I’ve been feeling rather stealthy lately, playing through Dishonored and Mark of the Ninja over the last few weeks. Playing them back-to-back has contrasted them rather sharply in my mind, though neither title suffers for the comparison. Rather, I’d like to highlight how certain elements of Mark of the Ninja’s design align perfectly with how I like to play stealth games.

Since most stealth games allow for a great deal of player agency, there are many perfectly valid ways of playing them. Some move through the levels like a ghost, others prefer to murder everyone from the shadows. Some are willing to go loud if their stealth is broken, others hide and try again. My preferred approach is to play each scenario as flawlessly as I can. I like to ascertain a situation, determine a strategy, execute it, then figure out how I could have done better. Can I avoid alerting the guards? Use fewer resources? Turn the environment to my advantage? I treat it like a puzzle, playing it over and over to find the optimal path.

In theory, there are “try again” mechanics built into the stealth genre. Your character is weak, so the guards can kill you quickly. Alternately, you escape and wait for the alert to die down. Either way you get a chance to reevaluate your strategy. However, both of those options are time-consuming, and the delay makes it difficult to iterate on a plan. Once you sit through a death animation and loading screen you’ve already forgotten the specifics of your recent failure. I made a point to pick up Dishonored on PC, allowing me to use quicksave and quickload to narrow down my perfect approach.

I didn’t have to micromanage my saves in Mark of the Ninja. The checkpoints are generous and there’s no score penalty for death. When my plan went badly awry, the window for recovery was small; I either died or escaped within a few seconds. There’s no minute-long ambiguous alert state, just clear immediate success/fail feedback. You could say Mark of the Ninja is the Super Meat Boy of stealth games: you die a lot, but you’re already back in game before that has a chance be bothersome. Iterating on a plan isn’t a tedious process when you can immediately begin executing your next idea.

Another element that supports the “puzzle” approach to stealth is predictability. As Anthony pointed out, Mark of the Ninja’s clean 2D presentation and excellent UI make it an exceptionally deterministic game. You have the unlimited ability to freeze time and line up exactly where your ninja distractions are going to land. Vision cones and noise radii sharply visualize the limits of a guard’s awareness. Everything is a known quantity, making failure a fault of planning rather than execution. The ability to know the outcome of individual actions with certainty gives players the confidence to create complex plans.

When I feel comfortable with a stealth game’s mechanics, I often like to invent impromptu challenges for myself. Can I fit all the knocked-out guards into one closet? Can I reach that far ledge with a pile of physics objects? I’m always impressed when the game recognizes and encourages these actions. For instance, I grinned when Dishonored popped up an achievement for reaching the top of Kaldwin’s Bridge.

Mark of the Ninja takes this idea one step further by taunting you with challenges. A prompt appears when you enter a new area, with instructions like: “kill 3 gasmask guards while they are walking in poison gas”. It’s entirely optional and rather difficult to pull off, but who can resist the temptation to try! The fact that this challenge exists is also a hint to new players: here’s something fun you didn’t know you could do. Completing challenges helps reinforce the player’s knowledge of how certain game mechanics interact. Reifying the made-up challenges that experienced stealth gamers give themselves helps encourage an improvisational mindset in every player.

Mark of the Ninja is a spectacular game, one that makes stealth mechanics accessible and readable without reducing their complexity. Furthermore, it support the puzzle-like stealth experience that I love: figuring out a plan then executing it flawlessly. I can’t wait to see what Nels and the team at Klei come up with next.

Oh, and I completely agree with RPS: the ninja protagonist should be named Mark.

This week saw the release of Valve’s new beginner-friendly level editor for Portal 2, dubbed the “Perpetual Testing Initiative”. Many have praised this new software for its accessibility, and have advocated it as an entry-point for first-time level designers. I had a chance to experiment with it a little myself, and I’d like to explore some of the specific principles Valve employed to create this remarkably approachable editor.

Booting up the editor for the first time gives you a simple rectangular testing chamber. The walls and floors can be dragged in any direction to expand the space or create connected chambers and corridors. Puzzle devices are dragged and dropped into the world from a tidy panel on the left side of the screen (very much like The Incredible Machine.) Right clicking these elements in the world exposes a small selection of options, and allows you to connect them to other devices. Simply moving the camera around the 3D space will likely be the most challenging interaction for a fledgling designer.

The editor is stylized like a blueprint: elements appear simpler than they do in-game, some devices (like the Aerial Faith Plate) project dashed path lines, and ceilings / backward-facing walls are automatically hidden from view. A working knowledge of Portal mechanics is assumed, as there are curiously no tool-tips to explain how the various devices function. Even I had to use trial-and-error to figure out how the Track Platform works, as the official Valve wiki is unfortunately sparse at the time of writing.

A great deal of editor’s simplicity derives from the fact that it’s not a generic tool designed to make levels, but rather a very specific tool to make test chambers. Test chambers in the Portal universe have a well-defined format. They are white, sterile, closed and grid-aligned rooms. They contain some permutation of the 32 devices. They necessarily have exactly one entrance, one exit and one observation room (which functions as the level’s main light source.) These fiction-appropriate constraints keep the editor simple by limiting the number of possible ingredients.

The devices themselves demonstrate a similar simplicity; both input devices (buttons, laser catchers) and output devices (laser emitters, piston platforms, etc.) maintain only binary states. Attaching several inputs to the same device will require them all to be active (logical AND), but there is no sanctioned way to achieve OR, NAND or XOR. Connections between devices are always visible to the player, as the editor automatically generates an in-game dotted line between them. Keeping the interaction between devices simple allows the editor to abstract away from any sort of complex scripting logic.

Fundamentally, the Portal 2 editor works so well because of the judicious use of physical constraints. In The Design of Everyday Things, Donald Norman describes how these types of limitations “constrain possible operations” such that “desired actions can be made obvious.” Since it’s almost impossible to do the wrong thing in this editor, the only possible actions are correct ones. Designers are thus free to experiment without fear of breaking the level in an esoteric way. The only clearly incorrect operation I’ve found is placing two devices in the same spot; the feedback for this error is clear and immediate.

In my few hours of experimentation I made a simple test chamber called “Ducks & Drakes”, which you can download and play by hitting subscribe in the Steam Workshop. You should also check out the Perpetual Testing Challenge over at the MapCore Forums.

A few weeks ago, the gents from the Moving Pixels podcast invited me to join them in conversation about League of Legends. League is an extremely popular free-to-play game in the style of Defense of the Ancients, and I’ve been rather hooked on it for the last few months. Jorge Albor, G. Christopher Williams and I discuss what we love (and hate) about the game, Riot’s clever business model, and the type of community that competitive games attract. You can download the podcast or subscribe on iTunes at the link below:

Moving Pixels – League of Legends

Since it’s been seven months since my last post, here’s a quick list of what I’ve been up to lately: I gave a talk at Juegos Rancheros (Austin’s indie game collective) back in November. Pax Britannica was ported to Montreal’s Arcade Royale and demoed at the Prince of Arcade showcase. Mostly, though, I’ve just been working hard on Starhawk (look for it on shelves May 8th!) However, all this does not excuse my writing hiatus; I’ll endeavour to resume regular blog cromulence over the next few months.

[Sona & Jax Lunar Revel fan artwork by RUshN]

While I’m not typically a shmup player, lately I’ve been enjoying a great indie shooter called Jamestown. It piqued my interest with its colonial Martian setting and beautiful pixel art. However, the game’s lasting appeal rests in the strength of its peculiar Vaunt mechanic.

When activated, Vaunt grants the player a seemingly arbitrary list of benefits: a brief bullet shield, followed by increased damage and a score multiplier for as long as the energy meter is kept filled. In practice, this mechanic gives Jamestown its own particular systematic rhythm of tension and respite. I’d like to use Vaunt to explore the idea that a game mechanic can have an inherent dramatic arc similar to those created by traditionally authored stories.

When I speak of a dramatic arc, I mean something along the lines of the three-act structure commonly used in storytelling. Strongly authored media (films, books, plays, etc.) map very nicely to this kind of structure, as does the authored content in video games. For instance, a level in Jamestown is composed of a series of increasingly intense enemy waves followed by a climactic boss fight. The pacing and intensity of this level design is determined entirely by the game’s creators.

When examining a game’s effective dramatic arc, we must of also take into account the player’s agency. The abilities that the player has control over can increase or decrease dramatic tension. For instance, a bomb move that kills all the enemies on screen gives the player a breather, thus creating a moment of dramatic respite. A slow powerful attack creates high tension (as the move charges) followed by low tension (as the hit connects.) These types of mechanics create a parallel dramatic arc authored by the player. The two arcs superimpose each other, interacting in a sort of wave interference that heightens some moments and dampens others.

What would the dramatic arc for the Vaunt mechanic look like? It begins with normal moment-to-moment gameplay, with its mild variations in intensity. Some high-tension impetus for activating Vaunt would then occur: a mid-wave difficulty spike or simply the filling of the energy meter. In response to this event, the player hits the ‘B’ button to activate the bullet shield and begin Vaunt mode. The momentary safety of this shield creates a brief nadir in dramatic tension.

After the shield has expired, Vaunt mode remains active as long as the player continues to replenish the energy meter by killing enemies. As I mentioned previously, remaining in this mode grants a score and damage multiplier. These multipliers increase the benefit of skilful play, which in turn increases the innate tension of moment-to-moment gameplay. Furthermore, surviving the duration of Vaunt mode grants an additional score bonus. The dramatic tension increases parabolically as the potential benefit of the survival bonus accumulates over time.

Vaunt mode can terminate in three different ways. The most desirable outcome, illustrated in the graph below, is when the player runs out of enemies to kill and the energy meter expires gracefully, granting the full survival bonus. In terms of dramatic tension, this would be a plateau followed by a resumption of normal gameplay. If the player instead becomes overwhelmed during Vaunt mode, she has the option to press ‘B’ again to activate a second bullet shield. This choice ends the mode prematurely, only granting half the survival bonus. This outcome would be represented graphically by a second brief peak in tension. Finally, the player could die during Vaunt mode and lose out on their survival bonus entirely.

These graphs reveal some general ways that a game mechanic can increase or decrease dramatic tension. When they provide momentary safety, increase performance pressure or ransom potential reward, they have a strong dramatic effect over time. We can also see how the mechanical tension interacts with the authored dramatic arc. The encounter design provides the high-tension impetus for activating Vaunt, and the level’s difficulty strongly influences which way the mode will end. The nature of Jamestown’s Vaunt mechanic works in concert with its strong level design to create an exciting gameplay experience.

The MDA framework asserts that game mechanics create an aesthetic response in the player. When we observe this response over time, we see patterns of dramatic tension and reprieve that match those found in storytelling. We often praise the narrative power of heavily-authored games, but the best video game tales often emerge from system-centric games like Dwarf Fortress, Civilization and EVE Online. If we acknowledge that game mechanics have inherent dramatic arcs that superimpose the authored content, then we can begin to analyze mechanics in terms of their storytelling potential.

SpaceChem is a remarkable puzzle game about fake chemistry. The game challenges you to build a factory in order to transmute the given input molecules into the given output molecules. While chemistry is the theme, on a mechanical level it has more in common with programming. The methods used to tackle challenges in SpaceChem are akin to real techniques used by computer programmers. I’d like to elaborate on these manifold similarities, as well as explore how games like SpaceChem could be used to promote procedural literacy.

The player commands two circular “waldoes” by laying out paths and instructions for them. The waldoes follow the path and sequentially execute any instruction they come across. They can grab, drop, rotate, sync, bond, fuse, request input or dispatch output. The waldo’s analogue in computing is the processor, a hardware component that sequentially executes basic operations defined by machine code. Like processors, waldoes are the engines that drive the control flow of a SpaceChem factory.

When a waldo grabs a molecule, it gains the ability to perform instructions directly on it. In other words, a grabbed element is more readily and rapidly available than one lying elsewhere on the grid. Conceptually this is analogous to storing data in registers, a form of computer memory that is accessed very quickly and that the CPU manipulates directly. Just as a waldo can only grab one molecule at a time, computers have very few registers and must therefore rely on caching.

If grabbed molecules are like data in registers, then molecules left on the grid are cached. The cache is a larger, cheaper form of memory, but it is slower to read and write. Data must be written from the cache to a register in order to be manipulated directly by the CPU. The amount of memory in SpaceChem’s “cache” is governed by the area of the grid (8 x 10). Each coordinate on the grid can therefore be considered a unique memory address. This analogy is enforced mechanically: a factory “crashes” if two atoms collide on the grid, since you can’t store two values in the same memory address.

Each factory has two waldoes, and they must be properly coordinated as they move through time and space. This coordination is facilitated by the sync node, which tells a waldo to wait until its twin has also hit a sync node. Parallel waldo management is akin to parallel programming, and they share the same perils: deadlock, starvation, race conditions, etc. The waldoes are like threads operating on shared memory space, and sync nodes are functionally similar to semaphores (operations that tell threads to signal and wait.) Operating two waldoes simultaneously in SpaceChem forces the player to confront the same shared resource problems as parallel computing.

SpaceChem and programming involve similar challenges: laying out simple instructions to achieve a complex result while managing limited time and resources. Like a good software specification, each puzzle is clearly presented as a black box defined only by its inputs and outputs. The player lays out instructions, starts up the factory, observes errors and corrects them, iterating until the puzzle is solved. Solutions can then be further optimized to take less time and use fewer instructions. SpaceChem and programming are engaging, flow-inducing activities because they have an identical inner loop: implementing, debugging and optimizing.

At this year’s GDC, Michael John asserted that programming is 21^st century literacy. If computer programming is currently considered esoteric knowledge, it’s because our general education is not preparing students to think about problems in an algorithmic or systematic manner. Ian Bogost calls this procedural literacy: “the ability to reconfigure basic concepts and rules to understand and solve problems.” SpaceChem may not be an ideal game for the classroom (it’s far too difficult, for one), but it strongly suggests that the best way to learn about and engage with complex systems it to play with them.

If you follow me on Twitter or elsewhere, you may be aware that I moved from my native Montreal to Austin, Texas last year to work for a new studio called LightBox Interactive. We’ve been requisitely tight-lipped about our project until this last Friday, when we finally unveiled Starhawk to the community.

Starhawk is a third-person shooter for the PS3, and a spiritual successor to Warhawk. The game is set on the lawless frontier of space, where the rush to mine rift energy incites conflict between the scrappy Rifter union and the post-human Outcast. These two factions form the basis of the online 32-person multiplayer. The single player campaign follows Emmett Graves, a gunslinger pariah hired to protect the small mining town of White Sands.

The core of the game is characterized by fast-paced action and air/ground vehicle combat on huge open maps. The most iconic of these vehicles is the Hawk, which can transition from a nimble airship into a staunch mech. It also features a new system called Build & Battle, which allows players to quickly call down fortifications, turrets, vehicles and reinforcements in real-time on the battlefield. This distinctive system unlocks a multitude of strategic options and gameplay styles.

Starhawk is currently set to release in 2012, and you can follow its development on StarhawkTheGame.com. You can also check out a profile video of our studio and interviews with the project leads on G4. I’ll also add the usual disclaimer that opinions expressed in this blog are always my own and do not represent my employer.

I’m still not quite sure what to make of Deadly Premonition. Everything you’ve heard about it is true: it has atrocious combat, compelling mystery, laughable graphics, memorable characters, inappropriate music, etc. The game is full of fresh ideas and has stuck with me for months, but I still wouldn’t feel comfortable broadly recommending it. I would, however, like to examine one particular section of the game that I think was both absurd and oddly well-designed.

The sequence I’d like to highlight occurs very early on in the game. Having arrived in Greenvale the previous night, FBI agent Francis York Morgan (“please, call me York”) heads to the Sheriff’s Department to begin his investigation into the murder of Anna Graham. He is greeted there by mild-mannered deputy Thomas MacLaine. Visibly flustered by the small town’s recent tragedy, he has lost the key to the evidence locker and requests Agent York’s aid in retrieving it. He further notes that the key can be identified by its “Southern Flying Squirrel” key holder.

At first glance, this seems like a fairly typical time-wasting fetch quest, albeit one that eventually reveals a humorous twist. However, the hunt for the squirrel key rather cleverly addresses a number of high-level design considerations. Namely, it serves a purposeful role in establishing character relationships, aiding player navigation and setting a tonal precedent.

Right away, the reasons behind Thomas’s request tell us a lot about him and his relationship with the other characters. His reaction to Anna’s death shows that he is kind and sensitive, and the fact that he lost the key demonstrates that he is mildly incompetent (or perhaps just inexperienced) as a police deputy. It is strongly suggested that petitioning York’s aid is motivated by a desire to avoid confrontation with the Sheriff, George Woodman. This hints at the nature of their relationship: Thomas is meek and very intimidated by his grouchy superior.

After receiving Thomas’s request, the player is allowed to freely explore the Sheriff’s Department. The building is rather large, with several offices on the first floor and a prison and firing range in the basement. Depending on the player’s exploration path, she may first stumble upon a “Pointy-Tailed Flying Squirrel” key in an inauspicious storage room. However, when this key is returned to Thomas, he politely explains:

…Ah. You don’t know your squirrels, do you. This isn’t the right key holder. This is a Siberian Flying Squirrel. It’s closer to a land-based squirrel. The Siberian Flying Squirrel is larger than the Southern Flying Squirrel, and has a standing tail while the Southern has a hanging tail. But we’re looking for a Southern Flying Squirrel right now.

There are, rather absurdly, five types of squirrel keys strewn about the Sheriff’s Department. One key is hidden in the locker room, another in the kitchen and yet another outside the firing range. Furthermore, as items they are only identified by description, such as “long-tailed”, “grey” and “striped”. Agent York, who frequently voices his urban prejudice, presumably lacks the country knowledge to discern their exact species. The Southern Flying Squirrel key (described as “curvy-tailed”) is found in cell #5 of the basement jail, which is the furthest room from the starting point.

Having the player complete the same fetch quest up to five times may seem ridiculous. However, remember that this sequence takes place during the player’s first visit to the Sheriff’s Department. It’s a location that plays a crucial role in Deadly Premonition, and the player will have to return here very frequently during the investigation. Obliging the player to initially explore the building from top to bottom ensures that he will be able to comfortably navigate the space in the later sections of the game. If the player ever wants to talk to the Sheriff or interview a suspect in custody, he’ll know exactly where to go. Even jail cell #5 plays an important role towards the end of the game.

Finally, the absurdity of this sequence helps to establish a whimsical tone running in parallel to the more serious otherworldly murder investigation. Deadly Premonition is an open-world game, and Greenvale is full of colourful characters who ask York to perform optional odd jobs for them. These side quests are as strange and as varied as fetching ingredients, competing at darts, chauffeuring an old lady, answering medical trivia, and catching a legendary fish. The player may feel compelled to disregard these excursions in favour of concentrating on the serious task at hand. The fact that a trifling chore like the squirrel key hunt is integrated into the main storyline suggests that it is perfectly acceptable to indulge the local populace’s strange demands.

Deadly Premonition’s squirrel key hunt is remarkable because it subtly conveys a great deal of information about the game, the town and its inhabitants in a short playable segment. It’s emblematic of the best kind of tutorial: one that is completely integrated into the core game and teaches through play.

Few online multiplayer games have become as habitual for me as Team Fortress 2. I’ve returned to it every few months since its release back in 2007, usually to plumb the strategic depths of a handful of familiar maps. In August of 2008, the Heavy update introduced Steel, a community map created by Jamie “Fishbus” Manson. Its complex layout and objective structure immediately intrigued me, and after hundreds of matches it has become one of my all-time favourite multiplayer maps.

Steel is an asymmetric attack/defend control point map. The red team begins with all five points under their control, but the blue team only needs to claim control point E within the allotted time to win the game. While E is open for the entire match, capturing it early is a daunting challenge. The control point is perilously situated right outside the red team’s spawn point and across a bottomless chasm. To make matters worse, E’s capture timer is twice as long as any of the other control points.

To facilitate their assault on the final control point, the attacking team can unlock strategically advantageous layout changes by claiming four optional control points (A through D). Bases shift, objectives change, new routes open up while others are closed off; every change has a significant impact on the high level flow of combat. While other control point maps tend to split each stage of combat into a segregated segment of the map, Steel cleverly folds five stages into one large contiguous layout. Each sequential pairing of A-D and E effectively functions as a distinct stage of the match. This iterative repurposing of the combat space is a large part of what makes Steel unique and noteworthy, and is a something I believe is deserving of detailed design consideration.

To demonstrate this, I’ve annotated the following overhead maps to visualize a loose concept of “combat flow”. The lines represent optimal or strategically valuable routes from spawn points to objectives, and tend to represent where combat will take place. By analyzing these player flow patterns, we can better appreciate how each phase of the match demands that players redefine and reinterpret the combat space.

Phase One – Control Points A & E

The first optional control point available for capture is A. It is situated in the southwest corner of the map, inside a small shack atop a gently sloping hill. The defending team can reach A by simply stepping through the western gate of their spawn camp. They have a 60 second setup phase to fortify the control point undisturbed.

To capture A, the blue team has a choice of two main attack routes. The spawn camp’s main exit opens into large wide corridor winding around to approach the point from the west. Curving around the enemy spawn point in this manner affords a certain degree of safety. However, this route has several drawbacks: long sight lines make defending Snipers a serious threat, a blind corner could conceal an enemy sentry nest and Spies often lurk in the open plain’s nooks and crannies.

The alternate northwestern exit of the blue team’s spawn sends players onto an elevated plateau. This point overlooks the capture point, making it an ideal shooting range for Demomen and a rapid launch point for Medic ubercharges. To dissuade blue players from poking over the ridge, astute defenders will often place a sentry gun on the elevated platform in the back corner of the base.

Control point E is open for capture throughout the match, though it is exceptionally difficult to do so early on. It’s located on a small circular platform surrounded by a bottomless chasm, a gap that can only be crossed by double jumping (Scouts) or rocket jumping (Soldiers/Demomen). The path to E is quite long, winding past locked capture point B. Furthermore, the defenders can quickly respond to an attack on E by exiting through their spawn camp’s eastern gate or sniping from the western window.

Control point A can be a tough nut to crack, so an all-out assault is often not be the best approach. Skilled attackers will apply calculated pressure at E in order to pull some of the defensive force away. This allows their team mates to make a push for A while the enemy forces are distracted. The tactic of splitting the defender’s focus in this manner is crucial to offensive success in Steel.

Phase Two – Control Points B & E

Claiming control point A unlocks two nearby doors: one through the back of the shack leading to D/E and the other opening a short underground route towards B (not shown on above map). The first path permits the attackers to stealthily assault E, though the efficacy of splitting the defenders in this phase is greatly reduced due to the close proximity of B and E.

Control point B is a rectangular yard in a courtyard surrounded by tall buildings. A small wooden fence blocks the western approach. Since the point isn’t immediately visible from the defender’s spawn point, it can be quite difficult to recapture it once the red team starts pushing. An alternate path from the defender’s spawn camp leads to an east-facing second storey window, an ideal camping spot for defending Snipers and Demomen.

The blue team can mount their attack along two parallel paths. Travel on the lower path is slightly longer, sloping upwards into the underside of B. The route bisects a man-high wall, which can function as loose cover for both sides. There’s also a ramp leading to the roof of a small shed, but this detour rarely provides an offensive advantage. The higher path leads to a ridge overlooking the entire courtyard, an advantageous position that carries the risk of high visibility. There is also a windowed hut on this ledge, just opposite the one available to the defending team.

Phase Three – Control Points C & E

If the blue team manages to capture control point B, two major changes occur: the door blocking the eastern path towards C slowly opens and the red team’s spawn camp is shifted to the far northern side of the map. Though the defenders continue to spawn right outside E’s northern approach, the attackers have effectively gained control the entire southern half of the map. You may notice that the blue team’s camp is now far away from current objectives; this is a key element of the attack/defend asymmetry, but the disadvantage can be negated by the strategic construction of teleporters.

The area around C is characterized by a strong contrast between high ground and low ground. The control point is located on an elevated balcony nestled into the back corner of the base. The red team also controls a small ledge just south of their spawn camp overlooking C. Both of these positions are high above ground level, offering long sight lines for Snipers and elevated sentry nooks for Engineers. Fighting in the pit below often devolves into a messy brawl, somewhat favouring Pyros and Scouts.

The blue team controls an opposing elevated ridge on the southeastern side of the base, which is a great place for Engineers to set up camp. Large rock crenellations offer convenient cover for Soldiers, Snipers and Demomen to bombard C’s defences from. The western path is also a strong candidate for offensive fortification, as it allows quick access to both available control points. From here, blue players can move between C and E almost as quickly as red players, splitting the defender’s focus very effectively.

Phase Four – Control Points D & E

If control point C is captured, three bridges extend across the chasm surrounding E. This layout change has two important consequences. Firstly, whereas control point E was previously available only to Scouts, Soldiers and Demomen, it can now be captured by any of the nine classes. Secondly, a major central route now connects the north and south ends of the map. Both of these factors make E significantly easier to capture, spelling doom for uncoordinated defenders.

The red team can immediately reach D and E through the spawn camp’s western and southern doors respectively. With the final control point now vulnerable, the defenders must be vigilant about concurrently defending both points. This is usually achieved by moving between bases as threats arise, though a cleverly constructed sentry gun can cover both approaches at once.

The blue team can now take advantage of a door that was unlocked in the first phase, allowing them to traverse the long northwestern path from A to D. The winding eastern route previously used to attack B and C now becomes the principal attack vector for E.

There are also two minor attack routes that I omitted from the diagram for clarify purposes. Firstly, any blue players left straggling at C at the end of the last phase can sneak westward by passing in front of the red team’s spawn camp. Secondly, there is a window overlooking E from A which is ideal for Snipers (you may recall that this nest was previously under the red team’s control in phase one.)

Phase Five – Control Point E

Occasionally the blue team will manage to capture all four optional control points before capturing E. Claiming D blocks off the red spawn camp’s southern exit, forcing defenders to take the longer western route to get back into the fight. The three bridges to E also sprout guardrails, protecting players from being pushed into the abyss. The blue team can continue their assault via the roads from A and B, or attempt to intercept respawning red players at D. These layout changes put the red team at a severe disadvantage; their only hope is to make a noble last stand and try to run out the timer.

I suspect that these diagrams and descriptions will fail to evoke the real experience of playing Steel. Beyond the inherent limitations of projecting a 3D space onto an overhead map, there are multitudes of small clever design decisions that these high-level illustrations fail to capture. However, I hope these annotations do reveal how Steel cleverly creates five distinct combat scenarios superimposed over one layout. This unusual map rewards those who can reinterpret the changing space around them. Failure to attack or defend Steel is often more fundamentally a failure of adaptation and imagination.

Only ten months after promising that they were “coming soon”, the gentlemen of No Fun Games (Henk, Renaud and myself) have finally finished porting our one-button real-time strategy game Pax Britannica to OSX and Linux. You can check them out at our fancy new website, or download them directly here:

Mac Download / Linux Download

Unfortunately, the OSX version of the game is currently lacking gamepad support due to a platform-specific issue with GLFW. We’ll be sure to release an updated version of the game if that’s ever patched!

I’m tremendously grateful for all the positive feedback we’ve received about Pax Britannica. In particular, this video review by Joe Larson and his son Andrew reminded me why I started making video games in the first place:

Minecraft was my gateway drug. It seduced my imagination with grand ideas: setting foot in a dangerous new world, gathering provisions from the wilderness, erecting meagre shelter and surviving on your cunning and creativity. Regrettably, these concepts quickly wane once you learn a handful of commonsense safety rituals. Late-game Minecraft becomes a different game entirely, one largely centred on erecting impressive macrostructures or testing the limits of redstone torch circuits. This minor letdown gave me a taste for “harder stuff”, which led me to the seemingly impenetrable pioneer simulator Dwarf Fortress.

Dwarf Fortress has a peculiar dual inheritance: the permanent death and procedural generation of Roguelikes and the city-building strategy of games like SimCity. Its well-deserved reputation for inaccessibility is rooted in several factors, most notably the extreme austerity of its graphics. Simply learning to mentally translate a screenful of ASCII into a bustling dwarven settlement is a considerable endeavour (though a sprite pack certainly helps). Underneath this mess of characters lies a byzantine system of mechanics that drive the game’s detailed world simulation.

The scope of this simulation is almost inconceivable. For starters, every dwarf has a unique name, equipment, proficiencies in various professions, work orders, religion, moods (sometimes strange), relationships, and health status categorized per limb. The world generator models elevation, temperature, rainfall, drainage and erosion to generate several dozen biome types. These biomes are populated by thirty kinds of trees, a few dozen types of rock and ore, and several hundred creature species ranging from elephants to hydras. Despite its anachronistic low-fidelity graphics, the sheer quantity of information being processed and updated under the hood necessitates modern computing power.

Agency in this complex world is expressed through the dwarves, but they are not directly under your control. Instead the player outlines a high level task (dig here, store wood here, construct a workshop here) and the game chooses a dwarf to perform it based on certain criteria. As far as I can tell, this aspect of the control scheme is unique; strategy games usually require manual unit selection before issuing simple commands. Dwarves are highly autonomous once set up with the proper facilities, and will occupy themselves with eating, drinking, sleeping and working without the player’s input.

Regrettably, this remarkable system also has a massive flaw: the nontrivial task of managing who does what. Each dwarf has a list of “labours” that he or she is permitted to perform. These labours loosely correspond to professions: mining, wood cutting, farming, masonry, hauling etc. This system allows you to maximize the benefits of your specially trained dwarfs. After all, you don’t want your best farmer to be hauling barrels while your expedition starves. However, needlessly restricting labours can create a work bottleneck or leave an overspecialized dwarf idle. Managing labours manually becomes extremely tiresome once your dwarven population swells to thirty or more, necessitating third party spreadsheet applications such as Dwarf Therapist.

One aspect of Dwarf Fortress that particularly appeals to me as a programmer is that its systems are not inherently complex. Instead, the complexity arises from the interaction of many simple systems. Tarn Adams described this design philosophy as: “finding the key, basic elements, finding the rules that govern them, and then activating those things in the world.” For instance, one of the first challenges for a new dwarven settlement is securing a source of food, and the safest ways of doing this is subterranean farming. In order to plant crops underground, the soil must be muddied by temporarily covering it in water. Rather than having one preordained way of doing this, a number of interesting options emerge from Dwarf Fortress’s sophisticated fluid dynamics simulation. One method involves setting up a dwarven bucket brigade to carry in water from a distant source. Another option entails digging out the side of a murky pool so that the water flows into a larger chamber. Advanced players can even work out complex irrigation systems using floodgates and pumps. Hungry dwarves, thirsty plants and simulated water physics intersect to create an interesting problem.

The intersection of simple systems is also responsible for Dwarf Fortress’s peculiar difficulty scale. The level of challenge associated with any given playthrough is largely determined by the choice of embarkment site. Each biome offers a distinct set of flora and fauna, and is further classified on axes of savagery and alignment. Evil and untamed lands are teeming with dangerous creatures and are thus far more perilous to inhabit. Proximity to other civilizations is also a difficulty factor. Human and elven neighbours will send trade caravans; goblins neighbours will send raiding parties. The most pernicious threat to dwarven pioneers is the presence of aquifers: underground layers of water-saturated soil. They’re difficult to dig through, can cause accidental flooding, and halt excavation toward more valuable ores. Since all of these gameplay factors are presented on the embarkment screen, it’s up the player to choose how difficult their experience with Dwarf Fortress will be. For instance, Tim Denee was clearly playing on “hard mode” when he chose to embark the Oilfurnace expedition in a haunted land infested with undead and riddled with aquifers.

Dwarf Fortress is chock-full of fascinating design ideas and endless procedurally-generated adventure. Don’t let the steep learning curve scare you away: grab a guide, embrace the philosophy that losing is fun and strike the earth!

Back in late April, the No Fun Games gang (Renaud Bédard, Henk Boom and I) took the train down to Toronto to participate in TOJam. Over three days, we hacked together a silly game called Tea Time Quarrel. Since then we’ve had the opportunity to present the game publicly at TOJam Arcade and the Mount Royal Game Society. However, we never got around to officially releasing it… until now!

Download Tea Time Quarrel (Windows)

Though we’re quite proud of this little experimental game, our excitement for releasing it is tempered by the fact that the majority of players will not have the hardware peripherals necessary to play it. Tea Time Quarrel is a multiplayer game designed to be played with four game pads. There simply isn’t enough room on the keyboard to allow four players access to six keys each, and the limited scope of the game jam meant that we did not have time to implement a variable number of players.

Partly in light of this unfortunate restriction, I thought I’d write a little bit about how Tea Time Quarrel is played and what our design goals were in creating it.

The central idea behind Tea Time Quarrel occurred to me when I was reading an article about the fundamentals of game design (which I can no longer find, but may have been Jesper Juul’s “The Game, the Player, the World”). The article asserted that the rules of a game are agreed to by all players beforehand, and are fixed once the game begins. My inner contrarian balked at this statement; why couldn’t the rules of a game be defined dynamically¹? Could the strategic creation and election of new rules be a second-order game mechanic?

The goal of Tea Time Quarrel is to be the first player to reach 100 points. Players can perform a modest variety of actions: jump, run around, collect teacups, attack goats², attack other players, etc. However, none of these actions will inherently bring them any closer to a victory condition. Every twenty seconds one of the players is given the opportunity to propose a new rule. Rules follow a simple four-part syntax:

This may look complicated, but it’s quite simple in practice. For example, the rule “Each Teacup Adds Points” would give a player one point every time she collects a teacup. On the other hand, the rule “Least Jumps Removes Speed” would reduce the walking speed of the player who has jumped the fewest times overall at the end of each round. While the vocabulary seems rather limited, it can still produce 128 valid rule combinations³. Due to scoping and technical restrictions, it should be noted that the effects of rules do not currently trigger other rules.

Of course, proposing a rule is only half the story. A rule is only added to the game if a majority of players vote for it (“Democracy! Just as The Queen intended.”) This prevents players from designing rules that are blatantly in their favour. Instead, players must subtly seek the advantage while convincing other players to accept their new rule.

Whether you assemble enough peripherals to actually play the game or just have a good chuckle at the concept, we hope that you enjoy Tea Time Quarrel!

¹ Of course the rules about making rules are fixed and agreed to beforehand, so this is just a layer of abstraction.
² The “Goat on a Pole” is the TOJam mascot.
³ Rules with conditions of “Each Point” or “Each Health” can never be triggered, so they’re marked as invalid.

Minecraft is a peculiar game that’s difficult to classify. Its pedigree certainly includes the world-building of Dwarf Fortress, the procedural dungeon crawling of Rogue, and the undirected creativity of LEGO. While it’s marvellously simple and intuitive, Minecraft is not an easy game to learn. In its current alpha release, it has nothing in the way of guidance or tutorials. It’s nearly impossible to figure out what to do on your own, making it necessary to follow an external FAQ.

In an effort to help resolve this unfortunate situation, I’ve put together a small guide to surviving your first day and night in Minecraft. There are already a number of excellent walkthroughs for new players available on the game’s forum, and my advice certainly does not diverge strongly from them. However, if this guide manages to pique your interest then I strongly encourage you to purchase a copy and explore the world of Minecraft for yourself.

Welcome to your very own procedurally generated world! It’s very pretty and ripe for exploration. However, you shouldn’t start wandering just yet. When nighttime falls, the land will be crawling with all sorts of dangerous fiends. You need to start gathering the necessary materials to survive the night.

The first resource you need is lumber. Walk up the nearest tree trunk and begin harvesting it by holding down the left mouse button. The block will eventually break, dropping a log that you can pick up. Chop down a few more trees in this manner until you have collected close to a dozen logs.

To begin using these logs, they need to be crafted into lumber and sticks. Begin by pressing ‘i’ to open your inventory, then click and drag the logs into the crafting window. You will receive four units of lumber for each log you process. Next, drag the lumber into the crafting window in the shape illustrated above (one on top of the other) to create sticks. If necessary, you can split your lumber pile in half by right clicking it.

Crafting is one of the Minecraft‘s most fundamental mechanics, but in the alpha version it is very poorly documented. If you’d like to know more about the sort of things you can craft, I recommend consulting the Minecraft Wiki.

Coal is the second essential resource for your first night in Minecraft. As illustrated in the screenshot above, it looks like black splotches on a rock cube. It’s most commonly found embedded in sheer rock cliffs and natural cave formations. However, unlike wood, you cannot gather coal with your bare hands; you need to craft a proper tool.

To make a tool, you need a crafting table to access the 3×3 crafting grid. You can make one by arranging four pieces of lumber in a square. Move the crafting table to the bottom line of your inventory, use the scroll wheel to equip it, and place it in the world by right clicking. Don’t worry too much about the position, as you can pick the crafting table back up by left-click “gathering” it.

Right click the crafting table to access the larger grid, then place your lumber and sticks in the above formation. This will create a wooden pickaxe, a valuable mining tool that tears through rock and harvests certain ores. Equip it (the same way you did the crafting table) and hold the left mouse button to mine the coal. You should also gather some rock while you’re at it, though it’s plentiful everywhere.

While pickaxes are fundamental to progressing in Minecraft, it’s worth noting that you can also craft axes, shovels and hoes to speed up your work or swords and armour to protect yourself.

By the time you’ve finished gathering coal, it’s quite likely that the sun has begun to set. Zombies, spiders and skeletons will begin wandering the land shortly, and you’re in no shape to fight them with your current equipment. It’s therefore imperative that you construct some shelter to hide in. Fortunately, all the materials you’ve been gathering will help you to do exactly that. Use your pickaxe to carve a shallow cave in the side of a cliff. Any location will do, but I advise not wandering too far from your starting point (you’ll respawn there when you die). For extra safety, wall up the entrance with dirt when you’re finished.

Of course, noone wants to sit around in a dark cave all night. To get things done, you’ll need some light. Combine sticks and coal to craft some torches, then place them on the walls to light up the room. Monsters won’t spawn in lighted areas, so you should place a few outside your abode as well.

Since you’re stuck inside until the sun rises, you might as well get some crafting done. I recommend constructing two particularly useful pieces of furniture. A furnace is made out of rock and consumes fuel (wood or coal) to smelt ore, bake bricks and cook food. A wooden chest provides an abundance of extra storage space. It’s a great place to keep your more valuable items, as it will protect you from losing them when your character dies.

If it’s still dark outside, you should start digging a mine and exploring the underworld. You can find rare and valuable ores as you descend, but you’ll need a better tool to gather them. For now, crafting a pick out of rock will allow you to collect iron. Resist the temptation to dig straight down; you might get stuck or fall into lava. Instead, dig diagonally in a descending staircase shape. If you hit a natural underground cave or dungeon, be sure to explore it (cautiously!)

Similarly to coal, iron ore appears as tawny patches on rock. Smelting the ore into ingots with your furnace will allow you to craft iron armour, minecarts, buckets, etc. Iron is a very useful metal, but as you dig deeper you’ll find precious gold, diamond and redstone.

When dawn finally arrives, the morning sun will burn any monsters that are still roaming about (except for explosive Creepers, inexplicably). The land is once again safe to explore, so I recommend taking advantage of the daylight to gather more lumber, hunt wild animals or embellish your residence (here’s mine at the moment).

Once you’ve gotten the basic mechanics down, how you continue to play is really up to you. You could try spelunking the depths of the earth, building a treehouse or sailing to distant lands. There are no explicit goals or directives, just a wonderful sandbox of pure undirected play. I hope you have a grand adventure!

Ancient Trader [XBLIG]

It requires a bit of searching, but you can occasionally find a real gem in the unfortunate ghetto of Xbox Live Indie Games. Ancient Trader is a simple turn-based strategy game that’s aesthetically inspired by old world cartography and cryptozoology. Players compete to be the first to track down three artifacts and defeat the powerful Ancient Guardian.

At its core, the game is mechanically similar to the old DOS game Drugwars; the goal is to buy goods (tea, spice and fruit) for a low price at one port and sell them for a profit at another. Players must explore and uncover the map to discover the most profitable transactions, but the prices never fluctuate. However, the journey is not without peril, as players can be assaulted by sea monsters and competing traders. Combat is similarly straightforward: a game of rock-paper-scissors augmented with numerical values to settle ties. Allowing a choice of weapons gives the illusion of chance, but playing rationally makes the battles almost entirely deterministic. Players can upgrade their vessels with stronger cannons, larger storage and faster hulls.

Whereas the gameplay is simple and sufficient, the presentation is lovingly crafted and absolutely joyous. The sepia-stained maps of fictional islands look as if they were hand-drawn by 16th century explorers. The various sea monsters are inspired by the scribbled horrors imagined in the “here be dragons” regions of ancient atlases. Minor features are animated with care: waves sway, flotsam bobs, breezes fill sails, clouds waft. The menu iconography is simple, clear and consistent with the period setting. Fourkidsgames has done a tremendous job of developing this uncommon aesthetic style, and the game is consistently delightful and polished as a result.

Whatever Ancient Trader lacks in strategic depth, it more than makes up for with its charming presentation. If you’re as fascinated by ancient cartography and the exploration of the New World as I am, I strongly recommend checking it out.

Hook Champ [iPhone]

There are a multitude of platformers available on the iPhone’s app store. The vast majority of them rely on some kludge to work their way around the device’s touch interface, often opting to clumsily emulate a traditional control pad. However, every once in a while a game comes along that embraces the iPhone’s idiosyncrasies. Hook Champ by RocketCat Games is one such game, and a personal favourite.

The goal of the game is to direct protagonist Jake T. Hooker as he escapes from a sepulchral heist. Jake’s primary mode of transportation is his trusty grappling hook, which players can deploy by touching the screen and retract by releasing it. As you become accustomed to flying through the air in this fashion, the sequence of touch and release becomes delightfully rhythmic. Should you miscalculate a maneuver and fall, you can slowly run across the ground in order to locate a convenient ledge. However, keeping up your speed is essential, as Jake is being chased by a rancorous apparition known as “The Curse”. Of course, the thrilling feeling of speed conveyed by successfully maintaining a fluid swinging motion is sufficient incentive in and of itself.

Jake can spend his misappropriated gold on a number of grappling hook enhancements, special equipment and fancy hats. This of course provides some incentive to replay and explore previous levels. Upgrading the grappling hook enables a much smoother swinging motion, which in turn makes the whole game more fun. This is a somewhat curious choice; why not make the controls this excellent from the start? The unlockable shotgun and rocket boots provide limited horizontal and vertical bursts of speed respectively, and are activated by two small buttons on the bottom of the screen. This equipment adds welcome variety, but mapping them to a meagre portion of the screen makes them difficult to deploy with precise timing.

My largest annoyance with an otherwise excellent game is a significant late-game difficulty spike. Only the most dedicated players will be able to make any progress through the unforgiving Bull Idol stages, where a floor of lava ensures that every mistake is deadly. Since there are already time trials and global leaderboards in place for the hardcore audience, I can’t imagine why the developers sought to exclude casual players from the later levels.

Plain Sight [PC]

When I’m trying to proselytize my friends to this game, I describe it as “quick-draw robot sword-fighting with Mario Galaxy physics.” That’s usually sufficiently intriguing to pique anyone’s interest, but Plain Sight is more peculiar and interesting than even that brief description lets on.

The game’s multiplayer deathmatch has an unusual set of rules: you spawn with one point, and must slay other players to steal their points. Points makes you bigger and stronger, but also make you a more visible and attractive target. Here’s the rub: your points only get banked and added to the scoreboard when you trigger self-destruction. Catching other players in your explosion multiplies that score. These mechanics give the game a strategic risk/reward dynamic: should you bank your points now, or take advantage of the extra strength to accumulate more? Should you target a lucrative point-laden player, or elude him to avoid increasing his multiplier?

The aerial combat in Plain Sight is a breathtaking experience. Swords kill in one hit, so the emphasis is placed on movement and reflexes. As I mentioned earlier, this game builds on the orbital gravity mechanics of Mario Galaxy. Each platform has its own gravitational field, so the meaning of up and down is entirely relative. Holding down the left mouse button charges a dash attack, which is used both to lock-on to other players and to quickly change direction while airborne. Combine jumping, charging and low gravity and you can soar through the sky indefinitely. Beatnik Games tuned a thousand subtle details just right to produce a wonderful sense of speed and flight.

If you’re looking for something new to play over the Labour Day weekend, I hope you’ll consider checking out these terrific independent games.

However, this year we were joined by my good friend Sven, an Antiguan foreign student who just graduated from software engineering at Concordia with me. He brought a set of dominoes with him, and thought we might enjoy learning a Caribbean game he had grown up playing. He knew the game only as “Dominoes”, but a little post-trip research revealed it’s commonly known as “Cut Throat”.

Cut Throat derives a great deal of strategic complexity from a very simple ruleset. The game begins by dealing the 28 dominoes evenly to four players. The goal is to be first player to empty their hand. The winner of the previous hand (or the owner of the double 6 tile) plays first, then play proceeds clockwise around the table. A player can only play a domino with an end that matches one of the two open ends of play (there is no branching). If no moves are possible, knocking the table indicates that you are unable to play. In the rare event where no one is able to play, the hand is shut and the player with the fewest total dots in their hand is the winner. The first player to win six hands wins the game provided (here’s the catch) another player has won zero hands.

As a game designer, Cut Throat utterly fascinates me, and not only because it is elegantly simple and a real joy to play. It has certain unusual characteristics that make it unlike any game I’ve ever played, and I have a hypothesis regarding why that might be. Video game bloggers have long discussed how Japanese and American games have distinct regional flavours. If we consider games as cultural artifacts, then logically their mechanics will reflect such roots. Despite my extremely limited knowledge of the region, I’d like to propose the following: that Cut Throat’s unusual characteristics, which distinguish it from more common tabletop games, may be an expression of Caribbean culture.

Despite its simple ruleset, Cut Throat has a rather complex colloquial vocabulary. Of course, it’s not uncommon for unique ad-hoc language to emerge from game communities (the fighting genre in particular). However, the terms in Cut Throat are used less to describe rudimentary mechanics and more to add flavour and commentary to the game. They enhance the experience, rather than merely describe it. Here are a few examples:

• Lie down: To play a double. Since you haven’t changed the state of the board, you haven’t done any work!
• Jail: A player is in jail until he wins a hand. The goal of the game is effectively to keep at least one player in jail.
• Pushing: You are pushing the player to your left. Since you play right before her, you have the most control over how she plays. If you’re making it difficult for her to play, then you are pushing hard.
• Strong Back: Conversely, if you’re being pushed hard but are still able to play then your back is strong.
• Buoy: The player you are pushing is also your buoy. If he gets out of jail, then your buoy has floated away!
• Running From: A player will run from numbers they are unable to play on. For instance, a player with no fours in their hand is running from fours.
• Wash up: To shuffle the dominoes.
• Eat Your End: Late in the game, it’s possible that there’s a tile that only you can play on. This is clearly a very advantageous situation. If you’re forced to play on this end, then you eat your end and negate your advantage.
• Anti-man: At the end of the game, there is one winning player (who won six times) and at least one jailed player (who never won). If the winning player was also pushing a jailed player, then he has played an exceptionally good game. The losing player is then referred to as the anti-man, a slur for homosexual men¹.

Cut Throat is a high competitive and energetic game. Indeed, players are encouraged to slam their dominoes on the table if they’re playing well. This aspect of the game is enhanced by this unique vocabulary; with the explanation of each term, Sven described an accompanying emotion. Lying down is cheeky, losing your buoy is stressful, escaping from jail is relieving, and being anti-manned is very shameful. “Washing up” is delegated to the player who was pushing the winner of the hand, because they evidently failed to push hard enough. Furthermore, winning players are permitted to draw from the shuffled pile before those in jail. In Cut Throat, friendly taunting is not only encouraged, it’s intrinsically built into the structure of the game.

Cut Throat has the strongest positive feedback of any game I’ve ever encountered². You may have noticed, for instance, that the winning player gains an advantage by playing first. However, there is a unique social mechanic that is far more influential. As I described earlier, the game ends in a draw if all four players have won at least once. In order for there to be a winner, there must also be a loser. Therefore, it’s common for the three players with at least one win to conspire to beat the final jailed man. In other words, they team up against the player in last place! This mechanic subverts one of the most fundamental strategies of all multiplayer games: playing to beat the player in first place.

In conclusion, Western and Japanese games tend to include some form of consolation to weaker players, often in the form of negative feedback. They certainly never stack the odds against the weakest player, then proceed to mock him for it. With its extremely strong positive feedback and institutionalized taunting, Cut Throat unabashedly offends these sensibilities. I suspect that this divergence in game design philosophy can be at least partially attributed to cultural differences. The uniqueness of Cut Throat may be an expression of its Caribbean roots. As video game studios continue to pop up all over the world, what new game design paradigms will be revealed?

¹ Homophobia is extremely prevalent in the Caribbean.
² For a quick primer on feedback loops in game design, check out Game Design Concepts.

This post is partly a (two month late) response to Chris Hecker’s GDC 2010 rant entitled Please Finish Your Game. It also condenses some rough thoughts I’ve long held about motivation and game making. It took some effort to edit it into a coherent form, so I apologize in advance if it’s a tad rambling.

In his rant, Chris expresses concern about the fixation on short development time. He worries that rapid-fire game releases (exemplified by Jonatan “Cactusquid” Söderström) have become a “badge of honour” in the indie game community. This attitude is mirrored in the industry, where ship dates often trump quality. Chris asserts that, in terms of contribution to games as an art form, Braid is worth more than 100 game jam games because it explored its mechanics to the depth that they deserved. “We need more depth and understanding”, he says. “We don’t need more wacky ideas or shallow games.”

I have great respect for Chris (I loved his talk at MIGS 2009) and thus am cautious about disagreeing with him. However, I believe his argument overlooks the real value of rapid development and its place in the creative ecosystem¹. I think that it’s misleading to compare a masterpiece like Braid with the multitudes of forgettable unpolished jam games. The final product isn’t the point; the value of a game jam lies in the process of creation. Specifically, game jams provide tools that enable amateur game designers to experiment, learn and grow.

Anecdotal evidence suggest that there are a great many people who are interested in making games, but have never done so. I suspect this is largely due to the fact that to start making games, you have to make your first game. There’s tremendous symbolic and psychological value to doing something for the first time, especially if it’s something you’re passionate about. As Havi Brooks explains, doing what you love can be terrifying:

You’re avoiding the thing that’s holding all your dreams? Good grief! Of course you are! That symbolic weight? It’s that much potential for hurt and disappointment. [...] It’s not this: “Even though I thought this meant everything to me, I’m still avoiding it so clearly I don’t really care about it.” It’s this: “Wow, this means everything to me… so of course I’m avoiding it.”

Game jams provide tools to help overcome this pressure. For instance, they establish a well-defined start and end date for the project. They provide a theme to riff off. Fellow jammers can provide assistance and feedback. Finally, knowing that you’ll release a game concurrently with dozens of others reduces its symbolic value. Simply put, game jams provide a friendly supportive atmosphere for newcomers.

Those who do take the leap and make their first game quickly run into another problem: they don’t like what they’re making. After all, if you care about games enough to try your hand at making one, then your taste in games is likely quite advanced. You’re perceptive enough to know that what you’re making isn’t very good. Ira Glass explains why this is problematic: “Your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. [...] A lot of people never get past that phase.”

Fortunately, he also presents a method of getting past this roadblock: “The most important possible thing you could do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you’re going to finish one [game].” In other words, do exactly what people like Cactusquid and the Experimental Gameplay Project are already doing! Experiment with weird genres, unusual aesthetics and unfamiliar technologies. Create exactly the kind of unfinished shallow games that Chris Hecker is warning us against. Why? Because nobody can create a masterpiece without first making a hundred crude sketches.

In a general sense, I worry that the burden of having to develop mechanics deeply will dissuade people from making games. If it is “our duty as developers to follow a mechanic to its logical and aesthetic extent”, then the inverse is also true; we should not make a game if we cannot give its mechanics their due diligence. This encourages designers to hold onto their ideas, waiting until they have the time to execute them with the appropriate fidelity. To quote Ze Frank: “If you don’t want to run out of ideas, the best thing to do is not to execute them. You can tell yourself that you don’t have the time or resources to do them right. Then they stay around in your head like brain crack.” This attitude is anathema to amateur game development. It’s better to get those ideas out there, even if they’re flawed and incomplete!

If we embrace this sort of flawed rapid development, do we then disregard the notion of exploring mechanics to the depth that they deserve? I don’t believe we have to. As Cactus observed in an e-mail discussion with Chris, “it’s hard to decide if the game you’re working on really deserves that much hard work or not.” Creating these crude unfinished games is a form of prototyping; ideas that seem promising can be developed further². Chris himself did this with Spy Party:

SpyParty was actually an idea from Indie Game Jam 4 that I didn’t quite get working at the jam, but that I felt was strong enough to spend (a lot) more time on.

In conclusion, while I appreciate that “the good-enough is the enemy of the excellent”, I think the onus of developing mechanics fully is detrimental to amateur game development. Creating wacky, shallow games plays a valuable part in building up new developers. Attracting fresh voices and perspectives is the surest route to expanding games as an art form and creating more masterpieces like Braid. Don’t worry too much about greatness, just get excited and make things!

¹ I feel a bit sheepish saying this to one of the founders of the Indie Game Jam.
² This may have been Chris’ point all along: too few developers are following through in this manner.

Back in January, Henk, Thomas and I presented two games we were working on (Norwegian Wood and an alpha build of Pax Britannica) to the DemoCamp at CUSEC 2010. DemoCamp is a really cool informal event where programmers can show off what they’ve been hacking on. The rules are simple: 15 minutes maximum, no powerpoint, show working code!

I think the talk went really well, we got by with some laughs and a little bit of casual swearing. Big thanks to the CUSEC organizers, host Joey DeVilla and A/V tech Guillaume Theoret for giving us a chance to show off our games!

These past few weeks I’ve been fighting a pitched interstellar war against fellow game bloggers Matthew Burns, Ben Abraham and Michel McBride-Charpentier. Early in the game I had a long-standing alliance with Ben, and we peacefully teamed-up to take out our red neighbour “Dr Dinosaur”. I sold weapon technology to Matthew in his distant campaign against Michel, who was the winning player at the time. As I rallied my troops on my Eastern border to confront the next enemy, Ben and Matthew launched a treacherous surprise attack on my unprotected plank. I’m making a last stand on four planets now, while Ben and Matthew turn on each other for complete control of the galaxy.

Neptune’s Pride is a browser-based multiplayer strategy game that falls somewhere between Galactic Civilizations and Risk. Eight empires fight to be first to conquer half of the galaxy’s ~180 stars. While the game ostensibly progresses in real-time, moving a fleet from one planet to another takes about 16 hours (before speed upgrades) and your economy only produces funds once a day. Thus players only need to check the game a few times a day, a style sometimes referred to as “sporadic play”.

What’s even more interesting about Neptune’s Pride is the high level of strategic abstraction, closer to a board game than a video game. There is only one type of fighter ship and one currency. Planets can be developed for economy, industry or science. Science slowly improves fleet weapons, speed, range or scanning. The diplomatic options are equally stark: players can message each other (privately or publicly) and send resources/technology. This means that there are no game mechanics governing alliances, trades, borders, etc. Interstellar relations are therefore forged on trust, cunning and strategic treachery. Playing with friends adds an extra dimension of political deviousness: are they going to check Neptune’s Pride before going to bed, or can I launch a sneak attack overnight?

While my performance in the last match was nothing to brag about, I feel I’ve mastered Neptune’s Pride sufficiently to impart some wisdom to new players.

Firstly, understand how the combat system works. There are no random elements or dice rolls in Neptune’s Pride. The defender always strikes first, and kills a number of enemy ships equal to their weapon tech level plus one. The attacker then kills a number of enemy ships equal to their natural weapon tech. This goes back and forth until one side runs out of ships. There’s therefore no need to guess the outcome of a battle; you can compute the results beforehand, and only commit if the outcome is favourable.

Remember that the defender has a double bonus: first strike and extra weapon damage. Use this to your advantage! Try to leave a one ship garrison on every planet you own. If the enemy tries to land there, they’ll lose 5+ ships and you’ll only lose one. This kind of attrition can really slow a raiding party.

The four technology upgrades are not equal in worth. Namely, the range upgrade isn’t very good. Early in the game it can be handy to throw a level or two into range in order to reach outlying stars or save travel time by cutting across diagonals. You might assume that later on it would also be handy to blitzkrieg your way behind enemy lines. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. If the enemy can see your fleet, he or she can also see its destination. Your opponent will have plenty of time to organize their defences for your arrival. Your upgrade time is better spent on weapons, speed and occasionally scanning.

On the topic of science upgrades, I learned the hard way that it isn’t worth being the tech leader. At the height of my empire, I had invested in 5 more scientific research facilities than any other player. However, I only had a negligible advantage in terms of fleet technology. The reason was that other players were more pro-actively trading technologies. They were therefore upgrading their fleets at a fraction of the cost and nullifying my advantage. It’s simply more strategic to barter, even at the risk of arming your enemies.

Those are all the strategic revelations that I managed to gleam from my one and a half games of Neptune’s Pride (you might also learn a thing or two from Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s play diary). If you’re interested in giving the game a go yourself, I highly recommend dragging a friend or two along for the match. I’ll be sure to put out a call on Twitter for the next campaign!

No Fun Games is proud to present Pax Britannica, a one-button real-time strategy game we made for the GAMMA4 design competition. Our team includes designers/programmers Henk Boom, Renaud Bédard and me, artist Daniel Burton and composer Ben Abraham. Unfortunately we were not selected and will not be showing off our game at GDC. However, we had a great time making the game and I’m glad we finally get to release it to the public!

Windows Download

Mac Download

Linux Download

The game was designed for 1-4 Xbox 360 controllers hooked up to a PC (the keyboard controls are A-F-H-L). Holding down the button spins the needle on the radial menu in the middle of the player’s factory ship. The needle will only travel as far as the player’s current resources allow. Releasing the button creates a ship that corresponds to the quadrant that the needle is pointing at: fighter, bomber, frigate, or a factory ship upgrade. Ships you spawn fight automatically using the latest in artificial aquatelligence technology. The player who keeps their factory ship alive wins!

We had been hoping to fix a few things for an official release, but the game has been “out there” on TIGSource for a few weeks now. In fact, we’re thrilled by all the positive feedback we’ve gotten! Pax Britannica has been picked up by the Indie Games Weblog, Bytejacker, PlayThisThing, and GayGamer. Furthermore, Darius Kazemi made this awesome video review:

Enjoy the game, and please leave your feedback and suggestions in the comments below.

You can listen to it here:

• Download the podcast directly [mp3]
• Subscribe to the podcast via iTunes
• Subscribe to the podcast feed

Since I somehow neglected to mention it here, I also had a terrific conversation with Corvus Elrod and Deirdra Kiai as part of the Brainy Gamer “Summer of Confabs” a few months ago. In it we discussed sexist game marketing, Orson Scott Card’s involvement with Shadow Complex, and some of our favourite indie games of the year. Do give it a listen if you haven’t already!

2000

The autumn years of the Nintendo 64 and Playstation brought us some real gems. Perfect Dark, Rare’s successor to GoldenEye, forced us all to buy 4 MB of extra RAM in order to enjoy four player deathmatch with an abominable framerate. The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask was destined to be the black sheep of the series, but it has found significant critical appreciation with age. We clicked and looted our way through the hellscape of Diablo 2 (including the long-teased “cow level”). Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 found broad appeal outside of skater culture for its deeply challenging trick chaining system, establishing a fan base that would justify dozens of sequels.

2001

This year saw the release of Grand Theft Auto 3, a game that spawned the 3D sandbox genre. A decade later, countless imitators are still iterating on its innovative core concept. Halo: Combat Evolved was the “killer app” for Microsoft’s new Xbox, and revealed the potential of first person shooter games on consoles. Two personal favourites were also released that year: Final Fantasy X, one of the finest in the series, and Super Smash Bros. Melee, a game I played continuously for roughly seven years.

2002

The highlight of this year was Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, a century-spanning horror masterpiece. Most memorably, the game quantified sanity and played frightening tricks on the player as it depleted. Warcraft III introduced RPG elements to the strategy genre and spawned the incredibly successful mod / subgenre Defense of the Ancients. Timesplitters 2 was a tremendous multiplayer game, and one of the few of the era that supported four player spliscreen. Finally, Metroid Prime brought Samus into three dimensions while the maintaining the series’ trademark atmospheric loneliness.

2003

There were several great games released this year, but first in my heart is The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. With gorgeous cell-shaded graphics, distinctive character and enemy design, beautiful music and sound, and a gigantic oceanic world to explore, it’s my personal favourite of the series¹. Meanwhile, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time introduced time-manipulation to Jordan Mechner’s beloved platformer, Beyond Good & Evil became a cult classic for its beautiful world and memorable characters, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic showed us that Luke should have definitely gone to the dark side (they have sassy robots).

2004

Valved defined this year with two pieces of software: Half-Life 2, which showed the storytelling potential of first-person shooters, and Steam, the groundbreaking digital distribution platform. Idiosyncratic Japanese designers Keita Takahashi and Hideo Kojima released Katamari Damacy and Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater respectively. The former is a delightful game that defies classification, the latter is the most focused and tight entry in the series to date. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was remarkably ambitious, introducing a gigantic world map spanning three cities, farmland, mountains and desert. What it lost in focus, it recovered in remarkable scale and variety.

2005

With the next generation right around the corner, this year was defined by late era console games. Developers finally had the knowledge and experience to take full advantage of the hardware, and they did so to great effect. Resident Evil 4 surprised everyone by reinventing the third person shooter, and is one of the finest action games of the decade. Double Fine Productions, founded by former LucasArts designer Tim Schafer, released their hilarious debut title Psychonauts. Punk developer Suda51 made his Western debut with Killer7, a game that noone understands but many people enjoy. Finally, the mournful Shadow of the Colossus gave many of us our first inkling of what this whole “games as art” idea was all about.

2006

The beautiful ink painting-inspired Okami was one of the first titles to be declared the Playstation 2′s swan song; the console would continue to see excellent new releases into 2008. Gears of War build on Resident Evil 4‘s over-the-shoulder camera, added exemplary cover mechanics and became the must-have shooter of the next generation. Meanwhile, Nintendo found incredible success with the Wii. The console included the surprisingly fun tech demo Wii Sports, a game destined to be a perennial at family get-togethers. Finally, the long-awaited RPG Mother 3 was released in Japan; it would receive an unofficial translation by dedicated fans two years later.

2007

“Fall 2007″ has become a synonym among gamers for “a large number of great games released in a very short amount of time”. Bioshock introduced us to the underwater objectivist paradise of Rapture, which featured remarkable storytelling in every inch of its rich world. Portal was an instant classic with its innovative puzzle mechanics and terrific dark humour. Team Fortress 2 showed the refinement of a decade of development, and Valve admirably continues to support it with free content. Call of Duty 4 : Modern Warfare succeeded with a thrilling campaign and addictive multiplayer meta-game. Finally, Harmonix’s Rock Band brought the peripheral-based music game trend to its logical conclusion. These five tremendous games (and many more) were released between August and November!

2008

It was the year of indie, as World of Goo, Castle Crashers and Braid led the charge for independent games to be taken seriously in the mainstream. Suda51 released No More Heroes for the Wii, a title that was more palatable to the average gamer without sacrificing his trademark eccentric style. Sins of a Solar Empire married real time and 4X strategy with unprecedented galactic scale; I’ve been something of an evangelist for this game ever since. Clint Hocking’s Far Cry 2 became the benchmark for first-person immersion and open-world shooters. Grand Theft Auto 4 was met with exultant praise on arrival, then promptly forgotten about. On more sober recollection, it’s generally agreed that the living breathing city of Liberty City was the game’s real star.

2009

It’s difficult to take a long view on this most recent year, especially since I’m still playing through half of this year’s strong contenders². Here’s what I’ve been enjoying so far: ThatGameCompany’s Flower showed that art games can be beautiful, accessible and rather zen. Chilean studio ACE Team introduced us to the mad world of Zeno Clash, a first-person brawler with a unique punk fantasy aesthetic. Demon’s Souls introduced innovative asynchronous multiplayer mechanics, but will surely be remembered more for its crushing difficulty and tremendous atmosphere. Batman: Arkham Asylum was certainly the superhero simulator of the decade. Having successfully iterated and refined the meta-game formula, Modern Warfare 2 has been my multiplayer mainstay over the holidays.

My favourite passtime has changed a lot in the last decade. I look forward to seeing what the next ten years have in store.

¹ Michael Abbott can back me up on this one.
² I still haven’t played Uncharted 2 and Brütal Legend!

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was a something of a sleeper hit for me. I had enjoyed the previous entries in the series, but only as World War 2 simulators with little lasting appeal. If it hadn’t been bundled economically with Assassin’s Creed¹ at the time, I doubt I would have even bothered to check it out. It was therefore a complete surprise when Modern Warfare delivered a one-two punch: an exciting campaign with some truly memorable set-pieces and an addictive MMORPG-inspired multiplayer. I was absolutely floored, and have been an Infinity Ward adherent ever since.

Modern Warfare introduced an innovative multiplayer metagame: collecting experience persistently as you play, unlocking new guns and perks as you increased in level. Completing difficult gameplay challenges earned an experience bonus, while weapon-specific challenges unlocked useful attachments. Perks allowed the player to enhance their avatar with increased speed, greater damage, more ammunition, etc. These RPG-like mechanics gave players long term goals to pursue between matches, while the extensive customization allowed players to explore the endless permutations of combat style. Modern Warfare was the most popular game in Xbox Live for several months, and it’s easy to see why.

Modern Warfare 2 was released last month, the third game in recent years to be labelled “the largest entertainment launch ever”². The critical discussion centered around the controversial “No Russian” level, where the player takes on the role of an undercover agent during an airport massacre. I think Mitch Krpata said it best; the level is “meaningless except in its capacity to shock”, and compares poorly to the AC-130 sequence from the first game that was “chilling in its clinical detachment”. While the recycled sequences are beginning to wear thin, the overall campaign was still excellent and very exciting.

However, like Michael Abbott’s students, I’m much more interested in talking about Modern Warfare 2‘s multiplayer, whose improvements deserve unconditional praise. Infinity Ward managed to simultaneously inject a cornucopia of new content while refining and perfecting existing systems. The result is game that supports a wide variety of play styles, and has a lot to offer both veterans and newcomers. I’d like to examine the small refinements Infinity Ward introduced to accomplish this.

One of the most obvious improvements is the deemphasis of frag grenades, a source of many frustrating deaths. The first Modern Warfare had a level 41 perk that tripled the number of grenades a player would spawn with. This perk became ubiquitous in multiplayer, as grenade spamming was an incredibly effective strategy. Players could haphazardly launch a barrage skyward to pick up a kill or two (particularly on small maps like “Wet Work”). In Modern Warfare 2, the grenade slot is renamed “equipment”, and players can only hold one grenade at a time. Furthermore, the range and damage of these grenades has been reduced. This quashes grenade spamming tactics and encourages players to explore other options for that slot (such as a Blast Shield or Tactical Insertion).

Another noticeable improvement is the addition of new secondary weapon types. In the first game, a pistol was the only sidearm option (unless you used the “Overkill” perk to spawn with two primary weapons). This made it difficult to justify choosing a sniper rifle or shotgun, as it left you extremely vulnerable in medium range confrontations. Modern Warfare 2 moved shotguns to the secondary weapon slot and introduced new machine pistols and rocket launchers. Improving the quality and variety of secondary weapons allows players to be more experimental with their primary weapon choice. For instance, submachine gun users can equip a Thumper to clear out rooms, while snipers can compete at medium range with a TMP machine pistol. Overall, this makes the multiplayer class customization much more creative and personal.

On the topic of secondary weapons, the addition of lock-on rocket launchers provides a crucial counter-balance to the new killstreak rewards. While it was ostensibly possible to take down an attack helicopter with an RPG in Modern Warfare, it was extremely challenging to properly line up the shot. Thus, Infinity Ward introduced a number of launchers that sacrifice free-fire kills for the ability to lock on airborne targets. This gives a losing team some relief against helicopters and harriers, and even allows players to take out the other team’s UAV reconnaissance. To justify their high skill requirements, more advanced killstreaks (AC-130, Pave Low) are equipped with flares that can divert a limited number of seeker rockets. These mechanics add an interesting layer of strategy to the killstreak arms race.

While killstreak rewards provide positive feedback for the winning team, Modern Warfare is already highly skewed towards very strong players. Thus the addition of deathstreak rewards gives the losing team a fighting chance and makes the game much friendly for new players. Players who have died several times in a row can spawn with more health, drop a live grenade when they die, or make a last stand with their primary weapon. “Copycat”, the most interesting deathstreak reward, allows players to copy the loadout of the player who killed them, effectively giving new players early access to the more advanced weapons and perks. The introduction of this negative feedback system has a stabilizing effect on the game, and generally reduces the frustration of losing.

Finally, Modern Warfare 2 carefully rebalances and synthesizes the weaker perks³. This is accomplished in part by the addition of pro versions of each perk that are unlocked by completing specific challenges. These advanced perks provide a small secondary benefit, usually of little consequence, to the perk’s main function. For instance, the first game had a perk called “Dead Silence” that muffled the sound of that player’s footsteps. While theoretically useful for stealthy players, in practice it was easily outclassed by every other perk in that tier. In the sequel, silent footsteps became a secondary effect of the pro version of “Ninja” (invisibility to heartbeat sensors). Overall, the perk system has been rebalanced such that there are many useful options in each tier, greatly increasing the number of interesting loadout permutations.

While these changes may seem minor, they have a dramatic effect on the balance and flow of Modern Warfare 2‘s multiplayer. They greatly reduce the number of capricious deaths, somewhat levelling the playing field for new players. More importantly, the greater variety of weapons and perks allow players to capitalize on the spectrum of play styles that Modern Warfare 2 supports. Infinity Ward has skillfully iterated on their past success and created a multiplayer game that is superior in every way.

¹ Ironically, I thought Assassin’s Creed was rather underwhelming.
² Halo 3 was the “biggest launch ever” in 2007, Grand Theft Auto 4 in 2008.
³ However, I have no idea how SitRep got through playtesting. It’s useless.

Anamanaguchi – Dawn Metropolis

With the chiptune scene becoming increasingly important and interesting, it was only a matter of time before a band like Anamanaguchi showed up with a radical new take on the genre. While many chiptune artists create rocking music using synthesizers and NES sound chips alone, Anamanaguchi complement their sound with live guitar, bass and drums. The synthesis of the two worlds is difficult to categorize; it has the excitement of metal, the timbre of a vintage video game, the rhythm of dance-punk. Dawn Metropolis is an exciting album, pure and simple.

Mos Def – The Ecstatic

Mos Def made a big impact in the late 90′s, both with Black Star and his excellent solo album Black on Both Sides. Unfortunately his releases this decade have been somewhat lacklustre, and adherents have long anticipated a return to form. I doubt The Ecstatic is exactly what they were looking for.

The album doesn’t statically capture his old sound, but rather reflects the tribulations and blessings of the interim decade. Songs with Middle Eastern vibe (“Auditorium” and “Wahid” in particular) echo the complexities of America’s increasing involvement in that part of the world. In contrast, “Life In Marvelous Times” and “Casa Bey” explore the obligations of fulfilment and plenty. It’s a remarkably mature and complex album, more authentic than an anachronistic carbon copy of Black Star.

Fever Ray – s/t

Fans of the Swedish electronic duo The Knife had a lot to be excited about this year, as Karin Dreijer Andersson released her highly anticipated solo album under the alias Fever Ray. The album is significantly murkier and slower paced than the band’s other material; the formerly danceable elements of The Knife’s sound (layered synthesizers, tribal drums) are translated to be mournful and foreboding. The exploration of deep pitch shifting is particularly interesting, given Karin’s haunting voice and distinctive accent. The entire album has a shamanic vibe, an aesthetic that’s reflected in her live shows.

Metric – Fantasies

I’m surprised I haven’t seen this album on more “best of” lists, especially given the long gap since their last record. Have we started taking excellent Metric albums for granted now? Fantasies is loaded with hits: “Help I’m Alive”, “Gimme Sympathy”, and “Front Row” all charted in Canada. The new songs are layered with synthesizers and vocal harmonies; in contrast the lyrics are more romantic and personal. Metric is really hitting their stride as a band, and as a fan I’d be quite content to see more of the same in their next album.

Dirty Projectors – Bitte Orca

Like many people, I became aware of Dirty Projectors after the 2007 release of Rise Above, a cover album of Black Flag’s Damaged reinterpreted from childhood memory. It was a really interesting experiment, but the cognitive dissonance caused by knowing the original songs made it a bit difficult to appreciate.

Bitte Orca, on the other hand, is composed of entirely original material and is significantly stronger as a result. The band’s idiosyncratic formula contrasts Dave Longstreth’s strange soaring voice with soft vocal harmonies by Amber Coffman and Angel Deradoorian. While the singing is usually backed by extremely minimal instrumentation, the guitar and drums occasionally crescendo to incredible effect (ex: “Useful Chamber”). I suspect this is the kind of formula you either love or hate, but to me it’s absolutely magical.

Honourable Mentions

• Regina Spektor – Far
• Jay-Z – The Blueprint 3
• St. Vincent – Actor
• Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion
• Sieber, Kammen, Fulton and Schatz – Braid OST

That’s my perspective on 2009 in music! Did I miss any of your personal favourites? I’m always open to new music suggestions, so please do drop me a comment with your picks.

This week I attended the Montreal International Game Summit, a professional conference for game developers. Since that is not my profession (yet), I managed to get a free pass as a student volunteer. This was a compelling arrangement, even if it meant I didn’t always have my choice of presentations (I particularly regret missing Brenda Brathwaite.) Fortunately, the talks I did attend were also terrific, so I thought I might share some of what I learned.

Jason Graves – The Music of Dead Space

Did you notice the music in Dead Space? Neither did I, yet it’s an absolutely fundamental element of the horror genre. Composer Jason Graves explained the unique challenges involved in creating “the scariest game ever”. He explained how a soundtrack with consistent themes and progressions makes the player feel safe and strong, so an effective horror soundtrack has to be dissonant and arrhythmic. His compositions were partly inspired by the surreal techniques of Modernist composers, including odd directives that are difficult to express using standard music notation (ex: play this scale as quickly as you can.)

In a fascinating intersection of music and programming, each track in Dead Space has four dynamic layers of intensity. The chosen layers depend partly on the player’s distance from objects in the environment labelled as “fear emitters”. These objects are usually monsters, but can also include hallways, corners, bodies, etc. The music slowly crescendos as the player approaches these objects, a subtle and interactive method of inducing dread.

Nathan Vella – Indie in 2D

Capybara Games is an independent game studio that assembled from members of the Toronto IGDA. Their premier game is Critter Crunch for the PS3 and iPhone, an awesome throwback to the era of “hardcore puzzle games” (think Yoshi’s Cookie) with gorgeous art and animations.

Co-founder Nathan Vella talked about finding the right people for a video game startup; real partners who share your creative vision. He explained how nearly everyone Capybara hired had been introduced through friends and acquaintances. The hiring process for a small company should be casual and instinctual: hang out, have a conversation, look for shared passions.

He also emphasized the importance of a shared aesthetic goal. He revealed the piece of concept art that served as the vision for Critter Crunch, and showed how little the final game diverged from it. Every team member kept that concept piece on their desk, ensuring that everyone pulled in the same direction.

Randy Smith – How To Make Games That Aren’t Fun

Randy Smith is a game industry veteran. Formerly a game designer at Looking Glass studios, he recently co-founded the indie studio Tiger Style Games and released the excellent arachnid simulator Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor for the iPhone.

In his presentation, he explored the question: do games need to be fun? This is ostensibly the metric by which video games are judged. However, in other media there is plenty of room for work that is engaging and worthwhile without being “fun” (ex: the film Schindler’s List).

Randy noted that many games have dark themes (death, murder, loss, anger) but treat them in a very light manner. They neglect to explore the consequences and ramifications of actions and events. As Penny Arcade recently demonstrated, Nathan Drake kills hundreds of minions without concern or guilt. While such games are entertaining, the scarcity of games that address the human condition in a serious way is emblematic of the immaturity of our medium.

While he didn’t have an easy answer for how to address these issues, he proposed a thought experiment “not fun” game called Hospital Director. He suggested giving the player choices with no right answer: should a busy hospital send an overworked doctor home or risk her making a mistake? He also put forward some ideas about creating emotional connections and leveraging interactivity.

Marc LeBlanc – Mechanics, Dynamics & Aesthetics

I’ve written about my own take on the MDA framework, but at MIGS I had an opportunity to meet one of its co-creators. At the end of his presentation, I took the chance to ask him two burning questions I had since reading his paper:

Do you feel MDA is compatible with Scott McCloud’s six layers of art? If so, how do they intersect?

Prefacing his response with the fact that he had read Understanding Comics a long time ago, he replied that to him the six layers of art purely described games at the Aesthetics level. In that sense, he asserted that McCloud’s layers are actually orthogonal to MDA. He was also sceptical of McCloud’s system where artists “accumulate experience and level up” to gain access to the esoteric aspects of art.

According to MDA, the Aesthetic level only includes emotional responses in the player that were intended by the designer. Why make that distinction?

Marc replied that MDA is intended as more of a design tool than a criticism paradigm. Thus, an unintended unpleasant aesthetic response should really be considered a flaw and therefore be fixed in the design phase. He conceded that there was room for emergent aesthetic responses, and that designers should pay close attention to such player behaviour.

I copied Marc’s answers above from memory, I apologize in advance for failing to capture shades of meaning. I may address my own views about his answers at a later date.

Chris Hecker – Meaningfully Mass Market

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was the biggest entertainment launch of all time, making $550 million dollars in one weekend. Sensationalist headlines often tell us that the video game industry is now bigger and more profitable than Hollywood. In his presentation, Chris Hecker revealed the numbers behind such claims and explored the idea of what it means to be meaningfully mainstream.

While video games are making record profits, they lag behind film and music in terms of unit sales. To quote someone who had the good sense to take notes at the presentation:

Gone With the Wind, the most successful film by revenue after adjusting for inflation, sold 35 million “units” in the United Kingdom alone in 1940, at which point that country had a population of 43 million. Even more astonishingly, it sold 202 million tickets in the United States — which had a population of only 130 million at the time. “Everyone went twice!” Hecker exclaimed. “This is mass market reach.”

Put otherwise: “Celine Dion is beating every game we’ve ever made.” He also refuted the claim that the average gamer is 35 and female. When “games” are deceitfully defined to include cards and board games, then two main market groups emerge: 18-34 males and senior women. These two groups average to a mythical 35 year woman who is not at all representative of the gaming demographic.

How can games avoid the “cultural ghetto” that comic books have fallen into? Chris asserts the answer is to target a more varied audience and take more creative risks:

Not all bands are trying to make Thriller. They’re not all trying to hit every single person in their entire audience with a single work, which we try to do routinely. We have such incredibly narrow sets of users that we don’t actually have a reasonable description of a mass market audience. Film can do both The Dark Knight and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and it makes the medium richer for it. You can rent one when you’re in one mood, and the other when you’re in another mood. We don’t provide for that.

He concluded with an introspective challenge to game developers: “What are you trying to say, and why? And are you trying to say it with interactivity? If you can answer those, you’re on the right track.”

Finally, I also attended presentations by Jakub Dvorsky of Amanita Design, Jason Della Rocca, Jeff Goodsill, Paul Winterhalder, Valve’s Jason Holtman, Jonathan Cooper and Dorian Kiken from Bioware, and a business panel featuring Clint Hocking. I regret not being able to reproduce your great talks from memory!

MIGS was a terrific experience, I learned so much and was surrounded by people with a passion for game development. I’ve thankfully taken some of that energy home with me, to reinvest in making and writing about video games.

Photographs by CasualCapture.

The response was overwhelming; of the nine people I had e-mailed, seven of them were interested in participating. The project was suddenly much larger than I had anticipated, but I didn’t have the heart to turn anyone away. The eight of us (Henk Boom, Thomas Hibbert, Phil Jones, Renaud Bédard, Alex Charlton, William Mitchell, Kyle Sama and I¹) formed the facetiously titled collective No Fun Games.

You might be surprised to learn that our original game idea had nothing to do with music, shoot ‘em ups or The Beatles. While we explored a number of different game ideas, we settled on creating a murder mystery game set in an JRPG-style lumber town. We gave the development version the nickname Pulp².

Pulp‘s main character was “Penny”, a local girl with a knack for mysteries. She teamed up with retired Sherlock Holmes analogue “Detective Powell” to solve the murder of his former partner “Dr. Watson” (we never really settled on official names). You can see Phil’s concept art for some of the characters above.

We developed an elaborate back story which outlined the motivation behind the murder and its connection to the protagonists. However, our ideas for the game’s actual plot and structure were little more than a skeleton. Truthfully, we possessed neither the inclination nor the talent to write good fiction and this was ultimately the game’s downfall.

On the programming side, we put together a basic game engine in Python with the help of the Pygame and PyOpenGL libraries. It gave us the bare essentials, allowing us to add actors to the screen and assign them behaviours. As seen above, we created a simple world for Penny to run around and interact with (the Fez spritesheet was placeholder art lent to us by Renaud).

Sadly, this is as far as the Pulp project ever got. Despite our best intentions, we drifted apart over the summer. Everyone had personal commitments, internships, and travel plans. We simply didn’t have the time or motivation for leisure coding. By July, Pulp had reluctantly become vapourware. Fortunately, this wasn’t the end of No Fun Games.

By late August, things in my life were starting to slow down. I was back living in Montreal (after spending the summer at IBM in Ottawa), and had a couple of weeks off before the fall semester. Blessed with free time, I decided to reconnect with my teammates for a final sprint. Naturally, we wanted to release something after all our hard work.

Of course, not everyone had the luxury of time off. While we all wanted to participate, only Henk, Thomas and I had the hours to spare. Our artist Phil was also interested, but couldn’t commit to the heavy art demands of the murder mystery concept. With this in mind, we decided to drop that idea and reuse the engine we had created to pursue an entirely different genre.

The concept for Norwegian Wood came from our desire to explore the burgeoning intersection of music and gameplay. We wanted to create a game where listening and following the rhythm played a strong role in the player’s experience, but less directly than a game like Rock Band.

This idea manifested as a shoot ‘em up game where the bullet patterns are timed to the individual instruments. The decision to use The Beatles’ music was somewhat incidental; I happened to be listening to Rubber Soul when the game concept occurred to me. However, the song has certain qualities that make it rather ideal. For instance, the notes are quite discrete, making it easy to divide the instruments and record timestamps. More importantly, using a calm lilting ballad with subtle dark undertones contrasted nicely with the upbeat synth-metal used in most shoot ‘em up games.

Henk, Thomas and I got together at school to work on the game, working nearly full time for two weeks. We managed to create a playable prototype within a few days, then put the majority of our work into refining and iterating on the core gameplay. We also placed a strong emphasis on player feedback, bugging everyone around us to playtest it.

After chasing down the cross-platform bugs and ironing out the details of deployment, we finally released Norwegian Wood in late September. Thanks in large part to friends on Twitter spreading the word, we’ve had thousands of hits, hundreds of high scores and some very positive feedback. We’re thrilled that so many people have enjoyed our game, and promise to put all that excitement right back into making more of them.

To summarize Gamasutra-style, here are some lessons we learned during development:

What Went Right

1. Working Together Locally
While most of the work on Pulp had been completed remotely, it came at a cost to communication and motivation. For Norwegian Wood we decided that there is really no substitute for face-to-face time and met up in person every day. This was extremely effective, both for making consistent measurable progress and sharing a common creative vision.

2. Recording Global High Scores
The online high score table was a minor last-minute addition to the game. However, as Eric Swain pointed out in his insightful Indie Spotlight, it added a ton of value in terms of competition and replayability. “Even after all these years and innovations it is still a huge motivation to play. [...] It isn’t all about competition, but the close knit community that get formed in that competition.”

3. Sidestepping Copyright
It took a lot of thinking to come up with a way to release a music game without infringing on The Beatles’ copyright³. Despite our doubts, having the user provide their own mp3 turned out to be a very successful strategy. Of course, it’s a shame that we picked the one band whose music can’t be downloaded legally. In the future, we’d very much like to reexplore this concept with Creative Commons licensed music.

What Went Wrong

1. Big Team Woes
Starting out with such a large development team on Pulp was a major challenge. Responsibility was spread too thin, and no one felt like they had creative control of the game on an individual level. In retrospect, I would recommend a team of no more than 4 for your first indie collaboration. Furthermore, it helps to have a fairly autocratic team leader.

2. Summertime Blues
I had assumed that summer would be the perfect time for students to pursue a side project. Working nine to five at an internship means having evenings off and lots of free time, right? Sadly, I was way off. The temperament of summer is lazy and leisurely; it’s hardly a season for picking up additional work. Furthermore, working full-time turns casual hacking into an unpleasant chore. Counter-intuitively, students would much rather attempt side projects while they’re juggling exams and assignments in the fall.

3. Storytelling Failure
We were incredibly naive about the process of writing a story for Pulp. We had the big picture ideas and the game mechanics, and just assumed that the moment-to-moment narrative experience would flow from that. We quickly discovered that writing a good story is an extremely demanding task, one we were ill-equipped to handle. Lesson learned: if you insist on having a narrative element to your game, make sure you have a dedicated writer (or semionaut) on the team.

Thanks again to everyone who was involved in Norwegian Wood, including those of you who playtested it and helped spread the word on release day. Making this game was a terrific experience, and it taught me a great deal about game design, programming and project management. I look forward to applying these lessons to my next game!

¹ Ben Abraham was also briefly involved as music director, he wrote us a lovely dirge for Pulp.
² Funny how Pulp turned into Norwegian Wood. The arboreal theme is coincidental.
³ Actually, Nick suggested this approach. Thanks Nick!

The game project that I’ve been quietly working on this summer is finally ready for release! It’s a rhythm-based shmup inspired by the Beatles song Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown). You can download it for PC, Mac and Linux on the game’s website:

Norwegian Wood – No Fun Games

I have more to say about the game’s development process, but I’ll save that for a postmortem post later this month. For now, enjoy the game, and please leave your feedback and suggestions in the comments below.

Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc and Robert Zubek defined MDA in 2001 [PDF link]. It stands for mechanics, dynamics and aesthetics, the three layers that define a game. These words are often thrown around casually in game design discussions, but in MDA they have very specific meanings:

• Mechanics are the formal rules of the game. These rules define how the game is prepared, what actions the players can take, the victory conditions, the rule enforcement mechanisms, etc.
• Dynamics describe how the rules act in motion, responding to player input and working in concert with other rules. In programming terms, the “run-time” behaviour of the game.
• Aesthetics describe the player’s experience of the game; their enjoyment, frustration, discovery, fellowship, etc. In simple terms, what makes the game fun?

We can illustrate these concepts with the classic game Pac-Man. The pathfinding logic of the enemies is defined by a formal set of rules. Each ghost has a unique seeking mechanic: Blinky targets the tile that the player currently occupies, while Pinky targets four tiles ahead. Together, these rules create a dynamic wherein the player becomes boxed in by Pinky in the front and Blinky from behind. The enemy dynamics present a challenge to the player, creating an aesthetic of fun and excitement.

In his post on MDA, Schreiber also offers the following example:

In a First-Person Shooter video game, a common mechanic is for players to have “spawn points” – dedicated places on the map where they re-appear after getting killed. Spawn points are a mechanic. This leads to the dynamic where a player may sit next to a spawn point and immediately kill anyone as soon as they respawn. And lastly, the aesthetics would likely be frustration at the prospect of coming back into play only to be killed again immediately.

As illustrated above by Clint Hocking² (lead designer of Far Cry 2) and Ben Abraham (blogger, musician, Far Cry 2 enthusiast), designers and players experience games from different perspectives.

Game designers only have direct control of the game’s mechanics; the mechanics work together to generate the dynamics, which in turn generate the aesthetics. They want to make their games fun and engaging, but only have indirect control of the player’s experience. Schreiber calls this a “second-order design problem” and it’s the reason why game design is challenging. Thus, designers tend to see mechanics and work outwards.

Conversely, players are immediately familiar with their own emotional response to a game regardless of whether they understand the underlying rules. One can enjoy Wii Sports tennis without necessarily knowing the exact dimensions of the virtual court. Only through hours of observation and deduction do the dynamics and mechanics gradually become clear.

We can see the contrast between these two perspectives in Clint and Ben’s writing about Far Cry 2. Clint’s GDC 2009 presentation reveals how the game inflicts “random, small losses” in order to keep the player alternating between “composition” and “execution”. This explains how the attrition mechanics create dynamics that force the player to improvise, resulting in a challenging and immersive aesthetic. Ben, on the other hand, insightfully chronicles the aesthetics of games. This does not imply that his appreciation is shallow, rather that he sees games in terms of personal experiences and emotional responses rather than abstract systems of rules.

How do the three layers of MDA compare with the six layers of art proposed by Scott McCloud? Schreiber suggests that they are nearly parallel: “mechanics are roughly equivalent to [...] structure; dynamics are analogous to craft; and aesthetics are similar to surface.” While there is ostensibly strong similarity between the two frameworks, I believe that they diverge on a crucial point.

McCloud’s six layers of art are ranked according to importance; novices concern themselves with surfaces while masters concentrate on ideas and forms. Schreiber compares aesthetics to McCloud’s concept of surface, which are the “production values, finishing, the aspects most apparent on the first superficial exposure to the work”. However, McCloud defines ideas, the innermost layer of art, as “the impulses, the ideas, the emotions, the philosophies, the purposes of the work”. This is also strongly analogous to MDA’s definition of aesthetics³. The idea that the innermost and outermost layer are so strongly related is irreconcilable within McCloud’s strongly ranked framework; why then do aesthetics make perfect sense within MDA?

I suspect the reason is that, while MDA’s three layers are also ordered, they are not ranked according to importance or value. Mechanics, dynamics and aesthetics are equally valid and interesting perspectives for understanding a game. While surface is superficial and inconsequential, aesthetics describe concepts that are crucial to an artistic study of games: sensation, discovery, fellowship, expression, challenge, narrative, etc.

McCloud’s six layers of art and MDA are both useful ways of understanding and deconstructing video games. However, this fundamental difference prevents us from drawing easy parallels between them.

¹ Months ago Nels recommended I read about MDA, good advice I managed to completely forget. Apologies!
² Correction: CLINT HOCKING.
³ One could argue that McCloud’s idea/purpose refers to the emotions and impulses of the creator, not the player.

What’s interesting about the series is the contrast between how unremarkable many of these games are in a larger sense and how important they are on a personal level. Did the creators of Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe know that they would inspire Jim Rossignol’s lifetime of gaming? Do these influential games have common characteristics, or are they imbued with greatness by the emotion and (later) nostalgia of the player?

I doubt these questions have easy answers, but I’d like to explore these themes by profiling five games that have greatly influenced my life.

Tank Wars was the precursor to games such as Scorched Earth and Worms. Players took turns firing at each other with a variety of explosives, adjusting their shots for gravity and wind. It even featured crude destructible environments, a neat trick for the era.

Tank Wars was not the first game I ever played (that honour likely goes to Super Mario Bros. on my friend’s NES.) It was only one of the many DOS games I played on another friend’s old computer, alongside titles like Hugo’s House of Horrors and Jazz Jackrabbit. Why, then, does Tank Wars stand out so strongly in my memory?

I believe it’s because Tank Wars was the first game I ever played that had cooperative multiplayer. In other games you could pass around the controller, time-sharing the protagonist. However, Tank Wars gave me and my friend individual agency, then expected us to work together to overcome the computer. This simple change made a world of difference. We had to coordinate tactics. We were accountable to the “team” for our performance. We shared victories and losses.

Michael Abbot pronounced “co-op gaming” as his 2008 Game of the Year. I suppose it’s my pick for GOTY ’93.

I’m sure this will make some of you feel quite old: Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars, released for the SNES in 1996, was indeed the first RPG I ever played.

A bit of context for this: my parents reluctantly bought me a Super Nintendo for my birthday in the Spring of ’95. It was my very first video game system, and I cherished it. In its box was a card that urged me to subscribe to Nintendo Power magazine, so I dutifully handed over my allowance money later that Summer.

Each issue included a feature called “Epic Center” entirely devoted to RPGs, a genre concept that was entirely new to me. Stories that went beyond the instruction manual? Characters with personalities? Giant worlds to explore? These ideas blew my little mind, and I poured over each volume as if it were gospel. After the cover of issue 82, I knew exactly what I wanted for my birthday the following year.

In many ways, the action elements of Super Mario RPG made it an ideal starting point for a newcomer to the genre. The light platforming eased me into new concepts, such as turn-based combat and equipping items. Inventory management was particularly problematic; it took me ages to figure out that you could revive fallen party members with items. On the other hand, it taught me a variety of unusual habits that I carried with me to other games. I timed my attacks with the A button in Chrono Trigger and Pokémon, only realizing years later that most RPGs didn’t have such a system.

I’ve played through Super Mario RPG many times over the years, and it has held up very well with age. I still chuckle at the silly one-liners (“Who do you think you are? Bruce Lee?”) and quirky enemies (among them a wedding cake and a pastiche of the Power Rangers). It’s terrific to see the game’s legacy live on through the Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi series.

It must be difficult for people who grew up on PC games to understand the fuss over Goldeneye. The success of Doom inspired hundreds of imitators, planting the roots of first person shooters firmly in the PC market. At the time of Goldeneye‘s release, they were already enjoying online deathmatches in Quake. Why would anyone get excited over a movie tie-in with clunky controls and unremarkable graphics?

For those of us raised on Nintendo, Goldeneye was a completely new experience. Still becoming accustomed to the third dimension introduced by Super Mario 64, we were now allowed to navigate this space from a native angle. I didn’t just control a character on the screen, the person on the screen was me. In other words, Goldeneye was the first game that felt truly immersive.

Despite my earlier claims, Goldeneye was also innovative even in comparison to its PC brethren. For instance, it moved the focus of FPS games away from constant killing. Goldeneye rewarded stealth, and encouraged the player to silently and effectively achieve the mission objectives. This gave the game a strong sense of pacing, with highs and lows of intensity.

Unfortunately, as Mitch Krpata pointed out, the game has not aged well. The graphics are so crude that it’s often difficult to tell what’s going on, and the framerate is abysmal in multiplayer matches. Still, I credit Goldeneye for introducing me to a genre that I have come to love.

In the early 2000′s, my parents finally bought the family a computer. This was very exciting to me, as I finally had a chance to catch up on the last decade of PC games. Having enjoyed Warcraft 1 & 2 at a friend’s house, I knew exactly which game I wanted to play first.

Despite being a terrific RTS, I’d be hesitant to call Starcraft an important influence on my gaming tastes today. In fact, I suspect that less than half of my playing time was actually spent in-game; it was the Campaign Editor that really captured my imagination.

If you’ve never used Starcraft‘s editor, you might not know how robust it is. Beyond being able to shape the terrain, place resources and modify unit statistics, the Campaign Editor allows you to define triggers. A simplified form of event-based programming, they implement logic such as:

CONDITIONS:
-Player 1 kills at least 1 any unit.
ACTIONS:
-Display for current player: You have slain your first foe!
-Modify resources for Current player: Add 100 Ore.

Using triggers, I could coax Starcraft into becoming any kind of game I wanted. I experimented with making RPGs, racing games, and sci-fi survival horror. Furthermore, it was easy to import the custom maps to Battle.net and test them out with other enthusiasts on the “Use Map Settings” playlists.

In terms of personal “gaming education and influences”, Starcraft‘s Campaign Editor may be the most important. It planted the seeds of programming and game design in my young brain, seeds that have blossomed into an academic pursuit of Software Engineering and (hopefully) a future career in game development. I can only hope that LittleBigPlanet and Kodu will do the same for the little nerds growing up today.

Unfortunately, not all of my “gaming education” has had a net positive effect on my life. I played Final Fantasy XI from April 2004 until January 2007, from the end of my last year of high school until halfway through my first year of university². At the peak, summertime with no school and a part-time job, I suspect I played over 40 hours a week. It’s shocking and shameful for me to put that into numbers, but it’s the truth.

Some people talk about being “addicted” to an MMO. This may be an accurate metaphor for some people, but in my life I think it was much more subtle. I didn’t fail out of school, miss work or even stop learning karate. I suspect it wasn’t externally obvious that I played an MMO at all.

However, the part of my life that the game did consume was my leisure time. Instead of watching TV, reading a book, exploring a new hobby or playing a different game, I would play Final Fantasy XI. That’s exactly the problem with MMOs: no matter how much time you put into them, you can always benefit by playing more. As Jonathan Blow explained: “It doesn’t matter if you’re smart or how adept you are, it’s just how much time you sink in. You don’t need to do anything exceptional, you just need to run the treadmill like everyone else.”

There were some positive aspects to play Final Fantasy XI. I got to play and interact with people from all over the world, including one or two that I keep in contact with to this day. I learnt quite a bit about the psychology of MMO players, including the strange social hierarchies and superstitions that develop. Most importantly, participating and coordinating with ~60 other people to take down some of the strongest monsters in the game was a truly unique gameplay experience.

Playing Final Fantasy XI made me into the person I am today because I’ve learnt from my mistakes. It was my first and last MMORPG, an unforgettable experience that I hope never to revisit.

¹ Check out Michel’s take on the series as well.
² In Quebec, there are 2-3 years of CEGEP between high school and university.

This chart shows how the site’s RSS subscriptions have grown since June 2008 (according to Feedburner.) These numbers should be taken with a grain of salt, but they do illustrate that I’ve had a very fortunate year! The big spike in October came from being linked by Kotaku and the front page of Digg in the space of a week (many thanks to Maggie Greene.)

This year I wrote 41 posts, overhauled my blog design twice, and made my first two non-trivial games: Inventory Tetris and Rockwell, Papyrus, Skia. There’s more to come! I’m currently hard at work on a substantially larger secret project in pygame, and experimenting with flixel when I have a moment to spare.

More significantly, this last year saw the game blogging community really begin to gel. The conversation that started in blogs and comments moved to Twitter and the #GBConfab IRC channel, then came full circle as cross-posts, podcasts and shared experiences. The game writing archive Critical Distance was born out of this spirit of collaboration, and will hopefully serve to further expand the conversation.

In fact, the game blogging community is already so large that I do not feel that I can adequately thank everyone individually. Therefore, I’d like to thank all of you for your support, your critical insight, and your humour. I look forward to many more trips around the sun writing and learning with you all.

To all my quieter readers: thanks for sticking around, and happy Canada day!

When I first listened to Future Of The Left‘s “The Hope That House Built”, my first thought was: “that’s the filthiest guitar I’ve ever heard!” Their latest album Travels With Myself and Another is dirty, hungry and excellent throughout. With indie rock tending toward dreamy Pet Sounds pop these days, their heavier sound is both refreshing and distinctive.

Could this trio of teenagers (16, 21 and 19 respectively) from London spark a modern swing / rockabilly revival? I certainly hope so! Kitty, Daisy & Lewis‘s self-titled album consists mostly of covers, but they have a unique contemporary take on the classics. Beyond genre novelty, the band’s sheer instrumental ability shines through, particularly Kitty Durham’s wailing harmonica. This is a band to watch, without a doubt.

Regina Spektor‘s latest album Far was released yesterday, and I assure you it will be playing on repeat at my place for the foreseeable future. A Soviet-born, Bronx-raised folk singer, Regina’s music is defined by its contradictions. Her songs are playful and mournful, traditional and experimental. If “Dance Anthem Of The 80′s” (embedded above) made you smile, I strongly suggest investigating her entire discography.

Finally, the story of Connie Converse is as peculiar as it is heartbreaking. In the 1950′s, this aspiring musician was living in an apartment in Greenwich Village. Her melancholic, thoughtful, feminist music was perhaps too avant-garde for contemporary recording companies, and she was never picked up. Disillusioned, she packed up and disappeared.

However, her private recordings were rediscovered decades later, “unearthed from the bottom of a filing cabinet.” As Lucy Foley [via Simon Parkin] explains, her music is remarkable:

This woman wrote her songs before the Beatles showed up. Before Elvis showed up. Before rock ‘n’ roll showed up. Long before the singer songwriter paradigm showed up. Connie Converse was writing songs in the fifties of such intimacy, wit and poignancy that would not be heard in the mainstream until Joni Mitchell came along, a hundred cultural light years later. There’s an uncanny quality in Connie Converse. Her songs go on journeys into yearning, into the uncanny.

You can hear more about this outstanding lost musician on WYNC’s Spinning on Air, and purchase an album from the people who rediscovered her work.

That’s all from me, but if you’re looking for more music check out Nav’s Summer selection over at Scrawled in Wax.

Little Wheel [Flash]

Many game bloggers have tackled the subject of adventure games and their unfortunate fall from grace in mainstream gaming. It’s quite possible that the golden age of Lucasarts was the artistic peak for traditional adventures. However, enterprising developers are breathing new life into the genre by switching to a shorter format. While some companies are exploring this new niche by releasing episodically, indie developers such as Vector Park, Amanita Design and OneClickDog are creating short self-contained adventure stories.

OneClickDog’s latest release is Little Wheel, a 15 minute flash game about a brave little robot who is tasked with reviving a dead world. The protagonist is animated in a way that’s as charming and expressive as Wall-E, and the artwork is drawn in striking silhouette. It also features a terrific low-key jazz soundtrack.

Beyond its aesthetics, Little Wheel is an adventure game that isn’t shy about rewriting genre rules. On-screen elements that can be interacted with are clearly circled in white, eliminating the need to hunt pixels. There is no inventory, and each puzzle is confined to a single screen. It’s not a particularly challenging game, but it also isn’t difficult for the wrong reasons.

Little Wheel is a charming title that’s well worth spending a lunch break to explore.

Blueberry Garden [PC]

Blueberry Garden took the grand prize at this year’s IGF, and was finally released earlier this week. With its hand drawn graphics and zen atmosphere, it’s very obviously an indie title (though it falls short of a bingo). However, its gameplay is anything but typical. The goal of the game is to shut off the faucet that’s slowly drowning the garden. More fundamentally, Blueberry Garden is a game about exploring, and it introduces two innovative twists on the formula.

Firstly, the avian gentleman’s powers are tied directly to the garden that he inhabits. He gains abilities by consuming the fruit of local trees. The player can spread their seeds, planting new trees in strategic locations to overcome obstacles. Furthermore, many of these powers manipulate the garden’s terrain, raising or contracting it. The world of Blueberry Garden is an organic entity that shifts and changes with the player’s actions.

Secondly, the game uses a distinctive system to unlock new areas. Rather than impede the player with locked doors, Blueberry Garden uses altitude to divide the map. The avian gentleman assembles the objects he finds in the world (cameras, tomatoes, pencils) into a tower of stuff, which in turn allows him to glide to new ledges. The unique vertical level design unites with the flying mechanic to form a truly exceptional platformer.

Today I Die [Flash]

I find Daniel Benmergui to be one of the most personally inspiring independent game developers. His games are minimalist and offbeat, strongly authored yet loose and free form. His most recent title is Today I Die, a game “about the daily choice of waking up in the morning.” He elaborated on this concept in an interview with Rachael Webster:

“We are conditioned to look at life as a series of milestones and achievements, so anything that is not one of those seems to be irrelevant. Like, what you do every day. The game is not about someone who suddenly changes her life in a single, spectacular moment like movies show people doing. It’s about a constant choice, an everyday choice.”

Today I Die is an interactive poem. Words can be swapped out and rearranged, and changes in the text are reflected in the world. Conversely, actions in the world generate new words for the player to manipulate. The unusual gameplay can take a little while to get the hang of, but take Corvus’s advice: “don’t read it like a game, play it like a poem.”

Zeno Clash [PC / XBLA]

ACE Team’s Zeno Clash is a harbinger of a new class of games, dubbed Single-A games by designer Steve Gaynor. Falling somewhere between lo-fi indie and professional mainstream, they often showcase the graphical fidelity of the latter while maintaining the team size of the former.

Zeno Clash is a first person brawler built on Valve’s Source engine. It’s set in a dark “punk fantasy” world inhabited by a unique cast of strange and wonderful creatures. Among them are Father-Mother, a tall hermaphrodite creature with a very protective family, the Corwid, insane hermits who refuse to be slaves of reality, and the Hunter, a blind mercenary who commands explosive rodents. It’s a wonderfully imaginative setting, and ACE does a great job of slowly establishing the world and its inhabitants.

While I very much enjoy the game’s first-person fistfights, there are a few limitations. For instance, the guns come in two varieties: underpowered and overpowered. Neither camp strikes a good balance with the melee combat. Also, the ‘E’ key is mapped to far too many functions: locking on/off, changing targets, picking up weapons and eating fruit. A game that often demands precise timing deserves equally precise controls. However, these are minor qualms and the brawling mechanics are fundamentally solid and fun.

I started Zeno Clash with very high expectations, and it somehow managed to meet and exceed them. Hopefully the upcoming Xbox 360 port will expose this great game to an even wider audience.

Michel McBride-Charpentier explored some of these methods in a post entitled How Designers Turn Heads. The most naive solution is to “simply temporarily remove camera control from the player and send it off somewhere with a script”, a blunt method which sacrifices player immersion and denies the interactive nature of games. A step above this is the Gears of War approach, where “the camera can be focused on a special event at the press of a button.” This offers the player a simple binary choice: look at the event or ignore it. This method is still artificial and inelegant, as it relies on a “giant blinking controller button prompt” to indicate that something is happening.

The best approach is to guide the player organically, catching their eye with elements that fit seamlessly into the game world. In this school of thought, Valve is peerless. The Half Life series is a testament to subtly managing the player’s navigation while maintaining the illusion of a big open world. I’d like to explore some of the methods they use to do this, using screenshots from my recent playthrough of Half-Life 2: Episode Two.

Flock of Birds

One of the most obvious tricks that Valve uses is having the player startle a flock of birds which fly off in the direction of a distant object of interest. Their sudden movement captures and directs the player’s attention. As Michel put it, “Birds are never just birds in Half-Life 2.”

For instance, near the beginning of the game, the player approaches a cliff overlooking a small abandoned factory and startles a group of crows¹.

As the birds take off, they fly toward a rooftop where the player can catch a glimpse of a Hunter robot stalking them. This neatly foreshadows the upcoming encounter.

Getting the player to look at the birds can also be inherently useful. Valve occasionally uses them as a proxy for the player, demonstrating the consequences of nearby danger.

Halfway through “Under The Radar”, the player has been tasked with taking out the Autoguns that are defending a nearby Combine bunker. As the player crouches to enter their firing range, he/she startles a nearby crow.²

The Autoguns swiftly target and dispatch the bird, warning the player that they must remained crouched in this area or suffer a similar fate.

Ammo & Supplies

Another method that Valve uses to draw the player’s attention is the careful positioning of supply crates. In many first person shooter games, unmarked crates and barrels may or may not hold health and ammo. The player must therefore break everything in sight in order to replenish their supplies. In Half Life 2, however, ammo caches are clearly identified by a yellow marking. The player will therefore consciously look out for them and navigate toward them.

For example, halfway through the Antlion den, the player spots a yellow ammo crate sitting in front of a wooden plank wall.

On approach, an Antlion Guardian breaks through the barricade and attempts to slash the player. This prompts the Vortigaunt companion to comment on this new enemy, and once again foreshadows a future confrontation.

In another example, a shield battery can be seen next to a fallen ally at the end of a dark hallway. This encourages the player to investigate the corridor.

At the end of the passage, the player finds a hole in the floor. The presence of additional health and shield supplies at the bottom indicates that the player should jump in and explore it. Like breadcrumbs, the path through the following underground tunnel is also marked by scattered supplies.

By using supply caches as navigational tools, Valve provides game world incentives for staying on the right path. Furthermore, since they disappear after being picked up, ammo and health provide one-directional guidance. There’s little chance of the player inadvertently following the chain of supplies backwards.

Barnacles

Barnacles are passive ceiling-dwelling enemies. They drop down a long sticky tongue that latches on to anything it touches, pulling up prey to their razor-sharp mouth. They’re used in many creative ways in Half Life‘s level design, including inciting the player to look straight up.

For instance, toward the end of “This Vortal Coil”, the player walks into a cavern where a Barnacle’s long tongue is hanging down.

The player looks upwards to kill the enemy, only to discover a web cache with health and ammo embedded in the ceiling. Had the Barnacle not directed the player’s attention, the concealed supplies would likely have gone completely unnoticed.

Graffiti

Finally, Valve will occasionally make use of suggestive graffiti to lead the player’s eye. This approach is a bit lacking in subtlety; why would anyone tag a wall with lines and arrows? Fortunately, it’s a technique that’s used sparingly.

The shed that houses the Autoguns features some suspicious markings, possibly tagged by someone named “Mooee”?³

Turning the corner, the player finds a Zombine hammering on the back door. This communicates that the door is locked, and that the player should seek an alternate entrance.

Valve subtly guides the player’s attention toward significant events and objects by using elements naturally found in the game world. This allows the player to retain control of their perspective without getting lost or confused, and contributes to an overall immersive experience.

¹ “A murder of crows” is the official compound noun. Much more poetic!
² Note too the placement of the ammo create in the drainage tunnel, indicating where to go next.
³ Seriously, what is this supposed to say?

Last month, head editor Ben Abraham and his crew of bloggers launched Critical Distance, a game criticism archive and compilation blog. They’ve been doing a terrific job, linking out to fascinating new sites and really expanding the conversation.

With exams over, I recently had a chance to contribute something: a post wherein I attempt to connect my love of indie games with my interest in music history. A quick note about the unusual format: it’s not intended to be an in-depth comparison, just a light exploration of the concept via various game bloggers.

Critical Distance – Punk & Indie Games

If you’re looking for fresh perspectives in video game criticism, then Critical Distance is definitely a website to watch.

Tom’s post was also my first exposure to Grifball, a sport-like player-created game mode in Halo 3. Robust mapmaking tools and heavy official support now make it a poor fit for the consensual model², but Grifball remains interesting both as a case study for emergent gameplay and as a unique well-balanced game mode.

Grifball was invented by Rooster Teeth (a production team best known for their Halo machinima Red vs. Blue) and named after Grif (an orange Spartan character from the aforementioned series.) The game is a modified version of Halo‘s “Assault” mode, with the following custom rules:

• The map is set to a custom version of Foundry that has been edited into an empty square court with opposing goals.
• The players are all equipped with melee weapons (Gravity Hammer and Energy Sword) with infinite ammo. Grenades and equipment are disabled.
• Weapon damage is doubled and player health is set to 10%, so the Gravity Hammer’s concussive blast can sometimes kill in one hit.
• The player currently in possession of the bomb is granted 150% speed, overshield and bright orange armour.
• Players respawn at their goal after 3 seconds.
• The bomb timer is set to 1 second, so there is no chance to defuse it.
• Planting the bomb at the opposing team’s goal scores a point and ends the round. The team that’s ahead after five rounds wins the game.

It’s worth noting that none of these changes require external mods or hacking, but rather are easily accomplished using Halo 3‘s powerful map editing tool. If mapmaking isn’t your thing, you can grab the Rooster Teeth version off Bungie’s file sharing service or wait for the official playlist during double EXP weekends.

What’s fascinating about Grifball is how well it emulates a sport (or rather a sport game.) Like basketball or hockey, players must alternately think offensively and defensively as the bomb changes possession. Movement suddenly trumps aiming, as players must gauge distance for successful attacks and create openings to score. The best players are the ones who can move in tricky, unpredictable ways and psych out their opponents. In terms of skill and strategy, Grifball has much more in common with virtual rugby than it does a shooter.

Grifball is also surprisingly deep and well-balanced, especially for a game that was assembled on top of a rules calibrated for ranged fighting. For instance, the game’s three weapons create a rough circular hierarchy³ (shown in the diagram above.) Defensive players must therefore alternate between using the sword to chase down the bomb carrier and the hammer to take out their support. Experienced offensive players can also use the repulsion of the Gravity Hammer to propel a jumping bomb carrier over the heads of the defending players, a sort of “Hail Mary” play that can be very effective. There’s a deep rabbit hole of player vocabulary and strategy to explore, if you’re so inclined.

In his post, Tom Armitage proposed that consensual games like Grifball are so good because they have survived thousands of Xbox Live players playing and refining them. Grifball is now nearly two years old and is enjoyed by several divisions of competitive league play. If you’re one of the 8 million people who owns Halo 3, I strongly suggest giving this unique player-created game mode a shot.

¹ “The creative use of a video game in ways unexpected by the game designer’s original intent.”
² The rules are entirely enforced by the game, therefore there is no need for mutual consent.
³ Experienced players would probably argue that it’s a bit more complex than that (see this chart).

With final exams beginning to wind down, I’ve had a chance at last to get back to playing Mother 3, the Japan-exclusive sequel to the cult SNES RPG Earthbound. The game was translated to English by the dedicated fans at Starmen.net, and was finally released last Fall to much excitement and acclaim.

I’m currently about halfway through the game, having completed chapter 4 by personally dispatching a disgruntled bass guitar¹. The game is noteworthy in countless ways, but what has really struck me so far is how much the game diverges from the Earthbound formula. This is peculiar, given how ostensibly similar the two games are. To use a cooking metaphor, it’s as if the designers used the same ingredients, but tweaked the recipe and ended up with a very different dish.

As I was assembling my thoughts on the game into some semblance of a thesis, I happened across an interview with lead designer Shigesato Itoi in which he expressed exactly what I had been struggling to say:

When we were working on [Earthbound], RPGs were all basically “road movies”. The main character would set out on a journey and go from town to town. By laying this out in a spiraling fashion, an RPG’s structure would start to resemble a simple board game.

But I felt that there was a limit to this road movie/board game style of moving from one spot to the next. Kind of like, “Okay, I made it this far, but what’s happened to the people in the last town?” [...] That’s when I thought of an RPG in which you stay in a certain town for a long time.

[...] The game would have character relations, and the people would all have their own lives. This way, we could do all sorts of things in the game. For example, someone who recently hung laundry out to dry would be wearing those clothes the next day. I wanted to make an RPG in which you could grow closer to the people as time went on.

In my opinion, this is the key difference between Earthbound and Mother 3. The former is about a journey to far off places, while the latter is about seeing the same place from many different perspectives.

The first half of Earthbound is organized in such an explicitly board game manner that it’s difficult not to conclude that this was an intentionally facetious choice. The first four towns are laid out in a crooked line, the latter three being directly connected by a single highway. Their names, in order, are Onett, Twoson, Threed and Fourside. There is a strong sense of progression as you travel down the road, and until very late in the game there is no necessity (and little incentive) to backtrack.

By contrast, the entire first half of Mother 3 is spent in and around the first town: Tazmily Village. However, in that time you sequentially control four different protagonists: Flint, Duster, Salsa and Lucas. Each chapter reveals a facet of the village’s collective character; Flint demonstrates their good nature, while Salsa exposes their naivety. Furthermore, several significant events are shown from a different perspective in each chapter, slowly revealing a complete picture of what actually took place. Finally, we get to see how the village slowly changes under the effects of the peddler’s meddling². Progression is decoupled from displacement, and is instead tied to the development of Tazmily Village as a character.

It took me a while to wrap my head around exactly what Mother 3 was doing. I was stuck in Earthbound‘s board game progression mentality, and was anticipating the illusory “next village” just over the horizon. In retrospect, I’m glad that Mother 3 took the time to develop this small cast of quirky characters.

¹ Yes there are minor spoilers in this post. Lose the ball and chain!
² An attack on industrialization worthy of Tolkien.

Like all stupid ideas, it began on the Internet:

As a man with a weak spot for questionable mash-ups, how could I refuse?

Of course when Zelda: Spirit Tracks was announced, it was only a matter of time.

Nintendo marketing department, I await your call. I build crowds, guaranteed.

This semester I attended “User Interface Design”, a class that encouraged us to think critically about the ways in which people interact with systems. While the course work naturally focused on software interfaces, the principles of good UI design are universal. Whether you’re creating a website, a toaster, a lamp or a door handle, intuitive design relies on understanding human psychology.

In my ongoing quest to contextualize everything I learn in terms of video games, I’d like to explore how the principles of user interface design might be applied to make games more accessible.

In his book The Design of Everyday Things¹, Donald Norman defines three principles of control design:

1. Visibility: It Should Be Obvious What a Control Is Used For.
   If I press this button, what will happen? If I want to unlock the door, which control should I use? A system with good visibility allows the user to easily translate goals into actions.
2. Affordance: It Should Be Obvious How a Control Is Used.
   The system should provide “strong clues to the operation of things”. A button affords pushing, a lever affords pulling, etc. The user should know how to operate a control just by looking at it.
3. Feedback: It Should Be Obvious When a Control Has Been Used.
   Once the user has pressed a button, the system should react in a manner that clearly communicates what has just been accomplished. If nothing has happened, this fact should also be obvious.

By following these principles, we can create systems where “the relationships between the user’s goals, the required actions, and the results are sensible, meaningful and not arbitrary.”

These principles can be applied to at least two layers of interaction in video games: the interface between the player and his/her agency in the game (usually an avatar) and the interface between the avatar and the game world. While a lot can be said about the latter², I’d like to explore two ways in which these three UI principles can be applied to a game’s physical interface.

Visibility for Controllers

Because controllers are designed to support a wide range of games, their buttons cannot usually be labelled according to the functionality that they provide. Instead, buttons are labelled according to letters, numbers and symbols, and the game must provide additional documentation that translates A to “Jump” and R1 to “Shoot”. This violates the principle of visibility, and is a source of considerable frustration for inexperienced gamers.

However, some games use clever tricks to get around this problem. The Legend of Zelda series and Beyond Good & Evil, for instance, facilitate the translation by integrating the documentation right into the player’s heads-up display. Since the buttons cannot be physically relabelled, they are instead relabelled on screen. Not only does this improve visibility by mapping game functions directly to buttons, it also removes ambiguity for context-sensitive actions.

Eric Swain also pointed out the following about controls in Beyond Good & Evil:

It has a simple set of unified controls that transition from one mode to another. From this point of view, the R2 button is not the run button, but the move faster button. The hovercraft and the spaceship both use the same buttons to maneuver as Jade does on foot. On the PS2, the X button will always be action, the O button will always be item and the Square button will always be attack.

By using these kinds of labelling techniques, game designers can compensate for generic controller design and provide consistent visibility.

New Affordances

While traditional controllers have inherent visibility issues, the next generation of interfaces may circumvent the problem by harnessing new affordances. Touch screens and motion controls can actually improve visibility by reducing the representational gap between player action and game agency.

Consider a baseball game on the Wii: the player’s goal is for their avatar to swing at a ball. A motion controller affords physically imitating the desired action. Similarly, the touch screens found on the iPhone and Nintendo DS afford pressing directly on the object that the player wants to manipulate.

In both of these cases, “how the control is used” is conceptually very close to “what the control is used for”. There is effectively no translation or thought required between “what” and “how”. Therefore, the nature of the affordance provides visibility. I believe that this interface quality goes a long way in explaining the success of these consoles with non-traditional audiences.

To many people, video games are user-unfriendly software. Improving the UI design by applying proven principles will hopefully go a long way in opening up the medium to new audiences.

¹ Sadly I haven’t yet read the book, it was quoted extensively in the assigned textbook.
² For instance, check out Iroquois Pliskin’s great post on affordance in puzzle design.

Inspired in part by Petri Purho’s “5-minute game” magic trick, I decided to see if I could put together a small functional game in the scope of an afternoon. I didn’t quite meet my time goal (for reasons I’ll explain below), but finally did put together a small game called Rockwell, Papyrus, Skia.

The goal of the game is to identify which text sample won the game of rock, paper, scissors based on their typeface. I’m a bit of a wannabe font nerd, and I thought this would be a neat way to combine my two interests.

Why wasn’t I able to finish the game in one afternoon? My initial plan was use the LÖVE engine’s graphics library to load the Fonts I wanted to use. However, I ran into a snag: I either had to distribute copyrighted Fonts with the source code, or dynamically load them from the player’s machine. The latter approach was tempting, but fonts files are stored across several system folders and I was only interested in a handful of commonly used fonts. In the end I decided to render the text in advance as images, which lengthened my development time to two and a half afternoons.

You can run the game yourself in two ways:

1. Download the Windows-only executable.
2. Run RockwellPapyrusSkia.exe to play.

or…

1. Download and install LÖVE (it’s multi-platform and very small).
2. Download the source files.
3. Double click RockwellPapyrusSkia.love to play.

You can access the source code by unzipping the .love file, and everything is GPL licensed so you’re free to distribute and modify the game as you please.

I hope you enjoy my second silly game. While it has served me very well, I don’t think I’ll use LÖVE again for my next project. It’s great for rapid prototypes, but I’d like to work with something a bit more powerful in the future. The lack of mouse hover callback, for instance, meant I couldn’t change the pointer to a hand when hovering over buttons. I’ll start checking out alternatives such as XNA and pygame.

While you could be forgiven for dismissing the game due to its designed-by-committee visual design, I contend that beneath its surface lies a unique and intriguing battle system that’s easy to learn but difficult to master. It’s a seamless mix of real time combat and strategic deck building that allows a skilled player to defeat a challenging enemy in seconds without taking a hit.

The first MMBN game was released in 2001, back when the Internet (with a capital ‘i’) was still new, exciting and a completely legitimate setting for a video game. Mega Man is the “netnavi” of a young boy named Lan, and together they roam the web defeating viruses and battling the sinister terrorist organization known as WWW. The viruses and navis are all modelled after classic Mega Man enemies, such as Heat Man, Quick Man, Guts Man, etc. The plot and characters are typical JRPG fluff, but generally fall short of being obnoxious or annoying.

The combat takes places on a pair of adjacent 3×3 grids, with Mega Man on the left and his enemies on the right. Both are constrained to moving within their grid, and trade shots across the divide. Enemies move and fire in patterns, and the player must react accordingly while counterattacking with the classic arm cannon. However, to defeat enemies efficiently, the player must use battle chips.

Every ten seconds the game pauses and the player is presented with a selection of five chips from their folder, from which they select a handful to bring with them into battle. These chips represent a variety of offensive or defensive abilities, such as bombs, swords, shields and recovery. Multiple chips can be selected if they are of the same type or have the same letter, and some can even be combined to form stronger attacks. While this might sound overwhelming all at once, new elements are introduced gently and the whole system builds up in a logical and consistent way.

Last year I compared the MMBN series to The World Ends With You, and I still think the comparison is apt. Both games fuse action and RPG gameplay with light deck building and collection mechanics. While TWEWY was innovative and experimental, I would argue that Mega Man Battle Network unites these disparate elements in a more cohesive manner.

If you’re interested in checking out the series, I recommend starting with MMBN2. The first game was good but didn’t fully explore the potential of the mechanics it introduced. Conversely, I felt the third game added too many new elements which diluted the battle system, a trend that unfortunately persisted for the remainder of the series. In Goldilocks terms, MMBN2 is “just right”.

[This post is part of the Hidden Gems series.]

I picked up a copy of Burnout Paradise last month, an open world racing game that’s over a year old now but is still commendably being supported by its developers. However, the timing of my purchase wasn’t by chance; I decided to take the plunge because the developers finally added the option to restart a race without having to drive back to the starting line. In my mind this was a major flaw, the one that made me initially lose interest and walk away from the demo. With that sorted out I could finally sit down and really enjoy the game.

However, after having played for a few dozen hours or so, I’ve realized that being able to restart a race goes against the entire design philosophy of Burnout Paradise. Not allowing restarts wasn’t an error or a mistake, but rather an extremely purposeful design decision. The developers at Criterion expressed it thusly:

The lack of retry really isn’t an issue. You may disagree, but we don’t feel it is and retry would have introduced loading into the game, which we didn’t want to do. In fact, we hate loading with a passion now. Games like Burnout Paradise and Uncharted Drake’s Fortune [...] keep you IN THE GAME rather than watching what is usually a very dull screen.

While wanting to avoid loading screens is a noble cause, I think the real reasons run much deeper than this. The game expects the player to wander, and thus is designed for downtime and variety.

Firstly, Burnout Paradise is as much about racing and wrecking cars as it is about exploring and experimenting. So much of the game’s content is actually expected to be enjoyed between races: destroying billboards, performing unique jumps, adding cars to your collection, etc. Marc Bell went as far as describing the game as “a platformer whose dude just happens to be a car”. By using the restart feature and constantly being in a race, the player ends up skipping all the neat between-race content that comes naturally when exploring.

Secondly, the game doesn’t stand up well to repeating the same course over and over. The Burnout series isn’t a highly technical racer like Gran Turismo or F-Zero. With its rubber band A.I. and slow-mo crash sequences, it was clearly designed for light-hearted (but still challenging) fun. This also means that there’s a certain amount of luck involved in any win, and this fact becomes painfully obvious when you can instantly restart a race. You begin to notice that you can win most races by brute force, not improving your driving skills but simply grinding until you happen to catch a lucky break and boost to the finish line. It’s the same reason that a Mario Kart cup has you playing four different races in a row: fun based racing games work best with variety.

The developers never intended for you to drive back to the starting line after losing a race. Instead, they wanted you to continue from where the last race left you, find the closest traffic light and start a new completely different event. In all likelihood it would even be in a different category; follow up a race with a stunt run or marked man event. Instant restarting destroys all the variety that the designers built right into the game.

I’m not saying that the restart patch was necessarily a bad thing. It’s a handy feature and one that I appreciate having. However, it’s an addition that clashes badly with the overall vision of what Burnout Paradise is about.

I also think this situation has interesting implications for game design. What if all games were patched by popular demand? What if Square released the “bring Aeris back to life” patch? What if the Bionic Commando developers released a “jump button” patch? Do players really know what they want?

Here are his picks for this month:

Greetings, Quixotic Engineer readers. I’m quite tickled that I have this opportunity to share my recent musical obsessions with you, which Matthew graciously invited me to do. Now, to the music:

Aleks & the Drummer is a local favorite of mine, based here in Chicago. It consists of ‘Aleks’andra Tomaszewska on farfisa organ alongside her siren-y vocals and Deric Criss on drums. I saw them open for The Octopus Project in 2007, and in 2008 they finally released the EP May a Lightning Bolt Caress You, filled with tracks that manage to sculpt out a space that brings to my mind space-age choirs. The ethereal landscape that is provided by Aleks through her two chosen instruments is well complemented by the driving force and reality that is Deric’s percussion.

I’ve always had a mild obsession with Grace Jones, ever since I first saw her in “Conan: The Destroyer”. Years later I would discover her music, and then my friend Josh showed me this video from her recently released Hurricane. The album itself is rather spotty, though the tracks that do stand out do so quite forcefully, and well. This was the first single, and seems to be perfectly suited for the economic crisis in which we find ourselves. Needless to say, it’s been played a few times since I’ve heard it.

Two notes: this video is much better viewed in HD and is NSFW. I have a special place in my heart for Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons, given his treatises on gender and a voice that seems to reverberate with that special quality we attribute to the soul singers of the past. From his new album, The Crying Light, this song has a very soft touch in its instrumentation, in contrast with the floating majesty of Antony’s voice.

There exists no actual video for the song I wanted to share for Goblin Cock, but this happened to aurally work its way into my brain quite effectively regardless. Goblin Cock includes the talents of Rob Crow, a rather prolific artist, if not widely known. What we have is a doom metal band that doesn’t take itself seriously, nor is completely lost in genre with gruffly presented lyrics. The result is the doom metal sound with only two acknowledgements: well-written in its form and fun.

Thanks again to Denis for graciously accepting to guestblog, check out more of his great work at Vorpal Bunny Ranch.

Tag: The Power of Paint [PC]

Tag is a game designed by a group of students at DigiPen, and was a winner at the 2009 IGF Student Showcase. It’s a first person puzzle game wrapped in a shooter, along the lines of Portal. You are equipped with a paint gun, which you use not only to colour the bleak greyscale cityscape but also to explore the game space. Painting a surface green makes it bouncy, red increases your speed and blue allows you to stick to walls.

The video embedded above is a developer walkthrough of the entire game. I urge you to watch only as far as you need to be convinced that this game is brilliant, then go download and play it for yourself. It may lack the polish, setting and dark humour of Portal, but, used in concert, the three paint abilities are just as mind-bending as the portal gun.

Gravity Bone [PC]

I highly recommend playing the game before reading further, it’s very difficult to say anything meaningful about Gravity Bone without spoiling the fun.

That being said, better writers have already gotten to the heart of what makes the game so delightful. I particularly like Duncan’s take on the matter:

The game asserts the existence of a deeper fiction and plot threads that will never be resolved. It establishes a pace of simple, episodic missions, and ends before anyone would predict. Gravity Bone is a 300-page novel that ends on page 60. Because the art style is so charming and pronounced, players might think that that’s the big attraction and therefore the extent of the game’s creativity. Gravity Bone’s purpose is to manipulate expectations by cutting them short, which is why it’s effective at all. Everyone who plays Gravity Bone gets played by Gravity Bone. If you remember the debate over Portal’s shortness from a year and a half ago, the consensus was that Portal’s brevity was beneficial. Here, it’s essential.

Like No More Heroes and You Have To Burn The Rope, Gravity Bone subverts assumptions that are so fundamental to the fabric of gaming that veteran gamers cease to notice them altogether. In this case, the assumption is that the main character’s narrative arc and the player’s learning arc define the length of the game. However, as Kieron Gillen put it: “The hero could always be shot before his adventure starts, and the illusion of games arc is always that – just an illusion.”

Spelunky [PC]

Spelunky caught my eye when John Harris wrote about it in his fascinating @Play column at GameSetWatch. In the words of creator Derek Yu: “My goal was to create a fast-paced platform game that had the kind of tension, re-playability, and variety of a roguelike.” You must guide your little Indiana Jones downwards through procedurally generated dungeons, struggling both to survive and to escape with as much treasure as you can grab.

I was born too late to participate in the golden age of Nethack, and my interest in the roguelike genre is still largely theoretical. They fascinate me as intricate game systems, even if I have little experience actually playing them. However, by wrapping a roguelike in the familiarity of a 2D platformer, I think Spelunky reduces the barrier of entry for newcomers like me. Most importantly, it does so without compromising the elements that define the genre. Deaths come quickly and mercilessly, resource management is key, and loitering is discouraged by means of a ghostly time limit.

If you’re one of the many bloggers who fell in love with Shiren the Wanderer, I strongly urge you to give Spelunky a shot.

Treelings [Flash]

Finally, friend and fellow Canadian blogger Nels Anderson put together a short game at the Vancouver chapter of Global Game Jam. It’s incredibly polished for a game that was made entirely within 48 hours, check out how the main character moves around while idle and how the vine blossoms as you ascend. Kudos to Nels and his team!

There you have it: four innovative indie games that can be played in the span of an afternoon. Happy gaming!

Over the last few days I was given the opportunity to fly out West for an internship interview with a large Redmond-based software company. The interview was a really great experience and probably deserves its own post down the road, but today I have something far nerdier to talk about.

While I was in the Seattle area and looking for touristy things to do, Mister Raroo suggested that I check out Pink Godzilla, an independent gaming store famous for its selection of rare imports and retro titles. I’m not a collector and most of the neat stuff was out of my price range, but I had a great time looking around and talking to the friendly and knowledgeable staff. I took loads of pictures, but here are some of the highlights from my visit:

This is the “retro wall” covered in used NES/Famicom, SNES/Super Famicom, and Playstation titles (click through links for close-ups). Old games have awesome box art.

Apparently there was a licensed Platoon game for the NES? It looks pretty terrible and only vaguely related to the film.

A mint Japanese copy of Ikaruga for the Dreamcast, located in their rare games cabinet.

One of the most expensive rare games, an unopened copy of Panzer Dragoon Saga for the Sega Saturn.

This appears to an entry in the extremely weird Japanese games series Cho Aniki.

There were a bunch of awesome game soundtracks, including this pair from the Katamari Damacy series.

You can check out the rest of the series over on Flickr. Pink Godzilla is a fascinating store, if you’re ever in the Seattle area I highly recommend going out of your way for a visit.

Although I’m not taking part in this year’s Global Game Jam, I coincidentally decided to also put together a small game over the last two days. It was a feat only made possibly by the friendliness of the LÖVE 2D engine, a free weekend and several pots of tea.

Inventory Tetris a silly idea I’ve had bouncing around in my head for a while now, a literal interpretation of a phrase often heard in reviews and forums. I chose to parody Resident Evil 4 specifically (the merchant makes me laugh), but I thumb my nose equally at Diablo, Deus Ex and every other game that turns inventory management into a block puzzle. If the main character isn’t even seen carrying a briefcase, your commitment to spatial realism is moot.

You can run the game yourself in two ways:

1. Download the Windows-only executable.
2. Run InventoryTetris.exe to play.

or…

1. Download and install LÖVE (it’s multi-platform and very small).
2. Download the source files.
3. Double click InventoryTetris.love to play.

You can access the source code by unzipping InventoryTetris.love, and everything is GPL licensed so you’re free to distribute and modify the game as you please. I hope you enjoy my silly little game, please leave your questions, comments and bug reports (I’m aware of one or two) below.

Update: I’ve uploaded version 1.1, which fixes the “left side” bug and corrects a minor audio issue.

Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics continues to be a fascinating read. This is, in large part, because so much of his analysis of comics can be directly applied to video games, a new medium currently sorely lacking in critical vocabulary. McCloud has a knack for asking the right questions, and the further I read the faster the little wheels in my head begin to spin. The first chapter of the book asked the question “what is comics?”, which led me to question the definition of video games.

The second of McCloud’s concepts that I’d like to explore is his idea of the six elements of art (illustrated above). He believes that “any artist creating any work in any medium will always follow these six steps whether they realize it or not”, and that their order is innate. “All aspects of comics have the potential for self-expression” argues McCloud, “but the more a creator learns to command every aspect of their art and to understand their relationship to it” the more likely they are to focus on innermost aspects. Indeed, he makes the case that an artist’s skill is fundamentally related to the depth of their understanding in relation to these layers.

As they are innate to art itself, these six layers can also be applied to video games. I’d like to propose the following framework for how this might be done, using McCloud’s definitions as guidelines:

6. Surface: “Production values, finishing… the aspects most apparent on the first superficial exposure to the work”

In video games, this layer is best exemplified by cutting-edge graphics, sophisticated visual effects, high fidelity audio and overall technical polish (lack of bugs). These elements are very impressive, and can contribute greatly to the sense of immersion and suspension of disbelief. However, the surface is shallow and ultimately says little about the quality of the game.

5. Craft: “Constructing the work, applying skills, practical knowledge, invention and problem-solving”

The fifth layer (craft) is the realization of the concepts of the fourth layer (structure), and as such describes the concrete elements that make up a game. The aspects defined exclusively in this layer include:

• Level design
• Balance
• Difficulty
• Camera control
• Control layout
• Game feel

The key distinction in the fuzzy line between structure and craft is that the latter describes execution. For instance, I’m sure you’ve all played a game with a terrific concept that was ultimately made worse by sloppy controls, steep difficulty curves and poor level design. In other words, craft is to structure as engineering is to science.

4. Structure: “Putting it all together… what to include, what to leave out… how to arrange, how to compose the work”

The fourth layer describes the game in a conceptual manner, at the level of a detailed design document. It builds upon the skeleton defined by the first three layers, fleshing out abstract ideas into detailed systems.

What are the rules of this game? What is the role of the player, and how will they interact with the system? If there is a story, what is it about and how will it be told? Who are the characters? What will the art and music direction be? The structure of a game is defined by answering questions such as these.

3. Idiom: “The ‘school’ of art, the vocabulary of styles or gestures or subject matter, the genre that the work belongs to… maybe a genre of its own.”

While the value of legacy genre descriptors is highly questionable, in a general sense most games are deeply rooted in the paradigms established by their predecessors. For instance, modern first person shooters are the evolution of the vocabulary and perspective established by Wolfenstein 3D and Doom in the early 90′s. Mario Kart, Gran Turismo and Wipeout are very different games, but they share the common goals and language of the racing genre.

Of course, games should never be restricted by genre. Indeed, games that defy classification (Katamari Damacy and Indigo Prophecy are examples) deserve our attention, as establishing a new idiom is a feat of significant creative ability even if the game lacks craft or surface polish.

2. Form: “The form it will take… will it be a book? A chalk drawing? A chair? A song? A sculpture? A comic book?”

In a general sense, the form is the medium: video games. However, video games take many different forms: PC games, console games, handheld games, mobile games, etc. Each form has a unique identity, with idiosyncrasies, strengths and limitations, and usually addresses a particular audience.

1. Idea/Purpose: “The impulses, the ideas, the emotions, the philosophies, the purposes of the work… the work’s ‘content’.”

Put another way: what does this work mean? What is its thesis? What insights about life, the universe and everything does it communicate to the player?

Unfortunately, at this point in our medium’s history the answer is that most games mean very little. RPGs in particular classically have the veneer of “good vs. evil” or “value of friendship” morality lessons, but when the game mechanics revolve around combat and violence it’s clear that the commitment to these ideals is shallow. In reality, the thesis of Dragon Quest is closer to “fighting monster after monster until you’re strong enough to kill stronger monsters”. I love a good dungeon crawl, but consuming media with such shallow purpose is insubstantial and unfulfilling in the long run.

However, if we love video games, it’s because every once in a while a game crosses our path that speaks to us on a deeper level. A gem like Braid comes along and compels us, sending us in search of true meaning (fruitfully or otherwise). Games like System Shock, Planescape: Torment and Silent Hill 2 come along that give us meaningful experiences and reveal the exciting potential of this nascent medium.

In the future, I’d like to take the time to refine this framework and explore its implications for critique and design. For now though, I’d very much appreciate feedback and criticism both on my interpretation of McCloud’s six elements, as well as the basic premise that they represent.

Over the holidays, I picked up a copy of Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. It’s a comic about comics as a medium, and the concepts and vocabulary (abstraction, closure, transitions, etc.) that define it. McCloud avoids using specific artists, styles, genres or themes as a template, focusing instead on a critical universal examination of the artform. As someone who recently rediscovered comics, it’s been a truly fascinating read. The book also interests me because I can relate many of his ideas to another nascent medium that is of particular interest to me: video games.

In the first chapter of Understanding Comics, McCloud asks “what is comics¹?” He begins with Will Eisner’s definition “sequential art”, which he considers too broad (for instance, animations are sequential art) and gradually refines to: “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.”

This, of course, made me wonder: “what are video games?” What qualities define video games as a medium, and could be used to distinguish non-video games. We could begin by examining video games as a compound word, where a game is generally defined as:

Activity engaged in for diversion or amusement
- Merriam Webster Dictionary

Note that this definition already implies a purpose, entertainment. This quality is true of the large majority of games, but does it truly define the medium? We’ve seem games such as The Passage and Execution whose function is less amusement and closer to the purpose defined by McCloud for comics: “intended to convey information and/or produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.” “Video game” therefore works poorly as a compound word.

This raises many questions: is “game” then a legacy term? Have video games outgrown “games” in the same way comics have outgrown “comedy” (via Latin, from the Greek komikos)? Would the term “interactive art” be more appropriate? Note that “art”, however, implies a value judgement and therefore cannot define the medium. While these are interesting considerations, they don’t answer the question of “what are video games?”

Next, we can examine what definitions already exist for video games. Merriam Webster defines a “video game” as:

An electronic game played by means of images on a video screen and often emphasizing fast action.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who let out a frustrated groan at the “emphasizing fast action” bit. However, there is some value that can be gleaned from this definition. I think defining video games as being “played by means of images on a video screen” is valid, and helps to distinguish video games from card games, board games and sports.

The Cambridge Dictionary of American English defines them as:

A game in which the player controls moving pictures on a television screen by pressing buttons or moving a short handle.

While pragmatic and largely accurate, this strikes me as a particularly narrow definition. For instance, specifying a “television screen” excludes both PC and handheld games. Must the player input controls by a button or “short handle”²? What about Wii Fit, which is played entirely with the balance board?

Finally, the Random House Unabridged Dictionary includes the following definition:

Any of various games played using a microcomputer with a keyboard and often joysticks to manipulate changes or respond to the action or questions on the screen.

Ignoring the bit about keyboards and joysticks, this definition introduces an intriguing point about microcomputers. Video games are software, but do they have to be? It’s certainly possible to display images on a video screen without a processor.

However, what distinguishes video games from film is not a “short handle” or “fast action” but interactivity. The player “responds to the action” and the game changes what is displayed on screen accordingly. The quality of interactivity necessitates a computer processor, therefore video games must be software³.

While it lacks the succinctness of McCloud’s comics definition, I would propose the following definition for “video games”:

Software which displays images on a video screen, interacts with a player or players and is intended to provide challenge and/or produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.

Note what this definition excludes: a board game isn’t played on a video screen, a screen saver isn’t interactive and an Excel spreadsheet isn’t intended to produce an aesthetic response. Wii Fit, The Passage and Final Fantasy meet the criteria, and it’s likely that future games will as well⁴.

However, you don’t have to take my word for it! I invite you to please challenge my definition and come up with your own. How would you define video games?

¹ This isn’t a typo, McCloud defines the entire medium as “comics” singular.
² …or a long handle for that matter!
³ Occasionally only hardware, I suppose.
⁴ Until video screens become obsolete?

Fleet Foxes – s/t

A delightful, dreamy folk album that evokes the softer side of Jethro Tull. It’s lovingly and masterfully crafted from beginning to end. “White Winter Hymnal” is the perfect song for a chilly December afternoon, and “Ragged Wood” feels like a long walk through a familiar forest.

Girl Talk – Feed The Animals

I’ll admit, this album would likely have been higher on the list if I didn’t consider it an immense guilty pleasure. Thumbing his nose at the RIAA and other creativity destroying goons, Girl Talk gleefully samples across eras and genres to create his distinctive sound. The tracks are light and fluffy like the pop music they sample, transitioning from earworm to earworm at a furious pace. Like no other artist, Girl Talk coaxes harmony out of cacophony.

Gnarls Barkley – The Odd Couple

This album came as a complete surprise to me, as their breakthrough effort and its massive hit “Crazy” left me cold. I picked up The Odd Couple on a whim and discovered an urgent, poignant pop/soul/hip hop album that was uniformly excellent all the way through. I can’t imagine why singles like “Who’s Gonna Save My Soul” and “Run (I’m a Natural Disaster)” didn’t chart well.

Santogold – s/t

I wrote about Santogold‘s terrific debut album back in May, and I’m still listening to it regularly today. It’s a lovely eclectic record, M.I.A.-like on “Creator” while “Lights Out” is upbeat alternative. Amazingly, the disparate tracks come together to produce a refreshing coherent whole.

Shugo Tokumaru – EXIT

In October I described Shugo Tokumaru as falling “somewhere between Sufjan Stevens and the Katamari Damacy soundtrack.” EXIT is a quirky potent mix of pop, folk, and elements that I can only assume are uniquely Japanese. It’s dreamy and clever and, frankly, I’m nuts about it.

Honourable Mentions

• Beck – Modern Guilt: It didn’t reach very far artistically, but it’s the return of the catchy concise Beck we didn’t see on 2005′s The Information.
• Jenny Lewis – Acid Tongue: More honky tonk indie rock? Yes please.
• TV on the Radio – Dear Science: It featured some very solid singles, but didn’t grab me as a whole.

Happy new year, I’ll see you all in 2009!

UPDATE: I’m sheepish about admitting this, but the list previously included Cross by Justice, an album I was quickly told was released in 2007. It was new to me! Thanks to Denis for the correction.

This last week, I was invited to take part in an incredibly ambitious podcast by Michael Abbott of The Brainy Gamer. As part of his gamers confab series (in which I was kindly invited to participate back in September), he has invited nineteen fellow bloggers to talk about their personal favourite games of 2008. Amazingly, the twenty of us picked twenty different titles, showing just how diverse this year in gaming has been.

The three volumes run for about an hour each, which may seem a bit daunting if you’re not a regular podcast listener. However, the discussion is insightful, entertaining, delightful and well worth your time. You can find my conversation with Chris Dahlen and Michael “Sparky” Clarkson in the second half of Volume 2.

• Download Volume 1, Volume 2 and Volume 3 [MP3]
• Subscribe via iTunes
• Subscribe to the feed

I also wrote up my top 10 games of 2008 for Snackbar, as part of their staff picks series. Once again there was very little selection consensus, a stark contrast to 2007′s focus on titles such as Bioshock and Portal. A pessimist (*cough*) might say that this is a symptom of the large number of “great but flawed” titles released this year. I choose to believe that this is the natural progression of video games maturing as a medium. The audience for games is no longer homogeneous, and neither are our tastes.

Brick (House) – Ben Folds vs. The Commodores [MP3]

Sometimes I have silly ideas about mixed brick metaphors.

This just goes to show that my poor audio editing skills are second only to my poor photoshop skills. Thanks to Ben for the audio isolating tips.

My second review over at Snackbar Games is now up, wherein I compare Sam & Max: Season One for the Wii to a sitcom. I doubt I’m the first to describe it as such (the name and format certainly lend themselves to the comparison), but I think I’ve made a convincing case as to why it is apt.

Snackbar Games – Sam & Max: Season One (Wii) Review

On an unrelated note, I know a number of us are compiling “best games of 2008″ lists this month (some happily, others not so much), but a year is a long and memory is short. I can hardly remember what February was like, let alone what games were released that month.

With this in mind, I took a moment to scrape the Giant Bomb release calendar and compile a master list of games released in 2008. I hope its handy in jogging your memory about some of the great titles released last winter (hint: No More Heroes).

December is also a great time to be a music fan. All the music journalists are coming out with their top 10 album lists and you get to discover all the cool stuff you missed that year. This is how I discovered Janelle Monáe‘s debut EP Metropolis: The Chase. It caught my eye for exploring science fiction themes with a quirky Blade Runner inspired android love story. Her sound is a wonderful experimental blend of R&B, funk and spoken word, reminding me quite a bit of Outkast (she was featured on two songs off Idlewild.) Altogether a terrific start, I look forward to her first full length album.

I first heard of Max Tundra‘s latest album Parallax Error Beheads You from Chris Dahlen, who has already called it his favourite of 2008. I’ve been on a bit of a lo-fi kick these past few months, so it really hit the spot for me. Composed entirely on a Commodore Amiga 500, I would categorize it as progressive pop (you can’t get away with extended synthesizer solos without someone throwing in the “prog” word.) It may not suit everyone’s tastes, but I love it.

Nav may currently be on blogging hiatus (working on his PhD, which I’m told involves writing long essays and purchasing a tweed jacket), but that hasn’t stopped him from sharing interesting music on Google Reader. The latest is a band called The Happy Hollows, whose recent EP Imaginary is “free” if you’re willing to spam five friends about it. However, the album is so good that it’s almost worth losing respect in the eyes of your peers for. Fitting somewhere between the Fiery Furnaces and the White Stripes, they tell rambling stories and like to mix up the tempo. The Happy Hollows are another new band to watch.

7/10 – The Doyouinverts [download]

Finally, a comedy song about the romantic woes of a video game reviewer that Kieron Gillen described as “my life, basically.” This song is so funny that the very though of some of you not clicking through to listen to it compelled me to transcribe it:

[Show/Hide Lyrics]

That’s it for December, happy listening!