Category: Game Design

  • Rebuilding: Getting Your Food Fix

    “Food security”, despite what you may think, doesn’t actually refer to whether your household food supply is safe from thieves and grizzly bears. No, it actually refers to whether your food supply is sufficient enough to prevent starvation, which is a constant threat in the post-zombocalypse world of Rebuild.

    When you first start a new city in Rebuild: Gangs of Deadsville, you’ll find yourself in possession of a bright-eyed group of four survivors, but very little to feed them with. One of the most important tasks early in a new game is to achieve a state of food security; that is, to start bringing in at least as much food as your Hungry, Hungry Survivors are putting away.

    hugefarmLike the previous games in the series, the most reliable source of food for your survivors are farms. Unlike previous games in the series, however, farms in Rebuild: Gangs of Deadsville come in a few different sizes and shapes. Regular 1×1 Farms produce 1 unit of food per day, while 1×2 Big Farms produce 1.5 units, and 2×2 Huge Farms produce 3 units of food per day.* Farms produce food for your crew automatically, but you can also assign a survivor to work a farm to double its output. Since a survivor consumes 1 unit of food per day, having someone work a farm produces at least enough extra food to feed the worker, and in the case of a Huge Farm can produce an accordingly huge surplus! For that reason, and since you can only ever construct regular sized Farms yourself, you should definitely seek out and try to reclaim any Big and Huge Farms you happen to see near your base.

    Try not to think too hard about what kind of food these farms are producing, though, especially since they start producing food immediately after being built. Quick-growing mutant crops?! And you thought genetically-modified food was bad for you. Don’t even get me started on what makes up the 1.5 units of food that come from the Pig Farm.* Who’s been taking care of those pigs all these years? I don’t think I want to know…

    pigfarm

    That’s not the only way to get juicy units of food to cram into your survivors food unit-holes, of course. Hunting for wild animals in Fields and fishing in the ponds of Parks are also good sources of food, but can be a bit unreliable. Of course, if you’re starving and have a survivor to spare, why not try scavenging for goodies in a nearby apartment block, or trading materials to a wandering merchant in exchange for food?

    Wait, we haven’t talked about either of those things yet? Well, I suppose you’ll have to wait until next time… or you can find out for yourself right now by picking Rebuild: Gangs of Deadsville up on Steam Early Access!

     

    * These numbers are, of course, subject to change as we tweak the game’s difficulty. If you’re a food production number enthusiast, be sure to keep an eye on the official wiki’s Food and Farming pages for updated information!

  • Shader

    Shader is a video game, but it is stuck on one computer forever.

    Yesterday I went out and bought a cheap netbook. I’ve downloaded onto the netbook the as3 development environment I use to make games and started writing. I’m going to write Shader entirely on the netbook.

    After I finish writing it I’m going to destroy all the usb, bluetooth and internet capability of the netbook and superglue the harddrive in place. Shader will be stuck forever on this little netbook I bought in Buenos Aires.

    The game will be about using math and programming to make trippy visuals. It will have levels, a difficulty curve, a friendly UI. It will not have a tutorial. It doesn’t need one because I can explain to you how to play, because unlike most games there will only ever be one copy so I will always be there to show you how to play.

     

    I’m not actually totaly sure why I’m doing this. I have a strong urge to do it. Ever since I thought of the idea about a month ago in Panama I’ve been itching to start. Here are some things I like about Shader, although I hesitate to say these are the reasons I’m making Shader. I know I want to make it, and that’s reason enough.

    -Shader can never reach a large audience. Games can reach a massive audience, my game Fantastic Contraption was played by tens of millions of people. Because of the possibility of reaching an audience in the millions it is hard to ever be truly satisfied with how many people have played your game. Traditionally the audience’s experience is the entire point of the game but it is impossible for millions of people to play Shader. There is only one frail netbook, and when that’s gone, Shader is gone. This is weirdly freeing. I will never feel the hope, yearning, and stress of releasing Shader. This is also different from simply never releasing the game because merely the fact that you *could* release it will sit in the back of your mind. You will feel cowardly for not seeking an audience. After I sabotage the netbook it will be impossible to release it so there will be no stress.

    -I get to see the game’s entire life. Usually the vast majority of a game’s life happens outside its creator’s view. You get to spend the formative years with a game, nurse it to life, help it stand, watch the first few people play it. But then it explodes away from you. All you get is tendrils of people’s reported experience. The game is now it’s own thing and you don’t really know what its life is like. I will get to see the entire life of Shader. I wont sit, staring out the window, wondering what the game’s life is like now. I will know. I will be sitting next to it watching.

    -No need to attain standards but my own. Since Shader can’t find an audience there is no reason to consider what anyone else will love or hate about it. I will never nervously click on a review link or get an email about how much someone doesn’t like it.

    -No tech support. No Tech Support!

    -The feeling of creating one piece of art. I’ve always wondered what it would be like to paint a painting once and have only that. I’m so accustomed to being able to copy infinitely, I want to know what it feels like to have one of something. To sweat and work to create something and only have that. I want to know what a painter feels like when they finish a painting.

    -Blurring the line between the game being easily-copied bits or a solid physical thing. In some sense the netbook will *be* Shader and vice-versa. I’ve never made a physical thing of value before. The laptop becomes my canvas and paint, I now have a materials cost like a sculptor or painter. The ease of copying has a vast impact on the perception of games. I can put a game up on a forum and have hundreds of people dismiss it in two minutes, the standard price for two years of my work on the app-store is 3$. I want to see if I, or other people, think about Shader differently.

     

    I’m certainly not going to stop making audience-seeking games (I’m working on one of those now as well). Games being easy to copy and share is vastly better than the opposite. But for this one project I kind of want to see what it looks like on the other side of the reflection.

  • Aztez Improvisation

    AztezLogo

    Asset2-200x300I am very interested in Improvisation in games. One of my favorite things in games is knowing its systems inside out and then being able to play with them in unique ways. To be presented with novel problems I have never solved before and using the tools the game gives me to overcome them, preferably under time pressure.

    It’s no surprise that a lot of my favorite games strongly rely on improvisation; being able to quickly digest new situations and devise a novel solution to it. A list of my favorite improvisation-forward games might include Starcraft, Spelunky and Panel de Pon. These are games I love deeply. Games I have dropped hour upon hour into and never felt guilty about. Games that I am proud to be good at and still have room to grow.

    But today I want to talk about Improvisation specifically in the light of  Ben Ruiz and Matthew Wegner’s upcomming brawler Aztez. Aztez is still a ways away from release but Ben and Matthew stayed with us for a few months in Mexico so I have had the joy of playing early versions. Before Aztez I had never really played brawlers before (I don’t count River City Ransom, fun but shallow) and dropping into Aztez has been like discovering a new unspoiled continent for me. It’s very good at improvisation and I want to discuss why.

    Screen2-1024x576

    Broad Tools

    First Aztez offers you a lot of inputs, a lot of tools. I’m not going to enumerate every move in Aztez but in terms of variables to work with it has: damage, reach, knock-back, knock-to-ground, knock-to-air, stun, grab, parry, lead-up-time, cool-down-time, combos, foward movement, move to air, move to ground, etc… etc… Ben takes these variables and crafts moves out of them which in turn make up your complete tool set. These tools are varied and balanced, they each play a different role in solving the problems the game will present you with.

    Combinatoric Problems

    Asset1-300x298This is the beating heart of an improvisation game. What use are tools without problems to solve? Games that use randomness or unpredictable complexity are great at giving players a vast set of unique-but-simmilar puzzles. Aztez has different types of enemies but lets take a case where you are fighting four guys of the same type. Now how many problems do these enemies present you? Very many. The case of on being to your right and three to your left is different from all on the left, the enemies may or may not be attacking, they have different spacing, they have different amounts of health, they may be stunned, they may be on the ground, they may be in the air. The number and state of the four guys defines your current puzzle. Now you decide which tools to use.

    I call these problems combinatoric because they are a combination of many simple states. Each single state is easy to understand and the correct response to it is known. But it is their ability to be combined that is their strength. Not only does this generate many new problems for the player but, and this is important, they are all simmilar states. On the face of it this might seem like a disadvantage. You might think you want as much breadth as possible but if you were generating very different states then players wouldn’t get to use the things they have already learned. You want to present them constantly with puzzles that are simmilar to problems they have solved before, so that they have some idea of how to solve them, but problems that are still different, so that they are forced to improvise a slightly new solution.

    Many Possible Answers

    Asset3-257x300Think of improvising in music, there is no correct jazz solo, although some solos are better than others. This is part of the joy of improvisation games. By allowing a large number of possible solutions you maximise the player’s chance of finding one. Obviously this has to be balanced with challenge. In Aztez there are always many actions that solve the puzzle but there are many more actions that lead to death. This also leaves room for style. Different players will tend towards different types of solutions. In Aztez you might focus on controling the enemies or on being hard to hit or just brute-force dealing brutal amounts of damage. Players will naturaly develop different skills depending on what tactics work for them early on.

    Time Pressure

    You could have all of the above without time pressure, but time pressure adds a beautiful flow to the game. Without time pressure there is a temptation to spend forever maximising your solution, to sit and stare and calculate. With time pressure you are forced to focus on the bigger picture and to rely on trial and error to figure out the details. This is more fun, why? Who knows, that’s  the way the human brain is built. Time pressure frees your frontal cortex from the minutea.

     

    Incredipede, Fantastic Contraption, and the game I’m working on now don’t really use these principles, many great games don’t. But I want to start making games that embrace improvisation. Games that allow players to be artful. I’m even learning to play the flute so I can have a better understanding of improvisation. I hope in the future to make games that let you be a virtuoso every bit as much as Aztez does.

    Screen12-1024x576

  • Rebuild 3: Maptastic new cities

    Rebuild 3 rivers
    Temp art for Rebuild: Gangs of Deadsville showing new rivers and oceans. The walled-in blueish areas are the forts of NPC factions.
    I’m adding some exciting new features to the cities in Rebuild: Gangs of Deadsville.

    Well exciting to me, since playing with the map generation code is pretty fun. There will be coastlines where you might find a boat to help you escape the city, and rivers that make great barriers because zombies can’t cross them. Zombie mobs have to do some pathfinding to get around now. I know zombies shouldn’t be that smart, but it’s pathetic to see them bumping into a river over and over.

    Rebuild 2 small map
    A typical small, square city from Rebuild 2
    Oh and cities aren’t square anymore. One of the best strategies for Rebuild 2 / Rebuild Mobile was to beeline for one of the corners and build your fort with two safe sides – useful but not realistic. The new cities will be round and unevenly shaped, with denser urban areas in the center and farmland around the outside. Your fort will usually start in a balanced area, but some maps might be all farms, all suburbs, or all downtown core.

    Rebuild 3 map creation
    Map creation command line output. ^ are forests, ~ means water, Xs are forts and the numbers indicate urban zones.
    The cities in the main campaign mode will use predetermined random seeds, which means you won’t be able to keep restarting until you get a layout you like. For better or worse you’ll be stuck with the same city for however many tries it takes to save it.

    I’ll also include a skirmish mode where you can jump into a city with a random seed and whatever settings you want just like in Rebuild 2 / Rebuild Mobile. Giant size, easy difficulty, winter, with a coastline and two rivers? You got it.

    Rebuild 3 giant maps
    Zooming out on a new GIANT sized map
    Yes and I’ve finally added zooming, which honestly you’re going to need with some of the new giant sized cities. They average around 1000 squares, whereas in Rebuild 2 the max was 256.

    That oughta keep ’em busy.

  • Spelunky + Game Designers = <3?

    I was watching this video by Rev3Games hosted by Anthony Carboni this morning , at the beginning of the interview Anthony suggests that game designers tend to love Spelunky more than other people. I don’t know if this is true but I have a theory about why it might be.

    Games are inherently about getting better, progressing towards mastery and there are two ways for games to give you this feeling of mastery:

    1. Skill Mastery: give you systems that you can learn and improve at (i.e. improving your multitasking is Starcraft)
    2. Number Mastery: increase some number over time (i.e. increase your level in Final Fantasy)

    Games are almost always a combination of the two. The core of the game is something you can improve at and by improving you are able to increase some number that is a gauge of your skill. I think the less of a gamer someone is the more easily they confuse these two things. The most casual games have almost no skill mastery but strong number mastery systems (Farmville being an amazing example). The least casual games usually have number mastery very tightly coupled to skill mastery with Starcraft and Chess’ ladder systems topping the chart. Game designers, who think about games all the time, should be really good at distinguishing between these two things and that helps them like Spelunky, which has wonky number mastery.

    Spelunky is a hardcore skill mastery game. No matter how many times you play you always start the game naked as the first time you played. In the video above and in other places Derek talks about how Spelunky has a non-traditional difficulty curve: it starts very steep in the mines, gets even harder in the jungle and then eases out with the ice and the temple. But the rate at which people aproach skill mastery is the opposite, they start bad and then get better and better and better. This means the game’s number mastery system (getting to later levels) is telling you that you are improving very slowly even when you are improving very quickly. Even a future master of the game will spend a lot more time dying in the mines then they will ever spend in the late-game temple levels.

    The result of this is that the game is very frustrating to players who look to number mastery for their “I’m improving” fix (since improving at something is why games are fun) and less frustrating to players who “see past” the numbers and know that they are greatly improving their skills despite not being able to beat the first level.

    Does this mean that some people are better at self-gauging when they are improving at things than other people? Or that they trust their own sense of improvement over external indicators? Or that they value external indicators less? Probably a combination of all three. I would also wager that the more games you play the more true all of these things become. As time passes you play less and less for the numbers and more and more for the raw experience of playing and learning, of experiencing novel environments and learning to master them.

    So game designers, because we play a lot of games, probably like Spelunky more than people who have played less games. You could also argue that being in indie games self-selects people with a strong attraction to internal indicators over external ones. Making an indie game requires months or years of work with little clear, positive, external feedback. Meaning we have to be good at self-guaging when we are improving.

    It may be that all of these things make it easier for players like me to enjoy Spelunky, but I doubt that it makes Spelunky better for us. I think we would probably enjoy it just as much if the numbers reflected our growing skill more generously, and maybe all those people who find it “too hard” would realise that the game is just lying to them.