Support Obsidian's New Game... also, Arakion

Arakion is a game now on Kickstarter that is seeking support.  Here is a picture:

If this looks like something that might interest you go check out there the Kickstarter page:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lavidimus/chris-taylors-arakion

and figure out for yourself if it is something you want to contribute towards.  I am in no way connected to this game save for the fact that I am a backer--it looks like it will be a good game and it would be a shame to see it not reach its potential.

Also on Kickstarter is a new project by Obsidian: Project Eternity.  They want to revisit their days of RPG's (remember Neverwinter Nights?) and want to make something that will be as memorable to us as Baldur's Gate.  Check it out at http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/obsidian/project-eternity

-George

The Ouya and the Future

     Reading about the OUYA was something: if it delivers what it promises, it is going to breathe a new life into console gaming.  To think, a system for only 100 dollars that anyone who owned it already had the SDK to make games for the system.

     The fact is barriers to entry into game development seem to get lower every year. There is huge indie support for PC, there is XBLA, and smartphones have opened up huge avenues for people who want to make and distribute games.

     Making it easy to make games is great, it will allow for a larger number of good, worthwhile games out there and we will all have better play experiences because of it.  But there is still the concern of what it means for the indie guy, the small team who wants to just scrape buy and bring out a decent game to the public.  That is to say if the accessibility of game development is able to turn making games into a widespread hobby, the supply could overpower the demand and we might see a lot of indies go under and leave the industry.  We love making games but not everyone can make a living off of it; hopefully we are not pushing ourselves into a boom and bust—we need to know what direction the world is going.

     OUYA is going to be big, but what kind of splash is it going to make? What is this pool that is gaming like today?  Still there seems a sharp divide between the indie and the mainstream—will the OUYA just become a toy for the independents to play and share their own games, withdrawn and resistant to anything considered too mainstream?  That is not the future I want to see; perhaps we will see a more open audience in console gaming, perhaps we will stop seeing so sharp a divide between “AAA” and “indie” and their differences won’t guide or restrict the market.  Why must we differentiate the two so drastically?  Hopefully in this near future there won’t be a need to.

     So maybe this new openness will make it more competitive.  We would still see games that are better than ever, but there is the concern that it might make it harder for game development to be a full-time job.  Hopefully, this is not going to be an issue.  Maybe the answer could be found by looking at other industries.  With all of the video editing tools available and youtube have we seen any decline in movies, television, or independent films?  Honestly I don’t know for sure how these things might have been affected, but I think we can all agree youtube has been a good thing.

-GR

Site Update and Things to Come

I just updated my website and added a major revamp to my game Mountain dash.  You can check it all out at www.mediavitagames.com .

Generally speaking, I ofcourse love the game updates, but I always have some misgivings, like what if I changed something that was actually fun and unique?  Oh well, I guess when it comes down to it, no one is going to find any of the hidden depth of a game if they don't stick around long enough to play it.  Luckily, I always have my archived files and ideas on where to go with a new project.

Speaking of new project, I hope to shortly move onto making a fully compiled game for pc.  It will be a big project.  I'll give more news as it comes up, everything is still in the idea stage for now.

Hard Mode Done Right

Typically I skip hard modes.  Sometimes I see the difficulty modifier and I’m like “What is this?”  I want to play the game as it was meant to be played, the way it was envisioned, and I want to be able to tell others that I played it.  I want to play “the game” and nothing else.  I don’t have to make something that is supposed to be enjoyably challenging into some strenuous labor just to stroke my ego.  It seemed all hard modes would accomplish would be making challenges take longer, requiring faster reflexes or more accuracy, requiring carrying more potions, or making you memorize a needless amount of details about game minutiae.  I would rather pass.

Now let me introduce you to two well-known games: Kingdom Hearts and Diablo II.  They are two examples of how hard mode can be done right.  After beating Kingdom Hearts on the Normal mode I decided to start a game on Expert difficulty.  The experience was completely different, even with the game being exactly the same.  Suddenly I wasn’t just slashing baddies—I was watching their moves, taking evasive action, giving different threats priority.  I became more involved in the game and began to see the depth of possible interaction.

Without the difficulty there was no drive to reach these levels, no motive to strive for anything higher.  At lesser difficulties there was no need to develop these skills, and this lead to complacency.

In Diablo II’s Hardcore mode death becomes permanent.  This in turn demands a play style that is categorically different from normal mode.  Where death used to be just an inconvenience suddenly it meant the end; no longer was it an option, no longer was it a risk that could be taken.  That meant instead of building up mana reserves I was giving my necromancer more armor and life.  And by having less mana, I was forced to do other things differently: spamming spells at my enemies would have drained too much mana, I had to find more efficient ways to handle them.  By making the game less forgiving the very nature of the game was changed, the result that I had to adapt and grow. It was a change I think was well done.

That these two games did so well in accomplishing the task of providing a harder difficulty setting I would attribute to two primary factors.  The first is depth.  The two games had enough rules and variation in mechanics that the player could continue to explore and analyze them, whether it was anticipating an enemy’s attack or discovering that poison resistance could be quite useful, Hard mode’s demand for greater attention brought the realization of these details, and thus the ability to respond to them. 

This leads to the second characteristic these games share: good conveyance.  In simple terms this means you need to tell me about how your game works if I’m going to know how to play it well, and conversely, if there is no way for me to really know all of the rules then don’t expect me to utilize them.  Your game can be filled with depth but if your player can’t see how anything affects anything they won’t see any depth.  You can have tons of hidden stats and checks and if the player doesn’t know they exist it will just seem arbitrary.  Derived from this is Intuitiveness: the rules need to make sense in a way that the player sees how they are connected—it will make memorizing the rules much easier and feel more natural.  So depth, conveyance, and sort of intuitiveness, I guess that’s more like 2.5 principles.  With Kingdom Hearts a huge factor was watching the enemies movements, tracking their formations; this lends itself to be visually understood so they player gains knowledge of the rules through the senses.  In Diablo, everything was explained to some degree in text: you could read the stats of an item or spell and then look to see how it affected your character.  Sure, there is much more to these games, but this is just an overview.

In essence these games allowed for meaningful choice and situational analysis, and in their Hard modes there is then the need for the player to do these, an extra effort that was not necessary in the normal modes.  The player does not have to so much react faster, just to figure out how to react smarter.

http://www.mediavitagames.com/

I have a website!  Media Vita Games is now up and has its first game, a fun Flash Game named "Mountain Dash".  Try it out!  I'm already working on the next game too.

I'll still use this blog for posts and other things; I'll be writing some more articles sometime.

Pokemon Graduation

Hope you like it.  I'm graduating in just a few days but couldn't resist posting this.  Concieved and designed it myself.

-George

Student evolves into polymath.

Cheese in Games

In my (emerging) encyclopedia of game concepts I describe “cheese” as

“a tactic that is considered unfair, improper, and ‘not in the spirit of the game’.  Since the rules of the game still allow such a tactic to be used, it is not cheating in the proper sense, but is viewed as an abuse of the rules; loopholes in the game mechanics will also fall into this category.” 

Cheese is a sneaky exploit of game mechanics; it involves playing the game not as it was envisioned to be played.

This poses a problem for developers; they spend so much time trying to craft a specific experience, a particular challenge, but if the player learns of some unforeseen cheese strategy, all of this planning will be undone.  Remember the old maxim: “Players do what works, not what is fun”.  It might take a little time, and an ounce of lateral thinking to uncover such a strategy, but once the player finds something that works, they will use it and abuse it, and the developers just have to hope that it turns out to be what they intended.  It then becomes up to the developers to find potential cheese tactics, and revise the rules of the game to make them ineffective.  Sometimes this can be done in patching the game.

The most salient aspect of cheese, though, is in competitive play.  Nobody wants to suddenly find themselves victim to one of these strategies.  It’s one thing if the developers find an aspect of the game that did not foresee, but if the player community starts calling something cheese, they will get angry.  In this case it is not completely clear what cheese is.  What if they player community stumbles upon a cheese strategy and instead of being enraged by it, embrace it, such that it blossoms into the new heart of online competitive play for that game?  Should developers really put so much effort into dismantling such strategies?  Typically, from my own observation, when a player community sets up such a peculiar factor of the game dynamics as a core element of the gameplay, it puts the little details of the game before the grand vision.  This is an attribute more apt of niche games.  I was once playing a popular Warcraft 3 mod (Footmen Frenzy, to be exact) when my teammate became enraged at me for not killing my army, since my troops were just “feeding the enemy hero”, while my teammate proceeded to kill of his own army.  I simply couldn’t stomach it: even in a computer game, killing my own troops goes against my nature.  This game, Footmen Frenzy, was designed around the core mechanic of managing a giant army, but the player community found this ineffective against other strategies that dispensed with armies.  Suddenly the dynamics undo the core mechanics.  And so we end up with a game that has a few, die-hard fans, but nothing for the more typical player.

The term cheese originates from the Starcraft 2 community.  Many strategies have been devised by the players in order to get an edge in the very competitive landscape of Starcraft 2 online play.  Blizzard has been good at fixing these problems, as well as correcting general issues of balancing gameplay.  Nevertheless cheese is everywhere in the lower tiers of the Starcraft 2 ladder, and players all have to learn how to build some safeguard against it in order to advance in the ranks.  It has almost become a rite of passage for those who want to get higher in the ladder to learn how to handle getting cheesed. In the past, though, cheese was used even by the very best Starcraft 2 players, and Blizzard had a lot of work to make sure those strategies were no longer viable.  It takes a lot of work for developers to be able to accomplish this and still maintain the other elements of gameplay.

As it turns out, cheese it not just a problem for video games.  Cheese involves any exploit of the game rules that goes against the rules of proper play, and this can be applied to anything with a system to game; just because something is allowed in the current system does not mean it should be allowed.  In evaluating such systems, I play a game I call “Is it cheese?”  It plays exactly as it sounds: take any tactic and ask whether it is within the proper bounds of activity.  Is constantly inflating your currency cheese?  Are corn subsidies in the age of NAFTA cheese?  Is it cheese if you have a play where all of your players wear the same jersey?  Identifying cheese can be an important skill for anyone making decisions.

Developers can play “Is it cheese?” with their games.  Of course, the first step is to find any potential cheese tactics, and this requires deep inspection of the gameplay elements, and how they can be combined.  In Spryo: Enter the Dragonfly, I found that you could jump higher by immediately hovering as a jumped, allowing me to reach places early on that I was not supposed it; Spyro: Ripto’s Rage, on the other hand, did not allow for this exploit.  Another consideration is the save system employed: for example, easy saving/loading in a minigame where successive coinflips double the size of a monetary prize, with an ounce of patience a player could easily use it to gain extraordinary amounts of money.  It will be up to the developer to decide whether such a tactic is an exploit or a feature, but it will be the gaming community that ultimately judges.

-George Ramirez

Site Overhaul

I just deleted many of the extra blog entries that I found didn't belong, namely, those that were for homework assignments of the class that prompted me to start this blog.

From here on, this blog will take a more focused direction, with more entries on my current projects and I will expand the sections on the flash game reviews and will add to the catalogue of game concepts.

I hope you will enjoy these new changes and upcoming additions.