NORTHWAY GamesDesigning Games on the Road

Hey, I’m Alan, Colin’s brother. I just finished a game I was working on and I wanted to share some thoughts I had while working on it. Colin and Sarah were nice enough to let me post on their blog (hey it’s called Northway Games, and I am a card carrying Northway).

I just spent the last nine months developing my first game. It’s a physics puzzler that, simply put, requires you to set bombs in order to blow up objects in a crafty manner. I call it BombFace.

Three games I’ve played or re-played recently got me thinking about Control.

The Stanly Parable

Dear Esther

and Proteus

These games all say something different about Control aka autonomy aka player agency aka whatever you want to call it.

Every game lets you do different things. Some games are very opinionated about what you do, others less so. These three games all have something different but interesting to say about the Control they give you.

It’s easy to love The Stanley Parable because it is satire. Satire about the very idea of player agency in games. The Stanley Parable says your Control is an illusion. Whatever you do, wherever you go, the developer had to go there first or the place wouldn’t exist. The nature of code means games have to be meticulously authored. At best games offer you a convincing lie.

Into the world of the meticulously authored steps Dear Esther. Dear Esther makes no attempt to lie. Autonomy is not what Dear Esther is doing. It remove any meaningful Control from the game entirely. But by removing Control it gets to do something things other games don’t get to do. It gets to tell a linear story inside the gameplay. Dear Esther doesn’t have to be satisfied with tacked-on cutscenes or throw-away lines explaining some superfluous plot. The story melts into the visuals and the sound because there are no nasty choices to distract you from the pure sensory experience.

I personally don’t like Dear Esther as much as the other two games. I spent a lot of my playthrough chafing against my lack of Control. But it successfully touches people and I love that it does.

Proteus, on the other hand, is all about player agency. Proteus has very little interest in leading you by the nose. Little interest in showing you the best parts of its island realm. Little interest in ensuring an engaging experience. By letting go of the reigns it gets to do some things that other games don’t get to do. It gets to be pleasant place to be. With no real goal, no real systems to understand, and no story to tell it’s up to you to find something to do. It’s up to you to decide what will be fun or interesting. How much you want to explore, when you want to move on. I really like having all the power like this and Proteus provides an interesting enough world to reward the simple act of exploration.

Choice and Control is what video games do that other mediums don’t. All three  of these games use this unique power in unusual ways. Proteus revels in the simple fact of it and Dear Esther harnesses it to deepen its tale, but The Stanley Parable certainly gets the last laugh.

 

Yes, you can now get Rebuild for your Droid Nexus Galaxy Razr Epic Maxx, or whatever you call that thing! But first, an update:

Rebuild’s doing way better than expected on the BlackBerry PlayBook. This week it’s featured and in their top paid games – up there with three versions of Angry Birds (or is it 4 now?). It’s gotten mentions on crackberry.com, blackberrycool.com, and playbookdaily.com.

All of this is so awesome, because the port took zero effort… and I’m rather fond of my new PlayBook.

But even with all this extravaganza, my sales there are just barely matching the current iPad/iPhone sales (where Rebuild is #500 in games, #50 in strategy with a super-minor feature in iTunes – bet you can’t find it). So being a relative nobody on iOS == stardom on the PlayBook? Bummer for RiM, but I’m just so happy to be loved that I’d rather not dwell on that.

Up next: the terrifying Android marketplace. I’d been avoiding Android because of my instinctive fear of all those different devices. Despite all my laboring over the iOS version, Rebuild is still a little sluggish and crashy on the iPad 1 and iPhone 3GS. There are much less powerful Android phones out there and no easy way to target only the ones with enough RAM and CPU/GPU power to run Rebuild smoothly (although I’ve tried using compatible-screens). So it is with trepidation that I announce Rebuild on Google Play.

But apparently that’s not enough. I knew the hardware base was fractured, but I didn’t realize the app market itself was also fractured. There must be 100 different sites that sell Android apps, and each one wants me to upload my binary to them along with screenshots and promo art in different arbitrary dimensions. Many of the Android “review” sites either require you to sell through their store, or charge $200 for a review. Am I really seeing this right?

I’ve submitted to Amazon so I can get it on the Kindle Fire (although for $200 the PlayBook is a massively better hardware deal). But I’m not sure I have the stomach for all these other stores. Have I been naive to only buy apps through Google? Android users – where do you get your games?

Jordan Fehr is Joining the Incredipede team as the game’s sound designer. I’m a big fan of his work. He’s done a great job on other games like Super Meat Boy, Snapshot, Jamestown and others.

He asked me to describe my vision for the game. Which I haven’t really articulated here so I thought I’d share my response:

If you haven’t watched my Sense of Wonder Night presentation start there. I talk about the birth of the game. At its heart it’s about life and the wonder of the variety of life.

That’s why it’s set somewhere between the age of discovery in the 1600s and the Victorian era of the 1850s.

That was a time when the world was still open and unfound. When exotic beasts and men existed in rumor and sketch. Imagine the feeling of possibility. Imagine what you could believe.

The gameplay is about raw creation. The goals and levels only exist to goad you into creating. The point is to make something that you didn’t know existed. To delight yourself at your own creativity and ingenuity.

That raw creativity is wrapped in the (metaphorical) language of nature, life, and exploration to give it vitality. Why fiddle with nuts and gears and bolts when you can pull at the wet strings of life?

Colin

Hello to you sirs and madames. I would like to introduce you to a talented young man by the name of Thomas Shahan.

I found Thomas through a lucky turn of chance while I was perusing Wikipedia.

I was looking up jumping spiders while we were  in the Philippines because we had a lot of beautiful spiders running around. His astounding Phidippus Mystaceus picture caught my eye and I absent-mindedly decided to find out who had taken it. That brought me to ThomasShahan.com.

I always wanted Incredipede to look like a Victorian illustration. While I was working on the game in Costa Rica I spent hours poring over old illustrated texts of botanists who had traveled to far off corners of the world.

My favorite is Berthe Hoola van Nooten who traveled through Java and Surinam in the late 1800′s. Her work was lavish and colourful and her write-ups included rich details about how locals used the plants. She instilled the illustrations with a sense of the wider world. I can’t imagine how exciting it must have been to read her book in 1880.

I was so taken with her work that originally Incredipede was in the form of a book. Each level had text on one side and a level on the other.

So it was in this context that I discovered Th0mas’ illustrations.

Thomas’ woodblock cuts harken back to an earlier era than I was focused on. But his absolute reveling in the squishy fecundity of nature amazed me! His work has such a sense of place. It’s so disturbingly fascinating.

I sent him an email asking if he was free and possibly interested in working on a video game. It turns out he was just finishing art school and was interested. I sent him a screenshot of the game and he sent me a mock-up of the screenshot as it might appear with his art. I was blown away by the result.

It turns out he’s also a pretty big video game nerd. When we started corrosponding he sent me a link to an old Genesis shooter called Bio-Hazard Battle which has a nice organic feel. I’ve also seen him go toe to toe with Alex Neuse in an Atari nostalgia-off. Which makes no real sense since Thomas is way too young to have played any Atari games.

A few weeks ago Thomas came out to San Francisco where Sarah and I are staying and we spent a solid week on the game together (although we did find time to go spider hunting in Golden Gate Park).

So far he’s been doing an amazing job. I put together a secret game-play video and showed it around GDC and people went a little nuts for it.

I’ll begin showing off his work in future posts. I don’t want to show you everything at once for fear of blowing your mind out through the top of your skull.

 

Last week was my first GDC as an indie developer, and hoh boy were those goodtimes!

I helped Colin present in a talk about failure (Incredipede was the happy ending), and co-demoed Steph Thirion’s game Faraway in the Independent Games Festival. During the awards ceremony they gave us all BlackBerry PlayBooks, so I now have little excuse not to port Rebuild to it.

I sat down to get it running today and spent far too long stepping through RiM’s convoluted developer security setup, which took me even longer than Apple’s similarly obtuse system. There are several tutorials out there but some were out of date or assume you have Flash Builder (I use FlashDevelop). So as of March 2012, here’s what you do to get your SWF running as an app on your PlayBook:

Step 1: Request a CSJ code signing key from BlackBerry.com (takes a couple hours).

Step 2: Get the Flex SDK, AIR SDK, and BlackBerry AIR SDK. I had trouble with Flex4.6 + Air3.2 so I used Flex4.5 with Air 3.1.

Step 3: Start dev mode on your PlayBook in Options > Security > Development Mode.

Step 4: Edit & execute the following to install the debug token on your PlayBook (ten steps and five different passwords, seriously?):

@echo off

:: BlackBerry development token
:: More information:
:: https://bdsc.webapps.blackberry.com/air/documentation/ww_air_testing/Create_a_debug_token_CMD_ms_1968147_11.html
:: http://www.hsharma.com/tutorials/10-easy-steps-to-package-and-sign-air-apps-for-playbook/
:: http://docs.blackberry.com/en/developers/deliverables/27280/Running_unsigned_apps_debug_tokens_1585072_11.jsp
:: http://openbbnews.wordpress.com/2011/11/16/installing-a-debug-token/
:: http://www.mellisdesigns.com/blog/?p=37

:: Path to Blackberry SDK
set PATH=%PATH%;C:\Program Files (x86)\Research in Motion\blackberry-tablet-sdk-2.0.0\bin

:: Path to Java
set PATH=%PATH%;C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre6\bin

echo First get CSJ from https://bdsc.webapps.blackberry.com/air/signingkeys
echo And start dev mode on PlayBook in Options > Security > Development Mode

:: begin setup
call blackberry-signer -csksetup -cskpass [YOUR_PASSWORD]

:: register CSJ locally
call blackberry-signer -register -csjpin [YOUR_PASSWORD] -cskpass [YOUR_PASSWORD] client-PBDT-[XXXXXXXXXX].csj

:: create p12 file
call blackberry-keytool -genkeypair -keystore author.p12 -storepass [YOUR_PASSWORD] -dname "cn=YOUR_NAME" -alias author

:: register device against CSJ
call blackberry-debugtokenrequest -register -csjpin [YOUR_DEVICE_ID] -storepass [YOUR_PASSWORD] client-PBDT-[XXXXXXXXXX].csj

:: later calls expect the p12 here for some reason
call copy author.p12 "C:\Users\USER_NAME\AppData\Local\Research In Motion\author.p12"

:: create the debug token BAR
call blackberry-debugtokenrequest -storepass [YOUR_PASSWORD] -devicepin [YOUR_DEVICE_ID] debug_token.bar

:: sign bar with RIM (remote)
call blackberry-signer -verbose -cskpass [YOUR_PASSWORD] -keystore author.p12 -storepass [YOUR_PASSWORD] debug_token.bar PBDT

:: sign bar with developer (local)
call blackberry-signer -keystore author.p12 -storepass [YOUR_PASSWORD] debug_token.bar author

:: upload debug token to playbook (must be running in debug mode at this address & password)
call blackberry-deploy -installDebugToken debug_token.bar -device [DEVICE_IP_ADDRESS] -password [YOUR_PASSWORD]

:: echo important metadata
echo Add the following authorId to bar-descriptor.xml
call blackberry-airpackager -listManifest debug_token.bar

pause

Step 5: Download this FlashDevelop project adapted from Studio Chris’ BlackBerry template, and edit airplaybook.as3proj and airplaybookConfig.xml to point to your SDK locations.

Step 6: From FlashDevelop, hit F5 to build your SWF and test it locally using ADL.

Step 7: Edit & execute the following to package and install the app:

@echo off
:: AIR application packaging
:: More information:
:: http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/html/help.html?content=CommandLineTools_5.html#1035959
:: http://www.hsharma.com/tutorials/10-easy-steps-to-package-and-sign-air-apps-for-playbook/

:: Path to Flex + AIR SDK
set PATH=%PATH%;C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Flex451AIR31\bin

:: Path to Blackberry
set PATH=%PATH%;C:\Program Files (x86)\Research in Motion\blackberry-tablet-sdk-2.0.0\bin

:: Path to Java
set PATH=%PATH%;C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre6\bin

:: package swf and assets into a bar then install to device and run the app
call blackberry-airpackager -package airplaybook.bar -installApp -launchApp application.xml bar-descriptor.xml airplaybook.swf blackberry-tablet-icon.png landscape-splash.png portrait-splash.png -devMode -device [YOUR_DEVICE_IP] -password [YOUR_PASSWORD]

pause

If all goes well, you should see Main.as (a red square on a black background) appear on your BlackBerry. Chances are good that some parts of the debug token installation aren’t necessary but it got the job done.

Rebuild actually ran the first time, and quite well which was an unexpected surprise. Now I need to adjust the fonts and aspect ratio, then go through what promises to be another certification nightmare to package it for sale in the BlackBerry App World. It’ll probably take two or three days total, so no great loss if it bombs.

Rebuild should be out for the PlayBook by the end of the month!

I personally don’t like to gamble. I don’t like slot machines or roulette. The decisions you make are too inconsequential.

Have you ever looked at the payout odds for roulette? No matter how you bet your percentage return is always the same. On average you’re going to lose 5 cents for every dollar you bet. It’s true that there are a lot of options in roulette. A lot of choices to make. But none of them have any impact on the game. You’re always going to lose about 5 cents for every dollar you bet.

Slot machines are the same. You can decide how much you want to bet and you can decide how many “lines” you want to bet but all your doing is deciding how quickly or slowly you lose your money. Even then, casinos tend to doctor the odds so that lower-cost slots have a worse payout in an attempt to even out the money-lost-per-hour of all slot machines.

So in slots, roulette, and other casino games it’s impossible to make a choice that impacts the game.

If you are a game author like me, shit like this makes you really curious. It’s hard to make a good video game, lots and lots of us have tried and failed. But here is a simple set of games where players literally make no decisions yet sit enraptured by them. The world wide gambling market is worth over 300 billion dollars while the videogame market is worth less than 70. Amazingly, the majority of that 300 billion dollars comes from people playing games where their decisions have no impact on the game.

But every pillar of game design that I respect is fundamentally rooted in player choice. So why the hell are all these people deciding to give money to casinos?

So far my only answer has been cash payouts. Yeah, slot machines are pretty simple skinner boxes. But even in a skinner box you need to give the pigeon something they care about. If you awarded the pigeon “points” for hitting a button then it would lose interest pretty fast. The cost of hitting the bar dwarfs the potential gain of the payout.

So it has been with slot machines. Downloadable slot machine games have been around for as long as games. They never really went anywhere because with no cash reward and no interesting choices the skinner box collapses. Until now. Ladies and gentlemen I would like to present to you, Slotomania:

Slotomania and, ridiculously, Slotomania HD are both on the iPad top grossing apps chart. That means people are dropping a lot of money into a slot machine with no payout. The skinner box has no clothes but it doesn’t seem to matter.

How did Slotomania manage to turn the Skinner Box back on? Well check out the bar at the top of that Screen shot. Can you guess what that is?

That’s an xp bar. You can level this slot machine. When you level you get access to more games (well, the same game reskinned) and you raise your minimum bet. You gain xp purely by spending credits. The more credits you gamble the more you level. Of course you run out of credits about two and a half games in so the only way to unlock more is by paying real money.

I also think they trade off the associations that casino gamblers already have with slot machines. By mimicking casino slots they can hijack the Pavlovian response people have already built up around traditional slots.

This is genius, evil, and Slotomania has been making money off of it on iPad and facebook for two years. They had been refining their strategy and becoming more and more profitable until, shock, last year Ceaser’s bought them and they really started to make money.

It’s these kind of brain hacks that make me really uncomfortable. Ceaser’s and Slotomania basically earn their money from failures in the human mind. They can compel us to play their shitty games and they can compel us to pay them money to do it. They don’t offer us a system to master or anything you might define as “fun” in return. They just reach into our brain and make us dance to their tune.

Gambling and slot machines have historically, and sensibly, been deemed bad for society and often made illegal. Why Apple has decided to let them loose on its walled garden is beyond me. They’re gambling that the government isn’t going to step in and try to put things in order. If they lose that bet then the laws will be broad and ham fisted and we’re all going to wish they’d just stayed the fuck out of the casino.

I just released the version 2.0 update to Rebuild iOS, which adds support for iPhone 3GS/4/4S and iPod Touch 3&4. To celebrate, Rebuild is also on sale for 99 cents through the end of this weekend!

I just got new business cards made up for GDC. This one is my favorite.

I hope this update also addresses some of the stability issues that Rebuild has been having on the iPad 1. Did you realize an iPhone 4 has twice as much memory as the iPad 1? So it was easier than I’d expected to accommodate iPhones, and obviously I should have done this earlier. I can’t get enough of how nice the cartoony map graphics look on that double-density display.

Today Richard Edwards’ game  Pineapple Smash Crew was launched on Steam and Desura and it’s totaly awesome! I was lucky enough to play it before its release and I’d like to review what I think makes it such a great game.

At its heart Pineapple Smash Crew is about managing Chaos. It is a whirling, exploding, ballet where you are constantly trying to bring order in the face of total bedlam. I think as a species we value simplicity and order so it’s a strong theme.

Managing chaos is also a powerful game mechanic because:

1. pummeling it into order is fun
2. while living in the chaos we are constantly being presented with new situations and small puzzles to solve

Games are about making decisions. Every moment you play there are good moves to make and bad moves to make. You succeed by choosing the good moves. In this way every game is a puzzle game. Pineapple Smash Crew is a puzzle game with very quick turns.

In all games the fun comes from improving. From learning to play the game better. We do this by recognising situations we’ve been in before and growing a catalog of good moves which fit that situation. In some games (especially old arcade games) we play the same level over and over. This makes it easy to recognise situations because we see them in the same order every time. Every enemy or jump is a small puzzle that it’s up to us to solve. Then we have to remember the solution and apply each one in order to beat the level. This is how you play a hard Mario or Mega Man level.

These games have very little chaos in them. Because you can predict what’s coming you rarely have to improvise on the fly. Pineapple Smash Crew is different, it’s all about improvisation. In Pineapple you still have to build a catalog of situations, puzzles, and possible solutions to them. But in Pineapple you have to be more fluid in matching puzzles to solutions because you will never see exactly the same puzzle twice. Luckily our brains are really good at this. Just like we can recognise the letter “A” in many fonts we can recognise fundamentally simmilar gameplay situations.

The more we play the more situations we can recognise and the more chaos we can endure. This is essentially what a difficulty curve is. It’s an attempt to present you with slight variations on puzzles you’ve already solved and require you to solve them more precisely and efficiently.

Rich has done a great job of orchestrating this dance between order and chaos. You wont be thinking about cataloguing situations or slight variations, that all goes on in the subconscious. You’ll just be thinking “Oh god where is the next health pickup” and “Fuck Yeah!” when you blow the hell out of six guys with one well aimed rocket.

It was also a great year for us! Colin and I hopped around the world again with nothing but our laptops, meeting new friends and working on our respective games. I released Rebuild 1 in February from Costa Rica, Rebuild 2 in October from Japan, and Rebuild Mobile in November from the Philippines. The games have done well enough that we can afford to keep this travel thing up for another year.

Rebuild recently won the Best of 2011 award for Simulation/Strategy from JayIsGames, my favorite casual games review site. Between that, placing in the Kongregate top ten all year, and being called “unputdownable” by Touch Arcade, Rebuild has totally exceeded any expectations I had when I wrote the first version one weekend at my in-law’s house. Thanks to everyone who’s encouraged me to keep improving the series!

Soon I’ll be releasing Rebuild for iPhone/iPod touch, to complete my domination of the iOS market. Then it’s finally time to take a break from the brain nomming cretins (god love ‘em) and work on Incredipede with Colin. Which BTW is going to look amazing!