GameSetWatch

Playing Mafia Wars As If It Were Warcraft

editors@gamesetwatch.com (Jennifer Frank) — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 10:00:00 -0800

In the beginning, I was perfectly OK with the Mafia Wars Facebook app. But by the middle of my six-month crime spree, I was utterly addicted, even going so far as to download iPhone software just so I could level up in line at the grocery. My infatuation with the game verged on illness.

By the end, however, I felt terrorized. My friends and loved ones had essentially turned into an online gaggle of 13-year old girls, constantly haranguing me with their gifts of shotguns, pestering me with their endless requests for billiard balls. It was with a heavy heart that I retired my character, Gina the Firecracker -- ah! that onetime Decapitator of Dons, that Destroyer of Delis -- sending her to forever sleep with the fishes.

I doubt I'll ever re-attempt Mafia Wars, nor am I likely to commit to anything (anything!) with that kind of grim, psychotic determination ever again. But if I were to -- and I don't mean that I would ever consider it, because I am so totally done, so this is purely hypothetical -- but if I were to, I would model my tactics on Sam Bardelson's own winning strategy, as described at BitMob.

Sam, who fancies himself as something of an MMO prodigy, fashioned an all-new, dummy Facebook account expressly for noodling with the Mafia Wars app. And eventually, several dummy accounts later, he cracked the code.

The real secret to the game, Sam discovered -- besides obnoxiously amassing 500 mafia members, which you would never, ever want to do with a real Facebook account -- is in making sure you select "Fearless" as your character type. The key, after all, is to find ways to level your character without expending any "energy," and on that count, Fearless characters have a secret advantage.

"I leveled past my new friends, who had been playing for months," Sam writes, "and I quickly completed all the available content. People flooded my inbox and my status updates with comments and questions every time I leveled up or completed another batch of jobs."

Sam's experience is proof positive that, with time, elbow grease, and a little ingenuity, any game can be broken -- even a really lame one. (Kidding! Kidding!)

Still. Emergent gameplay really is everywhere. It's weird.

[Breaking Mafia Wars: Casual Gaming Meets Hardcore Gamer]

XONG Combines Breakout, Snake, And ZZT Into A Delicious Game Stew

editors@gamesetwatch.com (Jennifer Frank) — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 08:00:00 -0800

XONG, a lo-fi, hi-octane action puzzler, is quite the genre mashup.

Play This Thing! describes XONG as a brick-breaking puzzle game -- think Breakout or Arkanoid -- but with roguelike graphical aspects. (I'd like to quickly point out, rather snootily, that the game could more accurately be described as ZZT-like, since it has ZZT's same colorful ANSI graphics in common. It also has a bitchin' soundtrack.)

In XONG, your goal is to sink your enemies -- which have dangerous trailing tails, a la Snake -- into little "black holes" randomly scattered about the board.

To do this, you flit about the game board, laying down small arcs, or "chevrons," which alter your adversaries' course, steering them toward the sinkholes. Unfortunately, most of the black holes will be walled in from the start, so you'll also need to pong your ball, or "puck," into those barriers, chipping away until you've cleared a pathway to your intended abyss.

But be careful! It's easy to mismanage your chevrons or to mistakenly direct your pucks into black hole vortices, so you'll need to plan your moves quickly and deliberately. You'll also need to make sure your pong ball, which can change color (I know, what?), is the right hue before you can advance to the next stage.

Play This Thing! does warn that some of the game boards are randomly unsolvable, which could well be frustrating for players who were otherwise on a roll. Still, XONG is fun, free, open-source, and available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. See? So you have no excuse to not download it immediately.

XONG [Via Play This Thing!]

Mega64's Third GDC Commercial Falls At Final Hurdle

editors@gamesetwatch.com (Simon Carless) — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 07:00:21 -0800

For a while now, Mega64 have been trying to get their GDC 2010 commercials past the stern and unwilling censor (who is absolutely not Rocco's dad, incidentally). Firstly, it was the 50 Cent and 'Shigeru Meamoto' approach - no dice. And then, they tried nerding out a little bit - with little success.

So this third attempt to get the tone _just_ right for our colleagues at the March 9th-13th San Francisco game development conference, Mega64 decided to ramp down the bombast and ramp up the....art. As a result, you may see one or multiple of the following: French berets, discussions of how God intersects with games, and overhead panning shots of mysterious artifacts being dug up on beaches.

As for whether this one got past the GDC organizers, you'll have to wait til the end of the commercial to find out, but really - what do you think?

Game Developer February Issue Showcases Borderlands, Trials HD

editors@gamesetwatch.com (Simon Carless) — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 06:00:50 -0800

[Here's info on the latest issue of my colleagues' Game Developer magazine, with a super duper pre-GDC double postmortem issue in effect, and a bunch of other neat columnists besides, hurray.]

The February 2010 issue of Game Developer magazine, the sister print publication to Gamasutra and the leading U.S. trade publication for the video game industry, has shipped to print and digital subscribers and is available from the Game Developer Digital service in both subscription and single-issue formats.

The cover feature for the issue is an exclusive postmortem of Gearbox's post-apocalyptic shooter Borderlands. The article, crafted by the Texas-based developer's Aaron Thibault, offers insight on the challenges and successes experienced by the independent studio. It is introduced as follows:

"As Gearbox's first original IP in many years, Borderlands had a lot riding on it. The game wound up having an interesting design coupled with a new art style—but it didn't start that way. The team took a circuitous route to success, as Aaron Thibault explains."

Also featured in the issue is a postmortem of RedLynx's Trials HD, the latest in the Finnish company's unique series of sidescrolling motorbike trick games:

"The Trials series has been around for some time, but Trials HD marks RedLynx's first breakout success. Discussed here are the troubles getting up and running on XBLA, the magic of physics, and more."

In addition, Game Developer Research presents a selection of data from the just-released State of Game Development 2009-2010 Survey, of which a smaller excerpt is available online:

"In this Game Developer Research-partnered report, we reveal stats and figures related to our audience, from number of employees to core markets and game engine usage."

And as usual, our regular columnists contribute detailed and important pieces on numerous areas of game development -- this issue, we include Bungie's Steve Theodore on push-button art, Canabalt developer Adam Saltsman on constructed procedural generation, Maxis' Soren Johnson on theme versus meaning, Flower composer Vincent Diamante on audio loops, Matthew Wasteland with his monthly humor column, and the new Good Job! column on industry career moves.

Worldwide paper-based subscriptions to Game Developer magazine are currently available at the official magazine website, and the Game Developer Digital version of the issue is also now available, with the site offering six months' and a year's subscriptions, alongside access to back issues and PDF downloads of all issues, all for a reduced price. There is now also an opportunity to buy the digital version of February 2010's magazine as a single issue.

Analysis: The Design And Spiritual Evolution Of No More Heroes 2

editors@gamesetwatch.com (Simon Carless) — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 00:00:48 -0800

[Is a better-designed game really "better" -- and what does that really mean? Gamasutra's Leigh Alexander takes a look at how Grasshopper Manufacture's No More Heroes 2 for Wii evolves on its predecessor.]

In the original No More Heroes, Suda51 had a brilliant concept which critics largely agreed stumbled slightly on the execution -- the main criticism being that the open world lacked depth. With very little to do in the city of Santa Destroy, most seemed to feel the sequences in between missions were sprawling empty space, listless filler that could have just as easily been bypassed.

In No More Heroes 2, that bypass wish is fulfilled; gone is the player's ability to take Travis' motorcycle to the streets, and in its place is a streamlined, 8 bit-inspired (naturally) navigation menu.

The game is still challenging enough that it requires a little bit of grinding -- as with the original No More Heroes, this takes the place of menial odd jobs that luckless otaku Travis can do to earn cash for weapons upgrades, or visits to the gym by which he can become stronger, and these are the spots that players can visit from Santa Destroy's new interface.

Here is another major change: whereas in the first title, players did weird chores like garbage pickup and pest control with the game's standard controls, No More Heroes 2 replaces Travis' part-time work with mini arcade games, brilliantly designed to look, feel and sound like real old-school replicas.

It's easy to see that the result is quite streamlined and compact relative to the original game -- rather than take the long, tedious drive to a work site, using a map to navigate, players essentially pick a mini-game from the menu, give it their best shot, and earn upgrade cash from the result. Levels feel like tauter, more segregated experiences, with far less prelude to the title fights.

In that way, No More Heroes 2 should be praised for addressing player criticisms of its predecessor; Gamasutra's own Chris Remo recently analyzed Mass Effect 2's efforts to do the same. But in this case, amid the changes that birthed No More Heroes 2, has a subtle character loss taken place?

It's not just the Brainy Gamer's Michael Abbott who feels something subtle's missing in the leaner, meaner format for Travis' wild assassin's saga -- I've had a lot of conversations with gamer friends and fellow critics who agree.

But that stance certainly prompts a healthy scoop of mulling on what constitutes "character." Part of the spiritual shift in No More Heroes 2 is in the game's changed tone -- in the original, Travis' motive for ascending the ranks of the assassins' league was nothing more dire than to get laid. This time, he wants revenge for a murdered friend, lending the game a severity that makes it feel different -- less joyous, less silly.

Certainly, many players whose itches aren't quite scratched by No More Heroes 2 may be responding to that tonal shift: Sustaining the silliness is a reasonable wish. But perhaps there's another principle at work.

In the past, goes the theory, we've had two kinds of video games, if we're generalizing: gloss-polished, listless genre derivatives, and beloved, starkly flawed auteur projects. Has something of an expectation developed among game fans and critics that anything with grit and spirit must have something broken in it?

Perhaps there's a point where creators reach a crossroads: they can elect to follow their vision at the expense of intuitive game design -- as Metal Gear Solid's Hideo Kojima consciously did with the fourth installment's notorious yet self-aware protracted cutscenes -- or they can sacrifice an artistic goal in favor of wise best practices.

Has Suda51 done the latter in the polishing of No More Heroes 2? Save only for some balancing issues -- a difficulty ramp-up that could have been subtler, and a fairly broad schism between the game's two difficulty levels, for example -- and some gameplay sequences that many of my friends and colleagues have found needlessly repetitious, the sequel is watertight from a design perspective.

And from an artistic perspective, the same wild "punk's not dead" spirit seems to be on full, flagrantly absurd display -- within No More Heroes 2's first hour, for example, the player will have beheaded an overt send-up of Final Fantasy VII's Cloud Strife and engaged in a mecha battle in a football stadium against an athletic enemy who assembles his giant robot from a legion of identical blond cheerleaders.

But if many players feel like something's missing, it's worth wondering whether gamers have come to correlate tight design with a constraint of vision -- and whether there really is a trade-off.

And it's worth wondering whether Suda51 feels the same, and whether that emotion of constraint is expressed in the game. No More Heroes 2 opens with Travis having plummeted from the top spot in the assassin's league to the 51st -- a fall from grace that the game's exposition mocks the player for wondering about, so that initially it simply serves as a conceit to create new goals for the protagonist.

Lots has lapsed, in fact: Travis' cat Jeane has gotten fat, and weapons whiz Naomi also seems to have put on some weight -- to be specific, she appears to have had cosmetic surgery to boost her assets, and she'll even chide players for noticing.

So not only is No More Heroes 2's narrative darker, it's also peppered throughout with warnings of the kind of complacency that can come with success, along with the insincerity of artifice. Through and through, the game's a story of someone who's lost things amid the machinery of achievement, who's paid the price for skill. The first installment saw a hero-in-training flail his way to the top for his own dumb pleasure; the second gives us a hero cleaving coolly through obstacles with the kind of purpose that can only come from an external motive.

Maybe gamers do expect a somewhat broken game to be part of Suda51's "identity"; maybe they feel they've come to know the creator by being able to see his flaws. Perhaps instead they're reading those subtle messages of discontent from the narrative. Or maybe it's just that Travis acting on his friend Bishop's behalf isn't as convincing to some as Travis acting for the fun of it.

Two things are certain, though: First, No More Heroes 2 is absolutely and unequivocally a better-designed game than its predecessor. And second, better-designed doesn't mean "better" to everyone.

The Art History... Of Games? Games As Art May Be A Lost Cause

editors@gamesetwatch.com (Simon Carless) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 17:00:18 -0800

[Finishing up our Art History of Games coverage - here's Part 1 and Part 2 -- and this one has the ever-controversial Tale Of Tales guys kicking off a ruckus, as well as Celia Pearce weaving some absurdist art references into a look at art and games.]

At the Art History of Games conference, Tale of Tales, the indie studio behind The Path, argues that "games are not art," and "largely a waste of time." Meanwhile, one professor examines where art and play have collided.

Tale of Tales: Games "Not Art," Largely A "Waste Of Time"

Tales of Tales has never been shy about making bold statements. At The Art History of Games conference in Atlanta, GA last week, Michael Samyn and Auriea Harvey, who also worked on The Path, which many pigeon hole as an "art game," laid out their case for why video games are not and never will be art, and why games are never going to evolve.

"One thing need to be said first, we're not trying to not fit in on purpose," said Samyn. Instead, he maintained that they had tried to carve out a place for Tale of Tales in the game industry but room was never made for them. Samyn and Harvey listed the problems they have with games. Games, according to Tale of Tales, were not beautiful enough, or immersive enough, or welcoming enough for a large audience.

Harvey announced, "some of the members of the audience are confused," as he displayed a presentation slide that boldly said: GAMES ARE NOT ART. Samyn then argued that play was driven by a biological need, and that over time play had been turned into games. On the other hand, art was not created out of a physical need but in a search for higher purposes.

Unfortunately, according to Harvey, art is dead. After the rise of Modernism art has been co-opted by capitalism and restrictive forms of government. The speakers maintained that the real artists were no longer working in the art world, but instead were experimenting in the less explored corners of the internet.

Samyn then dug in further, intoning, "Beside a few noble attempts, video games are overwhelmingly a waste of time." Video games have stopped evolving, Samyn continued, and the reason that games could not get their act together was that they lacked guidance. Those that controlled the game industry weren't interested in changing, they were too comfortable with the way things were.

However, they said, old media that featured one-way communication was not enough. Computers offered the way forward for art, but at this point it is being held hostage by the video game industry. The speakers then switched from addressed to audience to a tone that implied that they were talking beyond the room.

Samyn announced that they, Tales of Tales, could not be stopped. They would continue to take games and rip out their "stupid rules" and goals. He promised that after eviscerating games they would breathe new life into the carcass, creating something new.

"Our time has come." Samyn said.

Harvey responded: "Make love, not games."

The two creators also announced that they were starting a project to organize all the people all over the world that were creating what they called "not games." The movement would be maintained on a series of blogs and forums, featuring conversations, screenshots of projects, as well as festivals with particular rules to guide the production of these new, 'not games'.

Tale of Tales' work to date includes The Path, the unreleased project 8, its first "anti-game" Endless Forest, Fatale, and its first iPhone project, the in-development Vanitas, commissioned by The Art History of Games conference.

When Art And Games Collide

While the subject of art and games has a lot of discussion that surrounds it, often it's without doing the hard legwork of actually compiling a list of the different instances in which the two worlds have collided. At the Art History of Games conference, professor Celia Pearce attempted to do just that, giving a long and thorough survey of participatory and game art from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day.

Appearing in several lectures beforehand, Pearce clarified the connection between the famous artist, Marcel Duchamp, and games. Famously obsessed with chess, the French artist also made art as if it was a game, often playing with constraints, such as doing on entire painting while cross-eyed. Pointing to Duchamp's readymades -- already-manufactured pieces that simply bore Duchamp's signature, including a bicycle wheel and even a urinal -- Pearce pointed out that "the procedurality of the readymades was more important than their status as objects."

Touching on the Fluxus movement, Pearce talked about the composer John Cage, who would often give himself rulesets for how to perform his different pieces, even going to the extent of physically modifying the pianos he would play. A friend and collaborator of John Cage was David Tudor, who would build musical instruments out of electronic devices that were never meant to produce music.

"This is playful art," Pearce pointed out, "not necessary games, but structured play."

Pearce touched on more modern perspective in game design, such as the New Games Movement, which created outdoor games that were not directly competitive. She connected this to the work of Frank Lantz, the co-founder of the game studio area/code, who created games such as Pac Manhattan, in which familiar video games and types of games were scaled up to the point where they became something like performance art pieces.

Parallel to the New Game Movement and Lantz's Big Games is the beginning of video game art, such as the game Alien Garden, which was designed by Bernie DeKoven and programmed by Jaron Lanier. Mods and hacks also played a huge role in early video game art. One of the first exhibitions of game art was actually an online show called "Cracking the Maze" which featured, among other pieces, the modification of different games to add female characters.

Interestingly, Pearce said, at the same time Counter-Strike, a mod of Half Life that is not considered game art, was showing the mods could actually be more popular than the games they were modifying. The two perspectives on moding collided however with the game art piece "Velvet Strike", which allowed the player's gun to fire graffiti all over the walls during a Counter-Strike match.

Pearce finished by pointing the audience towards latest wave of game art, such as Mary Flanagan's piece Giant Joystick. A recreation of an Atari joystick scaled up to 8 ft. 9-11 Survivor is a game that lets the player explore the terrible choices of a person trapped in one of the damaged Twin Towers.

Finally, Pearce pointed to the recent and strong overlap between the art games and indie games. Works like Unfinished Swan, Gravitation, Moon Stories, and The Path, are all the inheritors of a long tradition of both art and games. This meeting of the art game movement and the indie game movement is important in bringing art games to more eyes and finding more possibilities to explore in indie games.

[Charles J Pratt is a freelance game designer and a researcher at NYU's new Game Center.]

Steven Seagal's Video Game: "Celebrities Are More Stable Than Films"

editors@gamesetwatch.com (Jennifer Frank) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 16:00:00 -0800

I've been watching a whole ton of Steven Seagal: Lawman. That show is incredible. Did you know that, besides being a cinema action hero, Seagal has been a cop for over 20 years? (Well, according to the man himself, anyway.) And now, at least on US television, he's also a Reality Television Star.

But according to game historian Frank Cifaldi in this fascinating vaporware retrospective, in 1993 -- which I estimate is about when Seagal began to pursue hobbyist lawmanship -- publisher TecMagic licensed the action star's likeness for use in a Genesis and SNES cross-platform game titled The Final Option.

"At the time," Frank writes, "the project was being touted as the first example of a movie star -- rather than an actual movie -- licensed for use in a video game." (Fascinatingly, though Seagal's visage itself was licensed, his digitized video game character was portrayed by none other than Some Other Dude.)

Then Frank gives us this great morsel:

"Celebrities are more stable than films," TecMagik director of marketing Jeff Tarr told The Hollywood Reporter, saying that Seagal was specifically signed because of his film's performances in the video tape rental market, especially among the game-playing demographic.

Though it's left implicit, Cifaldi's column suggests that the partnership with Seagal largely contributed to publisher TekMagic's untimely demise. The Final Option never saw the light of day and, however arguably, Seagal's star, too, has faded. I keep trying to tie this all into something profound about how celebrity, too, has changed -- about how, in these modern times, you no longer need to be a "star" to be "famous" -- but I can't quite grapple the thought.

[1UP's Retro Gaming Blog: Lost Levels]

USA Network: Guitar Heroes Welcome

editors@gamesetwatch.com (Jennifer Frank) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 14:00:00 -0800

So here's some splendid news -- Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy, who together founded Harmonix in the mid-90s, are included among the honorees of the second-annual Character Approved Awards, a ceremony that celebrates meaningful contributions to the humanities.

And those software developers are in good company: included among this year's luminaries are Nora Ephron, for her contributions to writing; the band Green Day; Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow; Jessica Jackley, founder of kiva.org; and for design, Yves Behar, creator of the hundred-dollar laptop. Rigopulos and Egozy will be honored for their contributions to New Media.

The Character Approved Awards ceremony is a USA Network initiative -- get it? Because, the motto, "Characters welcome"? -- and as such, little narrated profiles of each of the honorees are slated to air on, you guessed it, USA.

I gather those segments will ultimately air piecemeal (the event itself isn't televised, unfortunately), with each honoree's profile presented as an autonomous human interest clip between other, longer television shows. So as for when to catch the Harmonix segment, your guess is as good as mine, although I'm told all those "vignettes" will begin airing on the 25th.

Last year's first-annual Character Approved winners included musician Lupe Fiasco, chef David Chang, Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales, and pop artist Shepard Fairey.

[Character Approved]

Q&A: Sega on Bringing Valkyria Chronicles 2 to the PSP

editors@gamesetwatch.com (Simon Carless) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 12:00:46 -0800

[Valkyria Chronicles 2's producer Shinji Motoyama and director Takeshi Ozawa talk to Game Developer magazine EIC Brandon Sheffield on scaling the neat SRPG console game down for portables, and how to design great maps in strategy games.]

Valkyria Chronicles was Sega’s acclaimed entry into the tactics RPG genre from Sega, with innovative active battle sequences that incorporated non-grid movement with dice rolls and finite turns. Valkyria Chronicles was on the PS3, and sported an appealing pastel pencil storybook visual style.

Sega has just released a sequel to the original on PSP in Japan, designed around a multiplayer experience for the Monster Hunter crowd, but without following the Capcom juggernaut’s playstyle (incidentally there is still a single player campaign).

In the past, Gamasutra interviewed the original game’s producer Ryutaro Nonaka and director Shuntaro Tanaka extensively, but this time around the game is getting some new blood.

We spoke with Valkyria Chronicles 2’s director Takeshi Ozawa, and producer Shinji Motoyama to see just how they scaled the experience down – and up. One method not mentioned in the interview is splitting levels up into multiple areas, allowing tiered maps to save on geometry while still allowing a vast playfield:

Graphically the new game looks pretty similar to the PS3; maybe just fewer polygons. How much of a challenge was it, making it work on the PSP?

Takeshi Ozawa: Well, without going into the nitty-gritty, there are assorted issues that the engine has to work with. The hardware platform's completely different, of course. The PS3's a high-end machine while the PSP's lucky if it's half as powerful. You just can't expect to output as many polygons on that machine, and the way light coloring and so on works is also different.

So one of the main issues we had to deal with on the PSP was how to deal with colors -- not have a shader overlay on top of everything like on the PS3, but still retain that canvas-like look that's the game's trademark. That required a lot of trial-and-error to accomplish.

Do you have previous PS2 development experience, and does that help when optimizing?

TO: In terms of being able to ballpark-guess the upper limits of what we'd be capable of accomplishing with the hardware audiovisually, I'd say that -- and we've all got PS2 experience, yes -- I'd say that experience is something we can advantage of. Our staff doesn't have to actively benchmark everything out; instead they can sort of eyeball it, so to speak.

This is not a criticism, but simply for the sake of asking - why make a sequel and not a port? What sorts of new things did you want to put across?

TO: Well, the story is completely new, set two years after the original game, and the characters and battlefields are all new and revised.

In addition, there's also a new and very substantial online-play mode, with both co-op and competitive modes available; something that was possible with the PSP that really piqued our interest. The volume of the game is a lot larger than before, too. Those are the sorts of things we were challenging ourselves to do this game, I'd say.

Shinji Motoyama: Multiplayer was something all of us on the team wanted, but after that, we also considered how we could improve on the BLiTZ battle system (the realtime/turn-based hybrid strategic battles in Valkyria Chronicles), which had gotten a lot of positive response.

We wanted something that everyone could play together - the story of the previous game put a lot of emphasis on the bonds the characters forge, so we wanted a way for players to form those bonds with each other within the game. With the PSP, and especially with Monster Hunter dominating the marketplace, there's a demand for online games that people can play while talking to each other in real life.

With the sort of multiplayer we had conceived, we thought the PSP was the ideal platform for that -- being able to call out to your friends to take out this or that unit and forming strategies with each other while you're playing. So that was one motivation behind choosing the PSP.

What sort of online play types are there?

TO: Well, there's co-op and competitive. In the previous game you consumed command points (CP) in order to move people around maps; here, two people can do that at the same time.

When this was first announced, I said to myself that it'd be nice to have a mode like that.

TO: Oh, exactly. Each character has a certain amount of CP that he or she carries, but you can pass these around between people and consume it as you work together. You can have both characters attack, or have one attract enemy fire while the other goes behind their flank. That sort of thing. In competitive battle, it turns into something very much like a chess game. There are a lot more customizable options in this game, too; you can create your own trooper and fight with him.

Can you make battle maps?

TO: Well, not battle maps, but we have a lot of maps available for play, and each map has its own special features - the previous game had sandstorms in the desert map, but now there's something like that in every map, which opens up the amount of choices available to you a bit. You can also set the rules of battle - in the previous game you had objectives like "destroy the enemy base" or "defeat all enemies," and now you can define what objectives you'd like to have in your competitive match, along with the time limit and the field of battle.

How do you design levels with the active-time system, in terms of determining optimal positioning for buildings and obstacles and things like that? When characters have different lengths of walking, their walking ability is different, so how carefully do you have to construct these worlds so that you know a scout can go this far, a lancer can go this far, a sniper can go this far...determining placement of the crow's nest and buildings and things like that. Breakable walls for the tank. How do you go about that?

SM: Well, in the original, you had your low-level unit types that could be leveled into higher-level types. In this game you've got 35 different types -- for example, you might have a character who's mainly a spy, but is at least somewhat capable in battle as well, or has more movement range than normal.

That sort of customization is now available. It's not like a spy can transform into an anti-tank gunner all of a sudden, and as a result of that, making every team member play his or her specific role to the hilt plays a far more important role in this game. The level design, naturally, follows from that.

It must require a lot of play-testing.

TO: It does.

SM: Every day.

TO: Every day!

At what point did you begin the playtest cycle?

SM: Well, the project runs on milestones, and before the alpha - at certain points in post-production whenever we had a sizable chunk of the game up and running - we'd run playtests and make that part of the milestone. Then when we’re wrapping things up, we can look across the entirety of the game and checking the balance and "fun factor" behind each section.

State Of Game Development Survey Reveals iPhone Support Surge, Wii Lull

editors@gamesetwatch.com (Simon Carless) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 11:00:00 -0800

[Just a note on my colleagues' new Game Developer Research report - probably a bit expensive for GSW readers unless you're a senior tool company exec, heh, but with some interesting public conclusions anyhow if you're reading for free.]

GameSetWatch sister service Game Developer Research has debuted its latest report, the 2009-2010 State of Game Development Survey, revealing among other things a surge of iPhone developers and a lull in those making games for the Wii.

The 100 page report is a result of a survey of more than 800 video game professionals from North America and beyond who read Gamasutra, subscribe to Game Developer magazine, or attend Game Developers Conference. Those complete results are available as a 100-page report from Game Developer Research, and more information from the survey is also available in the February 2010 issue of Game Developer magazine.

The results of the comprehensive 55-question survey help to illustrate which platforms Western game creators develop for, which market sectors they work in, which tools they use and how much they spend on these tools, and sheds light on which factors determine the target platforms for game development.

As a reflection of recent economic difficulties and resulting layoffs, this year’s survey reveals that many experienced developers have founded smaller studios, or have begun developing games on their own.

This trend is marked by a 7 percent growth in the proportion of developers employed by companies of 50 employees or fewer, while in sharp contrast, the proportion of developers at companies of 500 or more employees has fallen by two percent since last year’s survey.

As shown from the results of the survey, another increasingly prevalent trend has been the growth of the mobile space. Due in large part to the success of Apple’s iPhone software platform, mobile support shot up to 25 percent of developers, more than doubling last year’s 12 percent.

Of these mobile developers, nearly three quarters of that group are targeting iPhone and iPod touch development, a number more than twice the reported support for traditional handhelds like Nintendo DS and Sony PSP.

Meanwhile, the choices of development platform showed relative stability. Just over 70 percent of developers said they were developing at least one game for PC or Mac (including browser and social games), rising slightly from last year; 41 percent reported working on console games. Within that latter group, Xbox 360 was the most popular system with 69 percent of console developers targeting it, followed by 61 percent for PlayStation 3.

While those console figures stayed within a few percent of last year's results, the change in Wii adoption was much more significant: reported developer support for the system dropped from 42 percent to 30 percent of console developers, supporting numerous publishers' claims of a recent softening of the Wii market.

When it comes to choosing target platforms, more developers cited ease of development and market penetration as incentives, more than any other factors. Other important considerations included team members’ existing skill sets, portability of code to a given platform, and the acquisition costs of development kits and materials.

“Like any other medium of entertainment, video game development is subject to change with the ebb and flow of the economy and any hot new trends, and this year’s survey continues to reflect this evolution,” says Simon Carless, global brand director of Think Services Game Group (and publisher of Gamasutra).

"The full, detailed survey document, with its plethora of raw data and wealth of insight, is an important resource for any industry-watchers looking to navigate the changing seas of the games industry."

The full 'State of Game Development 2009-2010 Survey' includes dozens more data points about the preferred software, hardware, and tools of game developers across game engines, AI tools, production machines and beyond, as well as game genre and sector statistics, geographical breakdowns, budgetary information for the past year, and upcoming product purchase intent.

The survey was conducted with a sample of 814 users of Game Developer magazine, Gamasutra, and attendees of the Game Developers Conference, and can be projected to the overall game development community with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percent at a 95 percent confidence level.

Those complete results are available as a 100-page report from Game Developer Research, alongside numerous other reports delving into the key facts and trends that define the modern game development industry. More information from the survey is also available in the February 2010 issue of Game Developer magazine.

Mighty Boosh For Your iPhone

editors@gamesetwatch.com (Jennifer Frank) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 10:00:00 -0800

Vince Noir: Welcome to the Mighty Decider!
Howard Moon: Where... you can decide things... as and when... you need to.

Noir: What is the Mighty Decider, Howard?

Moon: It's a... it's an incredible way of deciding about things.

Noir: Really.

Moon: Yeah.

Noir: It's a decision-maker?

Moon: Someone comes at you with a...nnn.... option.... You have a quick way of finding out... which one you... which way you want to go.

Noir: Really.

Moon: Mmm.

Brian "Doctor Popular" Roberts -- and I only know his actual, given name from an earlier GameSetWatch entry, incidentally -- flew out to LA late last year to meet with the men of The Mighty Boosh, where they recorded soundbytes for an upcoming iPhone app. Now, after several months of hard work, the game is finally ready for download.

Just four minigames-of-chance comprise the Mighty Decider. "Naboo's Wisdom" and "Ask the Moon" each are especially witty little fortune-telling games. The "Spin the Bottle" game is exactly everything its name implies, except that peripheral Boosh character Bob Fossil (played to the hilt by Chicago's own Rich Fulcher) deliberately desexes every bottle's turn. And in the boringest app, "Flip the Coin," you attempt to defeat the Crack Fox (voiced by Howard Moon himself, Julian Barratt) in a series of coin tosses.

Certainly this software is but a passing amusement, intended for a particular audience. But for fans of surreal UK comedy, or for fans of handpainted backgrounds, or horoscopes -- and I am all of these -- the Mighty Decider is great.

The game is currently listed as just $0.99 at the iPhone App Store.

The Mighty Decider [via DocPop and Boing Boing]

Mech Mario, KodyKoala's Latest Custom Toy Figure

editors@gamesetwatch.com (Jennifer Frank) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 08:00:00 -0800

That zany Donald Kennedy (perhaps better known to the Internet as KodyKoala) has done it again.

Over at his custom toy blog, Donny writes that he has long played with the idea of having Mario characters "drive giant Mechs of themselves." And here is the first in Donny's planned series:

For his latest custom work, Donny bedazzled an ordinary Mario figure with rivets -- I love how the sideburns are ostensibly bolted on! -- before giving it a thick coat of metallic paint. What was formerly a Mario keychain is now perched high aloft at the control center, like some kind of homunculus doppelgaenger thing. Very nicely done.

I also recommend KodyKoala's earlier King Hippo custom, his version of Dr. Wily, and his paramountly frightening Mario action figure collection. And then -- this is only tangentially related to games, I guess, but it is inspired -- there's his Bubs' Concession Stand Soopa Coin Up custom.

[Via kodykoala.com]

2010 IGF Reveals Mobile Category Winners, Audience Voting, Award Hosts

editors@gamesetwatch.com (Simon Carless) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 07:00:04 -0800

[Here's the final announcement before GDC on the Independent Games Festival, including multiple new things - hosts, audience award, and IGF Mobile category finalists, which will all be playable at GDC - fun times.]

2010 Independent Games Festival organizers have revealed the five IGF Mobile category finalists battling it out for Best Mobile Game at GDC, also debuting the IGF Audience award and revealing the hosts for this year's IGF Awards.

IGF Mobile Category Winners

After announcing finalists and honorable mentions late last month, the 2010 Independent Games Festival Mobile has named the category winners that will show their games at GDC and battle for the Best IGF Mobile Game prize.

After battling it out from a field of 170 top-notch entries, winners thus far include Secret Exit's physics-heavy Stair Dismount for iPhone, Powerhead Games' cunning color-based puzzle game Glow Artisan for DSi, and Tiger Style's acclaimed action game Spider for Apple's handheld.

The category winners for the 2010 IGF Mobile competition -- an event that celebrates excellence in games for the iPhone, other cellphone and smartphone OSes, Nintendo DS, Sony PSP, and other handheld devices -- are:

Best Mobile Game Design:
Glow Artisan (Powerhead Games, DSi)

Achievement In Art
Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP (superbrothers + capy + jim guthrie, iPhone/iPod Touch)

Technical Achievement
Stair Dismount (Secret Exit, iPhone/iPod Touch)

Audio Achievement
Lilt Line (different cloth, iPhone/iPod Touch)

Best iPhone Game
Spider: The Secret Of Bryce Manor (Tiger Style, iPhone/iPod Touch)

These five outstanding independent handheld games will each win $500 in travel stipends, in addition to their already-awarded Game Developers Conference 2010 All-Access pass for being a finalist.

In addition, their games will also each be playable in a special area at the Independent Games Festival Pavilion on the GDC Expo floor alongside the 30 Main and Student competition finalists, and one of them will win the $2,500 Best Mobile Game award at the IGF Awards during the March 9th-13th event.

IGF Audience Award Opens

IGF organizers have also opened this year's Audience Awards, with members of the public able to vote on all 2010 Independent Games Festival Main Competition finalist games that have (or have had) publicly available versions.

Voting for eligible titles is now open at the IGF Audience Award page, and will stay open until Friday, March 5th at midnight PST, with gamers encouraged to play through the games and pick their favorite via email-verified voting.

IGF Award Hosts

Alongside these two announcements, organizers have revealed that this year's hosts of the Independent Games Festival Awards -- to be held on March 11th in San Francisco's Moscone Center during GDC 2010 -- will be independent developers Kyle Gabler (World Of Goo) and Erin Robinson (Puzzle Bots).

Kyle Gabler is half of 2D Boy, the indie studio behind multiple IGF award winning game World of Goo. He is also one of the freewheeling dandies behind the recently reincarnated Experimental Gameplay Project, which runs monthly design challenges in an ongoing quest to discover as many new forms of gameplay as possible.

Erin Robinson has been making independent games since 2005. Her work has been featured by Boing Boing and PC Gamer UK, and has spoken at multiple conferences, including GDC -- where Heather Kelley and Erin presented the winning design in the annual Game Design Challenge last year. Erin's game Nanobots was a much-lauded indie title, and she is now working on the casual adventure game Puzzle Bots.

The duo will jointly present this year's Independent Games Festival awards in front of thousands of GDC 2010 attendees and indie game fans -- and will be joined by customary introductions and closing remarks from IGF co-chairs and indie developers Matthew Wegner (Flashbang Studios) and Steve Swink (Enemy Airship).

Announcement: Introducing GSW Guest Editor Jenn Frank

editors@gamesetwatch.com (Jennifer Frank) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 06:00:00 -0800

[NOTE FROM SIMON: It's guest editor time, since the stalwart Eric Caoili is out on vacay, and this is the first post from our designated awesome backup QB, for which... heck, read on, you'll work it out.]

So, your regularly scheduled GameSetWatch co-editor Eric is taking a deserved holiday -- vacationing in a tropical climate, we can only hope, perhaps with a little paper umbrella in his drink, maybe with a maraschino cherry skewered on the end of a tiny plastic sword.

This is probably not the case, but it's how we like to picture him. When we ourselves last went on a tropical vacation, we made the mistake of bringing our laptop along, and we ultimately wasted the whole holiday hunched over the Internet in a big, floppy sunhat.

No matter what exactly Eric Caoili is up to, however, Jenn Frank will be GameSetWatch's guest editor for the next two weeks, and beginning with this very post. And here she is now: blogging in a Chicago coffeehouse where they offer free WiFi with every coffee purchase.

You may remember her work from such exciting adventures as the Retronauts podcast (most recently Episode 68), some reviews, perhaps a few features at 1UP.com, a single piece at Wired.com, or for that time she snuck into a Sony party using Phil Fish's IGF trophy as collateral.

Nowadays, she mainly flits around on her own ill-advised and scarcely-updated blog, Infinite Lives, where she used to write about herself in the third person, much like this, until she finally surrendered to first.

Probably her credentials are none too reassuring, but all the same she'll do her very best to fill Mr. Caoili's shoes, updating you (and on schedule!) with interesting (we hope!) bits of relevant (perhaps?) video game pop culture.

GameSetNetwork: Best Of The Week

editors@gamesetwatch.com (Simon Carless) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 00:00:48 -0800

As we wander around the notable long-form pieces of writing elsewhere on the network, here's the top full-length features of the past week on big sister 'art and business of gaming' site Gamasutra, plus our GameCareerGuide features for the week.

Headed by an interview with the Dante's Inferno folks at EA, other big features this week include a discussion on 'truth in game design', a postmortem of Vicious Cycle's flippant XBLA title, a couple of fun Game Design Challenge articles - both results and a new challenge - and much more besides.

Find a way:

The Road To Hell: The Creative Direction of Dante's Inferno
"Jonathan Knight, creative director of Dante's Inferno, discusses the thinking behind the path he and his team took in choosing and adapting the classic poem for use in the Visceral Studios action game."

The Sensible Side of Immersion
"Neils Clark examines the intimate bond between psychology and play, and how games might tap into the recesses of the ancient human brain in order to reach new levels of immersion."

Jumpstarting Your Creativity
"Experienced sound designer Brad Meyer (DJ Hero) espouses a creative philosophy of taking a step back and making common sense decisions as the best method for reinvigorating that elusive creative spark once it's fled."

Truth in Game Design
"What does "truth in game design" mean? Microsoft Game Studios producer/designer Scott Brodie explores the nature and implications of how truth can be created and communicated in game design, via several case studies."

Postmortem: Vicious Cycle's Matt Hazard: Blood Bath and Beyond
"Eric Peterson, president and CEO of Vicious Cycle, recounts the ups and downs of making the PSN and XBLA parody video game Blood Bath and Beyond, and explains important lessons learned in the development of the studio's first downloadable game."

GCG: Game Design Challenge: A New Vision
"Our latest challenge asks readers to take a game that's ahead of its time and bring it into the present day -- keeping what was good and smoothing out the rough edges."

GCG: Maxims of Game Design
"Game educator Lewis Pulsipher delivers a list of useful maxims for game design -- simple rules to ponder that will help you on the road to creating a game your players will enjoy."

GCG: Results from Game Design Challenge: Free To Play
"Game Career Guide's readers tackled the growing free-to-play market in our latest game design challenge, and found creative solutions to monetize their original concepts."