• 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.

  • False Unicorn Horns

    The game I’m working on is really really fun. When I first played it I had near orgasms of delight. The problem is, it’s really really hard. I want to give players orgasms of delight but to experience them they have to learn a lot of stuff. I’ve decided to try to solve this problem with a false unicorn horn.

    No one I ever try to explain this to has ever seen The Last Unicorn (which is a shame) so I will fill you in on what I’m talking about. In the movie there is a last unicorn. It also contains Mommy Fortuna, a relatively evil witch who keeps a traveling sideshow of rare animals. Most of her animals are very humdrum but she uses a magic spell to make it appear to onlookers as if they are manticores and satyrs. The pertinent idea here comes up when Mommy Fortuna captures our Unicorn. Since unicorn horns are invisible to the general public she magically applies a false one. This is a great idea that I want to steal.

    Since the game is so hard players will never learn how to play it if I just explain all the buttons and throw them in. Red-faced, they will exclaim “this is just a horse” to each-other between quaffs of ale, have a good laugh, and then move on. I need to apply a false horn so that people will play the game even when it is not at its orgasm inducing peak in order to bring them great joy later on when they can see the horn for real. I think there are a couple ways to do this and I want make use of as many as I can. More ideas are appreciated, there is a comment feature on this blog.

    Abuse of Dopamine Receptors. The ultimate false unicorn horn, behavioural psychologists have done a pretty good job of ferreting out the strings attached to our brain that make us dance and have called them dopamine receptors. Things that our brain loves: bright colours, intermittent rewards, a feeling of progress, close calls, basically Peggle. Basically our brains were put here on earth to play Peggle.

    Our brain loves these things because they are hints that we are learning something. And god DAMN do we love to learn. The problem with Peggle is that any player-skill is swamped out by the random element. So, like gambling, it’s just a trick. An illusion. It tickles the brain making us feel like we’re learning something and improving but we aren’t. The horn on the unicorn is a fake. There are a lot of other games with big fake horns, like Farmville, WoW, and Drop7 (actually I’m willing to budge on Drop7 if someone can find me a player that reliably gets very high scores).

    So anyway, I have to get some fake learning into my game so I can get people to the real learning. I’m not really very good at this and it will take some serious study. Time to download WoW I guess.

    The other way that I can think of to paste a false horn on this unicorn is the “puzzle mode” strategy. The idea here is to provide a totaly different game mode from the one I want players to eventually play. But a game mode that has a learning curve. You can think of it as a very extended tutorial. Or like an upside-down Scribblenauts. Scribblenaut’s orgasms came from the sandbox mode. Making Scribblenauts the best kind of game. Everyone could see the horn right from the beginning. But you can’t really sell toys right now. Well not un-musical ones anyway. So they had to affix a false horn to get we who aren’t good without a reward structure to fondle the real horn.

    I have the opposite problem but want to take the same approach. I’m planning to have a fairly long set of puzzles that are more in line with “permute choices until you win” style of play like Splitter or Angrybirds. Which give you all the skills you need to play the more Aramdillo Runy, Contraptiony game later on.

    I have hacked out a small level-set to try this out on just a very few testers and the results have been. Well, lackluster is the word. So I definitely have a road ahead. Fortunately the puzzle design was pretty crappy and it had no Peggle elements so I might still manage to weave a horn that will wow the beer-soaked crowds. I can’t quite remember how The Last Unicorn ends but I’m pretty sure Mommy Fortuna comes out on top in the end.

  • Origin Story

    Hello World. Welcome to a little corner of the web about Games, travel, and Games. We are Colin and Sarah Northway. Two independent video game authors who fell hopelessly in love and now travel the world plying our trade.

    A few years ago I (Colin) wrote a game called Fantastic Contraption while we were living in San Francisco. At the time Sarah was working at a great game company called Three Rings. We love San Francisco and three rings but we also love traveling so when Contraption made us some money we decided to cut loose. We sold everything but our laptops, quit our jobs, and started traveling and writing games full-time.

    We’ve made friends in Turkey, Czech Republic, Italy, Malta, Scotland, France, Honduras, and Costa Rica. We try to meet up with local independent game authors wherever we are. So far it’s been an amazing experience. Sarah has managed to write and release a game called Rebuild while on the road. It went live about a month ago to some serious acclaim. I spent most of the last year working on a game called Clutter which, unfortunately, I put on hold about two months ago near the end of our trip in Honduras. It just wasn’t working out.

    We are both working on new games right now and the plan is to use this space as a kind of public sounding-board. I find the process of writing about ideas tends to bring out other ideas and give me a more concrete understanding of the topic at hand. I also hope there might be some amount of discussion on the sight. But it remains to be seen if anyone will ever read it!

    At any rate. Welcome. I hope you find something interesting.

  • Of Rods, Cones, Meat and Monaco

    This was orginally a guest post I wrote on the gifted game author Andy Moore‘s website. It is reprinted here without his permission, or indeed any regard for how he might feel about me duping content on his site.

    I’ve spent the last few years prototyping games and generally trying to get my head around the discipline of game design.

    This post is about the latter.

    As you know the human eye uses Rods and Cones to detect light. Cones see colour and Rods see black and white. Since Cones see in colour and Rods don’t you’d think we could ditch the rods and just use the whole eye to see in glorious colour. Unforunatley Cones suck at a lot of things. In fact Cones are so bad at most things we don’t have very many. The human eye contains abut 7 million Cones and about 100 millions Rods.

    The biggest thing Cones suck at is seeing in low-light conditions. This is why dogs see better at night but also see in black and white. They haven’t sacraficed any retinal real-estate to Cones. Cones also suck at detecting motion. Our eye harneses groups of rods together to be incredibly good at detecting motion and it can’t do that with Cones. Mabey because of this some of the pathways in our brain that process motion are also bad at dealing with colour.

    This is pertinent to video games. Especially games which have a lot of motion and rely on quick decisions. Like Super Meat Boy for instance, or Monacco.

    I recently started playing the PC version of Super Meat Boy. I have been eagerly eagerly eagerly awaiting the release of the PC version of Super Meat Boy and it has not disapointed. It is a wonderously tuned piece of art. The pacing and the feel are perfect and it is seriously cutting into the time I’ve spent working on my own game. But I noticed in a few levels that I was having a hard time keeping track of Meat Boy as I sent him careening around the levels. After dying a few hundred times I began to wonder if it was related to how my eye perceives motion. Here is a screenshot of a Super Meat Boy level I have trouble with:

    And here is the same image completely desaturated:

    This image is how the motion sensing part of your eye and brain sees Super Meat Boy. Notice how Meat Boy fades into the background? That means he’s almost invisible to the part of you that detects motion. This is bad for a couple of reasons. Mostly because you Fovea is so small.

    The Fovea is the part of your eye that can see details. It’s where most of those 7 million Cones are. Inside the fovea the rods and cones are packed into a tight latice and we have very good visual acuity. Outside of the fovea we only have a vague sense of what’s around us. Outside the Fovea we have an sense of patches of bright and dark and we are extremely queued to see motion. The problem is the Fovea is tiny it’s about the size of your thumb-nail at arms length. That means we can only see a very small part of the world with any clarity. It doesn’t seem that way to us because our brain is so good at filling in the gaps. You know how you don’t notice the Blind Spots in each eye? Your brain is filling them in so you don’t notice them. It’s also doing similar tricks for pretty much 90% of your visual field.

    Your brain actually builds up a scene by using tiny eye movements to flit your eyes across your field of view. These tiny movements are called Saccades and you need them to build up an image in your head of what’s out there and what’s happening. Motion is a major driver of Saccades. If something is moving your eyes will quickly move to focus your Fovea on it, take in all the details, and then flit back. Your brain will then super-imposing the data it has gained on your view of the outside world. This makes you think you have a pretty good idea of what’s going on out there even thought you exist in a fog of uncertainty

    Meat Boy blending into the background causes two problems for this system. The first is, we can’t track him very easily. The part of the visual system that keeps a moving target in view is very old and very honed and it needs the motion sensitivity of your rods to do its work. If you rob it of those rods it will have a harder time doing its job. The second problem is reaquiring Meat Boy after you Saccade off to the ledge you’re trying to land on. Imagine you hurl Meat Boy off a cliff planning to land on a narrow ledge farther down. As Meat Boy travels south you can’t fit both him and the ledge in your Fovea at the same time, it’s too small. But you need acurate information on the ledge and on Meat Boy in order to land on it so your brian Saccades your eyes back and forth. It’s pretty easy to Saccade to the ledge since your brain remembers where it is. But Saccading back to Meat Boy is harder since he’s moving. In most levels your brain manages without too much trouble. It uses the movement data your rods are feeding it to keep track of where Meat Boy is moving while you Saccade off to the ledge. Then you can Saccade back because you know where his new location is. But in the levels where Meat Boy is of a simmilar brightness to the background your motion sensing system suddenly goes blind, you miss your Saccade and Meat Boy falls to his death two or three hundred times.

    Note that this is only a problem in a handful of levels and it doesn’t erase your ability to play, it just makes it a little harder. It is a good example, though, of how knowledge of the eye and the brain can make you a better game author.
    Now. If I haven’t totaly bored you to tears lets talk about how this relates to Andy Schatz’ upcomming game Monaco. Like Meat Boy, I am a giant fan of Monaco. I spent most of PAX this year playing Monaco. In fact it was all my Monaco playing that got me started researching all this eye-brain stuff in the first place.

    In a very real way Monaco is about Saccades. You Are Not So Smart is a relatively interesting blog on how the brain operates and the author, David McRaney, managed to coin one of my favorite quotes: “Reducing chaos into a manageable mental state is a constant battle”.

    A lot of our brain is dedicated to making sense of the world around us and multiplayer Monaco is a direct gloves-off challenge to this ability. It requires an extreme level of Situational Awareness. That’s a fighter-pilot term. Situational Awareness is how well you understand the state and location of all the important variables around you. Those variables might be MiG fighters or they might be french goons looking to knock the block off whover took their employer’s shinies. In Monaco you have to worry about the goons but also, more importantly, you have to worry about your team-mates.

    Monaco is about working as a team and you can only work with your team-mates if you know where they are and what they are doing. The pacing of the game is such that verbal communication is often too slow to adequately coordinate everyone’s movements. You all have to be actively keeping track of what’s going on and making decisions that will further the goals of the team. In this sense Monaco is more like a basketball game than a game of Chess. In this way Monaco is about Situational Awareness. And that Situational Awareness comes from your eyes and the processing of the information your eyes provide.

    Monaco sets the motion sensing part of your brain all alight. Like christmas tree lights. Your brain is trying to keep track of everything and is sending your eyes flying all around the screen trying to keep your mental map up-to-date. Andy Schatz hasn’t ham-strung our Rods by making the players blend in with the background. Monaco represents a fair challenge to the sensory system. But there is a lot of extraneous movement to draw the eye in the form of fog-of-war. As a player enters a room the scope of their vision rapidly opens up which makes objects in the room much brighter. This brightness is in turn noticed by our perephreal vision which then Saccades the Fovea off to identify it.

    This is troubling because usually we don’t need that information. We don’t need to know the contents of the room someone just walked into unless it contains a guard or a shiny. We should be satisfied with the vague notion of our teammate being “off in the top left cooridor somewhere”. But every movement of our team-mates is providing many pings of movement to our brain. With so much movement the location of guards and team-mates becomes lost in the shuffle. If you played Monaco while the fog-of-war was tile based you’ll know exactly how this works. Each tile used to change brightness so each tile represented a possible source of attention for our brain. It was very difficult to seperate important input from the constant bombardment of flickering tiles.

    Interestingly, I think this could be a good thing. Just as Situational Awareness seperates fighter pilots into the skilled and the dead it seperates Monaco players into the rich and the jailed. Brains are magical learning machines. Unlike the small handful of Super Meat Boy levels Monaco doesn’t blind our visual system, it just presents it with a very hard challenge. A challenge your brain can improve at subonciously. Think how much of getting better at Super Meat Boy is subconcious. It’s about training your brain with practice just like Situational Awareness in Monaco. That’s pretty much the definition of video games.

    Which is a good thing since I don’t think there’s much Andy can do to change it.

    In fact back when I was reading about all this I made up a simple Monaco analogue. I made a game that mimics (although mimics poorly) the Situational Awareness challenge of playing Monaco. It has a fake fog-of-war that moves around as the players move and you have to keep track of many variables while ignoring changes in the fog-of-war.

    You can swap the fog-of-war from being based on changes in brightness to being based on changes in hue with the space bar. Theoretically the version where the changes are in hue and not brightness should be easier. In practice the difference is subtle.

    You can play it here: Morocco

    You will need instruction as it took about an hour to write:

    Goal: Get a high score. Your score is the Grey Number in the top left-hand corner.

    Score By: keeping your mouse hovering over the player that is the same colour as the square in the top left-hand corner

    Also Score By: the other players will ocasionally turn into squares. Keep track of them and Click on them when they do for a big point bonus.

    Swap Between Brightness and Hue Fog Of War: with spacebar

    Restart at the end of a round: with the “R” key

    I am always impressed at how broad a base of knowledge is required to author video games. I think understanding of the human brain is one of the most rewarding. Learning about the Brain is also great for shining light on every-day life. I am constantly trying better to understand my own.

  • Pura Vida


    Tap Dancing Horse! a video by apes_abroad on Flickr.

    Out at Gabe’s bar again, where we ended up for drinks after dinner. We finish our last beer on the beach under the new moon sky so filled with unnamable constillations. Colin’s been bugging Jose to have a game of pool since Thursday, but there are always too many dishes. Finally they’re into their second game, so I leave them to it. Wander back tipsy through the sand and baby palms, ducking under the clothesline and stepping carefully over the ageing barbed wire fence into our yard. Our beachfront yard in Pochote, Costa Rica. Taking the secret backup key from its hiding place and penetrating the hexagonal wooden capsule, our little shiplike home. Nuking some leftover Gallo Pinto, setting the aircon to stun and settling down to my laptop on the dining table.

    </wierd present tense>

    I was just saying to Colin today: Colin, life is good. We were floating out in the water near the little stream where the skimboarding is usually good. Today we went out at high tide and the waves were good instead, so Colin left his board to go bodysurfing instead. He’s quite good at it, and when he gets it just right you will see him coming towards the shore like a disembodied head in the middle of a rolling white wave, grinning ear to ear. We collected shells and looked for Mary’s beans on the walk back.

    It was our usual break to a day spent hard at work, as we have been for the last month. A writer’s retreat, Colin likes to call it. There’s not much to do here and we are both so excited about our games that we’d rather work on them than do just about anything (though we make time for swimming!). Tomorrow I’m sending Word Dog off to FGL for strangers to poke and prod and give me their first impressions. Today Colin sent Flora & Fauna (short for Flora & Fauna on the Isle of Ajav, his new working title) to a few people for personal review. He weighs those reviews so highly! If I had done that for Rebuild I never would have finished it, and it just won the Kongregate monthly contest and is their #3 ranked game – hah!

    Colin spent the last 2 days doing art for Flora, which has taken the style of a mid-1800s botanical text. It’s really quite beautiful what he’s done with it and his artistic strength seems to lie in his willingness to try crazy things, like bending the entire play screen as if it was folding into the center of a book. It really looks great and the gameplay is super fun, kind of like Contraption but with more organic kinds of creations.

    I whussed out again and did the art for Word Dog myself rather than getting an artist, but it was much less work than Rebuild and I did most of the character stuff in one afternoon. The gui and tiles are… well they’re good enough for now. I actually spent forever on the logo trying to get it to look like the spraypaint title to Wild Style, but I am just not that cool. I picked music for it yesterday which consisted of me listening to every song in shockwave-sound‘s “hip hop” category and eventually picking the cutest, least hip-hoppy song in there. I got some excellent feedback from friends and family this week and I think the tutorial is pretty solid. Today I fiddled with dog barking sfx and drew a pretty halfassed dynamite explosion. Totally nearing completion!

    Next up for me is a tossup between doing the iOS version of Word Dog myself (I’ve been meaning to learn) or jumping in to Rebuild 2. I haven’t decided if I want to make that sequel 1) a straight flash game, 2) a multiplayer facebook game, or 3) some flash demo/content pack thing. I guess I could add 4) full downloadable game in there because so many people have suggested it but the scale of such things is intimidating. Just hiring an artist to do some animations has me fretting but I’m going to have to bite the bullet this time. I just don’t trust other people to work hard and come through on things and I don’t want to end up in a relationship I regret.

    But anyway, it looks like I’m going to make my deadline of getting Word Dog done by the end of Costa Rica. The Mishkins are coming to visit about a week from now and we’ll have a nice break from our writers retreat to do some of the fun local things we’ve been planning. I’m determined to see monkies in one of the parks nearby and go snorkeling at the popular Isla Tortuga.

    Oh I nearly forgot to mention, one fun local thing we did do already was go to the annual Rodeo in Cobano. The bull riding was pretty wild, because they let spectators down into the ring where they run around drunk trying to get the bulls to chase them. This is after the riders dismount of course, when they send out guys on horseback to lasso the bulls. I was a bit disappointed nobody got gored (Colin was horrified at this remark, to which I replied, “just a little gored!”) but some of the rides were pretty amazing and looked scary as hell. Those bulls really can jump. The pupusas and churros were yum and we got to practice bad Spanish (and at the same time, bad English) in a bar playing salsa music and spanish rap. A Good Time Was Had By All, or as they say here, Pura Vida.