JD Kilby

Abandoning Virtual Goods (or Thank You For Your Purchase, I'll Be Taking It Back Now)

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 16:41:00 -0800

There's a stink currently going on in the forums for Battlefield Play4Free. While I won't pretend to understand the difference between a "Veteran Weapon" and a "Legacy Attachment" (probably similar to the diffrence between the NES and ROB), the bottom-line is that users paid for a virtual good to give them an in-game advantage and are having it replaced with a different type of good that gives them a not quite as big in-game advantage.

This demonstrates one of the things that has always bothered me about microtranscations for multiplayer games. When the game shuts down or changes to decrease the usefulness of virtual goods, what happens to the users who spent money on all those virtual goods? Do they get a refund? Or do they lose their investment?

The key is that the user has to feel like he got his money's worth from purchasing a virtual good. For more permanent items such as avatar clothing or in-game weapons, this has to come from how much the player used the item - in other words, time. In this case, the players didn't have the weapons for very long. While this was done for competitive balance reasons, many of the players who purchased the item are understandbly upset and have lost the trust in the game that made them want to purchase the items in the first place.

The moral of the story here is that a child won't be too upset if you take away a toy it purchased with its allowance if it no longer plays with the toy, but it will get upset if you take away a toy it loves or just purchased. Then again, why is anyone putting themselves in a position to take away a child's toy in the first place?

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Pulling The Game Out of The Gamification

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 00:21:32 -0800

I was listening to some recent episodes of This Americn Life when I discovered an episode filled with stories centered around amusement parks. As someone whose devotion to roller coasters as a teenager included riding one for thirty minutes without getting up out of my seat, my curiousity was... let's just say "piqued" since that's such a great word.

Piqued. Sorry, I can't help myself.

It turned out the episode focused a lot on amusement park games. Of particular note is the tale of Cole Lindbergh, the manager for all the carnival-style games at Worlds of Fun in Kansas City, Missouri. Much of the story centered around his management style, a style that the piece astutely observes is similar to Michael Scott's style on The Office. One of his tactics is competition; namely, he has the workers at the different games compete to see which one can earn the most money.

I don't find this strategy effective in of itself. In one of my previous jobs, my coworkers and I were awarded the chance to win prizes for higher performance. Most of us saw through that and demanded actual benefits for stellar performance (hint: we wanted something green... and it wasn't a $10 Starbucks gift card).

The important part of these competitions is what they inspire Cole and his crew to do. The employees started devising tactics that would get their games to the top of the money earner list. Some strategies were as simple as rigging the game so that the players would win a bit more often. Other tactics involved wearing a banana suit. If that's not the definition of war, then the military should probably be glad I never responded to any of the recruiting letters they mailed me.

It's not just the employees are directly involved in figuring out how to win. Cole actively encourages his employees, telling them when something isn't working right. Cole Lindbergh is a good game designer who provides his players with well-designed achievements.

<Phoenix Wright>OBJECTION!</Phoneix Wright>

What? It should be obvious I wasn't just talking about effective management strategies! This story reminded me of the whole "good achievement versus bad achievement" debate. The way I see it, "bad achievements" are the ones that only exist to provide incentive to keep playing the game through grinding. I'm talking about the ridiculous "level up all the classes to 75" achievements in Final Fantasy XI or the "get 200 kills in multiplayer on 50 different days" achievement in Unreal Tournament 3. While I'm guilty of attempting the last one back when I was actually competing with friends to get a high Gamerscore, I can't say I look back on attempting to earn that achievement with any fondness.

On the other hand, I do recall my recent attempt to try completing Mirror's Edge without using a gun to obtain the "Pacifist" achievement. I can even recall the exact place in one of the later levels where I was starting to regret making this attempt. With a little bit of practice and cleverness, I managed to complete the level en route to earning a whopping 80 Gamerscore points (hmm... maybe the Starbucks gift card wasn't such a bad reward after all). The important thing is that a "good achievement" like that one encourages the player to play the game in a new way. That's what Cole is doing with his competitions. He's not just dangling a carrot on a stick - he's creating new and interesting ways of obtaining that carrot.

All of this seems timely given the small Twitter debate (or as I just decided to start calling it, Twitbate) started by Jason Caffoe's analysis of Mafia Wars creator and current Zynga employee Roger Dickey's monetization strategies. Many of Dickey's tips are the strategies that push games more toward being activity-inducing reward machines than fun experiences.

So c'mon devs: reward players for doing cool things, not grinding. Unless the game is a skateboarding game. In that case, grinding is cool.

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Flash Games on Android Devices: The Adventure Begins

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 20:35:00 -0800

During Black Friday, I picked up an ASUS Eee Pad Transformer (yes, I know a new one is coming soon, but it was hard to pass up at the price). I've always been curious about creating games for Android and touch screen devices, but I haven't had the time to learn the tools and process needed to do so.

It turns out it's not difficult at all to get a Flash game up-and-running on an Android device using freely available tools. In fact, Joseph O'Connor has a wonderful set of video tutorials on how to do just that.

I would have gotten my test project up-and-running within an hour if not for a roadblock I hit when packaging the Air app. I got the following error while running the PackageAPK.bat file:

Could not generate timestamp: handshake alert: unrecognized_name

After scouring the web for an explanation of this issue, it appears this has something to do with a change made in Java 7. It works perfectly fine in Java 6. To fix this, you have to edit the adt.bat (the file the PackageAPK.bat file calls to do the grunt work) to use Java 6. To do this:

Find the directory you copied over the latest Adobe Air SDK into for FlashDevelop (this should be the Tools\flexsdk in your FlashDevelop directory).
Open the bin folder.
Open adt.bat as an Administrator in Notepad or your text editor of choice.
Replace @java with the direct link to java.exe in Java 6 directory. For Windows 7 64-bit users, this is probably "C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre6\bin\java". For other Windows users, this is probably "C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\bin\java". In either case, make sure to include the quotes.

Do that before packaging the app and everything should work great.

Next up: making my first-ever game for touchscreens.

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Player, Tell Me a Story

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 15:22:00 -0700

Since I purchased my Android phone, Game Dev Story ( iTunes | Android ) has been staring me down every time I browse the Android Market. Over the weekend, I was stuck in a car for a long road trip. I was looking for something new to play on my phone when I saw that Game Dev Story was on sale for $2.50. I finally gave in - I love game development, I love simulation games, I'm not going anywhere for the next five hours - I purchased the game.

It turned out to be a great decision. I ended up playing the game not only in the car, but anytime I had an idle moment to myself during the weekend. While the late phases of the game leave a bit to be desired (it eventually runs out of new things to offer as a reward for player progression), it does a fantastic job giving context to a series of repetitive decisions made based on nothing more than a handful of numbers and meters. This context rings especially true for those who are familiar with the game development process and the last thirty years of console game history.

Its greatest achievement is what the title suggests: it is a game dev story. When the player decides to create a new game, the player chooses the genre, the theme, and what parts of the game to emphasize in development. For instance, players can create a Gran Turismo knock-off by choosing the Racing genre, a Motorsport theme, and decreasing points assigned to Cuteness and increasing points assigned to Realism. At the end of development, players name the game and it is shipped. Players then get a Famitsu-style review followed by real-time sales data. During this process, it abstracts the actual content of the game. Players never see screenshots of the gameplay or see comments about the game beyond "the graphics are really good" or "this game is a lot of fun." Like painting mental pictures when reading a book, the player must imagine what it must be like to play the created game. When the player invests enough time into Game Dev Story to have a library of titles developed by the fictional company, the player has created a mental story with events such as the struggles to have a steady bankroll, attempts at game innovation gone awry, and the first time a game sold one million copies. When a video game is able to convince a player to make lengthy series of laborious decisions in order to construct a memorable, highly-personalized narrative on-the-fly... well, that's when the magic happens.

In the push to create game worlds with as much detail as possible, it's easy to forget that the player is often the best storyteller of all.

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My Blog is on the Move

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 19:30:00 -0700

Once again, I'm making a change to my website. In the last decade I've been blogging, I've used Blogger, Wordpress, and (most recently) Tumblr. Now I'm giving Posterous a shot. I'm actually replacing my entire website with Posterous. Let's see how this turns out!

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