• La visita de mi familia


    Aunt Diane and the Falls
    Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

    Last week was our long-awaited visit from the Mishkins! Colin’s aunt Diane and our cousins Ariel and Aaron came all the way from Nanaimo, BC to hang out with us in beautiful Costa Rica. Colin flew up to San Jose to meet them and help with the process of getting a car and navigating the four hour drive over to the Nicoya Penninsula and our house in Pochote. They stopped at a zoo near Alajuela and saw all sorts of rare local animals from ocelots to alligators. First order on arrival was a walk on the beach (the first of many) followed by roast chicken at Gabe’s place (also the first of many).

    For the last five weeks we’d been making do sans vehicle, bumming rides off our kind neighbors and walking to the Super Lapa Grocery at the other end of the bay. With the rental car we were eager to get out to see other towns and nearby reservas and refugios. We drove down to the cute surf town of Montezuma (which we’d previously seen at the end of our 4 hour beach hike) and checked out the waterfalls and Cabo Blanco reserve. Colin had a bit of a headache (understatement!) but he pulled through and we finally had our first encounter with the howler monkeys that we’d been hearing for the last 2 months. Sitting in trees, they look quite a lot like big black termite nests, but it’s easy to tell the difference once they start hooting. Later we walked up to a nice little swimming spot at the base of a waterfall. Colin and a local guide dove off high things together (the pool was small but 10m deep!), and I found a nice spot to sit right under the falls.

    We continued our daily routine of walking down to the river to skim and swim, now with Aaron on the skim board and Ariel with me in the water. Even Diane tried bodysurfing! We took them over to the Playa de los Muertos one day to go snorkeling. Crossing the estuary was a challenge at high tide, but Ariel works as a lifeguard and was able to swim across with our food above her head, not getting it even a drop wet. On the way back we met a family of howler monkeys on the hill and stopped to watch them crossing in the trees above. It was an amazing experience seeing them right here in Pochote and knowing that these are probably the same monkeys we hear every morning.

    On their last day we drove up to the Refugio Curu near Paquera. It’s a hotel as well as a wildlife park so I was prepared for tourists and plasticness, but there was none of that. We took the lovely low trail that goes from beach, through mangroves, across a rickety wooden suspension bridge, into the dry jungle for quite a ways, then through an overgrown mango plantation that has been left to the monkeys. We saw all sorts of wildlife: orange crabs licking their sand balls, lazy iguanas, skittish brown lizards with and without their tails, a huge inland hermit crab, a skunk, white-tailed deer (you’d think you were in Nanaimo!), snakes, “Jesus Christ – lizards!” (they run on water, and yes you have to pronounce it that way), howler monkeys, white faced capuchin monkeys, rehabilitating spider monkeys and a nasty goat that stunk of urine.

    I should explain the last few. They had a rehabilitation pen where spider monkeys that had previously been pets and were being prepared for release into the wild. One of them ran right to us when we arrived and stuck his arm through the bars. I held his hand and he gazed at me as if to say “I can’t take it in here – call my lawyer, you have to get me out of here!”. Then this horrible reeking goat (the prison guard, I think) chased the monkey off to the other end of the pen. The other monkeys just looked on in silence, fearing solitary should they step out of line.

    The best part though was the capuchin monkeys (as seen on Friends), which unfortunately only Colin and I got to see. A big family of 20 or so were hanging out in the mango trees chewing on fruit and bean pods and for some reason breaking off all the sticks (gardening?). There were little babies and bouncy teenagers and we abandoned the path to get as close as we could. Eventually one of the males got sick of our presence and went all monkey-aggro, baring his fangs at us with his butt all up in the air. I bravely snapped pictures until a second one picked up the stance then I booked it. Scary monkeys! Turns out they wanted us to back off so they could cross the road and head over to the other side of the river. One of them followed us and sat over our heads as guard, while the rest of them crossed through the trees with some amazing leaps (and some misses).

    They headed off to check out an active volcano before flying back to BC. I can’t believe it was over so fast! I had such a great time with the three of them. Cooking and making smoothies, swimming and kayaking and hiking and walking on the beach. We were so happy to finally be able to share our little corner of paradise.

  • 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: selling a Flash game on FlashGameLicense

    FlashGameLicense is as far as I know the only Flash broker out there and is used by every Flash game sponsor, so it’s amazing that despite their monopoly they’re working so hard to improve it all the time. When I uploaded Rebuild I got great feedback from the FGL admins who play every game before it’s allowed up for bidding. They were really enthusiastic and helped personally through the bidding process, so I was happy to pay their 10% commission – they really do deserve it.

    FlashGameLicense sale data
    Most games on FGL sell for under $1000

    Of course, FGL doesn’t come through for everyone. The average winning bid for primary sponsorship is under $1000, usually for things like dressup or seasonal games that sponsors can easily judge the value of because they’ve seen them a thousand times before. Colin tried to find a sponsor for Fantastic Contraption through FGL, but the best he got was an offer of $300 for full ownership of the source (try 1,000 times that, asshole). This was three years ago and FGL has improved their content discovery tools, but it’s still hard for sponsors to know if a confusing, wordy game like Rebuild is going to be popular.

    I’m not at liberty to give you exact numbers (visit Andy Moore’s blog for that) but here’s how Rebuild’s bidding went on FGL. It started out with a bang, a higher-than-average-sale bid from a fellow developer looking to promote his Zombie-themed MMO by featuring it on other games’ loading screens. In my opinion a pretty cool way to simultaneously advertise and support other developers. Three other sponsors I’d never heard of joined in and by the end of the second day I’d made my minimum wage.

    Jay Is Games Review
    Launch day review on Jay is Games!

    Someone put a bid in for a sitelock, which is a secondary sale made after primary sponsorship. You create a version of your game locked to one domain, stripping out ads and primary sponsor logos and implementing the secondary sponsor’s high scores api. It was early, but they were letting me know they were interested no matter who won the primary bid. JayIsGames contacted me to say they wanted to review the game when it came out. This is my go-to site for casual games so I was pretty stoked! I got excited about how fast things were happening and pulled in some contacts to invite the other major sponsors to take a look.

    Then I heard nothing – no bids – for five days.

    At this point there were two highest bids for the same amount with different contract terms. One of them included ads and extra work, so I contacted that bidder and told them that I was favoring the other offer. Bidding sprang to life again! I still hadn’t seen hide nor hair of any big sponsors, but the guys who were bidding seemed to personally like my game and were willing to go above budget for it.

    From then on, every time bidding stalled I messaged the runner-up again to let them know that, although I really liked them and their bid was great, the other offer was a little better. I gave a specific dollar amount they’d have to put in to beat it. I think I would have missed out on a lot of bids if I hadn’t done this. We were well into the holidays at this point but I got bids even on Christmas day (a marvelous present!).

    Two Towers Games logo
    Zombie-themed splash screen for Rebuild

    Until then the offers had been for primary licenses with additional work requirements (apis, new features, etc which were increasing in complexity as the bids went up). Two Towers Games asked about switching to exclusive, which meant I wouldn’t be able to sell sitelock versions to other sponsors. Implementing sitelock apis seemed like effort I could be spending on my next game instead, so I agreed. Their winning bid went in 20 days after bidding started and sat for another week before I accepted it. Again, I can’t tell you how much it sold for, but I will say it brought me into the FGL top-sellers list.

    My sponsor Two Towers was new on the scene, and the exclusive license gave them more time and control over Rebuild’s release and traffic. I was a little dismayed to find I’d agreed to implement ads (this is standard in most licenses) but we agreed there’d be none in the Kongregate version which was what I really cared about. It took about a week to make all the necessary changes for launch.

    Ads in Spanish
    The only CPMStar ad in Central America

    Rebuild spent the first month live only on twotowersgames.com, then I uploaded versions to Kongregate and Newgrounds and it began to make its rounds on the internet. Two Towers devised a cunning system of dynamically showing content based on a call to their servers, which lets them control on the fly which sites see ads or bonus content. I was also able to sell a few sitelocks with their approval, so long as their branding stayed on.

    For reasons that I don’t fully understand, Rebuild shot to the top of the Kong rankings, won the weekly and monthly contests and after one month is still the #3 highest ranked game with 1.5M plays.

    I’ve gotten hundreds of emails and pms with suggestions for the sequel which I’m eager to get started on, but first I need to finish the game I started during bidding: Word Up Dog. I’ll try to post updates here on the progress of both games.

  • 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.