Category: Game Design

  • Rebuild: Sales abound as winter’s come early

    Rebuild mobile’s on sale for 99 cents as part of the indie #superstrategysale. If you’re looking for real mobile strategy games, now’s the time to get Rebuild, Hunters, Call of Cthulhu, and Tactical Soldier – Undead Rising for a fraction of their usual prices.

    Rebuild’s been on sale quite a bit lately. October marked the one-year anniversary of Rebuild 2 (Oct 6th to be exact, with the mobile version on Nov 17th). To celebrate I did my first big content update for Rebuild, and ran a 99 cent sale for most of the month. The main new addition was seasons – now you could start the game in winter and play with an extra challenge: farms produce no food (no, not even winter melons!).

    Of course, although it’s possible to get through by just tightening your belts and doing daily scavenging trips to food-marts, that wouldn’t be as exciting as, say, eating human flesh. For example. So I made that an option: if it comes down to it you can eat your fallen comrades. Of course, once you try the other-other white meat it’s hard to be satisfied with anything else, and cannibalism has a tendency to escalate to much darker places. You’ve been warned!

    Another advantage to this winter mode is that it comes up naturally if you start a fort in spring and make it to day 200 or so, well past the point that the game gives you interesting content. So you can now try to save up enough food to feed your 100-person fort until spring (hint: you’ll need 100 * 30 * 3 = 900 day’s rations). Or, you know, just see what happens. Winter might be a good time to get in that helicopter and get the hell outta Dodge.

    The October sale and new content afforded Rebuild a round of press mentions and a New & Noteworthy feature on iTunes. It surprisingly didn’t make it into any Halloween-themed features which was what I was aiming for with my brazen new pumpkin icon. Downloads slowly petered off after the initial spike, and the curve didn’t seem to change when I put the price back from $0.99 to $2.99. In all the event doubled my expected profit for October. Probably it was worth the trouble, although the iPhone5 release and some Google Play bugs made it far more stressful and time consuming than it should have been. Not to mention that month I had to finish Incredipede with Colin!

    By happenstance Rebuild also got rolled into Google Play’s 25 cent sale in September which was rather interesting (55k downloads in one day whaaaow). It seemed to have no effect whatsoever on my iOS sales, but Android sales appeared to triple because of it. It was interesting to see them try such a daring “Steam sale”, but I hope to hell players don’t get used to it and start waiting for 99 cent apps to “go on sale”.

  • Dear Proteus Parable

    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.

     

  • Apple is Gambling

    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.

    Pachinko Players by Miguel Michán

    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.

  • Embrace the Chaos with Pineapple Smash Crew

    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.

    Bring Order to the Chaos!

    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.

  • Can You See the Dragon? (no you can’t)

    Adam Saltsman wrote an article for Gamasutra about Brainstorming and the limits of Brainstorming. He talks about how brainstorming is not equivalent to game design. My only comment by the time I got to the end of the article was pretty much “yeah, duh”. But that isn’t the reaction of a lot of people and after reading their reactions I feel like I read a slightly different article than they did.

    A lot of responses have been about defending brainstorming and I guess I didn’t feel like it was an assault on brainstorming but rather it questioned whether you could know if a game idea was any good before actually trying it out. Adam’s conclusion was “no” and I agree with that whole heartedly. I’d go further to say that you don’t really have a clue of what your idea really is. To show you what I mean let me tell you a story:

    I suck at drawing but when I was six years old I hadn’t figured that out yet. I vivdly remember six year old me having a very odd drawing experience. One day I decided I was going to draw a dragon. This seemed like it was going to be easy. I knew what a dragon looked like. When I pictured a dragon in my minds eye it was all there. Pointy claws, jagged spikes along its back, long smoking snout, the whole thing. I knew exactly what a dragon looked like and drawing it was going to be a piece of cake.

    Some Ideas Threaten to Take Years To Figure Out

    Wrong! I couldn’t draw a dragon, I still can’t draw a dragon. I still think I know exactly what a dragon looks like but when I have to prove it I fail utterly. I think this has to do with how the brain stores information. We seem to be very metaphorical creatures and I think we store kind of a metaphor of a dragon. We store some important features that help us define what a dragon is but we don’t store 90% of the details. Only the really _draggony_ bits.

    Game design is the same way but worse. Most game ideas you hear on the streets are of the “you’re a window-washer with a jetpack” variety. You can hear this statement and the finished game stretches out before you. You can almost play it. Except you can’t. That’s an illusion. Your brain is just taking what is special about two things, jetpacks, and window washing, and adding them together. There are a million design problems to solve before you have an actual finished game. I know it feels to you like you know exactly how that game is going to play and how fun it is or isn’t going to be but you _don’t_. You can make a bad guess, that’s as far as it goes. I know because I have those ideas professionally.

    Some Ideas Break Your Heart

    I spent two years prototyping games before I found Incredipede. I thought I understood all the nooks and crannies of those failed games before I ever started them. I thought I knew how fun they where going to be. I had no idea. Video Games are a very hard thing to imagine. They involve rule-sets interacting with eachother (often in real time) and we are not good at imagining how two or more rulesets will interact. It’s a very hard problem. Imagine playing several games of chess simultaneously with no boards. We _feel_ like we know something about our ideas but in fact it’s just a lie.

    This is why the games industry has phrases like “ideas are worthless”. Not because your idea isn’t good but because your idea is a mere shadow of a finished game and no one can tell if that game will be fun or not. Not even you. That’s why Petri Purho‘s Rule-of-Ten resonates so much with me. Petri hypothesised that for every ten games you write one will be good. There’s no way to know which one. You just gotta sit down and pound ’em out ’till something works.

    Is there a bright side to this seemingly depressing state of affairs? Well when a game works it _works_. You will morph and grow your game into something greater than you ever could have imagined. The game will get further and further from your original mechanics and closer and closer to that raw inspiring idea that was really at the heart of your excitement.

    No one invents great video games sitting on the john. They invent them sitting at their keyboards pushing and pulling and playing.