Category: Game Design

  • Rebuild 3: games you should play while you wait

    Rebuild 3 (ahem, I should get used to saying “Rebuild: Gangs of Deadsville”)… is going to be awhile. I’ve updated my release date to Spring 2014, which simultaneously feels forever away, and far too close. While you’re waiting, here are some similar games to play that have been a big inspiration for the Rebuild series and the new game.

    King of Dragon Pass

    inspiration_kingofI can’t believe I only just played this game from 1999, but I can tell you it still holds up. It’s a wonderfully rich storytelling experience, a strategy game where you manage a clan while being barraged with moral dilemmas. It’s set in a super deep fantasy world based on gods and mythology that goes on forever in such detail, all of it illustrated with these huge hand-drawn pictures. I’ve never played anything like it. It’s inspired me to make the text events in Rebuild 3 even longer with more explorations of the world and events from that terrible “first year” of the zombpocalypse.

    They more recently released an updated iOS version and have a great development blog for it. I highly recommend it to fans of strategy and storytelling.

    Dwarf Fortress

    inspiration_dwarffortressNow showing in the New York MoMA, this game is without a doubt a work of art. The product of years of obsession; Toady’s unrelenting drive to simulate the running of a dwarven city in raw and ridiculously minute detail. With ascii graphics. You need to squint and use your imagination to see the blonde/brunette/redhead, but part of the appeal is that the game is in your head. But to be honest… I prefer Mayday’s graphical edition, and though I know it’s sacrilege I’d kill for a full-mouse interface.

    Despite their lack of visual representation, those little dwarves have so much character that they inspire epic works of fanart/fiction. I come back to them when I’m brainstorming new survivor enhancements like perks, backstories, individual happiness, relationships, kids… it’s hard to know where to draw the line. With Dwarf Fortress there is no line since it’s a perpetual work in progress, which I guess in a way Rebuild has been too.

    SimCity

    inspiration_simcityThough not totally accurate, I sometimes describe Rebuild as “SimCity with zombies”, and my earliest prototype used modified building graphics from SimCity 1. Mostly because I needed some quick and recognizable placeholders, but also because the first two SimCities were defining games from my youth. I later played every other simulation game I could get my hands on, but these were my favorite.

    So I was heartbroken that the newest SimCity is riddled with always-online DRM which means I can’t reliably play in the remote places I live half the year. No surprise their servers didn’t handle the day 1 load, but it was inexcusable that EA claimed the always-online was to offload processing, which was a bald-faced lie. I’ve also heard the new game itself is a disappointment, but you can always go back and play the earlier games.

    Space Rangers

    inspiration_spacerangersRecently remastered as Space Rangers HD: A war apart, this space trading/piracy game breaks up the strategy with delightful interactive fiction events. Sound familiar? This game was on my mind when I came up with the initial concept for Rebuild: a strategy game broken up with text that tells a much deeper story.

    Rebuild 3’s going to have even more, longer events with more complicated decisions to make than just “yes” or “no”. They may not have you performing espionage at alien cocktail parties (a plotline I seem to recall…) but hopefully will be just as compelling.

  • Solution to the BirdBrain Puzzle

    I posted a very hard puzzle here and challenged the Internet to solve it. It’s quite a hard puzzle and it took about a day from originally posting it for someone to solve it. That someone was Mark Ivey (@zovirl). I asked him to write a quick description of his solution and he did up a very nice little post which I thank him for. Here is Mark Ivey’s solution to my puzzle:

    The Solution to the BirdBrain Puzzle by Mark Ivey

    Overview: A down-and-left circuit moves the birds to the first & last yellow pellets. A decaying memory circuit bounces the birds up off the red ball. Since this loop decays over time the birds will go down again after clearing wall #2.
    Down-and-right circuit
    To bounce up, the birds have to hit the ball from the top. If they hit the side, they’ll bounce at the wrong angle.
    The right signal is slightly stronger than the down signal to make sure the birds get over the ball before hitting it.
    Decaying Memory Circuit
    Bouncing up requires reversing the ball signal. Keeping the birds moving up after they hit the ball requires a memory loop. When a bird hits the ball, the ball signal gets injected into the loop. The 2 neurons in the loop keep the signal alive even after the bird leaves the ball. Then the signal is reversed (repel from the ball instead of attract to it) and passed to the wings.
    Don’t want the birds to keep going up forever, just want them to go high enough to clear wall #2. This means the memory of hitting the ball has to decay. A sidetrip out through the 1/2 neuron does this. To keep the signal from decaying too quickly, more connections are added between the 2 memory neurons. This dilutes the effect of the 1/2.

     If the bounce signal has to fight against the down signal, the birds move too slowly. To prevent the bounce from having to fight the down signal like this, a bunch of parts of the bounce circuit send suppression signals to the down-and-left circuit.
    Tuning
    Once the birds are moving in a nice down-up-down motion, it took some tuning to get them to just barely clear wall #2 before going back down to the 3rd pill.
    Tuning #1: The memory decays slower if there are more connections between the 2 memory neurons (this dilutes the effect of the 1/2 signal). About 5 connections in each direction worked well.
    Tuning #2: The suppression lines are doubled in a few places to suppress the down signal even more.

  • BirdBrain Puzzle

    Hello Internet. I have a puzzle for you. It’s quite hard.

    In this puzzle you have to build the brain of a bird. The brain already has several Neurons, you need to connect them with some Axons.

    The puzzle is here: BirdBrain

    Don’t run off though! You need some instructions and I happen to have some hastily written instructions right here:

    Controls: Click on a Neuron (the grey disks), drag to a different Neuron and let the button go. This will make a wire between the two Neurons.

    Click on a wire to delete it.

    You want to make the stream of birds pass through each yellow “food”. If you get one dot then you’ve figured out how to play. If you get the second dot then you are clever indeed. The third one is genuinesly hard, I really doubt you’ll make it there so why stress about it?

    There are Three broad catagories of Neurons and Nine specific kinds.

    The Three catagories are:

    1. Input
    2. Processing
    3. Output

    These correspond to the top row, the two middle rows, and the bottom row of the puzzle. The top rows generate directional input, the middle rows can change that input, and the final row takes whatever is being fed into it and steers the bird in that direction.

    Here is a run-down of all the neuron types:

    This Neuron points towards the red baloon. But, and this is important, only if the bird is touching it. The bird is blind, it can’t see the baloon, it can only feel it.

     

    Up/Down/Left/Right: These Neurons point in one direction at all times no matter what. Try conecting one of these neurons to the final “motor neuron”.

     

    These are your basic normal Neurons. They average whatever input they get. If you pass them a down and a right you will get down-and-right out of it.

     

    This reverses whatever you pass in. If you pass it a down and a right you will get up-and-left out of it.

     

    Will average whatever input it gets and then multiply by two on the way out. If you pass it down and right you will get down-and-right-but-fast out.

     

    Will average whatever input it gets and then divide by two on the way out. If you pass it down and right you will get down-and-right-but-slow out.

     

    This is the birds wings. It will fly in whatever direction you like. If you pass it down and right then the bird will fly down and right.

     

    Wires: are used to connect Neurons. Information flows along the wires in the direction you draw them. If you draw from the Left Neuron to the Motor Neuron your birds will go left. If you drag from the Motor Neuron to the Left Neuron the bird will not move.

    Inhibiting Wires: These wires inhibit whatever they are connected to acoriding to the strength of the information passing along them. If you connect the Down Neuron to the Motor Neuron with a normal wire and then the Left Neuron to the Motor Neuron with an Inhibiting wire the bird will not move because the Motor Neuron is being inhibited with the strength of the Left Neuron.

    Loops: You can make loops.

    Overlapping Wires: You can place a wire between the same two Neurons as many times as you want going in either or both directions. There is no graphical hint to tell you how many wires are there.

    Special Case: Neurons average all the information they get except for the special case of zeros. If they get a zero they will simply ignore it. Since the birds can not see the Baloon when they start connecting the Balloon Neuron to anything will have no immediate effect because it is sending no information. Combining anything with no information results in no change, not a halving of the value.

    Good luck. You’re going to need it. (and yes, it is possible, here is a picture of my birds getting to the end)

    If you’d rather just mess about in a sandbox I have one of those here.

  • How Does a Good Game Start?

    I’ve spent the last two years working on Incredipede and I’m finally about done with it. That means I get to enter that wonderful world of prototyping! Not having a game to work on is the best because looking for a game to work on is super fun, except for the parts that suck. The part that sucks the most is having a new idea and not knowing if it’s any good. To close this knowledge gap I wrote some designers I know who have had success to find out how to tell if your prototype is any good.

    There are a lot of game ideas out there and it’s not obvious which ones are going to be fun. I have a file on my desktop called gameIdeas.txt which is a list of over 40 ideas ranging from “One button game: afghan kite fighting” to “knitting!…?”. Picking which game to start is easy, which one makes your mouth salivate the most? Picking when to give up on it is much much harder for me. Even when a game isn’t fun after months of work and exploring I still feel like just one change, one decision, could make it great. On the other hand, the only two of my prototypes that have worked out and been fun enough to finish were fun right from the start. Fantastic Contraption and Incredipede were both fun (for me) almost immediately and Sarah’s games, Rebuild and Word Up Dog, were fun right away. Is that a general rule? I wrote a psudo-random collection of eight games designers I know to try to find out.

    I wanted to know if their successful game was fun right away, I figure if all successful games are fun right away then I can skip the months of grinding on ideas that seem promising but just aren’t working out. So without further ado, here is the data:

    Derek Yu, Spelunky

    Was it fun right away? Yes

    “Spelunky was honestly the smoothest development I’ve ever had”

     

    Justin Ma, FTL

    Was it fun right away? No

    “We felt the idea (which was very abstract) could be fun but the actual prototypes were not enjoyable for months.  We could see hints of interesting gameplay but it wasn’t really fun for a long time.”

     

    Jonathan Blow, Braid/The Witness

    Were they fun right away? Yes

    “Braid was fun in the first week. The Witness probably took 2-3 weeks, if only because it is 3D”

    “I do think this depends on one’s level of design experience, though. Part of being a good designer is being able to just home in on what is really good, without having to spend a lot of time slogging through mud.”

     

    Jan Willem Nijman/Rami Ismail, Radical Fishing

    Was it fun right away? Yes

    “At Vlambeer, most games come together within a few days. If they’re fun, we work on them for a few weeks. If they’re fun to work on for a few weeks, we turn them into a project (or not).”

     

    Dan Cook, Triple Town/Leap Day

    Was it fun right away? No

    “Of the prototypes I’m working on now, I’d say that the best ones convert over a few weeks and then we really know we have something fun after 2-4 months.”

     

    Marc ten Bosch, Miegakure

    Was it fun right away? Yes

    “Miegakure was the third prototype in a series of ‘games in higher dimensions’ prototypes. Ignoring the first two prototypes, Miegakure is incredibly similar to its original vision”

     

    Michael Boxleiter/Greg Wohlwend, Solipskier/Gasketball

    Were they fun right away? Solipskier: Yes, Gasketball No

    “I do think it’s important to get something down that’s interesting as soon as possible, something that you can play over and over, but there are a lot of games that I would never be able to make if it had to be fun in a few days or a week.  It’s really hard to gauge early on, and I don’t really have any good rules even now.”

    Mike also mentioned that most games he’s worked on have been fun right away with a few exceptions.

     

    Cactus/Dennis Wedin, Hotline Miami

    Was it fun right away? Yes

    “It was fun straight away from when the basic gameplay had taken shape, which took less than a week.”

    So 5.5 out of 8 replies were “it’s fun right away”. Clearly not every successful game is fun in the first week but a lot of them are. And if you can make a great game without months of smashing your fists against the wall then why not! I like that Vlambeer has gone so far as to build this into their process, judging games by how quickly they become fun rather than how fun they might be down the road. Marc’s aproach of exploring the same design space with totaly new games is also very appealing. If I want to make “knitting!…?” it makes sense to try a bunch of disparate ideas in the design space instead of settling down with one and trying to force it to work.

    FTL and Dan Cook are the counter-examples, and they are strong counter-examples. FTL won the Excellence in Design Award at GDC this year and I personally respect Dan Cook as a game designer more than just about anyone (Leapday is totally amazing). Standing opposite to Vlambeer, Dan has built the months-long search into his process and the resulting games speak for themselves. Clearly you can make great games by taking a rough idea and through teasing, exploring, and experimenting make it into something wonderful.

    But that’s the thing, all that teasing… I hate stressing about whether I should keep working on a “promising” project or whether I’m groping in a blind alley. The fun-right-away rule takes away that stress entirely and maintains a good chance of finding a great game. It’s the way I’m going to prototype my next game. It’s all dim sum from here on out!

  • Word Up Dog: Then and now

    Word Up Dog‘s coming to mobile this Thursday! Now for the very few of you who actually played the original Flash version (available here), I’m gonna tell you bout the changes I made. The most obvious one was the addition of Sara Gross of Two Bit Art to the team. She turned my janky blobbish characters into super pimpin funkmasters. By comparison anyway.

    The Lightnin (formerly Lamp) Lizard got some serious mojo.

    I resisted change in the UI but added a sweet clock for the bonuses, and generally made everything bigger so it’d be easier to see and read on bitty little phone screens. I changed the default aspect ratio from 4:3 (800×600) to 16:9 (iPhone5), but the game stretches and pads to fit any device.

    The Dog left pastel country fields and donned a phat tuque.

    Gameplay-wise I took out the idea of lamps and limited sight radius so you can see the whole screen all the time now. I added two more levels and a unique element to each one like vines, vending machines, dancing bugs and lava. And I took out adventure mode, which was a single superlong level that changed the deeper you went. It really needed some design work although it was my favorite way to play, and I’ll put it back in if I get enough mobile sales.

    You can see a lot more in the game now.

    The bulk of my time on this was spent totally rewriting the graphics engine in Stage3d/Starling and making a hundred other little performance improvements. Those things you don’t even have to think about when writing a browser game for PCs but suddenly become make-or-break on an iPad 1.

    The mobile version of Word Up Dog is so improved it’s practically a sequel, but I think of it as version 1.5. I’d like to go back and upgrade the original Flash version now… but ironically it runs slower now on some computers because of the Stage3d. The dance continues!