I don’t have anything too serious to write about today, except that a curious cat and prototyping tools such as tiny wooden pieces do not make for a very productive development session.
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Tic-Tac-Toe, or Naughts and Crosses if you are wrong, is a children’s game. It’s a solved game, which means there is always a best move someone can make, and the only reason why it appeals to children today is because they haven’t figured out the solution yet.
In any case, it’s a simple game. Let’s analyze the heck out of it as a game design exercise.
First, let’s look at the rules of Tic-tac-toe.
Setup:
We need a 3×3 grid and two players.
One player places X pieces, and the other player places O pieces.
Choose a player to go first.
Game play:
On a your turn, you place the piece you represent in an open square in the 3×3 grid.
That’s…pretty much it. All you can do is place your piece in the grid. Then it is the other player’s turn.
Resolution:
If, after placing a piece, you have three of your pieces in a row, column, or diagonal, you win the game.
If there are no more open squares in the grid, and no one has won, then the game is a draw.
Analysis:
It doesn’t seem very complicated once you write it out, does it? We knew it was a simple game, but wow, that’s pretty simple.
What’s interesting is what’s not explicitly mentioned in the rules but ends up being a part of everyone’s mental model of the game.
Here’s an example game in progress:
If it is X’s turn, where should the next piece be placed? At the top center square in the grid. Why?
To block O from winning. Because O just needs to place one more piece to get three Os in a row and win, and X doesn’t want to lose, X has one move that prevents O from winning here. Blocking isn’t explicitly mentioned in the game rules, and yet it becomes a key aspect of any serious Tic-tac-toe player’s strategy.
How about the above situation? O has just placed the piece at the bottom right. What’s the next move for X?
The answer: it doesn’t matter. O has forked and is now potentially able to win on both the right column and on the bottom row. If X places a block in either the bottom center or the middle right spot, then O simply places a piece in the other spot and wins the game. Forks are also absent from the rules, but expert players always look for an opportunity to create one.
Blocking and forking are examples of dynamics that are the emergent properties of the game’s mechanics. A minor change in the rules can have an impact on the game play.
What if you could use your turn to destroy a piece and open up a space in the grid? The obvious idea is that it would be hard to win because players would essentially destroy the opposing player’s piece any time it threatened to get to three in a row. Ok, what if we allowed each player to do so only once in a game?
It might slow the game down a bit. Destroying a piece merely delays the opposing player’s move by one move. The game is so simple and so very, very solved that it might not really change the nature of the game much.
But one dynamic that might evolve is the discovered fork, as the above example can show: even though O is threatening to win with a fork, X has just placed the piece at the bottom left. What if X decides to destroy the O in the center? Now instead of merely preventing a potential win by O, destroying that O resulted in a fork in which X can now win either with the left column or the diagonal.
The end of this game would still be a draw if everyone played perfectly, but it might surprise the amateur player.
Conclusion:
Even without custom rules, it’s easy to see how the simple mechanics can result in more complex game play than might be expected. Even a simple game like Tic-Tac-Toe has emergent game play that derive from the rules.
The big takeaway lesson here is that you need to see a game in action in order to really understand the game, which is why playtesting your own designs is so important.
Web 2.0 was all about changing the Internet from a solitary experience to one in which you are a consumer of content to one in which you are creating and sharing as par for the course.
Today’s social media took it to an extreme. Tweets drive Twitter. Facebook made sharing cat pictures and status with your friends easier, before making it difficult to see unless you opt-in twice, once by liking and once by saying, “Yes, I mean it, I want to see this account’s updates, please.” Pinterest became a huge force in its own right, and it’s all about pinning interesting things you find elsewhere.
Recently I’ve been seeing quite a bit written about the downsides of social media. Steve Pavlina wrote last month about taking a year off from social media and feeling much more conscious and in control of his life. He could concentrate on what’s important, such as planning out how he was going to accomplish important goals.
Social media gives us instant feel-good rewards for doing next to nothing of value. When those rewards are no longer so easily accessible, we have to work harder for those same feelings. When we accomplish something meaningful to create that dopamine surge, the feelings can positively guide our behavior, and those feelings can stack up and create lasting motivation to tackle more sizable goals and projects.
MMO designer and author Brian Green of Pscyhochild’s Blog is writing daily posts for Blaugust, and he’s focusing on what he doesn’t like about social media this week, analyzing how it works and what the repercussions are for discourse in society.
…the nature of social media is that it polarizes people. Often if someone doesn’t appear to directly support a position, some assume they must support the opposite and are therefore the Great Satan. Nuanced views are often looked at with suspicion. This causes a lot of frustration, as it closes off useful discussion.
See Social Media: What gets promoted? and Social Media: It leads to the darkside for more of his thoughtful analysis.
While I’m a fan of social media, I find myself agreeing. I’ve had to make the decision to stop checking Facebook first thing in the morning because I found it to be a time suck. I get more important things accomplished when I focus on them than on seeing what funny video was shared today or what notifications I should check. It took me awhile to resist the urge to type “f+TAB+Enter” in my browser first thing when I sit in front of the computer, since Facebook showed up as the first entry every time. I find myself checking notifications on Twitter on my phone throughout the day, and when my app is not pushing them, I go in and check anyway in case the notification function is broken. It’s bizarre and makes it hard to concentrate.
And the content is generally terrible. <insert picture of Grumpy Cat here>
I see clickbait headlines that promise things that will blow my mind that usually garner no more than a shrug, yet I’ve already clicked on the bait and wasted my time. At some point, I got fatigued by it and stopped clicking, but I admit it took me awhile to catch on.
I see friends posting hateful statements in public view that they would never say in person, or at least I would hope they wouldn’t.
Every so often I see something genuinely inspirational, but it can be buried among the vapid motivational quotes and celebrity put-downs.
Why do we spend so much of our time actively looking at this stuff? And why do we seem to keep distracting ourselves with it when we know we have more important things to do? How else is it changing our behavior?
Social media makes it easier to share, but I get confused by the work flow of blog readers these days. Someone will click on a link in Facebook or Google+ to a blog post, read the post, then instead of commenting at the bottom of the actual blog post, they go back to the social media platform they came from and comment there. And the thing is, I do this, too. Instead of treating the blog post as the source of the conversation, it’s as if it is the social media platform that is the driver and the blog is a temporary stop.
I actually miss the old days when bloggers would write comments on each other’s blogs, when a response to your post would as often as not be a post on someone else’s blog linked back to yours instead of disappearing into the hard-to-find social media comments section.
I miss people blogging because they had something to say, not because they were part of a blogging collective interested in selling you on some narrative, trying to get you to see and click on ads while giving you feel-good or feel-angry notions for a few seconds until you click on the next thing.
All that said, social media is probably here to stay, and luckily it is amazing because while it can seem like nothing but pictures of breakfast and pithy sayings to some, it means getting around authoritarian censorship for others. That is, real and dangerous censorship, not the kind that people made up to mean they don’t like the consequences of their free speech. It means keeping in touch with people you met at a conference. It means meeting new, like-minded people.
Social media allows the invisible to become visible. Hashtags such as #BlackLivesMatter are used to raise awareness of racial injustice. Many people of privilege are more aware that they even have privilege than before. Major accomplishments in science, such as NASA’s New Horizons flyby of Pluto, means a lot of excitement and hope for humanity that may translate into children today becoming the scientists of tomorrow. People no longer limit their social circles to geographic locations, which is great for us in the flyover states.
So, there’s a lot of good in social media as well.
But social media makes all of us publishers. Did we waste each other’s time with what we put out into the world? Will we be proud of it when we look back?
Or will we simultaneously feel glad that no one can easily find it a few days after we hit the Share button and feel worried that it’s out there for someone to find if they really dig for it?
I normally listen to audiobooks in my car, but I had just finished one and hadn’t visited the library yet to check out another, so I had the radio on.
I caught the tail end of an NPR story about a game trying to get approved by the FDA, so I told my phone to remind me to look it up later.
Will Doctors Soon Be Prescribing Video Games for Mental Health? by April Dembosky was that story, and it talks about the many games that claim they are good for your brain but don’t have any real science to back it up.
I’m reminded of Nintendo’s Brain Age. In its official title is “Train your brain in minutes a day!”
In 2007, CNN’s Linnie Rawlinson wrote up her experience playing it, asking Can Nintendo’s ‘Brain Training’ really boost your little gray cells?. While she had fun playing it, she didn’t believe the claims. She asked a neuroscientist about it and was told that while it may help, it’s “hard to measure the impact that brain training could have.”
The NPR story refers to a very, very long letter signed by cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists rejecting the claims:
In summary: We object to the claim that brain games offer consumers a scientifically grounded avenue to reduce or reverse cognitive decline when there is no compelling scientific evidence to date that they do. The promise of a magic bullet detracts from the best evidence to date, which is that cognitive health in old age reflects the long-term effects of healthy, engaged lifestyles. In the judgment of the signatories, exaggerated and misleading claims exploit the anxiety of older adults about impending cognitive decline. We encourage continued careful research and validation in this field.
One of those scientists decided it wasn’t enough to admonish game marketers and decided to try to create a brain game that would stand up to scientific rigor.
Neuroracer was the research developed by a team of neuroscientists and was specifically targeted at training cognitive control abilities. While it’s not commercially available, it did demonstrate how a game could actually help with cognitive ability.
Neuroracer was made for scientists as a research tool. Based on this technology, Project:EVO is the clinical product being created by Akili Interactive Labs. It’s been covered in many mainstream media outlets, but hardly at all in game press. I found one reference to Akili at Gamasutra, and it was a blog post by Noah Falstein on general neuroscience in games.
From the Akili Interactive Labs website:
Project: EVO platform is currently being tested in a variety of clinical studies in multiple patient populations around the globe, including ADHD, autism, depression, and traumatic brain injury.
It’s quite an ambitious endeavor. Adam Gazzaley, co-founder of Akili Interactive Labs, claims he has four other games in development if Project:EVO makes it through the gauntlet.
And with what Neuroracer demonstrated, perhaps there will be a growing market of science-based brain games that actually do help who they claim to help.
There are hard skills and soft skills.
Hard skills are things you can practice outside of any context. Soft skills are usually built upon the hard skills.
Basketball players can practice shooting three-pointers over and over outside of the context of a real game. During a game, knowing when to take a three-point shot is a soft skill, which depends on reading the defense, knowing the shot clock, and keeping in mind the current score.
When I think about hard skills vs soft skills, I found myself struggling to think of the hard skills of a game designer.
A game designer needs to be able to communicate, which means writing and drawing well. But I have a hard time seeing writing prose as a core exercise in getting better at designing games.
A game designer needs to be able to establish rules for setup, for procedure, and for resolution. But how does rule-setting translate into a hard skill that I can practice outside of the context of a game? Do I train as a game designer by setting arbitrary rules for everyday activities? “When getting ready in the morning, I must do everything with my non-dominant hand.” It might be interesting to experiment for a week with setting rules and restrictions where they don’t need to exist, but will I really get better at game design for it?
A game designer needs to be able to prototype and playtest. Do you take an existing game and create your own board, cards, and tokens? Does doing so actually help with future prototyping? Maybe. I actually like this idea. You practice with existing games, and it helps you get a more intuitive feel for exactly what goes into a game of your own creation. Maybe you didn’t appreciate how many different cards are in a game of Onirim until you tried to make them yourself.
But hard skills specific to game design seem hard to identify. Game design tends to be about trade-offs and figuring out second-order effects of rule changes, which are mostly about soft skills. But maybe I’m missing something basic that I’m not appreciating.
What do you think? What are the hard skills of game design?
Yesterday at the No Fluff Just Stuff conference, I went to the Learning to Learn presentation by Raju Gandhi.
He talked about the nature of knowing and learning, and he shared a number of techniques for learning more effectively.
But then he said something that especially piqued my interest. He mentioned keeping a programming journal, partly to be able to celebrate what you’ve accomplished, and partly to have something to reference when you inevitably forget a key detail.
Whenever you learn something new, log it.
And I thought, “Blog it!” That way, you aren’t the only one who benefits from your new education.
It’s something I already do, but not consistently. For instance, when I was implementing my own physics code for a game, I ran into a crash bug when sorting my objects, and when I realized what I had done wrong and fixed it, I wrote about it.
What’s funny is that later in the week, I ran into the same exact problem at the day job and knew exactly what was going wrong.
Five years ago, I wrote up all of my research into component-based entity systems when I was looking into implementing it for my own game project, and people still find it useful today. Heck, I still find it useful today. Thanks, Past Self!
Sometimes I do things that I haven’t written about. For instance, when I ported my existing game engine code and cross-compiling build scripts from SDL to SDL2, I didn’t blog about it. I had to do some research and figure out what’s really different, but for some reason I thought it wouldn’t be interesting enough for anyone but me. Now I wish I had a way of seeing how much effort there was to do so because most of it is forgotten.
So going forward, whether I deliberately set out to learn something like a new programming language or learn how to fix an annoying bug, I’ll make sure to publish it, both for your benefit and for my own.
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Behind the Scenes with Bhaloidam
I love learning about how things are made.
The finished product often hides the false starts, the problems solved, and the journey.
The iPhone’s scratch-resistant glass is something owners don’t think about because many of them don’t know that the scratches on earlier prototypes were seen as problematic enough to do something about, even a little over a month before the official release. Robin Williams tried out a number of different ways to portray Mrs. Doubtfire, so that scene in the movie when he was getting turned into a women and discarding a few attempts also happened in real life. Disney animators had to work out how many frames of animation to show before playing speech in order for it to look natural.
Upon discovering that his email address was publicly accessible, I once emailed American McGee to ask him about the workings of Alice, specifically about the part in which you turn into chess pieces and move about the giant chess board on the ground. I got a short reply along the lines of “We had to ship, so it wasn’t perfect. Try to have fun instead of focusing on the details!” I remember thinking, “But, focusing on the details IS fun for me!
When you have only the finished product, you don’t think much about it and you take a lot for granted. When you learn how it was made, you gain a greater appreciation for the craft, the effort, and the ingenuity of the people involved.
So I was excited to see that my friend Corvus Elrod has released a visual history of Bhaloidam, the participatory story-telling platform he created. You can read more about it at Bhaloidam.com.
I know what Bhaloidam looks like today, but it’s fascinating to see how it back in 1991. I’m curious about what CorWorlds was, as a quick search online reveals nothing. B-)
I loved exploring how complexity was added, then stripped completely away, before coming back into something recognizable in today’s Bhaloidam. I was delighted when I saw the hexagonal paper cups and pente stones.
It was only a high level history, but it still felt like digging under a city to find another city acting as its support structure. And while I knew he was working on it for over two decades, now I can walk through and see the progression over that time in a more visceral way.
Bhaloidam‘s handbook and lifewheels are freely available online as print and play (PaP), with high-quality Skein packs available for purchase in the store at a great price.
I’m not a Java developer, but I am going to the “The conference series for JVM software developers” called No Fluff Just Stuff today here in Des Moines, Iowa.
Why? My main tool has been C++ for years. I haven’t programmed in Java since college, and that was over a decade ago.
Partly because it’s a local conference. I don’t have to travel or get a hotel.
Partly because my day job is paying for it. When you are offered free training, you take it.
And partly because I didn’t actually know it was a Java-specific conference when I signed up for it. /me looks down at his shoes sheepishly.
The itinerary I put together for the next few days is geared towards the general talks about software architecture, metrics, and other topics that can translate well outside of a specific programming language or platform. I am especially interested in the microservices architecture session, ever since I first heard about it at an Agile Iowa presentation.
There’s even a magician among the speakers, so it should be entertaining.
And who knows? Maybe I’ll pick up some cool ideas from the Java practitioners.
I’m a bit disappointed that the Android tablet I’m bringing doesn’t seem to have as full-featured an app as the iOS version. Somehow at a Java conference the Java-oriented platform doesn’t let you download slides? One of the Play store’s reviews for the NFJS app complained about needing to carry around not only his own Android tablet but also the conference-provided iPad, which was awkward. I wonder if I’ll be doing the same today.
Anyone else going?
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How Long Does It Take to Make a Game?
Originally, games were made by solo developers. It took a long time because the code was at the level of binary, and the games were simple.
As computing power grew, so did the capabilities of the game developers. For years, games were seen as expensive productions by hundreds of developers working in teams for potentially half a decade. Someone interested in game development wouldn’t even know where to start because it seemed so overwhelming.
Then indie game development became more well known. Games could be made in mere months, like in the old days, but with much better tools to leverage.
Then people tried to see how quickly they could make games. One Game a Month makes a game out of finishing and publishing games each month. Ludum Dare challenges you to make a game in 48 hours (by the way, there’s a major compo later this month you should join!). People involved at Garage Games had Game in a Day, a 24 hour competition.
The 0hr Game Jam takes place during Daylight Savings Time, in the hour that is lost between 2AM and 2AM.
In the past, Andy Moore has said that an hour is plenty of time for a game. “I’m not talking a WHOLE GAME (you need a weekend for that!), but an individual mechanic, feature, or tweak? It should take less than an hour to hash out the lowest common denominator version of that.”
Jonatan “Cactus” Soderstrom, famous for his quick development, gave a talk at GDC in 2009 on The Four Hour Game Design.
With paper prototypes and the amazing digital tools accessible to almost everyone, it’s easy to try something out quickly and see if it will work before you spend months or years building content around an idea.
So games can be made quickly, and some are even good games. Really good. Some quickly-developed games even become massive financial successes. Flappy Bird was made in a couple of days and was earning its developer $50,000 a day at one point.
But not all games can be Flappy Bird, even if a quick glance at the App Store might make you think otherwise. Some games need more time to cook. Maybe you found a core mechanic that works, but you spend more time iteratively tweaking and playtesting and fixing issues you find.
Pac-man‘s AI took half a year to perfect. Monster Loves You! took months of prototypes, and the finished product had a custom dialog engine and plenty of content. Tower of Guns was developed over 600 days.
2dBoy has a 7-part series on the development of World of Goo, a game which was famously based off of a quick prototype called Tower of Goo made in four days. The original World of Goo demo release happened a year after development started.
At 8 months into the project:
it’s now almost 4 months after we thought we were 3 months away from finishing the game. we continue to fool ourselves and think we’ve got another 3 months left to go.
So how long does it take to make a game? It clearly only takes a few hours, plus time for playtesting, content creation, and polish, all of which takes much longer than anyone expects.
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Making Core Game Design Choices
I’m making a tycoon game about raking leaves. At first, it was slow going, partly because I lost focus on what I was really trying to accomplish, and partly because I was treating it’s development as something that needed to be fully formed from nothing.
Then I realized that most of the player interactions are menu based, and the GUI and related content would be independent of the game play itself, which is going to be geared towards the development of the invisible economy and the player’s feedback related to the consequences of his/her actions.
I normally think of prototyping along the lines of my handy-dandy physical prototyping toolbox, in which I use paper and drawn lines with wooden pieces and stones to represent objects. I could prototype menus on paper, which I think would work well for getting the feel of the GUI, but I don’t think it would work as well for what should be on the menus in the first place.
So I’m creating a command line version of my game. The UI is fairly stripped down, and it’s easy to code. I just accept input as numbers, and the relevant choices in a given menu are processed. Simple.
And effective! I was surprised what only a few hours of development churned out. I even have a basic weather system in place.
MAIN MENU
1: See neighborhood
2: View inventory
3: View weather report
4: Quit current game3
Today: Mostly cloudy with a 86% chance of rain
Tomorrow: Mostly sunny with a few clouds with a 15% chance of rain
I can quickly play the game as it is being developed because build times take mere moments. I’m spending time designing rather than coding infrastructure because the infrastructure is so lightweight.
But what about the bigger design decisions?
In this tycoon game, I had a general idea of the player being able to set a rate, do some work, and get paid for it. Simple, right?
But when I started to play, I realized this simple idea has a lot of unanswered questions. Do you set your rate before you get clients? Do you set it on a client by client basis? Do you charge hourly, or for a finished leaf raking job by the size of the yard, or is it a static rate? Does the game track time in hours, meaning you need to decide which yards to work on in a given day based on how long they take, or in days, so your decision is which yard you tackle on a given day?
This is a core decision that determines how the game will be experienced. It’s terrifying because this decision basically says what the game won’t be like. You can’t include all of them because they’re mutually exclusive, and you can’t put off the decision because without it, you have no game.
How do you make such a decision?
I have criteria to measure my options against, such as whether or not the option fits my design goals. An educational game would play differently from a physics puzzler. But what about deciding between a number of options that all seem to fit the higher level design?
In Lemonade Stand, you set the price of a glass of lemonade before the day starts. Then you start the day, and you find out at the end of the day how many glasses people bought and how much income you got.
There’s no haggling. There’s no adjustment during a given day. It’s a simple abstraction to a real life situation and quite accessible to the children it was geared towards.
But since it’s a game, it could have gone in any number of directions. The game could have had you interacting with each individual customer, making many minor decisions such as how much to fill each glass or if you should charge someone more or less. It could have become a higher fidelity simulation, but it would have been more difficult to play. It would have been a different game entirely geared towards a different audience.
Similarly, as a designer, I need to figure out the course of my game. I could see this as a huge decision and go through a lot of analysis about which is best before picking a direction, and even then I can only hope I made the right choice.
But I could also just try all of them and see what happens.
When prototyping, a cheap and quick implementation allows you to experience the real thing instead of wondering. You could implement the simplest solution, see how it feels, and either add to it and tweak it or discard it and try something else.
Maybe I’ll be surprised at how the simpler solution actually feels perfectly fine, or maybe I’ll discover that two different approaches are just variations on the same design. Maybe I’ll decide on an approach, but after developing a good amount of the game around it, I decide it doesn’t quite work and pick up one of the other approaches again because I realize it has some benefits now that I didn’t see before.
Read about the changing design of Threes by Asher Vollmer and Greg Wohlwend, or multiple prototypes of the board game New York 1901 by Chénier La Salle, and you can get an idea of how much sweat it takes to design a game.
It’s hard work. Game design isn’t just playing games and it isn’t just writing a story for your platformer or FPS. It’s more like trying to determine which of 10,000 materials to use to make a lightbulb than it is about shining a flashlight in the right direction in an attempt to discover the fun.
The more options you try out, the more informed a decision you can make about the play experience, but it takes effort and time.
So in the end, the answer to the question of how you decide on core game play is to continually prototype and play test.
What else helped you make such core game play decisions in the past?