Author: Gianfranco Berardi

Categories
Game Design

Game Design Directions

Cliffski juxtaposes two theories about the direction new games should be developed.

On the one hand, technology is getting more complex. Everyone uses computers, everyone watches involving television shows, everyone has a cell phone that has more computing power than the first computers did. Why shouldn’t games also become more complex to keep up?

On the other hand, information overload is very real. People don’t understand that “their Microsoft” isn’t broken. There are too many channels to surf. Too many websites to look at. Life has become overwhelming, and games should become a safe haven. Make them simple, and people will enjoy them more. It isn’t fun if it feels like work just trying to get the game to start.

Cliffski leaves it at that, but I guess that’s where we’re expected to come in and talk about it. Diabolical!

Steven Johnson, author of “Everything Bad is Good For You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter” would argue that the Sleeper Curve is at work. Popular entertainment is requiring more and more brains to “get it”. He compares classic shows such as Dragnet with 21 Jump Street, and he demonstrates how today’s shows, even “reality” shows, are just more complex. Dragnet was easy to watch. One event led to another. Everything was sequential. People would say the obvious as an aid to the audience. While watching it today might bring back some sense of nostalgia for some, you’ll quite frankly get frustrated at the simplicity of it. They hit you over the head with plot points and dialogue.

Today, even the “dumbed down” shows have more complexity than the brightest shows of the past. You just need to think more to understand television today.

Similarly, I think, with video games. A child today is able to work with a complex piece of equipment such as an XBox controller as if it was an extension of his/her body. Children look at older games with disgust. They make fun of Pong and Super Mario Bros. My cousin laughs at me for loving Pac-man instead of some new racing game that’s all the rage.

But what about people who don’t play video games? There is a learning curve involved, and for some games, that curve is incredibly steep. Casual games are meant to be simple to play, and it would be easy to say, “Complex games for those who can handle it, and casual for the rest”. But are these people relegated to playing casual games exclusively?

I don’t know how to play poker, but I don’t want to play Go Fish or solitaire all my life either. Won’t military history buffs want to play accurate war games? Games like Uncommon Valor, as great as they might be, might not be appropriate because they are just so darn complex! I bought this game thinking that it would be like Koei’s PTO II, which I had bought for the SNES. It turned out that it was incredibly detailed, and focused on a very specific part of the Pacific Theater of Operations. I tried to play a few turns, but it was hard to tell if I was doing anything important. Oh, to have hours a day to play games again…

So while you can focus on making a game complex to keep up with the Sleeper Curve or making it simple to provide relaxation for the mind, I’d have to argue that some people might not appreciate the idea that you need to “dumb down” games for them. Sure, there are some people who will say, “I don’t want to think!” but other people WANT to be challenged. They don’t want to passively have fun. They want to be involved in the fun!

So I think I won’t be as quick to complain if someone takes an old game and remakes it with “more weapons ” and “better AI” anymore. It seems to be a natural step to take something and add complexity to it. Those kinds of games might not be all succesful (Tetrisphere comes to mind), but I don’t believe there is any law that dooms them all to fail.

But adding complexity doesn’t necessarily mean making it impossible to play. People figured out how to drive cars. Automatics were added to make it easier, but you don’t see labels like “casual driver” being thrown at those who use them. I think you can add complexity and the requisite brain power to play a game while simultaneously providing the player with the means to easily “get it”. You can also do so without upsetting the veteran game player who doesn’t need any hand holding. It’s a balance, and it might be tough to achieve, but hey, that’s what helps a great game appeal to such a wide audience, right?

Categories
Politics/Government

Illinois Video Game Ban Ruled Unconstitutional

Governor Blagojevich plans to appeal a ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Kennelly that deemed the Illinois restrictions on sales were unconstitutional.

“This battle is not over,” Blagojevich said in a statement. “Parents should be able to expect that their kids will not have access to excessively violent and sexually explicit video games without their permission.”

He also added excessively violent movie tickets, DVDs, books, magazines, and cable television would be added to the list.

No, wait. That would be logically consistent. I made that part up.

Anyway, my favorite part from the article:

“In this country, the state lacks the authority to ban protected speech on the ground that it affects the listener’s or observer’s thoughts and attitudes,” Kennelly wrote.

Of course, what impact will it have on banning indecent material, such as porn? Wasn’t the point of doing so to prevent children from “being led astray”? You know, by affecting their thoughts and attitudes?

I didn’t read the official ruling, but I would think that that statement alone might do more than expected. Was it careless? I’m not a lawyer, but I think it was.

At the same time, while I am not a parent, I am not sure that I would want my government dictating to me what my children should and shouldn’t be able to see, read, or hear. No porn? No violent content? Yeah, I’ll just ban it in my own home, thank you very much.

Of course, banning the sales of such games to minors wasn’t really going to have a huge effect. Most of the time the parents buy the games for them anyway, and according to some anecdotal reports, they buy them even if the clerk at GameStop asks, “Are you sure it’s appropriate?” So how does the law help parents be better parents?

It doesn’t.

So why am I upset about such a law? If it wouldn’t have a big effect anyway, why oppose it?

Because if this law is allowed, then what’s to prevent someone from going further the next time? Will the actual development of violent games be banned next because the previous was found to not be good enough? Will the government actually be able to accurately rate games as appropriate or not, or will it just use vague language to cause a lot of confusion, resulting in the banning of games like Super Smash Bros Melee along with Mortal Kombat and GTA?

The government has enough problems and issues to deal with. Parenting is a tough job, and the government is not going to be able to do it.

Categories
Game Design

Somewhat Interesting Game Idea: A Buggy Game

On the way home last night, I thought, “What if you can make a game that looks and feels buggy, but was purposely made to seem that way? A game that is fun because it seems buggy, but in reality it isn’t?”

It sounds weird. Or at least I think it sounds weird. I don’t know of anyone purposely making a game seem buggy, but if you do I would love to know about it. Software, and video games are no exception, is generally hard to keep bug-free. There is the idea that every program has a bug in it. It’s hard to completely and comprehensively debug a program. But that’s besides the point.

I’m talking about making a game where the “glitches” and “hiccups” are purposely created. You are walking down an alley, and a ninja comes out of nowhere. Except he seems to flicker and splits into two images of the same character. You know, like the Mouser bug in Super Mario Bros 2 (which is apparently not documented on the Interweb?). It was still one guy, and you only had to hit one guy to defeat him, but it had a bug where it move back and forth fairly quickly. Well what if you made the bug funny? Like, the ninja’s split image made faces at you, or looked like a clown?

Or how about that same ninja being able to run through walls? Or if you could run through walls? You know, when you’re temporarily invulnerable because you just got hit. What if it lets you walk through walls? Or what if you jumped at a wall and got stuck on the side of it, allowing you to climb up? I’ve survived pits in the original Super Mario Bros. or Bionic Commando because of bugs that allowed me to stand next to a wall without falling. Wouldn’t it be interesting if they were purposefully placed into a game?

It would make the gameplay interesting because part of the fun is figuring out what weird thing you could do next. What inconsistency would you be able to leverage to progress through the game? Would you be able to use water to put out a fire but find that the water itself burns because, you know, “fire burns everything”? Could you use that? What if you could punch a firepit? Or swim both in the water and in the air? What if you could kill your ally, but your ally comes back for a cut-scene? Original War had a bug similar to this one. Generally people in your army talked, and an image of the person speaking would appear. Once in a great while, the image and/or the voice would not match the person who should be speaking. So what if your ally returned, bloodied and bitter, but due to obligations in the game, HAD to come back to make a speech?

So maybe it isn’t necessarily a “buggy” feel so much as a “this-is-not-the-universe-you-think-it-should-be” kind of game. The point would be that reasonable expectations are thrown out in favor of surprising the player with odd behavior and unexpected reactions. It might be tough to develop such a game. After all, keeping track of real bugs, the difference between actual results and expectated results, would be a chore. But it would also be different enough that it might confuse players more than anything. Who would find it fun? I know I like to explore the boundaries of a game. I once jumped over the flagpole in Super Mario Bros. I’ve fallen off the edge of the screen in Super Mario World while spinning. Side note: are Nintendo games that much more buggy, or is it just me? B-)

NOTE: If you are somehow reading this post without the comments, I would strongly suggest you read them, too. Some good discussion is coming out of this post, and you’ll miss it!

Categories
Marketing/Business

Shareware Development Takes Patience

Tom Warfield had a number of articles written years ago that I’ve never read, and he’s been updating his blog by reposting them. The latest such article is How Long Does Great Shareware Take?, which he originally published in 2003.

Now, it is generally understood that you can’t go into indie game development and expect to become rich overnight. Steve Pavlina’s article on the difference between shareware amateurs and shareware professionals notes how important it is to realize that version 1.0 isn’t the latest version of your product. You release, fix, rerelease, update, rerelease, etc. Warfield mentions that most shareware products don’t do well initially, and his Pretty Good Solitaire actually took months to sell one copy and years before it was sufficient to live off of the sales.

Last month I found a thread on the old Dexterity forums about shareware games, and there was a discussion between Pavlina and Warfield likening their business models to rotating a flywheel. It’s harder to turn at first, and it might seem like you are putting a lot more effort into it than getting rewards out of it, but eventually it gets easier and easier to turn faster and faster.

But patience is required. If you aren’t satisfied with the immediate results and try to change them, you’ll constantly change and never let anything last long enough to actually work. If I kept restarting my own game development just because it took longer than a month, I would probably have four partially finished projects instead of one, er, much-more-completed project. And I’m just starting out! I’m just now getting feedback about the game from people, some of whom haven’t had a chance to actually see it in action.

If Joel Spolsky says that great software takes 10 years, and Warfield and Pavlina have said similar things for shareware games, then it would make sense to plan for the long haul for indie game development, especially when you are flying solo and aren’t able to lean on 10 employees of varying skills and talents.

Categories
General

My Hair Was So Stupid Back Then…

I am working on my business plan, and part of it entails figuring out which payment processors I would like to use. I know that the question crops up on the Indie Gamer forums a lot, and so I searched through the archives.

You know how people look back at high school photos and laugh at everyone’s hair? “Man, I can’t believe we thought we looked cool back then.” That sort of thing?

Well, going back over your year-old posts on old forums is kind of like that. Or at least it is for me.

Check out this thread about creating a sacrificial title. David York asked if it made sense to create a simple, easy to make game to gain the experience of making a game and selling one. Since hindsight is 20/20, why not make use of it before you make your serious game?

Now check out my response. It was posted July of last year, and I have definitely learned a lot since then.

I agree, though. Start small and work your way up. Gain experience, and then you can start to tackle the bigger projects.

Wow. Sage advice. Where the heck did I get off giving it back then, though? I am certainly no guru today, and a year ago I didn’t even really have any experience to speak of. Maybe it seems like obvious advice, but there are other examples where I was talking about theory as if it was practice.

I am sure Indie Gamer and GameDev.net and the Association of Shareware Professionals Members newsgroup abound with similar advice by yours truly.

At one point I realized that I really shouldn’t talk like I knew what I was saying when I didn’t really know about the topic, but I soon discovered that prefacing everything I said with “Keep in mind that I’m not speaking from experience, but …” wasn’t any better. And at one point I started to wonder if the “Man, these forums are starting to get a high noise-to-information ratio” wasn’t directed at me. So I stopped posting as much as I did.

Which was good because I didn’t spend so much time on the forums and was able to direct my energies to more productive matters. I can’t get paid for being one of the top five posters on the board, and I definitely don’t have as much advice on the business-end of things as other people might to justify that many posts.

It was like finding an old email I had sent to root at the email server used by my college in my freshman year. I had asked how to setup a website on the server, and he wrote back explaining how to create the public_html directory and changing the permissions to allow everyone to view it. At the time I had no Unix or Gnu/Linux experience, and so I actually wrote back, “Thanks, but I think it needs a better user interface.” Reading that email four years later, after I’ve been using Gnu/Linux as my main OS and have a much better understanding of permissions and Unix in general, made me laugh.

Man, was my smiley funny-looking a year ago…

Categories
Personal Development

Action vs Waiting, Practice vs Talent

Action wrote Debugging Habits: “Wait and See” vs. “Act and Learn” in which he discusses the results he gets by taking action versus waiting around for things to happen or fall into place.

On a similar topic, David Seah wrote Building a Niche of One, in which he discusses leveling up abilities by orders of magnitude. He cites an article that claims talent isn’t the only thing. Practice is just as important.

Just like successful songwriters need to write hundreds of songs before they get their “overnight” hit, chess players need to play thousands of hours worth of games to become good at chess. Seah was nice enough to provide a graudated scale. 10,000 hours over the course of 10 years might make you a master, and it sounds daunting. Well, yeah. It is. That’s a lot of dedicated hours. But 1,000 hours is doable within a year if you work full time, and you can be an experienced expert. Already have something taking up your full time? 100 hours can be done on the side, and you can still be somewhat of an expert. 10 hours could be a dedicated weekend or spread over a few of them, and you’ll definitely learn enough to be dangerous. Even dedicating an hour to a task will give you practice with the basics.

I’ve never liked the idea that some people are just never going to have certain talents. It sounded too much like your lot in life is set before you, and you never had a chance to make a difference one way or another. “Some people just aren’t meant to be programmers” or “Some people just aren’t musically inclined”. I personally think that if they aren’t going to be able to do it, it is because they’ve decided that they won’t do it. It wasn’t due to any inability except to take action, any action. I’m sure talent is important, but I also believe that talent isn’t always inate. Left-handed people might be more creative initially, but I’m sure if I practice being creative enough, I’ll also get a +4 creativity roll. Or at least be much better than I am. No law says I must stagnate.

I can play chess, but I don’t have nearly as much experience as a friend of mine does, and he destroys me almost every time we play. Almost, because I’m slowly getting better. One game I almost won, and one time I managed to take his queen before he realized his mistake. B-) I also play as Terran in Starcraft, and while I know “how” to play, I am almost always struggling to survive by the end of a game. Almost, because there were a few games where I made a decisive strike that would have turned the tide of battle permanently in my favor if I had only paid attention to producing more units (Larry, I will defeat your Protoss!). When I first played Quake 3 Arena, I was the n00b that would stand on a platform and look around while rockets and machinegun fire found me like mosquitos on a hot summer day. Eventually I became the regular leader on the boards within my group of friends. Well, until they remembered how to play again (there was a long absence from the game for a lot of us). Even then, I was holding my own. I gained experience and was able to play more competitively. I became better, even though I stunk something fierce when I began.

Whether it is programming, meeting women, writing novels, juggling, brainstorming, or playing games, taking action and getting the experience of the attempt, whether you accomplish your goal or not, will always improve what you know. How can I possibly learn the best way to design a C++ class in my game project if I don’t get familiar with the problem domain? How will I learn how to write the next great American novel if I don’t try to write anything before taking it on?

I’ll make mistakes. I’ll make HUGE mistakes. I’ll probably look silly. But I’ll only have myself to blame if I don’t learn from it. I’ll take a variation of “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me” as “I stumble once, and that’s expected. I stumble again, and I should have marked the stupid rock on a map!!”

Perfect practice makes perfect. No one is perfect. You’re expected to make mistakes. Learn from them. Then do better. Then do better again. Take action, practice and learn.

Categories
Marketing/Business

I Hate Being Sick

I somehow came down with something yesterday. I woke up, my throat was sore, I got to work, spent the entire day feeling slightly warm, then got really warm and felt terrible on the train ride home.

I ate some dinner, drank some water, and went to bed. So much for Development Night.

Of course, I was so sick that I couldn’t just fall asleep. I needed to sleep, but I guess my breathing was weird. My heart was beating pretty fast for being stationary. Eventually I did fall asleep, but now I’m wide awake, it’s 10:45PM, and while I’m feeling a bit better, I feel like crap for not being able to sleep AGAIN.

Oddly enough, while I was waiting to go to sleep, shivering in bed because I was so warm and my room is above a garage, I kept having delusions about how my game business was going to work. I imagined what it would be like to have a FAQ that talks about my company. I imagined that GBGames was a lousy name and that I was working on a new one. I imagined talking about how much more trust my business model put in the customer compared to say Sony or Valve: “No DRM here!” I imagined talking to other developers, and I was actually a role model for a number of them. I was a serious competitor to a lot of businesses as well.

I had a number of other images, and I am upset because I would have loved to write all of them down, but every time I became conscious of them, I would immediately forget. It was like I was dreaming, realized it, woke up because I had to breathe (stupid stuffy nose), and forget the important points.

I hate being sick, but I really got excited thinking about the near future. I smiled despite the crappy way I felt. I actually dreamed about the success I was going to have.

Now to make an action plan to make it into a reality.

I’m writing this still feeling a bit sick, so hopefully it isn’t too rambly. I’m just awake enough that I can’t lie in bed anymore, sick enough that I can’t do too much, and my back still hurts enough that I can’t sit up and read a book.

Categories
Game Design

Game Design Resources

Even while I continue to work on Oracle’s Eye, I am looking forward to working on my next game project. Since OE took so much longer to develop than I expected, I can imagine that something similar will happen with my next project. I’ve also mentioned that I want to create a game for the next Independent Games Festival. I want to make sure that I dedicate enough time to that project, so I might as well get a jump on designing it instead of postponing it.

I’ve set a deadline by the end of December to get a basic idea of what kind of game I want to make. Of course, I’d like to be able to come up with more than just “it’s got spaceships and explosions and stuff!” I’ve realized that game design is a complete discipline in and of itself. You can’t design games just because you’ve played a lot of them when you were younger, just like you can’t be a high school educator simply because you went to high school and “know all about it”. While hacking it out is great for getting things accomplished quickly, it is also hard to know what it is you will end up with by the end. Also, I’d rather avoid potential game design pitfalls if I can help it. While reinventing the wheel is good for learning how it works, I wouldn’t mind reading about how other people might have messed it up before getting it right. I’ll mess up enough as it is. I’m all for taking risks instead of stagnating with what is safe, but I don’t have to ignore potentially helpful experiences that other people have been thoughtful enough to document for me. B-)

And so I decided to look up game design. I went to GameDev.net first and checked out the Game Design articles since I remember going there years ago. HOLY. COW. I don’t remember having access to that many articles on the subject! Maybe I just appreciate how important the topic is these days. Maybe there really has been that many new articles produced in the past couple of years. There are definitely a number of new game design books.

And I definitely have a lot more reading to do.

Categories
Game Development Politics/Government

Future Copyright Developments

Ernest Adam’s The End Of Copyright on Gamasutra focuses on a very touchy subject. I don’t know if I agree that copyright will end completely, but I do like that Adam’s actually did what most people seem to be afraid to do: he looked at different possible business models. He also appreciates that copyright is not the inalienable right that some people make it out to be.

Obviously the traditional business model of selling a single copy to each player isn’t the only one that exists. MMO games, even before Everquest, show that subscriptions work just as well. Some people will pay for better features, improved items, or just faster servers. Some people would pay for the privilege of having a better quality experience. Imagine if a Mickey Mouse movie came out that wasn’t by Disney but was 100 times better than anything Disney ever produced? Sure, if there wasn’t any copyright, anyone could then redistribute it, but I’m sure you could make some decent money by charging for the privilege of seeing it when it is only released in a select few theaters that you control, right?

I don’t think copyright should go away, but even if it did, I don’t think it would be the end of innovation and science. People will still want to create. They will still want to design. They will still work. I really don’t see everyone falling on their knees and crying out “What do we do now without the protection of copyright?!?” Oh, I don’t know, you could just make money by being the sole provider of an original work?

Of course, without copyright you won’t even have open source software to blame for your inability to profit from your work. If people didn’t want to give away the source code, they could keep it a secret. People do so now, anyway, but without copyright there would be no legal recourse to get access to the source. Open source and proprietary software both benefit from copyright law, contrary to what some would report as fact.

Anyway, it is good that a big name is actually taking a look at the industry and saying, “Hey, you don’t HAVE to do things the way everyone else is!” The idea that the most popular business model isn’t necessary is still a “crazy” one to a lot of people.

Categories
General

Back from Thanksgiving

Now that I’m back, I find that I have a lot of reading to do! Lots of blog updates, lots of email, lots of regular mail, lots of magazine articles, and lots of game playing. Ok, so the last one isn’t strictly reading, but still, it must be done!

Oh, and Christmas shopping.