I was recently reading an interesting post on Emily Short’s blog about how she handled conversation in her most recent Interactive Fiction project. You can read the post in question here.
The gist of it, for those who’d prefer a synopsis, is that she’s moved away from the conventional model, in which the player chooses something to say, and the NPC responds, then the player chooses something else to say (possibly with new options now), and the NPC responds again, and so on. Instead, she’s given the NPC as much agency in the conversation as the player - the NPC will now have a list of things he or she wishes to say, and an order to say them in, and will go down the list until they’ve said everything they want. In the meantime, the player can say or do whatever he or she likes, and these words and actions will tend to add and/or remove elements from the NPCs list.
These elements can be either immediate or postponed - which determines whether they’re added to the top or bottom of the list - and either obligatory or optional - which determines whether they’re removed from the list or not when the topic of conversation shifts.
Reading this, it occurred to me that you could use such a system to create a highly non-linear RPG, by simply extending it to cover actions as well as words, and also to include entities other than just NPCs (e.g. the environment, a whole group of monsters or even a distant kingdom could be an entity with a list of things it “wants” to do). Also, these actions would need to have a setup and a recovery time, as global events in an RPG don’t fall as neatly into a turn-based structure as conversation in a piece of IF. Aside from these changes, however, the basic idea remains unchanged.
Today, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how one would go about designing such a game, and I think the answer is to take the player out of the game to begin with, and come up with a story that would take place without any player intervention at all. Once you have that worked out, you can break it into one or more cause-and-effect chains, in which actions taken by one entity add actions to other entities’ to-do lists, and so on down the line. The player’s actions could then prevent some of these events from taking place, or change their outcome, or cause entities to take other actions entirely. In this way, there’s guaranteed to be a story of some sort going on, and the player can meddle in it however much he or she likes.
I think this system would be best suited to small games, because the system gets very complex very quickly, and the non-linear nature of the gameplay would give the game a high degree of replayability, so a long play-time might be more of a drawback than a positive. To manage the complexity in a larger game, the thing to do would probably be to divide the game world up into a number of isolated “islands,” (e.g. towns) whose entities only interact with others within their own island, and only major events in one place affect what happens elsewhere.
As an example, here’s an idea for a very small game I came up with, consisting of a very small number of locations and NPCs.
There are two towns. The one in which the player starts, we’ll call Hometown, and the other we’ll call Awaytown. Both towns have a few important NPCs, and a number of generic NPCs who only share rumors with the player, or give him minor tasks with minor rewards, and little impact on the main plot.
There are two ways to get from one to the other - a pass through the Mountains, and a Road through the Woods. The mountains also contain a wizard’s hut and a cave full of faeries, while the woods contain a bandit stronghold.
The major NPCs:
HOMETOWN Hometown Sheriff, who is secretly corrupt and in cahoots with the Stablemaster (below) Bartender, who needs a cart wheel, and knows various rumors e.g. about the bandits Bartender’s son, who is in his late teens Goldsmith, who makes jewelry, but is currently out of gold, and expecting a shipment soon
AWAYTOWN Awaytown Sheriff, who is a good guy, and wants to take down the bandits Stablemaster, who is in contact with the bandits and supplies them with horses and information Cartwright, who has a young son
ROAD/WOODS Bandit Lord, who stays in the stronghold most of the time Bandit Prince, who is the Bandit Lord’s son, and leads the group of bandits who attack the player and/or any NPCs who attempt to take the road between the towns.
MOUNTAINS Wizard, who has a powerful magic amulet Faerie Lord, who is dying Faerie Council, who need the magic amulet and a human child for a ritual to create a new Faerie Lord to replace their dying leader.
The Plot, without player intervention:
And so, we see that the story has a sad ending if the player does nothing; most of the nice people end up dead, and the bad guys come out ahead. Fortunately, the links in that chain are quite fragile, and the player can bend or break any one of them, and radically change the flow of events.
Early in the story, if the player talks to Bartender or Hometown Sheriff, he could be tasked with going to Awaytown to deliver the letter and/or acquire the cart wheel. If he goes to get the wheel, but doesn’t bring the letter, eventually Hometown Sheriff will find someone else to deliver it, but it will slow down the advancement of that part of the story. Meanwhile, if he does take the letter, he could deliver it as promised, advancing the story normally, or he could open it and read it. If he does so, he could expose Hometown Sheriff and raise a mob to lynch him, or he take the evil route and blackmail Hometown Sheriff into letting him in on the action. Alternately, he could take the letter to Awaytown Sheriff, who will propose that he go back to Hometown, steal Hometown Sheriff’s seal, reseal the letter, and deliver it… so that now, with the player’s assistance, Awaytown Sheriff can arrange a sting to catch the bandits - player, Awaytown Sheriff and a small posse meet up with the gold caravan and hide in the wagons to surprise the bandits.
Another way the player could find out about the Stablemaster/Hometown Sheriff conspiracy is if he happens to be out and about at nighttime in Awaytown, when the bandits come to meet with Stablemaster. The player might end up seeing them and eavesdropping.
Meanwhile, if the player chooses to travel via the mountain pass, he may run into the Faeries and/or the Wizard, depending on how much exploring he does. If he meets the Wizard, he’ll find out about the stolen Amulet - if he manages to figure out that the Faeries have it, and get it back, he’ll have the Wizard on his side. If he meets the Faeries, he may find out about their dying leader. If he’s particularly clever in conversation, he may even get some information about the ritual they have planned. The alternative to creating a new Faerie Lord is, of course, to save the current one, which requires some rare herbs from the Woods. If the player gets these in time, he can avert the abduction of Cartwright’s son. The Faeries may also reward him by giving him the amulet, which they no longer need. He could then keep it (and risk the Wizard’s wrath, if he sees him with it), or return it to the Wizard.
If instead, the player takes the road, he’ll be attacked by a small group of bandits. Assuming he wins the fight, Bandit Prince will attempt to flee. If captured, he will attempt to bargain with the player, saying he’s impressed with the player’s combat prowess, and inviting the player to join them. This would kick off a whole “evil” plotline, in which the player is with the bandits. Alternately, the player could turn Bandit Prince over to either Sheriff. Hometown Sheriff will, of course, set things up so Bandit Prince can escape, which will possibly help the player realize what’s going on. Awaytown Sheriff, on the other hand, will interrogate Bandit Prince to find out the location of the bandit stronghold, possibly leading to an attack on it, possibly with the player’s assistance… and, possibly even with the help of the Wizard and/or the Faeries, if he’s achieved happy resolution on that side of things.
Of course, the Bandit Prince might also escape, only to show up again later. Or the player might kill him, in which case the Bandit Lord, outraged over his son’s death, would seek revenge - either against the player specifically, or by attacking one or both towns, if he doesn’t have a way of determining who killed him.
Meanwhile, if the Faerie Lord does die, then the player might go to try to rescue Cartwright’s son himself, or he might join the party that ends up getting caught in the avalanche, or he might go up afterwards, to rescue them after they’re caught in the avalanche.
If this all sounds exceptionally complicated, that’s just because it’s nonlinear. There are any number of other possible interactions that could take place too - I’ve just tried to cover the main possibilities, but there are any number of ways the player character could involve himself in everyone’s business, either for altruistic reasons, personal profit, or loyalty to a specific NPC that the player has decided that he likes. Whatever happens, the overall story will probably be fairly short, but dense - this isn’t an epic game, by any means. However, the player should be able to play it several times, with a radically different experience each time through… almost any NPC or group of NPCs can end up being an ally or an enemy, depending on what the player does, and certain locations (the inside of the faerie cave and the bandit stronghold) might not even be seen at all in a given game!
Also, the possible permutations and combinations of PC-NPC and NPC-NPC interaction grow exponentially as more are added. With just four main areas and a handful of entities, the game is already quite complex - just a couple more locations to visit and a few more active parties with their own agendas, and the story would be truly unpredictable and surprising. The ultimate goal, of course, is to make an RPG that is actually a role-playing game in the true sense of the term, similar to the experience one has playing a pencil-and-paper RPG.
Gameplay: 7/10 Graphics: 7/10 Sound: 8/10 Originality: 7/10 Overall: 7/10
Play at: http://www.kongregate.com/games/TerryCavanagh/dont-look-back
Retro, in the sense of ancient history
Modern fantasy games draw plenty of elements from Greek mythology, but usually these consist of places, people, magical items and monsters, taken out of the context of their original stories. Here we have a game that takes its (minimal) storyline - and its most original gameplay feature - from the story of Orpheus. In the myth, Orpheus’ wife Eurydice dies, and he travels to the underworld to persuade Hades and Persephone to let him bring her back. They agree, but on the condition that he not look back at her until they’ve both returned to the surface. Unfortunately, in his anxiety, he can’t help looking back as they approach the surface, and thus loses her forever.
In Terry Cavanagh’s Don’t Look Back, you take the role of Orpheus, albeit anachronistically armed with a pistol, rather than a lyre. Running, jumping and gunning your way through hell, you eventually confront Hades and “persuade” him - via several bullets to the head - to liberate your dead bride. At this point, the game’s title - and the reference to the myth - come to light, as you must now return to the surface, but while moving only in a single direction; turning around even for an instant results in her disappearance, which is equivalent, in game terms, to your own death.
There are several good things about this game, and some not so good. In terms of gameplay, the level of challenge is tough but fair, and the level of frustration is kept manageable by the fact that you have unlimited lives and only need to restart the current screen when you die (or accidentally look back at your fair maiden). The difficulty curve is rather inconsistent, unfortunately. Some early screens are quite tough, and some later ones are trivial; I would have preferred to see more thought put into introducing challenges gradually. The two bosses - Cerberus and Hades - are likewise reasonably satisfying to fight, but poorly balanced in terms of difficulty; you would expect the main boss (Hades) to be the more difficult of the two, but it took me far more attempts to get past Cerberus.
Part of the problem is with the “don’t look back” mechanic. It’s original, but greatly limits the level design. Since you can’t turn or move backwards at all, the challenges actually become more simplistic, as the controls have been reduced to simply moving forward and/or jumping. Although interesting from an artistic perspective, it fails from a game design perspective for this reason. Much more interesting would have been if Cavanagh had Eurydice follow a little ways behind Orpheus, and allowed him to turn around so long as she was not in sight - for instance, if the player could get her temporarily stuck behind a wall. This would allow for much more interesting puzzles than the game currently offers.
There are likewise good and bad things to be said about the graphics; certainly, the blocky pixels and limited palette will be nostalgic for those of us who grew up on the Atari 2600 and similar machines. The palette itself is nicely-chosen as well, with everything portrayed in suitably bleak reds and burgundies. The special effects are also nice, including the rain in the outdoor scenes, and Eurydice vanishing in a puff of smoke if the player does look back. However, as is often the case with such games, one often gets the impression that the graphical “style” is often just a convenient excuse for artistic laziness - for instance, it would not be hard for a marginally competent artist to produce better-looking trees than those in the screenshot above, even with a four-color palette and low resolution.
The sound, meanwhile, is one of the game’s better features. The music suits the mood well, and I like that it comes and goes, rather than looping continuously. Eurydice’s wail when she goes up in smoke is also well done. The death sound is extremely retro.
I like the fact that this game manages to bridge the gap between being a game and an interactive art piece. Most art games feature minimal gameplay, and often no challenge whatsoever. Don’t Look Back, on the other hand, has several difficult parts, and manages to be fun, albeit simple. The artistic expression in the game is limited to the concept of the title and corresponding gameplay feature, the general graphical and audio style, and the game’s beginning and ending scenes. The rest of the time, the game focusses on being a game, as it should. All too often, those seeking to gain acceptance for games as a valid art-form try to do so by making their games less game-like; this, in my opinion, is self-defeating.
A masterpiece, this is not, but it’s still an interesting experiment. Moreover, it’s short, reasonably entertaining, and doesn’t even require a download - I would say it’s well worth investing 15-30 minutes of one’s time to give it a play through.
Anyone with any sort of creative or artistic talent has probably been approached at some time or another by a friend, family member, or random person on the Internet, asking them if they’d like to contribute to a project in some way. Usually, the people making these solicitations are looking for something to be done for free. Of course, it’s normal to want to help friends out, and especially when one is starting out, pro bono work seems like a good idea in theory. Among other things, it’s a way to get exposure, a portfolio piece, and some experience contributing to a larger endeavor instead of doing individual, personal pieces without any of the constraints present when working for a client.
However, every creative professional I’ve spoken to, in pretty much every field, has the same thing to say, which is that pro bono “clients” are by far the most troublesome. Usually, they’re more trouble than they’re worth. This is counter-intuitive, as you’d expect that most people would understand that beggars can’t be choosers, and that they’d be grateful to get anything at all from you, since they aren’t offering anything in return. I’ve often wondered why they’re almost universally so difficult to please, and I think, after my latest such experience, I’ve realized why it is.
I used to think it was because there’s something inherently selfish in asking for something for free; that the very act of asking someone to work for free implies a certain disrespect for the value of their time. A client who is paying by the hour has a vested interest in not wasting the freelancer’s time, since they’re paying for it. Also, they will tend to value the finished piece more, as they can associate a dollar value to it.
That argument makes some sense, but I don’t think that’s it. If that were the case, the nature of the problem would be that pro bono clients tend to nitpick over the details of the work, asking for endless little tweaks and changes. That isn’t my experience, however. The problem I’ve run into again and again (four out of the last four times I’ve grudgingly agreed to do something for free, in fact), is that the work is actually rejected entirely - I’ve either been asked to try something completely different, make so many changes it would be easier to go back to the drawing board, or else the client has decided that they didn’t need the work, or didn’t like what I did, and that they would do it themselves, or ask someone else.
Of course, you could try to put the blame on the artist in cases like that, but the fact is that in five years of working as an artist/designer, I can count on one finger the number of times I’ve had a paying client express dissatisfaction with my work. Nor is it that I’m not putting as much effort into free pieces - I’ve put many hours into a pro bono piece only to see it discarded, unsued, and I’ve likewise taken on low-budget, quick-and-dirty paid work and received great praise and a happy client.
Rather, the conclusion I’ve reached is this:
Paying clients are going to pay for the work whoever they choose, so they seek you out because they like your work. They’ve checked out lots of portfolios, and they sought you out because your work has the look that they have in mind. Pro bono clients, on the other hand, seek you out because they think they can get something for free. Either they know you personally, or they know you’re interested in their cause, or for whatever other reason, they believe that you’re likely to agree to do something for them unpaid. They might not even have seen your portfolio, they just know that you’re in the business. The odds are therefore very slim that you also happen to be the person they would have chosen to do the work if they’d been choosing based on style. A mismatch between the artist’s style and the client’s vision never ends well.
Making lowball bids to win contracts has the same problem - if you bid slightly higher than the competition, you may get fewer contracts, but the clients who choose you will have done so because they want you, specifically. Bid too low, however, and not only will you fail to be compensated adequately for your work, you will also end up with clients who are secretly hoping that you’ll do something similar to what some other artist would have done, just more cheaply than him or her.
And so, while working cheaply or for free may seem like a nice thing to do, it may actually be a recipe for frustration and disappointment, both on your part and that of the person you’re working for. It’s important to examine the motivations of those who approach you to do work - the primary reason should always be that they like your work, and believe that your style will give them the product they’re looking for. If you believe their motivation might be anything else, think twice before accepting the job.
In the games section of the site, I’ve just posted six examples of a puzzle I invented, called Jum Noli. It’s inspired by Japanese-style number puzzles like Kakuro and Sudoku, but in keeping with my tastes, I’ve tried to make it “denser.” The small grid and tight restrictions mean that most Jum Noli puzzles require just one or two leaps of logic to get the first few boxes filled in, after which the solution usually comes quite quickly. Making that breakthrough, however, can be quite challenging.
As explained in the puzzle PDF, the objective is to fill in a 4×4 grid of boxes, placing one, two or three dots in each box.
There are two restrictions in placing the dots. The first is indicated by the numbers next to the rows and columns; these indicate the total number of dots that there must be in that row or column. The second is indicate by the dots inside the diamonds. These indicate that the surrounding four boxes must have a clear majority of that number of dots - thus, two or more of the boxes must contain that number of dots, and no more than one may contain any other particular number. That is, if the diamond shows three dots, the surrounding boxes could contain [3, 3, 3, 1] or [3, 3, 2, 1] but not [3, 3, 2, 2].
Each puzzle has only one solution. Finding it typically involves applying logic to determine with certainty how many dots must go in specific boxes, then using that information to make similar conclusions about other nearby boxes, and so on. Usually, once 6-10 boxes are filled, the rest will be much easier, but how does one go about filling in those first few boxes? It’s easiest to explain by means of an example. Let’s start with the grid to the left.
One trick to apply is to look for the highest and/or lowest row and column numbers in the grid, because there are fewer possibilities for how to arrive at those totals. As an extreme example, if a row showed a 4, you would know immediately that all the boxes in that row contained a single dot. Likewise, if it showed a 12, all the boxes would contain three dots.
This puzzle doesn’t have any 4s or 12s, but it does have an 11, which can only be made with three sets of three dots and one set of two. The obvious question to ask, then, is which box contains the two dots. Looking at the two diamonds at the top of that column, we can see that the group of two dots must be in one of the top two boxes - if both of those boxes contained three dots, it would be impossible to obey the requirements imposed by those diamonds.
The left diagram shows one possibility. The right diagram shows the other, but we can eliminate this as an option. If the top box of the second column contains 3 dots, then the only way to make the top row add up to six is for the remaining boxes all to contain a single dot. However, the top right diamond requires that it be surrounded by a two-dot majority, which creates a contradiction. Thus, we can firmly place two dots in the top box of the second row, and fill the rest of the row with three dots in each box.
The next step is easy. The top left diamond requires that the surrounding four boxes contain a clear majority of one-dot groups. Since two boxes have now been filled in with a two-dot and a three-dot group, the remaining two boxes must clearly contain a single dot.
After this, however, the puzzle gets a little trickier.
Looking at the third column, we see that it must contain a total of six dots. There are only two ways this can be accomplished; either with one group of three dots and three singles, or else two groups of two and two singles. However, the key thing to notice is that none of the middle three diamonds contains a single dot. This means that nowhere in this column can there be two consecutive single dots! This rules out the first possibility, and also combinations like [1,1,2,2]. The only possibilities are [1,2,1,2] and [2,1,2,1].
All we can do is try out these two combinations and look for a contradiction. It turns out that it’s easy to find one. If we try [2,1,2,1], we find that the top right corner must also contain a 1, in order to satisfy the top row total (6). This conflicts with the top right diamond, which states that it must be surrounded by a clear majority of two-dot groups.
Eliminating this possibility, we arrive at the following result, at which point the rest of the puzzle should be very easy to solve, since most of the rows and columns are almost complete. I’ll leave it to you to finish it: Hopefully this example helps illustrate the sort of techniques needed to solve the puzzles. Of course, they vary widely in difficulty; some will only require reasoning at the level of the first two steps of the example - others will require even greater leaps of logic than in the third step. I’ve even managed to come up with puzzles that I myself can’t solve (though I’ve written a simple computer program to verify the existence of a unique solution).
It’s about time I got back to talking about typography. Up until now we’ve been discussing how to choose the appropriate typeface(s) to set your text. Many people seem to think that this is the big issue in typography, but it’s really only the tip of the iceberg. Actually putting the characters on the page is not as trivial as it might seem.
The usefulness of a wide right margin
Type is a fluid. It’s compressible, but only to a certain extent. It can be shrunk or expanded to fit the space available, but there’s only a small window of comfortable pressure - expand or condense it too much, and the readability starts to suffer. What you can do, however, is adjust the shape of the container; type, at least in English, has the nice property of being composed mostly of short words, so the lines can be broken up into all sorts of different lengths, so the same passage of text can be rearranged into any number of shapes and aspect ratios, as long as the total area on the page remains roughly the same.
Most non-designers, when putting a document together in word, simply use a single column, with the default margins. If they need to include pictures, they’ll often put them in at the top or bottom of the page, or if they do put them in the middle, will often interrupt the text above the picture and resume it below. This is equivalent to using a bucket for all one’s water-containing needs. Sure, it’s very practical at times, but it’s hardly the thing to impress dinner guests. Sometimes, it pays to be more creative with text placement.
The horizontal width of a block of text is called its “measure.” Unless the text is justified, the length of an individual line will typically be less than the measure; the measure is the maximum length of any line within the block. Justification is the process of forcing every line (except, usually, the last line of a paragraph) to be exactly equal in length to the measure, thus having clean edges at both sides, as opposed to a ragged margin.
There are a number of reasons one wants to have control over the measure, and like most things in typography, there are always trade-offs to be made. Making the measure wider can help fix awkward spacing in justified text, and is usually slightly more efficient in fitting text into a small area on the page if the paragraphs are long, as every line break represents a little loss of space, since the words usually won’t fit exactly into the space available on the line. However, expanding the measure also brings associated problems - the longer the line, the harder it is for the eye to trace its way back to the beginning of the next line, decreasing readability by increasing the number of times the reader will lose his or her place. Also, if the text contains many short paragraphs, wider measures can actually be less efficient, as a great deal of space is lost when a paragraph ends partway through a line.
Using a sketch to plan layout
There are two ways to change the measure. One is to break the text into columns. On a portrait-oriented 8.5×11 page, two columns are often optimal, as 7.5-8 inches is actually an extremely wide measure, usually too wide - the proliferation of single-column typed documents is mostly a throwback to the days of typewriters, but even in this day and age of powerful word-processing software, the majority of people haven’t outgrown this Dark Age in typographical history, due to a combination of habit and lack of understanding of the technology.
The other thing you can do is to adjust the white space on the page. Changing the width of the left and, particularly, the right margin of a page will result in a corresponding change in the measure. If you have more than one column, you can also adjust the gutters, that is If your document contains many images and/or is likely to be read by someone who might want to take their own notes, having a wide right margin is a very good idea! It allows pictures to stick halfway into the text and protrude out into the margin in an aesthetically pleasing fashion, and provides a convenient place to take notes.
Remember, too, that you needn’t stick to one measure for the whole page. Balance and harmony are important, but especially for text with natural divisions, and when there are images that can be used as visual dividers, you can split the text up into different areas of the page and vary the margins and columns between them. You can also use typeface variations as discussed before, to further create a separation between the different sections.
The key to creating a nice design in these cases is to experiment quickly by means of sketches, before starting to set the actual text. Using lines for text and crossed-out boxes to represent images, do some brainstorming - come up with as many viable layouts as you can before settling on the one that provides the best organization of the information and the most aesthetically pleasing page.
A recent thread on IndieGamer brought up the subject of addiction in games. The original poster linked to several articles on the subject, which discussed both how to create addictive gameplay by using constant small rewards, and also the ethical issues that have been raised, now that the very most addictive games, such as MMORPGs have begun to have increasingly documented detrimental effects - including death - in their heaviest users.
For some reason all these articles focus on the idea of achievements and item collecting, but neglect what I consider to be an equally-important aspect to making a game addictive: granularity/stopping points.
When stepping away from something, we naturally want to stop at a convenient lull in the experience. If I’m working on a piece of art, I’ll usually stop after finishing some object or area of the canvas. If I’m reading a book, it’ll preferably be at the end of a chapter, but if the chapters are too long, I’ll instinctively try to find a place where the end of a paragraph and the end of a page coincide, so I can start at the top of the next page when I come back to it. If I need to pause a rented movie for whatever reason, I’ll wait until right after a particularly important scene.
I think most, if not all, people play video games the same way. The easiest games to put down are ones divided into levels (or larger levels, divided into smaller waypoints), which take maybe 10 or 20 minutes to play. The decision whether or not to continue playing is thus broken into finite, significant, but manageable chunks. If there’s something else we need to do, eventually we will decide that we don’t want to commit to another 10-20 minutes, and it’s easy to put it down because we feel we’ve reached the end of a chapter in the story, and the game is giving us permission to stop there and come back later.
If you want people to stay glued to your game, rather than playing in such increments, there are two things you can do. One is to make the “chapters” longer, but this is a questionable strategy, as people will be less likely to come back to your game at all if they know they’re committing to an hour or more before they reach a good stopping point.
A much better, and more common strategy, is to make the gameplay either continuous, or make the bites so small that it’s always possible to play “just one more round.” This can be likened to the potato chip/candy phenomenon - no matter how full, guilty or nauseated the eater is feeling, they always find themselves reaching for just one more chip or gummi bear, since the commitment each time is so small. You can observe that the phenomenon decreases with something slightly larger, like a cookie, and disappears almost entirely with something on the scale of a cupcake.
Many Flash games take this model. I played a beta version (no public release yet) of an addictive little shooter called Bullet Time the other day; instead of featuring levels and a win condition, the game was merely about surviving as long as possible. Of course, it offered degrees of achievement for surviving 15 seconds, 20 seconds, 30 seconds, 40 seconds, and so on… With games rarely lasting more than a minute, the temptation to give it one more try is very hard to resist, no matter how many “one more tries” you’ve already given it.
You can combine the two versions of the strategy, of course. The Civilization series is a good example. Games of Civilization (or its sequels) generally take so long that few gamers will play all the way through in a single session - thus, the primary stopping point is rarely reached. However, the game is broken into a series of turns, which usually do not take very long to play. Thus, the player is constantly tempted to play “one more turn” before saving and quitting. This is compounded later in the game by the fact that with so many cities and units present, there is almost always one that is on the verge of something exciting - one turn away from capturing an enemy city, one turn away from finishing a World Wonder, one turn away from a scientific discovery, one turn away from finishing the last unit needed to fill a transport ship and send it off to war…
I’m not an MMORPG player myself, but from what I’ve heard, they also employ a mixed strategy in this way; the everyday grinding of monsters is a continuous experience, with the time commitment to seek out and kill one more foe being very small, and thus difficult to escape from. Meanwhile, raids are apparently a very large time commitment, and impossible to put down partway through - especially since there are other real human beings counting on you.
In a way, this form of addictive gameplay is more insidious than the achievement/reward system, though of course the two effects are hardly mutually exclusive. The latter, at least, gives the players something they enjoy - what’s good for the developer is also good for the players, at least in moderation. However, decisions about stopping points are a bit trickier, ethically. As a player, I appreciate games that give me a convenient way of sitting down for what I know will be a finite and predictable amount of time. As a developer, on the other hand, I would love nothing more than to suck a player in, and have them spend much more time playing my game than they had intended. Even disregarding the problems associated with real addiction, there’s something a little bit shady about giving people something that’s less good for them as a consumer because there’s an advantage to you as the provider.
Of course, in talking about games, players usually use “addictive” as a positive descriptor. At least on the surface, it appears that game addiction is a consensual relationship. The armchair psychologist in me wonders if this is really the case though, or whether it’s actually a perfect example of post hoc rationalization: “I sat down to play this game for 15 minutes and ended up spending two hours instead. Therefore, the game must be really fun.” Is fun something that is determined by the player’s emotional state while engaged in the game, or by their tendency to play for long periods of time and/or come back for more? The two don’t necessarily go together, especially when coupled with a personality type that is prone to procrastination and feelings of guilt for doing so.
Those especially interested in the whole issue of game addiction may be interested to know that there is a 122-page thesis on the subject. I don’t know if I’ll have time to read the whole thing, but I’m definitely tempted to try.
Gameplay: 8/10 Graphics: 7/10 Sound: 7/10 Originality: 9/10 Overall: 8/10
Available for download on Greenhouse or direct from the developer (Broken Rules).
I bought And Yet It Moves without knowing anything about it, for four reasons. Firstly, it’s available for sale on Greenhouse, which is a site that I’ve learned to trust in terms of game selection; in general, they carry only indie games with good gameplay, and which are innovative in some way. Secondly, it’s priced at $9.99 instead of the ubiquitous $19.99 that most game developers seem to regard as an immutable fact of the industry. Thirdly, the logo is cool, and I’m a design nerd. Finally, I’ve been neglecting the blog for the past couple of weeks, and I figured I was about due for another review.
The game has turned out to be a very pleasant surprise in most ways, though technologically problematic for my outdated PowerPC Mac. The first thing one notices about it is the unique graphical style; the world is constructed out irregular chunks of photographs with torn paper edges, while the player character is a sketchy black and white line drawing. It’s a simple and aesthetically pleasing style, especially when seen in motion and suits the gameplay well. I think a lot of its charm comes from its originality, however; like the whole silhouettes thing (e.g. this and this and this), I’ll get tired of it quickly if others start emulating it.
The gameplay is likewise quite original. You move your little pencil-drawing character around with the WASD control scheme familiar to most players of indie action games; in this case, S is not used, but A and D are used to move left and right, while W jumps. The pace of the character’s movement seems quite sluggish compared to most platform games, but this is intentional, and necessary due to the other half of the gameplay, which would be overwhelming if the character moved at a more normal speed; using the arrow keys, you can rotate the entire world around the character, in increments of 90 degrees, allowing you to make turn floors into walls, walls into ceilings, and holes into tunnels, as well as making strange, loopy jumps possible.
At first glance, this mechanic seems equivalent to simply rotating the world’s gravity, and the camera along with it. This is not the case, however, as the character’s velocity is preserved relative to the screen, and not the world. Thus, when rotating the world, you’re also changing your character’s trajectory within it. This is helpful in some ways - allowing you to make 90 degree turns in mid-jump - but dangerous in others; in particular, it means that you’re always accelerating when in freefall… once travelling at sufficient speed for impact to be fatal, there’s no way of slowing yourself down for a safe landing.
Fortunately, checkpoints are abundant, and generally placed right after a particularly tough challenge, so you rarely have to repeat a frustrating part of a level after you’ve passed it once. Although some challenges rely on timing, reflexes and fine control, the majority are more puzzle-like in nature, requiring you to figure out the rules certain objects obey, and how to manipulate the world to take advantage of them. For instance, at one point, your path is barred by a (photograph of a) gorilla. Nearby, a tree produces bananas… but the bananas become bruised when striking a surface, and splatter after a few rough landings. Of course, the gorilla is at the far end of a small labyrinth, so you must attempt to rotate the world such that the banana falls cleanly through the labyrinth without striking the walls or floor, finally reaching the gorilla and convincing him to move out of your way.
Each level has its own theme or central mechanic in this way, and rarely are they reused. If, for instance, lighting things on fire is the key to one level, there will be several variations on that idea within the level, but you might never see it again in subsequent levels. This keeps the gameplay fresh, and makes you curious to see what’s coming next. It’s made possible by the graphical simplicity of the game; in games with more traditional art, the cost of producing art assets is such that a one-time gimmick or sprite is a luxury that can rarely be afforded - generally only in the game’s climactic moments.
This economical art style is presumably also the reason that the game is priced at $9.99 instead of the usual $19.99. Through their clever idea, the developers have managed to produce an entertaining game that can be sold at an even more affordable price than most indie offerings, without looking cheap. Of course, as an freelance artist myself, I wouldn’t like it became the norm for developers to come up with gimmicks to all-but-eliminate the need for an art budget, but as a consumer, it’s certainly nice to get something cool-looking for half the usual price.
My primary complaint about the game is with its performance on my PowerPC-based Mac. Even on the lowest graphical settings, the game slows to a crawl if it isn’t allowed to monopolize my system’s resources. I imagine this isn’t a problem for PC users and owners of Intel-based Macs, but if you’re using an older Mac and are contemplating buying the game, it’s something to consider. Also, a bug in one of the early levels caused the game to hang - however, the tech support guy at Broken Rules answered my query quickly, assuring me that it’s a bug that only occurs on PPC Macs, that it will be fixed in the next release, and providing me with a way to unlock the next level so as to skip the problem for the time being.
And Yet It Moves is a good example of a game which is artsy without being an “art game,” and a successful experiment in unusual mechanics that turn out to be a lot of fun. Even my less gaming-inclined friends have said they like watching the game over my shoulder, as the visuals are so interesting, and the gameplay delightfully vertiginous, especially played at full screen. At its low price-point, I would call it a must-have for anyone with a PC or Intel-based Mac, and still worth the technological frustration even for PPC Mac users.
Recently, on the IndieGamer Forums, someone started a thread about a phenomenon familiar to many independent business owners. Small business is forever caught up in a series of gold rushes, and that’s especially true for technology-based businesses, such as computer game development.
The thread in question was mostly just a rant about how your patience can wear thin the umpteenth time a well-meaning but clueless friend seeks to persuade you that you have to get in on whatever trend the media is currently hyping. At the moment, it’s iPhone apps. The thread brought up the question of how to explain to such people that by the time you hear about it, it’s probably too late.
I came up with the following graph, which got a much stronger positive response from my fellow forum members than I’d anticipated:
Of course, this graph is not based on any statistics or factual information whatsoever, only my own feelings about the way these trends progress. I had my tongue in my cheek when I drew it, but the general consensus on IndieGamer is that it’s qualitatively accurate. The trouble is with the way developer activity, customer base and media attention interrelate, and it results in the often-quoted cycle of “Innovators, Imitators and Idiots.”
At the beginning, developer activity and customer base increase together - a new technology appears on the scene, and the desire of people to use it is limited by the amount of content available, while the development of content is limited by the perceived commercial potential… which of course, depends on the number of users. The developers in this phase are the innovators, who have the foresight to guess at the future popularity of the technology.
However, developer activity has a snowball-like nature. Smart businesspeople spend a lot of time looking sideways, watching what the competition is doing. They see this burgeoning market and get on the bandwagon. This first generation of imitators is often the one to make the most money, more even than the innovators (though not always). Unfortunately, once some people start making a lot of money, the number of others trying to pile on the bandwagon increases exponentially, quickly outpacing the customer base, which tends to level out after a while.
Finally, the mainstream media’s attention is attracted. Although certain independent publications may have had their eye on the technology for a while, the general public’s attention is only drawn to the phenomenon long after it’s common knowledge to people in the business. By that point, of course, the market is oversaturated and it’s the time for the smart businesspeople to be moving on to the next big thing. Some people may still be getting rich, but getting on board at that point is more like buying lottery tickets than a reasonable business decision. The people who buy into the hype and try to get involved in a market they don’t understand at this point are, unfortunately, the “idiots” referred to before. It’s perhaps too harsh a term, since it’s a natural mistake to make, but nonetheless, these people tend to lose money more often than they make any.
Quebec-based game developer Citérémis has just released their first game, Aztaka. This is by far the biggest computer game project I’ve been involved with - the game was written entirely in French, and I was brought in a few months before release to translate all the game text into English. I’ll also be coordinating any other volunteer translators to localize the game for other countries - so far, we have a German and a Portuguese translator, but if any translators of other languages are reading this and want to help, please don’t hesitate to contact me.
You can download a free demo and/or purchase the full game at the company’s website: http://aztaka.citeremis.com
Aztaka is a side-scrolling adventure/RPG set in the world of Aztec mythology. The player takes on the role of Huitzilo, son of the Sun God. Accompanied by his friend Ayopha, who has been turned into a hummingbird by Huitzilo’s evil sister, Huitzilo seeks to gather the Seven Ancient Phonograms, which will open the gateway to the Path of the Gods, thereby freeing his people from an era of darkness and bloodshed.
Central to the game’s mechanics is the idea of manipulating spiritual energy. This energy appears onscreen as a globule of light, generally after slaying an enemy. It comes in different forms, and can be manipulated with the mouse (while Huitzilo’s movements are controlled with the keyboard). The different forms of energy have different powers, and can, for instance, heal injured characters, or cause platforms to appear in order to give Huitzilo access to areas that were once out of reach.
One of the game’s biggest selling points is its amazing art quality. Citérémis set out to create a visually stunning product, and they came through in spades with Aztaka. For reasons of budget and efficiency, most side-scrolling games rely heavily on tiles for terrain and background - although clever level design can conceal the repetitiveness to an extent, it’s still intrinsic to the genre. By contrast, Aztaka’s backgrounds consist of huge, beautiful landscape paintings, with several levels of parallax and little or no repetition. The character animations are likewise extremely fluid and realistic.
Aztaka is impressive by any standard, but especially so as the company’s first release. So many independent developers bite off more than they can chew for their first project, and it’s rare to see such an ambitious project reach completion. It was a great pleasure to work with Citérémis on Aztaka, and I hope the game will do well, and that they’ll involve me in their future projects.
I am extremely busy with both freelance contracts and personal projects this week, and won’t have the time to make many blog posts. In the meantime, this is an essay that I wrote a couple of months ago for a post on IndieGamer, before I had a blog set up for such things.
Games are a controversial subject these days. Gamers and non-gamers debate constantly about the possible value and dangers associated with games, and gamers argue amongst themselves about which games or genres are better than others. This may be due, in large part, to the increasingly diverse nature of games; indeed, the term has begun to be applied so generally that two “games” may have very little in common with one another, beyond being forms of interactive entertainment. When dealing with such a broad categorization, it is impossible to establish clear criteria for gauging quality. It is thus inevitable that these quasi-religious arguments should go on indefinitely, with no resolution possible.
The word “game” used to mean something quite specific. Even the concept of a game was fairly universal, regardless of language. For thousands of years a game has been a form of competition between two or more parties, within the constraints of a set of rules. It could be a contest of physical speed or strength, mental ability, luck, or some combination of those. Regardless, the key elements were that a game had: Rules that were clearly understood by all parties; an objective; one or more winners, either at the end of the game (for finite games, like chess or soccer), or at any given point in time (for infinite games, like tag or poker); and the ability to replay the same game multiple times, following the same rules, but with potentially different results.
This is a clear way to separate games from non-game forms of conflict/competition (i.e. fighting, arguing, business), which don’t follow set rules, and non-game forms of entertainment, such as non-interactive ones like books, and solitary challenges, which are usually called “puzzles.”
Up until the advent of mass production, innovation in games was limited, because anything destined for a wider audience had to use either standard components (e.g. deck of cards, chess set, or dice in the West, or equivalent items in other cultures) or commonplace objects (e.g. horseshoes). Starting mostly in the 20th century, new mass-produced household board games started popping up, but designers instinctively stuck to the idea of a competition between individuals or teams, even if in a very casual way.
The latter half of the 20th century brought two successive revolutions to the world of gaming, in rapid succession. Each was accompanied by a massive broadening of the term “game.”
In 1974, TSR published the first edition of Gary Gygax’s Dungeons & Dragons, the first role-playing game (RPG). Although the existence of such games is now taken for granted by most aficionados, one cannot overstate the change in thinking that they represent. Although conflict is still present - between the player characters and fictitious foes - there is no longer competition between the parties involved; although the players could be said to “lose” if their characters fail or die, this does not equate to a “win” for the Game Master. There are goals, but no clear victory conditions for the players, and although there are rules, they are not exhaustive and very much open to be interpreted or disregarded entirely by the Game Master.
Prior to that, the first computer games began to appear. Rather than a sudden revolution, however, these created a more gradual muddying of the waters. Many early games attempted to simulate more traditional games, such as Tic-Tac-Toe, chess, or tennis (Pong). These often pitted two human opponents against one another, as computing had not advanced far enough to provide a worthy opponent. As such, these early games did not digress very far from the traditional definition.
Eventually, single-player games began to appear, featuring either fixed or randomly-generated challenges. Although still popularly referred to as “games,” many of these bore more resemblance to puzzles. Nonetheless, for many games, the addition of the concept of “points” created a sort of meta-game, in which multiple players could compete against one another by trying to obtain the highest score, despite playing the game separately, on different computers and at different times.
The advent of artificial intelligence introduced another ambiguity. Although a game like Robots, in which the enemies follow the simple rule of moving directly towards the player at all times, should probably correctly be considered a puzzle, other games feature more sophisticated and unpredictable AIs. This leads one to ask the question: At what point should a program’s AI be considered an “opponent,” as opposed to a part of the game/puzzle? The Turing test is one possible answer, although that would leave most modern games being classified as puzzles. Another criterion might be whether the game’s designer, knowing his own code, can reliably predict the program’s behaviour (or the probabilities of its behaviour, if randomness is present).
Another major change came with the ability to interrupt play and resume it later on. Eventually, this was accomplished with saved games, but earlier games implemented it via passwords. This allowed games to be made longer, but also began to remove the repeated playing that characterized many early games. They began to be more like crossword puzzles, to be set down after completion in favour of a new challenge. Now, this idea of games with a clear end has become so assimilated into the gamer’s psyche that a common datum passed around about new games is “number of hours to complete,” much as descriptions of books often give a page count.
Although early games were often quite difficult to complete - many beyond the reach of most gamers - the increasing emphasis on “completion” has caused them to become easier, as customers are often let down or frustrated if they cannot make it through to the conclusion, as if they’ve gone to the theatre only to have the movie interrupted fifteen minutes short of the climax. Although games vary in terms of how linear the route to the ending is, most have only a single endpoint, and reaching it is more or less inevitable, unless the player grows bored and abandons the game before.
Thus, we’ve reached a point where there are many very different forms of interactive entertainment that we still lump together under the umbrella term, “game.” Moreover, the players are equally varied in terms of their preferences and expectations.
Some want to compete against opponents, be they human or computer. These are the gamers in the very traditional sense; they favour multiplayer titles, or stick to physical tabletop board games or real-life sports.
Some want to overcome specific challenges, either cognitive or reflex-based. They favour traditional puzzles like crosswords or sudoku, solitary sports like skiing, archery or juggling, and computer or video games that resemble these activities.
Others want to create their own stories and make their own challenges. These are the people with the role-playing personality; some may still play old-fashioned pencil-and-paper role-playing games, but many favour the so-called “sandbox” computer and video games.
Lastly, there is an ever-growing segment of the market that simply wants to be part of someone else’s story. They don’t mind linearity in gameplay, nor do they want challenges that are difficult enough to break the flow of their progress through the story. They don’t need more than the illusion of control over the game’s events, much as any movie-goer or reader can suspend disbelief for the purpose of entertainment.
Although variations in taste are a given in almost all areas of life, it’s important to see how these different forms of entertainment actually bear very little resemblance to one another, other than the fact that we use the same word to describe them all. Imagine if all “handiwork” were lumped together under that single term - a cabinet-maker applying his standards of excellence to evaluate a sweater might find it very lacking, even if it had been made by a world-class knitter.
There is little hope of convincing the general public - or even the industry - to adopt more specialized terms. Nonetheless, the progress of interactive entertainment in general would be considerably advanced if it were more commonly recognized that these are more than different genres; they are different products, different activities entirely. We must stop thinking of a first-person shooter and a casual title as an action movie and a romantic comedy, respectively, but rather acknowledge that they are indeed more like a cabinet and a sweater - intended for different purposes and used in different ways, and thus subject to different theories and standards.
