own content for a game. I love how the fanbase of games like Trackmania, Team Fortress 2, Skyrim and many others make a lot of content for other fans to enjoy. This can be in the form of mods, extra levels or even some aesthetics to add to your already full game. These are usually free, but fans could just as well make money off of it. There have been fan made mods that went on for sale. Fans making money with their favourite game is more than awesome in my book.

Although it's a bit dubious, I still approve of people selling content they found in games to other people. A lot of clandestine setups have been made where players mined, fished or found a lot of in-game goods and sold them on E-bay. This might break a game with a big community and therefore game designers are generally against selling your in-game 'loot'.

Here is where the pointless part starts. In a game you get things by a counter going up over time, when mining for gold for example, or a randomized algorithm that drops an item for you, like in Diablo when weapons with certain damage stats are dropped. Wouldn't it be a lot faster if you could just fill in the height of the gold counter or the stats to that weapon? Why yes, it is. If you are playing to pass time, this timed counter and random drop are part of the experience, but when you are doing it for the money, it is just a very inefficient way of filling in an Excel sheet. Imagine you had to fill in your yearly income one euro/dollar/yen at a time. Pointless, right? So if you are selling your loot on E-bay, more power to you, but there are better ways of earning money. Like filing someone else's taxes!

Death and taxes, now also not avoidable in video games!

So Blizzard, the creator of Diablo, is just doing what the community is doing all along, but now the picture has changed completely. With other online games, the player can't hack into the server and treat him/herself to infinite golden pieces, but its creators can or it least they should be able to. Instead of the creator going to the marketplace, filling in some Excel stat sheets and making the resulting loot available for auction, (pause, here comes the important part:) they let the player run around in a multi million dollar hamster wheel and make them sell it. Let me rephrase that: Blizzard is making you fill in its annual income one dollar per click at a time. Another rephrase: They can make the most epic weapon in the world, but wait until a randomized algorithm creates it and let the finder sell. Even worse: they can sell it only once.

I have no idea where in the game this is...

Can I emphasize enough how pointless this is? This is not content generated by the players! With community made levels, the game mechanics can be pushed to their limits. Mods can add new features to games. New aesthetics can bring variation to a game. Of all the things Blizzard could choose to let the community make money with, why did they have to choose randomly generated content? This adds nothing to the game, except the genuinely frowned upon "pay to win" aspect.

There was an episode of Extra Credits, one of my favourite web series, philosophizing what it would be like if players could make a living playing Diablo 3. Although I like the idea, would you really want to make money off of a game knowing the creator can do the same as you by typing a bunch of numbers instead of crawling a dungeon for hours on end? This way, I really wouldn't. What's the point?

I could ramble on about how pointless it is making money off a game this way as a consumer. I could make unfunny jokes about the old Soviet Russia where streets were cleaned with groups of 50 men, just so they would have a job and it still makes more sense then earning money through Diablo 3. I could go into the subject of people laughing at "bitcoin", since it is a currency with no value other than what you want to pay for it, just like the loot in Diablo 3. I could make a joke about paying bankers huge bonusses is just as sane as paying Diablo 3 players for their loot. I will not go into any of this or similar subjects, since other people can probably do it way better than me.

So yeah, this exists... A human hamster wheel...

Blizzard, I will not run in your hamster wheel. It's not even a hamster wheel, since that eventually improves the physical fitness of its user and Diablo 3 probably doesn't. I don't care how evil the bad guy is. I will not waste my time trying to sell something your randomized algorithm just happened to spawn. I will not wait for my XP counter to slowly crawl up when I slay just another monster for the millionth time, just so I can sell my useless avatar. I will not make money for you in this way when you have the power to do the same in an instant.

I have better things to do and so do your 3.5 million customers. These things might not change the world and they might even be futile, like posting on this blog. But even if this post has no readers, at least I have some piece of mind.

I will not run in your hamster wheel.

You probably rigged it anyway...

My problems with western RPG's

2012-03-12T22:28:00.000+01:00

Since Mass Effect 3 came out last week and a lot of complaining about DLC's and endings came with it, a nasty feeling came creeping up my spine. I don't care about any of it. I don't care about the game, I don't care about the Mass Effect fans and I don't care about what happens to our earth in what is claimed to be the most important sci-fi universe of the current generation. I am just unphased by it all, just because I could never get into western RPG's.

Look, miss, even if you wear that helmet,
you'll have everything protected,
except your vital organs...

I'll admit that the reason for me to write this blog post was triggered by a three parter episode of Penny Arcade's Extra Credits about JRPG's vs. WRPG's. When I watched it I realised why I was able to have fun with Japanese role playing games, but had problems with it's western counterpart. If I seem to be rambling in this post, watch those episodes and you might understand my brain spins a little better.

I'm not saying I can't play all WRPG's. I've had a lot of fun playing the Quest for Glory series. I also don't fully praise JRPG's without criticism. I am not always happy with the feeble and annoying pubescent stereotypes presented in JRPG's, but these are all topics for a different post.

To let me explain my problem, let me list the recurring naggings that get under my skin in every western RPG:

The beginning of the game: Chaos! Destruction! "There is no time to explain!" and then the next hour is a tutorial, explaining how to play the game. Even worse: it breaks immersion by pointing out buttons in dialogue. "Use the action button to talk to me"
The protagonist: It's always 'you' playing the game. It might be called role playing, but the protagonist should be modeled after the player. I will not go into discussion what defines the 'self', but if I can model the protagonist to myself, then why are all these characters forced to be in my party? I already have terrific friends and an awesome family. Why can I never model these characters to represent my real life friends?
The futility of choice: So, I can choose any skill I want, right? Which one to choose? Oh, you have a suggestion ready for me? So, the game can be played for me by the game itself? Then why do I have these choices?
The lack of focus: So the galaxy/empire/rebels are in grave danger? Good! Let's go on an adventure! Wait, why do I have to sweep the floor? Is this other sidequest even necessary?
The abundance of dialogue: Hi there, how are you doing? Yes, I know all about the evil bad guy, 3 other people told me about him. Yes, it's nice you have a daughter. If I don't listen, will I miss something? Not sure... Can I play my game now? No? Well then, let's wait five minutes before we interrogate the next person... Do I really need to click all those dialogue options?
My motivation: Can someone explain why I'm on this adventure? If you need help so badly, then why do you depend on a so called chosen? Will it make a difference if I stay at home and let all these soldiers do the work for me? They are professionals, right? I am not that special, I assure you! I get clobbered by the nearest cave troll!

Oh dear, I'm sorry I said that about WRPG's!
Please! I'll make it up to you!

No doubt I have made WRPG fans go into a fanboy rage for bashing their favourite genre and you know what? They are right! I am jealous of you people! You can explore fantastic worlds and experience great adventures! I can't do that, I'm solidly rooted in reality. No, please don't "get a grasp on reality", you can do that when you're retired. As long as you have a little personal hygiene, you can leave reality for what it is and travel back and forth between your fantasy world and here.

What I understood about WRPG's is that you should be able to tweak your protagonist character in such a way that it will suit your play style or at least you'll have more freedom than in a JRPG or any genre outside RPG's. I never take a predetermined path, one time I am a wizard, the next I am a tank. Diferent as they may be, I always try to play with a "no shit, let's save the princess", but it always comes back to bite me. Every character in the environment wants me to do everything, except following the main plotline.

Maybe it's the way the available WRPG's are written, but I can't put my personal gripes aside. It's not like I haven't tried. I am really eager to explore vast new worlds, but with every game and its universe I eventually got frustrated for different reasons. Let me give you my RPG resume and what my reactions were to them:

Neverwinter nights; First as a sorcerer: "I have no idea what I'm doing! Why are all these enemies falling? Oh, wait, I seem to be hitting them with an ice rod..." At the end of the first mission my squadmate tells me he was "afraid to die and wants to go home". THOSE ENIMIES WERE FRIGGIN EASY, MATE! One step outside and this lady comes up to me. She needs help, but annoyingly doesn't want to tell me what's wrong. I finally go on a mission and get killed by the first enemy... Let's try a different play style...
"Me orc! Smash!" Ok, the first 10 people say my teacher spoke highly of me. How did a mentally retarded animal like me get through adventurers school? Never mind, killed again, uninstall...
Mass Effect 1; I really wanted to get into this one. The fans are loyal and the universe seems very interesting. I casually got a spaceship, went to a nearby ice planet and saved an insect race. Woohoo! Go Shepard! I guess... It all felt empty. No choice I made felt like it had some kind of gravitas. Also, the RPG elements felt like they didn't do anything. Why am I even talking to all these people? Why am I scanning all these mute aliens? (weird sidequest) Anyway, I got killed by pirates when I went to the next planet. I didn't feel the need to save the universe after that.
World of Warcraft; Hold on, I have to pay monthly... I hear stories of people rotting away behind their computers, because of WoW. The combat looks like you take turns... I can tolerate the graphics, but why do you want me to play this?
Knights of the old republic; Found it for 5 bucks in the discount pile. It seems to be one of the greatest RPG's of all time, let's try it. "I'm being attacked by the Sith! Let's attack them back! Oh, wait, first I have to save Bastilla, but before that I have to sneak past a guard, before that I have to win a race for a gang lord, but he wants me to steal an engine for it... now I need to fight a giant beast first... Can I save the princess now? No?" Forget it...
The Witcher 1; Again, what am I doing? Is everything dying around me? Good! Hey, I'm randomly meeting random best friends. Now I'm talking to a female... Wait, what are they doing? No, Wait! STOP THAT! MY GIRLFRIEND MIGHT BE WATCHING! Anyhow, I need something from the other side of the map... It's not there... another side of the map?... Also not there... I've no idea what I'm doing or where I should be going. Forget it.
The Quest for glory series: A friend introduced me to this. I played this for hours on end. It's fun, humorous and I understand the full character sheet. The characters only want something from you when you approach them, nobody claims to be your best friend. Finally time to breathe and take on an adventure... See? I can enjoy WRPG's!

Finally! Free of work and/or MMO grinding.

I refuse to try harder than I already do. All the games listed above have received at least 4 hours of play per game. If I can't get into it after that, then I have more important and or more fun things to do. I have recently finished games I enjoyed in 4 hours that might have cost more money, but I feel like I wasted less, because those 4 hours made me happy. If I need to get through a lot of frustration then somewhere along the line a failsafe kicks in that tells me I need to spend that energy on something useful, like work or studies.

One reason I don't like game reviews is because different genres appeal to different people. I am not a person that can get invested in western RPG's, even if they get high scores. It's a shame, because it is a genre with a lot of depth. Maybe if the dialogue wasn't so obnoxiously long or maybe if there was a little less drama, then maybe I could get into it more.

As for now, I'm just happy the bad ending of ME3 feels like someone else's 42 problems beyond a final frontier in a galaxy far, far away.

Oh dear, tablets...

2012-02-28T10:14:00.000+01:00

So, I was at the Blackberry Devcon the other week... Yeah, not the most exciting to write about, but a man needs to keep his blog active in some way, right? I had a great time at the con and the people from RIM tried really hard to win developers over to develop for the new Blackberry playbook. They even went as far as to give us our very own playbook, FOR FREE! I now have a Blackberry playbook. :)

Blackberry Playbook! Toys!

I don't have much to say about the con, except that they convinced me that the blackberry userbase is enough alive to make a third kind of tablet viable in the current market. The userbase might be small, but they spend more money and are more focused on quality. A 1 dollar app for android can be easily sold in the blackberry store for 3 dollars, just make sure it does what it should. This is news you want to hear as a developer, because you have a higher chance to make more money with your app.

While the Blackberry playbook is fine and dandy, i couldn't help but get a creepy feeling about the current tablet and smartphone market. Yes, the ARM processor, found in most tablets and smartphones, can perform phenomenally on a very low power usage and the multi-touch screens are fantastic for giving an intuitive interface. The problem is that the focus in marketing is pointed to the software.

Shouldn't have bought a tablet, mate.
Those things are expensive.

One thing all tablet manufacturers don't let you know is that every tablet is able to run the other's operating system. In layman's terms: the I-pad can run android and the other way around. They have roughly the same hardware and specs. All the apps in all three stores do the same. There are video players, music players and games with roughly the same gameplay. (Search for Fruit Ninja and marvel at the clones.) For every platform someone else makes an app that does the same as a popular app in an other or even the same store. The consumer might want originality, but in the mean time the clones keep the money coming.

The irony is that tablets have great hardware potential, but the software that's used for their marketing only restricts their possibilities. Here is a list of things I tried with tablets that took more trouble than needed or didn't work at all:

file management: I'm used to throw my files around as much as I like in a folder structure I want. Sadly, every tablet insists you use your apps to handle only their specific formats. There are file managers around, but most of them have a different opinion on if the system folder is part of the personal file folders.
Playing shared videos: This should be the number one reason to have a tablet. You want to watch your videos from your clunky computer in the comfort of your couch, right? Sadly, if you have shared files on your network, you can't access those files through your tablet. Technical reason: no tablet has a decent samba client. I got movies copied to the tablet under android using command-line ssh, but if you are a tablet user, you probably don't want to know what that means.
Flash: Do I need to say more? Thanks to a disagreement between Apple and Adobe, the industry standard for movies and online games is dead in the water for mobile devices. Yes, HTML5 is better, but developers are still trying the learn the ropes on that one.
Installing downloaded programs: You know when you are using a PC, there is always at least one little program you use that you got from this obscure site. It does everything you want and is hacked together by someone who had the same idea as you and had some spare time. That scenario is impossible on the tablet (except in android, but there are not a lot of android tablets). You have to get everything from the app store/market/etc. Worst part: people are deliberately making loads of money with free open-source programs that are probably not written by them.
There is no Red Alert or any RTS on any tablet! For shame!

Doesn't this scream 'TABLET!' to you?

My frustrations run even deeper on technical levels, but they get me on a long ramble. For my tech-savvy readers who want an example: I threw in the towel when I found out the Blackberry playbook has a SAMBA server, but not a client. If I want to watch my videos, I have to go to my computer and put them on the tablet, instead of the other way around.

I sincerely hope the tablet hype doesn't turn into an economic bubble. There is no independent programming community on the tablet. All apps are still made on a PC and distributed through 1 store per platform. This makes the tablet platform dependent on the PC platform and the distributors. If developers abandon the PC and try to force consumers to switch to tablets (like windows 8 tries to do with their interface. Yes that is for the PC) the consumer computer market will be dependent on the few people who know how to handle a PC. There will be a grave shortage of developers and the few that are available will be extremely expensive. Fortunately, that is just my doomsday theory. Personally I don't think it will come that far, because the shortage of developers will be obvious before the consumer has switched completely to tablets.

People have rightfully gone into a fit (just one, but very common example) about others who claimed that the tablet will be the sole way of computing in the future. It won't, the tablet only fills a niche. 5 years ago we only had desktops and big laptops. Now we have netbooks and tablets to suit more specific needs and the latter fills the need to read, watch and game from the couch. I don't have a need for a tablet, since my PC and netbook fit my needs pretty well. The Blackberry playbook is the only tablet I will ever own and I got that one for free.

When the I-pad was introduced, people listened way to much to the praises of Steve Jobs. Because the guy 'got shit done', people were intimidated. He was gonna remove your PC from your house! The thoughtless cheering from apple fans only made things more intimidating. Because of this, the market hasn't really had the opportunity to evaluate the tablet for what it really is. It's a tool, but not the future.

As with everything he did, Steve Jobs steered a whole market to thinking that some new gadget will be the next big thing. With it he brought a plethora of emotions to everyone who did or did not want to listen. He threw us head first in a direction that made us do something different and gave him a lot of money. I don't celebrate the death of Steve Jobs, because he seemed to be a nice guy, but I am glad he finally shut up.

Game development, how you could get there...

2012-01-13T14:22:00.000+01:00

Since I've gone through the trouble of listing my real name on this blog a few months ago, it might be time to tell a bit about a project I'm working on. It's a game and I'm very proud of how I got to that project. But first, let me tell you how I got there.

Take the power into your own hands,
just take those stupid gloves off first.

As a kid, I always liked video games, but after I graduated the Dutch equivalent of high-school, I wanted a challenge that would give me something in life. Note that my majors in high-school were physics, math and chemistry and I was young and reckless. I started studying languages and cultures of Japan at the university of Leiden. I was doomed.

I didn't fit in at that study and I was thinking of switching, but there was this one time I spoke to a professor about the absence of video games in research at the faculty of arts. She told me I should give it a shot. Long story short: my BA paper for Japanese studies was about "The narratology and character relations in Japanese video games".

Why Japanese and computer sciences?
answer: Akihabara

I finished my BA in Japanese studies, but didn't feel like doing a master. Now, because Leiden university has a lot of different studies in all fields, I was able to go back to exact sciences and start a bachelor in computer sciences alongside my Japanese studies. I finished my first year of computer sciences together with my BA.

In the meantime I started chatting with the professors at computer sciences. This time I would do something very serious! I would go into the field of artificial intelligence! My BSc paper: Calculating and predicting the game Five or More. I guess it was games again... queue silent celebration.

I started my master in computer sciences a year and a half ago. Not even a couple of months into the master I got an E-mail from a professor asking if I wanted to run for an internship at some company. At this internship I would develop a piece of software and I could do a research on the development process. This company was called gaming works and they play games at companies to show good and bad parts in working relations. I suggest you click their link, these people do really cool stuff and go around the globe. I had to develop the software part that calculated things in one of their games.

Since most of my study career was about games, I wanted to do my Master thesis on something serious this time. I learned during my internship that I really enjoyed software development, so I wanted to research something in that field. The conversation with my professor went like this:

"Doc, I've finally seen the light! I want to do something in software development. You said something about risk assessment ans severity last class? I want to research those subjects!" I said when I barged into his office. I was doubting for months and was finally ready to get my act together.

"That's alright, you can go in these directions," he said calmly whilst he put some print-outs on his desk.

"Great! I'll take that one!" I said, pointing eagerly at the paper about risk assessment.

The professor hesitated. "You know... You could do that, but I've also got this subject for you..."

As it turns out, I'm now researching how to teach people software development through playing a video game. I'm developing the game. It's a research about games... again.

IT. IS. AWESOME!

It might look like I'm bragging (and maybe I am), but I want to share a lesson I learned from all this: keep talking to people. The phrase "it's not who you are, it's who you know" is often used in a negative context, but I learned that it can be put to your advantage with little effort. With most of my professors I only chatted a couple of minutes total over the years, but they all knew I had a passion that had a lot of research capabilities: video games. I became a go-to guy for video games and the only thing I had to do for it is casually talk about what interested me.

If you want to do something in video games and you're even just remotely passionate about it, talk about it with everyone, especially your superiors. This goes for superiors in work AND education, but also isn't limited to the subject of video games. If you're a office worker at a bank and you have a passion for flowers, if your superior knows about it, you'll probably be helping the next florist set up shop with a loan.

Networking, now with blue noise gradient!

Talking means networking. Most of your network will not know what to do with your skills or passions, but you'll only need 1 person in their network to ask for a certain skill or passion and you're set. Make sure you speak out in classes and meetings if you feel strongly about something. Don't do this to impress, because everyone else will hate you if it's for that reason. Speak out to show people your stance and skills in situations where it's applicable and necessary.

Having said that, don't attract attention if the situation draws on your shortcomings. A lot of politicians are guilty of this. You don't look pretty when you stand up and start shouting something along the lines of "We don't need water! It doesn't even have a taste!"

Having also said that, don't hesitate to ask for explanations. Asking questions shows your interest and stance on a subject. The answer to the question can also show that a person might be capturing the audience's attention with a bag of hot air.

If you are already into gaming (or something else) and you are still left out for any reason, there are always specializations. You can specialize in AI or physics when programming, or sprites and 3D models when you're an artist. Make sure you are the go-to person in whatever comes to you naturally.

Competition improves prestige, but hampers
personal excelling.

However, be careful you are not doing something someone else is doing already. By the time you do, it can't hurt to learn something else too. I tried to set up a game development project over a year ago and it was really hard to find good artists. Mind you, there were a lot of good artists, but most of them only wanted to do concept art and didn't want to deviate from it. If more of them were willing to go a little beyond their field and make some textures or static background sprites, the search would have been a lot easier for me.

If any beginning concept artists are reading this, here's a little advise: Concept art is part of pre-production of a game, which is a very uncertain stage. Make sure you do something alongside of it which is also needed later in the production cycle. If you stick with a game longer, it will look better on your portfolio for recruiters and you'll meet more people in different fields which in turn will give you more job security.

Getting the subject back to my latest project: keep an eye on this blog. I am going to share stories about the development of my own educational game that, to the contrary of similar products, should be fun AND educational. I hope this post will give readers some advice on their career.

Also: thank you, all you new readers. I got over 1300 page views last month for no apparent reason. I haven't really had a lot of comments (1 in total on all posts), but thank you all for visiting.

I am sick of anticipation...

2011-12-20T18:38:00.002+01:00

...and it's not for Christmas eve. Don't be silly, I live in the Netherlands. I had my Christmas gifts on the 5th of December. Did David Sedaris never tell you anything?

Anticipation is like this baby: you think everything will be perfect,
but then they start crying... Wait, where was I going with this?

Anyhoo, with my Internet claim to fame spamming my blog, there hasn't been enough attention for games recently, so let's talk about something I really hate about my hobby: anticipation. To those whose English is not very developed (like mine), I'm talking about 'knowing about a game and be very happy that it will be released someday.' The idea is that you then buy the game and be exalted (very happy) with the game play and all the pretty things and whatnot you will encounter whilst playing it. It's that last aspect that got me sick and not just because it usually isn't true.

The way triple-A gaming advertises itself nowadays is by making an announcement about a game almost a year in advance of its release. Usually this trailer shows us no game play, but it hints on that you will have fun by the time you will finally pop the disc in and/or finished the required download. The developer will tell about some features that will be in the game and that is about all you will know about it. If the game only vaguely sparks your interest, you won't be able to help it, but you will get this feeling inside that keeps tingling until you researched everything about it on the net. Ofcourse, this doesn't count for everyone, but you are reading this on this blog, so you'll probably fall into that demographic.

Just look how happy he is with
all that money...

This act should be legal, because it is a great way to generate buzz around a product and the triple-A developer needs momentum to sell his game. Through the months between announcement and release you will be shown a couple of new parts of the game, some new features, maybe even an early play of the game. This is to keep that tingle in your stomach fueled. If for some reason the game is delayed, they'll ensure that it's necessary to make the game even better. This fuels that tingle even more. You don't care, because "It will be fun, the developer said so, so it must be true!" For months on end you will have this tingle forcing you to save up money to buy this ungodly expensive, but awesome game.

And then comes the moment when you'll actually shell out money to buy the game. It might be in pre-order, it might be on release or maybe a few days later, but you'll shell out that high price for that one game you've anticipated, because you want that cool game and you want to support developers who make good games. The moment you put that money down, all bets are off. The publisher has the money and neither the developer or the publisher has to do anything anymore, because they legally earned your money. The game you take home doesn't have to be any good, because you already gave them the money. This is the part that makes me sick to infinity and beyond.

Yes, you might return it, but the game doesn't have to be good in order for the player to keep it until after its latest return date. First you'll start checking your anticipation list. Are all features there? Are the graphics pretty? By then you won't have noticed that the game is designed as a skinner box and you are doing nothing but jumping through hoops when the game tells you to. Check my previous true post on how fun can be not fun.

In summary, what you'll need to know from the two links above is this: games can be rigged to make you work instead of having fun. They do this by giving you a reward for actions they wants to see from you, like killing people or winning a race, and punishing you when you do undesirable actions, like getting killed or losing the race. When you've learned that you get a reward, like an unlockable car or a skill level, they start to give you less rewards over time, so you'll work harder for the reward. The danger with this is that winning and losing and its derived rewards and punishments are an important part of the game, so it is hard to distinguish between the game's fun and addiction.

Portal 2; Great game, but was it worth the
anticipation?

What happens is that when you finally get the game and start to play it, your mind is rigged to "I have waited so long for this game, I'm gonna have fun, even if it kills me!" Nine out of ten games will engage you through addiction until you can't return the game anymore, if you can return or sell it at all. By the time it dawns on you the game sucks, it's too late. Your good review is online, your friends are on their way to the store to get that recommended game and the publisher is raking in the money.

And that's why I'm sick of anticipation. I'm sick of the whole scene of making people look forward to something that doesn't have to be good and will probably make you jump through hoops saying "later on it will be better, because you'll have this!" I'm sick of discussions on forums by people who like or dislike a game and trying to defend it, all the while forgetting that the game and its marketing rigged them to do so. But most of all I'm sick of reviewers creating more anticipation by giving a perfect score to a game that is clearly a skinner box.

As I try with most of my posts, I won't end on a sour note. What can we do to break this anticipation spiral? One answer would be piracy. Play the game first, then pay later. Unfortunately, this is illegal, but there are some good alternatives. First of all, you can play demo's. Second, there are services that can let you play the full game for free temporarily, like Onlive. When playing the game, check for any of the symptoms mentioned in this video of Extra Credits: the skinner box and if they are not too prevalent, the game might just not suck.

Also, Fall of Cybertron? Please don't suck, please don't suck, please don't suck!

Rat's and mazes, addiction does not equal fun

2011-10-17T21:32:00.000+02:00

Since I am mainly busy with life and my internet claim to fame at the moment, this post won't be too long. I just came across something in modern gaming I didn't like. In coming posts I might just elaborate on it.

The thing I am trying to aim at is the fun in games. I did not experience it in quite popular titles I played the last months. Its presence is so self-evident that people forget to check if it is in their game or not. The problem in games is that fun does not equal addiction to a game. What makes the problem bigger is that fun is not quantifiable and other aspects on games are easier to pinpoint.

The problem is made even bigger by the way the industry is constructed. At one end of the line is the reviewer (and vocal gamers with blogs or reviews at distributers etc.). The best way they can pinpoint fun is with phrases along the lines of "I had a blast with this game" or "It might be fun for fans of the genre, but not me". Reviewers are far to often very keen to focus on game features, the quality of graphics, the way a story develops or the integrity of the program. While these might be things that spoil fun when done wrong, they don't necessarily create fun when done right.

At the other end of the line is the developer. This party needs to make money and wants the player to be hooked as much as possible. While fun might work, addiction is a stronger incentive and easier to achieve. Addiction is formed by shaping the game in such a way that the player receives a reward at the right time when playing the game. Over time the rewards are harder to get, which makes the player work harder for his reward. The emphasis here is on work, I deliberately did not use the word 'play'. Rewards can be obvious, like unlocking new parts of the game, but also subtle, like praising the player for winning and booing him when he has lost. Also: showing a reward beforehand gives extra incentive.

Yay, fun! Now with CRT and joystick!

This last mechanic is the one that bothers me most. People might be scared they (but mostly others in their direct environment) get addicted to games, because the people creating the games have more insight in human psychology than they do. Double scare points if the distributor is evil (EA, Activision, Microsoft, etc.). I couldn't care less about addiction, but once you know the one trick that makes you addicted (balancing the rewards) it is quite literally like someone explained the show of a magician and all you are left with is some guy who thinks he is smarter than you. The key difference: you can tell the guy and he'll stop, but the game just keeps on repeating the trick. Then things get annoying. When done right, you'll never notice, but you only need one game that tries too hard and then the magic of all the other games is shattered.

The point is that the reward mechanics get in the way of the game. First of all, someone constantly shouting "you're doing great" might be a nice incentive, but becomes ridiculous when done on a low difficulty. An animated meter showing your progress in points might be handy, but gets annoying when a separate screen is used for it when you want to go to a next level and the animations takes too long. Cut scenes explaining your situation in the story or how you need to play the game might help game play and immersion, but are annoying again when too long in length and double annoying when not skippable. Also, I might be paranoid, but I've got the feeling that in some recent games the quit-button is hidden from me at times. (play Saints Row 2 and Split/Second for PC to know what I mean)

Dawww, isn't he cute?

I noticed I get annoyed by these mechanics and I felt like a rat in a maze, so I tried to compile a couple of key elements that could quantify fun in a game. These elements should be universally applicable to everybody, but might have some influence of other aspects of the game, like a genre that appeals, pretty graphics or funny remarks by characters. These elements are:

wide error ranges
A player should not be punished to redo a part of the game for a small error. To advance in the game no high standards should be expected from the player. Also the player must be well equipped for the game at hand. Bad examples: instakills, expecting a very fast race time to advance to the next track in a racing game, needing a ridiculous amount of shots to kill an enemy. Good example: grade while still progressing to unlock extra's that enhance game experience.

surprise, variety and juxtaposition
Monotony in grinding doesn't have to be a bad thing, but a surprise livens up a game. This can be an extremely powerful weapon or vehicle that makes the player dominate enemies for a short while or an extremely big enemy that suddenly bursts in the room. Common reactions should be along the lines of "ahahaha! How you like them apples" to "AAAAAAAAAAH, TAKE THAT! OH NO IT ONLY MADE IT ANGRIER!"

possibility to deviate
aka: the possibility to fuck around. A player should not only be able to win and finish the game in one specific way, this only creates frustration and gives a rat-in-a-maze feeling. A player should be able to create or choose his own style and he should be able to play with the game mechanics a bit. The best situation would be that the player can solve the game legitimately in a way the developer hasn't thought of.

These elements are just an hypothesis, but I hope to find some scientific work to either ground or alter them.

Videogames as culture: Okami

2011-09-09T09:00:00.001+02:00

Whether videogames are art or not can become a great discussion if you want to make your point clear to either side, so I will not go into that. What videogames CAN be is a window to another culture. The most notable example I can give you might just be Okami, a cell-shaded RPG from the creators of Viewtiful Joe.

The original cover, also available on the WII

The premise of Okami is that you are a Japanese god sent to (around somewhere) feudal Japan in the form of a white wolf to save the people from some imminent danger. On this journey you have a celestial (read: magical) brush which can manipulate the world. As another weapon you have a mirror on your back that can double as a shield and is incidentally on fire.

Because I don't have that much money and the game is relatively rare (more than, say Call of Duty), I haven't really gotten around playing it until a couple of months ago. Imagine my surprise at the first moments of the intro when a brush comes into the screen to draw the story and the narrator starts this beautiful story in sim-speak.

Baffled as anyone would be, this is the tone the game gives to the whole religious premise. The sim-speak is just the tip of the iceberg. The game starts of with a tree-goddess reviving the white wolf, so the goddess of the sun, Amaterasu, can manifest its body. Most of the dialogue is taken up by a bug-sized, wandering guide who mostly comments on the warmth of the tree goddess's bosom, again all voice acting is in sim-speak. This is not how one would expect a magic journey to begin.

On her journey Amaterasu doesn't get much recognition either. Most people can't see her godly form, so she is mostly referred to as 'pooch', 'doggy' or 'furball'. She doesn't seem to mind, as any dog would. She falls asleep whenever humans have an exposition that takes too long or whenever the player doesn't use the controls for a couple of seconds. For the head goddess in Shinto religion she has quite a laid back attitude.

Dear diary, today I made a tree bloom.
Love, Ammy.

Amaterasu meets other gods on her journey, but they aren't role models either. There are 3 monkey gods that are very clumsy in presenting themselves. There is a warthog god that grands you a bomb-summoning power, but he gets blown up himself in the process. There is a leviathan that rests in a bottle with a cork and when it tries to get out to salute Amaterasu, the cork seems stuck and he just stays in the bottle whilst talking.The most peculiar of gods was Kabegami, who's name literally translates to "Wall god". The protagonist is technically a cross-dresser since Amaterasu is a woman, but the wolf ogles at every busty female and raises his leg when peeing. In case you were wondering: Yes, Amaterasu has a battle move where she pees on enemies. Yet, she is still greeted with "Amaterasu, origin of all that is good and mother to us all".

As I already noted in the paragraphs above, the game is absolutely blasphemous... if it was made in the west. In the west we see gods as something supernatural and fearful. Anything remotely sexy, especially sexist, is shunned by (strict and/or orthodox) Christianity and cross dressing is just 'not-done'. However, the situation is different in Japan, but to understand this I will put some things in perspective for you.

The great wave of Kanagawa, by Hokusai. I might post
about this masterpiece one day.

First of all one must understand the environment of Japan. To the contrary of places like Europe, Australia and the middle east, the surroundings in Japan don't try to kill you. The most dangerous animals you will find are foxes and maybe a blowfish. You won't be killed by lightning, because that stays mostly in the mountains, where you won't go, because they are holy. All volcano's are dead, but the ground is volcanic, so it is very nutritious to plants and you can grow anything. Food is so abundant in nature that archaeologists found small mountains of shellfish shells that were just refuge of prehistoric Japanese eating fish. You might die of old age, but that won't happen soon. Japan is one of the countries where most people grow very old and are still healthy. The most famous artist from the 18th & 19th century, Katsushika Hokusai, became 88 and worked on well after his 65th birthday.

This environment does not create a mentality to fear gods. Add to that the fact that Japan was practically closed off from the outside world during our medieval times and Victorian age. In medieval times the focus of our Christianity became warped from 'living good' to 'beware of the sin'. In Victorian times we became intensely prudish, shunning everything even remotely sexy. All these mindsets weren't imprinted upon the Japanese people. There is peer pressure to abide to certain rules, but these rules are different and mostly refer to your appearance in public. I can fill a full scientific book with when and where there was censorship on what in Japan, but let's suffice to say that Japan, although prudish at times, has hardcore tentacle porn in the same collections as classic art. (not making this up, google "shunga")

Nowadays Japan doesn't really have a "main" religion. People go to a Shinto shrine one day and read from a bible in front of their Buddhist departed altar on the next. The oldest religion, "Shinto", hasn't got an origin story and was mostly derived from local religious customs. It is not even entirely certain where the word "Shinto" comes from. In Shintoism, gods are not as much supernatural beings, but more like creatures who cause unexplainable things. Furthermore, these gods are inferior to man and are supposed to work for you, although they can be treacherous.

This totally happens in noh theater. Except for the wolf,
the bird in dress and the flying weapons...
The dress is authentic, though.

Having things put in perspective, the conclusion is a bit of an anti-climax. The silliness of the gods and their manifestations is just how the Japanese see their gods. Ogling over women has been part of Japanese literature for decades, although one should note it wasn't as present as it is in current Japanese pop culture. The cross dressing part of Amaterasu can be led back to the noh theater (not to be confused with kabuki theater) where all characters were played by men. They do not talk in sim-speak, however. That was just done to keep the production budget smaller.

Putting silly and 'naughty' aspects in a game about gods and religion might not be appropriate in the west, but if this game didn't have those elements, the creator's would have denied their own culture. Okami is a display of Japanese culture that is hard to understand for outsiders, but is a perfect display of what gives Japan the identity she has today. Being wise and serene on one side, whilst being silly and lechery on the other, Okami is a perfect window into the culture of her home country.

Let's try: Let's play!

2011-06-13T20:52:00.000+02:00

Now, trying something new this week. Been wanting to put this up earlier, but got distracted. Here we have a first attempt to a let's-play video. This is all in a testing phase, but maybe I'll do more of this.

Returning with Streets of Simcity

2011-04-25T08:00:00.000+02:00

Right, time to get back on track. The insane deadline month is now officially over, as it should be. It took me longer than a month and when such a month is over you always get clogged up with things you didn't get around to while you were busy. That didn't include this blog, as you might have noticed, so I've gone a bit rusty at writing to it. I wanted to return with a grand, philosophic post, but when the moment was there (1 week ago), I couldn't come up with anything. I'll just start with discussing a very obscure game this week: Streets of Simcity.

If this game was a classic, this picture would be
iconic. Now it's ironic.

Streets of Simcity, as lovely explained on its wikipedia page, is a racing <slash> car battle game from 1997 that let's you set the game in your own cities from Simcity 2000. Let that sink in for a moment: this is a game that lets you customise a racing car with rocket launchers, machine guns, claymore mines and oil slicks and then lets you loose in a city you might have build before, since almost everyone I knew had SC2000. The awesome charts are off the scale. Yes, everything was possible. You would run into bandits and slice them up with your guns. You could fire a couple of rockets at a building which would collapse under the explosions. There were even upgrades for your car to jump or hover which, when combined, even gave you the ability to fly. Just imagine you, flying around in a car, loaded with machineguns and rockets, while taking a look at the arco you built a couple of weeks ago when you were still mayor of this town.

I was never very good at this game, mostly because my computer couldn't run the game well on any settings. This was because the game took my 3DFX voodoo1 card by default and the accelerated game wasn't customisable. The software mode was even worse, because I had a 166Mhz pentium 1 with no MMX. It went OK when there were no enemies around, but only one car had to enter the scene and the framerate dropped to less than 1 per second. I then had to manoeuvre to aim my gun, hold the spacebar and hope I hit the other. After a while I went to a strategy where I took their attention, made an instant 180, drove away really fast and dropped mines. I never played much career mode, because I would fail at most of the missions, instantly getting stuck at the beginning of all the 6 careers.

Yay, the software engine! Just look at the
beautiful square smoke.

About that 180, it was reeeaaaally instant. You wouldn't believe how instant. The gamedesigners had this idea that a handbrake on the shift key would be nice and then started to give it other functions when given the right key combinations. shift+steer+down was a 180, like straight <BAM!> other way, shift+steer was a hard steer and Shift+up was hard accelerate. You read that right; handbraking while accelerating makes you instantly get over the speed limit. There was even a possibility to strafe with your car while holding the alt button. This might be a bit weird design choice, but by the time your car can fly, who is looking at realism, ey?

Now I hear mister Cricket thinking: "If this game's so awesome, why haven't I seen it before?" Well, first of all, the engine is crap. Forget about the technical difficulties, like the heavy software mode and inefficient accelerated mode, the poor collision detection and the fact that it runs on windows 9X only, those are minor things compared to the major flaw originating from SC2000. Ever saw the roads in SC2000? Ever wondered how a car would get up a 45 degree hill, those blocks you get when building a road on a certain hill or the ramps onto the highway? Simple answer: you don't! The instant 45 degree corners in Simcity 2000 are not easy to take and they are just copied to 3D in Streets. The highway is not raised making a very weird flat surface over water and through the city. The highway ramps are pathetic heaps of rubble that make your car wobble a bit. In short: cities are for a large part undrivable.

If you had voodoo and you saw this many enemies
this picture was all you would see for 2 seconds.

With that in mind, the people who do know Streets of Simcity practically never give it harsh criticism, despite all its flaws. This might be because the game sets a great ambiance, even though the cities models look rushed, and there is a lot to customise. Within the packet of Streets of Simcity came a race editor and the SC2000 urban renewal kit, which is basically SC2000 without money or game element. You could make any environment you wanted and put a race-track through it which was all surprisingly intuitive to use. Even the skins were editable and the developers even went the extra mile by adding a blue-print bitmap for skins. I got a full 2 months of fun out of it before I even started thinking about other games.

If you liked SC2000 and you like to wreck a bit of mayhem, I definitely recommend Streets of Simcity. It's on e-bay for just a few bucks. I must warn you, though, that it will only work on MS windows 95 and 98. If you want to make it look pretty, try to find a computer with a voodoo card or try something with glide wrapper, but don't expect it to run smoothly.

Insane deadline month: the aftermath

2011-04-03T21:41:00.000+02:00

The problem with being overly busy is that when the deadline is reached there is always this little bit of extra effort you need. You might have finished that paper, but in order for it to be validated, you will have to reread a little or do a bit of extra research. Mowing the lawn may tidy up your garden, but you need to rake the grass together for it to be perfect.

Case in point: my deadlines. I was relieved to find that the deadlines for the guest subjects were actually 2 weeks later than originally anticipated. This gave me room to breathe and relax a little, but also meant that I will be tense for two weeks more.

I disagree with Douglas Adams. I hate deadlines. I hate the stress they bring, the pressure on the quality of your work and the lack of nice whooshing sound they make when passing by. It screws up your life and gives you nothing in return. I just need two more weeks and then it's over.

Late; insane deadline month, week 2 and 3

2011-03-14T07:00:00.000+01:00

As Douglas Adams once told: "I love deadlines, I like the whooshing sound they make when they go by." You few readers I have might have noticed that I haven't posted last week. This is typical to an insane deadline month: when you have multiple deadlines, you manage to get one and then miss the other. Luckily for me, the deadline that gets me paid is well on its way. Too bad that the blog had to suffer and on top of that, the posts are shorter this month.

"So Snake," I hear you not thinking ,"what is it that gets you paid?"
"Thanks for asking, Mr Tumbleweed," I reply to the empty void,"because these guys are awesome!"

People who don't read until they end will never
know what this picture is about ;)

The company I now do an assignment for is called GamingWorks and is based in the Netherlands, my home country. Their website is filled with a lot of professional talk, but I'll put down what they do in simple English. These people work out games to play in teams with employees from other companies to do a little team building. The idea is that these games, or simulations, mimic a kind of company or situation where people have to fulfil a certain role. If, for example, there are problems in a company getting the morale up, these games can be used to lay bare the problems in the company. The most fun part: these people are good at it, very good.

My job is to digitalise a certain part of one of their games. When I first got the assignment I wanted to digitalise the complete tabletop game. This seemed to be a beginner's mistake, because that took out all the internal interaction that was needed to do the whole essential team building. As a game designer, I didn't design the game, but I now designed a part of the game that will make it all run smoothly. It was a fresh challenge for me to make a game that is not fully integrated in a digital world and I think I am pulling it off quite nicely.

GamingWorks trains game-leaders all over the world to let people play these games. So if you work at a company and want a fun day on the office, I suggest you contact these guys (and gals). Ask for "the game with the pizza" (sorry, not sure if I can disclose the full name of the game), that's the one I worked on.

Note to self: Insane deadline month, week 1

2011-02-28T22:25:00.000+01:00

Today I will give you some advise: learn how to devide your time to reach your ultimate goal. Know what your ultimate goal will be and don't rush it. If you do rush it, you will get in the situation I am in now.

Putting it mildly: this guy probably feels better than I do.

It started off quite innocent: I wanted to do something with gaming, videogames or anything in that vicinity in my future life. I found the study and people who want to work with me on it and overall I've received more support than drawbacks. Then came the point where I didn't want to wait anymore and just pulled everything my way that might just slightly help me. I study at an university and I rigged my study program to be only about development, preferrably game development. I set aside everything that would draw me back, picked up guest subjects at another university and found an internship at a company that would let me develop software similar to a game.

This was a good move. But then came the point where I unintendedly sabotaged my future plans. All deadlines for everything that should take 2 or 3 months in total, is now due one month after this writing is posted. At best, I'll have to study and work 6 and a half working days a week to keep up. I am not the best worker and stress out quite fast. This won't be pretty, but I am gonna take it like a man. A man, with flimsy muscles, and a slightly stronger-than-average reaction to caffeine, alcohol, asperine, camilla and practically everything that could rig my mood, forcing me to handle this month sober from EVERYTHING.

I write this down for the few readers I have. My absence will probably go past unnoticed. If I'll ever get 1K readers, it'll be much. For the sake of posterity, I will update here every sunday this month when I'll try to emerge as a future game designer or crush my dreams horribly. The obscure games will continue after the deadlines, in the mean time, have fun with the now freshly included splash image at the top of this page.

Pax Corpus

2011-02-19T12:03:00.001+01:00

I'm a little late this time, sorry for that. I use this forum to present obscure games which are mostly worth playing. Today's game is worth playing, although not for the right reasons. It is obscure, though, very obscure for the right reasons.

Front cover of the game

Pax Corpus, created in 1997 by Cryo interactive entertainment, was meant as the first game adaptation of the Aeon Flux franchise. For reasons I haven't researched, it didn't have the Aeon flux name on it and therefore became just some mimic. The main selling point of the game were the ladies in the game, which all wear way too few clothes. It's all over the box art and for as far as I played the game, they haven't even put a male character in it. It's just too bad that the creators forgot 2 things:
1 - In 1997 Lara Croft was the best 3D rendered female character in western adventure games
2 - It's a game, not a dry hump porn movie

Something went terribly wrong with the game. The creators put as many scantily clad women in the game as they could, only to find out that the hardware wasn't powerful enough to render female curves. There was that and the creators were, quite frankly, terrible at drawing women. It's like the artist only knew the concept of 'women' as if they only read about it in a book the other day. All models look like robots with no female features. Even if they were robots, they would be robots with no cognitive vision (read: stupid) and a spine that is locked in one shape and one shape only: a straight plank. The breasts of the protagonist look worse than Lara Croft's first pyramid-shaped chest and her bottom barely passes the sexy test, but only because of some shades in the texture

You pass the sexy test... almost.

I haven't played this game much. At first I got killed by the first door of the first level. This was fun the first time, annoying at the second and a complete waste of time at the third attempt. It was only recently that I started it up again to show a friend what I thought was one of the worst games of all time. This time I got past the lethal door, only to find myself killed by a boss-person a couple of doors later. I really had no idea how to get past this 'boss', since she had a box to shelter behind and I didn't. Maybe in a couple of months I try again ;).

I might be flaming this game for being utterly bad, but I still suggest you play it, especially if you are not a native English speaker and even more if you're Dutch. Cryo made sure that everywhere it was released, it would be translated, including the voice-overs, by some (cheap) company while not giving the user the option to switch to English. Here in the Netherlands we only make new voice-overs for kids-movies, while everything above the 12 year recommendation just gets subtitles. This means that in the Netherlands Pax Corpus, recommended for ages 15 and up, got a voice over by people who are primarily experienced in kids cartoons.

You might get a partner later on, but I haven't
reached that point (yet).

Together with the fact that this 'action' game has clunky controls and choppy animations at best, the result is a game where a disabled lady in leather fights stupid robots while sounding like an 8 year old. There is a story behind it, but I gave up on that story already at 1 minute into the intro movie. The whole game is an experience that will make you question what the creators were thinking. They did it wrong in such a way, however, that it makes you curious to what will go wrong next. If you have the possibility to play it with a friend and you'll need a laugh, take up Pax Corpus, you won't regret it.

Dating Sims

2011-02-12T08:00:00.001+01:00

No, I am not going to write about dating someone who talks in gibberish and has a diamond floating over his head, but I reckon you already expected that ;). In my gaming 'career' I have played some Japanese dating-sims and I had the luck to be able to understand the Japanese language. I didn't have fun, though. I did it all for science! No, really. I was writing my bachelor thesis about narratology and character relations in Japanese videogames and dating-sims do have a distinct aspect in this. If people ask me if I enjoy dating-sims, I always tell them that if I have to choose between playing dating-sims or poking my eyes out with a blunt screwdriver, I'll choose the dating-sims, because they don't inflict physical damage. There's no other reason, it's just because of the physical damage.

Good day to you, madam. And yes, holding your
arms like that shows off your female-ness.

Dating-sims are games, mostly from Japan, in which you meet a couple of people and your goal is to end up in a relationship with one of them. The interface is usually ordered with a picture on top with text accompanying the picture at the bottom and an optional background. There are dating-sims in all different kinds, but mostly it's about a boy trying to get a girl or sometimes vice versa. Not that I have tried, but I haven't registered any homosexual equivalent of the standard dating-sim lay-out. If you, dear reader, do know a homosexual oriented dating-sim, please let me know in the comments. Science will be pleased. I, however, will not.

Although it has been 4 years ago, I still feel a bit awkward about playing dating-sims for my bachelor thesis. When I started, I wanted to know the full scope of Japanese game genres and when I was in Japan I found dating-sims were almost everywhere. At first I was amused by how it all seemed to be designed for pussies. While we in the west see conquering women as a very muscle-masculine task, the Japanese dating-sim player has to find his feminine side. The graphics are usually drawn in pastel colours and the music is all high pitched, happy bouncy as if a horde of clown bunnies are going to declare world peace. I am NOT exaggerating. If you were to show a dating-sim to a unknowing western person and ask what s/he thinks is the gender of the target audience, s/he'd probably estimate it would be for girls.

Just like a dating-sim, initially this picture looks innocent

After the initial phase of laughter came the phase where I wondered if really all dating-sims were like this. Then came the phase of the horrible realisation that, yes, all dating-sims are like this. This phase was followed by the phase where I didn't want to be beaten by a stupid, pussy game like this. Thank goodness I never got to the moment where I'd actually conquer a girl. No, before that moment comes the phase where the aforementioned screwdriver suddenly seems VERY appealing.

The problem with dating-sims is that they are psychologically downright stupid in the way that characters are portrayed and how the developer imagines what the player thinks. Most of the time you do nothing but reading what is happening. Maybe you walk around a bit in the world, but I was mostly translating the text while in the mean time being ear-raped by the music that had long lost its comical aspect. If you are to strike up a conversation with one of the characters, the conversation will just roll out and you are mostly left with just 3 choices: engaging, neutral or repelling. When I interviewed Japanese people about their opinion on dating-sims, the lack of choice was one of the main complaints.

Taking a (sort of) girl to a flowergarden

Worst of all: there is no such thing as reverse psychology or anything. This was most apparent when I was playing Tokimeki memorial (your mental health forbids you to click that link) and I took the sporty/flower girl to a tropical flower garden. The conversation rolled out and I got my three choices:
1) Flowers are beautiful, aren't they?
2) You're not the flower type, are you?
3) Are those edible?

And, yes, the only right answer was number 1, the most soulless, easy-going, slime-ball answer of all. The other two just made the girl angry. I got curious and polled my female friends on their opinion on these lines. They unanimously told me their reaction would be the exact opposite, as number 2 would just be teasing and number 3 is plain hilarious at such a moment.

I admit I don't dislike all dating-sims, some are even fun to play, like the Sakura Taisen series. Sakura Taisen has quite well developed characters and besides dating girls, you fight monsters in a giant, steam-punk battle mecha. The good part is that Sakura Taisen isn't the only dating-sim with variance and depth. The bad part is that Sakura Taisen isn't the only dating-sim featuring the very under-age girl. The very under-age girl seems to be one of those standard characters that just HAVE to be in the girl line-up. Anime fans might also know such characters from Tenchi Muyo and Love Hina.

The kid from Sakura Taisen 3. To you she might
look cute. To me she's fuel for nightmares.

For me, the presence of these minor characters can get very disturbing, because my Japanese isn't that good and to suave the toddler you have to go with the choice that is incidentally the easiest to read. I just can't break the heart of a little girl and thus in Sakura Taisen 3 the top-rated girl was suddenly the kid, because she wanted to rescue a person with giant mecha and I agreed by saying "Let's go save Mr With-the-beard!". I got my mecha battle and she thanked me by creeping me out with the words "your voice gives me strength" every time she sliced a monster. If anyone wants to say Japan is wrong in tightening the rules for sexual images of minors, THINK AGAIN! Thank goodness again that I have never been able to finish a dating-sim with any of the characters by my side. I can't imagine how I am going to explain anyone why I might look like a pedophile in the game. It was all accidental? Yeah, right.

Although they might be horrible, I do understand the presence of dating-sims in the Japanese culture. It's not there because the Japanese would be a bit loopy, it is there for the same reason we have candlelight/harlequin pockets and girly magazines. The target audience, in our case 15 year old boys, has an insecurity or need for 'warmth' and dating-sims can provide it. It's not weird for boys to want to try girls in a controlled environment, practically every boy has been there. It does become weird, however, if one goes about taking these games seriously. I've only given a few examples, but the cheesiness and effed-up-ness that is portrayed as normal can get much worse than I described. If you ever find yourself playing a dating-sim, realise that most Japanese find these games revolting too. Furthermore, make sure there are no pointy objects lying close by, especially blunt screwdrivers.