Category: Game Design

  • Super Crate Box tells us the magic number is 600

    Hats off to Vlambeer for making Super Crate Box. A great single screen platformer. Before it was nominated for a design award at the IGF it was nominated for love by the judge in my heart. And in my heart it took the grand prize.

    I found Super Crate Box while we were in Honduras and when you’re at the end of an impassable dirt road with no TV and spotty Internet what you really need on your hard-drive is a good super-hard game with both running and gunning. I played the hell out of it and am proud to have 100% unlocked everything.

    So why is it so fun? To answer that it would be helpful if you had at least a passing understanding of Super Crate Box (no I will not be acronyming that). There’s really no reason I should have to describe it to you. Just go play It. It’s free and more fun than reading.

    During my Super Crate Box phase we made a trip to Pigeon Keys with our friends Julie and Ed who run Radical Adventures. It was an amazing trip! We’d done a lot of snorkeling before but the waters off Pigeon Keys were perfectly clear. So clear it was like there was no water at all and we were flying 10 meters over the ground in a giant beautiful Catamaran pointing out fish and rays like you might point out birds. Diving off the boat became like bungee jumping. This one novel twist on an experience we had had many times before made it go from fun to once-in-a-lifetime amazing. Our brain loves to be in a familiar situation with a twist because it loves to learn.

    Video games are about learning and our brains do a lot of learning through pattern matching. When we have a decision to make we compare the situation to previous situations we’ve been in. If we can can find an identical one and we know how to solve it then we just do the same thing we did back then. If we can’t associate it with a previous situation at all we panic and do something random. But if it’s similar but slightly different to a previous situation, or better, is a combination of previous situations then we get creative. We try a combination of stuff that worked before. And this can be genius. This is an incredibly powerful tool evolutionarily so it makes sense that our brain likes to do it and it’s fun.

    Super Crate Box is in the business of giving us these slightly-different problems to tackle. It has dedicated its life to this task and I applaud it for its selfless dedication to making me joyful. It manages this by taking a simple proven game (jumping around and shooting stuff) and combining it with a dizzying array of weapons, all of which are slightly different from each other. “But that’s hardly new, lots of games have a dizzying array of weapons” you say. Yes that is true, imaginary reader in my head, you are correct. But Super Crate Box knows you’re too shitty a game designer to use them properly.

    Games are about learning and our brain really likes to learn. But it doesn’t like to learn just any old things. It likes to learn helpful useful things. It wants to learn how to win! Most games with a dizzying array of weapons let you chose which ones you want to play with. Super Crate box recognises this as a fault. The better you get with a weapon in Super Crate Box the less you play with it. The better you are with a weapon the more ruthlessly efficient you are at getting to the next crate and the next random weapon. In this way Super Crate Box refuses to let you specialise. It refuses to let you get good with one weapon and ignore all the others, which is how I (and I assume most people) play all those games with a dizzying array of weapons. We play games that way because our brain recognises that its often more efficient to get better with something we understand than to start over learning something we don’t. Unfortunately that’s less fun but our brain is a shitty game designer.

    By forcing us into a situation we’ve already been in but with an unfamiliar weapon Super Crate Box gives us a problem we can tackle creatively. And when we succeed at one of these problems it feels great! In fact it’s probably possible to mathmatically determine the number of possible situations and therefore the number of situates which should be contained in the perfect game (assuming Super Crate Box is the perfect game). Say there are 15 weapons (amazingly I can’t find a list) and say there are 40 unique board states (I’m pretty much just making that up) that means there are 600 totaly states. So take a look at your favorite game or the game your making and count the states. 600 = IGF Design Nomination!

    Anyway, once more doff your hat to Raimi Ismail and Jan Willem Nijman for being smarter than the human brain and giving us all something slightly different to play.

     

    Also thanks that there is this

  • Talkin ’bout SpaceChem

    I’ve mentioned before that I am a massive SpaceChem fan. Whenever I’m playing a great game I can’t help but wonder about the process that brought it about so I decided to contact Zach Barth, the designer of SpaceChem, and ask him a few questions. During the interview he was also nice enough to pass along some very early design sketches which I’ve included in the article.

     

    Colin: How did you start working on SpaceChem?

    Zach: I started working on SpaceChem in November of 2009 with a friend who, being familiar with my previous works, wanted to make a game. Over the next year we picked up another programmer, a musician, an artist, a writer, and a sound designer. My goal for the project was to up the scope an order of magnitude from my previous games. There were plenty of times when it felt impossible, but with the help of my team we nailed it in the end.

    Playing through those previous games you can see ideas evolve from game to game. The Codex of Alchemical Engineering obviously had a strong influence on SpaceChem. When you started SpaceChem what did you want to keep from The Codex and what did you want to change?

    While I wanted to keep the mechanic of building structures out of “atoms” by “bonding” them together, I also wanted to add a bunch of new ideas that came to me after releasing The Codex, such as inputs being more complicated than a single “atom” and a greater context for the puzzles. I also made sure to fix some of the glaring gameplay errors, such as requiring structures to be built exactly as shown and having the complexity of solutions ramp up exponentially.

    Are there other games in the back-catalogue that had a big impact on SpaceChem?

    The defense missions are very similar to the battles in The Bureau of Steam Engineering, as they both require players to build a mechanism to power massive weapons with timing and sequencing requirements.

    I found that idea interesting because of its contents and because of my familiarity with it. This is a bit of trend with all of my mechanics: I invent a new problem in the form of a new game and use both brand new ideas and lessons learned from previous games to solve it.

    A lot of indipendent game authors take a very iterative aproach to design. Do you work in the same way or do you plan things out from the beginning?

    A mixture, really. I started designing SpaceChem by drawing up initial concepts for mechanics, progression, interface, story, and almost every other aspect. After that we wrote a prototype to test out the reactor mechanics and then began working on the full game.

    Over the development cycle, though, we changed many details as we learned what worked and what didn’t. For example, pipelines were originally based around an economic model that rewarded efficiency and allowed you to either “pass” or “master” the level depending on how many constraints you were able to optimize for. You could place as many reactors as you wanted and discard as many molecules as you needed to, but in order to “master” the level you’d have to balance the number of reactors against the number of products you chose to produce and maybe not throw away any molecules.

    Although I’m sure some of our hardcore fans will think we were stupid for throwing this system away, early playtesting indicated this was far too confusing. After a bit of discussion we vastly simplified the system to a single binary goal of “produce all compounds using the number of reactors allowed and generating waste only if the level includes a recycler”.

    How much impact did the rest of the team have on the design of SpaceChem?

    Although I was essentially the “gatekeeper” of design, many of the decisions were made as a group, to the point that I can’t even identify who was responsible for what ideas.

    How long did you spend on the initial design phase when you were drawing things up?

    The initial design phase consisted of a year of spare moments and snippets of conversations that birthed ideas that would go on to make SpaceChem and about two weeks of sketching and discussion when we decided to get down to it. I sketched out most of the design not related to the core mechanics while prototyping was being done by Collin, the aforementioned initial programmer friend.

    In prototyping we found that the core ideas could work, but not much more, as the prototype only encompassed the core reactor mechanics and lacked critical touches such as the line drawing and reconfigurable bonders (they were originally all 2×2). As mentioned earlier, a lot of the little decisions about how to make everything fit together nicely were made incrementally.

    When it comes time to do design, my primary tool is sketching, which forces me to fill in the gaps in ideas that exist only in my imagination and allows me to visually inspect the finished product and imagine how it will function. In the early design sketches you’ll see the cut features I mentioned earlier: pass/master goals, an economic model, and tower-defense style defense missions.

    Now that it’s out the internet is peppered with glowing reviews for SpaceChem. I’m a huge fan of the game myself and I’m proud to say I’ve finished every level. The final level alone took me 10 hours to solve though. Were you not worried that the game requires too much stamina and prolonged intense focus? Is SpaceChem written for a specific audience?

    This was definitely a question that was on my mind, but more truthfully it was something we had very little information about. Some of my previous games were similar to SpaceChem, but were both free and short; we had no idea how players would respond to a scaled up version, let alone what would be the best way to broaden the scope.

    SpaceChem wasn’t written with any specific audience in mind, and from what I can tell it hasn’t resonated with any one audience in particular. I’ve read an astonishing number of players remark that they normally don’t like puzzle games, but that they can’t stop playing SpaceChem!

    Most important question for last: when are you finally going to write Ruckingenur III?

    Hah! Ruckingenur II is by far one of my favorite projects – it’s just so sexy! The puzzles were really difficult to make and had zero replay value, though, which in addition to the inherent niche-appeal makes me think that a sequel isn’t likely. I hope to explore the general concept more in the future, though…

     

    Thanks very much to Zach for answering some questions about how he and his team designed a great game. You can buy SpaceChem on SpaceChemTheGame.com or on Steam and you can play Zach’s back catalogue of games (including the really excelent Ruckingenur II) at ZachtronicsIndustries.com.

  • Rebuild: Tech-nomadic game development

    Rebuild game title screen
    I described it as Zombie Sim City, except no you don

    When I started Rebuild, I wanted something I could write, sell, and be done with. I wasn’t planning another Fantastic Contraption. I didn’t want to deal with servers and payment methods and message boards. I was looking for a sponsor, following the model my friend Andy Moore used to great success selling his game Steambirds to the highest bidder.

    I’d been rolling around the game idea for about a year. I’d originally conceived it as a multiplayer Facebook game where you could see your friends on the same map and trade resources with them. I was working for Three Rings who were doing some neat Facebook games and I had hope that the Facebook audience were maturing as gamers and would soon demand more sophisticated games. Or at least real games which involve some sort of decision making and aren’t just glorified slot machines.

    As you may have guessed, I became soured to Facebook games’ simplistic play and shady propagation methods. Also, although I think multiplayer is where the future (and money) is headed, it poses extra problems like server communication, synchronization and security. Too many hurdles for my first independent game! So I thrashed out a single player version over two days which was basically the entire game right there, finished. All it needed was a little polish. Or maybe six months of polish.

    I think it took me about 3 months full time to finish it, but spread across six months in which we travelled through Europe and Central America. Some places I got almost no work done (In Czech Republic we were too busy with friends, pilsner and pork knuckles). Our month in Malta was super productive since it was hot as frack and there was nothing to do. We always planned ahead to make sure we’d have a net connection in every country, and although some were more reliable than others we had few major problems. We met up with other indie developers, and I always had enthusiastic playtesting and idiot checks from my husband Colin, who was working on his own game at the time.

    Rebuild version 0.01
    Version 0.01 after a couple days of work

    I did the design, programming and art for Rebuild; everything but the music which I licensed through Shockwave Sound. I hummed and hawed about hiring an artist to help out but I was nervous of letting a stranger in to my project and had no idea how well the game was going to do. Instead I learned a lot about vectors and enjoyed being able to switch to something creative when I needed it. I learned I can still produce art and story text after two glasses of wine, even though it only takes two sips to totally wreck my programming skills. So the art took me longer than it should have, but Rebuild was ready for final testing by November.

    I’d posted earlier versions to Facebook and sent them to friends and relatives, but got little feedback except from a few diehard fans (including Colin). I sat down with a couple people and watched them play, but I find the process nerve-wracking and I always end up explaining things rather than quietly observing, because I’m afraid that they’ll get confused and frustrated.

    FlashGameLicense has a system called First Impressions where you can get strangers to play your game and give feedback for $1 a pop. Unbiased strangers playing my game! I ordered 10 and sat refreshing the page until my first review came in:

    User: ExamineDeepish
    Played for: 7 minutes
    Ease of Use: 3/10 – the game really make little sense
    Fun: 1/10 – waste of time
    Graphics: 5/10 – nothing to shout about
    Sound: 5/10 – the sound is cool
    Polish: 3/10 – the game needs some work
    Parting Thoughts: The games should be more interactive of a real game. People don’t want to read so much for a game they just want to play and get on with the fun.

    Rebuild 1.0
    After six more months of part time work.Too many words??

    A fun rating of one?? People don’t want to read so much?? There was no way I was going to make minimum wage (my humble goal) with this game. I knew it was a good game, Colin knew it was a good game, but if your average Flash player downvotes anything with words in it, no sponsor was going to touch it. The second review gave it an even lower score, so I slunk to bed dejected.

    The next afternoon I grit my teeth and checked the reviews again, and was delighted to find some of the new reviews praised the game, giving it 9s and 10s and speaking in full punctuated sentences. They managed to drag the overall rating up to a 7/10 with Ease of Use being the worst category. Two reviewers got lost and had no idea how to play, so I spent another day tweaking the tutorial before I made the game visible to other FGL users then started bidding in early December.

    Next time I’ll talk about FlashGameLicense and the bidding process.

  • The Fate of The Fate of the World

    Insofar as a game can be about something The Fate of the World is about ruling the world to eliminate global warming. The problem with games being about something is the general incompatibility between the real world and video games. Lets knock up a short list of stuff that’s important to video games:

    • A clear goal (go right and rescue the princess)
    • A clear set of options (run back and forth, jump)
    • Predictable results from the chosen options (what goes up, must come down)
    • The ability to try the same challenge or a similar challenge over and over allowing you to learn.

    Note that none of these are really present in world governance. Fate of the World is largely the same way. It simulates pretty well the hopeless “I have no idea what’s going on but I guess I choose… more taxes?” decision making process of government. The problem with stripping away all the things in the list is that it leaves you with an environment that is not conducive to learning. Video games are about learning so Fate of the World is not a great video game. Which is too bad. You’d think you were in for a fun afternoon with a  “take control of the world and save it from climate change and petty nationalistic bickering by whatever means you can” game.

    But the problems are all listed on that list up there. You probably haven’t played the game and there’s no demo so I’ll have to do some work explaining it to you.

    There is a world made up of 12 regions. You play cards in each region to set policy which then changes the region, your selection of cards, and the world.

    So far so good. This also describes (minus the weird playingcards metaphor) great games like SimCity, Cliffski’s games Kudos and Democracy, and Sarah’s game Rebuild.

    You start out playing all of these games the same. You start playing the metaphor (People are being killed by zombies? I should find more soldiers I guess) and as you progress you start playing the rules of the game instead (well I need 6 soldiers and I know that on average 2 zombies a turn show up at the walls so I have 3 turns to find more soldiers). You get better at the game by reverse engineering it. That’s why they’re fun because you are learning the rules behind the metaphor and thus get better at the game.

    To be able to do this you need a couple to things from the game. They are listed up there at the top. Unfortunately Fate of the World has some serious problems on the predictability side of things.

    Lets take an example. There is a card called “Commit to Renewables”. It “influences” a region towards renewable energy. When I play the card it will make graphs move around. Graphs like the one on the right. There are a lot of graphs because there are a lot of underlying systems. The basics of “Commit to Renewables” are pretty simple. It makes the things in the “Renewables” graph like solar and tidal energy go up. But in every country they go up by different amounts. Do I just have to memorise the differences between countries? Should I be scouring the web for material on South African geothermal output? What’s worse is I that can’t figure out how this graph interacts with the many other graphs. Renewables feed into the harmful emissions system and I’m pretty sure I know how that interaction works. They are, however, not independent of the other energy systems so they also feeds into the regional coal, oil, gas and nuclear systems. Those systems each feed into international versions of those systems which in turn flow back into residential, commercial, and industrial systems as well as the happiness system for your region. That system feeds into the happiness system of the world which feeds back into the residential, commercial and industrial systems, as well as the regional outlook, contentment, militancy, and stability systems. Which feed into yet more systems like war and poverty. I have played for two days and am still identifying systems that I didn’t even know existed.

    So we’re in real kill-all-the-butterflies territory here. This throws out the whole “comprehensible actions that lead to comprehensible consequences” portion of our list.

    Even this could potentially be made to work if they got the last bullet point right: “The ability to try the same challenge or a similar challenge over and over allowing you to learn”. And they actually got closer on this one than the previous two. There is only one scenario to play (until you beat it, unlocking the next one). This scenario can not be beaten creatively, or in a myriad of ways. There are a narrow few solutions to each level. This makes The Fate of the World a traditional puzzle game instead of an open Civilizationy strategy game. Your goal is to find the right path through the disastrous future. The one shining road of hope. This is what makes the game somewhat playable. This Groundhog Day like approach to saving the world.

    Unfortunately there is a magic game design number they are breaking. I don’t know what the value of this number is but I know its units. It is (time invested)*(percent chance of failure). It is the price of failure. And it is too god damned high. I am willing to invest an hour to replay the same level as long as each play through provides big insights “oh, people who are unhappy go to war”. If I get enough insights per minute then It’s worth playing through again. As I figure out the big systems, however, I’m getting fewer and fewer insights per minute because the little interactions are harder and harder to untangle. That’s why most games are about learning just a few systems and mabey layering in more systems over time. It keeps us learning at a reasonable rate.

    They could have fixed this game by ripping out three quarters of the systems and focusing on the few that express the soul of the problem. Or they could have given us tiny little problems to solve in this labyrinth of rules (probably not as fun). As it is I find the game frustrating and opaque although if you’re looking for a massive knot to untangle while blindfolded you couldn’t do better.

    One last note. Bizarrely, this game is based on a previous flash game by the same developers that has the opposite problems! It lays all the rules out at your feet leaving you nothing to learn. Try it out here. Don’t assume it captures the feel of Fate of the World, it is in many ways it’s shadowy opposite.

  • SpaceChem != Autocad

    People have been making video games for like 50 years and they’re pretty fun and intuitive. We’ve also been making apps like word processors, spreadsheets, and Autocad for 50 years. And they are not fun or intuitive. Why is that? Can we learn anything about game design from this question? Enter Zach Barth’s SpaceChem.

    I’m pretty giddy that I have a place I get to talk about games I love now. Expect some posts featuring my favorite games from the last few years. SpaceChem is one of my favorite games ever. It is wonderfully hard-fun. It’s all about learning, finding tricks, and letting your brain slowly sink into the game until you absorb its very essence. Lo’ you have become a master where once you were but a wobbly newborn colt. SpaceChem is a very good game. Unfortunately today I come not to praise Ceaser, but to bury him.

    Since this game is so good everyone must be playing it right? It’s crazy that you’ve never played it eh? Obviously a good rigorous playthrough is in order. Here is the free demo (there is also a mac version). Alright. Tried it? Got through the demo? Ready for more? No? You didn’t get anywhere and the game seems confusing and overcomplicated? Well that’s because it is. I’ve tried to get everyone I know to play it and I think I’ve managed to make Zach about two sales. No one else I know has beaten it despite my attempts to portray this as a sort of sword-in-the-stone accomplishment. I seriously considered adding a monitary bounty to the feat. People won’t play SpaceChem even if you pay them. This is despite the fact that it is an astoundingly good game.

    I have a theory about why SpaceChem is so very hard to play. It is because Zach aproached interface design from the point of view of an Autocad designer instead of a game designer.

    There is one major difference in the two. The Autocad designer can not change the nature of buildings and the plastic hee-haws that Autocad is made to model. A game designer has complete control over the domain of their problem. It is foolish of us to not abuse this ability! Autocad will never be as fun as Fantastic Contraptin because Autocad has to model the real-world which is messy and complicated. Contraption’s world, on the other hand, is specifically tailored to fit hand in glove with the tools used to interact with it. The real world has depth but depth is akward to manipulate on a 2D screen; depth is thrown out the window. We’ll use a “sticks collide, water rods don’t” metaphor to get us 90% of the way towards depth. In the real world when three things are connected at the same point and one of them has an engine attached you have to specify where that engine is. You can’t just say “one of them is a wheel and the wheel spins” wheels spin about other things. Which of the two other things does it spin about? Nope, that question goes out the window, we tailor the world so that it doesn’t matter rather than tailor the interface to perfectly model the world.

    This is why SpaceChem feels overcomplicated. The game-world makes no concessions to the interface, to the tools used to interact with it. Since you played the demo I can discuss one example and how I would do things differently. You know how the game is about grabbing a couple of circles from the left hand side of the screen, doing some stuff to them, and then passing them off on the right hand side of the screen. You can see that quite clearly in this screenshot. See, over on the left you can see where you pick them up, and then see, over on the right you can see where you drop them off. Excpet no, you can’t. The drop-off and pick up spots are only nebulously marked. They are the large squares marked with a greek letter. You can drop stuff off anywhere inside that square and stuff gets dropped in… well there’s a tiny little diagram on the left that tells you where it’s dropped in and you just have to do the mapping yourself.

    This is not how most games would solve the “place to pick it up and place to drop it off” problem. Most games would have a little outline on the ground of where stuff will come in on the left and another little outline on the ground of where stuff must be dropped off on the right. This would make the goal of the game crystal clear to players. It would make the perceived level of complexity go down. SpaceChem, though, is not most games. Its dreams encompass not just the rolling hills but also the jagged snowy peaks, and as such, this solution would not work.

    See in SpaceChem you build these little machines. But in some levels you also build several machines at once, linking them all up to eachother with pipes. Like in this screen shot over here on the right. Now you see why printing outlines on the ground doesn’t work. Since the player decides what gets spit out of these machines and where they go you can’t have the strictly-enforced outlines. The game simply doesn’t know what’s comming in and going out. Whats worse is that advanced players will pass more than one thing into the same pipe in different and odd proportions.

    So the game as it is designed can not have these nice outlines that tell new players how to play SpaceChem. To solve this interface problem we need to change the game design. Instead of letting the players build little machines that take in anything and spit out anything lets give them a selection of machines with pre-set inputs and outputs. We can include all the machines necessary for the intended solution, a couple of common alternates, and mabey a few red herrings/challenges for advanced players.

    Now the interface is clearer, the perceived complexity is lower, and more people will play (and buy) SpaceChem. The pipes-levels definitely lose some of their magic but the pre-set machines offer another kind of challenge that might turn out to be almost as strong.

    There are other ways which the domain of SpaceChem could be changed to better suit the interface and I don’t know if rounding all the edges off it would have made me love it less. It is certainly possible. But damn if I don’t just want everyone in the world to be able to enjoy my games. And damn it if it isn’t incredibly frustrating to try to get my friends to play SpaceChem.

    But you’re made of sterner stuff. Go buy SpaceChem and remember, if you don’t find it fun it’s only because Zach overestimated your intelligence.