7 Keys, $1, 14.3c/key,
50 Keys, $5, 10c/key,
250 Keys, $20, 8c/key,
1,000 Keys, $50, 5c/key.

That makes sense according to the Greater McNugget Law of Economics which has something to do with decreasing marginal utility and states that a 20-piece Chicken McNuggets should cost less than buying 5 4-piece Chicken McNuggets separately. Otherwise, McNugget arbitrage would throw commodity futures into chaos. Or something.

So we know that the cost per unit of MTX currency should go down (or stay steady) as the amount spent goes up. If I buy 1,000 Farmville Bux at a clip, it should cost me less than buying 100 Farmville Bux ten times. But how much should it go down per dollar? How much cheaper should it be?

A currency that provides no “bulk savings” would be just a flat line across at 1 because at any price point you would always be getting the same unit cost. The higher the curve goes up, the greater the “bulk discount” is for users. If there was an easy secondary MTX currency market, you would see all of these pressed flatter and flatter because arbitrageurs could just buy huge bundles of MTX currency and dole it out at cheaper than the supplier’s $1 level.

Here’s a zoom-in of the 1 to 2 range:

The sample of thirteen games available to me at the time that had easily divisible amounts provided quite a variety of suggestions.

• First, Danc is a saint because Triple Town‘s $5 currency bundle is either the most wonderful affordable currency bundle out right now or the $1, $2 and $3 bundles are vastly overpriced. The $5 bundle in Triple Town gives 25x the number of coins of the $1 bundle for 5x the cost. No one else does that. Why not? Are we afraid of over-saturating our whales? Give the people that buy the biggest bundle as much as they could possibly ever use. user.giveTokens(MAXINT);
• Every single game I looked at had a $5 bundle, but not every game had a $1 bundle.
• Someone at Ludia can’t do basic math because their $40 bundle on Family Feud & Friends provides more bang for buck than their $100 bundle.
• Who buys $100 bundles? Why aren’t they buying the $50 Fire & Dice bundle? Do we devs just put those out there to see if people will hit the button by accident like the I Am Rich app?
• Newtoy’s (er, Zynga with Friends’) games have the flattest curves. They really don’t offer much in the way of bulk savings.
• Ignore the weird curve thing going on with the Zynga Poker line from $3-$5 and the Triple Town line from $2 to $3. Google Doc’s curve smoothing wasn’t up to the task.
• While there seems to be similarity in the <$5 range (if you average the curves, you get about what we did for Fire & Dice!), once we crack $20 we get into crazy bux funtown. The curves diverge quite a bit. I think everyone can agree on 10%-50% bumps in the $1-$5 range, but the parabola gets so stupid when you get into $100 games that I guess you just pick a large number and throw it at the user.

*And lazy. I didn’t even out the space between x-axis points.

“[I]t’s good.”

Should I stop there? Nah:

“It is a strategy game complicated by lucky and unlucky dice rolls, a mix of intention and happenstance that makes games like Angry Birds and Peggleso much fun, too.”

I’ve never courted being compared to Angry Birds, but I’ll take it if it isn’t meant as an epithet.

“To describe Fire and Dice as a game of, well, putting out fires with dice, makes it sound strange. But the systems and style of play work well. It all makes a lot of sense when you play and feels fresh and right for a phone game. [...] It’s an odd idea, well executed.”

Version 3.0 is out on iOS and Android. 3.0.1 will be incoming (There’s always a bug you miss…)

In 2008, I read 31 Titles, 7,967 Pages, 21.77 Pages/Day
In 2009, I read 18 Titles, 4,960 Pages, 13.59 Pages/Day
In 2010, I read 36 Titles, 11,574 Pages, 31.71 Pages/Day
In 2011, I read 30 Titles,  10,163 Pages, 27.84 Pages/Day

In 2011, I moved back to Florida so I did not have the two hour of subway riding per day which really cut into my reading time. But still, I managed a closely respectable total.

Fiction

The Damned Busters: To Hell and Back, Book One (416) by Matthew Hughes

Normally I shy away from books that are explicitly set up to be a series (And to think later in the year I’d read Game of Thrones!). I know publishers love their predictability but they tend to be a bit overextended for me. Nonetheless, I had to get this one based on my fandom of Hughes’ sci-fi work. The first third of the book was featured in novella form in Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine and I found it to be excellent. Chesney Arnstruther is an actuary that accidentally summons a demon, refuses to sign over his soul and causes a labor dispute in Hell. Through a series of events, he ends with his own demon two hours a day (a self-styled James Cagney) and uses said demon’s infernal powers to turn him into a masked crime-fighter. The second act is a little dull, but overall it was pretty-fun and certainly nowhere as overwrought as your John Constantine fightin’-demons tales. There’s an essential sense of humor which makes up for the sort of caricatured characters. Nonetheless, I wholly recommend.

Embassytown by China Mieville (368)

Mieville is probably my favorite author. So take my opinions on him with a grain of salt. In Embassytown, he shifts to a sci-fi milieu that reminds almost of a futuristic version of his New Crozubon stories. Whereas Kraken was all about the pulp influences mixed with the New Weird paradigm, with a couple elements removed this could be a straight-up sci-fi novel. My favorite speculative books are all about Big Ideas and Embassytown has them in spades, especially if you are interested in language. Highly enjoyable.

Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott (124)

A classic I nabbed free on the Kindle. I never actually read it before. I like to drift towards Sci-Fi and Fantasy that is more philosophy than story sometimes and this scratched the itch. I was surprised at how sexist it is given modern sensibilities!

The Grendel’s Shadow by Andrew Mayne (140)

I found this for 99 cents on Kindle and the reviews made it seem highly enjoyable. I found the universe the author created to be interesting (I searched only to find that he has not written any other books in this universe) but the actual story to be dull. Without enacting spoilers, there is one major plot point that is just completely forgotten and never resolved. There is very little in the story that ends up being surprising. Since everything was so straightforward, I was waiting for The Big Twist only to be disappointed. It’s competent but not particularly compelling.

Penny Arcade, Book 7: Be Good Little Puppy (128)

You know, you either like Penny Arcade or you don’t.

A Song of Ice and Fire: A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin (720)
A Song of Ice and Fire: A Clash of Kings by George R. R. Martin (784)
A Song of Ice and Fire: A Storm of Swords by George R. R. Martin (1008)
A Song of Ice and Fire: A Feast for Crows by George R. R. Martin (784)

I know I said that I don’t like series, but I cracked this one open and got addicted… Yes, the quality does trail off in Book 4, but I think it picks up again brilliantly in Book 5. The series breaks a lot of “rules” with regards to storytelling, so it is illustrative as a writing lesson despite its flaws. Rarely do I find something this popular that I devour so insatiably. The fifth one is about half-done as the year ends. I don’t think I’ll be able to keep my enthusiasm to wait for a new tome.

Spin by Robert Charles Wilson (464)

Normally, I am less enthusiastic about science fiction as I am about fantasy. SF has fewer degrees of freedom; it has to be both internally consistent and consistent with the world we know where as fantasy only has to be the former. But every once in a while a book has a “What If” that is just as compelling as anything else out there. In Spin, one night the stars go out – or so it seems. Satellites fall from the sky, looking as if they had been in orbit for hundreds of years. The premise gets even more surreal after that, but always stays in the realms of consistent internally and without the use of magic. Wilson leaves great cliffhangers, peeling back the onion further and further with every chapter. Only Mieville’s The Scar did that as masterfully to me. What finally is most interesting to me is that in a market recently saturated with post-apocalyptica this novel shines as a sort of pre-apocalyptica: humanity knows it is the last generation, what will they do about it? Less dystopic than Children of Men, but still seemingly at task. Excellent read. Don’t read too many reviews of it or you will get spoilered.

Nonfiction

250 Indie Games You Must Play (280) by Mike Rose

IndieGames.com’s Mike Rose gives an overview of a number of indie games. I was disappointed in this. The analyses pretty much always covered the game’s setting and visual theme but rarely did it cover what was mechanically interesting about the game. It contains such insightful analysis as “the story is nice and long.” I’ve seen enough indie games to know that story generally isn’t the selling point – it is how the mechanics work in inventive ways. This didn’t need to be a book. It could have been one long web page.

How to Do Things With Videogames by Ian Bogost (180)

Anyone who follows me on Twitter knows I’m a big Bogost supporter. How to Do Things… is a great collection of essays about the different areas games can address, but I found the title and form misleading. The book should be called What Video Games Can Do since it answers what and not how. The essays are mixed in quality, but I found that the ones that connect hit it out of the park. Others are less of the form: “Did you know video games can tackle so and so?” and fit more as decent Gamasutra articles. While a little unfocused, it is still full of great insights and clued me into a number of projects of which I’d never heard.

Marching Bands Are Just Homeless Orchestras by Tim Seidell (80)

Barely a book, this is a collection of Tim Seidell’s (better known as Twitter’s @badbanana) Handy-esque quips. Hilarious, but you can get the same quality for free by following his Twitter account.

The Making of Prince of Persia by Jordan Mechner (330)

I wrote about it here. No book this year made me sadder or feel less alone.

Propaganda by Edward Bernays (168)

I was a bit disappointed in this. It’s a tract from the 1920′s that is essentially an apologia for propaganda. I was hoping this would be a little more intriguing as to the how-to but this is mostly about things that we consider as basic PR these days. It was a bit repetitious and a chore to get through, honestly.

The Rape of the Mind by Dr. Joost A. M. Meerloo (320)

Wow, where to begin? Dr. Meerloo was a prolific Dutch psychologist and Dutch resistance member during the Second World War. Under the Nazi occupation, he witnessed firsthand the methods of brainwashing and mental torture and became one of the world’s leading authorities on totalitarian mind control. Provocatively named, The Rape of the Mind hits on a lot of topics: freedom, philosophy, nature of Man, politics, advertising, faith, authority and strategy. I even picked up a little on design in there. It’s a timeless book with more to digest than you could grasp in one read. I plan on saving it.

The Revolution by Ron Paul (208)
Liberty Defined:  50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom by Ron Paul (352)

Yeah, go ahead start judging me on politics. This one is a campaign book from his 08 run. It’s honestly a little slapdash, not as convincing of a libertarian argument or as organized as Browne’s Great Libertarian Offer. It’s great if you already buy into what he is selling, but he does a poor job of providing supporting materials in comparison to Browne. Liberty Defined is the same way, but better structured, although it never sufficiently defines liberty. I suppose what causes his books to be more about principles than evidence is summed up in his chapter on Statistics and their drawbacks. While I didn’t find either of these to be too convincing, he does keep a good bibliography for further reading.

Tasty Morsels of Sonic Goodness by George “Fat Man” Sanger (528)

I’m torn on this one. One, I’m forever in debt to the Fat Man for starting project Horseshoe which I now go to every year. I now understand so much of its origins just by the stories that Sanger loads this book with. There’s a lot of folksy abstract storytelling in here and if you get easily distracted, you will lose him in the first third of the book. He spends a lot of time on this persona of his and it’s tough to give a shit about any of it until you get a “why” you should give a shit. For some reason, whoever formatted this for Kindle liked to highlight phrases and words with light grey text making them nearly impossible to read on my Kindle 2. The last third of the book (except a wonderful excerpt in the Appendix) is only of real value to audio guys, a cohort of which I do not identify. But if you peel back that first third and last third, that middle juicy core is full of wonderful philosophy about living a creative life. Whether or not you have the patience to peel away the irrelevant stuff is really a testament to how much you want what is in the core.

Instapaper / Longform

I discovered Instapaper and Longform.org this year. The latter collates high-quality bits of longer-form journalism from around the web. The former converts those articles into a handy, Kindle-readable form. When I reach 20 articles or so, I dump them into a .mobi file and there I have the most interesting magazine I could possibly find. Unfortunately, I’ve been using Instapaper to save far more than my ability to read all the saved articles. Since these don’t have a normal page count, I’m dividing words by 350 to get pages.

Instapaper Compilation #1 (362)

Instapaper Compilation #2 (309)

Instapaper Compilation #3 (304)

Instapaper Complication #4 (370)

Other (Graphic Novels, etc.)

Achewood Vol 3. Worst Song Played on Ugliest Guitar by Chris Onstad (136)

Achewood’s fallen off in recent years strictly on a quantity basis (but has just resumed), but if you digged (dug? dig-dugged?) the strips of the 2002 era when characterization was just knocking on the door (really the hallmark of the series next to the Mexican Magical Realism which is forthcoming) then these are the first strips that matter. What gets you to buy the book is the great commentary bits and the essays written in character. Top notch stuff.

Book-Length Magazines

Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine 11-12/2010 (260)
Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine 1-2/2010 (260)
Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine 3-4/2010 (260)
Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine 5-6/2010 (260)
Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine 7-8/2010 (260)

I don’t like Tower Defense games. Like everyone else, I played Desktop Tower Defense a few years back until I got bored and then I called it a genre. My main problem with it is the passivity of the actual game-time. The bulk of the important decisions are made before the action and then during action, it is just triage. Tower Defense reminds me a lot of a less interesting version of The Incredible Machine games, where one sets-up and then hits play and watches him or herself win or lose. The difference being with the Machine games that there were multiple dimensions to deal with: gravity, flammability, wind, etc whereas many Tower Defense games deal with just Put Damage Here.

Orcs Must Die is different. It has the pre-game component of Tower Defense, but the action is done in third-person shooter style and is largely dependent on your skill in that regard. Interesting decisions happen in the pre-game AND during game action. While it is still in the realm of Put Damage Here like most Tower Defense, the added constraint of having to ferry your warmage around to deal with situations adds a level of complexity that is sorely needed. Additionally, the art/animation/sound is slick and really adds to the experience. I’m starting to tire a bit of games using Captain Hammer-esque protagonists, but in this case it works.

The gold standard of my enjoyment of a game is if I will go back and replay levels and I did this in spades. I have only the final (*^&%$*&^ impossible!) level to complete, so I’m going back and trying to ace the previous levels. Ignore any pseudo-intellectual normative “should I like this?” internal dialogue and use this as the metric and see what results you get.

But what really stood out to me in the journals is his single-mindedness that this was just a step to becoming a filmmaker.  What Jordan will always be known for is Prince of Persia, yet so many of the entries are about wanted to be done with it so he can move onto films. Perhaps it is because he grew up in a time before video games were something you could be respected for, yet for most of the time that the journal covers he cannot see that he is on the top of the world with true creative freedom and control and mastery over an area of creative expression! The grass is always greener. I was literally frustrated when I was reading the period just after POP released and Jordan became a gopher for a student film and was nothing but excited about it. He went from the very top of one industry to the very bottom of another. I can’t criticize him for following his dreams, but I also cannot help but be sad for what was left on the table. I guess it is part of a great dramatic arc that you want to yell and scream at the main character.

There’s tons of fascinating stuff in here, especially if you’ve been a professional game designer. It’s amazing in this day and age of the willy-nilly aspect of just throwing things into a game without documentation or process or just taking six months off because you feel like it. Of course, it is also unreasonable in this day and age to actually expect to own anything you make AND get paid for it.

It is inspiring in a number of different ways. One, it makes me wish I’d kept a true personal journal during my EA and Gameloft days. Two, it reminds me that even the names in the industry face the same insecurities and setbacks.

Skyrim

Portal 2

Sword and Sworcery EP

Triple Town

Bastion

The Oil Blue

SpellTower

Ahem, Fire & Dice…

(Edit: Darius reminded me of Murder Dog IV: Trial of the Murder Dog and that certainly belongs on the list)

First, Fire and Dice is coming out with our epic 2.0 release with new interface, tutorials, helicopter mega-attack and all kinds of other improvements. If you are on Android, it’s live right now. We are always trying to improve it. We intend to support it for a while, so keep the improvement suggestions coming. If you are on iPhone, the app is crossing the Styx right now and I’ll devote a whole post to it when it hits. I love this game.

It’s an odd situation when you are a contractor designer because you want to “own” the project, but you aren’t in the office enough to make the hundreds of little design decisions. It’s simultaneously my responsibility and not mine.

We also have a non-traditional app coming out soon that is very social and I will require all you good folks to participate.

Oh, and I got married. So there’s that:

And I went to Project Horseshoe for the second time and hobnobbed with some amazing people. And gave a presentation about emotion:

The report is forthcoming on the official Horseshoe site. Seriously, if you have the means, you should be going to this conference.

Miscellany. I updated the Dominion picker script if you are into that. Every time I think about posting something, I get distracted by my two jobs or life and instead condense it down to 140 characters and put it up on Twitter. Hm. Maybe that’s for the best? Upcoming posts about new apps and IGDA most likely.

]]> http://www.hiwiller.com/2011/11/27/busy-bee/feed/ 0 http://www.hiwiller.com/2011/11/27/busy-bee/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/hiwiller/~3/v_5zWNtCLm4/ http://www.hiwiller.com/2011/10/06/fire-and-dice/#comments Thu, 06 Oct 2011 15:48:14 +0000 Zack http://www.hiwiller.com/?p=1158 Education is boss and I dig what I do, but I’ve also missed actually making games. Luckily, there’s a neat little startup about fifteen miles down the road from me called Sky Parlor Studios that needed some help crafting a portfolio of mobile games. We are working on a number of things but the first to release is called Fire and Dice. It’s one of my favorite games I’ve designed in many years, so I do want to tell you a bit about it.

Fire and Dice has a number of inspirations, notably the board games Roll Through the Ages and Elder Sign where the player takes random resources and assign them in a Yahtzee meets Sim/RPG kind of way.

In Fire and Dice, you play as the fire chief of Sparksville, which is a town of sixteen blocks that seems to have trouble avoiding combusting. You roll your dice and choose to lock in water, movement, rescue or truck dice to drive around the town, put out the fires and rescue the citizens.

Small fires take five water to quench; large fires take ten. If two large fires are next to each other, they will spread. But having two trucks at a location will double your water efficiency (spend 5 instead of 10 to quench the large fires). Having three trucks at a location will triple it.

Rescuing a citizen and returning them to the fire station awards you a new die (up to seven), which is key to long-term survival.

Here’s my strategy, but I don’t have the score, so take it with a grain of salt: get to seven dice as soon as possible, then expand your truck fleet and make sure there are never two large fires next to each other. Easier said than done. Do you bunch your trucks together for the efficiency bonus or do you spread them out to cover a larger area? It’s a catchy game and I wouldn’t sell it so hard if I didn’t think it was a lot of fun.

The Ad-Supported Android version is on the marketplace now. The Paid Android ($2) as well. Paid iPhone, Free iPhone and iPad Universal apps are all forthcoming. There are more features and tweaks we are rushing to add, but we wanted to get this in front of folks as soon as possible.

We put a lot of love into the game, so we would appreciate if you purchased one of these for the mobile device of your choice and supported original indie development. We’ve got a bunch of good ideas in the pipeline and want to be able to afford to come out with something fun every month or so. Use the comments if you have questions or suggestions and I’ll get to them as soon as I can. I’ll keep this post updated with news and screenshots.

Zuckerberg:

“I cried when I saw this. … I appreciate that whoever made this realized that all modern games should be social, but I also empathize with it because it really is one of the worst experiences on our platform that when you are just in the middle of some app doing something and then all of a sudden it just pops something up and asks you to share… So today we want to make it so that you no longer have to do this.”

For the record, I’m jazzed that I can have some small impact on the world, but the “whoever made this” (He would probably know who made this if his people didn’t scrub my watermark from the image) does not believe that all modern games should be social. Unless he means something different than my conception of what they think social means.

It is a very cynical take on relationships and I wonder if part of that is due to the differing cultural mores between here in America and there. Although Lea’s previous game Ultisa Dimitrova is far more cynical, it is also playable in only one way. Ute can be played as if its subject matter was completely abstract or rethemed in any number of permutations. In fact, the cultural payload would change greatly if you rethemed the game to a man seeking out women. Would it then be a game about power struggles and gender roles? These thematic assignments are done wholly on the framing of the game and not the mechanics of the game. What do the mechanics themselves say about the game’s theme?

Dan Cook’s statement (and I paraphrase) that designers also have to be businessmen is never more appropriate than it is today. The new wave is Free to Play and I think it is a great leap forward. Too long has the conversation been framed as business vs. ideals as if it were two sides of a balance. The truth is that in this environment business has to trust design and design has to consider business. That’s not a fence-sitting cop-out–it’s my assessment of industry trends.

Anyway, here’s the interview, which is also cross-posted on their site.

I disagreed at the time but was too polite to say so. Now the more I think about it, the more merit it may have. What if many of our games that we find to be paragons of balance are that way because of organic player behavior? I know from experience that balance is largely a guess and check endeavor. I’m playing League of Legends with folks from work lately and I am astounded that there aren’t obvious dominant strategies with such diverse character abilities. Is this because of rugged playtesting and post-launch tweaking and nerfing or because the system is complex enough to allow for self-balancing? What if games that seem needlessly complicated or fiddly (Arkham Horror is a good example) are that way to allow for player flexibility in the hopes that the player, rather than the designer, finds the balance?

Gamasutra has a great article up by Simon Ludgate on the economics of that particular market that I find incredibly interesting. Designers and companies deserve to get paid for the products and services they provide. If this model helps breed innovation in game design and doesn’t just become a mechanism for extracting revenue from users (nee Zynga), then I welcome the sea change.

Coworkers have introduced me to League of Legends which is confounding in many, many ways, but I have to admit to finding how the business merges with the design to be fascinating. My one worry about these games are their ephemeralness–once Riot moves on, the game is done. There are no artifacts to leave behind. If that is the unfortunate dynamic of privacy prevention, then we all lose.

In January, I was wide-eyed and hopeful. In just two weeks, I’d start to get disenfranchised:

January 19 - First day at new job. No one told me what time, so I’m going in for 9. Strangely nervous!

January 20 - The inspiration. I found it? This is what it felt like?

January 26 – I may finish the draft of this GDD by Wednesday after all… 5200 words in two days ain’t bad.

January 27 – Blarg. My 33 page doc is in the wrong format, needs to be totally reorganized. Here we go!

January 28 – Balls. My design proposal got vetoed.

February 17 – Just saw the most masturbatory design document I have ever seen in my life.

February 23 - I think my team just formed a new band called “Rage Against the Gantt Chart”

By March, I was starting to learn that I wasn’t being respected and it was getting to me:

March 2 – Grr. Breathe. Relax.

March 31 - Unbefuckinglievable.

April 1 - Why do I let myself get this stressed?

April 12 - I totally understand Alan Smithee

April 13 - You know it’s bad when delicious Polish food, getting a game from Germany in the mail and walking home with my love couldn’t cheer me up.

April 26 - No! My beautifully balanced system tumbled like a Jenga tower!

April 27 - Today crossed that line from frustrating to so ridiculous that you have to laugh. It’s a good place to be.

On April 29, my creative frustration must have boiled up and it led to my famous Mario + Tutorials post and everyone started telling me I’d get fired.

May 4 – Wholly depressed. Best time to try writing.

May 5 - Seriously, if I get fired for that I’ll probably kill myself since there will be no one with a sense of humor left in the world.

May 17 - wegyrgwuegroqrgtqwiergfylqwgeflqwergfqpw;re8tyq9rwehfrgbkhgwwuoewr830ywe97wte23gui34hkr32gifewkbfewaoywfeuo412h43hjv532vhj532h23589y532ghi90

May 21 - Quick! Shoulder me out of the way because if you don’t stand 1 inch from the subway door, you won’t be able to get out! i hate ny

June 1 - Some of my work got nuked, but I hid a backup in a place no one would ever think to look – the GDD.

By June, I’d given up and was a downright mess. Our project that had given me so much stress over the past half-year was cancelled for reasons way beyond my area of impact. Nothing looked like it would make sense and I had nowhere to turn.

June 16 – head kablooey

June 28 - Only saw three crimes on the subway this morning. #mondayinnyc

June 28 - Filling up documents with useless data. Thinking about adding some lorem ipsum to see if anyone reads it.

July 6 - It’s so hot out that the area of high pressure has reinflated my hopes and dreams.

July 8 - I’m gonna choke a bitch.

July 12 - The least annoying thing happening in the office right now is the drilling into metal sounds.

July 13 - If enough people believe that our project is uncancelled, then maybe it will be? @radmartigan get working on that.

July 19 - Fast, Good and Cheap. Pick all three.

July 19 - On the verge of totally flipping out. #keepsayingitsfriday

July 19 - When I feel like I am about to lose it, I read “focal feature” as “fecal feature” in a GDD and all is right for a moment.

July 21 - Watched world’s worst mother berate and abuse her child on the subway this morning. No civilized person can live here. I’ve had it.

July 28 - I can just tell this will end poorly.

July 29 - Cells in this s.sheet that are important are highlighted yellow. Cells of cut features are also yellow. Then we just made some more yellow.

By August, despite my internal attitude leaking out to Twitter, I was still creating prolifically and working hard. But when you push yourself to the bone and then you are essentially called worthless, there is little you are left to do.

August 10 - 25 pages of design doc in one day. Not bad.

August 13 - Left Gameloft today. Definition of a poor fit. Anyone know of any openings? RT if you can.

Damn do I feel bad for “Past Zack”. His tweets really do feel like they are coming from a different person. The Twitshift application is a lot different than just reading your old blog or diary. Since it happens in realtime alongside the tweets of real people, it really does feel like you are watching an external real person. Except you have this burden because you know how his story will go before he does. I want to message him and tell him to hang in there, that everything gets better really soon. But I can’t and it breaks my heart.

By October, Past Zack will have moved away from New York but will be really vague about where he is and what he is doing. He won’t want to tell people that he, a grown man, will have moved his things back to his parents house to save money while he looked for a new job. He won’t tweet about the crippling depression he is trying so hard to hide from everyone. In fact, he will try and stick mostly to retweets and quips about football. I think what is more disturbing to me is my knowledge of what is going on behind those tweets, why they get farther apart and why they become less relevant to the things that actually interest me.

By the way, things are completely great for me right now. What a difference a year makes!

Too long and wonderful to tweet:

Enough pronouncements and posturings about game design as problem-solving, of finding the most effective solution, or the most powerful trump card, and wielding it in the air like an autistic Achilles. Let’s make games. Let’s make good ones. Let’s try to figure out what that means for each of us. Let’s help our colleagues and our players and our critics understand it.

- Ian Bogost

I’ve unfollowed so many of the so-called designers-to-follow out there because of their egotistical and unsubstantiated pronouncements on design that X is dead, long live Y; that because they consulted on some obscure title or read some obscure author that they have the true design principles, carved into stone by the hand of God. I’m no relativist, but I cannot believe that what passes for GDC lectures need be read by students and designers alike as gospel.

—

Oh, the Game Design Document! It is one of the most useful tools in a designer’s toolbox for communication, but also one of the most misunderstood. Nearly every professional designer deals with game design documents (or GDDs). But what are they? Why are they so ubiquitous?

When a game development team is only three people (say a designer, artist and programmer), the team only has three channels of communication they need to keep open: designer-artist, designer-programmer and artist-programmer.

Figure 4.1 – Three Members and Three Communication Channels

But add just one more programmer and the number of lines of communication jumps from four to six:

Figure 4.2 – Add One Member and Communication Lines Double

Professional game development can be a mammoth undertaking with team sizes that can top well over one hundred people. If everyone on a team of one hundred had to connect with every other team member, it would require four thousand, nine hundred and fifty connections. World of Warcraft is estimated to have over a hundred and forty people on the team.^[1] If this is true, there are 9,730 connections between the team members that would need to be maintained if every team member needed to directly talk with each other.^[2]

This is too unwieldy. Real-world teams are not structured where every team member needs access to every other team member. Instead, larger teams are subdivided into groups by either discipline or project area. For instance, the artists may all talk to each other but route their communication with other disciplines through a producer. Or all of the team members working on the multiplayer portion work together while the single player teammates only communicate with their own.

This causes another problem: instead of team members being able to directly communicate with each other freely, communication has to be routed through gatekeepers such as producers or leads. If you ever played the childhood game Telephone, you know how multiple rebroadcasts can add noise to a channel:

Figure 4.3 – The Telephone Game

A fluid and, at times, highly vague concept like a game design can’t be faithfully communicated in such a manner. Teams devise artifacts that can be digitally replicated to eliminate the signal loss of the “telephone” method above. The game design document (or documents) is a tool to solve this problem.

A game design document is any method of documentation that gives instructions for building a game or feature. It is important to note that from team to team and studio to studio, game design documents can take wildly different forms and be constructed from wildly different methods. There are also common misconceptions about the form and purpose of a game design document.

Common Misconception #1: The Game Design Document is a repository of all information about a game or feature.

Game design documents are there to serve a primary purpose: to inform team members as to what they are to build. To this end, there are a number of stakeholders:

• Programmers. Because they need to build the thing.
• Artists. Because they need context to know what they are creating.
• Producers. Because they need to be able to gauge how long a feature will take.
• QA. Because they need to know what a feature looks like when it is working.
• Other designers. Because their systems need to work with the feature.
• Licensors. Because they need to ok use of their intellectual property.

To look like they are producing a lot of content, many designers fill a GDD with explanations of all of influences behind a system, backstory, design discussions or other ephemera. Here’s the rule of thumb: Unless it directly instructs a programmer or artist what exactly to make, leave it out of the GDD proper. You may relegate it to an appendix (see below) or to another document.

In some cases, it is necessary to keep a second pseudo-GDD. In cases where you have external licensors or overly involved executives, they will want to get their hands in what the team is making. In these cases, the GDD will likely be too technical for what they need. For these situations, “Design Overviews” or “Executive Summaries” are sometimes useful and are covered at the end of Part Four.

Common Misconception #2: The word in the GDD is law.

Aspiring designers who are just entering the field often hold this misconception. Game design is an iterative process: it requires experimentation and often-copious trial-and-error. Yet many game design documents are written and attitudes are hardened as if the game design document will never change. In the worst-case scenarios, programmers will print out the GDDs and build from a static conception of what the feature is.

The GDD is the formulation of an idea at a given time. The GDD’s function is to foster communication throughout a team, not to be a dictate.

Often I have heard from programmers that they don’t read game design documents. We will get into the cardinal sins that cause this attitude below but one of the reasons for this attitude is that GDDs are not kept up-to-date. If a programmer reads a GDD and then is told to make something contrary to what he or she read, she will wait to be told in the future instead of trusting that what the GDDs say. It is the designer’s job to keep documents as up-to-date as possible, no matter how tedious a job that may be.

Remember the purpose of the GDD: Unless you personally want to communicate a change in design to every member of the team, you must keep the GDD aligned to the most current design.

Common Misconception #3: There is a template to how studios create design documentation.

Often students will ask to see sample design documentation. I will show some made-up examples later in this book. Why I am hesitant to show anything at all is that every studio has its own documentation processes. The purpose of a student asking me for a sample is to copy formatting. The formatting is the least important part!

The design documentation is written specific to a particular audience. Blizzard’s design documentation for MMOs on hundred person teams is going to look quite different from Quantic Dream’s narrative-heavy design process. Who are your programmers? What do they know implicitly^[3]? You are going to write your documentation for a particular audience.

Some studios do, in fact, have massive templates for game design documentation. This can be a useful practice if there are needed sections that are commonly left out. The danger with templates, however, is that they are not updated as the team and the project change and are thus prone to overloading documentation with wasteful, empty categories. Empty sections that have to be scrolled through make it more difficult for programmers and other stakeholders to find the information they need. That is anathema to having formal game design documentation at all. Given all the other things you have to deal with when writing your design document, keep clarity as the most important goal.

GDD Creation Process

Now we will go through an example together of creating a short, concise design document. Assume we are on a small team putting together a Fantasy RPG for Facebook. The lead designer comes to you and says you need to design a crafting system for the game. How would you go about creating the documentation?

Step One – Determine Purpose, Desired Scope, Locate Connected Systems

Designers usually have lead designers or creative directors above them. From one of these folks, you must clearly determine the goals of the designs. You must find out: the purpose of the design, the scope of the design and the systems that will necessarily connect with the design.

The purpose of the design: Without knowing the purpose of the system, all you can do is copy a similar crafting system from another game. Your lead designer says: “We need a system to use the items that players receive via gifts from other players. We want it to encourage creativity and social connections.” That is a start. Interview. Ask probing questions. Really understand the motivations behind the assignment before you begin writing or prototyping.

The scope of the design: Designers have an awful tendency to over-design. What this means is that given an assignment, designers will come up with nuanced, complex systems. In isolation this is not a problem. But in aggregate, no project can sustain complexity in every system and still expect to ship on time and be understood by users. Great designers know which systems benefit from complexity and which benefit from simplicity. By identifying the scope of the feature, designers get an idea as to the depth of the system to create.

In our example, the lead designer says: “We have a lot of art time for this, so you can make it broad, but the entire game is pretty casual so keep the complexity low.” In this instance, I would probably choose to go with the “Market Standard” complexity. We will deal with the implications of this choice below.

The systems that will connect: Clearly, from the original proposal, this system will be interacting with the gifting system. In addition there may be an inventory system. Perhaps you will make salable items? What designer is in charge of the economy so you don’t flood your game’s market with free goods? Who do you need to contact?

Assure that none of these statements are contradictory. For instance, if the purpose of the design is to have a fully customizable character generator while the scope of the design is to be simple, then you will need to meet with your lead designer to find out what must give.

Step Two: Research

The scope level you come to in the previous step will help you to decide how much and what type of research you need to do. Having a wide breadth of exposure to other titles in the industry helps here. I remember working in a studio that only produced one genre of game. Many of the designers there never played games from other genres! How will you know about features that may eventually creep into your genre without exposure? What is going on in matchmaking for leagues in sports games may become relevant for real-time-strategy games.

I have often said that the best examples for growth in being a designer is to play bad games and endeavor to understand why they are bad. By identifying features that were unsuccessful, you can design around the pitfalls and mistakes of your industry brethren.

Of course, your research is not just limited to games.

Step Three: Brainstorm

We are going to discuss brainstorming and its uses in a later chapter in depth. A brainstorm is a creative meeting where an individual or a group tries to create a quantity of solutions to a problem. Based on the research you completed in Step Two, you should be well equipped to envision a number of possible solutions. See the Idea Generation chapter for the how-to of using this technique.

Step Four: Reduction

You will have a lot of possible directions to pursue after your brainstorming. It is best to sleep on them to have adequate time to think them over. When this is done, come back to the list of possible ideas. In Brainstorming, you don’t discriminate against ideas. In the Reduction step, discrimination is all you do.

Eliminate ideas that are:

• Not in line with the chosen scope
• Impossible to create
• Not effective in researched titles
• Don’t meet the purpose of the design
• Conflicts with another design in the project

Step Five: Write the Best Method Down

Now fire up a word processor and get this idea down on (digital) paper. You’ve been exposed to a large amount of research in Step Two and a large amount of ideas in Step Three. It would be easy to put your voluminous knowledge down to paper. Stop!

Remember your audience.

If you are writing for programmers (and it is likely that you are), remember that programmers will change your words into logical code. The closer the form your document is to how they think, the easier it will be for them to translate it into code that works for their system. Generally, they will like hierarchically formatted lists like:

• Player chooses a race (See RaceList.doc).

⁃          If player chooses elf, +2 speed.
⁃          If player chooses dwarf, + 2 strength.
⁃          If player chooses cow, +2 mooing.

• Player then chooses a class (See ClassList.doc).

⁃          If player chooses priest, starting skill is heal (see Skills.doc)
⁃          If player chooses paladin, starting skill is smite. If player chooses paladin, he/she cannot choose evil alignment later.
⁃          If player chooses critic, starting skill is annoy. If player chooses critic, he/she cannot choose good alignment later.

This, of course, is a generalization. There are many types of programmers and each like different styles, but I have found it to be helpful. When in doubt, ask the programmers what they like to see. They are just as afraid of you as you are of them. Generally they will tell you, “Something short and easy to read.” No one has ever said “Something thirty pages long with lots of details.”

Err on the side of brevity. Remember how I have told you that it is your duty to keep the design documents up-to-date? Which do you think is easier to update: short hierarchical bulleted-lists or vast walls of text? Always ask yourself: what can I do to make this document clearer and shorter?

References

Did you see the “See RaceList.doc” mentions in the above example? Those are references and are the most helpful technique to keep your document size small. If you find yourself copy and pasting information into multiple designs, consider separating that information out into a reference and add a hyperlink. In the above example, I could have spelled out all the races, their designs, attributes and locations in the character creation design, but is it relevant?

Appendices

What if there is some background information that is necessary or helpful to include? We don’t just throw that out, right? Absolutely not. Jesse Schell points out in The Art of Game Design that game documentation is a cure for the frailty of human knowledge. But since the programmers won’t be using that background information in scheming up how to create the feature, we don’t want it cluttering up the design document proper. Therefore, all the “bonus” material should be put at the end of the document in a footnote section or in a linked “FAQ” document. Here you have little restrictions on brevity. Anything that needs to be remembered (design battles, reasoning for certain choices, sketches that aren’t particularly informative, etc.) can be added to the appendix section/document. If you find it painful to be brief in the design document, you can let loose in this section.

Step Six: Edit and Find Edge Cases

You’ve written down the most salient feature idea and condensed that idea down to a logical list form. Great! Now there are two things you must do and it helps to do them simultaneously. Send the design out to your fellow designers and folks implementing the feature. Ask them: is this clear? Are there mistakes? Where does it break down?

An edge case is a problem that occurs only under extreme conditions. While others are reviewing your documentation, try to find edge cases in your own design. Test the extremes to see if it breaks down.

For instance, here’s a simple design:

“The player’s jumping height is equal to his strength divided by the weight of items in his/her backpack.”

Sounds reasonable. What if the weight of items in his/her backpack is zero? 18/0 means the player can jump an undefined height!

Here’s another:

“Players can put items in the “bag” item, which has twenty storage slots.”

Neat. What happens if a player puts a bag in a bag? What happens when a player tries to put a 21st item in a bag? What happens to the in-bag items when the player tries to sell the bag itself? These are all questions that will need to be answered. Since the bag-in-a-bag question is a little awkward, it would be an edge case. The others should have been thought out in the draft.

It is difficult to identify edge cases sometimes, at least more difficult than my simple examples above. The easiest way to check for edge cases is to make extreme examples of your players. What if a player has zero of something? What if he has everything? What if the maximum number of players all tried to stand on the same spot? What if a player did this action 20,000 times? What is the most illogical way the player could access the features in this design?

If you are an aspiring game designer and want to learn about what a Game Design Document is (and isn’t), how to use Powerpoint without murdering your audience and how to use Excel to answer game design questions, then perhaps you should check it out?

The problem with being a perfectionist is that every time I’d make a proof revision, there would be about fifty other things I wanted to change. So my enthusiasm for the final copy is a bit muted even though I worked super-hard on it. I’m actually quite proud of it and think it will be a great help to students. I fear if I waited until it was “done” that it would never come out. So I tell the perfectionist voice in my head that all those changes will come in the second version which is already taking form.

I’ll post some excerpts here on the blogitron shortly. I’d love to hear from anyone who orders it.

]]> http://www.hiwiller.com/2011/07/12/words-on-paper/feed/ 3 http://www.hiwiller.com/2011/07/12/words-on-paper/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/hiwiller/~3/jK6t_qXb8ys/ http://www.hiwiller.com/2011/07/06/depression/#comments Wed, 06 Jul 2011 20:12:27 +0000 Zack http://www.hiwiller.com/?p=1077 “Turning Depression into Inspiration” by Michael Todd.

The above link is a GDC Vault presentation about being a game designer while being depressed. I hope they never take it down. The presentation itself is okay in terms of organization and style but it is excellent in broaching a taboo topic. How do we as designers create joy for players when we cannot create joy for ourselves? We should be able to talk about this. How do we sell ourselves as artists when we hate ourselves? Interesting questions without straightforward answers.

For a game with an aesthetic response right there in the title, it does little to evoke fear. Day 1 Studios tries hard and I want to gently pat them on the head and say “Good effort” but there seems to be a clear delineation between “scary parts” and “shooty parts”. The “scary parts” are marked by a lack of enemies and overall creepier music. But once you realize there is no danger in the “scary parts”, then it becomes like a tame theme park haunted house. You walk around and admire the workmanship and cleverness of the designers.

But good survival horror (if that’s even the genre they look to nudge into) doesn’t give you a chance to breathe and enjoy the scenery. Or if they do, it’s only to lower your guard for when they choose to shock you in a “safe” area. About three quarters of the way through the game, they seem to start to realize this and they start throwing enemies at you in a way where you can’t camp behind cover and methodically advance. I was excited by this, but the rails came off when I realized the AI of the enemies was a bit too stupid to provide for any interesting encounters–the monsters bite at your ankles mostly so you just unload shotgun round after round at them until they go away or you die. Playtesting must have revealed that they had no clue how to balance this thing as there is a difficulty slider on the respawn screen so you can nudge it to suit your own level of flow.

I probably wouldn’t have pushed myself through the entire campaign but for periodic surfacing of some truly great tactical set pieces. About once per mission there appears an encounter where you truly have to use the environment and the weapons at your disposal cleverly to progress rather than either Ramboing or playing cover tag.

If these moments happened more often, my blood would have been pumping. Regretfully, it seems like a rogues gallery of early 00s bad design and technical decisions. Enemies will pop in from nowhere. Doors lock behind you constantly to load further parts of the level (I just blew up a helicopter with this surface-to-air missile, yet I can’t open this door that just automatically closed behind me?). Invisible walls block progress where you aren’t “allowed” to go yet. Enemies clip through closed doors. Scripted events trigger too early meaning you don’t actually get to see the helicopter crash or the monster come through. Even enemies that are invincible because they are part of scripted events and can’t be killed until you walk past the line that triggers the event.

Inexplicably, these bugs and mistakes are paired next to excellent looking levels with masterful indirect control. You almost always know which way to go and it is usually because of a well-placed light or other non-obvious marker. Of course, a lot of the cool-looking things were in Half-Life 2, seven years ago but games can’t all be Half-Life 2.

You’ll get sick of the same monsters appearing over and over again by game’s end. One of the best enemies is some sort of Dr. Manhattan-esque blue guy who can create portals and walk through walls. These guys can set up some pretty good moments, but they don’t go far enough. In fights with them, you should always be vulnerable next to walls as they can just teleport behind you and grab you. This would make being out in the open the safest place, a direct reversal from the dynamics set up in the rest of the game.

The story is pretty nonsensical, but I’ll admit I didn’t play the first two iterations. For some reason, they stick with the silent protagonist (nee Gordon Freeman) but they place him in cutscenes where it would be natural for him to offer some sort of response. Even a nod or a grunt. Instead, he looks stone faced at whoever is talking to him. I guess I shouldn’t ask for much when the character doesn’t even have a real name. The game hints on a theme of mistakes and favorite sons but really doesn’t develop on either. One mechanic at the end of the game takes it into consideration as which brother you played throughout the game, but since they don’t really tell you that, you will probably have the Point Man ending.

There’s an exploitative points system that gets you to do stupid things like hiding in cover when no one is around to gain points. When you complete levels you unlock the ability to play through the game as the evil brother Fettel who can possess enemies and make them fight each other. This is much more interesting than silent commando protagonist! But since it is just an unlock option, few will play that way. Why not have made Fettel levels and Point Man levels where you can set up interesting pieces with your possession abilities? I almost wrote something about Fettel’s voice acting being almost as bad as Psycho Mantis from Metal Gear Solid, but looking at his biography it turns out he was Vulcan Raven in that series, so I understand perfectly.

The multiplayer shows signs of being compelling, eschewing the normal deathmatch/ctf types for some objectives that are a little more interesting. I didn’t dive too deep into it, but there were some mechanics I really liked in there. One mode has you possessing NPC enemy players and battling NPCs possessed by other real players. That’s clever. One mode has you running from an ever encroaching wall of badness, which strangely reminded me of a minigame from Fuzion Frenzy. Something tells me co-op would be a blast, but I’m so tired of the game after going through the single player. If the game was primarily about Fettel or provided a separate co-op campaign, you’d see it jump a few points in my book.

Overall though, it is a game about guns and little else. If you are tired of gun games like I have been lately, then this won’t do anything to change your view of the hollowness of gun games. If it was released in the crowded Christmas season, it would have been instantly forgotten. Luckily WB Games is smarter than that. There are plenty of things to like, but they are surrounded by frustrating same-y filler. Unless you are willing to forgive a lot of sins, you will be more distracted by FEAR 3 than drawn into its world.

Is this from Uncharted 2 or Fear 3 or Call of Duty 6?

Oh! I almost forgot! There is a level that takes place completely within a near future Costco!