Author: Colin Northway

  • Incredipede

    Anouncing Incredipede!

     

    Sort of. Not really.

     

    The game I’ve been working on for the last six months is going to be shown at the Sense of Wonder Night at the Tokyo Game Show! This will be the first public unveiling of Incredipede. Currently only a few friends and family have played it.

    In keeping with this non-announcement there is no trailer, no screenshots, and no description of the game.

    Stay tuned though. All will be made clear on Friday September 16th at SOWN! We’re flying to Tokyo!

    In the mean-time. Contemplate this:

  • In Defense of Hating Cloners

    I, like many of my Indie brethren, hate Cloners. I honestly believed that this would not be a controversial opinion but I was wrong. A surprising number of people think that clones are a-o.k. Their arguments for thinking cloned are a-o.k. are oft repeated. Whenever someone writes an article about shitty cloners cloning some game the same arguments tend to crop up. Since I’ve heard them so many times I figured I would respond to all of them in one place. Maybe this way I’ll stop being tempted to wade in to every hundred comment debate-wasteland on cloning.

    If you don’t know what cloning is or want a primer you can read Sarah’s post on the subject. It has some great specific examples.

    Rebuild vs Chinese clone Rebuild
    Rebuild vs Chinese clone Rebuild

    Arguments for cloning:

     

    1: Everything is a Clone!

    Here is the big one. This is the most commonly used argument that clones are fine. It is simple. The argument is that game development is equivalent to cloning. Many of the great games in history are simply clones of something else. Some of the most popular examples are: Doom = Heretic = Rise of the Triad, Dune 2 = Warcraft, Infiniminer = Minecraft.

    The problem with this argument is: no they aren’t! All of those games have significant changes to their game design. Maybe you’ve never actually played these games? Maybe time has made you forget how different they are from eachother, but they are not clones! They are similar, but not clones! But ha! Where do you draw the line between similar and clone? Well that’s argument number 2.

    2: It’s a Fuzzy Line So There’s No Such Thing

    Where is the line between clone and honest iterative improvement? I don’t know precisely where the line is. I can’t mathematically define it. I can’t write down a definition of the line. But that doesn’t really matter because so many clones are way over the line. I don’t have to know exactly where the line is to know that a lot of these horrible clones are on the wrong side of it. They are so aggressively cloney they never even imagined there was a line to consider. I can see arguing about whether a specific example is or isn’t over the line. But I can’t understand arguing that the line doesn’t exist because it’s fuzzy.

    FarmTown vs FarmVille
    FarmTown vs FarmVille

    3: We’re Going to be Sued Into Oblivion!

    Many of us are not calling for new laws. Our societies haven’t really figured out how to protect intellectual property. It’s a hard problem and the Indie game community doesn’t have anywhere near the required heft to make laws happen anyway. So since laws aren’t going to happen there’s no reason to worry about that dark dystopian future. But that doesn’t mean cloning isn’t reprehensible. Just because something is legal doesn’t make it moral (I’m sure no one is going to argue with me on that point).

    4: You Deserved to get Cloned

    If someone can write your game better than you or serve a market you aren’t serving then good for them. You deserve to get cloned.

    We’re working on it dude! We’re trying to get our iPhone versions out but it takes some time. Especially since, unlike the cloners, we have to babysit the original release and might have to assemble a small team to make the new version. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. The cloners strength is getting something shipped. Our strength is inventing something elegant and fun. You can’t let us starve or you will lose your source of elegant and fun.

    Desktop Dungeons vs League of Epic Heroes
    Desktop Dungeons vs League of Epic Heroes

    5. Game Design Has No Value

    So here’s the one that really gets me. This one feels like people spitting in my face. It often comes out as “they changed the graphics so it’s fine” or “it’s more polished so they deserved it”. I love game design. I’m writing a game right now that I am in love with. It’s new, it’s crazy, it’s fun (hopefully!). I spent two years prototyping stuff  before I had this idea. I have since spent nine months working on it and a lot of that time has been spent trying to design it. I think about game design obsessively. I have done major rewrite after major rewrite to try to discover how to make this game work. I theorise, I code, I playtest, I start over. It is really really hard to design a fun new game.

    I think part of why people think it’s easy is because a good game is (ideally) simple and elegent. Since most people have never tried to design a game they don’t really know what’s involved. You will hear the phrase “the best ideas are the simple ones aren’t they?” and that’s true. But what that phrase doesn’t capture is the immense amount of work it takes to chisel a horrible lump of granite into something simple and elegent.

    If you think it’s o.k. for someone to lift 2 years of my work, slap a panda on it, and beat me to the iPhone then you are a massive dick.

    Fantastic Contraption vs Magnificent Gizmos & Gadgets
    Fantastic Contraption vs Magnificent Gizmos & Gadgets

    6. It’s Everywhere and There’s No Way to Stop It

    It is everywhere and it always has been. Dirty damned cloners have always existed. But that doesn’t mean we can’t have an effect. If everyone in the world hated cloners then there would be fewer clones. People tend to avoid taking jobs that will make them seem like assholes to their peers. People don’t tend to buy things that morally outrage them. If we just keep stating our case reasonably and passionately we can make a difference to the culture of games. The only thing you hear more than “cloners will always exist” is “video games are a young medium”.

  • Rebuild Vancouver

    I am currently playtesting Rebuild 2 for difficulty. I decided to write up a first-person account of one of my games and post it for your amusement. Note that I am no writer so this is essentially just bad fanfiction. Although it _is_ fanfiction for an unreleased game. It was a pretty intense three hour playthrough so the original write-up was pretty long. Sarah cut it down for me but if you are a particular fan of  tortured prose you can read the un-cut-down version here.

    Also, minor spoiler alert.

     

    I remember when this city wasn’t a smoking terror-scape. I remember when it was the city of glass, the most beautiful city in the world. When you could sip an espresso or a pint of beer by the water without some brain-hungry Zed trying to liberate your frontal lobes. This is Vancouver damn it! And it’s where we start again!

    A few fellow survivors and I walled up a few blocks of the city and I knew there was an old science-lab a few blocks away. My plan was to rally all the downtrodden, scared stragglers to my banner and fight back against the zombie hordes.

    As our struggling fort started to grow, an itinerant gambler stopped by to gamble for food. I couldn’t help myself, I was blinded by hunger and played with what little we had. Fortunately I was lucky with the dice and nearly doubled our meagre supply of rations and won a kitten to boot! I taught the kitten to ride on my shoulder and Mooch became very useful for recruiting survivors to my cause.

    We were growing fast, and having trouble scavenging enough food from the surrounding grocers and 8-12 marts to feed everyone. I met an honest to god researcher named Rob earlier and he was keen to get to work. I set him on rigging up a radio to find more science minded people.

    One day, while most of us were away scavenging the ruined city for sustenance, the zombies got into the science-lab. Jimbob Foster and “Faraway” Boyle were first to the scene. They acted bravely but Jimbob was overcome and eaten alive. “Faraway” was injured trying to fend them off with a Bunsen burner and sent to recuperate in an old hospital.

    Heroic efforts to gather food farther and farther from the fort were keeping us alive. We were also bringing back some pretty interesting stuff from those missions. Julia Jenkins brought back a sub-machine gun from an old pawn shop, and later found herself a shotgun.

    It took nearly a week to bring the lab back under control, then just as it was an old man with a thick Russian accent came to the doors of the fort. Dr. Bryukhonenko said he could do more damage to the zombies with science than we could with bats and rifles. He wanted our lab to himself though. Honestly, Rob wasn’t exactly a specialist before the world fell and I had more hope in this confident stranger, so I gave him the lab. Soon after that he demanded Nurse Betty to be his assitant. She wasn’t the most adept of Rob’s trainees, but she was definitely the best looking.

    I was obsessed with drawing in new people. When my scouting parties found someone I’d take Mooch out there and talk them into my vision of the future. I may have played up the safety and comfort of the fort more than was realistic but if we were going to win back our city it was necessary.

    We still couldn’t feed everyone and people were losing faith in my leadership. To keep morale up I ordered that a few churches on our borders be cleaned out and walled off.
    I preached not of hell; it was evident for all that hell was real. Instead I preached of new cars and bad TV on a Sunday afternoon, of eating lunch on Granville Island and the functioning ski-lifts on Grouse Mountain. I made them yearn for what we had lost and slowly they came back to me.

    While this going on I was getting odder and odder reports from Rob about what Dr. Bryukhonenko was up to. Rob said his methods weren’t safe or necessarily moral.
    I didn’t care what methods the doctor used. As the zombies massed outside the walls I feared he was our only real hope.

    The doctor often made odd demands, and the fort didn’t much like him. There were often strange noises coming from his lab but strange turned to disturbing then to terrifying. It was enough that people had to daily confront hunger and the zombies outside. That’s why when the lab exploded I was the only one who was devastated.

    I sent Campbell and a few other soldiers in there to clean up. They found Dr. Bryukhonenko and Betty’s bodies in the wreckage but also the doctor’s notes. Devastated, I sent the notes to Rob in the vain hope he could make sense of the Russian scribbles.

    I had no idea what to do now. There might be other options out of this. I could could try to start a government and make a proper city work despite the constant threat of zombies. I might be able to overpower some of the raiders and free us from some of the constant danger. There was an airfield in the city. I might have been able to wing myself and a few close survivors away to find… help… or a little tropical island somewhere. Someone might as well end up well from this escapade.

    Then Rob came to me in the night. He said he’d cracked it! Bryukhonenko had found a cure. He said I didn’t want to know the lengths the doctor had gone to finding it. I’m amazed at what someone with no moral compunction can accomplish. Rob said the team needed ten days and three labs to prepare the cure. “Faraway” reclaimed the exploded lab.

    I was on top of the world when Rob and his crew stated their work. We were 34 survivors now well fed, well trained, and well housed. We had the zombies at bay and soon this nightmare would be over. I wasn’t prepared for the zombie’s response. It was like they knew their time was near and they started massing into huge hordes and hurling themselves against the walls every couple of days. They took our farms, our police station and were eating their way towards the lab. At this closest of moments, when I saw my impossible dream finally falling into place the hordes of Zed were set to tear down everything we had accomplished.

    Which brings me to today: May fourth, 2014. 103 days after I decided we were going to start anew. Today’s the day Rob said he’d be done. I can hear Zed moaning their request for our living flesh. I don’t have many healthy fighters to answer their request.

    I hope to god Rob has found a better answer for them…

  • Thinking… Metaphorically

    I’ve been trying to tease out the constituent parts of human problem solving for a little while now. This is the kind of topic you’d think you could just find a couple of books to read or fish out a couple of papers to get some insight. Unfortunately my searches aren’t bringing up as much as you might think. Although I will heavily recommend Jeff Hawkins’ On Intelligence. His book is still pretty theoretical but it has a lot of great ideas that have been slowly sinking into my thinking.

    Nevertheless I have recently contrived a crude theory of human problem solving in my own head. I’ve come about these ideas from reading a few books, some introspection, the rope experiment I mentioned last time, and watching a ton of playtesting of puzzle games. It’s probably shallow, wrong, and not worth anything, but I’m going to subject it to you anyway.

    I think there are two major components to our problem solving.

    • Permutation
    • Metaphor

    The first one is easy. Permutation just means “trying everything”. I have believed permutation to be super important for a few years now. I don’t think the idea of just trying every possible action is going to shock anyone but from playtesting puzzle games I think you’d be surprised just how important permuting is to our problem solving. A lot of puzzles are solved by permutation alone. When you’re just “playing around with something” you are permuting. When you solved one of those “get the metal loop off the rope” puzzles and it just falls apart in your hands you are solving by permutation. When you are thinking out every possible outcome of a chess move you are permuting. Permutation is our go-to workhorse for getting things done. To do it all you need is two hands and a memory. It’s super versatile (you can apply it to pretty much any problem, regardless of how diverse) and it’s generally pretty effective, if laborious.

    So permuting is an obvious part of problem solving but it’s clearly not the whole story. It doesn’t explain how people make leaps of intuition, and it doesn’t explain how people play games with very large solution spaces like Fantastic Contraption. In Fantastic Contraption permuting is very hard. You can put a stick or a wheel anywhere and connect them to anything. It would take you days to solve a problem by just trying every possible machine. Luckily, we have a wonderful gift for metaphor.

    By a gift for metaphor I mean we have the ability to see similarities between seemingly disparate things. Consider this typical metaphor: “an angry man is like a simmering pot of water” (that’s a simile, which is a kind of metaphor). I argue that we are using the familiar pot of water to help understand the more rare angry man. We take some traits shared by the two objects: that they could both quickly convert to a state of painful unpredictability. At the same time we don’t get confused about other qualities of boiling water and anger that are not related. We don’t think of the man as being wet or becoming a gas, for example. This is second nature to us, but if you were to try to write a computer program to do this you’d quickly see how magical the talent is.

    We can use this ability to see similarities between new problems and previous problems. Consider the rope problem from my previous post. A number of people wrote me saying they thought of the rope solution first. In fact I think more people come up with the swinging solution when the problem is posed as a thought experiment than when they have the ropes in front of them in person. I’m going to guess that this is because it’s harder to permute in our heads so we jump more quickly to our metaphor engine. Then we recognise the similarity of the rope problem to a tire swing, or a clock pendulum, and we’re off to the races. Metaphor also helps explain mastery of a game. As you improve in chess, for example, board states start to become analogous to eachother and so the outcome of previous games start to inform future games.

    Permuting also helps us discover new metaphors. By playing with things we are always seeing them in a new light and there is an ever increasing chance that we will see a sudden similarity between the current problem and something we’ve seen before.

    In this way Metaphor is your ability to take what you understand about one problem and apply it to a new problem. That is a super powerful talent that we all have. I believe it’s this ability, along with just trying random stuff, that makes our species so adaptable and so good at videogames.

  • How Complex is BrainSplode!?

    Playing BrainSplode! in Honduras

    When we were in Honduras last year we had a pretty crappy Internet connection. It was pretty slow and we had to pay for our bandwidth by the meg. When you pay by the meg suddenly podcasts and torrents are less fun. Fortunately there were a few indie games I sucked a lot of fun out of. They kept me entertained for days and all they asked for was a few megs of bandwidth.

    One of those games was BrainSplode! by Rich Edwards. BrainSplode! isn’t even a proper game. It’s just a prototype. But it’s so good it drives me crazy that Rich is continuing to prototype stuff rather than just double down on BrainSplode!.

    You can think of it as a game about programmable howitzer shells. I like it for a couple of reasons. One is because it is incredibly, rediculously fun. Another is that you can so easily enumerate the complexity of BrainSplode!.

    I will give a very brief description but you should really just go play it. Brain Splode! starts off as a very familiar ballistics game ala Scorched Earth or Crush the Castle. But it mixes in some Roborally/SpaceChem style programmable elements. Namely, you can chose to change the direction of the shell, fire off a booster rocket, pop a parachute, or any combination of these three actions at any time after the shell is fired. You do this by lining up three ‘actions’ to take before you fire the shell and then activate them in turn by pressing the mouse button.

    As an example, I can fire the shell high and to the left, then I can make it face backwards, then I can fire off a booster rocket which sends it flying to the right and then pop a chute to slowly glide towards my final target.

    Manually calculating ballistics trajectories

    BrainSplode! has something like 6 variables to play with. Two for the cannon, one for how I program the shell, one for how I set the direction changer (assuming I use one) and then another couple for when I choose to activate each action.

    Since a lot of these variables are along a continuum and not discreet choices it’s hard to enumerate the total number of options available but we can easily see that the solution space is huge. In fact I think it’s too big. BrainSplode! is yet another game in a long series of games that I love but utterly fail at convincing my friends to play. I pestered everyone I knew and almost no one else finished BrainSplode!. I think that has to do with the complexity of the solution space.

    There is some good empirical evidence that the two variables of the ballistics game on their own represent a comfortable level of complexity (Angry Birds). So I think BrainSplode! is stumbling outside the optimum complexity fun-zone. As an interesting experiment I’d like to try pushing it back into the fun-zone. Here’s how the experiment goes. You can play along at home.

    1. Download BrainSplode!
    2. Beat BrainSplode! normally.
    3. Go back to level 7 and set the cannon to shoot up and left with minimum power (put the power meter in the very top left of the square). Now beat level 7 without moving the cannon.
    4. Do the same for level 6.

    You have to beat the game first because steps 3 and 4 are very hard (since the game isn’t designed with them in mind) and if you didn’t the difficulty curve would be way out of whack. By holding the cannon variables constant we push BrainSplode! back towards the optimal-fun zone where the complexity is more manageable. I think as players and designers we intuitively understand when something is too complex or not complex enough, but only after the fact. We pretty much have to build something and play it before we know if it needs more or less stuff glued onto it. Worse still after we’ve been living with a game for a while we lose perspective on the optimum complexity: “I have no problem understanding the game I’ve been making for 4 months, I don’t know why other people are having trouble”.

    I’d love to understand the relationship between complexity and fun better. Mostly I find it an impenetrable fog. I’m always trying though and BrainSplode! is probably the most fun experimental complexity playground I’ve yet to find.

     

    p.s. if you’re really looking for a BrainSplode! challenge I have two more for you:

    – Try level 7 but with only one set of programed commands. You can use parachutes and rockets and everything, but you can only set them once  at the beginning and never change them. This includes the green change-angle power. You can use it but you must chose one angle at the very  beginning and never change it. You also have to leave the cannon locked in one place, but you can set it anywhere you like. No changes to  anything! (if you play RoboRally then think of it as having all your registers locked).

    – Then try level 6 the same way.

    I’m pretty sure I’m the only one in the world to get these ones. Even Rich shied away from these challenges. Happy ‘Sploding!