Games and Men

Efficient writing for video games

2011-01-10T13:54:00.000-08:00

Good writing in video games is crucial. Note though that writing does not equal story. Story is part of the writing but let's not forget menus, tutorials, items and skills description, etc.. When I write for games, I often rewrite the same texts 5 or 6 times with a strong emphasis on reducing the word count to the strict minimum. In that regard, Dawn of Heroes for the Nintendo DS is appaling by it's inneffiency. It seems 70% of the texts could have been removed for a better effect. There is much to learn from other's failures so let's jump on this opportunity.

What is Dawn of Heroes?

DoH is a regular tactical RPG where you control up to 5 characters on a battlefield and use their abilities against a range of enemies. The game's mechanics are interesting as is and the game itself features nice pixel arts along with a cartoony 3D renderings of the battles. It features a very large range of abilities and often require to read their effect description in order to take good decisions in battle. Since this is an important part, I'll focus on the skills description in this article.

Nayeli's Omniscient ability

At first sight, the description is a bit long. One important information is highlighted in yellow, which helps a little but other important informations remain "hidden" through this block of text.

First sentence : "The skill-user" is totally redundant to the screen itself. We are looking at a character's skill and as such know who it is affecting.

Second sentence : "the skill user" is used again with the same redundancy effect, followed by "suffers from a debuff", which could easily be removed as it doesn't add anything to the only important information here : "locks down Move for 2 turns."

Suggested rewrite :

Grants unlimited range to all abilities.
Using an ability locks down movement for 2 turns.

Two small sentences, displayed one over the other for easy "bullet point" style reading. The text is reduced by almost 50%. It went from 28 words down to 15 words.

Yuji's Sweep Kick

It's a bit shorter than the previous text but there is still a lot of uninformative bits that can be removed.

Important informations : "disables Move", "1 turn" and "area of effect".

There's a redundancy : "Places a Curse debuff" and "This debuff". What's more is that both can be removed without losing any important information.

Suggested rewrite :

Disables Move for all enemies within area of effect for 1 turn.

All this babble of "placing a curse" and "debuff" is totally irrelevant to the player. The only thing that matters is what this skill does to who. And as such, the text has been reduced from 18 words down to 12. The new rewrite also places the effect of the ability (Disables Move) right at the start of the text, instead of at the end. This is a good thing since it is the most important information.

Reynald's Amnesia

Important informations : "an (one) enemy", "locks down Abilities that cost MP" and "1 turn".

This text contains the same redundancy than the previous one with the use of "Curse debuff" and "This debuff". In fact, all texts I've seen in the game so far are pretty much consistent with this structure (while not very good, at least they are consistent).

We could move the "1 turn" to the end of the text and then remove everything before "Locks down abilities". This would get us :

Locks down Abilities of an enemy that cost MP to use for 1 turn.

20 words down to 14. This sentence could be made even shorter (and easier to understand) if there was a single word or expression to designate "abilities that cost MP to use" in the game's rules. Let's say it is "Spells" (as opposed to "Abilities", which would be abilities with cooldown effects instead of MP cost). We could rewrite this sentence again :

Locks down Spells of an enemy for 1 turn.

I'm down to 9 words. This little change would affect all other places were "Abilities that cost MP to use" and would considerably reduce the word count (and reading time) over the course of the game.

Disabling magic is a common rule in RPGs and TRPGs and is often known as the "silence" effect.

Silence an enemy for 1 turn

6 words. From 20 words we went down to 6. Feels good doesn't it?

Assassination

This one is totally confusing as it requires the player to do mental maths in order to understand it's meaning. Why write 800% ? Is it relevant to the player to read a percentage? Computers excel at doing math but the writer on this one decided it would be more interesting to let the player do the work.

Let's go straigth to a rewrite :

Deals 5 Physical Damage.
25% chance to deal 40 additional damage. Cannot be avoided.

19 words down to 14. There is not much to remove here but there is great improvement in changing how it is explained. By replacing the 800% with the actual number, we remove a useless strain on the user's brain.

Comparison with an established title

In comparison, let's look at another popular tactical RPG : Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. The rules of this game are deeper, more complex, yet they manage to elegantly fit it all in the tiny display screen of the Gameboy Advance.

It might take a while to the untrained eye to read the whole screen here but an accustomed player will have no problem finding what he needs to know. This is the preparation of a simple attack. We see the health and magic points of both attacker and defender, the damage dealt and the success rate.

To be fair, DoH does it too with as much elegance. However, where the writing shines in this screen is in the red "Counter" word over the enemy's stats. This single word gives all the information the player needs : attacking this character will trigger a counter-attack. The understanding of this word lies in the rules of the game. The player already knows what a counter is and if by chance it's the first time he encounters this skill, he needs but a single time to learn and remember it's meaning.

Short, elegant, single word.

The little ninja here, controlled by the player, prepares a special attack. Again we can see the damage and success rate of the ability. The "Counter" word is here again, showing that the enemy will counter-attack if possible but it is now gray as the ninja is too far from him to allow a counter. The change of color is all that is needed to understand that.

Finaly, we can see a short text at the top of the screen : "Fire damage & confuse!". 4 words. Can it get any shorter than that? All the required information about the attack is in these 4 short words. The player recognizes the meaning of those four words through his understanding of the game's rules (about elemental damages and special ailments). Elegant!

Conclusion

Writing is crucial to the design of a game and to the player's understanding of it's rules. Clarity first, all informations required to make a choice should be easily available but also easily readable! Every extra word on screen has the potential to hide important informations and / or confuse the player. It's important to re-read and re-write all texts in a game and eliminate everything that do not bear any informations.

Short and to the point, nothing there without a reason.

Sponsoring MegaDrill

2010-10-05T19:40:00.000-07:00

8 months already... MegaDrill has been out in the wild for almost 8 months now and it's only now that I dare take a look back at the numbers! Here's a little "post-mortem" report showing a bit of numbers about the sale of MegaDrill

As I've mentioned previously, MegaDrill was made with the purpose of making money! Not that I'm an evil money-loving capitalist or anything, quite the contrary, but money is a necessity and if this game didn't made good money I would have had to return to the employment market (no thanks).

The Game
The main inspiration for this game is the success of games like "Shopping Cart hero" and, mainly, "Learn to Fly". I emulated the flow of these games (play-uprade-play) while introducing a completely different metaphor (going down instead of going higher). MegaDrill is different enough that it does not suffer from being compared to those games directly.

In the end, it's a great game. It's highly polished, it has a fine gameplay, the balance is pretty good and I'm quite glad with the look and feel of it. I think I've made a very good job even though I never was "in love" with that game.

I also worked a lot on the presentation of the game. I worked a lot on the icons and made a trailer to present the game to sponsors. I polished even the integrations of a fake sponsor logo in the game, making it look as good as possible (you can see it at the end of the trailer).

Performances
MegaDrill has reached over 4 million views after 8 months of life. To tell the truth, I expected more but I'm not really disappointed about it. It did a fair job. More interestingly, the game has been played all the way to the end almost 1,5 million times! This means that a THIRD of the players who got their hands on the game actually went all the way through the end! That's very good for a half-hour long free game.

The Bidding calendar

The game was up for "sponsor view" on FGL at the beginning of December 2009.

December 7th 20094
4 bids from 4 different sponsors. Excellent start!

First bid at $1000 flat
Two "per million views" performance bonus bids
Frag Time : flat high four figure (obviously hoping for a quick buy)

December 9th 2009

Another high four figure + some NG ratings bonuses
Frag Time : raising the bid a bit, including the same NG ratings bonuses

I discussed the terms with Frag Time, explaining that I'd rather go for a performance bonus deal. He made another bid on the same day :

Frag Time : about half the amount of previous bid but with a "per million views" bonus.

December 11th 2009

Enters Kongregate! A big advance on a "per unique clicks on sponsor's link" bonus deal. I was delighted to get Kong's interest. I love these guys, and I know I can trust.

December 21st 2009

Spent a while discussing the bids with Greg. I was leaning toward the high amount offered by Frag Time. Kongregate placed another "per-click" bonus based bid with different terms that pleased me more. I set his bid as "best bid".

Things slowed down for Christmas. At the very end of december, another sponsor contacted me about the game but couldn't place a bid until the beginning of January.

January 3rd 2010

Dumpling Games : An important sponsor in the bidding process so I gave him a delicious name. :) He placed a bid similar to Kongregate's with slightly different terms. That would soon give me headaches.

Kongregate and Dumpling Games entered a short bidding war until the end of january, slowly increasing their offers. On one side, there were more risks but higher potential. On the other side it was less risks but less potential. After every bid I made calculations to weight the risk and rewards of several scenarios. Kongregate came on top in the end. I discussed a last possible offer with Dumpling Games, something totally different. I refused it to gamble on the per-click bonus with Kongregate (I ended up losing a little bit on this gamble compared to Dumpling Game's final offer but really the value of the two bids were really close). Also, I must say I really wanted to work with Kongregate.

A deal was accepted at the end of january and the game launched the 10th of February 2010. The primary sponsorship got me around $12K.

Everybody loves numbers!

Money earned
around $12K for the primary sponsorship.
around $2000 in non-exclusive licenses
around $3000 in ad revenue (CPMStar + Kongregate's revenue share)

Total Costs :
Costs were really low, totaling a little under $2000 for the musician's salary and FGL's commissions.

Total e-mails exchanged during the bidding war:
with Dumpling Games : over 60
with Kongregate : over 40

Conclusions
Important lessons in selling a game :

good communications with sponsors is essential. Take the time to clarify each points of the bids together.

Be patient. For MegaDrill, a major sponsor came into the bidding a whole month after it started.

Presentation is a MUST. I worked a lot on the game's description on FGL and on the icons. I made a kick-ass trailer and this certainly helped! Hooking the sponsors is crucial. Also, it proves you are a serious developer.

We're still young

2010-07-29T06:36:00.000-07:00

Nowadays there is a real cult of the youth. Advertisement makes us believe we should look young forever and could if we used their products. The star system goes in the same direction with ever younger singers, actors and other "young talents". It is commonly believed that we are in our top years when we are in our twenties and that it is at this moment that we build our life (getting out of school, getting a career, car, house, kids, boat, lodge, and blah blah blah...). By our thirties all we are supposed to do is work and enjoy these things until we retire. And then we just enjoy these things.

Young, young, young. What a boring song.

All of this is just bullshit. "Young" (as in 24 and under) is just a tiny part of our life. What happens after that? Everything. I'm in my late twenties and I feel I really just started to live. I feel I really just got to a level of confidence and got enough knowledge to really do something with the rest of my life. How could I have done everything already?

I recently read a book about "simple living lifestyle". The author (Dominique Loreau, a french writer) made a point that shattered several constructed beliefs well anchored in my mind: she says it's by the age of 45-50 that there is a real change in a person (a big part of it due to the freedom we get back when kids go away from home). At that age, she says, we are at about half of our living years.

Wait.. what? At 50 I'll still have a few decades for doing... well... whatever I want? Gee! Common beliefs are that by 60-65 we should just retire and enjoy ourselves, waiting to die, basically. This doesn't have to be like that!

I'm almost thirty now. I'm unemployed. I have a kid. I work for myself making video games. I make a living out of that working 20 or 30 hours a week. I live frugally but I live well. I'm not depriving myself of anything (I'm just not buying all the shits advertisements tell me to). Will I still make video games for myself in thirty years from now? I don't know. Probably not. Maybe. It doesn't matter.

What matters is that I'm almost thirty and I'm still young. Very young. I have time. I can change my life around whenever I need to, whenever it makes sense to. YOU are still young, even if you are older than me. What matters is to do what we want, to do what we believe is right for us, not what society and culture tells us to. The important peoples, the ones changing the world around are not in their twenties (well, there is rare exceptions). Peoples making changes are old, have experience, have explored a field of knowledge, master their craft, made errors in the past and have enough wisdom now to create meaningful things.

This is why Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his researches for his book Creativity : Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention only interviewed people over the age of 60 in different fields of knowledge. The only well known video game designer I can think of that is that old is Tōru Iwatani, the creator of Pac-Man (he turned 60 this year). Even Shigeru Miyamoto is not that old.

What does it say about video games (because it is a video game blog after all!)? Video games has just been created, there haven't been no real changes made since it's birth. Forget about processing power, fancy 3D graphics, motion controls, and next-gen hypes. Those are all fancy gadgets with which we do the same games over and over. I tell you again what I believe with all my heart: there has been NO real change in the face of video games since it's birth.

What does it say about us video game designers and designers wannabe? Everything is yet to be done. The potential of games is yet to be revealed and it is not by reveling in technology and gadgets that it will be unlocked. I do not pretend to know how to do it but maybe, and just maybe, I'll be able to put my share in unlocking this potential after I've acquired enough knowledge, in thirty years or so.

Because I'm still young. And you are too.

Why getting a job as a game designer sucks

2010-06-15T18:05:00.000-07:00

Being employed sucks... big time! Even in the game industry. Maybe even more so in the game industry. Actually, working as a game designer was the worst job I ever had. I'd much rather go back to delivering pizzas than to get another job in the game industry (ok, I don't think it's true but mostly because being a designer pays much better than delivering pizzas).

Yeah, I know, the game industry is so glamorous, games are so great, it's a creative industry, surely what I'm saying is non-sense. It MUST be great to be a game designer! Well... tough luck kid. It ain't. Here is a few reasons why:

Working like a dog
One of the most important questions you will be asked when being interviewed for a game industry job is if you are willing to do overtime. If you really want the job, answer « yes, I'm willing to sleep under the desk whenever it will be necessary! ». This automatically adds a hundred points to your interview's score. To be fair, quality of life is a big issue in the game industry and it's being worked on. I've heard a lot of new studios manage things better and rarely rely on overtime but good places like that are still rare.

Not so creative
Projects are long, teams are big, employees are specialized. There is a lot of space for ideas and decisions in creating games but most decisions are taken at high level, sometimes in committees or through focus groups. Even lead designers on small projects are not free to make all decisions. In fact, I've had to cope with several crappy decisions taken by an oversea producer I've never met. It CAN be a creative job, but you have to earn trust through the years, and even so, you are always a victim of market trends (unless you are called Shigeru Miyamoto or Will Wright, then you can do whatever you think is good).

Low employment security
It's a volatile market and it's moving fast. Studios rise and fall, they get bought by behemoths like EA and Ubisoft, projects are cancelled and people get fired by the dozen when the shareholders require it. Nothing is carved in stone so if you are looking for a secure job, go work for a bank. For some it's a boon though, they can get hired in other studios and diversify their experiences. If you don't care about security, than proceed.

Hierarchy and peer pressure
This is, for me, the worst part. This is not related to the game industry alone but to being employed at large. You have to submit to a hierarchy for all your actions and not only does the bosses make you feel bad for what you do « wrong » but you peer makes you feel it too. When we entered crush time on a project and I decided to go home at normal hour, my team barely looked at me the next morning. When the project was extended into my planned vacations and I refused to cancel them, I was a monster. Gee, great! Make ME feel bad for the bad management!

But... I still want to make games!!
You want to work at your own pace on creative game projects you are passionate about? You refuse to live under the fear of losing your job and the stress of hierarchy? Well screw this whole game industry shtick! Head for the Flash game industry, it's a booming market! :)

(and what better place to get you started than here)

Art is not a result, it's a process

2010-03-10T08:18:00.000-08:00

[Disclaimer: The opinions in this article are purely my own and may not (probably not) reflect those of other artists]

Is this art? Is this not art? How can we tell really? Art is ever present in our lives but also so subjective. To one a particular piece of production is great art and to another it's just rubbish. My guess is that we can never come to any universal definition of what is art, but to me, art is much more in the process, in how we do things, than in the result of that process.

When is it art?
To me, we create art when we do something for the sake of doing it. In these cases, we are most likely to be driven by the desire to express something; a feeling, pain, joy, a message or a reflection... The process is highly internalized and comes from deep inside ourselves. If we are not driven by these internal motivations, then we are driven by external ones like peer pressure, engagements with others, the need to make money, hunger... In these cases, not only does our motivations come from external sources, but we also look OUT for cues about what we should do; how do people react? What other production has been successful? What do experts think about this particular technique? Etc..

Art comes from deep inside and, in this matter, I believe that the only person that can really judge if a production is art or not, is the artist that produced it in the first place. This is why I will here look at two of my own productions (follow the links below to try the games).

Play Finding my Heart
Play MegaDrill

My own process
The last two games I've created are widely different in their design but mostly in the process by which I came to designing them. One is art and the other is not. I'll briefly explain how I came to design both of those games and then I'll talk more about the result of my work.

Process 1: Finding my Heart
Finding my Heart is an example of a production that came from deep inside. The only motivation to doing the project was to do the project. I felt like doing a small, simple adventure game and the idea of playing with and using emotions as part of the story came to me very quickly. I wrote a scenario and knew instantly that I would create this game. I didnt went through any market study, I didnt looked at other successful games, I didnt CARED about other games. I just wanted to do that one game because I thought it was the right thing to do at the moment.

Process 2: MegaDrill
After completing and distributing Finding my Heart, I was slightly frustrated that it did not made much money. It did not seemed like a good way to actually make a living so I went on to look at popular games, in search of a sort of "gold mine". The games that caught my attention were "Shopping Cart Hero" and, more importantly, "Learn to Fly". The idea is very simple: go as far as you can, upgrade, try again. I played with that concept until I came upon the idea of going deeper underground instead of further away. This felt different enough to be original. I applied the upgrading concept very faithfully to what I had seen and threw a bunch of rewarding mechanics (grabbing money and collecting trophies) to keep the player hooked. I was set. The motivations here were mainly to make money and get a widely successful game (but mostly to make money). I looked outside to what people liked as much as possible and tried to provide.

Results
Quite simply, the results for both games are exactly what I had first envisioned: Finding my Heart is a beautiful game that I'm very proud of and MegaDrill pays the bills. But I'm not particularly proud of MegaDrill. Sure, it is a good, very polished game and the monetary rewards are great and will allow me to produce more games, but it is not something personal to me. It doesnt come anywhere close to the love I have for Finding my Heart.

I think it also shows in the public's reception: the comments for MegaDrill are very generic while the comments for Finding my Heart are often very personal (going from a deep hatred for the game to a profound appreciation). This is very encouraging, as it means that a genuine work of art, while it may not have the same market presence as a purely commercial game, has the power to make a deep impact in the viewers. That alone is a strong incentive for me to go back to make games that are meaningful to me and not only "market studied" designs.

Conclusion
Game CAN be art. If this short analysis of my early work does not prove it to the world, at least it deeply convinces me of it. This is what I'm looking for. If I had to go through life making games for the sake of making money, I'd probably drop it all and go find something better to do (like becoming a lawyer or a doctor). But I have the soul of an artist and I found that games can have a real impact on the players. This fuels my drive to continue in this path.

As a closure, here is a player's comment on Finding my Heart:

So this is kinda ironic... While play this my girl started complaining that I spend to much time on the computer and not with her. I never was able to finish the game as she kicked me out. While at a friend's place later that night I started playing it again. I guess it's now time to copy what happened in this game...

Mission accomplished.

A game analysis: Super Ghouls'n Ghosts or the double-jump done right

2010-01-16T09:35:00.000-08:00

In this piece, I'll take a deep look at the game mechanics of the 1991 classic platformer Super Ghouls'n Ghost released on the Super Nintendo system. I'll first be looking at the excellent implementation of the now well known “double-jump” mechanic and secondly at the different weapons and armors and how the player “gambles for power” through the game.

A quick contextualization

Environment
Let's first look at the environment in which the hero progresses. Super Ghouls'n Ghosts (SGnG) features dark level heavily filled with evil creatures. The first level gives a good idea of the pace of the game with zombies constantly growing out of the ground at random places. Weak enemies are often overwhelming in numbers, appearing randomly, though they can be killed with single shots of the weakest weapons. Stronger enemies are placed at pre-defined locations and require more hits to be killed. The important thing to keep in mind here is that the pace of the game is extreme, seldom allowing the hero to stop to take it's breath. The player's reaction time is constantly being tested.

(To see the game in action, I recommend watching the “Let's Play Super Ghouls'n Ghosts” walkthrough video on youtube.)

Limiting controls
Being a platformer, two things the player does a lot in SGnG is run and jump. The hero runs at a fixed speed, meaning that as soon as the right or left key is pressed, he instantly reaches full speed. There is no acceleration or decceleration, he's either running full speed or not running at all.

The implementation of the jumping mechanic is similarly limiting: pressing the jump button instantly makes the hero jump at a fixed speed and height. Jumping while holding the left or right key makes the hero jump in the respective direction, but since the running speed is fixed, the jump trajectory is always the same. On level ground the hero will always travel the exact same distance (though the ground is seldom even). The hero can change his facing direction in mid-air but not his speed. Thus, once the jump has been launched, the player will land at a predictable position no matter what he does during the jump. The space of possibilities for jumping is limited to three different jump trajectories (not taking into account environment and obstacles).

In an other popular platform game of the same era: Super Mario World, we'll see that things are quite different. In this game the player has a lot of control on the running speed and jumping height of the character. While holding the right or left keys, the hero will start slow and accelerate before reaching full speed (he can reach a greater speed if the action button is held) and he will deccelerate before stopping after the button is released. The jumping height is defined by how much time the jump button is held, allowing for a great range of jumping height (a small tap makes him jump very low, holding the button can give him a lot more height). The jumping height is also affected by the running speed; the faster he runs the higher he can jump. Also, the player can control the hero's speed in air with the right and left keys, allowing him to slightly modify the trajectory as he is jumping. These mechanics allow for a nearly infinite number of possibilities of jumping trajectories!

With this comparison in mind, we can easily see how the basic controls of SGnG offer a lesser space of expression to the player. However...

Introducing the double-jump!

The double jumping mechanic is the real complexity of the game's controls. It allows the hero to do a second jump while in mid-air that works the same way as the first jump (offers the same three possible trajectories). This second jump thus allows the hero to change his direction or give him more height or distance. It can also be used to reach seemingly unreachable spots (platforms located under ledges for example). The second jump is, in itself, as limiting as the first jump in it's possibilites. However, it can be performed at ANY moment during the first jump's trajectory, thus allowing an almost infinite number of possible trajectories when mixing the two jumps.

This double jumping mechanic also allowed the designers a larger range of possibilities in creating the levels, with the inclusion of platforms that would be impossible to reach with a single jumping mechanic.

While the player has little control over the speed and the direction of each independent move, these limitations create a great predictability in the hero's movement, allowing to react much more quickly than if the hero had to accelerate and deccelerate to perform his moves. Mixed with a near infinite number of possible jump trajectories offered by the double jump mechanic, the player is given access not only to a very quick and responsive reaction time but also to a complex control scheme for his hero.

The controls in context
As previously mentioned, the pace of the game is very quick, with most levels featuring enemies constantly appearing at random places, forcing the player to stay in movement. Since jumps have a pre-defined trajectory, once a jump is started, there is a certain feeling of inevitability to the outcome. This is where the second jump is crucial. If an enemy suddenly appears in the player's trajectory, he has this second chance of saving himself from doom. However, this second jump must be well calculated. Unless the player can shoot down whatever is coming at him, he won't be able to change his trajectory until he touches the ground again. Thus, the game is constantly filled with situations that reminds us of the classic “last second” movie scene where the hero jumps out of the building as it explodes to pieces. A ghost appears in the hero's trajectory and he instantly double jumps in the opposite direction, the ghost flying on his heel, flying at the same speed until the hero finaly falls down millimeters under the ghost's path. Or the player jumps in a fatal pit to avoid some incoming projectiles falling down on him and jumps back on safe ground when the danger is passed.

The player's brain is constantly pre-calculating trajectories and dangers and any small error in his calculations can potentially put him in the helpless situation of watching his hero fall down to his doom, knowing full well that he is “done for” several fractions of seconds before he really dies. This is this feeling of inevitability, in conjonction with the fast pacing of the game and the extremely responsive controls, that makes this game so satisfying. The game is hard. Very hard. But every time the hero dies, the player knows full well that it is his fault, that there was another move he could have pulled that would have saved him. And so he tries again, strengthened with an ever more acute understanding of the system.

Gambling for power

In the second part of this analysis we'll take a look at how the difficulty is balanced between the weapons and armors available in the game. The game features several weapons differing in strength, speed and ease of use. Also, each weapons possess a unique magic spell that can be used only when the player obtains the magical gold armor.

Armors
It's first important to understand how the armor system works. There is three different armors available in the game. In order of power: the silver armor, the jade (green) armor and the magical gold armor. Each armor offers the same level of protection: after a single hit they explode, leaving the hero wearing only his boxers. However, later armors enhance the weapons' power. The jade armor changes the weapon into a magical weapon, making it quicker, more powerful or bigger depending on the weapon. The gold armor offers the same change but also allows the hero to perform a magic spell that is unique to each weapon.

The coveted armors are found inside treasure chests hidden through the levels which appear only when the hero moves through a specific location of the level. The content of each chest is relative to the hero's current armor AND to the sequence of chests found in the level (if the player misses a chest, even if it contains only a weapon, the next one won't have the piece of armor). The player cannot find the jade armor without the silver one and cannot find the gold armor if he doesnt have the jade armor. Thus, these armors are often extremely hard to find (and do require the player to memorize the chests' locations) and are even harder to keep as they are all lost from a single hit.

Weapons
Which brings us to the weapons and their magical powers. Weapons differ greaty in their use. While a few weapons are just simple projectiles flying straight ahead, like the quick knife or the lance, others travel differently like the circular motion of the flying axe or the upward motion of the two arrows coming out the bow. On top of that, each weapon has a very different magic spell that is unlocked by the magical gold armor. The interesting part of this mechanic here is that the weapons that are the easier to handle, like the knife or the bow and arrows, offer the weakest spells of all.

Above: the knife's dragon spell. Any enemy in the dragon's path is destroyed, though the actual path, following mostly the border of the screen, is very hard to target and pretty much fails to be useful.

On the other side, weapons like the scythe, which is very powerful but extremely slow and clumsy to use, offer the most powerful spells of all. Thus, choosing to handle a weapon like the scythe greatly increases the difficulty of the game, in comparison to using the quick and handy knife, as long as the hero has anything but the gold armor. But when he finally gets the gold armor, the power of the scythe's spell will make most enemies laughably easy to dispatch... Until he loses the armor again, that is.

Above: The scythe's powerful spell send a huge tornado flying in a circular motion on both side of the player, wiping about 80% of the screen, possibly hitting the same enemies multiple times.

This is where the gambling spirit of the player is taken into account. The powerful weapons like the scythe and axe are much more rare than the common lances and knifes so when faced with one of these weapons, it's a matter of taking the chance to temporarily increase the game's difficulty and try to go for the hard to find gold armor or keep the safe route with the ever handy knife but sacrifice the possibility to become god-like powerful. And since these choices don't come up all that often, it makes it even more difficult to choose.

(For a detailed look at the weapons and their spell, watch this extremely helpful youtube video showcasing each of the eight weapons of the games and their magical powers.)

This is most interesting as it offers parallel options to the player. His choices will depend on his expertise with the game and his personality. Does he wish to gamble? Is he comfortable enough with the game? Wishing for a challenge? Or just craving for power! Most beginners will go fo the knife or even the bow (which has a globally useless spell but is very easy to use). Expert players will take more risks, not to mention renewing the game's experience and it's challenge by playing it with a different weapon.

Conclusions
Let's take a step back and look at the most important design lessons that can be learned from this analysis.

1. Movement limitations can be used to make more responsive and predictable controls. It is still possible to have complex and precise control schemes whithin these limitations by mixing together the use of two (or more) limited movements.

It's also extremely important to carefully pace the game in accordance to these limitations. The speed, power and size of the enemies must be appropriate to the speed, power and size of the hero in order to offer a fair challenge.

2. Having to choose between items that are harder to use but offer a powerful incentive versus items that are easier to use but offer less potential makes for an interesting, meaningful choice and create longer term anticipations.

Getting a better score is NOT a powerful incentive to the average player. Greed for power, as is used here, is much more interesting. Other things like getting more experience, reaching new levels or anything that change the way the game is played or offer long term advantages are preferable. This is all about the potential outcome of the decisions over instant earnings.

3. Offering options (like the use of different weapons) that can make the game either easier to play or harder and more rewarding provides ways to reach new, unexperimented players while giving an interesting replay value to expert players. (This is what Adam Saltsman call “layering” in his article about game accessibility.)

While control limitations and pacing lessons are more likely to apply to action and reflex games, balancing items, powers and rewards and offering the player different options to play the game according to his own expertise are lessons that can be easily ported and successfully applied to any kind of games. The universality of these design solutions, even almost 20 years after SGnG (1991), make them all the more worthy of our designer's attention.

References:

Analysis: Game Design Accessibility Matters

Let's Play Super Ghouls N' Ghosts, Part 1

Super Ghouls 'N Ghosts weapons

Super Ghouls'n Ghosts wikipedia page

MegaDrill's Trailer

2009-12-05T04:26:00.000-08:00

MegaDrill, Small is Beautiful's new game, is nearing completion! I hope to sell it to a sponsor before Christmas and so I have created a nice little Trailer to showcase it.

You can watch it right here!

How to become a Game Designer? - My career story

2009-10-30T08:18:00.000-07:00

Since writing my article on “How to Become a Game Designer”, I've received many comments and e-mails asking me what one should study to increase it's chance of becoming a game designer. Well I've thought about that for a loooong time, and I've came to this very conclusion: I DON'T KNOW!!

I can't pretend to give THE good advice that would make anyone a game designer because there is just so many ways that one can become one. In fact, game designers are probably the one position in the game industry (if that's the game industry you are interested in) that have the widest range of possible backgrounds. I've heard many differents and none the same. But for my own background, THAT I can tell you!

My career story

Act 1: Education, education
Like a lot of young guys my age, I've grew up with video games and developed a keen interest in them. Mine might have been sharper because I've set my mind to become a game designer and never wavered from that objective. When it was time to go to college, I applied to only one place, on a program about “Multimedia Creation”, a sort of mixed pack of cinema, advertisement, graphism, art, informatic art tools (like Adobe's Suite and (in that time) Macromedia's Flash), photography and others. This seemed like the closest thing to what I needed to make video games (there werent many programs about game design in that time, let alone in the province of Quebec). Those were two nice years. I've learned so many different things, I was pleased! I continued on that path in University with a similar program in Multimedia for another 3 years. The approach of the program was on creativity. There was a creativity class and in the cinema and advertisement class we went deep into the human psychology to analyze and understand the media's codes and how they are perceived.

Act 2: The first job and the shattered illusions
But it's far from being the whole story. After those 5 years in multimedia, I had explored many different disciplines, from photography to psychology, from painting and sculpture to managing a project and staying on budget, but I had no speciality! I could do “ok” arts, knew a little bit of programming, had done two textured and animated character in 3Dmax for a game, but really, I was far from amazing in any of those things and really wasnt qualified to apply for any of that. But hey! I wanted to be a Game Designer, not an artist or a programmer. So I got a job as a game tester in a big shop making cell phones games. I was in the industry, I had a crappy salary, I was pleased!

So I worked as a game tester during the day, and at night I read books about game design and kept experimenting in Flash, building prototypes and making some arts in Photoshop and Illustrator. Flash has really been a good vehicule for my ideas. Not being a programmer, Actionscript 2 was a great platform to start with, since it had easy to learn codes and a very visual approach. It suited me very well! After a few months, I sent them a small design along with some kind of “Game Designer test” they asked any applicants to fill. I was not taken. The design I gave them was not very good and really my approach not very professional. I kept testing game, reading books and prototyping for another year until I sent another application. I was taken. The design I had submitted was ok and I gave them a strong Flash prototype. I went throught the interview and the questions they asked seemed to be right out of the book I just read (A previous edition of the "Fundamentals of Game Design" by Ernest Adams). And so I became a game designer. My dream was becoming true, my salary jumped up more than 50%. Was I pleased?

I was in a bliss for maybe 3 or 4 months and then I hated that job. The job was not what I had envisioned at all! I had no decision power whatsoever, I couldnt design anything but do some mock-ups dictated by a producer located in another country, I had all the dialogs I wrote for a game re-written (by the same producer), and was in a constant state of frustration. Moreover, I often had to do overtime to extend the torture. Not so pleased...

Act 3: The second job and the search for more
Ok, making video games was not as fun as I thought... But did it have to be like that? I've quit my game designer position after 11 months. I was slowly becoming lazy, I was losing my passion, I didnt wanted to make games anymore. I was not even toying with Flash in my spare times anymore. I had lost it. And it's never been like me to submit to something I don't want. It felt “wrong” to be there so I decided to leave. I went on to become an integrator for a small montreal business making educative children's games. I was losing a lot of responsibility going from Game Designer to Integrator but it was advertised that there was opportunity for part-time work and I thought that would be perfect to keep working on my own projects. The business was very nice, filled with a bunch of great, relaxed peoples. I loved the team and the boss was really a friendly, talkative guy that was fun to be with. And no more overtime. Pleased again!

Unfortunately, when I started working there it was the end of a huge project that has been going on for almost two years and I never had the chance to switch to part-time work. I wasnt doing overtime but I was working full time. The job was not very stimulating, very repetitive, so I quickly grew bored of it. What does this all have to do with becoming a Game Designer? I had quit a designer position to become an integrator! But the story is not over and believe me, even then I was not wavering from my objective. I knew it was not right but I was still hoping for a part-time job. And lo! It came to me! I was offered to give Flash classes by the University were I studied. They found my portfolio on the internet and found that I was still working with Flash (somehow I was, from time to time). Very, very pleased. Teaching was something I always thought I would like, and I did like it.

Act 4: The third job and the shattered fears
While being a lot of work, teaching was a lot of fun. After three years of working full-time in front of a computer, interacting with real live students was a blessing. Moreover, the job allowed me to take 4 months of unpaid time off during the summer which was a perfect plan to work on my own personnal game projects. So on the first “summer-off” (2008), I took upon myself to actually finish a first game (HyperSpace Shooter). This finally felt like I was getting closer to achieving my child's dream of making games, much more so than when I was employed as a game designer in the big industry.

I admit this is far from being a good game, but it was a great learning project. Hands-on experience helped me learn the art of design, programmation and about the Flash market at large. But mostly, finishing my own project was extremely empowering! I had a long history of beginning prototypes and designs and never finishing them. I had a lot of fears: fears of not working on the “right” project, of not being able to build what I had in mind, of wasting my life, of... anything that could justify me cancelling a project and start working on a new one. This is a fact of life: starting a project is extremely exciting, finishing it is difficult and requires a painful dedication. But if I could not finish a simple project, I would never go anywhere. Completing HyperSpace Shooter totally shattered those fears. It raised my confidence to levels I could not imagine.

A few months after that project, I started working on Finding my Heart. I came up with the idea for this game in about 20 minutes (scenario and all). HyperSpace Shooter got me tired of programming so I wanted a project that would get me closer to art and animation so I started with the idea of making a short adventure game and the idea came very quickly. Not a strike of genius, no, but a good idea it was. Enough that I wanted to do it. My raised confidence really helped me get started on the new project and right from the start I just knew that I could complete it. I had no hesitations, I knew it was the right thing to do.

Act 5: the future opens up!
So here I stand now. I'm still giving classes one day a week and I'm completing a third Flash game, which is very promising. Finding my Heart didnt make a lot of money but helped me learn a lot again about the Flash game business and gave me good basis for my third game. My teaching contract is not renewed for the winter for reasons out of my control so I'll be a full time indie developer after Christmas. I find it to be yet another opportunity that is put along my way so I'll take it as such and won't even try to get another job. I've got enough money to get me going for a while so it is a perfect time to invest in my own business.

The games I worked on so far have been individual works. They allowed me to prove my capacities and greatly enrich my portfolio. Now I've hired a musician for my next game, which was a great relief for me (I did the music for my previous games but I'm not very good so it takes me forever) and I'm looking to work collaboratively on small and bigger projects in the future. I certainly would'nt be looking at possible collaborations if it werent for Finding my Heart, but it gave me enough credibility to go that way. Now I have to prove I can actually make a salary with my work, and again I'm determined to do it.

So do you still need some advice for becoming a game designer? Is my current position really intesting to you? In any way, this story is my own and you can only make yours by yourself, so really I'm not sure I can give good advices. Oh, maybe just one. Do it. Find some time, work hard, and prove the world you can do it on your own. Nobody will ever give you the means to make games but you. So yeah, just do it.

Integrated design in Finding my Heart

2009-09-05T05:00:00.000-07:00

[ If you havent, I suggest you first read « Integrated Design for Games » before reading this article. ]

When I did Finding my Heart, I had an objective of creating a game with as few words as possible. The story is told with animations and icons and I wanted it to be as self-explainable as possible. However, when I started doing tests with players it became obvious that some sort of tutorial was required as the « no-word » interface was not easily understood by at least half the players. Some players managed easily but other felt completely lost. I still wanted to keep the word count as low as possible and I certainly didnt want a big block of text to tell the player what the game was about. It would have ruined a good part of the game's mood for the player. I finally came out with a pleasing solution that actually give even more mood to the game.

As an integrated solution, I've placed two short pieces of text in the game to give useful hints to the player. One is placed as an advertisement tacked on a tree and the other is a lost loved letter placed on the grass near the protagonist's appartment. While not perfect, they work fairly well in giving subtle but useful hints to the player and, most of all, they get right down to setting the romantic mood of the game.

The lost loved letter.

This one “explains” to the player that he can press the X button to leave a conversation with a character. By starting with “My dear”, this piece of paper is clearly introduced as a letter sent to someone. I needed to tell the player that he can quit a conversation so what would I say in the letter? I introduced the idea of “leaving” and reinforced it with the part “I just didnt want to talk to you anymore”. So it sounds like the person who wrote the letter wants to break up with is loved one. In itself, it makes sense. It has it's own narrative value : “Some mysterious person wrote a letter to break up with the loved one.” We don't know who it is and who's the loved one, which kind of create a mystery for the player (though it is unresolved in the game).

The letter continues : “I decided to press the X and leave.” This is the necessary informative part, the actual message I want to give to the player about the underlying mechanic. I could not avoid mentioning the X, even though it wouldnt be written like that in a romantic letter, but the whole point of the letter was to show that particular piece of information and so it's as integrated as it could. The letter ends letter with a simple “I'm sorry... xxx”, confirming the presence of emotions in the letter and so reinforcing it's integrated value. And, to finish, I've illustrated the letter to look like paper, with a fold in the middle and a hand-written font.

It requires a little more thoughts from the player than if I would have just written a clear « how-to » (ex: « when talking to someone, press the X in your inventory to walk away. »). However, the clearly written solution, while very informative, would have had the opposite of temporarily breaking the game's mood and the player's efforts, instead of focusing on « getting » the hint (which is intellectually satisfying), would have been focused on getting back into the mood (which is distracting). Not good.

The ad on the tree.

This one I'm most proud of. It is really short and I managed to make it look just like real and lively in regard to the game world. I went as far as making the small pieces of paper with phone numbers that you can rip-off and made most of them gone, as if they have been taken by other people. Again, the piece has it's own narrative value: someone is offering services (we don't know exactly what but it seems related to emotional support and personal growth) and several people were attracted enough to pick up the pieces of paper. A passing of time is suggested from the moment when someone tacked the ad to the tree and the moment the player encounters it. This suggests that the player is not alone in this world, that other people walk around, interact together, have their own emotions and problems. It gives life to the world.

As for the text, it all plays the dual role of setting the ad's own narrative value and giving information to the player. The big “Confused?” (supported by the few extra « ? » of the middle illustration) introducing the ad suggests there is hints about the game. Followed with “Looking for emotions??” (which is the whole point of the game) the subject of the hint is quickly introduced. And then to the hint itself : “Everyone you meet in life can teach you something.” The six non-player characters of the game each teach one skill to the player. If the player doesnt know that, he might uselessly try to learn more from the same character or dismiss another one entirely if he can't find the correct thing to do. The text ends with “Learn the way of the earth and find true love!!” which relates to the global objective of the game (return to your girlfriend and charm her back) but is mostly used to nicely close the advertisment and again set the romantic mood.

This piece of information is particularly interesting because it is fully integrated. There is no technical terms and is narratively coherent. It does not distract one second from the game world. Quite the opposite, it brings the player to think ABOUT the game world, which contributes to immerse him more deeply into it.

Conclusion
Even though these two parts are useful to as much setting the mood as giving out useful informations to the player, those solutions were not perfect and I still received feedbacks about the game being unobvious. I decided to add an help button that brings up a short text explaining the setting and the player's objective more clearly. Unfortunately, this part is not integrated to the design at all but I still tried to keep it unobstrusive (small button on a corner of the screen, never pops-up by itself, only one screen of text, you can close it with a simple click anywhere on the screen). It was important to me to keep the player as close to the game as possible and don't bother him with reading or learning how to play. I wanted him to discover the game by experiencing it. I believe it works and I'm glad I got some player feedback. If I had not learned that players had difficulties, I might have passed on the opportunity of adding integrated informations to the game that actually make it even richer.

Integrated Design for Games

2009-09-02T19:08:00.000-07:00

Integrated design is all about the metaphor. In a fully integrated game, everything has a reason to be there. The tiny pieces that constitute the game are invisible, we can only see a game that is complete and involving.

What is integrated design?
« Integrated design » is a way to design that puts a special attention to giving meaning, in relation with the game's metaphor, to every parts and objects that constitute the said game.

« To give meaning » to an object is to ensure that it has it's rightful place inside the game's world. Objects are not reduced to walls, platforms, enemies, power-ups and such, but also include menus, tutorials, save screens, etc.. Some objects are harder to integrate than others and some are even almost impossible to or don't benefit from integration. But in most cases they do and the extra effort done to integrate them is really worth it as it can create a richer, more meaningful game.

Let's look at two examples :

Example #1: Halo's tutorial
At the start of the first game of the Halo serie, the player, as Master Chief, is waken up from a cryogenic sleep. A soldier gets him to walk and look around as a test routine. He's taken through all he needs to know to move in the game world but unfortunately the emergency situation prevents them from going through the weapon test routine and so he starts without weapons. The whole tutorial is part of a tight scenario: waking-up, the player learning to control the character and the fact that he starts with no weapons are all careful design decisions that were given reasons to be inside the game's world through the scripted narrative. The entry tutorial is perfectly integrated into the game. This helps the player feels like he is a part of the game's world and contribute to setting the mood of emergency present in the first chapter of the game.

Check the youtube video. The tutorial starts at the 4th minute.

Example #2: Breath of Fire II's saving system

Here's another good example of integration from the good old Breath of Fire II (originally released on the Super Nintendo console in 1993). To save his game, the player has to “tell the story of his journey” to a statue of the Dragon God (technically, he places his character in front of the statue, presses a button and then confirm he wants to save through a “yes \ no” menu). The Dragon God adresses the player with the same dialog box as any other non-player character would, this way avoiding the need for a different interface that would take the player away from the game world. Also, the question is phrased so as to avoid technical terms like “saving” and the system is introduced to the player, by the Dragon God himself, as “praying to the Dragon God”.

The game's story tells the player of a new God trying to gain strenght from the prayers of the world's inhabitant. In opposition, the Dragon God is an old God to which people don't pray to anymore. By making the player pray frequently to the Dragon God in order to save his game, it creates a bounding between the player and the Dragon God, thus forcing him to reject the new, “evil” God. This simple integration of the saving system goes a long way to position the player in the game's story and to confirm what he is fighting against. If the saving system were not integrated (let's say the player would have to save through a menu entry of his character menu), this would not only create an extra screen to take the player away from the game, but it would also deprive the game of a powerful narrative technique.

Why would I want to do an integrated design?
Integrated design is not just about polishing a completed game. It is a design process, a way to look at the game as a whole, that should be used from the start of the project until it's very end. It's a design philosophy. The designer should always be aware of what goes into the game and ask himself “does this piece make sense in the context of the game? If not, how can I give it it's rightful place, it's meaning?”

A non-integrated game feel like it's broken into many pieces. The player can point at the different parts and say “this is a tutorial, this is a power-up, this gives me points”. Everything starts to feel mechanical. Historically, as the great games got endlessly copied and game genres established themselves as a serie of “features”, the game's vocabulary became a part of the players' culture and they started to see non-integrated games as a “normal”. They KNOW what a tutorial is and often EXPECT one when starting up a new game. With these expectations building up and the financial pressure of ever bigger games, designers are often forced into applying a known genre-bound recipe. Any efforts to integrate the game's pieces are often leaved behind.

These phenomenons perpetuate an ideology that video games are meant to be mechanical pieces that we overcome with brute force rather than pieces of art we enjoy with feelings. In the end you can still make enjoyable games without using an integrated design. The players will love the game for the challenges, the fun mechanics and maybe even the story, but it will be difficult to see those games as memorable. A fully integrated game will stick out much more in the player's memory because it is unobstrusive, complete and meaningful. It is easier to remember a fully integrated experience because it contains less distractions and much more meaning.

Read more

Integrated Design in Finding my Heart.
An auto-analysis of what I did to give useful informations to the player in my latest game.

Rules of play, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman.
The first chapter about "Meaningful Play" and most of the books for examples and applications of the concept.

Finding my Heart's ending song under Creative Commons

2009-08-17T05:04:00.000-07:00

The short song present in my latest game was catchy enough that it got caught in the head of many players. I was even asked by a few if they could do a remix and create lyrics for it. Since the song received such a good public reception (despite it being very simple and being my first ever recorded song), I decided to share it under a Creative Commons License.

So here it is, for you to download, modify and distribute! The license restrictions include:

You cannot use the song for commercial use
You are authorized to modify the song, as long as you share the result under the same license
You MUST credit the author (me) for the original material

Download it here now.

Follow the link below for more informations on the license. Contact me if you wish to use the license in any other way or require other informations.

Play "Finding my Heart" now!

2009-08-03T20:40:00.000-07:00

I'm very proud to present my new baby, "Finding my Heart" to the public. Play now! I will blog about it more thoroughly in the future... I would not want to bother you while you play!

"Finding my Heart" is coming out oh so very soon!

2009-08-01T11:51:00.000-07:00

"Finding my Heart", which has been completed for some time, has finally found a sponsor! The proud sponsor is www.allfreegames.eu and has been found through www.flashgamelicense.com.

I cannot wait to share this little gem with the wide open world and the thoughts and process that went into it. I'll wait until it is finally made public before posting anything about it.

I hope you are as excited as I am! (yeah, well, probably not)

Why disposable games are wrong and how to turn them into art

2009-06-05T06:44:00.000-07:00

I've been reading through this news “Video game manufacturers may pressure resellers”, (Thanks to Acord of the Indiegamer Developer forum) which is an interesting read about the conflict between publishers and Gamestop's used games and trading policies, and a part really caught my attention:

Video games are different from movies or CDs, which often hold more sentimental and replay value over games, which can be played through in 10 hours and then discarded. The challenge for the industry is to get consumers to buy games they'll want to hold on to.

Reading this, I suddenly flinched at the awful realisation. Have video games fallen so low as to have no sentimental value whatsoever? It's not something to generalise about, but I'm afraid there is a certain amount of truth about that.

A player that is interested in a particular gaming genre (RPG, FPS, RTS or any other categorizing acronyms) will be able to find several generic games of the genre on the shelves, used or new. The keyword here is GENERIC. A lot of games implement a certain amount of features that are expected from the genre they classify in and then add a few minor improvement to it so they can write something on the back of the box. Generic games like that are raining down from the game industry and they are often hard to differentiate (except for a minority of them). What's there to get all emotional about?

A player interested in a particular genre just play through a game, discard it and play the next one, which will probably be just as satisfying (or unsatisfying) as the precedent. In this context, yes, I can understand that games are a disposable product. This reality comes down from the industry itself which pushes out those disposable games. “The challenge for the industry is to get consumers to buy games they'll want to hold on to.” Well yeah!! And publishers are turning to downloadable content, online features and other server based features that prevent piracy and reselling. This is probably a perfectly suitable business solution, but does it create love? In most cases, no. It creates bounds.

The players won't care emotionnaly about the games they buy as long as the publishers are deciding what goes in them exactly. Game development handled as a pure business inevitably creates disposable products, NOT products made of love and caring. If the publishers want products that instill love and caring in the players, they MUST give creative control to the developers so that they can care more about the products they work on (how many times have I heard not to take a gaming industry job too seriously, that it's “just a job”?). If the products are made with love and caring, that love will shine over to the customer. And THAT my friend, is ART!

Coming soon: Finding My Heart

2009-05-20T07:40:00.000-07:00

After a long period of slow development, it seems I'm nearing completion of my second game, called "Finding my Heart".

The new game is a short, free to play, web-based "interactive romance" (as I like to call it). I have already posted some characters on this blog a while ago to give a taste of what it looks like and might be posting additionnal informations soon.

I am very proud of the result so far, though there is still a lot of polishing and improvements to be done. Stay tuned!

When do you need a game design document?

2009-04-19T06:57:00.000-07:00

There is different kind of “design” documents. How you write it, which details and how much informations you put into it really depends on who it is adressed to. Personally I don't like using a lot of documentation. Often short notes on your intentions are enough to get you started in the right direction. Documents can be useful when used well but it really depends on the given situation.

What's necessary for the team
Since I've been working alone on my two first games as an independent game developer, my design documents mostly look like a pile of paper with scribbles and a one or two pagers written on the computer. Really just some notes to keep track of my ideas and put a bit of structure in it. I've also worked as a designer for a big company in which I was part of teams of 7 to 12 peoples. You might think that the documents are more important when working with a team, but we did not work so much with docs. Before the project started we initially developped what we called a “pitch” for the game, detailing the intentions of the project, the main mechanics, the main features and selling points and was also used to compare other existing products. This document was aimed to get the project started by convincing lead producers that it would be profitable. This was the biggest document written during development.

There were a dozen designers in this company and most of them wrote their designs differently. However, all of them relied heavily on “mock-ups”. I don't remember seeing any huge bible describing all the details of a project. The pitch was there if we ever doubted the direction and then we mostly did a bunch of Flash demos, still images or animated gifs depicting what we wanted (yes, the animated gifs were very popular). When we DID write documents, they were short (never more than 5 pages) and detailing only small, ambiguous parts of the project that needed more thought. And nobody read them. If it was explaining a game mechanic, the programmers would jump to the pictures and graphs or look at the mock-up. If they could not figure it out instantly they would come to the designers for explanations. The documents were not totally useless though. Even if nobody read them, they still allowed the designers to deepen their reflexion and have a better, more structured vision of the mechanics, making them easier to explain with confidence and clarity.

The design changed so often during development that writing a huge design document detailing the project in it's entirety before the project started would have been a tremendous waste of precious time. It's impossible to accurately “imagine” how the game will play until you've tried it yourself, so how could you know what would work and what would not?

So what should we do??
If you work alone, all you need is a pile of notes to keep track of where you are, where you're going and a short but strong description of your focus. The focus statement, a few paragraphs about what you want and how you want it to feel like, is a strong tool to keep you on track. You can come back to it once in a while to take you back to the initial spark of interest that triggered the project. It might change during development but you should still keep that initial spark somewhere handy. The rest of the notes (mine anyway) really are just random schemas, sketches and datas about the mechanics of the game, the structure of the data, the basic display of informations in the screen, the look of the characters, etc.. Here is the main “design document” I've used before starting HyperSpace Shooter. I have a few other pages of notes but the single page you see here is the initial spark. Note that almost nothing from these notes made it into the game (mostly because it was too ambitious for the time constraint).

Prototyping is the key!
Yes, this is the golden key. It's good to pin down your ideas on paper as they come, but writing long and detailed documentations about behaviors, look and backstory will prove useless if, once done, the game is uninteresting. (As an example, building a prototype allowed me test and redirect my focus for HyperSpace Shooter.) Also, written documentation always bear the risk of being wrongly interpreted by the various team members while mock-ups and prototypes allow direct testing of the ideas, making them quick to assimilate and easy to understand. With it you can easily find the most important problems and team members are able to make constructive criticism before anything is built, thus improving on the ideas and saving development time.

When is a design document really useful?
I found that documents have a lot of value to structure datas. For example, when you need to write the story, keep track of how the events are linked together or what are the dialogs, make a list of the available weapons in the game, etc.. If you have a lot of designed content (as opposed to user created or procedural content) it allows you to have a whole view of it. Documents are also very useful as a “to do” list. When we had to record, cut and edit spoken dialogs of a game I worked on, we applied color codes to the excel sheet to keep track of the work (for every line of text, we marked them as red when they were recorded, yellow for cut and green once integrated in the game. The producer could take a quick look at it and estimate the remaining work load in seconds).

In all these cases, and many more, documents are invaluable tools. But you don't need no stinking document to explain how the character moves or jump. You are waaaay better off with a prototype or mocked-up animation. Remember that when people are asked to perform a task, the less they have to read, the more they're happy.

Conclusion
To me, design documents are more like a tool than a plan. They are invaluable to keep track of datas and structure ideas but as soon as development starts, they are useless in explaining how the game works. So my own way of working is to start by writing a few pages about my initial ideas, work on a prototype to test them and, once I'm happy with the direction, write a few “to do” lists and structure documents to make sure I'm not forgetting anything. Unless you need to convince someone to join in or invest in your project, any other documentation is futile.

Games are not like real life - human psychology in games

2009-03-18T12:19:00.000-07:00

While it is often true that life feels like a game, it occured to me that games are far from being like real life. Is it possible or even desirable to have games that reflect life as it really is?

Life is like a game
In life, we often follow rules. There are rules of “acceptable behavior” when we eat with other people, ride the bus, walk down the street, work, go to school, attend a funeral, etc.. There is also laws to follow for the good functionning of society and for security (like when we drive a car for example). There is rewards and punishment that comes with most set of rules. Be it encouragments from a peer, a beautiful smile from the cute girl to who we have given our seat in the bus, a punch in the face from her boyfriend if we take advantage of the situation or a speed ticket because we were in a haste on the driveway.

Also, in life we have skills that can be “upgraded”. If we keep doing something, we eventually get better at it and “level-up”. If you play the guitar a lot or cook often, your skill improves and new habilities open up. In these ways, life often feels like a game.

Games are not like life
However, games are but a mere simplification of life and miss several key aspects of it to really feel “alive”. While some games successfully create a feeling of coherence strong enough for us to believe in them and feel like the characters have a life of their own, it will never even get close to the actual complexity of things as they are in real life.

The inevitability of events
Games grant us freedom. Freedom to escape from real life and live as someone (or something) else. Every game gives a different kind of freedom. It can be, for example, freedom in movement or in choice of action. Some games give you a basic feeling of choosing your own fate or choosing who you become (like Fable). Sometimes they even let you influence key events and let you try to change the finality of the game (like the experimental “Façade” for example).

In real life, a single human being seldom save the world. In fact, we seldom have full control over our own life, let alone over the world we live in. Some people call it fate or destiny. No matter what we do, we end up to a predefined point of our life. Now I don't believe we have no control whatsoever on our life, I believe we forge our own fate by our choices and actions. But it's not our judgement and actions alone that forge it. There is a multitude of external influences that makes us what we are. We are driven by our culture, by our emotions, our faiths, education, personnality, traumatism, phobias, past experiences and our environment, etc.. We are also driven by our interactions with other people, who are all themselves driven by their own influences and living their own lifes. All these influences make life incredibly complex and it's difficult or even impossible to track which cause created what effect.

Let's make up an example. One of your friend hesitate to take a life changing decision, say quit his job and go back to school. He thought about it a long time but he still can't decide. You think it would be a good thing for him so you try to convince him. You can talk with him about the several advantages, try to comfort him in this challenging and risky choice and give him some advice taken from your own life. While it is possible that you will have a strong influence on him and direct him toward one particular choice, what is more likely is that everything you say to him he will have already heard or thought of and will bear but little effect on his decision (unless he has you in very high regard). The choice is still up to him and there is several other factors that influence his choices, a lot of them having way more effect than a short conversation with you.

However, where we can make the best impressions on others and on our environment is through our actions. Words are cheap and weights little but giving the example bears a lot of weight on those who surround us. In short, we shape the world through what we do a lot more than through what we say or think.

Games like life?
So how is this represented in games? Let's look at Façade. While it is a strong piece of art and explores with some success the possibility of influencing the outcome of a situation, I'm afraid it does not reflect life as it really his. You are a friend invited by this couple that have problems in their relation and you talk to them and try to influence them to either break-up or try harder. It's a real wonder they even listen to you, not withstanding ask your opinion, while they argue together. What would probably happen in real life is that you could try to talk to them and make them realize their mistakes but they will be far too enclosed in their feelings and beliefs for your opinion to make it's way in their cognitive process. Your opinion CAN have an effect but it will mostly stay on the surface and be forgotten quickly as the stronger emotions and patterns push it back out. Façade is a strong game but it over simplifies human relations in order to achieve a particular goal.

However games ARE a simplification of life, and simplification is necessary in order to make games playable, enjoyable or just buildable. How could we simplify human interactions and still keep some feeling of authenticity in the psychology of the characters? It goes without saying that I'm talking about interactive portions of games, not fixed narrations or cut-scenes.

Influencing the game world
As we have seen, a person's opinion and arguments often bear little weight in another's choice and beliefs unless he is highly regarded as an expert or reference in a particular field of knowledge. We already have a lead on possible dialogs' mechanics. If a character asks the player his opinion and the player gives it (through multiple choices of answers for example), the reaction of the character should reflect his view of the player. If the player is not highly regarded in the subject of the question, his answer will bear little or no effect and the character will probably make the same choice no matter what the player say.

Is it useful? Is it fun? It depends how it is implemented and what surrounds this single interaction. But it's still a powerful tool for the game to suggest actions to the player. The question and the possible answers are actually targeted at the player. Every choice of answer should suggest a particular course of action and allow the player to think about different possibilities linked to the rest of the game, not just to this single conversation (which make it an integrated mechanic). Thus, it is not the player that influence the game's character, but the game character that has a chance of influencing the player, even if it can feel like the opposite to the player (which is good, because it empowers him).

Since different course of actions are suggested, this brings us to the second and strongest way of influencing other people: through our actions, through our example. Once the player has hints about what he can do, he can set out and act in the world. His actions shape his character and the character shape what the player can do. It the actions that should influence the other characters' behavior in the game. If you bully one character in the game, there is good chance that he will resent it and start bullying another inferior character. Isn't it what happens in real life? If you mostly do good deeds around you and show humanity and magnanimity, people will quickly start regarding you as a great man (or woman). If they regard you as a great man, they might be more enclined to listen to your opinion and follow your example. However, be aware that bad behaviors often spread more quickly than good behaviors do and vile characters might be inclined to take advantage of the righteousness of another character. “Good” behaviors can have a very strong influence but takes more time to spread in the environment than bad behaviors do.

Ok, I firstly intended to display some thoughts about fate and games but this could easily become the subject of a master degree and it's hard to conclude with a single thought. What I do want to say is that life is a complex thing and that to successfully understand it we have to create mental models of it, which are simplified ways of looking at complex systems of interactions. Games are models of real life or of aspects of real life and a powerful tool to help us understand it, but it must reflect it accurately if our understanding is to useful.

Video game innovation and storytelling incompatible?

2009-02-10T16:11:00.000-08:00

With it's nomination as “innovative game of the year” in the 2008 IGF competition, You Have to Burn the Rope (YHTBTR) by Mazapán a lot of heat in the indie game dev community. (For the context, YHTBTR is a small “parody game” which consists of a short corridor and a single boss. In all, it takes about 3 minutes to complete and closes on a short song complementing the parodical aspect.)

Despite it's small scope and utter sillyness, I'm glad this game was made for one thing: it's construction and reception point towards the maturation of video games as an artistic medium. Much like the work of Marcel Duchamp (who exposed a mostly untransformed urinal in an art gallery) created a lot of heat in it's own time, the simplicity of YHTBTR feels like an insult to other game makers, some of them working their asses off for years for a fraction of the recognition (I'm sure at least a few of those indie developers will be glad to find I compare YHTBTR to an urinal).

The slap in the face was necessary in Duchamp's time and Mazapán's slap in the face is probably as necessary now for the game medium. Far from being a great work of art, this small vignette can still make you stop and think. It can make a player think about how he plays and a game maker think about how he creates (It still doesnt deserve any innovation award...).

Innovation
In the past decades of it's history, video games developed a language that can be mostly divided in game genres. Games praised to be innovative mostly mix and match mechanics from different, known genres in new unexpected ways. Sometimes very innovative games successfully create new ways of playing but as time passes, it's becoming increasingly rare. Technical and functional (aka: gameplay) innovations have their limits. Not in their possibilities but in the effect they have on the player. Though it will always be possible to create new ways of playing, it might not always be profitable to do so.

While innovation has a hook on some hardcore gamers looking for new mental exercises, sometimes the need to construct new mental models can push other players out of the magic circle of a game (or out of the game completely). Just like when we rent the latest horror movie, we, as players, are developing expectations about the games we play. A game providing us with a known mental model prevents us from having to think too much. We know what to expect and thus can jump right into the game and enjoy the actual content. If the game maker wants to make the content the most important aspect of his game, innovation can become a nuisance.

In fact that's exactly where YHTBTR stands. There is absolutely no technical or functional innovation in this game. It tackles a known genre (platformer), uses it's codes and turns some upside-down in order to create meaning.

Storytelling and meaning
Nowadays video game contents seem to be very volatile. Most avid gamers do not really care what the story is about as long as there is at least a slight innovation in gameplay or technology. In such a situation, why would a developer bet on stories? This is not the fault of the players. It is the fault of the way the games are sold to them. Stories are all too often overly generic and mere pretexts for the proposed game mechanics. More often than not, there is very little attention given to it.

To me, video games is essentially a story telling medium. Though the importance of stories in games has long been debated, it is mostly that which keeps us going through the game. The player uses the story to map his progression in the game. It can be the author's story or the player's story but if the game does not provide for neither one nor the other, what interest can there be in continuing to play the game? If you answered “challenge”, remember that overcoming a meaningful challenge creates space for the player's story.

If a game creator really wants to focus on storytelling, he has to choose the best mechanics to allow the storytelling to take place, but he should not feel obliged to introduce any “twist” in the choosen mechanics. Having the finest understanding of the choosen mechanics and their particular codes and patterns should allow him to create his own masterpiece without having to uselessly reinvent the wheel. Innovation for the sake of innovation always bears the risk of creating discrepencies between a player's expectations and his actual experience of the game.

Conclusion
Games are becoming mature. This is undeniable. Known genres and their particular codes and patterns are becoming increasingly developed and elaborate. These codes are a language that any developer can use. While it is sometime fun to do so, it is not necessary to create any new codes. Mastering the existing codes of a particular genre can be more than enough to create a masterpiece. Some authors could dedicate their creative process to the mastering of a particular set of codes in a classic genre with great success, just like tons of artist in other mediums (music, painting, movies, ..) find their own niche and exploit it with great mastery.

Maybe the best way to achieve it is to stop trying to please everyone and actually do what WE really like?

Think big, plan low, deliver more: a Game Development Process

2009-01-25T18:05:00.000-08:00

Having idea is fun. When developping a game, having the idea is probably the easiest and most fun part of the project. Delivering our ideas into a final product is much harder and demands huge commitments. Here is a simple, beginner's process that can help you get to the end of a production with more ease and focus: Think big, plan low, deliver more.

Think big
The process is based on a cyclic approach of expanding and reducing the scope of a project before and during production time. The first step to creating something is to come up with a vision or an idea. This often starts with a brainstorm or a flash of genius. One way or the other, it is time to “think big”. You have to jump in on the idea and explore every aspect of it. You put aside doubts and censorship and throw on paper every possible idea that revolves around the concept, expanding until every little detail has been explored or your brain melts, whichever comes first. Once your brain has melted (because you cannot ever explore every little details of a given idea), it's often a good time to put it down to rest. Come back to it later with a fresh brain and expand it some more.

You will then probably feel like you have a good grasp of the concept. While some may think that production can start once you have that kind of “mental plan” to guide you, it's good to actually pin down the core of the project before doing any actual development. If you do go into development at this point, you are likely to encounter important questions and problems which will slow down production or stop it altogether. In a lot of cases, the work will be a complete waste. This is why you have to “plan low” before starting development.

Plan low
Go back to your ideas and meditate on this. What do you really want to express? What is the kind of fun that you want in your game? What are the skills you want the player to use? What is the story? The meaning? What is the essential CORE of your game? This is your target: The Core. While you may feel you had tons of great ideas revolving around your concept, they cannot all go together elegantly. You have to take the bloody axe and chop down every unnecessary part until you come up with exactly the smallest possible number of ideas (or mechanics) necessary to your game. Chop it kindly though and put the extra ideas aside for later. They are always a good reference when you want to go back to your initial idea, but for now, they are extra weight. An example from Nintendo's development process: when they developed Mario 64, the first thing they did was make sure that running and jumping was fun (The Core). After all, this is what the player do most of his time in that game. Shrinking down to a “low planning” is just that: finding out what the player will do most of his time and making sure this is fun.

When you understand the basic activity, you can go on and start production. Build a first prototype and see if the core is fun. If it's not fun, then there is a problem and you should fix it before doing anything else. Building on a broken core is always a waste of time. You cannot make a bad cake tastes good with fancy decorations. If you do have a fun prototype, then it's good news. You can test it with some friends and collect comments but be careful; some people don't really understand the concept of “work in progress” and can make destructive comments that might turn you down instead of giving you good insights.

Deliver more
Playing the prototype, you will probably come up with new ideas but sometimes, especially if the prototype comes out to be very fun, you feel like you have yourself a game and might be reluctant to change anything. While you can't make a bad cake tastes good with fancy decorations, you CAN make a good cake better with some sweet topping and a colorful presentation. This is where the extra notes you so “gently” chopped away come in handy.

Digging back into your original notes is sure to vividly bring back old ideas and spark more new ones than you can ever use (always works for me), but at this point, you have a nice prototype to direct the creative process. Now the difficult design process of trial and error begins and you might have to go several routes before finding the one thing that really comes out nicely.

Making games is an art
Design and creativity is a difficult process. Don't be discouraged if your ideas don't work instantly. Making games is essentially an art, and the process of making art, any kind of art, always requires to throw away a certain amount of ideas in order to find the one gem. If this was not the case, it would not be art. It would be craft. And every single game would be the same.

Looking back on my first game, 5 months later

2009-01-14T19:50:00.000-08:00

Now 5 months after releasing my first game under the "Small is Beautiful" brand and close on to releasing a second, it might be interesting to look back on my first game and see where it succeeded and where it failed. If you want to get into the context, you can start by giving it a quick shot.

HyperSpace Shooter's focus
The initial idea was more ambitious than the final result, as you can see in the first prototype, but I decided on doing a simpler game in a well known genre, something I knew I could pull off by myself in a few months. My initial focus was to learn ActionScript 3.0, the new language used in Flash, and to actually finish and get a first game out so I decided to reduce the design to it's bare minimum and still try to make a fine game out of it.

While I was having high hopes for the game and loved it very much (it is something that often happens while you are working on something, you become blind on the flaws and only see the hard work you've put in), for it to be a commercial success was never the main focus.

Where did it succeeded?
As a learning ground for AS3.0, it was a total success. It was on purpose that I chose to do an action game so that I could keep the graphism and sound design to the minimum and concentrate on the different programming challenges it would bring. I'm still far from being a "great" programmer and I still have to tackl seriously with object oriented concepts but all in all it was a very profitable experience.

Another thing were it succeeded tremendously was in seriously raising my own self-esteem. I had worked on several designs on the past. Some were prototyped, some remained on the concept stage and other got into early production but all were too ambitious and failed to go all the way through the development process. It was very important for me to get out a completed game at this point and I had confidence that I could do it. But it's only after achieving it that I could really understand the meaning of it. Having a game out there, I cannot deny my own abilities anymore. I now not only believe that I can make games, I KNOW it. This is a very important psychological step that I'm glad for. Also, I am now a better judge of what I can actually achieve. I'm much more realist with my designs and with that in hand it was a real breeze to start the second game and evaluate the development time.

Other important things I learned
The game quickly generated comments from the gaming community on Kongregate and I could adjust easy things the same day I posted the game (like stacking shields and more powerful guns). I was surprised to hear almost unanimously that is was way too easy since I was afraid that it would be too hard. But then I did not took into account the nature of the average gamer on Kongregate, which are mostly young hardcore players. I removed the first level in order for the challenge to be a little harder but at this point there was not much more that I could quickly do. In the end it still helped me understand my target market and made me more aware of the issues of having to size it up before releasing a game.

A commercial failure
The game totally failed to be a commercial failure. I was aiming at publishing on Kongregate and through the Mochi-Ads channel and really didnt knew what to expect but I was expecting at least something. All in all, as I previously said, the game did not generate much more than 5$ in ad revenues. It was a disappointment at the time but I soon understood why it happened.

To get in my given development time frame, I had to cut several features that I was hoping for: characters, backstory and short dialogs, space map, altenate weapons and, more importantly, bosses. I am totally aware that the game is strongly lacking in features and presentation. While I tried my best to wrap it up elegantly with what I had, it still feels like something it missing.

Space shooters being a very well established genre, HyperSpace Shooter just could not size up with any kind of competition with the few features it had. I still believe it is well done but it falls short of any kind of innovation or special interesting twist and the presentation and production value are too simple to keep the interest through the game. It got an average note on Kongregate and quickly fell into the abyss of forgotten games. I could have tried to push the marketing but really I didn't see the point. I knew that the game was just "not enough" and that any effort in marketing would be wasted. I do believe that marketing is important for the success of a game, but if the game is bad, no amount of marketing can pull it up from it's hole. For it to be a commercial success, it would need a majoyr re-work to make it stand-out among the crowded space occupied by the space shooter genre.

So where is the second version?
I did not abandonned the project. Even if I started another completely different project, HyperSpace Shooter still exists in my mind. It's a genre that I like and that I want to make right. But after working several months full time on it all by myself, I just couldn't stand to see it anymore. I decided to start another small project in another genre (point and click adventure). Something that would not require too much programming but would allow me to do more character design and animation instead. I really enjoy doing graphic work more than programming and I had to work on project that would allow me to do it for my own sanity. But when I'm done with the current project, I'll probably be ready to jump back into programming and do another version... I never make plans much in advance though, so I'll just decide when the moment comes. :)

Gameplay and Story

2009-01-04T19:37:00.000-08:00

Writing for video games is far more than putting some text or cut-scenes here and there. To me, the game is (or should be) the story. What actually happens during the levels should mean something to the player. One action can bring him one step closer to beating a good game or it can bring him one step closer to saving the living, breathing world he's been living in for some time.

Sadly, when we speak of story in games we (game developers) often refer to the annoying cut-scenes that slow down the action between mission one and two. But I'm happy to say that it's not the nature of video games to be like that, it's just the way we've been making them for some time. Maybe it's due to the current structure used in AAA game development businesses that places the writer as a separate entity like the artist, the programmer or the sound designer (none of which should be isolated anyway). The writers, not really knowing what happens during the levels just fill the blanks between them and try to put as much as they can in order to feel like they've been a part of the game development after all. Then, lots of people play those finely marketed games and get to think that's how games are. Eventually even indie developers, in which the writer is often the same person as the designer / programmer / artist, follow the same « level / cut-scene / level » model.

What's wrong with that? Well... let me be harsh by saying that everything is wrong with that! The gameplay is slowed down, the story is often too long (and thus boring) and both of them do not rely much on each other. Both the gameplay and the story are wasted. What do we have to do then? INTEGRATE THEM!

The game has to be the story. If you want to go crazy and write a huge story for your new platformer or first-person shooter, go crazy and do it. Write a backstory for every character and environment, give a place in that world to every creature or machine you might encounter. Make it detailed, complete and thorough, but KEEP IT TO YOURSELF. You DON'T want to EXPLAIN what the characters' are and think, you want to SHOW it. Everything you write about the game world is important to you (the writer or designer) but what is written is not important to the player. If a character is prone to anger, make him react quickly to anything that happens to him, fists clenching, eyes firing up, etc. If the girl from the park is falling in love with the player, maybe she will look at him intently while he passes by or she will actually follow him whenever she can. If the player is hot on the heels of the bad guy, the bad guy might get nervous and try to throw obstacles in front of the player. This is all very telling about the characters, but it will be even more interesting to the player if this all happens while he plays the game.

There is several ways of making the story part of the game and how it has to be done is really specific to each and every game. However, I would risk stating something radical and say that if you have to create more than one interface in which you push the story, there's probably something wrong.

Some upcoming game characters

2008-12-22T21:13:00.000-08:00

I've been working for quite some time on a new game that should be out and free to play somewhere in january or february. It's going to be a cute little adventure game for which I won't give too much detail just yet.

All I'm gonna say is that after finishing HyperSpace Shooter, I felt like stepping back from action games and programming, so I settled for a simple game in which I could focus mostly on graphics and animation.

I'm still going to tease you a little bit with some character sketches compared with their vector renditions:

The sketches were done very quickly. You can even see that they were done on used papers, as the printed text shows through it. In the end they came out pretty nicely and are fun to animate. More on that later!

The indie game developer's start-up cost

2008-12-14T14:13:00.000-08:00

This article is a free exploration on the cost of starting an indie game business. The calculations are rough and not meant to be exhaustive. The typical individual starting an indie game business is relatively young, willing and motivated (or else he would'nt try to be an entrepreneur). I assume throughout the calculations that the individuals are living on minimal money and estimate the living cost of every one of them to be $15,000 per year (from experience, that's about what I need to sustain myself). The cost estimates are for one year of business, which is a reasonable amount of time for building a small game.

Case one – The garage dweller model
Let's look at the smallest cost possible. The hypothetic situation here is a lone developer trying to develop downloadable games or games for the web and generate revenue via various income streams. Even at such a level, there is several possible scenarios. Let's look at two of them:

Cheap, used computer with peripherals (screen, mouse, keyboard, printer) – $1000
One year internet access – $500 to $1000, depending on available services
Free graphic softwares (say, Gimp) – $0
Free coding environment (C++, java, Flex, ...) - $0

We have a whooping total of $2000. It's interesting to note that the costs described above are probably already been paid by anyone who is interested in making games and would actually NOT involve any new investment from it's part. The only thing left to pay for is time.

The work could be distributed via free channels like online game portals where posting games is free and revenues are generated through advertisements, sponsorships or royalties.

Total investment for one year: $17,000

Case two – The lone ranger model
The second model is still a lone developer but working with better tools.

A nice computer with peripherals – $1500 to $2000 (let's be conservative)
Adobe web premium suite (flash, dreamweaver, photoshop, illustrator, ...) – $2700
One year internet access – $500 to $1000
One year web hosting – $100
Domain name – $40

So far I'm not considering the cost of renting an office space since I'm assuming the developer works alone and from his home, « garage style ». In this second case, the initial investement rises to a little under $6000. Still not a big deal.

Total investment for one year: $20,840

Case three – The small start-up model
The final model I'm looking at in this article is a small start-up company formed by a party of three individuals: one designer, one programmer and an artist.

Office space – $1200 x 12 months = $14,400
One nice computer with peripherals – $1500 to $2000
Two state of the line computers (powerful, dual screens, lots of ram) $3000 x 2 = $6000
Adobe web premium suite – $2700 x 2 = $5400
One year internet access – $500 to $1000
One year web hosting – $100
Domain name – $40

$28,940. We are nearing the $30,000 point in investment. The team members probably already own computers, so if they want to stick with what they have, it is possible to lower the initial investment by a few thousand dollars. It is also possible that they will all work from home so the office space (the highest investment), while a neat thing to have, might be superfluous. With a team of three, the possibilities are soaring and the amount of work that can be done in a year is much bigger. Depending on the scope of the game, they could easily pull out from 1 to 3 games during the year.

Total investment for one year: $73,940

Comparison chart:

Case one – The garage dweller model: $17,000
Case two – The lone ranger model: $20,840
Case three – The small start-up model: $73,940

In the end, if you intend on starting-up a small indie game business and want to buy yourself a year of development, we could roughly estimate that a fair amount of cash to start up with would be around $20,000 per individual. While the number we explored here are interesting, there are several other scenarios that we haven't looked at. Some developers keep a full time job and try to work on their business on the evening and week-ends, others have part-time jobs or accept some freelance work for other companies in order to survive. Still others outsource the art, music or coding to other companies so they require more money but less time.

Personally I am blessed with a part time job that fulfills my basic needs (incomes fluctuating somewhere around $20,000 a year) and leave me with a four month stretch of free time during the summer. I have been able to develop a first game last summer after a three months of full time development and the result of my work was a total income somewhere around... hmmm... $5... We might as well say I got nothing from it but I would say that it's not bad for a first game that taught me much about being an indie developer.

And with that last bit of information, I would like to end the article with this advice: design your first game to be a very small one so you can build it in only a few months and do not focus on money. Expect go gain $0 from it because it is quite probable that this is what you'll get. However, expect to learn very much, and be prepared to build a second game using that knowledge!

Student "Escape the Room" compilation 2008

2008-11-30T09:33:00.000-08:00

As a mid-term project, the students of the Flash course I'm giving were asked to produce an "Escape the Room" kind of game. I've just posted the amazing result of their effort on the Kongregate website and I invite you to try it out! The games have been made in a few weeks only by Flash beginners, so make sure to give credits where it's due, and rate the games!!

"Scurge:Hive", video game mini-critic

2008-09-11T09:07:00.000-07:00

This is intended to be a short critic of the game Scurge : Hive, NOT a review. I will look into interesting game mechanics and how they support the fast pace present in the game.

There is two important mechanics at the heart of Scurge ; the first being the infection level and the decontamination chambers and the second being the “rock / paper / scissor” style weapons and enemies.

Infection, tension and portability
Scurge is often tense and always fast paced. The character is constantly being infected by a virus, making an “infection gauge” slowly rise up from 0 to 100%. When the infection is up to 100%, the character's health starts going down quickly and she eventually dies. To avoid this fate, the player must constantly be on the look-out for decontamination chambers which will heal the character to full health, drop the infection level back to 0% and automatically save the game.

Effects of the mechanic
This timed style of play considerably rises the tension of the game, forcing the player to act fast while he's navigating the environment and solving the puzzles and to be on the look-out for the next decontamination chamber at all time. The player must also be careful not to step into slime like tiles which will make the infection rise even quicker. This mechanic has two interesting effects on the gameplay: it quickens the pace of an already intense action game and assures that the game is often saved. It is also interesting to note that saving the game becomes virtually transparent as it is coupled with an important play mechanic.

A very quick game of rock, paper and scissors
There is three different categories of enemies in the game (energy, biological and mechanical) and for each category a special weapon is available that have extra effect on them. However, each of those special weapons also boosts the attack and speed of another category of creatures.

Here is a very crude graphic explaining the links between enemies and weapons.

Rock / paper / scissors mechanics are well known in video games but are still efficient in building strategic thinking. Here, however, the pace is too quick to build strong strategic thinking but instead enforce quick reactions and intense decision making into the action.

Where the game makes this interesting is in the controls related to it. The player can only use one of the weapons at any one time but he can efficiently switch between them in much less than half a second by holding the right shoulder button and moving the directional pad in the direction of the desired weapon.

Effects of the mechanic
Since each weapons is very efficient against one type of enemy but boosts another type, the choice of weapon is always crucial. Most of the time two different types of enemies are present at the same time and the player must choose his weapon accordingly. Will he dispatch the easy ones while risking to boost the other? Or will he choose the weapon that kills one type quickly and has no special effects on the other? In the latter stages of the game, often the three types of enemies are present at the same time in the larger rooms and asks for the player to quickly alternate between the weapons several times in a few seconds. Yet again, the pace is quickened and the tension is boosted up, here by coupling a classic mechanic with an efficient control scheme.

Conclusions
Scurge was intended to be a fast paced, intense action game. The tension is greatly risen through the use of timed play and efficient weapon controls. Being a portable game, it is also an advantage to be able to play for short sessions of time. The timed play mechanic supports this strenght by enforcing the player to save the game every couple of minutes while rendering the saving transparently integrated into the metaphor of the game. The player is thus always sure that he won't lose any considerable progress and is also free of interface-navigating. At the same time, the suspension of disbelief is strongly kept in place.

Gaming habits and creative freedom: where did my time go??

2008-08-31T18:04:00.000-07:00

How much time do you spend playing games every week? Every day? As I previously said, I found myself with a lot of enjoyable free time this summer. This is an experiment I'm finding most enlightening and that I am bound to do again next summer. However, when I found myself spending increasing amount of time playing games every day (mostly on kongregate's website), I began questionning myself on the use of that much anticipated free time.

Somewhere in the twelve weeks of the creative program I'm following (from the book « The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity »), the author asks us, as an artist, to avoid reading anything during a whole week. It appeared to make sense and I did just that. It was not easy. I turned off my RSS feeds, put away my bed shelf novel and the three or four books I always keep at arm reach and tried it. I was amazed at how much time I had on my hands and I found myself being much more productive during that week. Whenever I felt like just lying down and reading a good book, I found myself in dismay as I had to do something else. Most of the time I grabbed my guitar and scratch a few chords just to kill off time, or I got my hand on some pen and paper to draw or write. What was amazing was that I found it much easier during this week to get work done on my Flash game and other duties. I also cooked a lot. Over all, a pretty busy week.

Fast forward to just recently, the answers to my question about my gaming habits became clear: I WAS spending too much time playing. Yes, I like playing and it is helpful to me as a game designer, but I had to keep some kind of balance. I was playing games mostly out of escapism and fear of duty so I had to do something about it. And that something was radical: no games for a week. While I thought not reading for a week was hard, I found it much more difficult not to play... And much more productive. Believe me, I never played that much guitar in my life as during that week! I also worked on a new game and the graphics progressed at an amazing speed.

Most interestingly, I felt some kind of switch in my feelings. When I play a lot of games, I often put aside more important duties and feel pathetic for “the time lost”, but, while I kinda missed playing during that week, I felt an immense satisfaction at everything I was accomplishing. Overall, this was very empowering, so much that I'm considering doing this again in the futur (thought it won't be any easier than it was, maybe even more difficult). In the end, I realized I'm a “game addict”. My gaming habits are life long and I'll keep playing my whole life, but as someone who seeks out accomplishment and creative freedom, this experiment was very eye opening.

Becoming a better (game) artist

2008-08-18T11:47:00.000-07:00

In the past few years I've spent several summers locked inside climatized buildings, working, just to watch the good time go by throught the closed windows. Last summer I felt it really painfully and I told myself I was not going to work during the next summer, no matter what. Call it « law of attraction » or whatever but I've soon been offered to give Flash classes in the University where I studied. I jumped on the occasion. Since I am on a school schedule, this summer I enjoyed four months of (unpaid) free time. Awesome.

So what did I do during those four long months? At first, having so much free time is a little bit frightening and I didn't knew exactly what to do but I soon got hold of myself and used that time to my advantage. As some readers may know, I've completed a first independent Flash game, which took about 3 months of almost full time work (+ one month of initial design done before the end of the school session). This involved learning ActionScript 3.0, making graphics, codes, music and sound effects (I will likely go back to this project in the future but now I'm taking a break from it). Here's a quick list of other things I did:

Started two new smaller Flash games (work in early progress)
Worked on a paper game prototype
Practiced playing guitar
Practiced playing clarinet
Began writing a novel (a first for me)
Wrote song lyrics
Made a small painting for my incoming daugter's bedroom
Cooked a lot
Took good care of my pregnant girlfriend
Played games (of course)
Built nice wall-hanging CD-Shelves out of nice wood we found in the street
Read a lot of books
Enjoyed walking and riding my bike in city's parks
Followed Yoga classes
And so much more things it seems...

These four months were one of the best time I had in my life. I basically did what I wanted to, which involves doing a lot of different things. It was not easy at first to efficiently use my free time, but at that time my girlfriend found this great book by Julia Cameron called « The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity » which proved to be a valuable tool in just getting to do things (no matter your situation, I highly recommend this book to anyone who feel like doing a little more with their life, creatively speaking).

The free time I had this summer was highly enlightening and I will do it again next summer without hesitation. I was able to slow down, think about what I had done so far and what I wanted to do, and I actually did a bit of that right here and now. It helped me to put things in perspective and getting that first game out (even if it's not an awesome game) gave me a temendous amount of confidence for the future. Not working is awesome. You should definitely try it. :)

Design Journal 3 – Testing Sessions

2008-08-06T08:27:00.000-07:00

I had three test sessions for my board game so far. As I stated before, the first two sessions proved the potential for a good game but for some reason the third play session was a real catastrophe. I'll look into those reasons and try to bring out some useful lessons.

What happened?
For my third prototype, I decided to simplify the game a lot as it was involving much micro management and a mental maths. I reduced the number of fields the player had to manage from 10 to 6 and removed the player-actions that were not or almost not used. I focused on the more interesting player-actions involving ressource sacrifices as these actions brought interesting choices and strategies to the game. However, the maths were still too overwhelming for the players, which brings me to a first rule:

Choose the right moment to play test
The maths were simple but were recurring every turn the player took. I play tested the game with my family members, which play lots of card games but not much complex board games, let alone space adventure ones. It was late in the evening and the testers were beginning to get tired even before we started, which made the maths even harder to cope with. One of the players even abandoned the game altogether in the middle of the session due to sheer fatigue. I'll simplify the rules again but it's clear that the moment influenced my observations of the game. For better or for worst? I cannot tell yet.

Choose the right players
My first play session was with students who were accustomed to computer games and they got the concept fairly quickly. They did not have any difficulty coping with the recurring mental calculations and even showed possibilities for complex strategies within the game. However, the last two sessions were with my close family who have less experience with those games and they had difficulty grasping what they had to do to reach the game objective. But the biggest problem I had with the third session was that, even if the game was simplified, I used the same players as the previous session and they had expectations about the game rules. While some of the rules were changed, they tried to play according to the rules they previously learned and it caused some confusion. Unless I had experienced players, it would have been a better idea to use different peoples for my new version.

Don't play your own game, observe
Another thing I did wrong for the third test session was that I joined the game as a player. Being a player, I concentrated on my part of the board and did not observed the other players as much as I should have. It's important to keep a larger view of the game if you want to see the inherent strategies and the way the players actually engage in the game. The game also being competitive, I got caught in the feeling of wanting to win. I mean, I was the creator of the game, I should have had no problem winning the game! This was such a wrong attitude!! First of all I did not win, which does not matter at all. More importantly, the feeling was keeping me focused away from were I should have been; trying to find the fun for the OTHER players.

Let your pride at the door
Some testers are going to tell you how to do your job and what changes you should make to improve the game. It happened to me and it is not fun. While there can be good ideas, most of the time they miss the larger picture and are just small tweeking that won't necessarily improve the game. You know best how to change the game and nobody likes to be told how to do their own job so it can be very frustrating. Yet, it's important to keep a cool head and to listen to your player. Even if the changes they suggest don't make sense, just shut up and listen, everyone will feel better. There is no use in telling them why it won't work. You don't have to do what they tell you, but listen! The most useful comments the players will make are the ones where they tell you what they actually like or don't like. You can put more focus on what they like and remove or change what they don't. Being more general about the game, these comments are stimulating, in opposition to the frustrating precises suggestions.

Don't give up
I took a lot of time before writing up this third entry of my design journal. First I wanted to finish my Flash game HyperSpace Shooter, but also I had a lot of ressentment from the bad test session. After thinking much about how it went and what I should do, I decided not to let myself be brought down and learn from it instead. It's good that I waited some time before writing it. Getting some time away from helped me cool down and see it with a clearer eye. I'm not giving up on it and have tons of new ideas for making it more enjoyable (in particular, I'd really like to make it a cooperative game). So if you encounter some bad experience while testing one of your games, by all mean, don't give up. You can learn a lot of things from a bad experience, maybe even more than from a good one, but you have to step over the bad feeling and think about it. If it's necessary, let the game sleep for a while and come back to it later. It will be much easier than trying to change it with your head still hot.

The Making of my First Game - A mini Post-Mortem

2008-07-21T13:59:00.000-07:00

Overview of the project
Developping the first version of HyperSpace Shooter was a 4 months process in all. Not too bad considering I did it all by myself. The point of doing this particular project was, first and foremost, to get into a game project I could actually finish all by myself in a reasonable amount of time, which is something I wanted to do for several years now. The second goal was to learn ActionScript 3.0, the new coding language of Adobe Flash. I'm very happy that I released this first version but I know that it is only a first step. Here is how it went.

Starting the project
The first month was mostly spent doing the design while I was still teaching in University. I started off with a design involving a complex, living system underlying the action mechanics of the game but after doing some prototyping, I soon killed it off as it was starting to seem like a bigger project than I had first intended. I'm not giving up on the idea but for my first game I decided I was better off doing something as simple as possible. So I put my focus on doing a game in a known genre and do it well.

Defining the style
Right from the start I knew I wanted something pretty that would not scare, say, my girlfriend away. Space shooters are either totally dark and metallic or full of cute faces and flowers, so I decided to go with a casual, simple yet personal style with nice, plain colors. Again, the important word here is “simple”. I could not afford the time required to build a very elaborate graphical style so I kept with mostly flat colors and simple animation effects for the ships. The player's ship looks nice when it moves around and that's the most important part. A good side effect of the style is that it kept the weight of the game low. The whole game weights 2,4 megabytes, and in this, there is 2,3 megs of sound and music, so that's pretty low in graphics.

Freedom
Working alone, I had all the freedom to play around with my ideas and nobody above my shoulder telling me what I should be doing. Having worked in a corporate game environment where I had my hands tied all the time for almost three years, this freedom was really appreciated. The final product really is my own vision and I can pride myself with actually having done a whole game all by myself. Working alone has it's downside though; I could not share much of my ideas and I could not receive much feedbacks on my work either.

Organizing my time
I am on a free summer schedule from the end of april until the end of august, which gives me about 4 months of free time so I seemed to have plenty of time to invest in my game. I did waste a lot of time, mostly in the beginning of the project, fooling around and doing anything but working, but then I eventually rolled up my sleeves and worked full weeks. I didn't had any precise time plan but I knew I wanted to finish the work before the end of July. I made simple to do lists once in a while to keep me focused but I mostly did the work on a per need basis. The most time consuming aspect of production was the coding, which required heavy time investment from beginning to end. Graphics and animations were done very quickly, sketching some ship shapes on the corner of the table and reproducing them in vectors pretty quickly. I kept the shapes simple and easy to manipulate and most of the ships don't even have any aimations. I spent about a week doing the music and the sound effects, which was probably the part of the project I most enjoyed.

Keeping the motivation
It was not always easy to keep going all by myself. There is always a part in an art production where you actually feel like you'll never do anything good and it's always dangerous to drop out at this point. I myself have a long history of beginning several projects and never finishing them but this time I was really determined to finish something. The further I got in the project, the more time I was ready to concede to it because I felt I had crossed a point of no return. As the end of the project approached, the motivation gradually went up and in the end I was striving on an angry determination to finish and release it.

Learning ActionScript 3.0
I was getting fairly good with AS2 before Adobe got out the new AS3 language but making the switch between the two is not actually easy. I had to learn it though since I am going to teach it this fall so the project was a very good way to get myself into it. This alone was a fairly good motivation to keep going. I did learn a lot and while I probably didn't use all “good practices”, I kept learning new tricks until the very end of the project. I worked with XML, external .swf (a system I changed in the end for internal graphics instead), inheritance and composition classes, sounds and all kind of events. Doing a game is great way to explore all the aspect of a coding language and I feel very confident with it now. Coding another game will probably take half the time it took me now.

Doing the music
Like I said, the music was the part I most enjoyed. It came as a surprise to me since, while I did some music for fun in the past, I'm not a very good musician and never really explored the possibility of becoming one professionally or anything. The first song I did came out nicely though it might be a little bit too light and joyful (as was already commented by various players) but that's what I actually wanted. The second one (playing in the 4th, 8th, 9th and 10th levels) is the one I'm really proud of. Before and while doing it I listened to a lot of midi samples from Final Fantasy II and III as well as various Megaman games to get into the video game feeling I wanted. I mostly inspired myself from the Final Fantasy's battle music, which thaught me to make intense punches and reminders of the first song (in FFIII, the main melody of Kefka's song is integrated into the final battle's song against him). It took me about one full day for each of the two original songs (1 minute 30 each) and I feel that I could do yet better songs in the future.

Balancing the game
Balancing a game is hard but I expected it and prepared my code for easy balancing. I could not play test my game with a lot of players. In fact, I mostly tested myself for bugs and I made my girlfriend play 2 or 3 times to see how it was going. She kept telling me that the game was too hard and I knew that it is something that often happens when the developper is the only tester of his own game, so I got the difficulty lower for the first levels. As soon as the game was posted on Kongregate, the most common comment was how easy it is. I quickly rescripted the first levels to make them more interesting but I'm still unsure if the balance is good or not for all the levels.

What really helped though was the way I built the script engine. There is a delay between the appearance of every ship or wave of ships that can be easily modified through the tweaking of a single variable so I could play with this and see how the levels were going depending on the setting. This is actually the base of the five difficulty levels in the game. While other parameters are changing, like the maximum health of the player's ship and of the enemy ships, the most drastic change is this particular delay. So from one difficulty setting to an other, the levels are the same, they are just playing at different speed. I play tested it myself to see if I had something interesting and I could beat the “very hard” setting with a lot of difficulties so I figured it was nice. If someone ever complete the “insane” level, make sure to contact me. I want to know about that. :)

Player's comments
I only posted the game three days ago as of now and already got a lot of comments, mostly from Kongregate's players. Even though they are not particularly positive, I was really surprised by how constructive they were. When releasing the game I was feeling a bit anguished by the possible feedbacks and was afraid of being bashed on. Coming out with an art piece, exposing ourself to a public and critic view, is always difficult in that regard and brings forth a lot of stress, but in the end it was not that bad. While I was not very pleased with the average 2.5 out of 5 stars rating (I invested a lot of time and efforts in it), when looking back at it, I know that's probably what it deserves. Most comments were about the same major flaws (mostly that it is too easy and repetitive), others were more precise about the expectation of the players and allowed me to make easy changes right the day after I had posted the game (for example the stacking shields, which I had the code for but ended up turning off for some reason during the project).

Conclusion
In the end, I'm just very happy that I got a project out and it is, in itself, a good motivation to keep going in that path. I'm not sure I will get any money from it, but I don't really care since really few resources were invested in the first place. I had a lot of fun doing it and got out with more confidence and experience. Doing a game is something I wanted to do for a long time so I reached my objectives in that matter. I know my next game (or next version of the game) will be much better!

Small is Beautiful's first independent game has been released!

2008-07-19T13:41:00.000-07:00

I am proud to announce that my first game as an independent developer has been released. You can play it on kongregate's portal right here.

I have invested several months of my life in this game and though it does have it's flaws, I am very pleased with the resulting outcome. It's a quirky game with a lot of personnality in the well known genre of the "shoot'em up". The whole game has been developed by myself as I have done the art, animation, programming, sound and music.

I hope to continue developing it in the future, but for now, I'm going to take a rest... Go play now! :)

Gamesetwatch: Is Gameplay As Narrative the answer?

2008-06-03T13:26:00.000-07:00

Good opinion piece on GameSetWatch from professional writer Justin Marks which represents exactly the way I feel about gameplay and narratives. Here's my favorite sentence:

We need to stop thinking about story as a device to make us care about the gameplay (it doesn't), and start thinking about the gameplay as the narrative itself (thus, making us care).

Gameplay as narrative is still found at different levels in most games but often at very low, accidental levels. Ironically, games that emphasize story-telling are often the ones to dismiss gameplay as narratives the most. Gameplay (or man-machine interactivition) is what defines video games as a medium on it's own. Real video game narratives cannot be anywhere else then there.

It seemed like an acquired reality in the infancy of video games, as I have stated before. Why does it seem so far and distant now?
_

Design Journal 2 – Coming up with the idea

2008-05-31T08:10:00.000-07:00

The initial spark for my current game project was a Flash learning project from one of my students. A simple, classic space shooter: shoot enemy ships, fight bosses, avoid asteroids. I felt like doing this kind of simple game too, and besides, I could practice Actionscript 3 programming on that project. I just had to find a simple twist to make the game interesting.

The Plot
I took a lot out of the world of the Meta-Baron by Alexandro Jodorowsky and Moebius (Jean Giraud) and from it's characters (check out some of the pages, you can taste the intensity of the writing in every drawing). As the main character, I wanted a mercenary not unlike the Metabaron, a warrior whose might could change the fate of galaxies. This powerful player character would be contracted by different planetary factions against each other, depending on their ability to pay.

I also wanted to give the player more freedom than traditionnal SCHMUPs. In the first design, the player could jump out of a level into a mini-map of the galaxy and instantly go anywhere at any time through hyper-space travel. While on the minimap, the player could watch the flow of events between the planetary factions and decide which missions to take on. I knew I was getting more ambitious than I first intended but the idea appeared interesting. Since it would be nearly impossible to script every possible outcomes, I had to build a world that would live on its own, with discernable rules and gambits.

Politics
To breath life into this underlying political context, I started modeling a system to define the ressources the planets would fight for, their objectives and their means. The Mercenary gained the role of a tool in this game of power and politics. The planet that can afford to pay for the Mercenary's services is assured a victory, but beware of his frequent shifts of allegiance. Through his choices and his ability to achieve the missions, the player would decide the fate of a whole galaxy, but the actual “game” would be played by artificial intelligences making their own choices.

Crafting a prototype
The design was getting pretty interesting but it's commonly known that you cannot know how a game will feel before you can actually play it. So before programming anything, I had to know if my system worked. Programming AIs around untested set of rules would probably lead to a massive waste of precious time so I went on to create a paper prototype (more on paper prototypes here and here) for the underlying political game rules. I thought that if I could fix and balance the rules and make them easy to play for human players, programming them should be a breeze.

Interestingly, the political game was fun enough that I decided to pursue it as a board game of it's own. I only had two play sessions so far but, even if the game is still loaded with flaws, I saw emerging strategies and interesting player choices that are very promising. After each of those two play sessions, the game changed radically, but the core of the game remains the same. More on this later...

Design Journal 1 - Complex Systems and their relevance to Game Design

2008-05-27T20:01:00.001-07:00

A while ago, I randomly bought a used copy of “Le Macroscope” by Joel deRosnay (1975), a book about systemic analysis and the study of complex systems. Right from the start, the theories striked me as powerful game design tools.

A complex system is a group of “entities” bounded by a network of interactions, trying to keep the system in balance. Examples of complex systems: the ecosystem, the economy, a city, a corporation, a beehive, etc.. The interactions in a complex systems follow one or many sets of rules and have one or many “centers of decision”.

Look at these illustrations (01, 02) from “Le Macroscope” representing different sets of rules found in nature. The ressources, processes and movements within the models are all identified visually. The systems, stripped down to their essentials, are easy to visualize and understand.

Note: I encourage you to at least read the first chapter of this excellent book. It is the most practical part of the book and gets you started quickly.

With the help of this kind of schemas, I worked on and idea about interplanetary politics and trades (at first I intended to create a simple background mechanic for a Flash game but it evolved into a board game). I quickly pinned down the most important aspects of the game, named them and depicted possible interactions. After a few sketches, I came up with something coherent with all the details I wanted. Here is the resulting model (my model is more akin to deRosnay's model about simple economies).

With a clear and understandable model, I went on to create the pieces of my board game and wrote the rules. At this point, all the important mechanics and most of the gameplay details were in place. Illustrating the desired system helped me visualize it and gave me a better understanding of the decisions the players will have to take. After all, this is what games are: complex systems.

Loom Child's touching adventure

2008-04-08T14:39:00.000-07:00

I have just finished playing through Lucasart's Loom (1990). I was deeply moved by the subtle fantasy, the strong plot and characters, the excellent voice acting, the beautiful arts (even though they are in 256 colors mode) and almost twenty years later, it appears as completely absurd that one of the most heard of debate in the game industry is if “games can evoke emotions for the player”. Because if it can't, well I have no idea what was that shrivel that went up my spine so often while I was playing this game.

While I did got involved emotionaly in a lot of games throughout my life, I think I can safely say that Loom is probably the most touching one I ever played. Do I dare say another time that it was created almost 20 years ago? One could argue, for the sake of arguing, that Loom's interactivity is not as deep as, say, a platform game or a FPS, and maybe even go as far as calling it an interactive movie. But hey! That's a game! The player makes choices and his choices, even though they merely unveil the story, bear meaning to the player. This alone makes it a game.

Interactivity can have a strong impact on the creation of meaning, just like colors and shapes in a painting or movement and lightings in cinema. For example, in Final Fantasy II (IV in Japan) on the SNES, at one point in the game, the main character, Cecil the Dark Knight, goes through an ordeal in order to become a Paladin. I'm sure some of you remember that part. Through the first part of the game, the player learns to fight whenever he enters the “combat screen”. This pattern is deeply imprinted in the player's behavior through repetition but when he reaches his ordeal, his appearance changes and he enters combat against his old self. If he fights, he will die, but if he just waits and accept being hit by his “shadow”, eventually he triumphs and becomes a real Paladin. Now this pattern that the game breaks, it means something. It forces the player to step back and look at all the fights he has done and all the fights he will do and think; “Why?”. If this part had been a simple cut-scene in the game, the player would probably read through it without really examinating the meaning of his becoming. Interactivity gives a meaning to this scene in a way that you cannot do in any other medium. This meaning, that the hero can become a better person, is also reinforced by other interactive elements (Cecil returns to Level 1, the equipment he uses is different, he has new skills) that changes how the game is played and understood. Did I say that this game was created almost 20 years ago (1991)?

I cannot say I'm a dedicated enough player to judge the state of the game business today (so much games, so long to go through them, so little time), but where did it go wrong? Why this debate about games and emotion? Isn't there enough proof already that games CAN and DO evoke emotions in the players? Who started this absurd debate? Please send a copy of Loom to Roger Ebert of Ebert and Roeper.

Characters, meaning and magic

2008-03-04T08:16:00.000-08:00

Corvus Elrod at Man Bytes Blog has some good thoughts on the use and misuse of character's backstories in games. Read it in these two posts.

This reminds me of important thoughts that were brought to me lately: namely that objects or beings are not as powerful as the connection between them.

A character in Marie Jakober's fantastic novel The Black Chalice, explains that magic is not in the things themselves (amulets, statues or other sacred objects), but in the links that connect these objects and beings. Objects possess no magic as long as we do not believe they do. To me, Corvus' point is very similar: Characters bear very little importance as long as they don't "act" and "interact" with other characters or objects in their environment.

The magic at work here is meaning. Take two random characters and put them side by side and it's just two characters standing side by side. But make them look at each other as if they were in love, or in competition with each other, or one is annoyed and the other is sad, or whatever... And suddenly, it's not just two characters standind side by side anymore: a relation is created, suggesting previous actions and events to come. Time is created. Meaning is created. A story is revealed.

So yes, "shut up about yer damn backstory!", don't be litterate about it. The backstory is for YOU, the writer. The story is for the others, those who listen. Know your precious characters and use what you know to make them mean something through their actions and reactions. Make them ACT!

Space shooter prototyping

2008-02-22T06:47:00.000-08:00

First space shooter prototype, quickly built in Flash AS2 in around 6 hours.
I'm currently rewriting it in AS3.

Turn with LEFT and RIGHT
Accelerate with UP
Slow down with DOWN
Shoot with SPACEBAR

Enemy ships follow you around but don't hurt you (maybe they are friendly ships?). You can crash in the asteroids though.

You can try it here.

Interactive Humour

2007-11-30T08:12:00.000-08:00

Interactive humour?
What defines humour? Humour often starts with a story. There's an initial situation, a development and a conclusion (or a punch line). Within this story, humour relies on surprise to make people react. The initial situation is broken or reversed, or the punch line is totally non-sequitur.

Every art has found over time how to use it's own nature to achieve surprise and humour, but what about interactivity? Funny video games often take advantage of funny characters and stories to achieve comical effect, but this is not where the nature of video game lies. How can the very nature of interactivity be used for humour? We are looking for the underlying humour at the core of games: in rules, mechanics and controls.

“Punch lines” and Non sequiturs
One way to achieve humour is to use wacky rules. In Mad Magazine's board game, a satire of Monopoly, the goal of the game is to be the first to lose all his money. This breaks an established rule convention for players. The game also forces the players into bizarre challenges (like walking backward around the table with a playing card on the head). This rule does not really have any link with the metaphor of the game. The humour is at the core of the game, it is in what the players do and what it means to them.

Making the player move with a video game
Forcing the player to do wacky movements is funny but kind of hard with a standard controller. The Nintendo Wii allows new ways of forcing people in movement, let's hope it is put to good use. So far the funniest game I have seen one play is Dance Dance Revolution. This kind of humour is mostly social. It's not as funny if there is no one to see you move around.

Flexible rules
When several different approaches and strategies are possible (even better if it has emergent qualities), the game has a potential for being surprising and unusual. This works best if there is several players to compare the different play styles. It is tremendous to see other people surmount obstacles in ways we had not imagined.

Changing the rules
When introduced to a set of rule and given time to get accustomed to it, a player comes to expect the world to work in a certain way. If the rules are changed, the player becomes shocked and confused. It acts as a punch line for the initial situation (initial rules). 1000 blank white cards is a rare kind of game that relies esentially on having the player change it's rules.

Changing rules as a narrative ingredient
Children change the rules all the time when they are playing games. If there is something they don't like, they just change it. And children can be very surprising! By nature, digital games are rigid and do not allow radical changes to their structure. In video games, the rules are modified all the time, as the player grabs power-ups or encounter new creatures, but they are not changed. What if suddenly your bullets transformed into eggs and up became down? What if enemy ships became a shield or your deadly uppercut move a loving hug? It might be done in a clever way and try to make a statement, or it might be totally non-sequitur.

Humour is an art in itself. It is a little like a recipe, let's apply it to the very nature of interactivity!

How useful are games?

2007-11-25T13:17:00.000-08:00

What is the most useful game you have ever played? By useful I'm talking about something that can benefit you on a daily basis. Let's say we note games on a scale of 1 to 10 for their usefulness, 1 being a « total waste of your precious time » and 10 is « essential to your survival in a crazy world ». Questionnary board games can teach several facts about different subjects, which would get them a 4 or 5. Zelda and God of War, while they are nice entertainment pieces, would not score over a 2.

We could argue about hand – eye coordination being important and all, but Zelda won't teach you how to survive. Tetris might get a better note for teaching spatial dimensions for example. Brain trainings are good too to keep the brain sharp, rythmn games teach you to follow the beat and DDR does extra by making you move and sweat, so it could get up to 5 too, probably. There is also simulation games designed to teach pilots how to land a plane without putting anyone in danger. This is probably a 8 or 9 for this particular field of learning.

What are the different ways that a game can be useful (for people, society, environment, economics..)? What is the most useful game you have ever played?

Rant: Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance

2007-09-26T19:19:00.000-07:00

Whatever happened to simplicity, ease of use and good narrations in game today?

When I play a game like Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance on Gamecube, I enjoy about 40% of the actual gameplay (how exactly is the "Biorythmn" and "character affinity" mechanics supposed to affect the game?) and about 20% of the story (the dialogs are so freaking long and boring, I skip most of them).

On top of that, the game is extremely unforgiving. There is several occasions where a character will die of a single blow and once a character dies, he is lost forever. There is a huge amount of characters and they tried really hard to put personnality in them only to make them die from a single blow...

I miss the era of the SNES RPGs (as I'm sure a lot of old players do). I was never so much of an "open world" game player, I liked tight stories better, and in that sense, I still have to play the game that beats the efficiency of the narration of the 12-hours trip into Final Fantasy II (IV in japan).

That's all for now. I might be digging deeper into games narration in the next months (I sure hope I will) so be prepared to hear a lot about FFII. :)

If you have any games to recommend that have strong narratives, linear or not, I'd be pleased to hear about them. My personnal appreciation criterias are effectiveness (how much information is given in as few words or visuals as possible) and connectedness (how the narrative is connected or used by the game mechanics).

New Pixel Art: Chinese Soldier

2007-06-27T04:06:00.000-07:00

Here is a new animation I've just finished. I can say I'm happy with it. This is a chinese soldier in traditionnal clothes, minus the traditionnal hat that I did not want.

It's 43 pixel high with 16 colors (including transparency) so it's a very light sprite (less than 4kb for 10 frames of animation). I drew two frames, one standing and one walking frame, on my drawing table with my good old mechanical pencil, scanned those and worked the animation in photoshop and ImageReady (to test the animation).

Feel free to comment! It's always appreciated. :)

Working on: Ninja Flash Game

2007-06-20T04:01:00.000-07:00

Since my attention span is quite small, I could'nt get any further with the interactive park scene. Instead, I went back and started working on this little Ninja Game demo.

So far it is just a prototype for the controls. I'm quite happy with how it moves and feels and I think the animations are coming out quite OK. And yes, the tiles are horrible. :)

Anyway, next step: make some nice environment tiles, clean the code and eventually add some enemies and weapons.

Ian Bogost on Lambourne's V-Tech Rampage.

2007-06-15T13:47:00.000-07:00

Gamasutra has a very inspiring piece by Ian Bogost about Ryan Lambourne's V-Tech Rampage game. It doesn't speak so much of the game as it speaks of the covers and criticism that has been given to it. From the article:

I challenge the industry to do better than the homebrew hacks McCauley would have us banish. I want a proper game, in a box, in the store, just like United 93 and Elephant and Munich share shelf space with Con Air and Bad Boys and Coyote Ugly.

While that would be really awesome, I don't think the game industry is mature enough to go that way yet. Maybe we'll be able to see it in 5 years from now, in the best of cases. More likely, it will come from independent developers. I doubt big players will be interested in tackling tough subjects until someone proved to them that it can be profitable in some way.

I don't want to be a turn down though, I'd rather see an independent, non-censored author's piece than a massive, bland, "designed by committee", state-of-the-art work.

I'm looking forward to it. :)

Gamasutra: making your way through the genres.

2007-06-05T09:41:00.000-07:00

Harmonix designer Chris Canfield has an article up on Gamasutra titled "Establishing A Beachhead In A Crowded Genre".

Very good read. The main points are to strip down what's distracting the player from the core, add a "signature" to the design and, since it is about genres, use the rules of the genre to your advantage.

Three very important points in my opinion. I'm a great supporter of stripping down to the essential but I also like games that break the rules just enough to surprise you.

Sean Howard and his 300 game ideas challenge.

2007-05-31T10:09:00.000-07:00

Sean Howard at www.squidi.net gave himself a challenge of coming up with 300 game ideas in 300 days.

To this day, he's up to 22 ideas. This promises to be an interesting inspiration source. Plus, it's full of great pixel art! I love the simplicity.

China - game addiction treated by the army.

2007-05-23T06:30:00.000-07:00

"Le Devoir.com" has a disturbing story about children's addiction to video games in china. The story is in french so I'll roughly translate the big lines.

A 40-something peasant was sentenced to 10 years in jail for killing his 14 years old son. The man had drunk and "blew-up" after learning that his son was found in an internet café playing online games for three days instead of going to school. Doctor Tao Ran explains that 95% of internet dependencies are related to online videogames.

The psychiatrist and military doctor also explains that while parents in china are very conscientious about their children's education, they are lacking towards the affective development.

Kung-fu and assault guns

In 2004, a readaptation center for internet addict has been created in an aerial base near the capital. The young "junkies" have lot of space and a pool at their disposition and follow a military training. They learn to use assault guns, kung-fu, military knowledge and are in for a lot of exercising.

I don't want to comment on this story since it's very hard for me to have the big picture but let's ask this question: would Jack Thompson approve?

Thanks to my friend Christian Ayotte for pointing me to the story.

Interactive Park Scene v1

2007-05-18T04:23:00.000-07:00

I have'nt posted much in the last week since I've been working on a little interactive scene. The main goals of the exercise are to a) practice my pixel art skills and b) test a Flash Framework I've been working on for a long time.

You can see a first version here.

As of now, the interactivity is limited to walking around in the scene (using the mouse) but I'll be working on some fun things in the next weeks.

Comments appreciated.

Ecology of the game world.

2007-05-09T07:08:00.000-07:00

An excellent design feature on Gamasutra this week: "Living Worlds: The Ecology of Game Design" by Kevin Carter

Kevin is describing three principles in world building to make those breath life and seem more realistic:

1) Creatures are Part of Their Environments
Begin the level design process with your Non Player Characters (NPCs) in mind

2) Creatures are Territorial
Congregate Creatures in Groups Around Resources

3) Creatures Organize Themselves into Innate Hierarchies
Arrange like creatures in a hierarchical manner

These principles are all present in the real world. Just look around, you won't have problems finding a bunch of ants gathering ressources for the nest. This simple example quickly illustrates the three principles: they are part of their environment (they build a nest), they are territorial (they gather ressources) and organized in a hierarchy (they are social creatures organized in different casts).

For more fascinating read on the ecology and the environment, I recommend reading David Suzuki's books "The Sacred Balance" and "Tree: A Life Story".

As for the games' environments, Kevin Carter concludes:

Ultimately, the three guidelines laid out by this article can be seen as the connective tissue that holds a game world together. The tighter and thicker this connective tissue becomes between, the more believable your game world will feel, and the easier it will be to reach what should be the ultimate goal of all game designers, specifically stellar game play that works on multiple levels.

Videogames and Videoplays.

2007-04-28T06:44:00.000-07:00

Tadhg Kelly from Particle Blog has an interesting post about the different form of games and their intended use.

There is a difference between those who interact to "game" and those who interact to "play", and the difference between gamers and players is one of perspective, much like the difference between factual and fictional readers.

He says that different games are different for different reason, just like reading a recipe book is very different from reading a novel. With the emergence of "How-to" softwares, no one can argue against that anymore.

A cry against hollywood and game convergence.

2007-04-24T08:27:00.000-07:00

The "Click Nothing" blog has good thoughts on the convergence of blockbuster games and hollywood movies, rejecting the idea that it could be helpful to the game industry.

Building on 300's story as a metaphore for the struggle of Hollywood (Xerxes) to conquer the gaming industry (the Spartans), he concludes with a lucid cry:

Unfortunately, as it was with Leonidas and his Spartans, this is not only something loathe to us, it is something impossible for us. Even if we wanted to accept Xerxes’ terms and kneel, we cannot because making better games by learning from film is impossible.

I more than agree with him and I know there is well over 300 people ready to gather on this call. The unfortunate part is that the big players of the game industry are not all about making better games, but more about making more profits.

Who's in for a fight?

"Art is not supposed to be comfortable."

2007-04-20T07:27:00.000-07:00

Ian Bogost, author of "Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism", has an excellent post on Water Cooler Games about the state of games as an art form.

Art is not supposed to be comfortable. Art is not supposed to be a "positive educational experience," to use Sloane's words. Art must be allowed to be disturbing and dangerous. It must be allowed to make us uncomfortable. There is a place in art -- and in games -- for work that speaks on its own, without appeal to authority, educational standards, psychology, or anything else. Designing solely for reception is a weakness we must overcome.

I agree with him, it's time to give video games a wider range of expressions and meanings. It is a medium with a huge power that is yet to be explored. The range of styles in games can be as wide as it is in litterature or cinematography, maybe even larger.

What do you want games to express? What topics would you like them to explore?

Among other things, I'd like to see them digging in psychological conflicts, to express the influences characters (including the player) can have on each other's personnality. Sometimes a simple word can make or break a whole life, how can we express this interactively?

How to become a Game Designer? - My experience

2007-04-17T03:44:00.000-07:00

I've been working as a game designer myself for some time so I wanted to share my experience of it and give some insights.

What are the requirements?
There is no precise set of requirements for becoming a game designer. Most designers come from different fields of computer arts, programming or directly out of QA and I could totally see people from science or psychology fields orienting themselves in the video game field. In fact, the more diverse are your knowledges, the better.

The first thing to do is to ask yourself “what kind of games I want to design?”. A lot of big companies are breaking down the designer's job into sub-categories like “sports game designer”, “FPS designer” or others. But this is not all. You don't have to work for one of the big companies to work as a game designer. There is a whole independent (indie) scene getting larger than ever, the casual web game scene, ludo-educative games and an emerging serious games scene too. There is probably a lot of other opportunities that I'm not even aware of but let's look at those first.

The big players
Here we have the likes of Ubisoft, Electronic Arts, Gameloft, Eidos and other huge studios that concentrate on getting as much games out as possible with the highest production value possible. I've been in one of these companies before. While working on the latest cutting edge next-gen game might sound very exciting, you must be ready to put in some time and effort as these companies are habitually very demanding toward their employees (check out the EA spouse web site http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html to see what I mean). I've known people who were happy to work for those big corporates and pull those huge next-gen games but, for myself, I quickly got tired of the long hours and the low rewards. However, if you are new to the game field, it might be your best chance to get a designer job as they hire a lot of young talent. From my experience, employees would stay in that kind of company for an average of 2 years, so this opens up for a lot hiring in the long term. Just show them you know what you are talking about and that you are motivated and ready for the wild ride, and it should be enough to get you in somewhere (be it game designer, level designer or integrator. Integrator can be a great starting point).

The indie scene
Independent development is a lot more risky since it is often paid on short contract and you have no warranty that a game will sell. I would not recommend starting your own company if you have no experience, though getting a couple of contracts will help you see what the indie scene is all about. Check out forums http://forums.indiegamer.com/index.php for informations and job offers. While there is a lot of risk at sake (ie: how much food there is in your fridge) being an indie developer is extremely involving and exciting. You get to work on the projects you believe in, you have a lot of responsibilities regarding the quality of the game, it's marketing and customer support, there is no boss over you head to tell you what to do. Basically; you get the freedom to do your things. If you have enough talent and are ready to risk a part of your income, I'd say go for it.

Being an indie developer also means that you'll have to wear a lot of different hats. Most of the time you will be working with a very small team so the more you know about coding, art, sound and design, the better. These days, some online publishers are emerging to help the indie scene. The most important one is probably Manifesto Games that concentrate on hardcore games of different genres but there is also Kongregate which wants to be the YouTube of Flash games. The advantage of these publishers is that they pay a good percentage to the developers.

Casual games
What some call the “thirty-something-at-home-mother's games”, though this is somewhat totally inaccurate and limiting. This particular market mostly started out with independent developers building simple and addictive puzzles games but it grew to a point that now there is big players in it; Shockwave games, Big Fish Games, Reflexive Arcade, Real Arcade and a lot of others. Those are all massive publishers or game portals. A lot of the games are still developed by independents and sold to the portals for distribution. Developers are paid based on the number of game sold but the margins have gotten a lot smaller as time passes and the popularity of the portals goes up. While you might not get a lot of money on each single game sold, the big advantage of these portals is that it gives you a huge amount of visibility.

Ludo-educative games
This is where I work right now. I'm working for a company that develops educative games for young children. I have not heard about a lot about these companies as there is few of them but from where I work, I can tell that the quality of life in these environment is much higher than with the big players. First of all the company is much smaller, which gives place for more discussion and employee empowerment. I'm not doing any overtime and if ever I have to (in exceptional occasion) I'm paid for it. My bosses care about their employees and the environment is much more relaxed. I'm really enjoying my experience so far and the games are of tremendous quality.

The big difference with the children's games market is that while the profit margin per game is somewhat lower than the next-gen games, there is a lot less competitions and a single game can sell for several years. Children do not care about having cutting edge technology graphics and they are not consuming dozens of games every years like the average hardcore gamer so a single game has a lot longer shelf life. This reduces the pressure on a company and, consequently, on it's employees.

Serious games
This might be the kind of games I'm the most interested in but at the same time it's the domain I know the less about. Indeed, this is a very new domain. Academics and searchers are realizing that games have tremendous power for teaching and they are trying to put them to good use for the society. This includes games for education, training in various fields, health, politics, etc. These games can range from simple trivia to complex simulations. I encourage you to discover this field. There is some very entertaining games that gets you thinking (like 3rd word farmer that I have talked about in a previous post).

Here is some other links on the subject:
Social Impact Games
Serious Games Initiative

I could not tell exactly what it takes to get into this business but it appears that a lot of games are produced by companies outside of the game industry and by universities. I've seen universities offering open calls to developers for making particular games with social impacts so there is certainly some openings for independent developers as well.

So what now?
Once you found where you want to belong, I recommend that you read as much as you can on the topic of your interest. If you are interested in the big players or the casual game space, play a lot of those games and find out what it is that interest you. What are the strength and weaknesses of those games? Why do you enjoy them so much? Study their design (levels, mechanics, controls, interfaces, characters pace).

If what you are really interested in is the AAA games of the big players, you better break down to what really resonates with you. Would you rather be a level designer or a script writer? Do you want to build game mechanics, artificial intelligence, stories, interfaces? As these companies get bigger, the jobs are getting more specifics so it would be good if you knew what you want to do exactly, or at least what you want to specialize in (as you are always likely to wear more than one hat).

If you are interested in serious games or ludo-educative games, read on the subject and check out what has been done. While there is not a huge amount of serious games, the domain is well documented and you can already ask yourself what is the statement you want to make by developing a game. Surely it will be about a well known topic that is already strongly documented like health or politics. How can you apply interactivity to it and how is the interactivity meaningful? More than often it will be a big challenge as it is most probably something that has never been done. Educative games often bear the same kind of challenges; you have to learn about education, school programs, learning methods, etc..

And whatever the kind of games you want to build, do you want to work for someone else? Would you prefer working in a big or small company? Or would you rather go out on your own and try to do it by yourself?

Design basics
Yet, if you really want to be a designer, whatever in which field, there is a lot of basic stuffs that you need to know and there is a lot of books that can help you.

Here are some recommended read on design topics:

A Theory of Fun
Raph Koster
Fast and fun read. Simply thought provoking.

Rules of Play : Game Design Fundamentals
Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman
A lot of strong theory and very practical tidbits and experiments. Very academic book. Strongly recommended.

Rollings & Adams on Game Design
Though a bit too general to dig in anything specific, this book comes as an excellent overview of the established genres and basic design consideration. I would recommend this one as a good starting point.

Better Game Characters by Design
Katherine Isbister
I have yet to read this one. Tell me what you think if you've read it. :)

Understanding Comics
Scott McCloud
Though this book is about comics, I found that most concepts can be applied to telling stories in a game. From building worlds and characters to developing the pace and a graphical style, this is all amazing stuff.

Le Macroscope
Joel de Rosnay
This is a scientific vulgarization book. Rosnay explains how different complex systems (human body, economic systems, corporate environment..) work and are regulated (or balanced). This is crucial theory if you want to build good simulations.
The book can be read online for free (the original version is in french but the link is for an english version).

Becoming a game designer is a lot of work. It is an art in itself and must be taken as such. But it is also a lot of fun and seeing your game getting built is very rewarding. If you have any other read recommendations or something to add on any topic of this article, I'd be pleased to read about it so go on and comment! :)

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[UPDATE: If you want to learn more, you can read the follow-up to this article: "How to become a Game Designer? - My career story"]

3rd world farmer, a politic game

2007-04-12T10:13:00.000-07:00

This is really an amazing game I've just stumbled upon. 3rd world farmer puts you in the role of a family striving to survive from their farm in a 3rd world country.

I have yet to play a lot more of this interesting game, but from my first two games, I could feel the desperation of losing your livestock at the hand of greedy guerillas and the joy of having a splendid harvest (one of the rare positive events in the game).

As simple and straight forward as the representation of the game is, the emotions and thoughts it evoke are really strong.

Pixel art: "The world's tallest virtual building!"

2007-04-12T06:48:00.000-07:00

I'm a big fan of pixel arts so you can expect some posts with links on the subjects and probably creations of my own.

Here's the first link:

The world's tallest virtual building!

I really like the concept: several artists, each doing one story of this huge building. Great collective creation.

Article: Jane McGonigal on ARGs.

2007-04-10T18:18:00.000-07:00

I never really got into the idea of ARG (Augmented Reality Game) concept until I read this Gamasutra interview with Jane McGonigal, creator of Cruel 2 B kind and ilovebees.

McGonigal on her experience with ARGs:

[...] there’s such a fluidity of who’s in the game and who’s not. It’s a way of bringing in more and more people. I mean, ARGs started as viral marketing, right? That idea of viral: it’s not just about marketing it’s about that experience of viral.

This sense of wonder and mystery and the fact that you could talk to people you didn’t know was completely viral and spread to someone who wasn’t playing the game but saw other people behaving in a way that was different and that was meaningful. They were like, “Let’s test it out. We want to be meaningful, too.” So I think that viral meaning is a really powerful mechanic. Games tend to spread culture really quickly.

On collective intelligence and MMO:

I’ve been reading this research that came out of Palo Alto Research Center in Stanford lately, about playing together alone. They took snapshots of MMO servers for something like every 10 minutes for several months -- this huge amount of statistical data -- to see how many people were playing with other people. They came out with a really surprising result, which was that something like seventy percent of time was spent playing alone. The real social interaction there isn’t interacting with other players, but inhabiting the space together.

And one final quote on "the culture of celebrity vs. the culture of contribution":

[...] my opinion about optimal psychology and quality of life is that 15 minutes of contribution is way better than 15 minutes of celebrity. MySpace is good for a lot of thing, including maintain social ties, keeping in touch, but in terms of culture of celebrity, feeling that you’re of use to strangers is better than being of interest to strangers. I know it sounds weird now, but I’m pretty sure in 10 or 15 years that won’t sound idealistic. We’ll say, “Of course it’s better to be the super hero than the super idol!”

I urge you to read the rest of the article. There is a lot of very thoughtful ideas on games, culture and social interactions.

Welcome

2007-04-10T02:34:00.000-07:00

Welcome to games and men. Here I intend in publishing game design related content and news. More specifically games analysis and a few serious reviews.