[Every week, IndieGames.com: The Weblog editor Tim W. will be summing up some of the top free-to-download and commercial indie games from the last seven days, as well as any notable features on his sister 'state of indie' weblog.]

This week on 'Best Of Indie Games', we take a look at some of the top independent PC Flash/downloadable titles released over this last week.

The delights in this latest version include a punishing platformer in the style of Matt Thorson's Jumper series, a mash-up remakes competition entry, a unique puzzler, an experimental game, and a neat production inspired by an early Commodore 64 release.

Game Pick: 'Meat Boy' (Edmund McMillen and Jonathan McEntee, freeware)
"A challenging platformer created by the developer of Gish, Aether and Coil. The story tells the tale of our nimble protagonist who embarks on a quest to save his love, Bandaid Girl, from the clutches of the evil Dr. Fetus."

Game Pick: 'Snakoban Dash' (Tom Beaumont, freeware)
"A puzzler designed by Tom Beaumont as an amalgamation of Boulder Dash, Snake and Sokoban. The objective of the game is to push blocks onto their designated areas, all the while trying to avoid getting trapped in an inescapable position."

Game Pick: 'I Wish I were the Moon' (Daniel Benmergui, browser)
"A short puzzle game designed by Daniel Benmergui, where five different endings can be achieved by taking pictures or manipulating objects on screen in a specific order. Dan has been referred by at least one commenter as the South American equivalent of Jonathan Blow, and it'd be interesting to see what this promising developer comes up with next."

Game Pick: 'Building Houses with Side Views' (Peter Boon, browser)
"A simple Java-based puzzler with a novel premise. Players build houses using basic square blocks as construction pieces, but the building only has to look correct from three different angles. The game is a lot easier to play than to explain actually."

Game Pick: 'This Game is Wizard' (James Dewar, freeware)
"A one-screen platformer created by James Dewar of Square Earth Games, where players assume control of a wizard who has to find a way to reach the exit in each of the thirty-eight levels included."

Posted by timw at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In an exclusive pair of excerpts we grabbed from David Edery and Ethan Mollick's book 'Changing The Game: How Gaming Is Transforming The Future Of Business', the duo examine how web-based games such as The ESP Game and Fold.it can be used to get humans to process important data sets -- for free!

The book, which has an official website with more information about it, discusses "...how leading-edge organizations are using video games to reach new customers more cost-effectively; to build brands; to recruit, develop, and retain great employees; to drive more effective experimentation and innovation; to supercharge productivity... in short, to make it fun to do business."

In addition, its introduction notes of the wider field of games used for non-entertainment purposes:

"Companies of all shapes and sizes have begun to use games to revolutionize the way they interact with customers and employees, becoming more competitive and more profitable as a result. Microsoft has used games to painlessly and cost-effectively quadruple voluntary employee participation in important tasks.

Medical schools have used game-like simulators to train surgeons, reducing their error rate in practice by a factor of six. A recruiting game developed by the U.S. Army, for just 0.25% of the Army’s total advertising budget, has had more impact on new recruits than all other forms of Army advertising combined.

And Google is using video games to turn its visitors into a giant, voluntary labor force -- encouraging them to manually label the millions of images found on the Web that Google’s computers cannot identify on their own."

The book's authors, which include Gamasutra/GameSetWatch contributor and Microsoft Xbox Live Arcade staffer Edery, particularly recommended these intriguing sections of their new title, dealing with the last of the three examples mentioned above:

The ESP Game

It turns out that there are many areas where human intelligence is still superior to computing power.

For example, computers are very bad at identifying images, which has become an increasingly important problem as millions of new photos and illustrations are uploaded to the World Wide Web each year.

Luis von Ahn, Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University and winner of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant, developed The ESP Game to help solve this problem.

In The ESP Game, two anonymous players are matched online without any means of communicating with one another. Both players are shown a random image (for example, a flowering plant under a clear sky) while a clock counts down two and a half minutes.

The players must then type words that describe the image, such as "plant," "flower," "pretty," or "sky." When both players have typed at least one word In common, like "sky," they both score points and a new picture is shown. At this moment, the players have helped teach the computer that this picture contains a "sky."

This goes on until the players have run out of time. In an interesting twist, sometimes pictures get recycled by the game after they have already been labeled once.

When this happens, the old label (i.e. "sky") is no longer accepted by the game, so players must come up with a second or third word to describe the picture. In this way, the game forces players to give each picture a more detailed description.

The ESP Game is undeniably addictive. Many people play for over 20 hours a week, and over 20 million labels have been harvested in just a few years; the equivalent of several million dollars of free labor.

Professor von Ahn estimates that just 5,000 people playing The ESP Game for a month - a tiny number, compared to the active populations of many gaming websites -could label every image on the Web.

In fact, Google found the ESP Game to be so useful that it licensed the game for its own use, as the "Google Image Labeler."

The ESP Game is just one of a variety of "games with a purpose" developed by Professor von Ahn. Peekaboom refines the data gathered by The ESP Game by encouraging players to identify the parts of a picture that are associated with a given label.

For example, two players of Peekaboom might be shown the picture of the flowering plant under a clear sky. The first player, seeing the label "sky", might correctly click the blue region above the flowing plant.

The second player must then guess the correct label, solely by seeing what region of the picture was selected by the first player. If the second player guesses "sky," both players score points.

The techniques pioneered by Professor von Ahn may soon be applied to many other real life problems. For example, the Transportation Security Administration has expressed interest in creating a game where "bags are screened at the airport and sent over secure networks to multiple players who help determine the contents of each image.

This could imply a major gain in security as an aid in the baggage screening process: instead of a single officer looking at each bag, multiple people could see each bag, having a higher chance of finding potentially dangerous objects.

Fold.it And Distributed Innovation

Distributed innovation games take a different approach to gathering information than human computation games.

Whereas human computation is powered by large groups of people playing a game as frequently as possible, innovation games are designed to identify and bring together those rare individuals who can creatively solve very difficult problems. In other words, human computation games are about manpower; innovation games are about brainpower.

Fold.it is an example of an innovation game - one that might soon help develop new treatments for disease by exploring the secrets of protein folding.

Proteins are the molecular structures that drive most of the important functions in living beings; their shape determines how they interact with other substances. A particular shape might make a protein effective at clotting blood, while a differently-configured protein might prove effective at neutralizing the HIV virus.

Unfortunately, determining the ideal shape of a protein can be very difficult. Even a small protein with less than 100 chemical components could have a huge number of configurations - about 3^100, to be precise.

There are algorithms that can be used to determine whether one protein shape is better than another, but taking advantage of them requires computers to test billions of possible shapes for each protein, which requires massive amounts of computing power. So Fold.it takes a different approach to the problem, capitalizing on people's spatial awareness and problem-solving skills to achieve what computers cannot.

Fold.it turns protein folding into a game, where the goal is to score the greatest number of points by identifying the optimal shape of a protein. Using a colorful graphic interface, players push and pull pieces of a protein into various shapes, trying to maximize their score by eliminating chemical incompatibilities.

A team-based component of Fold.it ensures that players will work together to solve particularly tough problems. And Fold.it's designers can create protein puzzles for any purpose, such as the best configuration to treat a particular cancer, and then have the players try to solve it.

One of the fascinating discoveries to come out of Fold.it is that the best solvers of a particular problem may not be the people you'd expect. In the words of Fold.it designer Seth Cooper, "Some of the top scoring players are biologists, but the people who are really doing well and consistently winning don't have any biological, or even academic, background at all."

Unlike a human computation game, distributed innovation depends on finding the best people to solve a particular problem, no matter who they might be. Indeed, most players of Fold.it give up quickly and move on, but those who stay tend to be quite talented, and many become addicted to the game. And the Fold.it team has every intention of leveraging the efforts of those talented players for the benefit of humankind.

They plan to create games that will help design biofuels and vaccines, and express the hope that someday, an innovation game player will win a Nobel Prize for the work they did while "playing around."

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The weekend is here, and unfortunately, quite apart from more borderline adult DS games in Japan (the latest example pictured, I even did some slight pixelation to feel more comfortable about posting it), there's also a disturbing set of calls to action from indie developers in this set of links.

Specifically, both Kudos 2 creator Cliffski and Multiwinia developers Introversion seem to be having trouble getting word out about their indie titles, and are appealing to their audience to get more interest in their general direction. It's a shame, but hey, maybe if I mention it it'll help a bit, huh?

Tech no tronic:

Cliffski’s Blog » Getting the word out
'Getting heard about when you are a small PC developer is a nightmare. Many websites are console only, some cover just a few ‘Triple A’ pc games, and most of them have the attitude that it’s their job to cover the games their readers are currently interested in.'

Canned Dogs » Blog Archive » Soon you can spank naughty girls on the DS
'5pb. has announced KimokawaE!, a new game for the DS where you have to discipline girls from the underworld so as to help them adapt to life in the human world.' Sigh, Japan.

Idle Thumbs: A Weekly Video Game Podcast
The rather smart erudite-ish game site is now a game podcast, starring Gamasutra's own Christopher Remo and friends - this URL is Remo describing, linking to it.

PRNow: Rad Girls Licensing to be Exclusively Represented by Fog Studios
The sometime game development agents move into, uhh, semi-horrific reality TV stars.

PR: Dream Arcades Taps Into Fun with the Octane 120 Beer Arcade
'We designed the Octane 120 to feature everything that a gamer could possibly want in a home arcade racing cabinet, including a beer tap, PC and PlayStation 3 compatibility, and a whopping 120' projection screen,' says Michael Ware, owner of Dream Arcades.

When has a video game ever made you cry? - Citizen Gamer- msnbc.com
MSNBC still supporting indie games (in this case Indiecade) with lots of editorial - neat.

Llamasoft Blog » nice little job we just did
Jeff Minter on using his tech in Space Invaders on Xbox 360: 'This was a really nice project for us to do since it not only allows us to keep the wolf from the door somewhat between our own game releases, it also allowed us to use the latest generation of Neon tech, which is considerably more advanced than the old stuff used in the x360 visualizer and Space Giraffe.'

Defcon :: View topic - Save Multiwinia
Uhoh: 'Nobody is playing the demo of Multiwinia. There are a number of theories as to why this might be, but we think we already know the answer – very few people have heard about it, or have seen enough reason to try it.'

Ads in flash games - The Gameshelf
Interesting, sharp post on game advertising: 'Web ads are an attention tax levied on the people who don't care about them very much.'

:: Temple of the Roguelike - Roguelike News, Reviews, Interviews and Information :: » Blog Archive » Cyber burglar in the matrix
Oo, 'Decker' - cyberpunk roguelike alert!

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

['The Game Anthropologist' is Michael Walbridge's regular GameSetWatch column looking at gaming communities and subcultures. This week, he analyzes how Mega Man 9 doesn't only represent the distant past, but how far we've come, and what's changed about all gamers.]

Okay, so I've gotten to play Mega Man 9 a bit and I think the game is a great specimen, gaming's first meta-period-piece. Some people call Upton Sinclair's The Jungle a snapshot of culture and a piece of history, but not a very literary or entertaining read. It maintains its importance as a cultural artifact, a turning point, something that matters.

Mega Man 9 doesn't particularly innovate or call itself art or revolutionary, but it is a great piece of our period, something that will help old gamers understand new and new understand old.

The game may not have consciously meant to do that, but it had to be in the developers' minds. The thing I love most is that it manages to display the developers' opinions (or at least, the opinions they're allowed to express) of video games in an open state. What I mean is that, while the message Mega Man 9 sends is not readily apparent to those not critical of games, it's not exactly invisible.

Mega Man 9's differences aren't limited to its place in time and its salute to the past. It is also a carpet ushering in the era of the new. It's similar to the first 6 editions, but should not be properly regarded as part of the old series. It's paying respects to gaming's past, while admitting that we've moved on.

The first difference is the required integration into current game systems. This includes a traditional Mega Man menu with "Go Back To Live Arcade" written on it and a save feature that doesn't feature passwords, but simply a hard drive. These are simply requirements, though; the game itself doesn't necessarily have to be different based on this. But it doesn't end there.

The level and boss designs in Mega Man 9 are very different, and so are the ways you beat them. The levels are shorter and the difficulty concentrated. In the original Mega Man games, the difficulty was smooth and buttery. Here, it's chunky and not evenly spread. In a Mega Man level, there is only one objective: get to the end. It was always hard, but here it's a different kind of hard: single, isolated points of concentrated insanely stupid challenge.

There are basically two kinds of levels:

1. Easy, then a difficult miniboss (or series of bosses) battle in the middle, then a moderately difficult section to finish. (Magma, Concrete, Jewel, Hornet. Concrete has 3 elephants instead of a singular mini-boss.)

2. Easy, then an extremely difficult section filled with difficult-timed jumps and plenty of instant-killing pits or spikes. (Tornado, Splash, Plug. Galaxy Man is this pattern, too, though his level is much easier than the other three of this type).

The bosses are different, too. Previously, the bosses would follow set patterns. Here, the bosses follow patterns, but they change depending on your position. In Mega Man 3, Snake Man ran back and forth across the screen no matter your position.

These bosses will stay on one side if that's where you are. The bosses are thus more difficult because their A.I. is improved. They go from being wind-up clocks to responsive, auto-attacking land mines. Their attacks are based on your position.

But here's the catch: they still do the same amount of damage. They have to run into you about 8 or 10 times and then you're dead. And there is no power slide, no chargeable mega buster as introduced in Mega Man 3 and Mega Man 4; nothing to help compensate for the increased dodging difficulty. I wonder if dodging some of them is almost impossible. Hornet Man is extremely difficult but possible to avoid, but I just can't dodge Magma Man at all.

Yet, Magma Man is one of the five bosses I've defeated. And I didn't beat him by using a secret weapon, a gaming feature that can only linger in the past. I beat him by using screws I'd collected over my lives to purchase energy tanks. I kept refilling my life, and then I beat him. It takes a while to earn those tanks, but I got them.

Mega Man thus goes the way of the future: it turns out you really can just muscle your way through the game as if it were another Xbox 360 game with regenerating health and save points. The achievements, awards, and time attacks are there to give you bragging rights and assure you there's still a reward. If you want to see the content, the story, the world, that option is surely open to you.

Games can be difficult; that is allowed. However, to see every part of the game's content, including the ending, is guaranteed as long as you put in the time. That's now considered a right in the games of today, a right that was never demanded in the '80s or even the '90s.

Yes, it's difficult. Sure, you have lives, sure, the save points aren't as convenient as most modern games are, and sure there are extremely difficult bosses, jumps, and landings, but really, Mega Man 9 isn't a remake of the past; it's a tongue-in-cheek admission that we've moved on while maintaining respect for the path paved before. It's "what happens if we make the past meet the new?"

The story at the beginning has a key line from Dr. Light that prefaces Mega Man's design philosophy: "Be careful, Mega Man, you haven't done this in a while." Almost none of us have, and it may be that we will never do so again.

Posted by Mike Walbridge at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

[Long-time GSW friend Joel Reed Parker from Game Of The Blog will pop in from time to time to comment for us, and this one is worth pointing out because it's about a charity game pack that has been woefully underpromoted.]

I recently picked up an Xbox 360, mainly due to the recent price drop, and also because it’s been out long enough that there are enough cheap games. X-Men: the Official Game used for $4.99? Jumper: Griffin’s Story for only 10 bucks new? I’m sold!

While searching around for other great buys, I remembered last year’s ESA Holiday Bundle, with 3 games for 30 bucks. As described by the Best Buy website, it “contains three amusing game titles: Cars, Fuzion Frenzy 2 and Open Season” and mentions that “each game provides fun challenges for players of varying skills and preferences .“

For some reason, I contacted Dan Hewitt at the ESA to see if there would be another one this year. Unfortunately, I got this response: “Joel, thanks for writing…because it is such a commitment from the ESA, publishers and participating retailers, we only sell the game pack every two years. Thus, it won't be on store shelves this holiday season.”

He also sent me a link to a press release that points out that last year’s bundle raised 2.6 million dollars for various ESA Foundation children’s charities.

Ingrained mentally to the prospect of a bundle-less holiday season, I was of course surprised to see a banner on Xbox Live promoting a “Family Game Pack”, a new Xbox 360 game bundle, this time benefiting Children’s Miracle Network (take that, ESA Foundation!).

Clicking on it, I found that you can download a free gamerpic, theme, and video for the retail bundle, but the description of the actual product was pretty vague:

"Every year, Children’s Miracle Network hospitals treat 17 million children for every disease and injury imaginable. Download this theme to show your support as 100% of Microsoft’s net proceeds from this Family Games pack will go to support local Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals."

I had to go the almighty internet to discover more. Even then, the first link only brought me to various online sellers. It turns out that the three bundled Xbox 360 games this time (all fairly kid-friendly, if not highly rated) are Sonic The Hedgehog, Shrek The Third (based on a movie so stupid and offensive to the soul that I demanded and got my money back at the theater), and Viva Pinata: Party Animals.

Again, the price is $29.99 (of course this means my local GameStop is selling it in-store for $34.99*) and it’s available for sale right now. [UPDATE: Dreamy McWhertor from Kotaku tells us that it's been adjusted to $29.99 both online and in stores, according to his multifarious sources.]

Eventually, enough searching brought me to the press release on the official Xbox page, but even then it wasn’t easy to find from the front page.

Basically the point of all this is cheap games, great charity, terrible promotion -- buy it now even if you don't know any kids that would enjoy this or you're not me. According to the aforementioned internet, two of the games have easy Achievements points, and the Sonic game has a train-wreck-in-slow-motion appeal so there’s truly something for everybody.

-Joel Reed Parker
GameOfTheBlog.com

[*I e-mailed Children's Miracle Foundation, Best Buy, and GameStop asking about this but got answers from no one. GameStop has done this before, they sold both Raw Danger and Fire Pro Wrestling for $19.99 when they were MSRP'ed at $14.99, but doing this with a charity item wouldn't be quite right.]

Posted by joelp at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Yeehaw, time to get even vaguely up to date with GameSetLinkDump goodness, kicking off with the latest iteration of the Toronto-based Artsy Games Incubator -- which, as ever, is resulting in a bunch of games that I want to try out for size.

But yet, that's not all, with Japanese Sense Of Wonder Night write-ups, more LittleBigPlanet mod goodness, Flash shooter tutorials, the goodness of critics, and rather more things than the Earth hanging out in here.

Go go gadget linker:

Artsy Games Incubator » Blog Archive » Round 3, Session 4 Recap
Completely awesome project - get artists to make games - continues.

The Ambition of the Independent Video Game « (mashedmarket)
'Originally extolling the virtues of the short story, Steven Millhauser’s New York Times piece struck me as a manifesto for independent video game developers. I’ve reproduced Millhauser’s work below, substituting “independent video game” and “Triple-A game” for ”short story” and “novel,” respectively.'

YouTube - Little Big Planet - To Zanarkand Theme - リトルビッグプラネットβ　ザナルカンド
Japanese LBP players, with some kind of curious Victorian mechanical music player effect featuring the Final Fantasy X music. This is why LBP is awesome, folks.

Natural Selection 2 News: Videocast #5
Oo, really nice real-time lighting.

Daedalic Entertainment: Publisher Branches out into Film Production with New Documentary Gaming Industry | Press Release by MCV
Documentary about the making of a German eco-thriller game, and called 'An Inconvenient Game'? Uh, wacky.

【TGS2008】Inside-Games.jp covers Sense Of Wonder Night
Nice to see the Japanese media checking this out too - nice write-up, too, though you get me opining on the mic at the bottom.

Kongregate relaunches Kongregate Labs
Flash tutorials on making a shooter, sponsored by Scion, interestingly enough.

Blog - Infinite Ammo
Aquaria co-creator Alec Holowka has new Winnipeg studio, doing GAMMA 3D game, 'Paper Moon'.

【TGS2008】- pic of the Sense Of Wonder Night crowd
The guy closest to camera was hanging out with Keita Takahashi - doesn't he look a lot like the King from Katamari? Or is it just me?

If critics did more championing and less obsessing over details - The Cut Scene - Video Game Blog by Variety on Variety.com
Good discussion of Leigh's review of the new Silent Hill for Variety, resulting feedback, why being Debbie Downer isn't always right.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Am delighted to reveal the full judge line-up for the IGF this year - as you can see, lots of smart indie and indie-friendly folks who will be helping to judge the competition - and there's not long left to enter, developers.]

The organizers of the Independent Games Festival have revealed its full list of judges for the 11th annual version of the competition, with a host of top indie/mainstream creators and media helping to decide this year's winners -- also reminding of the imminent November 1st deadline to enter the IGF Main Competition.

Games selected as finalists in the Main Competition (due November 1st) or Student Showcase competition (due November 15th) will available in playable form on the 2009 Game Developers Conference show floor. Entrants will compete for nearly $50,000 in prizes, including awards for Innovation, Excellence in Design, and the coveted $20,000 Seumas McNally Grand Prize at the IGF Awards, held in March 2009 during GDC.

Over the past few years, the Independent Games Festival has helped guide the rise of the indie game scene by honoring and popularizing the best and brightest independent developers and their games. Former IGF honorees include Braid, Everyday Shooter, Audiosurf, Castle Crashers, Darwinia, and World of Goo, to name but a few.

The full judge list for this year's IGF competition is as follows:

- Jonathan Blow, Number-None (Braid creator and previous IGF honoree)
- Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games (author, columnist and social game developer)
- Raigan Burns, Metanet (IGF winner and N+ co-creator)
- Tom Buscaglia (IGDA board member, indie-friendly game attorney)
- Russell Carroll, Reflexive/GameTunnel (Wik maker's indie marketing expert, indie website EIC)
- Heather Chaplin (veteran game journalist, Smart Bomb co-author, PBS contributor)
- Jamie Cheng, Klei Entertainment (Eets creator, Indie Games Summit speaker)
- Mark Cooke, Grasshopper Manufacture (former Nihilistic staffer, long-time IGF judge)
- Brian Crecente, Kotaku (Gawker-owned game weblog's chief editor)
- N'Gai Croal, Newsweek (Level Up blogger)
- Mark DeLoura (former Game Developer magazine EIC, industry veteran)
- Phil Fish, Polytron (Fez and GAMMA co-creator, IGF award-winner)
- Kyle Gabler, 2D Boy (Experimental Gameplay Project contributor, World Of Goo co-designer)
- Kieron Gillen, RockPaperShotGun (PC Gamer contributor, Phonogram graphic novel author)
- Chaim Gingold (Spore editor design lead)
- Chris Grant, Joystiq (EIC of leading AOL-owned game blog)
- Kyle Gray, Electronic Arts - Tiburon (Henry Hatsworth team leader, Experimental Gameplay Project contributor)
- Alec Holowka, Infinite Ammo/Bit Blot (co-creator of IGF Seumas McNally Award-winning title Aquaria)
- Rod Humble, The Sims Label/EA (Head of The Sims franchise, The Marriage art-game creator)
- Soren Johnson, EA Maxis (Designer for Spore, lead designer on Civilization IV)
- Chris Kohler, Wired (Game|Life weblog editor)
- Dave Kosak, GameSpy (veteran IGF commentator, GameSpy journalist)
- Elan Lee, Fourth Wall Studios (ARG creator, 42 Entertainment co-founder, ilovebees designer)
- Tony Mott, Edge Magazine (UK game magazine EIC)
- Petri Purho, Kloonigames (IGF Grand Prize winner with Crayon Physics Deluxe)
- Chris Rausch, SuperVillain Studios (Order Up! creator, Fl0w PSP version developer)
- Brian Reynolds, Big Huge Games (Alpha Centauri, Rise Of Nations designer, former IGDA board chairman)
- Brian Robbins, Fuel Industries (Casual game creator/evangelist, long-time IGF judge)
- Sam Roberts, IndieCade (Slamdance Games curator, indie festival stalwart)
- Chris Remo, Gamasutra (Gamasutra Editor-At-Large, former Shacknews EIC)
- Margaret Robertson, Lookspring (Former Edge editor, BBC columnist)
- Jim Rossignol, RockPaperShotgun ('This Gaming Life' author, Wired contributor)
- Kellee Santiago, thatgamecompany (IGF Student Showcase winner with Cloud, Flow/Flower co-creator)
- Mare Sheppard, Metanet (IGF winner and N+ co-creator)
- Steve Swink, Flashbang Studios (Jetpack Brontosaurus developer, IGF/Indie Game Summit co-organizer)
- Stephen Totilo, MTV News (MTV Multiplayer weblog editor)
- Tim W., IndieGames.com (Independent game website veteran editor)
- Matthew Wegner, Flashbang Studios (IGF/Indie Game Summit co-organizer, Off-Road Velociraptor Safari developer)
- Mick West (former Game Developer magazine columnist, Neversoft co-founder)
- Don Wurster, Gastronaut Studios (Small Arms co-creator, Indie Games Summit speaker)
- Derek Yu, Bit Blot (Aquaria co-designer, TIGSource website editor)

Winners, as picked by the 2009 IGF judges, will be announced on stage at the prestigious Independent Games Festival Awards on Wednesday, March 25, 2009, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

The Independent Games Festival Awards are held along the Game Developers Choice Awards, and both award shows are part of the 2009 Game Developers Conference, which also features a two-day Independent Games Summit, with lectures and panels from the best indie developers.

The event's sister IGF Mobile competition is also giving away $30,000 to the top cellphone, iPhone, and other portable device games this year.

More information on this year's Independent Games Festival is available at its official website.

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[How did Square Enix and Jupiter construct critically acclaimed DS title The World Ends With You? Here's some excerpts from the postmortem featured our awesome sister mag Game Developer, revealing how the team experimented with music game elements and command-based battles before settling on the game's unique stylings.]

The latest issue of sister publication Game Developer magazine includes a creator-written postmortem on the making of Square Enix and Jupiter's The World Ends With You, the unusual 2D Nintendo DS RPG set in modern-day Japan.

These extracts reveal how the two studios behind the project faced the obstacles of early, perhaps overambitious, design goals, but succeeded in creating a new intellectual property -- a fairly uncommon occurrence at Square Enix.

Artist Takeshi Arakawa, graphic designer Tomohiro Hasegawa, and animator Tatsuya Kando -- leads on the project -- crafted the postmortem, which was introduced in Game Developer as follows:

"The World Ends With You was a departure for Square Enix -- a new IP, done in 2D, and set in real-world locations. The game took three creative leads who had never directed a game before, and threw them to the wolves. They learned, as do we all, that it's not as easy as it seems."

Dual-Screen Battles, Or "What's Going On Here?"

From early in development, the game was to have simultaneous battles on two screens, one of the game's most unusual features -- but the practical design implementation of that request was more difficult than expected. Here the team explains:

"The original concept of dual-screen battles came from creative producer Tetsuya Nomura, but it was easier said than done. Fighting battles on the lower screen using the touch panel was our original concept, and turned out as well as we expected. But our biggest headache stemmed from the battles in the upper screen.

"This sped things up and we arrived at the battle system we have today, where the player can simply let the battle progress in the upper screen by itself, or actively fight using the control pad. I regret that we hadn't come up with this solution earlier."

The Management And Development Culture Clash

With two development houses in two different cities, the team suffered a lot of headaches resulting from coordination issues. As the trio of leads writes:

"The game was developed by Square Enix in Tokyo and Jupiter in Kyoto. While we originally commissioned Jupiter as the developer, we wound up with more creative crossover than we thought. The Square-side directors got involved in the gameplay design elements, while Jupiter went beyond the call of duty and assisted with the game planning.

"Geographically, we were very distant as well-it takes about two hours to get between Tokyo and Kyoto via bullet train. It was critical that we met in person, but this ended up costing us time, and it hurt the schedule at every step. We had weekly telephone conferences, but it was hard for us to 'read' each other over the line. Sadly, we were unable to do video conferencing, which I believe would have resulted in a more open, jam-session sort of feel."

Getting To Go Wild With Original IP And Gameplay Concepts

A liberating aspect of development that is unusual in the franchise-heavy Square Enix was the mandate to create a new game in a new setting. The team explains:

"The project began with constant brainstorming and idea-sharing between the three of us. As this was our first game as directors, a healthy dose of paranoia prompted daily brainstorming meetings. These sessions established a strong sense of camaraderie and led for better overall communication, allowing us to constantly meet our deadlines without any serious delays.

"It turns out we were successful -- even a year after the game's Japanese release, hardcore fans are still organizing tours of the real Shibuya to compare it to the game world."

Additional Info

The full postmortem, including a great deal more insight into The World Ends With You's development, with "What Went Right" and "What Went Wrong" reasoning, is now available in the October 2008 issue of Game Developer magazine.

The issue also includes Game Developer's annual list of Top 20 Publishers and a fascinating biometrics-sourced analysis of player emotions -- plus tool reviews, special career sections, Matthew Wasteland's humor column, and development columns from Power of Two's Noel Llopis, Bungie's Steve Theodore, Lucasarts' Jesse Harlin, and BioWare's Damion Schubert.

Yearly print and digital subscriptions to Game Developer are now available, and all digital subscriptions now include web-browsable and downloadable PDF versions of the magazine back to May 2004, as well as the digital version of the Game Career Guide special issue.

In addition, the October issue of Game Developer is available in paid single-issue digital form (viewable in a web browser, and with an associated downloadable PDF).

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Rarely do we at GSW randomly post gloriously silly videos, but at 'kings of the UK game scene' RockPaperShotgun, they've pointed out that the folks at Scottish video maniacs Consolevania have posted a video of 'Kevin Leddins, Nu-Skool Journalist' on YouTube - and I suspect you should probably watch it.

Not previously available (easily) online, the video is actually the first of two profiling the legendary -- and fictional -- avant game journo, who is in no way inspired by RPS' Kieron Gillen. (The second one, which has been available for some time, is the bottom vid on RPS' post on the subject).

Anyhow, if you need to know about nightmares involving Julian Rignall and giant percentage signs, as well as "that androgynous issue in Crash Bandicoot", you'd better tune in:

If you enjoyed that -- and I think it's almost, nearly profound at the same, which makes me N.Barley -- the other vid, which is more about 'indie games' (and Shroud Of Turin-type objects) might be up your alley. Oh, also there's Consolevania Series 4, just debuted. Plz watch now.

[In watching the second vid, indie pretension to the fore, I was also reminded of Mega64's 'I Am Independent' pastiche, which was one of three videos we commissioned them to do for the IGF Awards this year at GDC. Also, please watch the 'Intro' vid again with volume turned up too high and live vicariously.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 2:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

[Every week, Gamasutra sister weblog GamerBytes' editor Ryan Langley will be summing up the top console digital download news tidbits from the past 7 days, including brand new game announcements and scoops through the world of Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network and WiiWare.]

Last week the Tokyo Game Show was in full swing, and Microsoft announced a ton of great titles that everyone should be looking forward to.

This week we've got a great selection of downloadable titles too - Age of Booty is coming for PSN and Xbox Live Arcade, PSN gets SOCOM Confrontation too, and WiiWare just got World of Goo - supposedly one of the best WiiWare titles to date.

Xbox 360

Age Of Booty and Crazy Mouse Now On Xbox Live Arcade
Age Of Booty is getting its release this week on the Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network - a hexagonal real-time strategy game featuring pirates and rum. The most fascinating thing about this game is that the demos for both platforms will feature free online play for the first two days!

TGS 2008 - Microsoft Keynote Notes - Space Invaders Extreme, Arkanoid and More Announced
A number of fantastic titles were announced for Xbox Live Arcade at the Tokyo Game Show - Space Invaders Extreme, Arkanoid Live, R-Type Dimensions, Metal Slug 7 and King of Fighters '98 were all revealed officially.

Microsoft No Longer Delisting Titles, NXE allows you to remove "0" Point Titles
With the upcoming release of the New Xbox 'Experience', it appears Microsoft have changed their mind about removing low selling Xbox Live Arcade titles... for now.

PlayStation Network

NA PSN Store Update - Puzzle Quest, Linger In Shadows and Battle Cars Now Available
There's a big PSN update this week. You can now play Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords (with the XBLA expansion free), Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket Powered Battle Cars, and Linger in Shadows.

There's also brand new expanded content for Mega Man 9, and new packages for those who haven't picked up Super Stardust HD. Don't forget - this week you can also download SOCOM Confrontation!

Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 Coming To XBLA and PSN?
New leaked ESRB ratings and Partnernet screenshots appear to show that Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 might be making its way to the Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network.

Prince Of Persia Classic Confirmed For PSN
It's been in the air for some time, but now it appears that Ubisoft's Prince of Persia Classic remake on XBLA will be making its way to the PSN sometime soon.

WiiWare

NA WiiWare Update - World Of Goo, Art Style: Cubello
World Of Goo, supposedly the best WiiWare title to date, is now available for download in North America. Also available is Cubello, the latest in the Artstyle line of games.

EU WiiWare Update - Midnight Bowling, Potpourrii
Europe played catch up last week with the addition of some older WiiWare titles making their way over.

High Voltage Software Announce High Voltage Hot Rod Show
High Voltage Software announces a brand new racing game for WiiWare. It's Micro Machines meets Super Off Road meets Unirally, with 4 player split screen multiplayer.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Andrew Doull is an IT manager from New Zealand, now based in Sydney, who spends his free time developing Unangband, a rogue-like game, and blogging at Ascii Dreams. He writes an irregular column for GameSetWatch, and the latest instalment deals with progression in games.]

MTV News' Stephen Totilo recently argued that the defining characteristic of role-playing games is playing a role; and by that definition, included LittleBigPlanet, Guitar Hero and Spore as great role-playing games he had played recently.

I am forced to disagree with Stephen's definition: while semantically correct, he is disingenuously expanding the computer genre to encompass most, if not all games. With the exception of the Eye Toy and 'Brain Training' style self-improvement games, the player is forced to interact with the game through the proxy of an in-game avatar or character. What defines a computer RPG is progression - and at the same time, there is nothing more greatly abused in RPG design.

The grind, the treadmill, leveling up, mudflation, scaling difficulty of opponents, are all tropes of RPG progression. As you can tell from the negative connotations of many of those phrases, few concepts have had more loathing heaped upon them, particularly in the MMORPG space. Progression, in the worst sense, can be the crutch of a lazy designer. Progress Quest typifies the ever escalating scale of identikit enemies and equipment, in which no distinction is attached to the ever increasing numbers.

But the RPG progression is powerfully compulsive and increasingly adopted by other games: achievements feature increasingly in other genres such as first person shooters, unlocking additional weapons, equipment and game types.

What Is Progression In Games?

What do I mean by progression? There are at least two distinct types of progression in computer games, which I’ll label player progression, and character progression (narrative progression is arguably a third). Player progression is the increasing aptitude of the player in mastering the game: whether through learning and understanding the technical rules of the game (surface play) or the implications of those rules (deep play).

Such progression can also be seen via better control over interaction with the game (hand-eye coordination, clicks per second) or rote memorization of in-game patterns (short term and long term memory). Player progression, while a fascinating topic in its own right involving human computer interaction, theory of game design and psychology, is not the focus of this article – instead, the poorer and often abused step-child character progression, is the intended target.

Character progression is the unlocking of additional rules of play, or altering the existing rules, by choices or actions within the game. The most common unlock is the ability: an additional in-game interaction that the player’s avatar can choose to do. But scaling upwards existing abilities is just as common in the RPG space. And sometimes, particular once the whole set of game abilities has been unlocked, or at the conclusion of the game prologue, abilities can be removed – usually through the convention of capturing the character, or having them narrowly avoiding death.

Bound up with the concept of progression, particularly in the RPG space, is choice. As the character progresses through the game, the player may be given the opportunity to choose which of several abilities to unlock or scale up. A fascinating alternative suggested on the rec.games.roguelike.development Usenet group would be to create a game featuring inverted progression: where the player is forced to choose which of a starting complement of abilities to lose as they move forward in the game.

The difficulty with choice is that it makes the game design harder, as the designer is forced to provide alternate solutions or balance game-play for each choice or combination of choices that the player has made for their character’s progression. This can be mitigated by ensuring that the different choices have limited or no real consequences to game-play, simply coloring the in-game aesthetic, but this trade off can make the choices less interesting to the player.

Spore has received much criticism for this decision: while the many in-game design tools allow a fascinating array of different creatures and objects to be created, the vast majority of creative differences have no impact on game-play. Only the mouth part, which dictates whether the creature is a herbivore, carnivore or omnivore, and a limited set of abilities in the creature phase provide real customization options.

Progression With Character!

Character progression can be neatly tied into player progression through the tutorial phase of the game. In this phase, the player is only given a limited subset of the total game abilities, and has to demonstrate mastery of these abilities before unlocking more. The tutorial phase extends until the full set of abilities is mastered: at which point the ‘real’ game begins.

The difficulty with the tutorial phase is that is implies a linear progression of abilities which does not sit easily alongside the choice component of game progression. The tutorial is usually gated, in the sense that the player cannot progress until mastering the ability, which may be outside their game play aptitude – leading to frustration at the tutorial element. And the pacing of the game may be affected, particularly if the tutorials have to be interleaved with the larger game play.

The Zelda series of games are good examples of mixing tutorials and game play elements: it is possible to explore the overworld at almost any stage, but mastering of abilities gained at specific times is required to unlock dungeons which further test these abilities. The whole game design supports this character progression – it may not be appropriate for genres such as real time strategy games or first person shooters, where mixing intense action and tutorials may result in game play pacing problems.

If the elements of the tutorial are interesting enough to be expanded to a full game, it is possible to control character progression through introducing new abilities in later game levels or higher difficulty levels. This divides the game play up into sub-games, each of which is of increasing complexity; allowing the player to master simpler strategies before moving onto the later levels.

Darwinia features this progression technique through each of its levels; and many Real Time Strategy games take this approach in their single player campaigns. The difficulty is to ensure that abilities introduced early are still relevant later in the game, and that the game is still interesting even with the more limited ability sets: otherwise levels will end up with a mismatched difficulty or under utilization of skills learned earlier in the game.

Abilities can be also unlocked once a player has mastered a particular section of the game, to make re-traversing the section less of a challenge. The early 2D Metal Gear games featured this, where an initially unarmed Snake would be forced to evade guards using stealth, but after equipping himself with weapons later in the game, he could shoot his way through the same screens far more quickly.

Item-Actuated Progression?

This is not just limited to geographic traversal: if a player in Resident Evil 4 has difficulty with a particular boss monster, they can purchase a one shot rocket launcher at considerable cost to bypass the monster in question, and in Spore the initial difficulty of fighting enemies in the Space phase is much easier once the player has acquired higher level weapons, made available by defending sufficient attacks at the more difficult early stage of the phase.

The acquirement of abilities can either be directly linked to actions within the game, which results in a puzzle-like structure to game play, where certain prerequisites have to be met in order to open up or make easier later parts of the game, or indirectly, by providing a resource that the player can then spend on abilities directly or indirectly. Classes, talent trees and skills are all mechanisms for controlling character progression in various ways and guiding player choices as to which abilities to acquire or improve.

The class structure is the most limiting framework, where the player makes a single decision, usually at the start of the game, that fundamentally colors the game experience. Talent trees and skills allow smaller, incremental choices to be made - the difference between the two being a matter of degree rather than kind, where talent trees implies a few, spaced out decisions as to which abilities to acquire, and skills implies a more frequent investment of time into the decision making process, with abilities improving on a scalar basis with the occasional break point which introduces a new ability or opens up a new skill.

Divorcing the ability acquirement structure from the game simplifies the design requirements: you are no longer forced to ensure that the parts of the game where an ability is required fall after the parts of the game where that ability is acquired. However, the mechanic for acquiring new abilities becomes more important, and here it is very easy to end up in a position where the mechanism (experience points, money, power ups) is available without bounds in a region, even if a fraction of what is available later in the game.

It then becomes possible for the player to continue to acquire new abilities in a low risk environment by trading off time instead of playing skill: in other words, to grind or farm the game. This implies that you should put a ceiling on the acquisition resource, and regularly change it as the player moves through the game and masters sets of abilities ('Your dubloons are worthless here, you need McGuffins to buy things this side of town').

Spore's achievement system implicitly does this by making the rewards for defending planets different to the rewards for terraforming them: and each reward set makes the particular task that contributed towards it much easier in future. It is easy to visualize a game of tiered abilities where each new tier requires a new resource and only a limited number of the possible abilities can be learned per tier.

Why Do We Hand Out Awards?

But none of this answers why, as designers, we feel the need to reward the player with new abilities moving forward in the game: particularly when those abilities make parts of the game easier or irrelevant. Is the progression of player skill and narrative not sufficient to inspire the player to keep playing the game? Does the game lack depth or complexity that we should trivialize it by making the game easier and easier, as opposed to harder and harder, the more the player plays it?

Or are the rewards we give purely cosmetic, the enemies scaling up as fast as the player does, so that the same sword swing at level 50, despite the gleaming blade, and cacophonous impact, change the world in only the same way that the timid stab of a level 1 character against a giant rat does?

To an extent, we are making the game more complicated, by providing more choices through progression. But when the range of choices are mastered by improved player understanding, is game progression a dressed up Skinner box? I think, and unfortunately many games shy from this, that progression must mean that the stakes are higher as well. You must risk more when you fail, which is why permadeath in roguelikes is such a powerful solution to the progression dilemma.

Of the classic games, Chess and Go don't feature progression in the sense that RPGs do: the one to come closest is Poker, where your stake is built up as you play the game, and those at the table around you withdraw. In the final hands, if you manage to stay at the table, the money you have staked is the highest, the rewards the greatest and the failures the most painful. Mat Williams compares Tilted Mill's new PC title Hinterland to Poker, and although he doesn't say directly, he must have been conscious of this acquisition strategy and how risking all is the direct counter to progression's woes.

[NOTE: Although Andrew's piece reads as a standalone article, it is part of his larger series on 'Designing a Magic System', which you may wish to read after finishing this.]

Posted by andrewd at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

[Our own Chris Remo caught up with the 2D Boy boys at a recent Nintendo press event, and we figured we'd release the interview to (more or less) coincide with the debut of their excellent IGF prize-winning title, which is not to be missed, in our addled opinions, hurray.]

This week, Kyle Gabler and Ron Carmel -- the two employees of developer 2D Boy -- released World of Goo, the already highly-praised puzzle game shipping out via WiiWare and various PC distribution platforms including Steam.

World of Goo originated in Gabler's college project-impelled Experimental Gameplay Project as Tower of Goo, and ended up winning multiple awards at this year's Independent Games Festival en route to its commercial release.

We caught up with Gabler and Carmel to chat about the game's development process, 2D Boy's relationship with Nintendo, and how the studio's employee structure is based on brain halves.

So do you guys have titles at a two-man company?

Kyle Gabler: Right brain. Big design, art, music, story, basically dumping emotions out.

Ron Carmel: I'm the left brain, and that's programming and production.

KG: Together we make a whole person.

Do you guys have that on your business cards? Left brain, right brain?

RC: Business falls under left brain.

So you're the only one with business cards, then?

RC: I have two, maybe three, left. I slacked on that. There were more important things.

KG: We don't need business cards.

Lean Development

Are you guys officially the entirety of 2D Boy?

KG: Yeah, we're just two people for the bulk of this project. We don't have an office, but we're not allowed to say that, so we just work out of coffee shops and stuff.

Late in the project, we brought in Allan Blomquist, who's this genius programmer who made everything run faster -- he's really good at low-level stuff, like making sure the correct bits get stuck in registers.

Did you guys contract anyone else out for artwork or anything?

KG: The vast majority of work is us. We had a part-time Q/A guy on board for the last few months. Allan, we've already mentioned. We don't speak Spanish, French, Italian, or German, so we had to get a translation company to do that for us.

How long was the develpment cycle? You had the IGF and all that, but how long have you actually been making the game?

KG: A year and a half? That's true, right? Approaching two years?

RC: We've been so busy we forgot to count time, so it's actually a little bit over two years now. We started in August.

KG: No! It's been four months. [laughter]

RC: No, five years. [laughter] It's just magic. It just happened one day.

How did the development process on this work? Do you guys have design documents, or is it just, "This seems like where it needs to go now"?

KG: Design documents are for suckers. It was just really, "Eh, what's fun? Let's do that."

RC: Seriously. When we came up with a concept, we're like, "All right. What are we going to start developing?" And Tower of Goo, which was the original Experimental Gameplay Project game, seemed like people were kind of relating to it in some way. So we were like, "All right. Let's try to base something off of that, " and, "How are we going to turn that into the game? Oh, let's see if we can reach some sort of exit for them to run out of."

From that point on, everything happened as like an evolutionary design. We were still adding new ideas on how to play the game and changing features up until like a month ago.

So there was never a design document. And if there was, now that the game is done is the only time that we could have written it. Things changed; we tried things; we crossed them out.

I understand you guys did all the music yourselves?

RC: It's all Kyle.

KG: Yeah, right at my computer. It's all synthesized instruments. Music is very important to me. A long time ago, I joked it's so hard to get music in games or movies. Like the only way I'm ever going to be able to write music is if I start a company, make a game, and be like, "Oh, I know a composer. It's me!" [laughs] So, that kind of happened.

Do you have any musical background?

KG: Yeah. I've written music since high school. It's just on my computer. I don't have any emotions in real life, so they have to come out in music and video games.

Dealing With Nintendo

How's it been working with Nintendo, as a developer?

RC: For us, it's been fantastic. We've got nothing but great things to say about them. For some people, that's not the typical story.

In the past, not all devs have felt that way, yeah.

RC: They've helped us out with doing a lot of PR. Obviously, being at the [Nintendo] Media Summit is great. One guy there has been fantastic. He's helped us get through the process of getting approved as a Nintendo developer and helping us rush things at the last second for the release. It's been amazing.

Is there any kind of back and forth with Nintendo? Do they have a producer on the project, or did they just trust you to make the game?

RC: They were totally hands off. They saw the demo, the first chapter demo, and they were like, "Yeah. We love it." And basically, they didn't contact us unless we asked them for something.

KG: I think one of our happiest moments was when Iwata and Miyamoto played chapter one, liked it, and said, "Hey, let's make this get on Nintendo." Childhood heroes playing your game -- it was a head-spinning moment for both of us.

I don't traditionally imagine Nintendo and Miyamoto playing, say, Western-developed indie games. It's interesting seeing them doing more of that these days.

RC: I think the only reason they did that was because the little goo balls look like those creatures from "Spirited Away," the Miyazaki film. [laughter]

They were suckered into it.

RC: And they confused us for something truly great.

KG: It looks like a Japanese game. It's colorful. It's playful.

The Goo Trend

There's also the other goo-based game, just called Goo!, that was in the same IGF.

RC: Yes. It's made by Tommy Refenes. He's fantastic. We just hung out with him this past weekend.

KG: He's really hilarious, too.

I've dealt with him online. He's written a number of crazy articles on multi-threading for us.

RC: Yeah, that'd be Tommy.

RC: Goo! is a really impressive game. It's technically marvelous.

The Electronic Arts Days

What were you doing at EA, pre-2D Boy?

KG: I was doing rapid prototyping. Basically, quickly making demo versions in like a week or two to test some new gameplay mechanics so we could find out if a game would be fun, so we don't make a game in two years and find out at the end that the game is not fun.

RC: Kyle basically had the job that every game design student dreams of. To be at a big company, get paid a salary, and come up with cool stuff.

But clearly it was not what you wanted to be doing long-term.

KG: We both just wanted to make our own game. So there's no way to do that, unless you're Kyle Gray, who made [Nintendo DS game Henry] Hatsworth [in the Puzzling Adventure] over there. So we left, and made our own.

Are you familiar with what the former Retro guys at Armature are doing with EA? They're going to be doing a lot of game prototypes and designs, then contracting development out.

RC: Yeah, I read about Armature. When I read about it, I was like, "Oh, they're taking the Experimental Gameplay Project ethos and trying to make a company out of it." I think it's a great idea.

The difficulty that I think they're going to be facing is they're going to need to have a really tight connection between their core group in house and the places they outsource the work to. They need to make sure their creative vision gets transferred properly to the people who actually produce the game.

The thing that made it great for us is it's two people. Every email is just back and forth and so we know that we have engineering and art and vision, everything. It's easy to keep everybody abreast of what's going on. I think it will be a challenge for them. I hope it works for them.

Was it strange to go from being at a company like EA to a point where every department was you guys, or was it totally natural?

KG: It was a relief! I mean, oh my God, if I want something done, I just do it. I think it helps having a small team too, because everything is really cohesive. There is a single vision as opposed to design meetings where we try to decide the color of the UI panel that pops up when you press the X button.

RC: When I worked at Pogo, I worked on small teams as well. There was a designer, artist, and programmer. So going from three to two isn't that big a deal.

The Money Issue

Did it require a lot of financial investment, or did you just start out and say, "Time to make a game, let's make a game"?

RC: The two Kyles, Kyle Gabler and Kyle Gray, gave a presentation about this.

KG: Here's my financial situation. I have $60,000 of student loans. When I left EA, I had $30,000 in the bank, so a net worth of negative $30,000. So, I guess if we can start a company with negative $30,000, then I think everyone should know that it's possible to start a company. You don't have to have money. All you have to do is be stupidly optimistic.

Do you expect to end up in the black?

RC: Our total expenditures for this game, other than like a few thousand dollars here and there in the last month of development and localization and QA and stuff like that, has been our living expenses. So, we've kind of been, sometimes metaphorically and sometimes literally, eating Top Ramen. And cheap rent and we don't have cars, so the development costs --

KG: I rarely buy new litter for my kitty litter box. [laughter]

RC: So, what it costs to make this game is the couple thousand a month that we each need to live for two years and that's about it.

Did you get any kind of advances, or is everything royalty-based?

RC: We tried to get as much in the back end as possible -- WiiWare's all back end. At some point earlier this year, we signed an agreement for a European publishing deal, and we started getting payments for an advance on that. But at that point, it was already clear that we were going to be OK in terms of going on WiiWare, so everything's going to be fine.

And that's retail in Europe?

RC: Yeah. That's the current plan, that retail is going to take it through. Had you heard about it in a negative way or a positive way?

I just heard someone mention at one point it'll be in a box when it comes out in Europe.

RC: We've caught some flak for that. Gamers were kind of annoyed. Apparently, we had no idea about this, but European gamers often feel like they're getting screwed, because games arrive late and cost more.

When you guys were approaching Nintendo or when they approached you, were you looking at Live Arcade or PlayStation Network or anything? Or did this just kind of happen?

KG: This kind of game would never work on PSN or PlayStation at all. Not at all. We need the pointers. That's why it's on PC.

It's nice that you got the PC release simultaneous.

RC: Yes, same day. A little terrifying. [laughter]

Any idea what is coming next now that you're basically done with this?

KG: No.

RC: My answer is that I want to get bored, because I haven't been bored in a year. I've just been working too much, so I want to just do nothing until I'm bored.

KG: We hope people like it. My biggest fear right now is that we have no marketing budget. I just want people to know and play it. That would make me so happy.

RC: Tell your friends about it. It's the only thing we can bank on. [laughter]

KG: Post it on the message boards.

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

The second and final catchup session before we return to your regularly scheduled GameSetLinks programming, starting out with some machinima goodness, hurray.

Also hanging out in here in this marvelously random conglomeration -- Douglas Rushkoff's 'Cyberia', Secret Exit's awesome iPhone games, Wipeout HD's insano resolution-scaling tricks, and the Suda51-ish Optron, woo.

Go go go:

Machinima Filmfest 2008 | Announcing the Machinima Filmfest 2008 Nominees!
V.cool, game cinemas still going strong, admittedly as a niche.

ktoormmp.gif (GIF Image, 250x156 pixels)
OMG genius GAF-ish Groundhog Day Vs. BioWare MMO randomness.

Ten Ton Hamster | Your Games. Your Friends. Your Worlds.
Yes, Ten Ton Hammer really has a kids' online worlds offshoot called Ten Ton Hamster. I boggled, too.

Gamasutra - Phil Harrison To Keynote Unite 2008
So Atari is buying Unity then? Rumor start!

The Independent Gaming Source: 'Demake Compo: Results!'
Yep, complete awesome.

Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace, by Douglas Rushkoff
Rushkoff's seminal piece of techno-silliness - still exceptionally readable - is now available for free online, has some game-related resonances (Chapter 15 on paper gamers, for example), and is generally worth presuing.

SPiN from Secret Exit Coming Soon | FingerGaming
Man, all the Secret Exit games are looking great on iPhone!

Inside the Digital Foundry: WipEout HD's 1080p Sleight of Hand
'Basically WipEout HD is the first game I've come across that seems to be operating with a dynamic framebuffer. Resolution can alter on a frame-by-frame basis. Rather than introduce dropped frames, slow down or other unsavoury effects, the number of pixels being rendered drops and the PS3's horizontal hardware scaler is invoked to make up the difference.'

Game Center CX’s Shinya Arino playing Mega Man 9. ... - Tiny Cartridge
Haha, totally cool - retro now future.

Optron: Brilliant instrument of noise ::: Pink Tentacle
Visually, looks somewhat hilariously like No More Heroes, heh.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

['Chewing Pixels' is a regular GameSetWatch column written by British games journalist and producer, Simon Parkin. This time, a message from the future.]

One of the grandchildren is browsing my achievement points. It's a record filled with tens of thousands of entries, an indelible, almost embarrassing testimony to a life spent in games.

She looks round. “Grandpa, what’s your favourite videogame of all time?”

It’s always been an awkward question but these days it’s near impossible to answer truthfully. She might as well have asked about my favourite meal. Who can possibly remember every plate of food they ever sat down to? You know that you ate most days and you know that you must have been nourished to some extent or other, but the details of what was on the menu, how it felt in the mouth, what it smelled and looked like are all lost to time.

After a while games lose their definition in memory too. You know that you played most days and that you must have been nourished to some extent or other, but the details... A few stand out, for sure, but most slip forgotten.

It's been six weeks since I was told that I'm dying.

The problem with death, for the lifelong gamer, is its supreme familiarity. There aren’t hairs on my head to measure the virtual lives I’ve lost over a lifetime of play. So when you’re told you’ve three months at best, it’s easy to be flippant.

In my time I’ve fallen foul of countless mis-timed jumps, stray bullets, car crashes and drug deals gone wrong; I’ve flown fighter jets into solid ground at 300 miles per hour, fallen under the heavy tread of a London bus and watched incredulous as my space ship dissolved in the mute explosion of a sun. The blocks reached the top of the screen time after time.

Playing a videogame is to enter into a state of inescapable impending doom: they are the moments between leaping from the clifftop and hitting the rocks below. Games only become games when you’ve a Game Over screen to avoid. Lives, profoundly perhaps, only gain value when they can be lost.

In a way then, videogames are the ultimate preparation for life’s ultimate event: through them you’ve died a million times.

Yes. Death should be easy: it’s virtually all I’ve ever known.

Except no, of course. There’s no such thing as one life left in videogames. If you’ve got another quarter, you’ve got another chance. There’s always another go, another opportunity to perfect your technique and claw closer to the final prize. There’s always another chance.

Not so for this world, for this body, for these cells. Not so for this man.

I think I’m one of the first generation to have lived their whole life with videogames. From cradle to deathbed, my life breaks down into legion roles, ghost lives led in pixel dimensions. You could write ten thousand obituaries of my life and every one of them would be as true as it is distinct.

A crack sniper who served his country with skill and determination through the Second World War; six times winner of the Le Mans 24 hour; he scored the winning goal in no less than twenty World Cup finals. This giant yellow vegan was relentlessly chased through life by his ghosts. Simon was the finest plumber in all the Mushroom kingdom. A loving father.

But while the lines of identity between virtual and real world experiences have blurred, there’s only one obituary for me that could really be written: gamer till the end. I never served in Dresden; I can’t drive, or kick a football where I want it to go. I’ve never eaten a ghost and I couldn’t fix a dripping tap, let alone rescue a flirtatious princess.

No. I sat and precision twitched in front of screens. I moved light from A to B and back again and played make believe forever.

They say our actions in this life echo through eternity. But what of those actions outplayed in videogame lives? Or does the very fact we acted in virtual worlds and neglected this one echo through the years; save game files a history of mis-spent time, energy and resources. How did my virtual choices shape tomorrow’s reality? Did I simply deplete our resources all the faster, escapism that fueled Armageddon’s engines?

It’s something we rarely speak of: gamer’s guilt. The generations that came before us feared our hobby, its intrusion into our lives, the distraction it brought. Indeed, their damnations made us all experts in defending any and every accusation aimed at gaming.

Now those older generations are all dead their mistrust is gone with them. Everybody plays games and, with nobody left to justify our hobby to, the protestations we learned rote echo as loud as they do pointless.

Did I waste my time? It’s a question you can only truly ask when you’ve no time left to give, no time left to justify. Play is the first step to knowledge and development, for sure, but as you streak into adulthood haven’t all the lessons game mechanics could teach been learned a thousand times over?

Aren’t games, as we defended against time after time after time, simply a colossal waste of time, a leisure pursuit as meaningless as a stack of blank Sudoku? Aren't they little more than a comfortable distraction of consciousness from the grim realities of this world, realities we would have been better off running toward, not from.

And if all videogames could ever aspire to was being big, dumb, blockbusting escapism, does that even matter? Hasn’t every generation that ever lived created make-believe worlds to climb into and take refuge?

I don’t know. I don’t know. I just wish we’d asked each other the questions a bit more fifty years ago.

Back to her question, the one being asked now. I look deep into young eyes, the eyes of a life with all of its cards left to deal.

‘Tetris,’ I murmer. ‘It was my first’.

[Simon Parkin does not, in fact, have any grandchildren and, while he rarely feels it, he’s still in his twenties. Just.]

Posted by Simon Parkin at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

[One of my last TGS write-ups, this panel was particularly interesting because it continued the honesty about how Japanese game firms operate worldwide -- and when do you see the bosses of Capcom, Namco, and Square all on the same stage discussing things so candidly?]

As part of a high-profile Tokyo Game Show business day panel, the heads of Japanese gaming giants Capcom, Namco Bandai and Square Enix sat down to discuss the worldwide financial crisis, the increasingly global nature of gaming, and the position of Japanese video game companies overseas, with honesty and candor in full effect.

Following an extremely blunt keynote from Yoichi Wada about Japanese game leaders' faltering position on the worldwide stage (if not the local one), a Nikkei BP moderator sat down with Square Enix's president Wada, alongside Namco Bandai boss Shin Unozawa and Capcom head Kenzo Tsujimoto, and spent an entertaining 45 minutes discussing some of the major obstacles to Japan's growth on the world stage.

The Worldwide Financial Crisis & Games?

Before the worldwide market differences were discussed, however, there was a question on whether the in-progress credit crunch and financial market turmoil would affect the companies the trio ran, whether in Japan or elsewhere.

Capcom's Tsujimoto explained that "we tend to harbor negative feelings and thoughts" towards the current crisis, but people need to find some ways to entertain themselves, especially at times of hardship. Thus, with those current games available at a reasonable price, "we shouldn't be too pessimistic."

Square Enix's Wada agreed that the market for entertainment is rarely curtailed or shrunk, even in rough times, and as long as the industry "keeps moving", things should work out. Namco's Unozawa agreed that things shouldn't be too bad, though he quipped that, for the benefit of the financial press or shareholders, he was "not able to commit to the performance of our company" in any of the remarks he made.

The Nikkei BP moderator then segued into the main topic of the panel, the discussion of Japan and globalization. As he noted, Japan has previously been successful in major areas such as the automotive and consumer electronics sectors. But in some cases -- for example the iPhone -- these areas are becoming more global, and he wondered if Japanese successes were slowing generally, not just in the game market.

Namco Bandai's Global Profile

Namco Bandai's Unozawa spoke on his company, where they are trying to create a "mindset to provide things for global market". He noted that some Bandai TV shows such as Dragonball Z are very successful outside of Japan -- but many of the shows are not.

However, the company has game franchises such as Soul Calibur which now sell significantly better outside Japan -- and Unazawa commented on the need to spend a lot of money advertising titles that might be strong in the West.

Unozawa then showed a graph featuring his company's Japanese, U.S., and European sales numbers for the first three quarters of 2006, 2007, and 2008, something the other execs would repeat for their own firms. His graph showed significant leadership in Japan, and some declines in North America (at least for the quarters surveyed) in recent years.

The executive believes that may related to the company's heavy use of the RPG genre, pointing out that the turn-based game model, where you enter a command and then your characters fight, is now "regarded as a legacy" in the U.S. and Europe. He asked whether Japan developers can (or should) make more real-time games.

He also touched upon the reverse issue, that American and European-made games have not historically sold well in Japan, with very few exceptions, suggesting that perhaps people still remember the bad localization and subtitles of the earlier Western titles released here.

How Square Enix Sees The World

As for Square Enix, Wada agreed that for Final Fantasy, Japan is still the strongest. He commented that, in general, Square doesn't have many titles that sell better outside of Japan than in. Nonetheless, Square's revenues are split 50% within Japan and 50% outside -- but, as the company executive noted, that doesn't really match the geographical size of the market.

Showing his graphs of 2006, 2007, and 2008 revenues for each territory, Wada quipped: "I don't want to explain this!" Square Enix still has the most Japan-centric revenues of the three publishers in the panel, with the others seeing close to 60% or 70% of revenues outside of their native country. In particular, the U.S. sales numbers declined notably from 2007 to 2008 for the company.

However, Wada made an extremely relevant point, suggesting: "If you focus too much on North America and Europe [with Japanese titles], it's like seeing a Western movie featuring someone who is supposedly Japanese, but doesn't look like it at all." And of course, no Western-headquartered publishers enjoy significant market share in Japan right now. Nonetheless, he believes that usability and interface are in many ways universal, and can be worked on similarly for titles worldwide.

Capcom's Worldwide Goals

Finally, Tsujimoto looked at Capcom's graphs for Japan, the U.S. and Europe, with reasonable degrees of stability, except for a major spike in Japanese revenues recently thanks to Monster Hunter. He commented on the success of the franchise in Japan, but agreed that the game could not do quite so spectacularly elsewhere if "just transferred overseas as it is".

Tsujimoto then went on to define some of the major play differences -- particularly that Japanese consumers use public transportation a great deal, so travel time is when you play your games.

As with all of the surveyed publishers, Japanese numbers were more than U.S. and Europe, but the executive noted that, with the release of Biohazard/Resident Evil 5 imminent, there's potential to change that, especially if similarly global franchises can be found.

The Capcom executive also discussed why "there should be more Japanese people enjoying Western games", noting that Grand Theft Auto (which Capcom published in Japan) has sold 500,000 copies in the territory. He believes that we're starting to see some "big growth in sales of Western titles" in Japan, as audiences become more familiar with overseas titles and global awareness grows.

Conclusion: The Road Ahead

So what of the future? Where do Japanese companies go from here? Square Enix's Wada praised the technical and creative state of Western titles, suggesting that overall they are "very well made", and that overall, he plays Western games more than Japanese ones.

Capcom's Tsujimoto was blunt on the issues, suggesting: "we are not longer at the top", though Japanese companies' capacity and skills are up there with the best. He pointed out that the survival horror genre was largely birthed and gestated in Japan, for example, as well as Final Fantasy-style epic turn-bsed RPG.

The key, as he saw it, was that the Japanese will need to collaborate with foreign companies or technology, but still have "our own unique ways of making products." He pointedly suggested that this "doesn't mean that we have become weaker, [just that] others have gained the strength".

Namco's Unozawa also analyzed where the Japanese industry is know, arguing that "maybe we had it too easy" at time of PlayStation and the PlayStation 2, when the Japanese game publishing giants could maintain growth in the overseas market.

But in many ways, he believes that Japanese developers somewhat stopped technically at the level of the PlayStation 2, and have been "maybe a bit lax" in going beyond that. Concluding with an oblique Galapagos Islands metaphor, he suggested that open communities were key to strengthening the Japanese industry's hand.

Wada's typically blunt rhetoric concluded the discussion, by noting that, with less and less boundaries and national borders, it's important to resolve major change to take the Japanese industry forward. He quipped: "I will probably never quit smoking unless someone tells me I will die of cancer tomorrow. That's the kind of situation I need" -- and one he seems to think is in progress right now for Japanese game companies.

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[I very much appreciated the opportunity to participate in Sense Of Wonder Night at TGS this year, both as onlooker and judge - and here's a pretty complete write-up of the evening's proceedings.]

At Tokyo Game Show on Friday evening, multiple entities, including industry association CEDEC, TGS organizers Nikkei BP and IGDA Japan combined to present the unique 'Sense Of Wonder Night', an evening showcasing 11 independent games from all over the world -- with the creators on hand to give presentations, and translation between Japanese and English making for a truly international flavor.

The showcased games were picked from a set of game submissions made earlier this year for the contest, which was co-ordinated by Nikkei BP in association with IGDA Japan head Kiyoshi Shin.

He also acted as effusive MC for the evening, which was inspired by the GDC's Experimental Gameplay Workshop in format, with just 10 minutes (including questions) for each set of creators to show and explain their games.

The loose, informal format was very much appreciated by the packed crowd of around two to three hundred, a significant majority Japanese, who packed one section of the Restaurant NOA at Makuhari Messe, adjacent to the Tokyo Game Show.

The event was co-located with the International Party on Friday evening, and the audience were given 'laughing' smiley-face toys to shake and make noise when they felt a 'sense of wonder' over the demonstrated titles.

A particular theme of the SoWN selections were new forms of expression and emerging genres in games, from titles using physics and flocking through titles that were prototypes or sketches designed to make you think about the nature of video games. As such, a light-hearted, wry approach was quite a contrast from the relatively formal strictures of TGS' Business Day and showfloor.

The order of the presentations for Sense Of Wonder Night 2008 was as follows:

Camera (Yareyare, Japan) (not available online)

First up was Camera, a art-game made for the PC where, simply enough, you control a hand holding a mouse. If you move or click your mouse, then the hand onscreen moves or clicks its mouse. A kind of Dada-ist prank, it's evidently pretending to be a camera showing your desk. But of course, it's actually not.

The wry Japanese author suggested to the Sense Of Wonder Night onlookers that Camera creates a "sense of unexpected that no other game offers." The crowd were much-tickled by it, and asked about the commercialization of the project -- not entirely seriously, of course.

Depict (Jesus Cuahtemoc, Moreno Ramos, Mexico) (video available online)

Next up, a Mexican duo discussed using the iPhone camera and a cute game concept to create a link with the real world. In the game, you are shown a picture consisting of a shape and some colors (say, a half red and half black image, or a white background with a red circle in the center of it), and you have to match it in the real world.

The creators then showed a cute demo video in which they and their friends tried to match the image by finding objects in real-life that resembled those colors, and taking a picture of it with the iPhone camera.

In fact, the Q&A revealed that the idea is not too far into development on iPhone just yet, because the creators can't afford to buy one of their own. But their video and ideas, including the concept of having multiplayer duels with different iPhone players submitting their photos and the best one being picked, are charming.

The Unfinished Swan (Ian Dallas, USC, United States) (video available online)

This prototype, from a member of the P.B. Winterbottom game at the University Of Southern California, starts in an all-white world, and has the player throw missiles that cover the walls and floor and effectively 'illuminate' the space with black color splatter.

The game has other twists, including a set of blocks that can be moved by projectiles, and the ability to move into all-black spaces and then throw white projectiles.

The stark, monochromatic game generated a lot of oohs and aahs from the crowd, who really appreciated the abstract, art-inspired nature of the title. In his presentation, meanwhile, Dallas honestly explained that, from what he'd seen, people were impressed with the game for about 30 seconds, until the brain understood what was going on.

But they tired quite swiftly of playing it, and in fact, many players asked for harsher game mechanics -- to have hard jumping puzzles, and even death. But that's not what he wants the game to be, even though he noted that wonder alone isn't enough for games to have longevity -- a good observation.

WorldIcelansista (Ambition, Japan) (Japanese website available)

This title, from developer Ambition, is an online RPG which creates picturebooks on mobile phones in Japan. As noted, cellphone gaming is pretty ubiquitous in the territory, and the title, a cute-looking 2D pixelated game, allows users to pick from multiple choices to make their own stories which they can save and replay.

Unfortunately, the Ambition representative didn't appear to do a great job of explaining the unique selling points of the game itself, other than explaining to people how to search for it correctly on the Internet.

However, at the close of his presentation, he showed a real printed book, and revealed that you will be able to print-on-demand books for the game, using the stories you pick out -- a neat concept.

Twin Tower (OMEGA, Japan) (Windows download available online)

Next up, noted Every Extend creator OMEGA, part of the hobby game development circle GameHell, explained his physics-based construction game, where the player needs to alternately stack falling blocks on a floating scale. If you can correctly stack either side without letting the sides tip over, then you've completed the level.

He then revealed that the GameDev forum at the infamous 2channel forums, based around rapid prototyping, were what spawned this title. Specifically, the theme for this particular 2ch competition was "Two Towers". Also, somewhat unexpectedly, OMEGA explained that the game was inspired by the "not so fun" 1983 Namco arcade title Phozon.

But how so? Well, the Japanese designer noted that he likes construction games like SimCity or Age Of Empires, but they have a long play time and are pretty complex. However, simple titles like Kenta Cho's dojin title Tumiki Fighters or Keita Takahashi' Katamari Damacy take a different, more chaotic, shorter-form approach to construction games. It was this spirit OMEGA was trying to call upon when creating Twin Tower.

PixelJunk Eden (Q-Games, Japan) (information available online, out now on PS3)

PixelJunk Eden was introduced by two Japanese staff members of Dylan Cuthbert's Osaka-based studio Q-Games. The abstract PlayStation Network downloadable 'jump action game' is on many Westerners' radar, thanks to its high-profile release in the West and the other games in the PS3-exclusive PixelJunk series -- but is not so well-known in Japan.

The creators explained, after showing a well-received trailer, that the combination of art and music was key to the creation of PixelJunk Eden, and particularly noted that an 'outsider perspective' from some of the game's designers really helped its unconventional style.

In addition, they discussed the particular choice of art direction and colors to make sure that the game looks good, but the characters are still well-differentiated from the background and playfield in the borderline psychedelic title.

Gomibako (Trash Box/ PlayStation C.A.M.P!, Japan) (video available online, PS3 version due out soon)

One of the most intriguing games of the evening, this game was developed by Jetraylogic as part of the PlayStation C.A.M.P project from Sony Japan, and a PSN downloadable title for the PlayStation 3. It's a physics engine-based title in which the player must break objects into a trashcan.

For example, you can drop wooden barrels on metal objects to smash them, and then lower in a flaming object to set the entire pile on fire. In addition, you can break water-filled objects to fill the trashcan with liquid, and then have the contents of the can rot.

In the game, which was also playable on the Sony booth at TGS, the 'bosses' are massive chunks of garbage such as trucks. If you don't correctly get rid of them, they dump mounds of tires on you. At the end of each level, you then get additionally rated on either 'ECO' (if you're good for the environment and didn't burn too much trash), and 'EGO' (if you're bad for it, presumably.)

This slick, well-produced and innovative PSN physics title went down extremely well with the packed audience. It's a devilishly smart physics-based take on Tetris, somewhat reminiscent of elements of recent PC indie title Blast Miner -- and it was also a hit with mainstream journalists covering TGS.

Moon Stories (Daniel Benmergui, Argentina) (Flash game available online)

These series of Flash 'micro-games' are created by an Argentinian former Gameloft programmer who wants to make titles "about people, not objects", and his wordless, highly conceptual game sketches were one of the hits of the night with the audience.

His main demonstration, I Wish I Were The Moon is about a three-way love story between a girl, a boy, and the moon. It has multiple endings, all set around taking pictures of the moon or manipulating the characters in the game, and is genuinely affecting.

Benmergui also showed a second title, Storyteller, which has a similar no-text, no-movie, simple art approach, and features three windows, each with a separate comic strip-style occurrence in it. Juggling what the characters are doing (attacking, imprisoning, etc) in each of the frames results in a different outcome in the final frame, an ingenious study in causation.

The Misadventures Of P.B. Winterbottom (The Odd Gentlemen, United States) (video available online, coming soon to consoles)

USC's Ian Dallas made a re-appearance to present this title, since he was also a designer on the university's Winterbottom, which he revealed will be coming to un-named consoles at some time soon. The Gorey-inspired side-on platformer stars a pie-loving Edwardian villain, and includes normal running, jumping and gliding controls.

But the main differentiator is the ability to record and utilize multiple versions of Winterbottom doing things such as jumping, balancing on teeter-totters, and even dying, using these multiple simultaneous character actions to solve puzzles and complete levels.

The title has been a multi-award nominee in areas from the IGF to Indiecade and beyond. It obviously echoes indie darling Braid in its time rewinding and recording, but uses very different design elements - for example, the player having to avoid previous versions of himself.

And with SCEA previously having a close relationship with USC projects such as Flow, this author is wagering we'll see this title on PS3 and PSP some time in 2009.

Genocide Automation (Naoya Sasaki, Japan) (Windows download available online)

The swarm simulator, with many units fighting against each other, looks a bit like a mutant Game Of Life. It features odd, abstract shapes being formed by lots of individual units - both blue and orange - attacking each other and fighting each other off until one side or another is destroyed.

Even though "each unit is only thinking about itself", the acting-out of the game logic creates the swarms that appear co-ordinated.

The author, Sasaki, explained that the title was simply to "watch and enjoy" until just recently, where he realized that mouse control could affect the swarming of the characters in real-time. Now, the aggressiveness of the AI can be affected by mousing over an area of the screen - leading to interesting conceptual possibilities for this prototype.

Nanosmiles (Yu Iwai, Japan) (Windows download available online)

Finally, Engrish-Games creator and OMEGA's fellow GameHell hobby group member Iwai showed Nanosmiles. This is a micro-organism shooting 2D game that uses some of the same swarming ideas shown in Genocide Automation.

However, it differs in that it has automated swarming characters gathering around the player, and only indirect offensive attacks are allowed. In effect, your swarming colleagues do your dirty work for you after you point them in the right direction. Iwai (aka Dong) also noted you can hide behind walls and let the swarm intelligence -- using boids -- take all the risk on your behalf.

Conclusion

Following the end of the presentations, the judging committee, which included Katamari Damacy and Noby Noby Boy creator Keita Takahashi, Enterbrain's 'Maker' series director Kenji Sugiuchi, and Vector.co.jp executive Takashi Katayama, as well as the author of this article, were asked to give their impressions on what we had seen.

Particularly notable were the clipped comments from an ever enigmatic Keita Takahashi, who claimed that he hadn't been to Tokyo Game Show for 8 years -- but that this event had drawn him to attend.

The evening ended with assurances from Shin that Sense Of Wonder Night will occur again next year -- a good thing for uniting the indie game scene in Japan with the rest of the world.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Not strictly related to video games, but is this not the best magazine cover you've ever seen? The Cooper Black font, the eerie CGI bits, the way everything fits together like a jigsaw puzzle with the pieces broken and crushed in a vain attempt to make them snap together? This is what we need more of, people! (And yes, I really did buy the mag just for the cover. I dig reading about electronics projects, yes, but I don't buy these mags regularly.)

On a slightly related note -- do you folks really like me doing these Mag Roundups? I'm beginning to get the impression that I'm repeating myself in most of these -- US mags are tiny and their preview sections are boring, Britmags are nice but expensive, Nintendo Power interviewed this guy, hooray. Do you readers want me to continue with this, or would my time be better spent covering fewer things in more detail instead of giving a more general view? Feel free to leave your replies below.

Until then, however, here's a look at all the mags of the past fortnight. It's the big ad-sales season for game mags, not that you can really tell anymore...

Edge November 2008

Cover: Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars

This is one of those uncommon occasions when Edge, for the most part, gets outrun by pretty much every other media outlet in America. Nintendo Power already did a big cover blowout story on GTA:CW (complete with separate spread devoted to Dan Houser PR'ing off in the engaging way he's capable off); Official Xbox Magazine also visited Rare this month to take an insider look at the new Banjo; and the "how Harmonix became such an important developer" piece was done a couple months back in Future's Guitars & Gaming one-off. (Edge interviews the VP; Guitars & Gaming interviewed the co-founder.)

The highlights of this month's issue, then, are in the littler things -- the way the reviewers pick on games like Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and Spore and Mercenaries 2; the retrospective piece on ridiculously ambitious 8-bit art piece Deus Ex Machina; and most impressively, the first interview Chris Crawford's given to the game media in about a million years. (If that name doesn't ring a bell, then...ah, never mind.)

Retro Gamer Issue 55

Cover: Ant Attack

Speaking of obscure Brit 8-bit games, here's one that the editor-in-chief obliquely compares to Ico in his editorial -- which is stretching things more than a little bit, but it's a lovely little making-of piece regardless, covering a game that spawned the first real overnight sensation in the out-of-the-basement British computer games industry.

RG continues to straddle the line between new and super-retro, covering PlaneScape: Torment in one feature and Defender in the next. Lotta neat stuff.

Total PC Gaming Issue 11

Cover: FarCry 2

Oh God, what has happened to my Total PC Gaming? It's now in a plastic polypag, comes with a DVD and some other crap, and the price has gone up by five bucks (a pound and a half in the UK). I thought the point of this mag, the thing that made it truly stand out from PC Gamer and PC Zone, was that it didn't rely on stupid "free gifts" to shift copies! What the hell, Imagine?

The stupidity of the free stuff in this ish is in the eye of the beholder of course. This one has a DVD where the only exclusive content is some editor commentaries laid on top of trailers (stupid); an except from an EVE Online novel (novel excepts are the only thing I hate more than useless DVDs); and a handbook devoted to PC overclocking (useful, but there's no reason why this should be a pamphlet with black-and-white photos and not inside the magazine). No way, no how is this worth $5 more to me. The content of the mag itself is nice as always, but I'm having trouble putting this above PC Zone in my mind any longer...even though I still have trouble getting PC Zone over here.

Electronic Gaming Monthly November 2008 (Podcast)

Cover: Resident Evil 5

Ahh, and now it's time to leave the Brit-mags and turn back to the American pamphlazines. EGM, at 100 pages (39 of which are ads -- a stat I hate pointing out becuase it's such a trivial thing to criticize mags for, but it becomes harder to ignore with page counts like these), is smaller than both GamePro at 114 and Play at 112 this month. Seriously, smaller than Play?! The mag that was lucky to break 80 pages a few months back?

I'm a little spoiled on the RE5 piece because I read the meat of the gameplay reveals in Famitsu last week, but it's got a nice avant-garde vibe in the design. It anchors a preview roundup of games with heavy co-op emphasis, which I hope you like, because that's about it after reviews and the front-end news section.

GamePro November 2008

Cover: Gears of War 2

GamePro.com has been redesigned, if you haven't noticed. That website's easily seen more redesigns than any print-mag site I'm aware of; this is the second or third large-scale redo since I was working there in '03. It looks nice, and while nothing's changed with the mag's design, this is a pretty solid issue, with more Cliff freakouts (how does the man find time to develop games in between all the media interview he does?) highlighting one of those massive GamePro-trademark preview blowouts for Gears 2. Which I hope you like, because that's it beyond reviews, etc., etc.

Play October 2008

Cover: Splatterhouse

Classic Play 'ere, as a Halverson interview with the leads is the entire content of the cover story and The Legend of Spyro gets about 100 times more coverage than in any other game media out let (print or online). Solid consistency.

PC Gamer December 2008 (Podcast)

Cover: Empire: Total War

If it weren't for that topmost coverline (which I love), this would look almost like an old CGW cover -- all that old historical stuff taking center stage instead of Crysis or Fallout or whatnot. This issue's heavy on the reviews and short on features -- I guess PC games are getting done for the holidays sooner than their console counterparts, or something.

Game Developer October 2008

Cover: Top 20 Publishers

Aww, and you can't forget GD, either! This issue's most interesting bit to me: A report from the GameStop Expo in Vegas, the only one I've seen from someone who wasn't posting on a message board. [EDITOR'S NOTE: There's an adapted version of the same write-up on Gamasutra, too, FYI.]

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. In his spare time he does writing and translation for lots and lots of publishers and game companies.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

[In a new editorial, Gamasutra publisher Simon Carless uses his LittleBigPlanet Beta experiences to examine why he thinks one of this holiday's most-awaited PlayStation 3 games represents "the future of user-generated content on consoles".]

I have seen the future of user-generated content on consoles, and it is the Beta version of Media Molecule's much-awaited LittleBigPlanet -- which the nice folks at Sony were kind enough to give us advance access to, ahead of its imminent PlayStation 3 debut.

Now, I'm sure some might accuse me of hyperbole in the face of relatively little evidence. And it's true that I can't tell what's going to happen to the community based around the game, when the full weight (and, hopefully, ingenuity) of the PS3 masses are brought to bear on it.

But the game has managed to do what console titles have thus far shuddered to provide - an open, easy to use creation system that lets the community make the magic, while the creators stand back and marvel.

Why is this such a big deal, and what makes LittleBigPlanet's air of creativity so different?

Here's the key things that LBP does correctly with regard to user-generated content. Previous console games just haven't managed many of these -- often through no fault of their own:

Robust Online Sharing

This is an absolutely key differentiator. Playing levels in LBP is as easy as going to the main menu, selecting an option, and rotating around a globe filled with the latest community-contributed levels. A simple selection from there, and you've downloaded the level and you're playing it, within just a few seconds.

Compare this with the hoops you have to jump through for pre-online console games (ugh, memory card sharing) or even recent Wii titles such as Blast Works (go to a website, queue your levels, go to your Wii and download them -- extremely fiddly.)

Joypad-Based Level Construction

There's another reason why very few decent user-generated levels/games have been created on consoles thus far, with the possible exception of Enterbrain's Maker series. It's the input device. Compared to using mice and menus, having to create objects and manipulate levels via the Dual Shock might be rough.

But I believe -- at least, judging by some of the comments from MM's Alex Evans at recent conferences -- that a large reason for the game's delay was because of constant testing and refinement of the creation tools.

As a result, it's hardly perfectly straightforward to design levels in LittleBigPlanet -- it can still be daunting. But it's definitely the smoothest and most entertaining interface created thus far, with your character the creative center of the levels as they are created.

Graphical, Text-Based Design Freedom

Historically, many console games that you can modify have been loath to give the player full control over all of the bells and whistles.

Why? Well, it's in case those darn users say rude things or express views that might be tied to the game's makers, publishers, or hardware manufacturers.

And let's be honest, this may still be a problem with LBP -- we've already had video of the penis level, even if it's not playable in the game, so when's that illogical tabloid smackdown due?

But -- and I think a lot of this was the Phil Harrison-led Sony at work -- the real-time community flagging ability (and the willingness to tell the more terrified lawyers not to sweat it) has meant freedom, freedom, freedom.

You can tell stories with a combination of visuals and text -- as with the charming but basic 'Heist', an early community level highlight. Or you can riff on pop culture cults, as in the charming Ninja Warrior (Sasuke) level that recently got added, complete with the Hanging Wall. Oh, and there's that 'Little Big Computer' level, showing you can create amazingly complex mechanical devices.

You can even scan in images using the PlayStation Eye, which led to the cheeky 'red ring of death' Xbox 360-pastiching level, something which Sony could have hardly made on their own. But that's the strength of allowing your fanbase to tell your stuff for you, perhaps?

Web 2.0-Style Tagging

I suspect this is the least-discussed of the innovations in LittleBigPlanet. In a lot of ways, it's not an innovation if you've remotely been connected to the web for the past few years.

Everyone's used to creators tagging their blog posts or Flickr users tagging their snaps. But LBP makes players rate a level after they've played it. And that's a piece of genius.

In particular, what it allows is filtering by a particular keyword that interests you, with a new universe of custom levels to play after you've filtered.

So whether you're looking for stupidly short, ridiculously fast, or actually plain bad/frustrating user levels, guess what? You can find them, and it's forever dynamically updated with sprinklings of the latest goodness. This is the best Web 2.0/games mashup in quite some time.

Multiplayer, Co-Operative Level Exploration

So you may get a little frisson of excitement when you're playing Halo 3 and a bunch of unconventional maps are chosen, outside of your control. The similar effect of being taken on a 'magical mystery tour' by whoever is controlling your LBP co-op session is delightful.

Of course, with most of the user-created levels being made for one, as opposed to multiple players, it can be aimless and hit and miss at times. (I believe there's a tag to help people find the best co-op levels, however).

Even so, exploring new levels in the game by having other people show them to you in real-time is a really interesting and different discovery method -- like 'Hey guys, look what I found?' cool.

Leaderboards, Leaderboards, Leaderboards

Everyone's used to online high score tables nowadays. But, somewhat as in Rock Band 2's impermanent challenges, the concept of having massive amounts of leaderboards, each for a very granular, small part of the game is a great one.

Why? Because then anyone can be a star on one tiny part of the whole game, getting their score up into the Top 1000 or even Top 100.

Conclusion

Now, I'm not sure that everyone will take to LittleBigPlanet. The single-player, Media Molecule-created game is pretty darn neat on its own. But you do probably need to be a fan of short, self-contained, bite-sized experiences to love the user-generated content it is spawning.

Yet hey, isn't that the way that your spare time, my spare time, everyone's spare time is going nowadays? And what's better than an endlessly refreshing series of levels, forever?

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Oh dear. Thanks to Tokyo Game Show giving me - as you might expect - a bit of a hellish backlog of emails, RSS feeds and suchlike, we're going to have a dual set of catch-up posts from the GSW link-trawling, both from before I left for Japan.

Now, this does mean that a bunch of the links were found as long as a week or two ago. But fortunately, most of them are pretty evergreen due to their randomness, so I hope you'll accept them as we get up to speed again, hurray.

Link link link:

PC World - Independent Games Take Flight
'We're not seeing aggregators that specifically serve the indie community.' I think someone is going to step up.

Channel Surfing: Americas Virtual Console/WiiWare Sales Chart, W/E 9-28-08 | VG Chartz.com
Just wanted to mention - shame on you, VGChartz, unlike the similar looking XBLA charts, which are extrapolated from real data (feeds of gamertag-related info), these are apparently done by looking at the top titles in the Wii Shop Channel and then just guessing sales numbers. For pity's sake.

Gamasutra - UK Video Game Archive Coming To National Media Museum
'Academics at Nottingham Trent University are partnering with the Bradford, UK National Media Museum to launch the country's first National Videogame Archive, to preserve the history of the medium and "recognize the significant contributions made by videogames to the diversity of popular culture across the globe."' Thumbs up.

<i>Singh Is King</i> — Flash Game Brings Humor to Indian Political Issues | GameCulture
'He's smarter than your average PM — that's the tagline for an Indian Flash game called Singh Is King (pictured), whose cartoonish graphics and simple, runner-game mechanics harbor some dark moments in Indian politics.'

Financial Woes | How They Got Game
Stock market analysis and, uh, crash-related games, from the Stanford archives.

Lost Garden: Rules of Productivity Presentation
For everyone, but amazingly relevant to game development (and from a game creator), too.

super nohoho fighter ii x: Three Charts was the Morning
Wow, proper graphs for who wins what, character-wise, during Japanese tournaments in Super Street Fighter II.

Ludomancy » The Kongregate Experiment
'If you were wondering, after 66,000 gameplays, Moon made… 45 bucks (it can be increased by implementing the Kongregate API and signing exclusively, but still).' He's done a bit better since then (see post updates), but will be great to see just how well you can do out of this, if he'll spill.

Matt Sandorf: Journey to Endless Entertainment - Jay is Games
'Matt Sandorf: Journey to Endless Entertainment is not just an artistic point-and-click game. It is a *sniff* advergame — a promotion for the Sony empire from music to gadgets to games.'

T=Machine » Over $150M invested in Europe into social games, VWs, casual MMOs & games
Quite a wide definition, as is often the case with things like this, but interesting nonetheless due to the lack of previous VC interest in the game biz - also see $350 million outside of Europe predictions.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[We split out the other half of the recent Hardy LeBel interview about Far Cry 2 because Chris Remo discovered the designer was the original multiplayer guru behind Halo's multi-person modes - and that they almost got cut in development! Possibly the first time this story has been told in public, we think.]

One could argue that the multiplayer component in Bungie's original Halo: Combat Evolved single-handedly made Microsoft's Xbox a staple in college dorms nationwide, giving the company's fledgling console a foothold.

But when Microsoft acquired Bungie, at the time a veteran PC and Mac developer, and repositioned Halo as a flagship Xbox title, its multiplayer mode was almost axed in the interest of expediency and cost-saving -- a move that may have altered Microsoft's early status in the hardware race.

Gamasutra recently caught up with multiplayer designer Hardy LeBel, half of the two-man team that brought the mode back from the brink. After Halo 2, LeBel went on to head up Zipper Interactive's SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs franchise -- itself a multiplayer staple on Sony's PlayStation 2 -- and now serves as multiplayer lead on Far Cry 2. In this retrospective interview, he recalls his Bungie days and comments on the various design approaches available to multiplayer developers.

Were you on Halo when it was still targeting PC?

Hardy LeBel: I was at Bungie when Halo was a PC project, but the origin of the title was out of the Chicago office, and I was the creative director for the San Jose office. When we got bought by Microsoft and relocated, it was clear that for us to be able to hit the launch window for Xbox, we all had to work on Halo, so we all kind of got pulled in.

What was your project before that?

HL: I was the lead designer on Oni, which was a kind of a third-person action title. When we got bought by Microsoft, Alex Seropian and Jason Jones, who were the two principals of Bungie, came to me and [former Bungie engineer and animator] Michael Evans, and said, "Multiplayer is cut from Halo because we're trying to make it really work on the console and we just don't have the resources."

But we threw a fit and were like, "No way! You can't cut it! It's just too cool!"

They said, "We were hoping you'd say that -- because you two guys have to resurrect it."

Wow, talk about changing the course of history. (laughter) That component of the game is a big part of what made it so ubiquitous.

HL: Well, my goal with the design for Halo was to make something that was a shooter that played like an action game. In other words, I honest to God wanted to make something that would have felt like it could have been made by Nintendo. It was just -- oh yeah, you get in there and everything feels good. It's smooth, it's really accessible, the sound effects are really accessible.

Even the naming conventions -- I'd like to point out that I didn't call it "deathmatch" because I felt like [the term] "deathmatch" was too hardcore, perhaps. I called it "Slayer" instead, because I wanted it to be more broadly accessible as a naming convention, like [the Halo gametype] "Oddball."

Bungie had a tradition of that -- in the Myth series and so forth. There was a history of off-kilter stuff in the multiplayer gametypes.

HL: Yep. Absolutely, there was that tradition. So the two of us basically dove in to resurrect multiplayer. Michael made a set of tools for me so that I could create multiplayer maps that plug into the Halo toolset. It wasn't the full set of Halo tools and we didn't actually have a level artist, so a lot of the levels in Halo were me learning how to use 3D Studio Max.

(laughter)

Really?

HL: Yeah! I was like, "Oh, I wonder what happens if I use this extrude tool. Whoa! That opens up all new possibilities!" (laughter) Anyway, it was a very, very small team.

So I worked on Halo, I was a contributing level designer on Halo 2, and then I was the creative director for the SOCOM [U.S. Navy SEALs] series of games. I left Microsoft and I went over to Zipper Interactive.

That's interesting, because the SOCOM games were almost the counterpart to Halo in terms of being the big flagship multiplayer games for the PlayStation 2.

HL: It's true, yeah. Absolutely, absolutely.

In each one of those games, to kind of bring the conversation back around, in Halo and in the SOCOM series of games, encounter design and level design is very much about creating a basis for the encounters and then populating it with a bunch of different elements that are sort of randomly generated.

Every time you play Halo, if you were to play the same level or the same encounter three separate times, you're going to get different guys every time. And you're also going to get different guys depending on the difficulty setting. You can try that.

Next-generation development is more about saying, "OK, we have this bed, or this group, of elements," and you're really trying to conduct them more than you're necessarily trying to explicitly say, "I want this guy to run this way and this guy to run that way." I've spent a lot of time and experience trying to shape the random elements together to make something fun and interesting.

In terms of including all the crazy modes, Halo still does that more than most games -- although I imagine you guys were influenced by Unreal Tournament in that regard as well.

HL: Well, sure. With Halo, I can authoritatively say that we learned at the feet of Unreal how much value you can glean and get out of the ability to customize your own rules.

However, in terms of the overall fun play experience, I personally never got as much huge value out of weird, kind of custom rules so much as a really screamingly good map with kind of good fundamental weapons and some complexity to the combat model. You know, that it was sort of deep enough for me to be able to explore and enjoy. For me, that's so much that you can really sort of get into and plumb. Counter-Strike is the absolute opposite end of the spectrum, right?

Right.

HL: Counter-Strike is all about map customization, really not about game play customization. Love that. Just love it.

Then some games are sort of neither -- you've got Team Fortress 2, which is more, "We've whittled this down to a few really solid things that we think work. We're pretty confident you'll like this mode on this map, because you're going to be playing a lot." That seems to be working for them.

HL: I think, it is. Yes. It can work. It is interesting how modal that is. In other words, if you find TF2 to be to your taste and you like it, then you'll like it anyway. But, if not...

Right, you're kind of locked out.

HL: Exactly. You're kind of frozen out. So, I think, for that particular product, that strategy makes sense, because there's a proven history, and there's an audience out there of people who are sort of looking for that team based, class based game play model. But, yeah, with not wiggle room, you either love it or you don't love it. That's a little bit tough.

In single-player as well, that's Valve's design aesthetic, is to go for that highly authored experience -- but they're also doing Left 4 Dead, which has the dynamic spawning and all that.

HL: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I should say, I worship the ground that Valve walks on. For me, their authored experiences are better than anybody in terms of creating and maintaining that amazing sense of location and feeling.

But, yes, a lot of games -- Halo, SOCOM, Far Cry -- are looking more at introducing those random elements so that it's [about] the fun set-ups. And really, so much of what comes out of this systemic approach in the single-player side in Far Cry 2, because it is so systemic, everyone's story ends up being incredibly unique and incredibly personal. You and I may have run into separate checkpoints, separate encounters, separate gunfights, and our personal story about what the weapons did or what the weather was or anything else, becomes personal.

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Even though myself, Brandon Sheffield, and Christian Nutt have been representing Game Developer magazine and Gamasutra at Tokyo Game Show this week, various other crack operatives (Leigh, Chris, Eric) have been holding down the fort at big sister site Gamasutra, for which we thank them heartily!

Anyhow, the features put up this week on Gama span the gamut of neatness, including this year's Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie from Ernest Adams, a postmortem of last holiday season's Uncharted, a great editorial from Parappa's Masaya Matsuura (pictured), and a v.informative Microsoft-sponsored feature on how they certify Xbox 360 games (don't think they've gone into that much detail before).

Time to list links:

Next-Gen Audio Square-Off: PlayStation 3 vs. Xbox 360
"Next-gen's about more than graphics -- how about audio? Gamasutra discusses next-gen audio approaches on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 with Bungie, Naughty Dog, and the hardware creators."

Sponsored Feature: XNA Game Quality: The Certification Story
"In the latest Microsoft-sponsored article, part of the Gamasutra XNA microsite, Microsoft's Nick Bodenham, Andrew Donnelly, and Michael Steer lay out the processes that go into certifying Xbox 360 and Games for Windows releases."

The Designer's Notebook: Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie! IX
"Designer Ernest Adams is withholding the confections again, taking big design mistakes to task in this ninth installment of his seminal series."

Postmortem: Naughty Dog's Uncharted: Drake's Fortune
"Naughty Dog calls Uncharted their 'biggest and most complex' challenge yet, and shares successes and stumbles in this fascinating postmortem."

A Sense of Fun: Anybody Could Be Your Player 1
"In an impassioned opinion piece, seminal Parappa co-creator and 'father of music games' Matsuura talks about his hopes for the future of games as tangible experiences with positive feelings attached."

Afro Samurai's David Robinson: New Studio, New Problems, New Chances
"In this in-depth Gamasutra interview, we go inside Namco Bandai's internal U.S. development studio with senior producer David Robinson, discussing outsourcing and art direction for Afro Samurai."

[Want to get RSSed-up with all Think Services' game sites? Quick list, with WWW links after the RSSes, goes like this: GameSetWatch's RSS (editor.blog), IndieGames' RSS (indie.games), Fingergaming's RSS (iPhone.games), GamerBytes' RSS (console.downloads), Gamasutra's RSS (main.site), WorldsInMotion's RSS (online.worlds), and GameCareerGuide's RSS (game.edu.info).]

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[In this enlightening opinion piece originally printed in Game Developer magazine, EA Maxis designer and former Firaxis (Civilization 4) lead designer Soren Johnson details seven common pitfalls that can hold back a strategy game, like overly aggressive anti-piracy measures and adding story in the wrong places.]

Amongst computer games, the strategy genre is one of the oldest and proudest, with a strong tradition, running from M.U.L.E. to Civilization to Starcraft and beyond. Nonetheless, certain design mistakes keep being made over and over again. Here are seven of the most common:

1. Too much scripting

Strategy games have a direct lineage from board games, and the fun of playing the latter comes from understanding the rules and mechanics of the game world and then making decisions that have consequence within that world. Computerized strategy games allow a single player to experience this same world on his or her own.

At some point, however, strategy developers began to create lengthy, scripted scenarios as the single-player portion of their games (In fact, the recent World in Conflict shipped without a single-player skirmish mode altogether). These scenarios have a peculiar feeling - they use some of the same rules as the core game while often violating others. The AI takes action depending not on its own development rate or strategic priorities but on whether the human has hit certain triggers.

In many scenarios, in fact, the human cannot even lose because -- when defeat approaches -- the script will freeze the AI and starting pumping in free units for the player. Further, these scenarios are often built around specific “objectives” to achieve, such as destroying a specific structure or capturing a single point.

This artificial environment takes decision-making away from the player. Not only is there only one path to victory, but the player’s performance along that path may not even matter. Games without interesting decisions get boring quickly.

Fortunately, some recent strategy games, such as Sins of a Solar Empire and Armageddon Empires, have returned to open-world, random-map gameplay -- without pre-set objectives or artificial triggers -- and are reminding us of the joy of cohesive and consistent strategy games.

2. Too much stuff

The temptation to pile extra units and buildings and whatnot onto to an already complete design is strong. Indeed, I have seen many developers describe games as simply a collection of stuff (”18 Weapons! 68 Monsters! 29 Levels!”).

This approach is wrong-headed. A game design is a collection of interesting decisions, and the “stuff” in the game is there not just to fill space but to let you execute decisions. Games can provide too few options for the player but -- more commonly -- games provide too many.

How many is just right? Obviously, there is no magic number, but it is possible to come up with a good rule-of-thumb for how many different options a player can keep in his or her mind before everything turns to mush.

Blizzard uses the number 12 to make sure their RTS’s don’t get too complex. StarCraft averaged 12 units per side. So did WarCraft 3 (not counting Heroes). And you can bet that StarCraft 2 is going to be in that neighborhood as well. In fact, Blizzard has already announced that, for the sequel, they will be removing some of the old units to make room for the new ones.

Players must be able to mentally track their in-game options at one time, and putting too many choices on the table makes it impossible to understand the possibility space.

3. Limited play variety

No matter how good your game, it is going to get stale after awhile. It’s unfortunate when a great game doesn’t take the few steps necessary so that players can change the settings to create alternate play experiences.

Company of Heroes is an incredible tactical RTS, a watershed moment for the genre - but the game allows neither Axis vs. Axis battles nor matches with more than two teams. This design choice may fit the fiction of WWII, but it significantly reduced the game’s play variety.

An example of an RTS that got this right is the Age of Empires series. Not only could you mix-and-match any combination of civilizations and players and teams, but you could also design your own map scripts.

I remember one interesting Age of Kings map that had almost no wood but tons of stone and gold, which turned the game’s economy upside-down. The game even allowed multiple players to control the same single civilization (one could control the military, the other the economy, for example). Thus, I’ve played 2-vs-3 games of AoK where the sides with 2 civs was actually controlled by 4 players (and, in fact, handily won the game!).

These simple variations probably doubled the life-span of AoK amongst my group of friends. Significantly, these options should be orthogonal to the game’s core mechanics -- they need to add variety without adding complexity.

4. Black box mechanics

Sometime during the late-90’s, around when Black & White was being developed, the concept of an interface-less game came into vogue. The idea was that interfaces were holding games back from larger, more mainstream audiences.

Ever since then, I have noticed a discernible trend to hide game mechanics from the player. Age of Kings shipped in 1999 with an incredible reference card listing every cost, value, and modifier in the game.

For modern RTS’s, however, it’s unusual if the manual actually contains numbers. I want to emphasize that the answer here is not to bathe the players in complicated mathematics in the name of transparency. Instead, designers should think of their interfaces as having two levels: a teaching level and a reference level.

The teaching level focuses on first-time players who need to know the basics, like how to build a tank and go kill the bad guys. The reference level should answer any question the player can think of about how a game mechanic works. It is perfectly fine, by the way, to put this info inside of a separate in-game resource, like the Civilopedia.

Rise of Legends implemented an interesting version of this two-interfaces idea. Most of the popup help in the game had an “advanced” mode that you could unlock by holding down a key, giving you significantly more details about the game’s underlying mechanics.

5. Locked code/data

Protecting your code and data is a very natural instinct -- after all, you may have spent years working on the project, developing unique features, pushing the boundaries of the genre. Giving away the innards of your game is a hard step for many developers, especially executives, to take.

Nonetheless, we released the game/AI source code for Civ 4 shortly after shipping, and -- so far -- the results have been fantastic. Three fan-made mods were included in the game’s second expansion pack -- Derek Paxton’s Fall from Heaven: Age of Ice, Gabriele Trovato’s Rhye’s and Fall of Civilization, and Dale Kent’s WWII: The Road to War -- and so far, these scenarios have been heralded as one of Beyond the Sword’s strongest features. These mods would have been nowhere near as deep or compelling (or even possible) if we had not released our source code.

For many PC developers, I’m preaching to the choir, so I’d like to be very clear that the problem is worst amongst strategy games. For whatever reason (perhaps the lack of a pioneering developer like id Software?), strategy developers have been much more closed off to modding than their shooter and RPG brethren.

There are exceptions, like Blizzard’s fantastic scenario editor for WarCraft 3, but by and large, strategy modders do not have many places to turn for platforms on which to work, which was one reason we felt compelled to focus on modding for Civ 4. Giving stuff away can feel good. It should also feel smart.

6. Anti-piracy paranoia

The damage that piracy does to our industry is impossible to calculate but also impossible to ignore. Few company heads can be as brave as Stardock’s Brad Wardell, who chose to leave out copy protection altogether for the Galactic Civilization series (They encourage paying customers by providing on-line updates to players with legitimate serial numbers.).

Having some sort of mechanism to stop casual piracy is a given in the industry, but what is not a given is the hoops companies will make their customers jump through just to be able to start the game. The most important question to ask is “will this added security layer actually increase our sales?”

A good place to be lenient, for example, is with local multi-player games -- in other words, can players without the CD join a multi-player game hosted by a legitimate copy. Starcraft let you “spawn” extra copies of the game that could only join local multi-player games.

Allowing unlimited LAN play was our unofficial policy for Civ 4 as well. The game does a disk check when opening the executable but not when you actually launch the game; thus, a group of 4 friends could just pass one disk around for local multiplayer games.

We do not believe players are willing to buy extra discs just for LAN parties, which are rare events. However, we would love for new players to be introduced to Civ in these environments, encouraged by their friends who are already fans. At some point, they are going to want to try single-player -- in which case, it is time for a trip down to the local retailer to buy their own copy.

7. Putting story in the wrong places

Story and games have a checkered history. Too many have suffered from boring cut-scenes, stereotyped characters, and plots that take control away from the player. Especially problematic are games which don’t let the player fast-forward through cringe-worthy dialogue.

The worst offense, however, is when a story gets stuck somewhere it really doesn’t belong. Like in a strategy game. After all, strategy games are the original games. Humans first discovered gameplay with backgammon and chess and go; it’s a noble tradition. The “story” in a strategy game is the game itself.

Picking a specific example, how much better of a game would Rise of Legends have been if Big Huge Games had given up on creating a story-based campaign and instead iterated on the excellent turn-based Conquer the World strategy layer from Rise of Nations? Ironically, the campaign mode was my favorite way to play RoL. I loved that you could only acquire technologies and advanced units on the strategic map between missions, which helped simplify the core RTS game.

However, I enjoyed the campaign in spite of the story, not because of it. The key point here is that, for the sake of chasing a story, Big Huge Games missed a big opportunity to match a great core RTS game with a simple, overarching strategy layer that could be infinitely replayable. They are not alone; almost every other RTS developer seems to be falling into the same trap, and it is time for this trend to stop.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)