[GameSetLinks is GameSetWatch's daily link round-up post, culling from hundreds of weblogs and outlets to compile the most interesting longform writing, links, and criticism on the art and culture of video games.]

Hitting the weekend, and GameSetLinks are back in town, headed out by one of my favorite magazine features of recent months, now online - Alistair Wallis' test drive of a real Warthog from Halo, almost unthinkably geeky-cool, actually.

But also in here - a neat look inside Okami's influences, 'The Long Road To Mordor', more pleasant foreign coverage of indie games and the IGF, Hardcore Gamer's sale probed by the New York Times, and much more.

Watch out:

We Drove The Warthog! | OXM ONLINE
Former GameSetWatch columnist and now OXM contributor Alistair Wallis + WETA Workshop + large no longer fictional Halo vehicle = wow.

Innovative Gratis-Spiele beim Independent Games Festival in San Francisco - Bild.de
Even the big German magazine Bild's website has an IGF feature this year.

Game/AI: The Long Road to Mordor
Awesome metaphor on game creation from an ex-project Offset-er: 'Game design is a lot like the One Ring of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.'

With Magazines Folding, One Finds a Surprising Bid - NYTimes.com
Good that Hardcore Gamer actually made a profit, but didn't the mag pay people $50 per page, or some ultra-low figure? I wonder if the new owner knows that...

Cabinet of Wonders: Independence in Games
Nice to see non-typical game players attracted to the aesthetics of indie games, I think.

Wild Tyme: [130] Nature and Nurture: Okami and Practicing Shintoism
A fun drifty thing: 'Nature saturates and enriches Okami on a variety of levels. Most immediately, this influence is seen in the narrative.'

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

In this round-up, we highlight some of the notable jobs posted in sister site Gamasutra's industry-leading game jobs section this week, including positions from Warner Bros Games, Other Ocean Interactive, Midway Games, and more.

Each position posted by employers will appear on the main Gamasutra job board, and appear in the site's daily and weekly newsletters, reaching our readers directly.

It will also be cross-posted for free across its network of submarket sites, which includes content sites focused on online worlds, cellphone games, 'serious games', independent games and more.

Some of the notable jobs posted in each market area this week include:

Gamasutra.com - Game Industry Jobs

Warner Bros. Games: Director of Engineering
"WB Games Inc. is a new production studio formed in Kirkland, WA, dedicated to the development of games and interactive entertainment across all major console, PC and handheld platforms. A division of Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Inc., the production company works closely with other Warner Bros. divisions, such as Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment (WBIE) and Warner Home Video (WHV), to bring games to market. WB Games oversees the creation of games by internally owned developers as well as a wide array of talented external game development companies. "

Midway Games: Senior Gameplay Programmer
"Midway Home Entertainment, Inc. is a leading developer, publisher, and marketer of interactive entertainment software. Midway videogames are available for play on all major videogame platforms including Xbox 360, PC, Nintendo Wii and DS, PS3 and PS2. Our San Diego studio, home to the team which developed TNA iMPACT! and Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks, has an opening for an experienced Senior Gameplay Programmer."

Other Ocean Interactive: Producer
"Other Ocean Interactive is seeking talented programmers to join our studio in beautiful Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada. Other Ocean Interactive is seeking an experienced video game Producer to join our colorful and dynamic team. The successful candidate will be detail oriented with proven project/production management experience, including preparing project budgets. Excellent oral and written skills are required. The individual will manage videogame projects from start to finish."

Virus Studios: Programmer
"Virus Studios was founded in Bangkok, Thailand in 2006. Our intention was to build a driven, creatively diverse development team with a dynamic and refined sense of style, with disciplined financial and production practices. We have offer a broad range of skills from fine art, animation, architecture, and mechanical engineering to modeling and FX. Offering outsourcing services for multiple AAA companies as well as working on our own internal IPs."

WorldsInMotion - Online Game Jobs

NetDevil: Sr. Programmer – Jumpgate Evolution
"This position is a very challenging role requiring deep knowledge in multiple disciplines. This person is required to lead a team of programmers and mentor and guide them while also being a significant contributor to the project's technical requirements. This person is also responsible for overall architechture, system design and integration. Additionally, this role requires interfacting with other parties involved in MMO development including operations, deployment and publishing teams."

GamesOnDeck - Mobile Games

Namco Networks America Inc.: Mobile Game Designers
"The Mobile Game Designer is responsible for generating a detailed, comprehensive Game Design Documents, which are the roadmap for the entire development team. An important part of the role is then communicating that vision clearly and concisely to the rest of the team. A strong technical or art background is highly desired. Designers are a key member of the Production team and are expected to proactively create, manage and coordinate the implementation of game designs with a primary focus on product quality."

To browse hundreds of similar jobs, and for more information on searching, responding to, or posting game industry-relevant jobs to the top source for jobs in the business, please visit Gamasutra's job board now.

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

[In a fascinating opinion piece originally printed in Game Developer magazine, EA Maxis designer and programmer Soren Johnson (Spore, Civilization IV) visits a wide variety of games both past and present to examine the complex issue of designing player economies.]

Game design and economics have a spotty history. Designing a fun and functional economy is no easy task as many design assumptions tend to backfire when they come in contact with the player.

For example, the early days of Ultima Online were infamous for the game’s wild and chaotic economy. Zachary Booth Simpson wrote a classic analysis of UO in 1999, detailing some of the more notable problems experienced at launch:

- the crafting system encouraged massive over-production by rewarding players for each item produced
- this over-production led to hyper-inflation as NPC shopkeepers printed money on demand to buy the worthless items
- players used vendors as unlimited safety deposit boxes by setting the prices for their own goods far above market value
- item hoarding by players forced the team to abandon the closed-loop economy as the world began to empty out of goods
- player cartels (including one from a rival game company!) cornered the market on magical Reagents, preventing average users from casting spells

MMO economies have come a long way since then; World of Warcraft’s auction house is now a vibrant part of the game’s economy and overall world, with many players spending much of their time “playing the market” to good effect.

CCP, developers of EVE Online, even hired an academic economist to analyze the flow of resources and the fluctuation of prices within their game world. Indeed, understanding the potential effect of market forces on gameplay is an important ability for designers to develop.

Can the Market Balance the Game?

Many designers have used economic game mechanics as a tool for balancing their games. For example, in Rise of Nations, every time a unit - such as a Knight or Archer - is purchased, the cost of future units of the same type goes up, simulating the pressure of demand upon price.

This design encouraged players to diversify their armed forces, in order to maximize their civilization’s buying power. By allowing the “values” of different paths and options to float during a game, designers present players with a constantly shifting landscape, extending replayability by guaranteeing no perfect path to victory.

However, if taken too far, efforts to auto-balance by tweaking the economy can destroy a game. In 2006, Valve conducted an interesting economic experiment within Counter-Strike: Source, implementing a “Dynamic Weapon Pricing” algorithm.

According to the developers, “the prices of weapons and equipment will be updated each week based on the global market demand for each item. As more people purchase a certain weapon, the price for that weapon will rise and other weapons will become less expensive.”

Unfortunately, the overwhelming popularity of certain weapons trumped the ability of the algorithm to balance the game. For example, while the very effective Desert Eagle skyrocketed to $16,000, the less useful Glock flatlined at $1, leading to some extreme edge cases (such as the “Glock bomb”). A game economy is not a real economy; not everything can be balanced simply by altering its price.

Gamers just want to have fun, and if the cost of the option considered the most fun is constantly tuned higher and higher until the price becomes prohibitive, players may not just alter their strategy - they may simply go play another game. The current price of gas may be making our real lives “unfun”, but only one real-world economy exists, leaving us no choice. Gamers are not in the same situation.

Ultimately, designers should remember that achieving perfect balance is a dubious goal. Players are not looking for another game like rock/paper/scissors, in which every choice is guaranteed to be valid, essentially encouraging random strategies.

Players are motivated by reasons beyond purely economic ones when playing games. Raising the cost of a player’s favorite weapon is simply going to feel like a penalty and should only be done if the imbalance is actually ruining the core game.

Putting the Market Inside the Game

Perhaps a more appropriate use of economic dynamics is as a transparent mechanic within the game itself. The board game world provides some great examples of such free market mechanics at work. German-style games Puerto Rico and Vinci both use increasing subsidies to improve the appeal of unpopular roles and technologies, respectively.

In the case of the former, every turn no player decides to be the Craftsman, one gold piece is added as a “reward” for choosing that role. As the gold increases slowly, few players will be able to resist such a bounty, which nicely solves the problem of making sure all roles are eventually chosen.

Puerto Rico still has some clearly better and clearly worse options - they just change from turn to turn based on the current reward. In this case, auto-balancing actually keeps the game fun because players are rewarded for choosing less common strategies, instead of being penalized for sticking to their favorites. Perhaps more importantly, the effects of the market are spelled out clearly for the players ahead of time, so that no one feels the game is biased against them.

Perhaps the most elegant example of a pure free market mechanic based around actual resources and prices can be found in Power Grid, another German-style board game. In this case, players supply their power plants with a variety of resources (oil, coal, uranium, and garbage), all of which are purchased from a central market.

Resource pieces are arranged on a linear track of escalating prices. Every turn, X new pieces of each resource are added to the market, and players take Y pieces away as purchases. As the supply goes up and down, the price correspondingly goes up and down, depending on where the next available piece is on the market track.

By making the supply-demand mechanic so explicit and transparent to the players, the market becomes its own battlefield, as much as the hex grid of a wargame might be.

By buying up as much coal as possible, one player might drive the price out of the range of the player in the next seat, causing her to be unable to supply all her plants at the end of the turn, a disastrous event in Power Grid. Thus, with a true open market, price can be used as a weapon just as much as an arrow or a sword might be in a military game.

The Benefits of Free Trade

Similarly, a number of modern strategy games, including Sins of a Solar Empire and the Age of Empires series, have included free markets in which players could buy and sell resources, influencing global prices with their actions.

These markets serve as interesting “greed tests” in that players are often tempted to sell when they need cash or to buy when they are short on a specific resource, but they know in the back of their minds that each time they use the market, they are potentially giving an advantage to another player. Buy too much wood in Age of Kings, and your opponents can make all the gold they need selling off their excess supply.

Unfortunately, the market dynamics of these games tend to repeat themselves, with prices usually bottoming out once the players’ total production overwhelms their needs. This effect stems from the fact that the game maps emphasize economic fairness - in AoK, each player is guaranteed a decent supply of gold, stone, and wood within a short distance of their starting location.

Spreading resources randomly around the map could lead a much more dynamic and interesting market mechanic -- but at the cost of overall play balance for a game with a core military mechanic. If your opponents attack with horsemen, what if there is no wood with which to build spearmen, the appropriate counter unit?

However, a game with a core economic mechanic does not suffer from such limitations. In most business-based games, specializing in a specific resource is a basic part of the gameplay.

Thus, a free market mechanic can become a compelling part of a competitive game. The ultimate example of such a game is the ’80s classic M.U.L.E., in which four players vie for economic dominance on a newly-settled world. Although only four resources exist (food, energy, smithore, and crystite), economies-of-scale encourage players to specialize. More importantly, players can rarely produce all the resources they need on their own, requiring them to buy directly from other players.

The game has a brilliant interface for facilitating this trade between players. Buyers are arranged along the bottom edge of the screen, with sellers on the top. As buyers move up, their asking price goes up accordingly. As sellers descend, their offer price decreases as well. When the two meet in the middle, a transaction occurs.

Once again, the mechanic is explicit and transparent - player inventories and market prices are all clearly visible to everyone. Players understand that they either have to adjust their own prices to make a deal happen or hope that their rivals cave.

Knowing how desperate another player might be to acquire the energy needed to power his buildings or the food needed to feed his labor, the temptation to pull ever last penny from him is strong. In such a case, prices tend to fall only if the player is afraid someone else might sweep in to reap the profits!

The game mechanic mined here by M.U.L.E. is deep and rich. Impoverishing one’s enemies can be just as much fun as destroying them.

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

[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 goodies in this edition include a 2D platformer and a tower defense game created by two former IGF finalists, an impressive Java remake of Q Games' PixelJunk Eden, a new vertical shooter from the legendary creator of Dungeon Crawl, a Flash game from the co-developer of Aether, and an action game which pays tribute to last year's indie darling Braid.

Game Pick: 'The Legend of Princess' (Joakim Sandberg, freeware)
"If you're going to play only one game this week, then it might as well be Konjak's new 2D platformer. Created as a tribute to one of Nintendo's flagship series, the action comes thick and fast as you do battle against loathsome creatures and evil-doers with the life of an abducted princess at stake."

Game Pick: '4bidden Fruit' (Simon Hayles, browser)
"A stripped-down remake of Q Games' Pixeljunk Eden, coded with Java and measuring only a measly 4K in size. No music or sound effects are included, but you can play any track from your mp3 collection in the background as a substitute."

Game Pick: 'White Butterfly' (Linley Henzell, freeware)
"A new abstract vertical shooter created by the developer of Dungeon Crawl and Garden of Coloured Lights. There are three levels to play here, as you once again put on your space helmet and board one of the five available ships to drive back another alien invasion bent on capturing Earth and enslaving humanity."

Game Pick: 'Closure' (Tyler Glaiel and Jon Schubbe, browser)
"A unique 2D platformer created by the co-developer of Edmund McMillen's Aether, with sprite and background art contributed by Jon Schubbe. The game involves using orbs to light up your surroundings, as the entire area is shrouded in complete darkness with each step outside the light most likely to be a fatal one."

Game Pick: 'Assassin Blue' (Banov, freeware)
"A 2D platformer with combat elements, where players assume control over a sword-wielding hitman who must carry out a series of missions for his superior. This naturally translates to a lot of jumping, climbing and fighting as you make your way past hordes of henchmen leading up to the commander of each resistance group."

Game Pick: 'NUD' (Sean Chan, freeware)
"A tower defense game created by the developer of Battleships Forever, one of the 2008 IGF finalists in the Design Innovation Award category. Still a work in progress, but NUD is already showing a lot of promise with the gameplay balance so finely tuned that it puts most of the other Flash variations in its genre to shame."

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

[In Atlus' RPG Persona 4, Kanji Tatsumi confronts his sexual identity in an engaging and meaningful manner, and in Samantha Xu's analysis, originally printed on Gamasutra, we talk to Atlus staffers and commentators about the character's flamboyant in-game alter ego in the recently released PlayStation 2 RPG.]

Persona 4's Kanji Tatsumi is one of the first video game personalities to confront his sexual identity in an engaging and meaningful manner.

His struggles and their outcome may not be politically progressive enough to dub him the Harvey Milk of gaming, but his unique existence in Persona 4 is a small and positive move forward toward a more socially diversified gaming universe.

First introduced as a rough-and-tumble teen with antisocial leanings, Kanji is feared by the locals and maintains a confrontational machismo toward the other characters throughout the game. He is a loyal son and employee at his family's textile shop, and it's not until the debut of his alter-ego Shadow Kanji that we are made aware of his inner sexual turmoil.

Shadow Kanji inhabits a steamy bathhouse dungeon inside The Midnight Channel, an alternate dimension inside the TV where the main characters must battle their alter-egos in order to save themselves and their friends.

The alter-egos manifest aspects of the main characters' psyches that they are trying to hide from others and deny from themselves. Once the alter-egos are defeated in The Midnight Channel, they are validated by the characters accepting them as necessary parts of their real personalities.

Shadow Kanji's scanty attire, flamboyant lisp, and over-the-top homoerotic banter shed light upon Kanji's hidden identity, but it is his remarks stating sexual preference for the male gender that directly support the notion that is Kanji is gay.

Once Shadow Kanji is defeated in the game, Kanji accepts that his gay alter-ego is an essential part of his personality, but he does not make any outward declaration or revelation that he is gay or remotely bisexual. As the game progresses, Kanji must deal with jokes regarding his sexuality and un-manly artistic hobbies, in addition to his crush on a male character, who turns out to be a cross-dressing woman.

Intentionally and perhaps tellingly, especially when we examine homosexuality within a greater social context in Japan, there is no concrete conclusion provided by the game regarding his true orientation.

So Is He? Or Isn't He?

"We would like everyone to play through the game and come up with their own answers to that question; there is no official answer," says Yu Namba, Atlus USA's Persona 4 Project Lead. "What matters is that Kanji's other self cries out, 'Accept me for who I am!' I think it's a powerful message which many, if not all of us can relate to.”

Nich Maragos, Atlus USA's Persona 4 Editor, agrees with Namba that it is up to each individual player to draw their own conclusions, but his personal opinions sway toward a gay Kanji. "At the end of Kanji's Social Link, should you choose to advance it that far, he does say specifically in reference to his Shadow self, 'That 'other me' is me.'”

Atlus Japan, the original developer of Persona 4, was not available for comment.

"Most American gamers will assume he is gay, especially if they are not aware of Japan's cultural differences and the subtleties of their interactions," says Colette Bennett, Japanese RPG enthusiast and editor at consumer weblog Destructoid.

Brenda Brathwaite, game designer, professor, and author of Sex in Video Games has an altogether different perspective: "It would have been amazing if they would have made a concrete statement that he is gay. That we could play as a gay main character in a video game would be a big deal."

Says Brathwaite, "I can find twenty things that I didn't like about how Kanji was portrayed, such as the game's juvenile nature in dealing with his sexuality, but there is a part of me that is thrilled there is a gay character in a game and that a game would portray how they are dealing with their inner struggles and interactions with friends."

Homosexuality In Japan

That Kanji's character comes to American gamers through a Japanese game is not surprising. Japanese attitudes toward sexuality and homosexuality are incredibly different than those of the West, even though the general assumption from Westerners is that the Japanese are a repressed people.

Because there is no legislation relating to homosexual sex, it's not a hot-button social or moral issue in Japan like it is in America. Many Japanese gay men resist the Western notion of "gay rights" because sexuality is not thought of in terms of what is right or wrong, but rather as play or something people may choose to engage in if they wish.

"The Japanese see homosexuality as a lifestyle choice, very different from the actual homosexual activity," explains Dr. Antonia Levi, author of Samurai from Outer Space: Understanding Japanese Animation.

"There is an understanding that you can play with fantasies that you might not want to live out in your normal life," Levi says. "Americans see things in very black and white -- you're either gay, or you're not. The Japanese are more comfortable with the concept of being gay and not being gay at the same time. In this case, it makes sense that, in the end, the game is not telling you what to think about Kanji or even if he is gay."

Because outward unorthodox behavior is frowned upon in Japanese society, many people who engage in homosexual activity see it as a world separate from their day-to-day lives. Upholding respectable outward behavior would mean being married, having children and having a respectable job, but what ones does in their sexual lives is not harshly judged.

For Kanji, working at his family's textile shop was a very traditional and respectable job, one that could have been at risk had he made a lifestyle choice to have an openly gay relationship with another man.

Japan scholar Dr. Mark McLelland says, "Even though homosexual characters are very prevalent in the Japanese media, its visibility in comic books, women's magazines, TV dramas and talk-shows, movies and popular fiction has not created the space for individuals expressing lesbian or gay 'identities' to come out in actual life."

"Yet, as recent research has shown, the notion of 'coming out' is seen as undesirable by many Japanese gay men and lesbians as it necessarily involves adopting a confrontational stance against mainstream lifestyles and values, which many still wish to endorse."

In Kanji's case, remaining ambiguous and undeclared about his sexuality is not necessarily a rejection of its existence or the developers displaying homophobia, but rather as a comment on homosexuality in a greater Japanese social context.

In translating the game for a Western audience, Atlus USA's goal was to retain as much of the original content as possible in order to accurately portray the Japanese culture.

Namba explains, "We did encounter a small number of sexually oriented instances which we decided to make more subtle, but the meaning of everything is still intact."

For instance, keeping Shadow Kanji's over-the-top flamboyance was important. "That flamboyance was also what the viewers of the Midnight Channel wanted to see: a typical gay person on TV that people would laugh at. The TV station broadcasts what the audience prefers to watch -- it's a stark portrayal of modern society."

More Kanjis In Games?

The response to Kanji's character has been generally neutral or positive among players of Persona 4. Google for any forums on threads about Kanji and you'll see comments such as: "I really love how brave Atlus was with releasing a game with with stuff like this in North America." and "Kanji. I love Kanji. He is all that is adorable. However, it would have been nice if they'd just gone ahead and made him gay."

Whether more characters as complex and socially relevant as Kanji's will appear in more games available in America is really up to American developers. User-created characters aside, one can count on a single hand the number of playable LGBT characters that have entered into the gaming world.

"From a ratings standpoint, when you're a game designer, you are so incredibly aware of the ramifications of the M rating. Putting any sex in your game, would potentially limit the market," explains Brathwaite. (Persona 4 carries an M rating.)

"There is also double perception that games are for kids. But eventually, we will want to tell more complex and mature stories. For example, Braid had an incredibly adult storyline, even though it didn't deal with sexuality."

So far, not many developers have chosen to tackle topics such as a character's sexual orientation in their titles. ESRB ratings, a risk-averse market, and lack of diversity in the developer pool are all factors that contribute to the slow social evolution of games.

"I don't think American developers have evolved to the point where they are comfortable with portraying characters like Kanji," says Destructoid's Bennett. "For the most part, any characters that are bisexual, gay or transgendered are either horrible stereotypes or their sexuality is just referenced on occasion."

"I would like to see more characters like Kanji in games, and what I mean is not just characters struggling to cope with their sexuality or inner demons, but characters who face more complex emotional, human struggles than just how to get the princess or fight some ultimate boss at the end of a game," she adds.

"I feel that the closer games bring us to reality the closer they come to evolution, where we play games not just for fun and entertainment, but to have compelling, resonant experiences as memorable as those in our real lives."

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

[In the fourth of a series picking out the most notable lectures presented by our colleagues who run Game Developers Conference 2009, we examine the Programming Track, with newly added talks from the Killzone 2, Halo Wars, and Uncharted 2: Among Thieves creators.]

Game Developers Conference 2009 (organized by our parent company Think Services) is set to take place in San Francisco's Moscone Center from March 23 to 27, 2009.

With nearly 280 sessions now confirmed for GDC 2009, we'll be taking a track by track look at the conference's line-up over the next few weeks.

Fourth on the list is GDC's Programming Track, which will focus on the "ever increasing challenge to produce games that capture the attention of the public and the media," as well as the opportunities presented by "mature consoles, new handhelds, a highly competitive sales environment, and increased demand for very high production values in games."

Notable highlights thus far announced for this track are as follows:

- In "The Rendering Technology of Killzone 2," Guerrilla's senior graphics programmer Michal Valient will present an overview of the rendering techniques used in the highly anticipated PS3-exclusive shooter. In addition to looking at lighting and shadowing techniques, Valient will discuss the "different optimization possibilities the Playstation 3 offers."

- Ensemble Studios's Colt McAnlis will present "Halo Wars: The Terrain of Next-Gen," a technical session on how the studio took advantage of the Xbox 360's hardware for the forthcoming RTS title by "moving from a standard height-field terrain, to a full vector field terrain and increasing vertex density by 8x over previous titles."

- Jason Gregory, generalist programmer at Naughty Dog, will provide an informative lecture on "State-Based Scripting in in Uncharted: Drake's Fortune and Uncharted 2: Among Thieves", giving attendees an in-depth tour of the studio's "highly flexible, object-oriented, finite state machine based scripting environment," while preparing programmers to implement a similar system.

- Titled "Insomniac Games' Secrets of Console and Playstation 3 Programming," this full-day tutorial will have the Insomniac Engine Programming Team dispensing "a day's worth of technical presentations, each offering an individual perspective on the methods, tricks, and optimization strategies involved with programming the Playstation 3 console."

- Rockstar's lead graphics programmer Wolfgang Engel will cover the advantages and disadvantages of different render design patterns and introduce "The Light Pre-Pass Renderer - Renderer Design for Multiple Lights," new renderer design pattern more material variety, less memory bandwidth usage, easy MSAA implementations on all platforms, and other improvements over other patterns.

- In "Zen of Multicore Rendering," Halo Team Microsoft's principal engine programmer Corrine Yu plans to expose the audience to "novel technology and pragmatic engine designs that exploits parallelism to implement features previously not possible in single core fixed rendering pipeline hardware."

- Epic Games' senior programmer Niklas Smedberg and engine programmer Daniel Wright will share their studios "gore and blood rendering techniques" and their "approaches used to aggressively optimize Screen Space Ambient Occlusion, which is necessary for console hardware" in this informative discussion on "Rendering Techniques in Gears of War 2".

- Providing an in-depth look at the technology behind the studio's 3D fighting game, Midway's graphics programming lead Jonathan Greenberg will present "Hitting 60Hz with the Unreal Engine: Inside the Tech of Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe" and describe a "series of optimizations and guidelines that describe how one could create a 60 Hz game inside Unreal Engine 3.

- BioWare's John Watson will provide a visual model of the complexities of large scale software development to demonstrate how changing factors impact software development in "Massive Software Complexity", a useful poster session targeting "technical staff who are motivated to decrease development time and increase correctness."

- Pulling examples from Star Ocean 4's development, Tri-Ace CEO and CTO Yoshiharu Gotanda will share how attendees can integrate a flexible shader management system and physically-based camera simulation during post-processing. He'll offer practical examples, implementation details, and the challenges his team faced in his session titled "Star Ocean 4: Flexible Shader Management and Post-Processing".

The full Programming Track line-up to date includes many more notable lectures and roundtables, including discussions on artificial intelligence, tool development, creating truly destructible worlds, and more.

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

['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist. This week she looks at "Ruben & Lullaby", a short emotion-centric piece for the iPhone.]

"Ruben & Lullaby" is a new kind of interactive story, developed specially for the iPhone. It calls itself an "opertoon", "a story you play like a musical instrument."

This is a fair description -- if you're a little loose about what you mean by story, and if your ambitions for musical instrument fall considerably short of the iPhone Ocarina.

This opertoon begins with its two main characters, Ruben and Lullaby, sitting on a park bench. They are lovers about to engage in their first fight. You get to conduct.

Tipping the phone left or right moves the story along, while leaving it flat can create long pauses; tapping the phone directs the characters to look towards or away from one another; stroking or shaking the phone makes the currently pictured character angrier or calmer.

As you play, the game improvises its own jazzy soundtrack. Sometimes this is melancholy, sometimes irritably discordant, sometimes angry.

This trick works pretty well, though on replay I found that there was less total musical content than I had initially expected. To a large extent that doesn't matter, though, because the soundtrack is accomplishing two things: communicating moment-to-moment mood, and encouraging the player to keep an overall pace.

I found that it felt natural -- and this is where the "play like a musical instrument" part comes in -- to move the story along fairly frequently during intense portions, and then to slow down at other points when the characters seemed to be in a more contemplative mood.

The tactile qualities of the interface come into play here too. Since you shake the phone for anger and tip it for story advancement, a furious exchange ending in break-up plays faster and more vigorously than one that ends in reconciliation.

One of the things that I consider an underexplored strength of console-based games is the possibility of using the player's physical involvement for emotional effect. We're animals, not just brains in jars; and while sometimes physical manifestations (laughter, crying, laughing, applause) often express our reactions to art, sometimes they're actually a way of engaging before we've really formed a reaction at all (sitting forward, sitting back, holding one's breath, singing along).

Traditional-media arts use those aspects of human nature, perhaps more than we tend to appreciate. Novels are a bit exceptional in this regard because they don't call on any particular physical mode of reception, but poetry asks us to read aloud, and live performances depend heavily on the house mood produced by the audience as a whole.

This is rich territory for video games, and only partly explored. I've played plenty of titles that got me energized or nerved up, and some that made me dizzy or nauseated or stressed out by frustration, but few that used the expressiveness of physical gesture to provoke or explore gentler feelings. "Ruben & Lullaby" does go there, and it's really cool to see.

The feedback of the game is largely body-oriented as well, since, in the absence of dialogue, most of the story comes from reading facial expressions, which need to convey a whole range of fury, indignation, surprise, sorrow, concern, reserve, and disengagement. Amazingly, this works. Ezra Clayton Daniel's images are the stuff of graphic novels for grown-ups: they're stylized without being childish, and they convey a lot of nuance.

I don't want to oversell. There's a lot that isn't present here that one might reasonably look for in an interactive story. "Ruben & Lullaby" is pretty low on surrounding information about its protagonists. The text in the tutorial -- the only text in the whole piece -- explains that Ruben is a bike messenger, Lullaby a project manager at a non-profit. They've been together for five months and are now having their first fight. From the drawings we can also infer that Ruben isn't the snappiest dresser and that his backstory includes some poor choices about sideburns.

This is more or less the extent of their characterization, and even the details about their careers really don't matter much. The help explains that you "get to choose" what the fight is about, but this is choice in the sense that you're invited to project your own fantasy entirely outside the application. At no point does the player have a choice to make within the game about why they're fighting, what the stresses and motivations might be, and so on.

So in one sense, the story can be whatever you want; in another sense, it's simply lacking. And it is, ultimately, personal detail that creates compelling characters. I didn't feel as though I came to know either Ruben or Lullaby. I could give them certain reactions at will, but who knows why Ruben experienced that sudden flood of empathy I forced on him, or what he said that set Lullaby off so badly to start with?

As I played, I couldn't help comparing "Ruben & Lullaby" with "Facade". (There are after all only so many game/interactive experiences that thrust the player into the middle of someone else's romantic discord.) The two complement each other in odd ways, one getting right what the other didn't. In Facade, the characters were specifically drawn, abounding in motives and neuroses, often to such a degree that I wondered why my character was friends with them in the first place.

On the other hand, it was often hard to tell how my actions were controlling the outcome of the game, and interaction -- typing full sentences of dialogue -- was clumsy. Things I wanted to say were often woven into the wrong place by the time I hit RETURN. (And I'm a pretty fast typist.) In fact, the comparison is more or less a case study in the value -- and danger -- of using verbal content in games. Dialogue characterizes, clarifies, makes specific. At the same time it's hard to interact with and potentially confusing.

The opertoon website suggests that "Ruben & Lullaby" is just the first in a possible line of productions like this. I would be curious to see more. At the same time, I'm not sure whether the range of input in this particular opertoon could stretch to provide meaningful agency in many different stories.

This piece -- being so simple, so general -- may be close to some essential archetype of all the conflict/resolution pieces that could conceivably be built around this mechanic. People meet; there is a problem between them; during the confrontation they react to one another with anger or calmness; confrontation ends with destruction, resolution, or stand-off.

The experience would feel a bit different, I'm sure, if recast with different music and presented with a pair of generals facing off in a war-torn region, or opposing cheerleaders at a dance, or a father and his estranged son. But wouldn't it ultimately feel like the same game?

If the interaction doesn't change with the content -- if the story aspect of the game doesn't introduce some variation in the player's behavior -- then is it really an interactive story at all? I suspect I'd play every other opertoon just as I played this one -- shaking the characters at the beginning to set up the premise of their anger, then calming them down for the pleasure of seeing them reunite. The story provides no motive or framework to do otherwise.

In order to make a significantly different narrative, I think one would need to introduce some element that would complicate the concept a lot: a story structure consisting of multiple scenes (for instance), or speech bubbles, or more ways for the player to control the situation.

I do wonder how a gesture-based handling of emotional feedback might fit into the context of a larger game or interactive narrative, and that's where I think future potential lies. "Ruben & Lullaby" is memorable, but gains a lot from being formally unique -- it's the new experience that draws me in, not the specifics of a tale that I could retell to someone else.

Though I admit I feel warm and fuzzy when I can get the two of them to hug at the end.

[Emily Short is an interactive fiction author and part of the team behind Inform 7, a language for IF creation. She also maintains a blog on interactive fiction and related topics. She can be reached at emshort AT mindspring DOT com.]

Posted by Emily Short at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

[GameSetLinks is GameSetWatch's daily link round-up post, culling from hundreds of weblogs and outlets to compile the most interesting longform writing, links, and criticism on the art and culture of video games.]

Vaguely approaching the weekend, and the latest GameSetLinks starts out with Andy Schatz showing how indies should actually, you know, schedule things out - fun stuff, even if quite involved.

This is closely followed by a tremendously geeky PlayStation shooter round-up, and there's also some silly whiteboarding shenanigans, the International Journal of Roleplaying, a (pictured) Unreal Engine dancing game, and more besides.

The search for Spock:

The Indie Infrastructure: Scheduling | Pocketwatch Games
An indie who actually uses Microsoft Project to properly calculate end dates on games. God, or the devil? I say the former, heh.

The Phenomenal Playstation (PS1) Shmups Library - racketboy.com
Complete gigantic, well-researched post goodness: 'Following up on his epic Saturn Shmups Guide, BulletMagnet walks us through the original Playstation’s well-rounded shooter lineup.'

The Plush Apocalypse » Blog Archive » A few game ideas EA will never make…
Awesomely amusing whiteboard designs, including 'Monster Christmas Tree (with Fire-Lightning Breath), and Sports Fruit'.

International Journal of Roleplaying - Issue 1
Covers 'a response to a growing need for a place where the varied and wonderful fields of role-playing research and development, covering academia, the industry and the arts, can exchange knowledge and research, form networks and communicate.' Via Juul!

Steparu.com | Nurien Review
Definitely the oddest use of Unreal Engine 3 yet - in a Korean online dancing game!

Looky Touchy: "...Muahahahaha..." When Localization Blows The Mood
Talking about localized text that "...fall[s] prey to the same pitfalls that foul most games imported to our shores from Japan", with some good examples.

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

[Mining his Lego-filled childhood, game designer Marek Bronstring describes four kinds of "player creators" -- Builders, Imaginers, Experimenters, and Destructors -- and shares how game developers can tailor user-generated content opportunities to them.]

User-generated content is playing an increasing role in gaming. Gamers are not just able to customize aspects of the experience, but many games now feature rich and deeply integrated authoring tools. As more games become at least partially reliant on player creativity, it's useful to think about the different kinds of players who create and share content.

It's agreed upon amongst game designers, as well as Web 2.0 developers, that not all users want to be creators. The so-called 90-9-1 rule says that generally 90 percent of the userbase consumes, 9 percent creates from time to time (or engages in low-level participation, such as tagging or commenting), and only 1 percent are heavy contributors.

The numbers may be different for games that make it exceptionally easy to be creative, but in any case, it's widely understood that not everyone will want to create, and most games are designed around that understanding.

That's generally where the thinking stops, though. We make distinctions between "creators" and "consumers" and take those two groups into account, but what happens when we zoom in on the creators? Are they all the same? Actually, not everyone wants to create in quite the same way. Inspired by the Bartle types of MMO players, I wondered if it was possible to determine different types of player-creators.

Searching For A Creator Typology

What set off my train of thought was recalling my experiences with Lego, the granddaddy of user-generated content (well, kind of). I absolutely loved playing with Lego as a kid. I played with Lego bricks in a specific way, and was often surprised by the completely different styles of playing that other kids had.

I always thought about what I wanted to build with Lego. Was it going to be a spaceship? Or the Eiffel tower? Or a medieval castle (like the one I built in the picture)? I conceptualized what I was going to make, and then set about to do it.

When I constructed, say, a wall of a building, I used same-colored bricks. That was always a huge point for me. A wall could be any color, but I never mixed the colors together, because that looked messy and unrealistic. I took a fairly structured approach to Lego building, and I think that put me in a particular category.

When friends came around to play, they would often just build something without a pre-conceived plan, mixing all kinds of bricks together. They'd grab random pieces from the box one by one, pieces that they thought were cool, and then decided where to stick them on.

These were the kids who'd not aim to build a spaceship or a castle, but who'd end up constructing "something that kinda looks like a house with trees on the roof that can also fly... but it's hard to tell."

Instead of building something specific, they looked for new combinations of bricks, and then figured out what it meant to them later, using their imagination along the way. Their creations could mutate dramatically throughout this process.

Sometimes, I'd play with a friend who'd instead come up with random challenges. For instance, one time we tried to build stairs out of Lego bricks without support columns and see how far we could get. Why? Just because!

Or he'd want to see if we could get the electric train to fly off a ramp and crash, or maybe if we could create some kind of lift for the parking garage so that cars could get to the different levels.

Finally, one time I played with this kid who only just built really high towers and then randomly smashed them, running around and giggling like a girl. This left me utterly confounded. What on earth was he doing? Is that what happens when you eat too much candy?

The Four Types Of Player-Creators

When I recalled all these different ways of playing with Lego, I realized they may be representative of four distinctly different types of creators. I tried to come up with labels that most accurately reflect their tendencies.

Builders

Builders, or architects, tend to pre-conceptualize their creations. They create in ways that seems sensible or structured to them. They build step-by-step, looking for the best version of what they envisioned.

A Builder might say, "I'm going to create an Indiana Jones level!" Or "I'm going to make a character who really means business, like Jack Bauer, except he's also an alien and has a cool laser gun." Then they'll look for the tools and options that will best enable them to do this.

Imaginers

Imaginers are more like the jazz musicians. They improvise with the tools, grab different elements, and see where it leads them. Imaginers tend to pre-conceptualize less. Instead they roll their Katamari ball through the creative landscape and see what sticks, then imagine afterwards what their creation is or how it works.

Imaginers don't mind creating things that don't make perfect sense, or mixing different themes together, or creating a bit of a mess.

Experimenters

Like mad scientists, Experimenters are driven by a desire to test the limits of the tools or game world (or perhaps alternatively the limits of their abilities). The experimenter wonders if you can create an animal with 50 legs. He wonders how fast you can make the cart catapult itself through the level.

Like Builders, they pre-conceptualize their experiment, but like Imaginers, they take a more free-flowing approach to implementing them.

Destructors

The Michael Bays of user creativity, Destructors build things mostly thinking about how cool it'll look when you blow it up. They're not to be confused with griefers; Destructors don't just want to mess things up, they want to construct things first and then mess them up. They like explosions.

Destructors might build a huge stack of crates (or preferably melons or ragdolls or anything) just to see it blow up or collapse in the most spectacular way possible.

Not Mutually Exclusive

These types should not be seen as mutually exclusive. Players can be one or more of these types at the same time, or switch between them.

For instance, I believe that most players who are not primarily Destructors will become one sometimes, especially when they're fed up with a slow creative process and want to see some dramatic effects. A common behavior in SimCity is to save your city and then unleash countless tornadoes and earthquakes just to see the city crumble and burn.

When I played with Lego, I was most comfortable being a Builder, but would frequently slip into Imaginer mode. While I enjoyed playing alone, because then I could just stick to my default creation mode, it was refreshing to play with other kids sometimes, because they forced me to create in different ways that I wasn't familiar with, and often the output would be really cool.

Using The Four Creator Types In Game Design

I believe that these four player-creator types can be used as a mental checklist for any game that involves player-created content. They can trigger specific questions about your game, such as:

- Which types of creators does the game hope to attract?
- Which types of creators does a feature appeal to?
- Does the game encourage switching between creator modes and if so, how?

Much like you probably don't want to create an MMO just for Achiever types or just for Explorer types (referring back to Bartle's types here), creative tools shouldn't be geared towards supporting only one type of creator.

When certain creator types are under-served, the designer may decide to add more features that will appeal to them. A "give me a random object" button will appeal to Imaginers, while an achievement for highest object velocity will be exciting to Experimenters.

Destructors will be highly attracted to games with some form of physics simulation or pyrotechnics, as without them there's very little else to enable what they want to see.

By providing specific goals or achievements, a game can also encourage players to explore different styles of creation. Sometimes players may want to try creating in a different way than they're used to.

Of course not all games that include some form of player-created content can foster all kinds of creativity, but by being conscious of the different types of creators, we can design games that are more inclusive, more engaging and hopefully more fun.

[Marek Bronstring is a game designer specializing in online and browser-based games. He most recently worked at NCsoft Europe on an unannounced project. Currently he is freelancing and blogging at Gameslol.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[Every week, sister site GamerBytes' editor Ryan Langley passes along 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.]

This week's releases include FunTown Mahjong for Xbox Live Arcade - a quite serious take on the rules of Chinese Mahjong, unlike the recent PSN title Mahjong Tales, which was based on the more American known Mahjong Solitaire.

WiiWare got Niki: Rock & Ball, an arcad-ey game in the vein of Pang! or Snow Bros.. Nothing for North America on PSN this week, but Europe finally got the first episode of Penny Arcade Adventures.

The big stories this week were that Square-Enix are taking digital download very seriously, with their iPhone Tower Defense game Crystal Defenders making its way to every console, and their Taito division working hard on Bubble Bobble Wii.

Here are the top stories for the week:

Xbox Live Arcade

FunTown Mahjong Now Available On XBLA
Popular Chinese game now available. Now, if only I knew how to play it...

Interview: Twisted Pixel On Creating The Maw
Our friend Terry Sirup over at Xboxlivearcade.com has got in touch with developer Twisted Pixel games about last week's Xbox Live Arcade title The Maw. Frank Wilson lets us find out the workings behind their first foray into creating a new IP.

Gamasutra Interview: Jonathan Blow: The Next Phase
Gamasutra talks to Braid creator Jonathon Blow about what he's up to next.

The Maw To Recieve New DLC Levels
Three new "deleted scenes" are on their way in the coming months.

PlayStation Network

EU PSN Store Update - Penny Arcade Episode 1
After a few months of delays, the first episode of Penny Arcade is now available on the European PlayStation Network.

Age Of Booty Update In February - Trophies For PSN, Avatars For Xbox 360
Big updates for Age Of Booty next month to coincide with the PC release.

Noby Noby Boy Scheduled For Mid-February
The most bizarre PSN game to date, and out in less than a month's time.

WiiWare

NA WiiWare Update: Niki: Rock & Ball
A single release for this week's WiiWare roundup - a 2D single screen platformer which includes... rocks and balls.

Square Enix To Release Crystal Defenders On All Platforms
The popular iPod/iPhone Tower Defense game is making its way to everything under the sun.

Bubble Bobble Remake Coming To WiiWare - 4 Player Chaos Included
First screenshots of Bubble Bubble Wii are in the latest Famitsu magazine.

Pole's Big Adventure - NES Action On WiiWare
Sega is making a sarcastic Famicom game. You heard me.

Super Meat Boy Heading To The Wii
Can everyone's favorite piece of meat save his girlfriend once more on WiiWare?

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

['Diamond In The Rough' is a regularly scheduled GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Tom Cross focusing on aspects of games that stand out, for reasons good and bad. This week, Tom examines Left 4 Dead and Mass Effect, and how the former especially leads the way in a new brand of pseudo-storytelling.]

To play a video game is often to be party to a strange chorus of grunts, yelps and insults. Characters in games are designed to react to their environments with as much "realism" and responsiveness as possible.

From the unfortunate pointedly, ethnic enemies in Drake's Fortune to the pained grunts of Big Daddies, to your teammates telling you not to shoot them, all games have hundreds of snippets of sounds in the wings, waiting for you to provoke them.

Even games that feature voiceless snarling enemies can create palpable atmosphere just by including interesting, scary, or numerous enemy and character barks. A game like Doom 3 relies heavily on such mechanisms: the groans, screams, roars and screeches that your enemies produce are all the information you’ll be provided with about their nature, aside from a few introductory cutscenes and forced expositional text documents.

Of course, there are also games that trade in verbose, incredibly context-sensitive responses. In Deus Ex, leaping on a table will elicit disapproval and derision; entering the woman's bathroom will earn you a disapproving coworker for the foreseeable future.

All of these interactions are worked out within the minor conversations and comments seen in passing through the game. Likewise, enemies in Deus Ex respond to you or what you are: a dangerous, fearsome genetically modified murderer and policeman.

But Deus Ex provides these interactions alongside traditional cutscenes. Games that don’t have cutscenes have to work even harder to get mileage out of on-the-fly, in-game narrative tools, because that’s all they have. Thus, it is not surprising that the most interesting and subtly successful practicer of this trade is Valve.

Masters of Understatement

Valve of course has a slight edge in this department: their policy of constant immersion within the avatar (never in there single-player games does the camera escape from the protagonist’s point of view except in death) has forced them to become better and better storytellers in areas that others do not have to explore as fully.

Valve’s Half Life 2: Episode 1 & 2 tested Valve’s technique in a new way. Before, Valve had only had to provide the banter for Gordon Freeman’s temporary comrades: they would mostly comment on the present combat situation, and nothing beyond that. In the first two expansion episodes, however, Alyx Vance became the player’s near-constant companion. As a result, she couldn’t just have combat and quest-related asides; she had to be able to respond to and “interact” with the character on a verbal level, creating the illusion of a consciousness aware of Gordon, traveling with him.

This was accomplished by making various physical actions taken by the player produce verbal responses from Alyx. In pitch-black tunnels, if the player turns off Gordon’s flashlight, Alyx will tell you to turn it back on. Likewise, Alyx will cover her eyes when you shine your light at them. These are of course the simplest of examples: Alyx would also comment on any number of puzzles and situations that she and Gordon found themselves in. Some of these comments were vague and could happen in different locations, but others were location and situation-sensitive.

Still, Alyx and the Half Life world still have cinematic scenes of a sort, and an extremely strong narrative force, however camouflaged. What if a game eschewed all but the briefest opening and closing scripted moments, and instead had to rely entirely on randomly (and not so randomly) generated sound bites to flesh out its characters and settings? Enter Left 4 Dead, Valve’s co-op online zombie apocalypse shooter.

Likable Nobodies

Left 4 Dead features only a handful of in-engine cinematics and one pre-rendered movie: aside from that, the story and characters are what you make of them, aided by their continuous stream of dialogue between each other. This of course means that there is no story to speak of. Your plucky (or grizzled or naïve) heroes either make the escape vehicle or not. There are no long-term story-based consequences for actions taken, beyond the death of a survivor.

Each character has a recognizable personality, if you take the time to learn them. Louis is sure that things will get better soon, that things will go “back to normal.” Francis hates everything: train yards, vans, the military, rooms, you name it and he’ll tell you he hates it. Bill is the gruff old survivalist who is the unofficial leader of the team (think Nick Nolte at any time in the last 10 years). Zoe is the wisecracking college student, the only one of the survivors to regularly find humor in their unpleasant situation.

That entire paragraph was culled mostly from the in-game dialogue. Sure, you can get the general idea of it all from the opening cutscene, but cutscenes only paint brief portraits. It’s the character’s constant dialogue that reinforces Zoe’s zombie insults and humor, Francis’ constant complaining, Louis’ strangely resilient optimism, or the grudging respect and feelings the group feel for each other. These are just the obvious aspects of each character. If you play the game enough, you’ll hear Bill joke about the last zombie plague (in the ‘50s) being much worse than this one. I’ve played this game for tens of hours, and gotten nowhere near to hearing all these characters have to say.

All of this character depth, and there isn’t a “quiet moment,” romance, or philosophical debate to be seen. It’s like a great horror movie with all of the bad stuff cut out, with characters that constantly remind you of their humanity without making too big a show of being “characterized.” And yet these are still horror movie archetypes, it’s just that they’ve been given a slightly different stage this time round.

It's best if You Don't Notice

This is the ultimate argument for seamlessly integrating characterization into gameplay. When this kind of descriptive writing is treated as commonplace, it blends into the gameplay. At the same time this technique gives players absolutely no control over said characterization. It makes it a part of the world and the characters in a way that a game like Fallout 3 or Final Fantasy could never replicate, despite occasional comments on the hero’s progress or "spontaneous" conversations between NPCs.

In those games, characters speak their parts and then go into vocal hibernation. Here, there’s never a “dialogue camera,” because the characters are performing their fake humanity all the time. It’s subtle and effective, as most people have noticed, and it makes the game that much more fun to play, when you know each character by name, personality, and sound.

It’s this hard to describe phenomenon, this almost casual, off-the-cuff air, that’s such an impressive accomplishment. Of course none of these sound bites are haphazard or unplanned. Every single one has been defined and designated as carefully as possible, so that every survivor has several reactions to certain kinds of enemies, to each other’s deaths, and to rescue. The brilliant trick of it is, since there is only one narrative mode, everything is character performance and definition. There’s never a point where we stand back and watch things unfold, and when we do, it isn’t a character-based scene, it’s a car driving away.

This kind of characterization cannot (in this state) replace storytelling. It can’t compare to the changing relationship between Elika and the Prince in Prince of Persia, for instance. In that game, the comments produced by characters changed over time, reflecting the changes in their relationship as set up by story segments. This doesn’t mean that the approach so deftly executed in Left 4 Dead couldn’t be employed to tell a story, and a detailed one too.

Load Times are No Match for Conversations!

One game that makes this attempt is Mass Effect. Say what you will about the game’s long elevator rides, Bioware decided to fill those trips with some interesting dialogue. Every once in a while, the two characters you had with you would have a conversation. If those characters happened to be Ashley and Liara, the conversation might be about how Ashley is a xenophobe. Their next conversation would acknowledge the previous one, and involved Ashley saying that she had learned that not all aliens were bad.

This didn’t mitigate the horror of the long elevators, but if it had been expanded and deepened, think of the possibilities. Every elevator ride would unlock knew insights into character’s motivations, relations with each other, and thoughts regarding the various quests at hand. There’s something to be said for NPC interaction that isn’t player initiated: it makes the ensuing relationships and dialogues feel more tangible and less dependent on player input. That’s an important goal when the whole game revolves around player action and inaction.

Worth The Effort?

This of course points us toward the problems inherent in such interactions. How do developers ensure that we fickle players will stick around to see these conversations (aside from annoying elevators)? Valve knows that we’ll be there for every second of Left 4 Dead’s dialogue, but that dialogue doesn’t catalogue the change of opinions or characters over time. The incredibly difficult job that designers have is to bring these moments closer to the realm of normal gameplay. Why expend effort on that kind of content when they know they can make us watch a video?

I’m sure that they’re doing just that as I write this: trying to figure out more and more ingenious ways to get us to pay attention to such moments. Obviously this technique has a long way to go before it approaches the success and acceptability of a cutscene, but it’s a viable support tool, and a potentially insightful and subtly brilliant kind of storytelling. It’s something I’d love to see more of, because it’s the kind of thing that I play games for, regardless of genre or theme.

[Tom Cross also writes for Gamers' Temple and blogs about video games at shouldntbegaming.wordpress.com. You can contact him at romain47 at gmail dot com.]

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

[It's nice to point out some of the smaller but more intriguing console developers out there, and Austin's Renegade Kid is definitely one of those - Gamasutra editor at large Chris Remo sat down with them recently to talk about first-person space horror calamities, and here's the fun result.]

Austin-based Renegade Kid has created an unusual niche for itself in the game industry: developing system-pushing 3D first-person shooter experiences for the Nintendo DS.

Impressively, the studio has coaxed quite a bit of power out of Nintendo's blockbuster handheld. In 2007 it released the horror-themed Dementium: The Ward through Gamecock.

This month it followed up with Moon, a sci-fi first-person DS shooter set on (and within) its namesake and published by Mastiff, which has been garnering decent reviews.

Gamasutra spoke with studio co-owners Jools Watsham and Gregg Hargrove -- game director and art director, respectively -- about Moon, as well as the company's unique portfolio, the ins and outs of high-end portable development, and how counting polygons on the DS makes you better prepared to count polygons on current-gen home consoles:

Did you roll into this before completing Dementium?

Jools Watsham: No. We completely finished Dementium and then we got in contact with Mastiff. In December 2007 we started the developing of Moon.

What led you to change publishers to Mastiff, having gone with Gamecock -- now SouthPeak -- for your previous project?

JW: There's no particular reason. We were already talking to Gamecock about other games and we'd been talking to Mastiff for awhile. As we had just finished Dementium, we thought, "Cool."

It was a good time to check with Mastiff and with this concept do a sci-fi FPS on the DS and they said, "Yeah, great." They were on board straightaway. So we started development immediately.

How did you get yourself in the position of pushing 3D engine technology on the DS for your games? It seems like a difficult segment to be in, because you wouldn't ordinarily associate the hardware with that type of thing.

Gregg Hargrove: A big chunk of our career was doing Nintendo 64 games, which is pretty similar technology-wise, and when we decided we wanted to do our own company, we wanted to ease into it a little bit. Besides, jumping straight into doing next gen games would have [required] at least 20 or 30 people on the team and millions of dollars and three years to do it.

We liked the DS anyway and knew the basic level its [hardware] reached, and knew we could do it. We saw that there was a hole for 3D stuff, especially first person shooters, and mature content. That's what really got us going in the DS direction -- we thought we could do it with a very small team, and we thought we could do it well.

What influenced the concept of this game and its setting? It's more of the solitary type of sci-fi as opposed to the space opera sort.

GH: Yeah.

JW: We've been fans of sci-fi. This is more of a space adventure. It's a concept we've been working on for a long time. We wanted to build upon the Renegade engine that we built for Dementium and we were kicking around the space concept anyway.

Coupling that with what we had achieved with Dementium and Mastiff being interested in working with us, it was just good timing for everyone. Everyone was immediately aboard and jumping into it. Having the opportunity to build upon a technology and make it happen was just perfect.

It's interesting that this game is set on the moon itself, rather than in another galaxy or a more extravagant sci-fi setting. Can you speak on that choice at all? People actually wear real space helmets, which you don't see often in video games.

JW: We wanted to do that. We found it's nice to cement you somewhat in reality rather than a completely fictional, way-off, super-future kind of land -- which is kind of fun because we knew inside the moon we were going to get futuristic and crazy. It's alien technology, and that's always futuristically crazy.

So, I think coupling that with the contrast of reality, we have this relatively minimalistic alpha base on the moon, set in the year 2058. We wanted it to be somewhat believable that this base could exist at that time. You cement the player in that reality and then present them with really super futuristic stuff; there's a nice balance there. I think that the player then gets to appreciate both

What was in your head from an artistic standpoint?

GH: Artistically, it was all over the place. As far as games, you look at the Metroid games and BioShock, and we looked at a lot of other next-gen-style titles as well.

JW: There was a lot of NASA stuff -- the actual space station. You get to see how really cool that is.

GH: Yeah, the actual NASA stuff. I've always been into space and astronautics, so I've got all these old kids' books with the "This is the future!" kind of thing. You see some of those futuristic concept sketches that never really made it, and you let those influence the direction you're going.

Plus, I've been a sci-fi fan my whole life, all the way back to the original Star Trek episodes. You'll see a lot of those influences in there. There is so much that really kind of emulates the whole Star Wars and even the Aliens kind of thing, we tried to stay a little bit away from that, but not disallow them to influence us. There were a couple of level sets that had all the twisty...

JW: Too Giger-like.

GH: Yeah, too Giger-like. And so, we tried to stay away from anything too iconic that way. Hopefully, the big mish-mash of all of it put together will create its own style.

JW: Once you get into the story, it unfolds what's really going on inside the moon. There are a lot of props and iconic pieces made to support that. There are actually objects and machinery that explain what's really going on. It's very functional, as well as just fun building alien-looking stuff.

Is there some aspect of developing games to this spec that's particularly interesting in terms of what it does to the design process? I would imagine that designing a level for this game would require a much different mindset than doing something on a home console where you are less constrained.

GH: We did design a lot of the level stuff, especially the alien stuff, as almost a block set -- a really big puzzle piece set. That allowed us to create different areas and spaces. There was a lot of going back and forth with the design, especially the first portion of the game in particular, trying to ramp it up.

We'd come out with a cool design, and we really were able to design in 2D pretty quickly using these basic puzzles pieces, and say, "This is where the enemies are going to pop out." Iteration was pretty quick.

JW: Very quick. It worked very well -- an old-school approach for sure. It was all designed from an overhead plan and view. The length of the corridor -- whether there's a turn in there, where the enemy is placed -- is all very important. It's not just a throwaway: "Oh, I'd like this to be this long, just for the hell of it." It's very specific: "I'd like him to walk this distance" or "He should jump out at them very quickly."

All of those things definitely played into it. And the jigsaw approach helped that. We could build a level, jump in there, play it, and go, "Ah, this is a bit too long," or "Let's add this over there," or "Let's stick a level in between these things."

It's so quick and easy to do that, and that was probably the reason we wanted to construct the game that way. We had a lot of flexibility to ramp the gateway how we wanted it to go.

Having now done two DS games, can you speak about some development lessons you might have learned about creating portable games in genres that are traditionally developed for home consoles or PC?

JW: It's a big technical challenge, even from a simple point of view of how many polygons you can throw onscreen, how far you can see, how many enemies you can throw onscreen.

From Dementium to Moon, we definitely improved upon that from an art point of view -- just pushing the DS further to display more. The enemies are a bit more sophisticated to the eye. You've got to be more efficient there to make that work on the DS.

But also, from Dementium to Moon, we added a lot of save points and stuff like that, to support mobile gaming. Dementium is very much lacking in saving points. [laughs] With this game that was a high priority for us. There are a bunch of auto-saves around bosses and around the driving sections, for example -- that's some of the stuff we learned.

GH: The key is boiling it down to the essence of what's fun about those games. In the next gen market, there's not a whole lot of difference between the game you play on the Xbox or on the N64. There's more of it, and it looks nicer, and there are more bells and whistles. But really, the game mechanics themselves are not that different.

There's definitely a lot of nice nuance, and those are the things that we try to pull back into the DS to make it feel next-gen, but we know that we can't get away with 20 unique environments and tons of AI. You've got to build a little smarter. You're not going to have tons of shaders all over your characters and all over your world.

So we have to find a way to make that work and look good. There are all sorts of little art tricks to make it as cool as it can look. I love the fact that it takes the art and shrinks it down to just this big [gestures]. And a lot less can look a lot cooler when it's only this big. If that was on the big screen, it would look pretty assy. [laughs] You don't want that.

JW: You play to the strength of what it is.

Do you find that affects the art design generally -- bolder patterns or affecting the color design, things like that?

GH: You definitely make sure you can reuse your textures as much as possible, as opposed to having every single polygon in the world being mapped to a separate part of the map. You try to repeat without looking like it's repeated, and try to get a lot of use out of three or four dimensions.

Dementium had four blood textures. We used those all over the place, but we used them in different ways. Moon is kind of similar. With a lot of the major machine models, we're able to get a completely different looking machine by utilizing the maps differently and by using the polygons differently.

We also wanted to make the world seem a lot more alive than Dementium did. It was what it was, but there wasn't much moving in the world; there wasn't much animating in the world besides you and the enemies. There were a couple little spots here and there where there's rain on a window or a fan would oscillate, but that's about all you had.

We really wanted to make this place feel alive. We really wanted to make this feel like a functioning facility, both on the human side and the alien side.

So we explored a lot more with animating props, whether that's straight animation or rigged animation. We also tried to throw a lot more variety into the enemy animation -- animated eyes and weapons.

We didn't have a lot of that in Dementium. We're trying to throw a lot more into this, and just that small additional detail makes it jump up a level. We're not really doing all that much, we just rotated it a bit. [laughs]

Do any of those design or art lessons -- making the most out of a small amount -- translate over proportionally to doing things on a larger console, perhaps in terms of being able to identify what makes the most difference to the end user?

JW: Yes, definitely. It makes you very efficient -- even from the NES, taking that to the N64, taking that to the Xbox, and now back to the DS, and then back to 360, and so on. A lot of artists, designers, and creative people making games now haven't got that foundation. You'll see 10,000 polygons to make an enemy, and they've got a meg's worth of textures. They use the whole lot whether they need to or not. It's very inefficient. Sure, it may be possible, but does it really need it?

It's nice to have those tricks. Not that you have to always use the bare minimum, but you really learn to respect all the polygons. You really get engrossed in that. I think that's key in game art.

The 360, for example, still has limitations. There's still a cap on how many polys you can throw around. The difference is if you approached it from old-school perspective, you may be able to then get double the amount of enemies on the screen because of that approach. It's a big deal.

Look at Gears of War 2, the Horde mode -- it took some tricky planning to have that big a horde of enemies on the screen, or in Dead Rising, having all the zombies in that game. Those are prime examples. Definitely some old-school trickery went into that for sure, to make that happen.

John Carmack talks about that a lot -- writing the DS engine for Orcs & Elves himself, and reminding himself of those limitations, then extrapolating out from it to larger-scale development.

JW: That's what I love about doing DS games right now. It's very similar to doing NES. If you make anything that's decent, you're like, "Yes! That's awesome!" Because the limitations are so low. Or high, however you want to word it.

It's very rewarding. It's very challenging. It's like a game in itself, really, making the game.

How big is your team?

JW: It's eight people and me.

That in itself has to be almost refreshing in a way, being able to make a game with eight people.

JW: It's wonderful. We wear a lot of hats; probably more than we should, so we're very, very busy. But it's good -- it's a very tight scene. If we need to make a change as far as game direction or a game design, getting input in the game and still making the schedule isn't too hard. You can make dramatic changes very quickly and very effectively.

On a 360 game, that'd be different. If someone's done a concept or modeled a character, done an animation or built the environment, you could throw away weeks or months of work because of a change. With DS you can do that, and maybe you lose some work, but it's only a week or two.

If it's important for the greater good of the game, then let's do it. Let's not just put it in there just because it exists and we've done it. That's not a good enough reason to put it in the game. So we're a lot more flexible, which is exciting. It allows us to focus on the game content rather than the process as much. It's great!

How long was the production cycle?

JW: It was a 10 month production cycle. It was pretty tight. We were very focused, very busy.

Working with Mastiff, though, was great. Tom [Gaubatz], the producer, got his hands very dirty and got very involved with the game, which is great. It was definitely a team effort and a hell of a lot of work for everyone on the team. Everyone really pulled their weight, and not because we demanded it and not because we messed up. It was just for the love of the game.

We wanted to do a great job and make it the greatest game we could. And it may sound cheesy, but we're really proud of the game. It turned out great and we're really happy with it. It speaks for itself, hopefully.

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

[We're talking to this year's Independent Games Festival finalists, and this time Eric Caoili interviews KranX Productions' Alexander Porechnov about Musaic Box, a hidden object game featuring puzzles that have players arranging blocks to complete music arrangements -- nominated for the Excellence in Design and Audio awards.]

At a glance, Musaic Box's casual "hidden object" gameplay might not seem noteworthy, but closer inspection reveals a fascinating music-based puzzle component unlike anything else in the genre.

In the game, players comb their dead grandfather's home for compositions to play with his "musaic box" left behind. To render the song, however, they have to listen to and assemble its pieces on a puzzle screen.

Presented as tetrimino-esque block groups, each piece contains a snippet of a song with up to four instruments. Players have to properly arrange the pieces on the board to form the whole tune. A basic version of each song is available to guide players, as are symbols on each block corresponding to the melody's instruments and bars.

We spoke with KranX's Alexander Porechnov about Musaic Box, nominated for both Excellence in Design and Excellence in Audio awards at this year's Independent Games Festival (part of Think Services, as is this website).

Porechnov discusses how he devised the music puzzle game's mechanics, why he chose to pair that component with hidden object gameplay, and KranX's plans to produce handheld ports for Musaic Box:

What kind of background do you have making games?

Alexander Porechnov: I’ve been a programmer since I was 10 years old; my first program was written on Fortran and was stored in punchcards! I also have a music degree in piano.

My first gaming and game programming experiences were with the Yamaha MSX computer (which had very advanced audio hardware for its time). My favorite games on the MSX were Metal Gear and Vampire Killer (Castlevania). I picked out tunes from these games by ear on piano and performed several spontaneous concerts for friends. I suppose that was when the union of video games and music was created in my life.

Up to 2003, I programmed business software, but I wrote unique mini-puzzle games in Java and inserted them as Easter Eggs for corporate time-tracking tools. All the employees were happy! I hope to recreate it in Flash some day.

And in early 2003, I was hired by [Russian developer] K-D LAB and participated in creating Perimeter, a real-time strategy game based on terraforming. Now I’m working with Kranx Productions.

What sort of development tools did you use?

AP: Outside of the usual tools for casual games, I chose a MIDI sequencer with scripting abilities, and then wrote a script for splitting tracks by bars. I've also done that work by hand because it was faster.

I used skeletal animations to control musicians in Musaic Box, so I coded a plug-in for a 3D modeling tool and animated the musicians myself.

What made you decide to create a music game with puzzle elements?

AP: Once upon a time, I was staring at my screen with a midi sequencer open, full of channels -- the idea of breaking this screenshot into pieces like a jigsaw puzzle came to me.

I'm sure this thought isn't unique, but I started analyzing it. I wrote down problems and solutions on a sheet of paper.

Some of those problems include:
1. Music has a disproportionate size in comparison with a jigsaw puzzle; a song usually has a long width (length of song) and a small height (number of instruments).
2. If we present music the same way we present a jigsaw, there is no challenge. Solving the puzzle will be too simple.
3. In jigsaw puzzles, we usually have a original small picture

So, if we want to have a fun puzzle:
1. We should take a small music fragment, like single verse of a song.
2. Mix channels with each piece, making them like Tetris forms.
3. Give players the ability to hear the original sample (only the lead melody). Solving the puzzle will play the completed arrangement, which will be the player's reward.

I also wanted to bring in an additional geometrical gameplay aspect, designed to provide additional challenge but simplify the puzzle for those who don't have a musical background. The game should be easy enough for players who aren't musically inclined.

So, I was needing an experiment from this point...

Were there any puzzle, audio-based, or other kinds of games that you took inspiration from with the puzzle portions of Musaic Box?

AP: On one hand, of course I've played Tetris, Sudoku, and so on, and I'm sure all these games played a roles during development; but on the other hand, I can't say I was inspired by a specific game.

I like music games where music is a part of the gameplay. In Musaic Box, player should both "hear and think." I suppose Musaic Box helps train the synchronous working of left and right cerebral hemispheres, because you work with music and logic at the same time.

You created the entire game by yourself? How long did you spend developing the game?

AP: I created the playable demo by myself in two months, even the art. Here's my first Musaic Box Logo.

The final game was made by 4 Alexanders and one Vadim in 10 months -- myself; artists Alexander Yuzvovich and Alexander Oleynik; menu programmer Alexander Drymov; and musician Vadim Chaliy (PhD in Philosophy!).

I should say that work with Vadim was quite interesting -- I'm in Simferopol [Crimea, Ukraine], while he is in Svetlogorsk [Kaliningrad Oblast], a 2000km distance between us.

It was something like simultaneous musical improvisation. For example, Vadim started with the base tune, I continued with supporting audio, and so on.

The musicians in Musaic Box were created using our team as models. I'm the one with the violin!

What did you find most challenging during development?

AP: I spent quite a few hours coding the audio portion of the game because it's very important to avoid any gaps between bars. All the other development tasks were more creative than challenging.

I did, however, take on both producer and project manager roles. In further projects, I hope to avoid this and spend all my time on more creative tasks.

What compelled you to couple the music puzzle game with a "hidden object" type game?

AP: I suppose we all want our games to reach as many people as possible. But if you have a new gameplay mechanic, you can miss all those people who are afraid of having to learn something new. So, we covered the unique music gameplay by adding the more familiar hidden object gameplay. It works like candy with a unique filling -- you start with a known flavor, and then taste a new experience.

Of course, we have some players who only like the hidden object portions and some players who hate hidden object gameplay. But our hidden object part is simple and adds a story while creating an environment.

I put in a lot of historical information about famous musicians and composers in the game's text. There are also some ancient and exotic musical instruments that can be found in Musaic Box.

Some gamers who might like the music puzzle portions might just want to play that component -- do you have plans to ever produce the music puzzle component as a standalone game?

AP: I'm not sure about the PC version, but we're planning to port Musaic Box without the hidden object part to iPhone, and maybe to Nintendo DS, too.

Do you have plans to further explore this mixing of puzzle games with music?

AP: I have several new ideas -- we have successfully prototyped one of them, and it will be one of the mini-games in our next title.

What songs did you end up having to abandon because they didn't work as puzzles?

AP: We used all the songs that we could find. The fact is that we could only use popular and free public domain songs while covering as many countries as possible. These requirements were quite pressing, and we didn't have a long list to pick from.

Each block in the puzzle forms have different and colored symbols. Can you describe how you developed these and how they aid players?

AP: Each instrument has its own color, so you shouldn't place two pieces with a similar color on the same column -- the musician won't be able to play two bars at the same time. If you look at the musician, he'll be breathless. This is explained in tutorial.

Returning to that screen with the midi-sequencer -- I drew the hieroglyphs in a similar way. If the melody goes up, then down, and then has three staccato notes, I drew a line going up and down with three dots.

So, you can use this, at least in the case of two or more identical bars. Signs will be identical, too. Moreover, if you see one pattern in a few pieces with different colors (instruments), you can place all these pieces in one column easily.

The game includes an unlockable "create a tune" feature. Can you share how this works?

AP: When I gave the demo to our first focus testers (my friends), I found that after some time, they forgot the goal and just arranged their own combinations with enthusiasm.

So, I put an additional "creations" mode into final game, something like sampler. I broke up all the pieces for each melody into the smallest atoms and prepared a big board. Some players call this mode a "casual sampler." This mode is just for fun, there is no goal. Some melodies can produce very funny combinations.

If you could start the project over again, what would you do differently?

AP: Nothing. Really, it was completed smoothly and in time, with a very creative mood. And, we have had great responses. If people say, "Each time I solved a puzzle, I would do a little happy dance in my chair while the music played," then I think we did all right.

Were there any elements that you experimented with that just flat out didn't work with your vision?

AP: Only one thing. I used bars' splitting into odd and even notes in several songs, but focus testing revealed that this is a good idea only for "The Entertainer" and "Für Elise." Other tunes with this presentation were extremely hard and not fun at all. It was the only time I redesigned finished puzzles.

What do you think of the state of independent game development, and are there any other independent games out that you currently admire?

AP: Indie game development is a huge and strong creative stream; if you plunge into it, you will be taken away. My last favorite game was Auditorium – great visuals and music performance.

What is the independent game development scene like in the ex-USSR?

AP: If you browse indie flash game portals and look in the credits, you will find many Slavic names. For example, yesterday, I enjoyed Splitter by Evgeny Karataev. As for Kranx, look for Yumsters. We have a few innovative prototypes on PSP and Nintendo DS.

So, I think the indie game development scene is alright in ex-USSR.

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

[I'm helping all the GDC Summit organizers get the word out on their market-focused mini-confs, with the aid of most excellent Think Services colleague Jen Steele, and here's one we've written up on the Casual Summit, which seems to have a pretty neat line-up of speakers from the casual game biz.]

The organizers of the Casual Games Summit at the 2009 Game Developers Conference have revealed speakers and sessions for the two-day March summit, with notables from PopCap, EA/Pogo, Oberon Media, Playfirst and more discussing the state and future of casual games.

The GDC Casual Games Summit will take place on Monday and Tuesday, March 23rd and 24th, 2009 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco as part of Game Developers Conference.

This always popular Summit returns to GDC with a broad range of topics that reflect the increasingly diversified casual games industry. CGS' theme for this year is based on the dueling business strategies from the book 'Blue Ocean Strategy', by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne.

The makers of Bejeweled, Women’s Murder Club, Build-A-Lot, Fairy Godmother Tycoon, Diner Dash and more will evaluate opportunities and challenges of the Red Ocean (established markets, audiences, and players) and the Blue Ocean (newly recognized or created markets addressing new segments) approaches in casual games:

In particular, they will look at hot topics like publisher’s funding criteria, optimizing the portal, the state of monetization, common design pitfalls, connecting people through casual games, and emerging platforms and business models.

Top sessions include 'The Year in Casual Game Design' with Nick Fortugno (Rebel Monkey) & Juan Gril (Joju Games). Back by popular demand, Juan & Nick will dissect the most successful casual games of the past year in their own unique way.

In addition, the 'Design Today' segment will feature a series of mini-lectures from some of the most successful designers in the industry; Kenny Shea Dinkin (PlayFirst), Jane Jensen (Oberon), Nick Fortugno (Rebel Monkey), Miguel Tartaj (KatGames), Jason Kapalka (PopCap Games), Michael Wyman (Big Splash Games), and Todd Kerpelman (EA/Pogo).

These notables will weigh in on designing today's leading game genres and provide tips for standing out in a crowded field. They’ll also recap recent developments in Hidden Object, Time Management, Adventure Puzzle, Card/Board, Match and Strategy Simulation games.

Industry veteran and Summit co-organizer Steve Meretzky of YouPlus commented of this year's line-up: "The field of casual games continues to expand to new platforms, new demographics, and new methods of monetization. The Casual Games Summit is a single super-strength dose of everything you need to know to create and to sell casual games in 2009, in this fast-changing but incredibly promising environment."

Elsewhere at the Summit, while genres are expanding, the current economic climate is tightening budgets everywhere. 'Business in a Red Ocean: Surviving the Squeeze' will feature Wade Tinney (Large Animal Games), David Rohrl (Casual Games - Zynga), Dan Prigg (RealGames, RealNetworks, Inc.), and Ofer Leidner (Oberon Media) discussing their survival techniques.

Some of the key questions discussed will be: 'What criteria do publishers use when deciding which games to fund? And how do portals decide which games to distribute? How can the big Web portal experience be perfected?', and, perhaps most key: 'How does a small developer survive in this climate?'

Despite the tough times now, Summit co-organizer Dave Rohrl from Zynga is optimistic, commenting: "Casual games are the key growth area for the game industry. This year’s summit brings together a great lineup of speakers spanning every part of the casual game industry – developers, publishers, distributors, journalists and more. They span downloadable games, social games, and every other part of the complex and diverse casual game ecosystem. This should be a multifaceted look at this exciting and fast-moving area.”

More information on the full line-up for the Summit is available at the official GDC Casual Games Summit webpage, with many new details on the entire March 23rd-27th GDC event also now available.

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

[In this opinion piece, pseudonymous game designer Spitfire looks at using fear in game design, setting it up in opposition to the usually-desired control, and asking: "how we can use core design techniques to scare a player?"]

I’ve been putting a lot of thought into control and how successful the player feels using that control lately.

Part of it came up when I read that Epic Games' Clifford Bleszinski was allegedly thinking of doing a horror game, part of it came up when I read Jerry from Penny Arcade's short take on Dead Space (and how it’s not a horror game), and part of it is me thinking about how combat relates to horror games, or any time a game asks the player to be afraid.

The following documents my thoughts for later reference, as I’m sure a lot of folks out there have already come to these conclusions.

Fear is a tough emotion to ask our players to have, especially when it relates to gaming. Gaming is almost entirely about "success." How successful does the player feel?

Typically, if players don't feel good and successful about the game they’re playing, they’ll stop playing it. They won’t recommend it to friends. They pan it on forums and boards. So, as developers, we’ve grown accustomed to players feeling successful. It’s good for us and our industry.

We can argue that fear involves scaring the player. Things that go “boo” or jump out at the player, or are visually horrifying to look at. Those things aren’t really within the realm of design, but simply use art or a player’s own base instincts against them. In the end, these things get old, and players get conditioned against them.

Fear & Lack Of Control

If we want to ask how we can use core design techniques to scare a player, I think we need to analyze that fear stems not only from a lack of success, but primarily, from a lack of control. We can take this literally to mean the controller in the player’s hands, but additionally, it can mean a lack of control over a situation, or even an absence of control altogether.

We can see the latter two of those notions in horror films. The viewer has no control over the protagonists in the film, and is essentially on a ride, experiencing what the protagonist experiences by proxy.

The Blair Witch Project accomplishes this through a lot of use of first-person cameras, and keeping the viewer in the dark about what is really going on the entire film (to the point of keeping the actors in the dark so they would convey this sensation and emotion to the audience), until the final reveal at the end, which the viewer (and even the protagonist) suspects is coming but is powerless to stop.

An even better example of control (and who has it) in horror films is found when we examine the relationship of power and control between the protagonist and the antagonist in “classic” recent horror films.

Jason, Freddy, that Saw dude, and Michael Meyers are all horrifying antagonists, primarily because they held all of the power. They had giant chainsaws, elaborate traps, huge knives, were seemingly impervious to damage, and could even control your dreams and kill you in your sleep.

How are mere humans supposed to contend with a “boss” of that magnitude? Most of the protagonists’ decisions are made in response to actions that the antagonist is taking.

Who's In Charge?

It’s the villain who has the plan and is in control of the situation. The hero is the mouse and is being confronted by mountain cats. Rarely ever do we see the protagonists come up with a plot to defeat the villain in a horror movie. Going “toe to toe” in combat almost always results in death. Most are lucky to merely escape.

This sort of mentality usually flies in the face of game design. Players expect to be a badass. They don’t want to have to fight a boss that they can’t really hurt.

Almost no one feels that they are getting their money’s worth from a title by having to side-step combat in order to succeed. We as developers have trained them to believe that we will either teach them how to defeat enemies or at least supply them with the tools to learn this for themselves.

For a perfect example of this, one has to look no further than Left 4 Dead’s witch, who was designed as a one-hit uber boss for the players to avoid, and yet everyone now wants to use the auto-shotgun exploit on her from behind. Killing her solo has actually become a new challenge, not something to fear.

Now, I’m not criticizing Left 4 Dead’s control vs. fear ratio. In fact, Valve has designed its game around this concept. The AI Director that we’ve heard so much about constantly tunes the game so that players with lower health are challenged at the right proportion so they don’t feel overwhelmed. Its objective is to make the game just difficult enough -- so that players limp, not sprint, across the finish line into the safe house.

And that’s a tough nut to crack. Left 4 Dead doesn’t rely on poor control to make the player afraid and tense; they use a procedurally-balanced difficulty system. In this way they have taken away the player’s control over his environment, even though it’s a mostly linear route.

Players don’t know what’s around any given corner, no matter how many times they play the level. So, players are no longer frustrated by the control of the character, as was the case in old survival horror games. They are powerful, but just powerful enough.

Fear Elsewhere In Gaming

But what about when we’re outside of the “horror” genre? How can we use the control vs. fear ratio to make players feel other kinds of fear, other than the straight up “I’m gonna get axe murdered!” kind?

I was surprised when I played Mirror’s Edge that I wasn’t really experiencing any real sort of vertigo. We’re certainly high enough up. We’re certainly in precarious enough situations. But I think maybe we were too much in control of Faith. Now, hey, I’m not saying make the controls clunkier here. That’s not the argument, necessarily. I think the problem is that we can either be a badass, or we can experience fear.

The two are nearly mutually exclusive. Faith was pretty much a badass. There isn’t anything in the game she can’t parkour over (or under, or around, etc.). We’re taught right off the bat that this isn’t really so much a dangerous rooftop scenario; it’s a playground for us to play on.

Any sense of vertigo is typically overwhelmed by a rush of endorphins or adrenaline. It’s not scary. It’s exciting. Compare the sensation of playing Mirror’s Edge with the sensation of watching this video.

In both examples, we are exploring dangerously vertical pathways. But in one, we’re in full control and a badass parkour expert, and in another, we’re trying to keep from pissing our pants. Part of this is the “level design” of the catwalk in the video, and part of it is in what we know our “character” is able to do. Even if it was playable, the catwalk video is terrifying because:

1. Our moveset only involves walking, stairclimbing, and balancing. Running is too risky.
2. We’re almost always asked to stand precariously on a ledge (so we’re constantly asked to flirt with but avoid failure).
3. Failure almost certainly means death.

The Dark Forces Effect

The only gameplay example I can come up with for comparison to the video was the Coruscant level from 1995's Star Wars: Dark Forces, where we’re asked to walk around a bunch of dangerous railing-free narrow catwalks so high above the planet’s surface we can’t even see the ground.

I was in full control of my character with an FPS control scheme. I was even a badass with an insane number of guns. But the pucker factor for that level was off the charts. Even with a quicksave feature, I was so afraid of falling it became almost crippling.

It was probably due to the constant wind noise, and if I’m remembering correctly, I think they actually tried to blow you off of some ledges every so often. Of course, it didn’t hurt that bad guys were on the ledges too and trying to shoot you the entire time or melee you off of them.

But the point was that despite being given a considerable degree of control (pinpoint shot accuracy, FPS view and controls), I felt at the time very not in complete control of the situation.

It’s interesting to note how this footpath takes control away from the hiker. At times the path is literally crumbled away in front of him, and he is required to walk a balance beam made out of the catwalk’s understructure hundreds of feet in the air before he can return to the relative “safety” of the cement path again.

Ostensibly, this is the same mechanic as the balance beam segments seen in Mirror’s Edge. Regardless of which one is real or not, one is exponentially more terrifying than the other, as we are expected to do brave and dangerous things in ME, but on this narrow hiking path we want to avoid them, but are forced to confront them if the hiker wishes to continue on.

So, as developers, if we seek to strike fear in a player, how can we give them complete control over their character, yet restrict control in their environment, in their decision-making, and within the confines of the gameplay?

[Spitfire is a game designer at a self-publishing development company. Before starting his site game-ism.com, he was a published gaming journalist, and during his career has also worked in television, commercials, and film.]

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

[GameSetLinks is GameSetWatch's daily link round-up post, culling from hundreds of weblogs and outlets to compile the most interesting longform writing, links, and criticism on the art and culture of video games.]

Time to dig out the GameSetLinks, then, and there's a host of fun stuff in here - particularly Jon Hare on the creation of Sensible Software's almost crowning, but eventually developer destroying rock and roll sim title, a story that's been told a few times - but never in this much detail.

Also in here - OXM on Community Games, silly shader mistakes, Codemasters and the Malaysian connection, some thoughts on SFII Turbo HD Remix, after the fact, and a few other things besides.

Yay hurray yay:

Independents' Day | OXM ONLINE
A good Official Xbox Magazine article about XNA Community Games.

Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix Afterthoughts from 1UP.com
These 'afterthoughts' pieces - and there are a few more just posted in 1UP's features section - are excellent.

I Get Your Fail: The Error Party Shader
Broken games make for some wicked effects sometimes, as this cute insider blog shows.

Sex 'n' Drugs 'n' Rock 'n' Roll Article - Page 1 // Retro /// Eurogamer
A longform and off the wall look, by co-creator Jon Hare, at the game that derailed Sensible Software's career - including a download of the first half of the resulting concept album.

How Britain loses quality jobs — Bruce On Games
The Codemasters/Malaysia funding connection hasn't been much discussed, actually - interesting catch.

white on white - By Lorenzo Wang
Oh my, someone who thinks You Have To Burn The Rope is the only worthy game in the IGF this year. Bizarro world alert. (I think all the IGF finalists are equally worthy, because that's what the judges voted for, FWIW, but I know it's been controversial, and we're working to clarify things for next year.)

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

[In an 'off beaten track' interview -- the kind of thing we love to host on GSW -- Japanese developer Imageepoch's (Arc Rise Fantasia, Luminous Arc) charismatic president Ryoei Mikage tells Game Developer EIC Brandon Sheffield about his studio's rapid growth and console plans -- and hints at a possible "million [selling]" action RPG targeting the West.]

Though founded in just 2005, Imageepoch's development staff has already expanded to accommodate over 120 employees, split into four teams all working separately on different projects.

The Tokyo-based company has three shipped titles under its belt, all for Nintendo DS -- Sands of Destruction (coming stateside in Fall) and two Luminous Arc releases.

Imageepoch demonstrated its flourishing talents in the latter games, noticeably improving the strategy RPG's combat and presentation with the recently released sequel.

The studio also has announced two highly anticipated titles -- Arc Rise Fantasia, one of very few JRPGs exclusive to Wii; and 7th Dragon, an RPG featuring an all-star development team comprised of Etrian Odyssey director Kazuya Niinou, Phantasy Star designer and director Rieko Kodama, and venerable composer Yuzo Koshiro.

Imageepoch's charismatic president Ryoei Mikage, who also heads one of the studio's four teams, talked with us a about his studio's rapid growth and console plans -- and hints at a possible "million [selling]-class" action RPG targeting Western audiences:

I want to clarify: Imageepoch was created during the production of Luminous Arc, and has nothing to do with Epoch (Barcode Battler, Doraemon games), the toy and game company, right? Because there's a big confusion in the Western media whether you're the same company.

Ryoei Mikage: Yeah, we're not in any way part of their company. Actually, I made this company with one yen. [laughter]

How did you hire people with one yen?

RM: You can buy five of us! When [Junichiro] Koizumi was prime minister in Japan, he had a plan of the one yen corporation. That was when I was in college, and I started up my company with one yen.

So it was effectively governmental help?

RM: Just a simple plan. Usually, you need 100,000 yen to start up a company, but prime minister Koizumi said, "We'll make it in the system that if you have one yen, you can make a company."

Did you have any idea of what you wanted to do or was it just made up as you went along? Like, you created a company and then you decided to think about what you just created and try to do something?

RM: I started up my company during my fourth year in college. By then, I was working part-time at Sega, and at that time, I was also working for Namco. But looking at the Japanese employment market, it's an environment that doesn't give young people a chance. You need to have certain experience, you need to have some kind of appeal. So, as one of my "appeals", or as an edge, I decided to start up a company.

I know that you made a reference to what Level-5 did, which was to create a new kind of environment for employees in Japan. Do you have a specific philosophy? Or is it just, "Let's do anything that Japanese companies don't do"?

RM: One of the slogans we always say is "Let's all be famous," not just one person. Another is "Let's all get skills," starting from when we don't have skills or when we're still young. And also "Let's all work together." That's one of the philosophies that we always kept, together.

How do you actually get to do that, when quite often in games you need sort of a "face" of the company in order to talk to press and things like that? How can you actually make everyone get this feeling that they are part of the face?

RM: One of the biggest things, that I try to do: In a lot of Japanese development companies, the president will do the speaking, and the president will announce a new title; in my company, I always introduce my producers and directors to the public and say, "These are the people who belong to this project."

And when they're working on their project I don't say anything -- I don't interfere with what they're thinking as creators.

In terms of the organization right now, I believe that you stole away [former Atlus director Kazuya] Niinou and [former Namco director Hiroyuki] Kanemaru.

First of all, it's very rare in the Japanese industry that someone managed to snatch some people. I was wondering how were they convinced and why you brought these people specifically, rather than others?

RM: When we were working at Namco, Kanemaru-san was working on the Tales series, and he was actually my boss. Niinou-san was unemployed at the time, and we had dinner together. We were talking about my vision, and he decided to go along with it. Then, I just noticed he was working for my company. [laughs]

So, it was after he left Atlus? He didn't leave Atlus for you?

RM: Yeah, it just happened that way. He was not with Atlus anymore, he was wandering around.

There are four teams internally at Imageepoch?

RM: Four teams, yes.

And you're one of the bosses?

RM: Yes.

Like [Nintendo CEO/president and once HAL head Satoru] Iwata.

Ryoei Mikage: Yes. [laughs]

I was wondering if the idea for taking specific people and bringing them into your company has anything to do with the production model of movies, since your father was a director?

RM: Realistically, it's not like I'm looking for talents that I want to bring over. I usually just talk to them about what my dreams are, and they come apply to my company. [laughter]

You must be a very good talker.

RM: Yeah, a lot of people say, "You're born with your mouth first." Which means, "You know how to talk a lot."

If I remember correctly, Niinou is not only one of the four directors or producers, he is also an overseeing producer -- I wanted to know the logic of that. For example, does he oversee all projects, even though one is maybe for Marvelous and another is for Sega? How exactly does it work?

RM: Niinou-san's title is producer, and my title is president, but in a management way, yes, he is in charge of looking after all the teams. Financially, he is overseeing everything. As for the game plans, there are some projects that he's not involved in.

I'm really interested in the way the company was set up because I think it is quite unique and it looks like it's performing, because everyone is actually talking about it.

Did you notice any mistakes in the original setup that you arranged or is everything working fine? Are there things that you realized with the first few projects that you announced that required changes in the organization? Because it's a very unique organization.

RM: For the ten year plan that I have in mind, we're on the right track. But is it the best way? I'm not really sure there is an actual best scenario ...

Within the structure that you have, is it easy to adjust for trouble that you may run into in terms of management style or stuff like that?

In Japan, development is done linearly quite often, but in the U.S., we have Scrum and different types of production methodologies. Have you found that with the team setup you have, it's easy to adjust for problems in the steps?

RM: First of all, yes, I think it is easier to adapt to different styles... or anything to make it a better system, but one of the ways that I tend to think about it is, the U.S. is good in that sense because it's easy for people in the U.S. to go to another country and make friends and communicate with other cultures.

Japanese aren't like that. They are really enclosed, and they can only really make friends within the Japanese community. Using sports as an example, like basketball and baseball, if all the teammates are working together with one vision, it makes the team so much stronger. That's one of the things that I'm trying to implement into my company right now.

How did Marvelous and Imageepoch wind up working together?

Hideyuki Mizutani (Marvelous director): Two years ago, we started working together for Luminous Arc. It was a strategy RPG for the Nintendo DS. From there, we talked about doing something with consoles, where we could do something that has a deep story and rich characters. And since the Wii is a new platform, it seemed like a good fit for us to work together.

It seems as though the company grew very very fast from small company to doing multiple projects at the same time. Was it difficult to staff up that quickly?

RM: I started off at Namco with the Tales series, particularly Tales of Symphonia. A lot of the people who worked on that are at Imageepoch now. ...

There aren't that many development companies that are full of young people nowadays. That's one of the things that I had in mind, to have a development company that has a lot of young people in the start-up. So, I didn't have a lot of trouble recruiting people into our company.

So, did you have to train all of these new people? Are they coming from college?

RM: Most of them are experienced, like myself -- I used to start to work on development when I was 16 years old. There are 10-15 staff members that are like straight out of college, and they don't know much, but other than that, they're all experienced.

So, young but inexperienced. Why grow so quickly, in terms of making so many games now? It seemed that you started small with DS, and now you have multiple projects simultaneously and working on console titles. Not that it's a bad thing, but what's the philosophy for it?

RM: My father directed some movies in Hollywood -- because of that, at a young age, like 12 or 13, I always had an image of starting a company, and I always thought that around 120 people per studio is a perfect size.

It's a good enough number for a big project because you need a lot of staff members. At the same time, when there's a small project, it's small enough that I can maneuver around and know what's going on.

So, with 120 people, it's the best to get the good 120. Within these two to three years, I've been handpicking the best players. I preselected good people, and they're on the verge of getting to that, and that's what I'm going after right now.

In a sense, we're still growing from there. We started of with the easiest, with the Nintendo DS, then we went to PSP, and now we're going to Wii. But as we get more good staff and a better studio, we'll of course move forward to 360 and PS3.

What is the ideal company size then for developing on 360 and PS3?

RM: At max, I'm thinking 200 employees. In my mind, I'm never going to go above that.

That's quite a large staff for a new company. It seems like it would be really important to set a vision for the studio in order to keep everyone on the same page. How have you fostered that?

RM: [By] talking about the company vision, what I'm thinking -- and I'm an outspoken person -- the easiest part is that most of the people that I'm recruiting are friends that I've had before. And I know about 400 to 500 developers.

So, from there, just picking 120 isn't that bad. Plus, we [all] have a long, long relationship as friends, so we have a really easy time communicating.

When starting a new company, it seems like a good opportunity to start fresh in terms of development style.

It's a really good opportunity to start over. Have you done that with new development styles or are you continuing with the traditional style?

RM: Of course, it's still a new company, and we have a lot of employees, which you mentioned, so it is a bit top-down right now. I usually come up with the management, the marketing table, the game genre, and the platform it will come out on. From there, I pitch it to the creative team and have them come up with the creative stuff.

But at the same time, since I graduated from art school and majored in movies, I have a lot of creativity that's coming from there. I’m also studying at law school right now to get my MBA, so I am trying to expand and come up with more new visions in that sense.

I think that in development companies, there aren't that many business/marketing people who are running them. It's more like a creator that rose to the top and then went from there. In my opinion, I want to be a creator and put it together with the business aspect.

With this concept in mind, when I explain that to other people, many understand what I'm trying to say and want to part of it. It goes back to that I said -- I don't have that much of a hard time recruiting people -- it's where that's coming from.

You're making a "core" game on the Wii, which most people are not doing. How do you feel about the environment for traditional games on the Wii?

RM: We always look at the market and look at what's not there, what's missing. And we try to go towards the goal from there. For example, we're looking at Nintendo's Animal Crossing and whatnot. Looking at that, it's like, "Yeah, there aren't [many of] those kinds of games." So, we always have those talks.

It seems as if a game like Arc Rise Fantasia has a larger existing audience for that kind of game for Xbox 360 or PS3 because there are more actual traditional gamers instead of grandparents and moms playing.

What are you looking at in terms of those consoles, because I know you said you were interested in moving to those next.

RM: One of the things is, honestly speaking, I wanted to work on a Nintendo platform. Actually this idea was brought to us by Nintendo, and then we started to go from there. Then we were thinking, "Who has a great relationship with Nintendo?" and from there we decided to go with Marvelous.

And, as you said, Wii is more of a casual gamer platform compared to the Xbox 360 and PS3, but for example, Tales of Symphonia did fairly well domestically in Japan with 300,000 [units sold]. And abroad, we had 500,000. We're not looking for a million-selling title.

At the same time, if [a core title like that] goes to XBox 360 or PS3, there's always a company that's been making those kinds of games, like tri-Ace. We didn't see that it was necessary to compete going into that market.

This environment right now is very different from previous hardware generations; it's really split. What in your opinion and in your company's style would be a million-seller?

RM: There is an action RPG that we're thinking is going to be in the million class. The target audience is Europe first and then U.S.. I'm thinking it doesn't really have to sell in Japan.

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

[We're getting into heavy announcement time for our buddies at GDC, and here's the first keynote reveal - Nintendo boss Satoru Iwata will be turning up to discuss new dev opportunities -- and hopefully throw in a mini-ton or two for the acolytes.]

Satoru Iwata, President of Nintendo Co., Ltd. will deliver a keynote address at the 2009 Game Developers Conference, kicking off the main conference’s schedule of lectures, panel discussions and roundtables.

The address, “Discovering New Development Opportunities,” marks Iwata’s first return to the GDC keynote stage since 2006. The Game Developers Conference takes place March 23-27 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco.

Being a developer himself, Iwata’s keynote lectures at the Game Developers Conference are known for inspiring other developers to think about creating games in new and different ways:

His 2005 keynote gave developers the first information about the technology being used for the next-generation console then codenamed "Revolution" -- which has since become known as the Wii.

In 2006, Iwata spoke about "disrupting development," and introduced the Western development community to philosophies on engaging new players, surprising existing players and the role the company’s video game systems would play in expanding the market and widening the possibilities for developers.

"The Game Developers Conference is thrilled to welcome Satoru Iwata back to the keynote stage," said Meggan Scavio, Event Director of the GDC. "His previous talks at the GDC can be credited with setting the stage for much of the huge growth the games industry has since seen, and attendees continue to talk about how both lectures impacted their perspective on development."

"We are confident that Iwata’s keynote this year will be added to the list of memorable GDC talks. Attendees are eager to know how he will inspire them this year."

Born in 1959 in the Hokkaido Prefecture of Japan, Iwata studied at and graduated from the Tokyo Institute of Technology University, where he majored in computer science. Shortly after graduating, Iwata joined HAL Laboratory, Inc. and in 1983 began coordinating the software production and development of Nintendo titles, such as the Kirby series.

By 1993, he had become president of that company. In 2000, Iwata moved to Nintendo Co., Ltd. as the head of the Corporate Planning division, where he was responsible for Nintendo’s global corporate planning. In 2002, he was named president of Nintendo Co., Ltd. where he continues to guide development of games with the passion of a game creator.

Satoru Iwata’s keynote, “Discovering New Development Opportunities,” is scheduled for Wednesday, March 25, 2009 from 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. PST in the Esplanade Room of the Moscone Center’s South Hall.

The Game Developers Conference (part of Think Services, as is this website), the largest professional industry event dedicated to the creation of games, attracts over 18,000 attendees, and will take place March 23-27, 2009, at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco.

For registration details and for more information, please visit the official Game Developers Conference 2009 website.

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

[GameSetLinks is GameSetWatch's daily link round-up post, culling from hundreds of weblogs and outlets to compile the most interesting longform writing, links, and criticism on the art and culture of video games.]

As the week rolls on, so do the GameSetLinks, starting out with a PC World feature checking out some Half-Life 2 mods created by Scandinavian students, including the (pictured) 'It's Mime Time', surely one of the oddest mods of an FPS ever.

Digging into these links, you'll also discover 1UP's epochally neat Retro Blog poking around highlights of the SNES area and coming up with polygonal rabbit star pilots, Jon Blow's sharp comments on the WGA writing awards, the slightly avant Vorpal Bunny Ranch and Versus CluClu Land both producing excellent analytical game writing, and more.

Phase bass phase bass:

Four Freaky Half-Life 2 Mods - PC World
Darren Gladstone takes the IGF Student Showcase winners as a jumping-off point and picks out and expands upon the slightly inspired DADIU titles - of which one was a finalist, but all were pretty demented.

1UP's Retro Gaming Blog : Heart on Fire: Key Moments in the 16-Bit Era - #03
Indeed, Star Fox and particularly the SuperFX chip are too often semi-forgotten, I think - not entirely sure why.

Braid » Blog Archive » About the WGA’s Video Game Writing Awards
Jonathan Blow takes on the Hollywood union's game writing awards: 'The problem is that it’s not really an award ceremony. It’s a membership drive masquerading as an award ceremony, and that’s a large part of the insult.'

Interview: Annabelle Kennedy << Attract Mode
Great interview with an up and coming indie game artist/designer. Also, I do genuinely think the indie scene may have more prominent women in creative roles (getting interviewed, etc) than AAA games, which is potentially a good sign.

Vorpal Bunny Ranch: Despite all my rage...
'Despite some people not liking the term ludonarrative dissonance, as a concept it exists in Gears of War: the game portrays you as a gruff, take-charge ex-prisoner who has to save humankind; problem is that you're doing all this while taking cover and rescuing your teammates so that you can progress in a stop-go fashion.'

Versus CluClu Land: Sweaty Delerium is the Worst Videogame Ever
This is the kind of writing about games we should see more of, odd though it is: 'So here's the thing: My hallucinatory feverishness had this distinct ludic quality.'

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

['Pixel Journeys' is a mammoth GameSetWatch-exclusive monthly column by @Play creator John Harris, discussing games with unusual design attributes that have lessons to teach modern game designers. In this column, he looks at obscure Japan-only dice-based RPG Sugoro Quest - and why not?]

These are the two great trends for CRPG development:

The first, focused upon by western developers, is towards greater freedom of player choice. Originating from Dungeons & Dragons, it has found fullest fruit in the Fallout games, the Elder Scrolls games, and in the roguelike games. But even the more linear RPGs usually feature some degree of player exploration and decision-making.

The second trend is towards depth of storytelling, which is the direction that most Japanese developers went. Taking more from the story tropes of D&D than its gameplay, it tends to focus more on storytelling than player decision-making.

The two branches of the tree have, in the years since 1974, grown far from each other. Eternal Sonata bears little in common with Fallout III. This month, we take a look at a game from a time when the two families weren't anywhere near so estranged.

Let's examine the unexpectedly awesome Japanese game Sugoro Quest.

Introduction

(Note: I played this Japan-only Famicom game through a translation [patch file only] made by Alan Midas and touched up by KingMike Productions. There is also a SNES sequel, Sugoro Quest++: Dicenics, which seems to be substantially different in many ways, and what might be an upcoming Wii resurrection of the series, Sugoro Chronicle. None of these games has officially made it to the United States, and knowing publishers, they probably never will. Thinking too hard about the injustice of this situation will make you want to punch things.)

Sugoro Quest is special because it's one of the few games I could name that's unabashedly a combination of both approaches. It's like a powergaming-heavy Western game, yet it has that Japanese design aesthetic. To top it all off, it's an RPG that likes to pretend it's a board game.

What do I mean, likes to pretend? Each area is laid out in squares and paths. You alternate between rolling a die and moving that number of spaces on the board. Some spaces cause events to happen if you roll on or past them, but others only activate if you land right on their space. There are good and bad events of both types. Because some spaces don't get landed on, there will be some events that do not happen during a playthrough, giving each run a pleasingly chaotic feel.

Remember now that many of the classic adventures of "traditional" RPGs contain random, or quasi-random, events. Some adventures allow the players to bypass the big fight against Foozle if they've been clever enough to find some object elsewhere in the dungeon, or make use of some cunningly-acquired information, or just out-clever the monster. The best such adventures encourage this kind of thing, but central to the idea is that the players have no guarantee of it. A few adventures contain surpassingly well-hidden things, things you'd think no sane group of players would encounter. You can bet, though, that someone out there has.

Playing the Game

For this play, I've chosen to take the oddly leotard-clad Half-Elf on a jaunt through the Beach area, to see what's been causing local fishermen to not pull in any fish. Now this may seem like a strange theory, but something makes me think the source of the problem must be some kind of monster...

We start at the head of a long path marked with spaces. Along the way are many kinds. The most common on most maps are "ordinary," orange spaces, each of which contains a fight with a monster. Although they aren't marked, each space actually has a specific monster to fight. Some areas of the board have lots of one type, while others offer a mix. Sometimes there's even one or two special monsters who only exist on a single space, and it might take many plays before you land on it.

This is because movement is handled much like a traditional follow-the-path board game, like Milton Bradley's Game of Life or Monopoly. Each turn begins when you select Move and roll a single die, which determines how many spaces you travel. A few spaces, like castles, villages and caves, activate when you pass by them (and ending your turn), but most spaces must be landed on to have any effect. Usually this isn't a big deal, but there are a few spaces that are very nice to land on if you know which ones they are.

The Beach map is the third of the six in the game. It seems that you don't have to play all of then, but ultimately the maps exist in order to boost your characters for tackling later maps. Each map has much tougher monsters than the previous one, so attempting to have a character skip one is usually suicidal. Since each trip only allows one of the four characters on the journey you might think playing through each map four times to be repetitive, but it turns out there's enough happening on each map, enough secret things and alternate routes, and the four characters are different enough from each other, that each board tends to remain interesting even through several playthroughs.

Speaking of those characters, let's have a look at how they differ.

The FIGHTER specializes, as you might expect, in physical confrontations. His weapon attacks, of course, are pretty good. He does pick up some magic too, in fact he gets Heal in the first few levels, and the Fighter must rely upon it. But he begins with no magic at all, and he doesn't even get the chance to earn MP until he earns his first spell. Eventually the Fighter earns several, some not bad, but his stats and dice generally force him to attack opponents. That's good because he can save what little MP he does get for healing, but it's bad because when a physical attack fails enemies get the chance to retaliate with a special attack, and some of those decrease attack effectiveness, which can make your character almost useless. If faced with a situation like that, most of the time the player must flee, leave his fate to one of the capricious Dicemen, or die.

The DWARF is the character you might have expected the Fighter to be. While he does eventually pick up a scant handful of spells, he won't get his first for many levels. The Dwarf must thus rely on items, or luck, for healing for most of his life. His great physical stats mean he'll start out with lots of HP, and gain even more when he lands on bonus spaces. Otherwise he's like an even more focused version of the Fighter. One more thing, the Dwarf is the only character who never learns the DiceCall spell...

The ELF is the major magic-using character. She can fight a little bit if need be if you've kept her equipment upgraded, but magic is what you usually rely upon. Elf gets the most spells, and gets lots of MP to use them. Suguro Quest is a game in which utility spells truly shine; there are spells to do direct damage, to improve your dice, to worsen your opponents dice, to heal, and even to decide what you'll roll for movement.

And then there's HALF-ELF. At first she might seem to be the all-rounder, with general proficiency in everything, but as is often the case with these characters in RPGs, it really means that she's only okay at both physical attacks or attack magic. However, since many monsters are weak to either normal attacks or magic, since she can do both it means she won't have as many situations where she's badly outmatched.

There is a hidden advantage to playing the Half-Elf, one which will come up as we follow her on a trip through the third map, the Beach.

Once a space is passed, it becomes difficult to return to it. The only ways to return to an earlier space on a playthrough is to run from battle (which may send the player back a handful of spaces, but may also get him into another fight), or to find a loop in the path. Usually the way you want to go is forward, since the paths generally lead to the boss, but there are a few very special spaces the player would be greatly helped by landing on.

This mechanic is a large part of what makes Sugoro Quest so interesting to play. It's not like a CRPG where once the player knows the right people to talk to he can always get particular things and advance with the story. The rolls of the dice can make the game very easy or very hard. There is an aspect of unfairness here, perhaps, but the player can make up for that by buying utility items in the shop, and just plain-out giving it another go. There is no lasting penalty for failing a map, and the player can try again and again until he makes it.

In the above screenshot, the first roll is a 2, which takes Half-Elf onto a Pool space. A good start! The most common spaces are "plain" spaces, which contain monster fights, and pools, which give the player extra HP and MP. One unique thing about this game is that characters don't have maximum HP or MP stats. If the player lands on three consecutive Pools, the points continue to pile up more and more. Many times maps begin with a lot of Pool spaces, and end with a lot of monster spaces, which provides for an escalating difficulty as progress is made through the level.

King: "Whatever the source, I want you to find it! First you should find yourself a good strong boat though!"
Half-Elf: "A boat in a land of fishermen. Easy! I'll just go run off and get one!"

Oh Half-Elf, if only it were that simple.

It's an Anti-Dice. They're the weakest opponents in the Beach, but they have an annoying special attack.

Fights in Sugoro Quest are also fairly unique. There are three major things you can do in a turn. Fight and Magic work similarly, you and the monster's "Diceman," an animated proxy that represents the monster in the fight, roll dice simultaneously and the numbers are compared.

It is a simple test of magnitude; whoever has the higher number has his attack succeed, and the difference between the two dice is the effectiveness of the attack. This screen shows Half-Elf losing one to five, a substantial difference. In addition to raising stats, gaining levels will occasionally upgrade a die, to a maximum range of one through nine. Attack and Magic dice improve separately, so while the fighter might roll one through four on Attack, he might be capable of getting only a one or two on Magic.

Half-Elf is also in a little trouble when Anti-Dice uses SlowDice, a spell which lowers your attack die rolls for the rest of the fight. Lower rolls mean your hits succeed less often, and the enemy's succeeds more, which he might use to pop another SlowDice, making the situation even worse. It's possible for a die to get degraded to the point where it only rolls 1s, a hopeless situation unless you have some means of escape or a trick up your sleeve.

But Half-Elf is eventually victorious, and continues on her journey. The next roll is a 6, which takes us to a village.

Old Man: "Finally someone's come to help us fishermen! Garin might be able to spare a boat! My boat sank." Half-Elf: "While I have no doubt that you only have yourself to blame for that, I can't help but glean a sense of foreboding from your words." The next moves, in accordance with the hateful laws of chance, are a 1, a 2, and another 1. The first and third spaces are monsters, a Ketbash in both cases, a kind of angry toucan-parrot.

But the middle roll lands poor Half-Elf on a Skull. Skull spaces cause the character to lose a percentage of his points, around one-fifth of the current value. Because spaces that do instant damage (instead of bringing forth a monster to do the hitting) seem to always hurt for a percentage of current HP, it's impossible die from them. If you have one HP and land on a Skull you won't lose anything, but if you have a lot of hits you'll similarly lose a lot. The implications of this will be easier to see when we reach the ocean. That last monster also gave enough experience points to being Half-Elf to a new experience level.

Next move's a three, landing our heroine on another appreciated Pond space. HP are now 117 and MP are at a respectable 210. While sources of straight damage on the board tend to take off percentages of the player's totals, the bonuses from Pool Spaces are proportional to the player's statistics. So high-level characters get more benefit from pools, but having that high HP means penalty spaces will similarly take off more.

The next roll's a 5, shown above on the step-before-last of the move. This landed on one of the game's better spaces, a Shield. Shield, Sword and Armor spaces grant a bonus to a piece of equipment in use, shown on the stat screen as a "plus." The bonus is slight but permanent; it even persists when the map is finished. It's lost when the player changes equipment though, so the CRPG upgrade cycle tends to eliminate these boosts.

Both the next moves, unfortunately, are 1s. This Half-Elf is slightly over-leveled for this map so they don't cause much problems, but even weak monsters can wear you down if the dice aren't tumbling in your favor. Actually, Half-Elf has a potent weapon against bad movement rolls that I'm not using at the moment to save magic points, but I hadn't expected this kind of bad luck. Surely it can't last, can it?

Rolled a three, bringing me to a village.
Guy: "Hello HalfElf. We're all friends of Garin here... Are you scared of what's ahead?"

Uh-oh, it's a choice! If this game were just about rolling a die and moving your character it'd be a little interesting due to the way randomness affects the player's progress, but it wouldn't really be memorable. Choices like this one mix things up, giving the player some say over his route. Depending on whether I say yes or no I'll take a different path through the level, and each path may provide an advantage, or inflict a disadvantage, that will affect my progress through the board. These decision trees are a big part of the game, and the Beach map in particular is devious in its use of them. Here, I answered "Yes."

Guy: "You're either brave or stupid..."
Half-Elf: "Thanks for your opinion, I'll be sure to file it away for future reference. Jerk."

Rolled a 5, getting me to another village. I'm having unusually bad dice luck here; low rolls on this path would have gotten me one or two more Pools, but I just whooshed on by. The other route has rougher terrain, but it also would have given Half-Elf a Fish, which has an unexpected use later on.

The village's message was a warning about the ocean, special board spaces found only on this map that can either greatly help, or harm, the player's health. Without a boat, the effort of swimming through the water takes off a whole fifth of the player's HP every time a space is landed upon. Around half of this map, by the end, is ocean spaces, and it doesn't take many of them to bring the player's health down to perilous levels. Even worse, ocean spaces also bear monsters to fight. At this point in the map there has been no chance to get a boat, so the player always must swim through this first ocean section.

Look at these rolls! Three 1s, and a 2 and a 3 among them. It took me six turns to pass these eleven spaces, bringing our poor gymnast down to 40 hits. At least as health is lost further losses are lessened. It's impossible to actually die from penalty spaces; if the player's taken down to 1 HP then all penalties will be for 0 damage, but since these spaces also contain monsters, it's a dangerous way to proceed.

A monster encountered on one of these spaces is a Sea Borz, whose Diceman used a dirty trick common to the foes of this game. Instead of rolling his die, he threw it at Half-Elf, knocking her out! When this happens, the enemy gets to throw dice unopposed until she wakes up, generally doing large amounts of damage. There's not much the player can do about this, although as the characters gain levels the trick works less often. Another trick they sometimes pull is to stomp the ground after the dice have come to rest, flipping their die over to a different number, but since they aren't discriminating when they do this, the trick is as likely to hurt the monster as the player!

The player can also use tricks, of a sort. On his turn, he can choose to use an item from his inventory. Unexpectedly, using an item does not use up a turn, although it usually consumes the item. If you use an item on a turn, the enemy does not roll unless it was a dice-affecting item. A common item found from searching random spaces is a Stone, a one-use attack that does a handful of damage to any foe without rolling. Since the opposition doesn't get a roll against this, if you have enough Stones even tough monsters can be brought down! The player's limited inventory space works against this tactic, however.

Rolling a 3, Half-Elf lands on a space and promptly gets her leotard-covered butt handed to her by a Ketbash. Even though she's a bit over-leveled for here, the monster's Diceman threw a die at her, knocking her out for consecutive turns, and with the combination of low HP from swimming and the lack of a chance to use heal spells, she lost. Fortunately she had an Elixir at hand, so she didn't get thrown out of the map. If at least one Elixir is held in inventory upon dying then the player can pick up where he left off, although he'll still have very few HP.

Elixirs are cheap, but the low health replenished by them makes them ill-suited to use to power through a level, and losing a fight to a boss sends the player on an alternate path away from the goal. Those paths always loop around for another go at the boss, but if he's already severely depleted after a failed boss fight his chances aren't going to be much better the next time around.

After healing up a little the next roll is a two, taking us to another village:
Girl: "My boss used to be the best fisherman in the country! His boat used to be the fastest thing in the water! You can use it if you want! (garbled text*)
HalfElf: "Really?"
Girl: "It's old now..."
HalfElf: "Oh well..."
Girl: "It might sink..."
HalfElf: "..."
Girl: "No! I was joking? Still want it?"

* The translation patch I'm using has a couple of bugs in it. The conversation at this point is a bit messed up. In later screenshots you'll see the garbage on the sides of the window.

This is actually a pretty important decision, but not for any reason the game would bother to tell you! Answering no sets the character on the route east, answering yes takes us north with an Old Boat.

Although it's a bit iffy, let's try our luck with the Boat.

The next rolls are a 2 and a 4, bring HalfElf to the shores of the ocean once more. Now that we have a boat, ocean spaces actually heal her!

Ah, this is the life. With all these hit points, even the boss should present no problem. Unless...

It sank! This means trouble. Although actually, the boat always sinks on this square; it's an invisible event space that can't be bypassed. But look at the map:

Six steps away is a warp space. This is a very important spot to try to land on. Important enough not to leave this to chance...

It's time to use HalfElf's secret weapon: the DiceCall spell.

In exchange for 14 MP, HalfElf gets to decide how many spaces she'll move. She gets this spell as early as level 3! It may seem like a ridiculous advantage in a game like this, and it's true, this is about the point in the game where it's most useful. Much earlier and 14 MP would be too much to dispense with, and soon after here Elf will be learning it too, and the boards will be designed to take it into more account. Even Fighter learns it late in the game. (Dwarf never learns it, the poor schmuck.) DiceCall is HalfElf's major advantage, the thing that makes her an interesting character for the first half of the game. She can use DiceCall to hit every Pool she comes across and build her HP and MP to astronomical levels. But this is balanced by her general weakness in other areas; even a character with 999 HP can lose it all against a boss she's not ready for.

Beneath the Surface

This kind of design is evident everywhere in Sugoro Quest. Another example, from earlier in the game:

At the beginning of the second level is this area, which has been set up in a fairly ingenious way. This run of spaces contains many villagers who have things to say if landed on, Some of them also have items to give the player. The most useful, by far, of them all is a Medicine, hidden on the next-to-last space in the area. Upon use, Medicine grants a very large (100+) HP and MP bonus, and upon use has a chance of remaining around to be used again. Level 2 contains two tough bosses, so this Medicine is a very helpful thing to have, but these spaces only give up their loot if landed upon.

It may seem at first like a fairly slim chance the player will get the Medicine, but the designers have built in a clever way to allow an observant player to bend his way to the Medicine space. Three of the spaces in the section give the player single-use Amulets. In Sugoro Quest, Amulet items have numbers attached to them. Here, the items are Amulet2, Amulet3 and Amulet1. When used, an Amulet item rolls the movement die and causes the number indicated to come up.

If you look at the map above, you might notice something interesting about how the Amulets are placed, and their numbers. If used immediately, it will send the player either to another Amulet in the chain, or to the Medicine! A player who realizes this will have a much greater chance of getting to that Medicine space; instead of only receiving it if he lands on that one space, he can get it if he hits any of four.

The presence this trick, and others like it, shows that the designers put serious thought into the map layouts. It may look like a whimsical RPG board game to you, but they worked hard to make up for the randomness and keep it fair for the player, while not going to far and designing the randomness out of the game. It's quite ingenious.

---

Returning to Level 3, successfully landing on that warp space takes the player to this little partitioned-off area. The middle space of this route is another hidden event: a helpful fairy gives the player a Fairy Boat. This is a major boon; it turns out this is the only unsinkable boat in the level! Even Garin's Boat, found by refusing the Old Boat, swimming across a second ocean section, then navigating through a lengthy route on land, sinks shortly after use. Only with the Fairy Boat can the player make it through the sea just before the boss without suffering through many turns of constant HP depletion.

But even knowing this, it's not so simple:

• If the player answered "yes" to the "Are you scared?" question back at the beginning, then for some reason after getting the Fairy Boat another character will claim it's stolen property and confiscate it!
• If the player manages to keep the Fairy Boat, his route will take him into a looped area filled with monster fights, with a warp tile exit. This is not necessarily bad, since he's getting HP back with every turn, but if unlucky he might be trapped in that cul-de-sac for some time.
• Even knowing this, there is a good reason to forego the Fairy Boat and take the main route through the latter half of the level. If the player answered "Yes" to the "Are you scared?" man, he'll have picked up the Fish. When that Fish is delivered to Garin, he'll point him to a small side-route that contains a strong suit of armor. The armor is usable by all four characters, is probably better than anything he could find to that point, and even if he's already gotten it or better, it can be sold back at base for good money.

What can we learn from Sugoro Quest?

What Sugoro Quest presents is a game in which randomness is allowed to shape the adventure without constructing it entirely.

The board game structure is ultimately a trick itself, a way to get the player to swallow the unusual form of its play. The movement die mixes up the boons and banes the player gathers on his way to the boss, which helps the game to remain interesting even after several playthroughs. The presence of die-affecting spells and Amulets, however, allows him some degree of control over which spaces he lands on. In other words, the game allows the player to choose his luck, basically random but more ordered when the player judges the stakes high enough to expend resources to affect them.

On a Sugoro Quest character's first trip through a level, the player likely doesn't have the information necessary to make good decisions on where to expend those resources, but as he comes to learn which spaces are the special ones, and what their effects are, he'll be better able to see where it's best to play his limited degree of pressure upon the dice. Sugoro Quest is thus a game of chance tempered with skill, in which the player must leave his progress up to the winds of fate, except for when he knows better than to do a fool thing like that.

Most other JRPGs tend to play like this, except with all the chance stripped out. The advancement of the genre has seen the removal of most of the randomization, even in combat. When a traditional RPG character hits, he tends to do an amount of damage between a small number and a large number: 1d4, 2d6, 3d10+2. When a JRPG character hits, he generally does damage determined by his stats and weapon, plus a very small number thrown in to hide the fact that damage is basically constant.

JRPGs are a bit stronger as a means of presenting a linear story. Sugoro Quest combines the linear path of JRPGs with a bit of variation, enough to put the storytelling focus on the success of the character instead of the machinations of the scenario writer.

As a result, I found it's a lot easier to get involved with the fate of happy-go-lucky, spandex-clad Half-Elf than any number of 14-year-old emo amnesiac swordsmen, shepherding their doe-eyed charges through goofy anime-reject scenarios.

Posted by John Harris at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

[This is the final set of Independent Games Festival finalists announced this year, following the IGF Main Competition and IGF Student Showcase - congratulations to all finalists, and we'll see you at GDC.]

The Independent Games Festival Mobile (IGF Mobile), an event that celebrates innovation in games for handheld devices, including mobile phones, DS, PSP, iPhone and iPod touch, has named the finalists for the second annual competition.

The number of entries more than doubled – to over 100 – compared to last year’s inaugural competition, bolstered by a strong showing from the emergent iPhone and iPod touch platform – so much so that a special ‘Best iPhone Game’ category has been designated for the titles which best use the unique possibilities of the device.

Winners of the 2009 IGF Mobile competition, who will get a share of $30,000 in prize money, will be announced at a special ceremony during the Game Developers Conference (GDC) Mobile conference on March 24, and additionally honored during the main Independent Games Festival Awards on March 25, 2009.

Some of the leading finalists for this year’s competition include stylish iPhone cube movement puzzler Edge (3 nominations), the technologically cunning Wardive on Nintendo DS, which uses local WiFi hotspots to generate enemies (3 nominations), and elegant iPhone ‘tower defense’-style title Fieldrunners (3 nominations).

Games also nominated multiple times include Secret Exit's touch-controlled iPhone rope wrapping game Zen Bound and iconic tilt-controlled iPhone puzzler Dizzy Bee, with a number of Flash Lite and Java cellphone games, including the innovative Cubic Republic, also finalists. Read on for the full list:

This year’s IGF Mobile competition is supported by Platinum and Founding Sponsor NVidia – which is awarding ‘The Next Great Mobile Game’ at this year’s awards, with finalists to be revealed soon, as well as Gold Sponsor and Best iPhone Game prize sponsor ngmoco.

The full list of IGF Mobile finalists, including screenshots and official website links, is available on the IGF Mobile website, and also listed below as follows:

IGF Mobile Best Game
Cubic Republic (IKS Mobile) – Flash Lite
Smiles (Sykhronics Entertainment) – iPhone/iPod touch
Fieldrunners (Subatomic Studios) – iPhone/iPod touch
Edge (Mobigame) – iPhone/iPod touch
Wardive (And-or) – Nintendo DS

Innovation In Mobile Game Design
Wardive (And-or) – Nintendo DS
Galcon (Hassey Enterprises) – iPhone/iPod touch
Eliss (Steph Thirion) – iPhone/iPod touch

Achievement In Art
Fieldrunners (Subatomic Studios) – iPhone/iPod touch
Dizzy Bee (Igloo Games) – iPhone/iPod touch
Ruben & Lullaby (Song New Creative) – iPhone/iPod touch

Technical Achievement
Football Tycoon (Dynamo Games) – Java
Real Racing (Firemint) – iPhone/iPod touch
Wardive (And-or) – Nintendo DS

Audio Achievement
Radio Flare (Studio Radiolaris) – iPhone/iPod touch
Zen Bound (Secret Exit) – iPhone/iPod touch
Edge (Mobigame) – iPhone/iPod touch

Best iPhone Game – Presented by ngmoco
Edge (Mobigame) – iPhone/iPod touch
Dizzy Bee (Igloo Games) – iPhone/iPod touch
Fieldrunners (Subatomic Studios) – iPhone/iPod touch
Zen Bound (Secret Exit) – iPhone/iPod touch
Frenzic (The Iconfactory) – iPhone/iPod touch

The IGF Mobile competition will have its own pavilion, adjoining the main IGF Pavilion and featuring playable versions of all of the finalists’ games, at Game Developers Conference 2009, set to take place at the Moscone Center in San Francisco from March 23rd to 27th.

“The mobile industry has seen incredible innovation and quality in mobile gaming, in particular with the rise of the iPhone and iPod touch platform,” said IGF Chairman Simon Carless. “The significant increase in the number of entries speaks to the unlimited possibility that exists in the mobile market, and the IGF is excited to acknowledge the importance of indie developers in the handheld game device space.”

The Independent Games Festival itself was established in 1998 to encourage innovation in game development and to recognize the best independent game developers, much the way that the Sundance Film Festival honors the independent film community.

The creation of IGF Mobile in 2007 was the direct response to the maturing of the mobile game industry, and the desire to similarly recognize and reward those driving the advancement of the space.

For more information on the Independent Games Festival Mobile finalists, visit the official IGF Mobile website; and to register for GDC, please visit the Game Developers Conference site.

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

[With claims of the decline of the PC gaming, commentators seem to lose sight of the platform's historic strengths and its place in the world -- Gamasutra's Chris Remo looks at companies like Valve and Stardock to define 'the new old wave' of PC gaming.]

Amidst the neverending talk about how the PC is changing or declining as a market for hardcore games, outside of perennial chart-crusher World of Warcraft, commentators seem to lose sight of the historic strengths of the platform and its place in the gaming world.

Meanwhile, studios like Valve and Stardock -- successful, independent companies comprised of staffers whose memories seem to go back a little further -- understand some key principles that have always defined the PC platform in a positive way.

These include ongoing, direct contact with their audience; agility and responsiveness in development and support; and smaller teams that can afford to take interesting design risks and thus foster a loyal niche (not to mention thrive on sales that are less than astronomical).

The 'Game Gods'

It's easy to forget that some of the PC's industry-changing success stories are more than just high sales numbers. The archetypal such case is id Software's Doom. Our recently-reprinted profile on the game serves as a reminder that it wasn't truly record-breaking sales that made Doom a success so much as it was a combination of a small, dedicated team, a business model that connected directly to consumers and allowed for higher margins, and a fresh gameplay concept.

Over time, those crucial elements became obscured by the rockstar lifestyles and Ferraris that were cited in every magazine article about "game gods" published throughout the 90s. The reality is that, with rare exceptions like The Sims and WoW, PC games have traditionally not had the per-title sales numbers that the most successful console games muster.

This is only a shock if you try to treat the PC as just another console, like so many modern-day publishers do -- loading it up with ports of multiplatform games whose franchises (and sometimes entire genres) have never had a strong base on the PC to begin with, then expressing disappointment when they underperform.

What many of these publishers, particularly those relatively new to the PC, don't realize is that this has never been a successful business model -- why would it be now?

Embracing The Differences

And as much as consoles and PCs are converging technically, the platforms are still very different, both with respect to their input methods and, just as importantly, their underlying principles. As an open platform in contrast to the manufacturer-controlled consoles, the PC is a place where developers and publishers can be the ultimate gatekeepers of their own games.

That responsibility has always been embraced by the more successful PC developers, from the relatively small Stardock to the mid-sized Valve to the massive Blizzard.

Witness how Valve's titles, which are now multiplatform, evolve on the PC versus on consoles -- Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead receive ongoing balance tweaks and updates on the PC, in some cases multiple times in a single day, a process that is significantly bottlenecked on console online services.

NPD has reported for the last few years that PC game sales have been dropping at retail, while admitting in those very same reports that largely untrackable digital distribution is on the rise.

The poor treatment of PC games by specialty gaming stores (it has long been a bizarre truth that a PC gamer is better served by going to Best Buy than GameStop) is driving more and more consumers to successful digital distribution platforms like Steam and Impulse.

These act not just as online stores but as increasingly full-featured gaming hubs that connect gamers to developers and to each other, fostering a sense of PC gaming community that for several years had been lacking.

Smaller Teams, Bigger Returns

But beyond the technical, communication, and distribution angles, there is a certain development attitude that is more native to the PC, one currently best embodied by Valve and Stardock in particular. These companies, and their partners such as Ironclad Games, of Sins of a Solar Empires fame, have embraced smaller-team development.

The result is games that are ideally suited to digital distribution, games that in many ways have the scope and ambition of full retail games. Yet, they are scaled down in intelligent ways that allow them to define and cater to an understood audience rather than try to spread themselves more thinly.

Valve is a particularly interesting case, because it consciously made the choice to move from the mega-scale development of Half-Life 2 to smaller games like the Half-Life 2 episodes and the wonderfully unique Portal -- as well as the recent genre-bending multiplayer game Left 4 Dead. If one of its current-day titles were to fail or fall short, it wouldn't have bet the farm on it.

Stardock, meanwhile, has chosen to carve out a very clear niche for itself, one ideally suited to the PC: strategy games. Its own turn-based Galactic Civilizations series has been a success, and it is getting ready to ship Gas Powered Games' Defense of the Ancients-inspired Demigod while developing its next internal title, Elemental.

Its real-time collaboration Sins of a Solar Empire was one of 2008's most impressive success stories; its 500,000 units may seem piddly at first glance compared to big console blockbusters, but its sub-$1 million budget puts that figure in a completely different light.

Mythbusting Budget Bloat

The lesson seems simple, but it's often overlooked in our NPD-obsessed industry: return on investment is a lot more important than units sold, especially as budgets continue to balloon dangerously.

And making games that can afford to succeed with a smaller audience often means the developers have more creative freedom -- which, in an ostensibly creative industry, means a lot.

It is worth noting that both Valve and Stardock, as entire companies, are smaller than some of the individual teams making competing triple-A games.

As of last year, Valve employed 160 staffers and has put out five games since 2006 -- while Stardock employs fewer than half that. Ironclad Games, which is much younger than the other two, boasts a mind-boggling team size of nine.

These companies show that it is a fallacy that successful modern game development must be bloated and unwieldy, and they know that the PC platform and its audience do not reward offerings that treat the system like an afterthought or a multiplatform port repository.

Particularly amidst the current financial uncertainty, it makes sense to explore PC game development that is more economical and knows its audience.

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

[GameSetLinks is GameSetWatch's daily link round-up post, culling from hundreds of weblogs and outlets to compile the most interesting longform writing, links, and criticism on the art and culture of video games.]

A relaxing Sunday evening and a bit of Mojave 3 will help usher in a new week with plenty enough GameSetLinks to go around - starting out with another 2K Marin staffer helping out those wanting to get into the game industry with some genuine, helpful tips.

Also hanging out in this batch of links - a high-profile MSNBC article that talks about IGF and indie games with some positivity, someone you wouldn't expect gets excited about achievements, changes at Joystiq, and interesting multimedia game-ish project via Channel 4 and Alice, and lots more.

To whom should I write:

vector poem » Getting Into Level Design
Another of those incredibly useful posts: 'This sounds simple, but making something you actually want to play makes it much easier to get over the hump of getting started.'

Tale of Tales» Blog » Achievements will save us all!
It's eye-opening to see who will get the bug, however unlikely: 'Achievements are a very simple mechanic. They require hardly any design, are easy to implement and instantly provide the player with motivation and goals.'

Wonderland: Routes
New multimedia thing thanks to Alice's commissioning at the UK semi-public broadcaster: 'Channel 4 education, in association with the Wellcome Trust, and conceived of and delivered by Oil Productions. Getting stuff to teens that's useful to them: in this case, we're going after the genome, DNA testing and other hot-button topics of the near future.'

Joystiq announcement: change is coming - Joystiq
The 'Fanboy' sites (DS, Xbox 360, etc) are being merged back under the Joystiq brand, which is interesting. Some peripheral contributors may have got cut, despite comments here, I think?

Broken Toys » The Real Hitler Problem
'The problem, though, that everyone seems to be dancing around: what, exactly, is *wrong* with depicting evil in gaming?'

Is this the future of video games? - Citizen Gamer- msnbc.com
Really, really awesome mainstream coverage of indie games and the IGF, yay.

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

[Continuing a set of interviews with neat folks who make video game audio, Jeriaska sits down with Canadian musician Jeff Tymoschuk to discuss the soundtrack to Hothead's episodic Penny Arcade Adventures game series.]

Fusing elements of the macabre horror of H.P. Lovecraft with the irreverent humor of the titular webcomic, Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness maintains a precarious balance between the grim and hysterical.

The series, by developer Hothead Games, inhabits a gritty 1920's urban landscape called New Arcadia, whose musical atmosphere comes courtesy of composer Jeff Tymoschuk.

The soundtrack for the episodic RPG (available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, XBLA and PSN) is the latest game project by the Vancouver-based musician, who maintains GreenWire Music and Audio.

Having contributed to dozens of films and interactive media, his previous game projects include co-composing James Bond: Nightfire for Electronic Arts, and more recently Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice for BigBig Games/ Sony Computer Entertainment Europe.

In this discussion, the musician offers his perspectives on the debut of Gabe and Tycho as proprietors of the Startling Developments Detective Agency. The conversation offers a unique perspective on scoring video game narratives, and a closer look at the making of Penny Arcade Adventures:

GSW: Thank you for joining us for this discussion of Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness. Now that the first two episodes of the series are available, game players have acquired a strong sense of the bizarre circumstances that govern this game world. Part of the fun of exploring New Arcadia is in hearing how the music adapts itself to fit the perilous locales. For instance, the carnival-esque menace of Pelican Bay in Episode One suits the fearsome mimes your party encounters there.

Tymoschuk: We wanted to give the different locations somewhat of a different feel, either with a different instrument palette or a different musical style. For Pelican Bay and the mimes, it seemed like a logical place to take it, somehow being attacked by waves of mimes implied polkas and Django Reinhardt. The slums were pretty much inspired by Bernard Herrmann and Tom Waits, and then with the asylum I let things get weird.

GSW: Speaking of Episode Two now, it sounds like a harpsichord can be heard upon entering the exclusive Riverbrook Estates.

Tymoschuk: Oh yeah, that's one of the first instrument choices for that level. Too much Addams Family as a kid, I guess...

GSW: We had the chance to hear from Adam Gejdos (audio director for Hothead Games) at the the Penny Arcade Expo, and he mentioned that his wife owns an antique store, which allowed him the chance to record a variety of old-fashioned machinery ticking and whirring for the game's sound effects. How did the two of you set about conjuring up the sounds of this dreamlike 1920's landscape at the beginning of this project?

Tymoschuk: There was a fair bit of conversation early on figuring out what the music was going to sound like. Adam had put together a CD for me of a bunch of possible reference material, that had some Tom Waits, some Bernard Herrmann, and a bunch of other stuff. Initially when I demoed for the gig, I did two pieces that were much more in the 1920s vaudeville vein, which really sounds nothing like the rest of the game.

When I started work on the game, the first three weeks or so were spent with me trying everything that I could think of to get the style right (with Adam emailing words of encouragement) and not really coming up with anything that we were happy with. And then somehow it clicked with some of the slums music, and from then on in, it was a remarkably easy process, and it seemed like the music came together very quickly.

GSW: The makers of the webcomic have made a point of mentioning Lovecraft as a literary influence and steampunk as a prevailing visual idiom for the game. Were you interested in having gothic horror or steampunk specifically represented on the soundtrack?

Tymoschuk: Yes, but really in more of a bastardized way. As far as the steampunk end of things, there's some odd percussion and metallic clangs, but that's about it. The horror elements came from a lot of listening to Bernard Herrmann, and I tried to go for a classic horror movie feel, which was expanded on in Episode Two. In general though, the music's all a little bit off-kilter, which was intentional...mostly, anyways.

GSW: Have you found that looping music tracks for videogames is a challenge for a composer whose background is in film?

Tymoschuk: I haven't really found it to be a problem, although there have been times that I've needed to write a two-minute piece and been at 1:50 and realized that I had no idea how I was going to get back to where I started. It can be a challenge to make it as transparent a loop as possible, but it's kind of fun to try and figure it out.

GSW: Was it useful reading through the archives of Penny Arcade webcomics when developing the soundtrack for the title?

Tymoschuk: It didn't really affect what I was writing, although it was cool to go through some of the archives and see what the strip was all about. I wasn't familiar with the strip before getting the gig, but I've been a pretty frequent reader ever since. And because there wasn't an established sound for the strip and I was given free reign, it was really exciting and freeing, at least it was after getting the initial style nailed down. I was able to just let the music go where it wanted, without having to keep within the lines of what had come before, and Adam was great about allowing me to have that freedom.

GSW: Were you interested at any point in taking musical elements that you had developed for your other games and embellishing them, stretching them, or otherwise distorting them to fit the outrageous game setting?

Tymoschuk: It really never came up. The plan was always to score the game fairly deadpan (albeit with a skewed sensibility), and especially in the more intense musical sections to keep the stakes high for the characters, but the worlds of the different games are pretty vastly different, and as a result there wasn't much cross pollination.

GSW: There are also a number of brief flash animation cut-scenes throughout the game, for instance upon gaining access to the Cloying Odor Sanitarium. Was it a challenge putting together a brief melody that succinctly captures these moments?

Tymoschuk: Actually, no. I've done a fair bit of scoring for animation over the years, and with there being no dialogue, I scored it like a traditional animation and let the actions dictate the music much more specifically. The musical ideas themselves are mostly fragmented, but you can often say quite a bit with just a fragment.

GSW: How would you describe the process of partnering with Hothead on this ambitious multi-staged project thus far?

Tymoschuk: Working with Hothead has been fantastic. I've been given an awful lot of creative freedom and support while working on these games, and it's been an extremely enjoyable collaboration. There's talk about some more projects with them, but nothing that I can really say just yet, other than I'm really happy to keep the collaboration going!

GSW: Keeping in mind that the series is still in progress, are there any plans at this time for a soundtrack album, either on disc or downloadable?

Tymoschuk: We have been talking about getting the music out there sometime soon in some form, but nothing's been definitively settled just yet. It's been great to hear the response to the music, and that people actually are digging it, so hopefully we'll have sorted out what we're doing with it in the next few months.

Fructus Dominus (Click for soundtrack sample)
Composer commentary: "Well, this tune had to be big, both because it's the halfway point of the series... and because you're fighting a gigantic robot. I took this as a chance to revisit a couple of themes previously introduced and send them off with a bang. I guess the only problem is that, as giant as this tune is, the franchise hasn't reached its conclusion yet, but I guess I'll have to cross that bridge when I come to it!"

GSW: There is a long list of movie credits on the GreenWire website. Would you say there is there a favorite movie that you have composed for thus far?

Tymoschuk: I've worked on quite a number of projects, and most of them have been satisfying for one reason or the other. One that does stand out is a short film called Latchkey's Lament, which was a really cool eighteen minute fantasy short, directed by Troy Nixey, that had no dialogue and was music pretty much from top to bottom. It was probably the most traditional score I've done to date, and I'm really happy with how it turned out. The film ended up getting a fair bit of attention, and Guillermo del Toro is producing a re-release that's going to be happening sometime this year.

GSW: Overall, is there a particular musician or group of musicians that have stood out as a significant inspiration to your work?

Tymoschuk: As far as inspirations go, it's a pretty wide range. The scores that made me want to be a composer were John Williams' Star Wars and Danny Elfman's Batman, and that sort of started the whole thing. I still listen to lots of film scores, both as recreational listening and as inspiration, and some of the composers that I dig are John Powell, Harry Gregson-Williams, James Newton Howard, David Arnold, Michael Giacchino, Sean Callery, Jon Brion, Alan Silvestri, Jerry Goldsmith, Christopher Lennertz, Troels Folmann, David Schwartz, Hans Zimmer, John Williams, & Danny Elfman.

GSW: How did you come to meet Dave Stephens, your collaborator at GreenWire?

Tymoschuk: Dave and I went to recording school together about 16 years ago. We initially started hanging out because we liked some of the same bands, and that led to me working on a Christmas album that he was recording with a friend (and doing Christmas albums of our own for the next few years). He was working as a sound designer/dialogue editor/foley guy at a local post-production studio, and I was an in-house composer at an internet company, and we were both taking on any available side jobs. In 2000, he'd left the studio he was at, and my job ended, so we decided to start GreenWire as sort of an umbrella for the projects we were working on.

We've been really fortunate in that many of our friends are filmmakers, and as we've been trying to expand our respective careers, our friends careers have also been taking off, and we've hitched our wagons to a lot of talented people. It also helps that Dave's a really talented musician and I've got some sound design background, while we tend to stick to our main specialties, we have an idea of how the other half lives. We're able to communicate in the other guy's language, and on a couple of occasions, help each other out with the work.

GSW: Did you set about achieving a certain aim with GreenWire, with its base of operations in Vancouver, Canada?

Tymoschuk: Film in Canada (and Vancouver specifically) is kind of an interesting kettle of fish. There's a lot of extremely talented people working in the industry, but especially compared to the US, there isn't the same kind of money in it. Getting funding for projects can be difficult, and as a result a lot of the projects that are being made are dialogue driven character pieces as opposed to car chases and explosions. The good thing about this is that filmmakers are often forced to be more resourceful and find alternate solutions to problems (and learning to write strong characters and dialogue is never a bad thing!).

GSW: What advice would you have for young musicians who want to enter the videogame industry? Are there certain areas of study that you feel are undervalued by music schools and universities today?

Tymoschuk: The way things are these days, you really have to master several disciplines. In addition to being the best composer you can, you often have to be a producer, music editor, recording engineer, technician, equipment manual interpreter, marketing director, and psychologist. It's a lot of things to learn, and while I'm sure that there's some great schools out there that cover a lot of the things that you need, it's probably too much to ask any one program to cover everything, never mind the fact that with most of these things the learning is never really finished. Read as much as you can, learn as much as you can, you really can never know enough.

The other thing is to be good to work with. Especially as your career progresses, and the budgets (and therefore the stakes) start getting higher, it can be a fair bit of pressure on the people involved. If you are seen as part of the solution, rather than part of the problem (in addition to making great music, of course!) then people are going to want to work with you again. Maybe moreso than any other industry, the entertainment industry is one of relationships, and if you do good work and are good to work with, then you should be fine.

Make sure that you keep playing with music, trying new things, figuring out different ways to tackle the same problems, and keep it fresh for yourself. The hours can get really long, and if you're not having fun doing it, it starts to suck in a hurry. Music's supposed to be fun, y'know!

[Interview by Jeriaska. Images courtesy of Hothead Games and GreenWire Music and Audio.]

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

The end of another busy week, so time to break down some of the week's top features on Gamasutra - plus bonus features from our excellent student site GameCareerGuide - there's a bunch of neat analyses, interviews, and so on posted over the past 7 days.

Hanging out in here - the ever-intriguing Jon Blow quizzed on post-Braid life, plus Matt Matthews' stat-hungry trawl through U.S. console trends for 2008, a useful postmortem of American McGee's Grimm, a look at U.S. legislation on games, Ian Bogost's thesis on what we should call the new wave of gaming, and more.

Here are the stories:

Jonathan Blow: The Next Phase
"After the success of the time-disrupting Braid, Number None's Jonathan Blow sits down with Gamasutra to discuss the state of indie gaming, his next projects, and 'meaningful' games."

Postmortem: American McGee's Grimm
"In this Gamasutra-exclusive postmortem, the creators of American McGee's Grimm honestly analyze the creation of the Chinese-developed episodic PC adventure series."

Persuasive Games: The Proceduralist Style
"'Games as art' is a tired conversation, says writer and designer Ian Bogost, who instead proposes 'proceduralism' as the new phrase to describe innovative indie titles from Braid to Passage and beyond."

Analysis: The Gears of War Franchise - Behind The Data
"The eight most-played Xbox Live games of the holiday season were all sequels, according to gaming social network GamerDNA -- and the first part of this Gamasutra-exclusive data analysis reveals player usage trends around both titles in the Gears of War franchise."

Sponsored Feature: An Interview with Havok's Jeff Yates
"Havok, long known for physics, now has a reach that extends into other crucial middleware areas. In this sponsored feature that's part of the Intel Visual Computing section, the company's Jeff Yates speaks about the present and the future."

Video Game Regulation: Where We Are Now
"How does the government regulate video games? Researcher Clark looks worldwide for perspective on U.S. game censorship, addiction, and piracy law in an Obama administration."

NPD: Behind the Numbers, December 2008
"In a Gamasutra-exclusive analysis, we analyze U.S. game hardware and software numbers for the whole of 2008, discovering surprising multi-year growth comparisons and marketshare changes."

Bonus GameCareerGuide.com highlights: Results from the Game Design Challenge: Gravity Game; Inside the 2009 IGF: Dark Room Sex Game; GameCareerGuide.com's Game Design Challenge: Why Did Frogger Cross the Road?.

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

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

I am in the midst of madly preparing for a long vacation. Everything always seems to happen last-minute when you've got one of these vacations, so my mind is frazzled right now.

Fortunately, I don't have to say very much in order to introduce Amusement, a French mag that's perhaps best described as a mixture of Edge and a European fashion magazine.

I'm surprised I haven't read a lot more about Amusement before now (although it's been mentioned on prominent blogs once or twice).

This is especially true because it does a lot of things that I think print-based game media needs to start doing right now -- be more visual, take angles that nothing else on the market approaches (online or off), and keep readers excited instead of bored and uninspired to continue reading.

Amusement EIC Abdel Bounane did an online interview last month where he lays the mag out bare for English speakers. Bounane says in the piece that an English-language version will get US and UK distribution in 2009, and already I can't wait for that moment. Hopefully, the English version is as well crafted as the French.

That's not the only good news in print land -- I've heard from a couple of industry people that Future U.S. has something new going on in '09, printwise. What, I don't know precisely, and it may not be quite as exciting as a standalone independent-editorial mag launch, but I'm looking forward to it regardless.

Or, that is, I'll be looking forward to it once I'm done packing and getting the ferrets situated for my vacation. Oh God, all these loose ends...

[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 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[GameSetLinks is GameSetWatch's daily link round-up post, culling from hundreds of weblogs and outlets to compile the most interesting longform writing, links, and criticism on the art and culture of video games.]

Rolling right into the weekend, and this set of GameSetLinks appears to be a little heavy on the indie side - it's headed by something on the indie film side of things which is still fascinating to translate to what's happening in independent game media.

Also in here - totally retro Guitar Hero geekouts, NPR on indie, Dylan Fitterer on surfing with audio, a postmortem of a moody title with plenty of zombies, and much more.

Ka ka ka:

Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood Daily » Sundance Film Festival Director Geoff Gilmore Talks ‘Evolution vs Revolution’
Running an independent-minded festival, it's interesting to see the trials and tribulations of the leading indie film fest outlined like this.

TRUE CHIP TILL DEATH » Chipstar Heroes unite
'With all the hype around Guitar Hero and Rockband (following the successful trail of the “DDR-type” games), the oldschool machines feel kind of left out of the loop.' C64 _and_ Amiga versions, natch.

My NPR piece on independent videogames - The Cut Scene - Video Game Blog by Variety on Variety.com
Another indie piece, by Variety's Ben Fritz, no less. And Dark Room Sex Game ahoy!

Charge Shot!!!: BestRideEver: A Talk with Dylan Fitterer
Neat new site has a pretty fun interview with the Audiosurf creator on music, games, and all things inbetween.

Zombpocalypse Postmortem - Buro-kun Developer Blog
Nice postmortem of a VERY individual, oddly atmospheric indie title.

IGN: Ten Trends That Are Saving Videogames
Indie games (with a prominent IGF mention) being one of them, hurrah.

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

In this round-up, we highlight some of the notable jobs posted in sister site Gamasutra's industry-leading game jobs section this week, including positions from Nintendo of America, Square Enix, N-Fusion Interactive, Redtribe, and more.

Each position posted by employers will appear on the main Gamasutra job board, and appear in the site's daily and weekly newsletters, reaching our readers directly.

It will also be cross-posted for free across its network of submarket sites, which includes content sites focused on online worlds, cellphone games, 'serious games', independent games and more.

Some of the notable jobs posted in each market area this week include:

Gamasutra.com - Game Industry Jobs

Nintendo of America: Web Marketing Producer
"[The Web Marketing Producer] works with management team to define marketing requirements and budget, requests assets, determines content matrix, manages interaction with I.S. department/internal designers/legal department, and manages web design/build-out/user testing/project launch/post-launch duties with outside agency partners and / or the NOA web production team."

Redtribe: Tools Programmer
"Redtribe is a successful independent game studio based in Melbourne, with a reputation for delivering projects on time and on budget for world-leading publishers. We are looking for an experienced programmer to join our core technology team and help develop our new production pipeline. The ideal candidate would have several years' experience in the games industry and have an excellent understanding of game production systems and tool development."

Square Enix: Software Engineer
"Square Enix is building a studio from the ground up. We are making an action-oriented original IP game here in sunny Los Angeles. We are looking for motivated master programmers to lay the foundation for a solid development team. How often do you get a chance to make sure that a studio starts off in the right direction? How often do you get to be one of the starting members, but also have medical insurance? This is a rare opportunity to have the creative control of a start-up but the backing and funding of a major publisher."

N-Fusion Interactive: Game Animator, Game Programmer
"Established in 1998, N-Fusion has just finished its first next-gen title and is currently staffing up for solid growth. With the heart of a gamer and the mind of a publisher, we have what it takes to keep moving up in the competitive world of interactive entertainment. We're the largest next-gen developer in New Jersey, a location that offers the best of both worlds: a serene, beautiful working environment that's only a short drive from New York City and the ever-beautiful Jersey shore."

SeriousGamesSource - Serious Games

Ngrain: Lead 3D Artist
"Ngrain is an award winning company delivering interactive 3D task-based training solutions to the defense industry. We license our breakthrough graphics technology to leading organizations across multiple industries and application areas. Resellers offer Ngrain solutions globally, and strategic partners include Microsoft, Intel and Adobe."

GamesOnDeck - Mobile Games

Controlled Chaos: Senior Programmer
"We are looking for people wanting to build something big and have a voice on how they want to do business. If you have a great work ethic, a great attitude, and a love for games, then you can be part of our team. Applicant should have a knowledge of console development, preferably Xbox360 and Wii. A knowledge of or great desire to work with mobile technology, namely iPhone."

To browse hundreds of similar jobs, and for more information on searching, responding to, or posting game industry-relevant jobs to the top source for jobs in the business, please visit Gamasutra's job board now.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Eidos has revealed its intentions to make iconic Tomb Raider heroine Lara Croft more "female-friendly", but is that really what the franchise needs? In this opinion column, Gamasutra news director Leigh Alexander tackles the issue -- and why Lara's much-critiqued sexuality is largely a straw man.]

By now you've probably heard somewhere or another that Eidos would like to make the Tomb Raider franchise and its heroine more "female-friendly."

"Female-friendly" is a well-intentioned but faintly gruesome marketing phrase that's come to be perceived as shorthand for "let's make everything pink so women will buy it."

It's almost inherently offensive -- so in order to treat this concept of a female-friendly Tomb Raider fairly, the phrase first asks us to get some words out of the way.

As a female journalist in a majority male industry, perhaps I'm owed a deck in the face from Gloria Steinem when I confess that, whenever we as a society discuss gender issues and "what women want," I get a pang of concern for the men.

I'm probably spoiled having grown up in this era instead of in a previous one, but I don't like that we're allowed to discuss what's "female-friendly" -- and yet, generally feel comfortable already assuming what's "male-friendly" (guns! explosions! boobs!), permitting girls' club attitudes while boys' clubs are conceptually frowned upon.

The "female-friendly" idea also assumes that all women are interested in the same ideals. But, semantics aside, I think it's clear what Eidos is trying to do here.

Bombshell Background

Longstanding, iconic heroine Lara Croft has a reputation as a bombshell -- okay, okay, sex object.

She's perhaps the game biz's most famous piece of eye-candy, and somehow over the years she's become iconic of the concept that 18-year-old boys drool over pixelated boobs. It's easy to see how this has made some women feel as if Tomb Raider games are not "for them."

But when it comes to why women don't feel comfortable with this or that video game, it becomes necessarily a far bigger issue than just one character's physique.

Lara could receive an extreme makeover and appear triumphantly on the set of Oprah, and yet it'd still unlikely be some magical cure for female perception of the brand -- and it might even alienate existing fans, which won't help their ends.

Eidos is forced to re-evaluate the franchise's appeal because Tomb Raider: Underworld posted disappointing sales. It may also be that Eidos would like to clean lingering skeletons -- such as this poster girl for teenage gamer boy fantasies -- out of its closet in order to pretty up for a strong buyer, but that's only speculation.

Releasing a title in a franchise that's felt if not a bit checkered, perhaps staid, for years during a packed, starkly hit-driven recession holiday would suggest that weakened sales are to be expected no matter how great this installment is.

That Tomb Raider is in need of an update may indeed be an idea with some merit behind it. But the go-to idea that making this larger-than-life heroine look mundane and conservative will make her appealing to more women is probably more than a bit flawed.

Impossible Realism

People often point out the implausibility of Lara wearing hot shorts in the snow, or having bare legs when she plans to be climbing stalagmites or obelisks or something.

Well, game characters have worn implausible clothes for ages -- none of the FFVII crew bundled up in the North Crater, and Solid Snake didn't mind lying belly-down in the snow at Shadow Moses.

Indeed, many a shirtless muscleman has braved monsters and elements for over a decade, facing nothing more than a chuckle and "that's video games for you." The argument that "we don't want to desexualize Lara, we just want her to be realistic" doesn't hold water.

Most women are smart enough to know that Lara is a video game character and not a real person. Maybe her body proportions are unrealistic -- but, uh, the fact that she leaps across chasms in the Amazon, balances on hairline ledges and discovers mysterious artifacts with ancient powers is acceptably grounded in reality?

Lara's physicality was palpable in Underworld. It had much less to do with how her body looked, and much more about how she used it, with sound design and character modeling that captured the precariousness, the breathlessness, of her acrobatic feats.

Personally, not once did I sit there feeling bad because I don't look like her, and I don't like the idea that women are so fragile that sexy fantasy women should never be allowed in video games -- especially when we allow sexy fantasy men.

Perception And Judgment

I don't believe that women have a problem with Lara, other than that we've been conditioned to blame her. I think it's Lara's social context -- Lara's perceived audience that makes them feel unwelcome.

And once again, this comes down to the longer-term history of the video game industry, which marketed itself for years as a toy for teenage boys, and now will probably take years more to get rid of that stigma.

You can even say it's the fault of society, fond of judging which kinds of things are "for girls" and which kinds of things are "for boys", that makes women feel like they ought not to try something like Tomb Raider.

Maybe it even makes women feel like they are "supposed to be" insulted by Lara, even without having taken a look at their own feelings around the issue.

I don't know, but I'm pretty sure that when it comes to the relationship between women and games, much broader things need to change than the long-established aesthetic of Lara Croft.

A Real Reinvention?

"We need to look at everything, as we develop the next game," Eidos CFO Robert Brent said in a report in the Times Online. "Look at how Batman changed successfully, from the rather sad character of the Michael Keaton era to the noir style of The Dark Knight."

Such comments are actually heartening; many early comic book superheroes were vague, justice-oriented concepts at their inception and then gained greater complexity and wider appeal through repeated reinvention.

So sure, media coverage around this Lara Issue has focused heavily on her body and what the desires of a female audience might be.

But it's clear that Eidos will only refresh the franchise successfully when they focus less on guesses about what appeals to women and more on what could make Lara more than superficially appealing -- period.

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

[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 edition include a triple-nominated 2009 IGF finalist, an offbeat side-scrolling beat 'em up, a uniquely different exploration game with minimal aesthetics, and a physics-based action game from the developers of Puzzlegeddon and Fret Nice:

Game Pick: 'The 24-Hour Police' (Desire Factory, freeware)
"A 2D side-scrolling beat 'em up in the style of the Final Fight series, where players step into the shoes of a vigilante cop on a mission to take down the local mob boss and his henchmen. This translates to three stages' worth of goons who can be punched, kicked, thrown, or shot at, as you make your way towards the final showdown with the leader of the criminal organization."

Game Pick: 'Mirror Stage' (Stephen Lavelle, freeware)
"An exploration number where every stage is divided into small areas, featuring a variety of objectives that usually requires highlighting all rooms or stepping into a certain spot to clear the level. The game is available for both Mac OS X and Windows platforms."

Game Pick: 'Walkie Tonky' (Pieces Interactive, freeware)
"A physics-based action game where players get to guide a giant robot around a city and engage in the act of smashing buildings, vehicles, and all manners of defensive measures that the Earthlings have set upon you."

Game Pick: 'Osmos' (Hemisphere Games, game demo available)
"In this serene and elegant orbital osmosis simulator, players navigate through an indigo sea of wandering motes, absorbing smaller bits while avoiding collisions with larger motes. The triple-nominated osmosis sim from Hemisphere Games, which now has a demo version available, is in the running for the 2009 IGF Technical Excellence award, Excellence in Design, and the Seumas McNally Grand Prize."

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

[Mister Raroo's latest regular GameSetWatch column considers the positive and negative aspects of digital distribution - where, naturally arguments for and against are made by an angel and devil sitting upon his shoulders. Can the angel and devil reach a consensus, or will Mister Raroo have to listen to their squabbling to no end?]

Is there really anything to debate here? It’s obvious that Mister Raroo loves digital downloads! Look at all the games he’s purchased from the Wii Shopping Channel, Playstation Store, and Xbox Live Arcade. In fact, he probably plays those games more than any of his disc-based games.

No more driving to the store to buy games. No more game cases cluttering up his shelves. No more having to get off the couch to change game discs! He has completely stepped into the digital distribution era!

Oh come now! Mister Raroo’s got some hang-ups about digital distribution. Remember all those digital duds he bought? Does Heavy Weapon ring a bell? Or how about RoboBlitz? They’re just sitting neglected and taking up valuable space on Mister Raroo’s Xbox 360’s hard drive. In an ideal situation, those games would be eBay fodder. But, oh wait! Mister Raroo can’t resell games that he’s downloaded, can he?

Let’s not forget, Devil Raroo, that digitally downloaded games are usually significantly cheaper than disc-based games. Together, the two “duds” you mentioned cost $25, which is less than half the price of most new Xbox 360 discs. Sure, it’s unfortunate that Mister Raroo wasted $25 on games he doesn’t play (knucklehead!), but that’s his fault.

Every Xbox Live Arcade game has a demo, as do some Playstation Network games. As for Wii…? Well, you’re on your own in that department, but in this day and age it’s not hard to go online and read impressions and reviews.

I’ll agree that Mister Raroo is sometimes an idiot when it comes to buying games he shouldn’t waste his money on, but there are times when the demos can make games seem more tantalizing than they actually are. You buy the game and—poof!—you’re stuck with a disappointment.

And publishers sure do what they can to make digitally downloaded games a breeze to purchase. How many times does a message pop up in the middle of a demo prompting you to buy the game? If the demo is halfway decent, it can be hard not to accept the offer and purchase the game on the spot, especially when the price is often deceptively unclear.

“Deceptively unclear?” I assume you’re referring to the use of “points” instead of actual monetary units for games downloaded from the Xbox 360 and the Wii. I’m surprised you’re not fond of that, since it is indeed devilish of Microsoft and Nintendo to substitute real money with points. Get it? “Devilish”? Haha! Ahem. Getting back on point, I'll admit that purchasing games via digital distribution can sometimes make it feel like you're not spending actual money. After all, there is no physical transaction taking place and you’re often spending pre-purchased points instead of dollars.

Dropping 400 points on a game feels far less significant than spending five dollars. But all the same, unless you have only a juvenile grasp of monetary and mathematical understanding, there is no deception in the fact that you are spending actual money. You do have to spend money on points in the first place, after all.

Oh, Angel Raroo, you and your rosy outlook sicken me! You hit the nail on the head with why points are used instead of dollars: they make it seem like you’re not spending real money. Of course, companies like Microsoft may argue that points are a way to bring global consistency to their digital marketplace so as to avoid having to come up with new prices for each county and their own unique currency, but that’s poppycock.

The Playstation Store uses actual monetary pricing and there’s no confusion there. And, for the record, Microsoft’s points are especially confusing. You’d think one point would equal one cent, like it does on the Wii. But no, it’s more confusing than that because each Microsoft point equates to 1.25 cents. That means an 800 point game is actually… let’s see… carry the one… here we are, $10. I’d wager that the funny math of “points” has brought in more money than a one point to one cent ratio would have.

Well, I can’t help you with your lack of mathematical ability, but I can at least point out that digital distribution has allowed for a resurrection of many of the types of games that would never have been green-lighted for a retail release.

As amazing as Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved and its sequel are, would either game have ever seen the light of day as anything other than as bonuses tacked on to full-priced game? Doubtful. However, we have seen a modern renaissance of many “lost” genres of games. Digital distribution has given developers the ability to create smaller-scale games and expand their creative visions in ways not permissible with larger releases.

Let’s not forget that the same scenario you’re describing has also allowed some developers to quickly shovel out crap easier than ever before. For every good game available for download, there are plenty of terrible ones. Did anyone really need Pong Toss on the Wii, for example?

And, as with games in retail stores, digitally-distributed games of dubious quality often have the same price point as the excellent games they compete with. Microsoft recently announced they plan to remove games with poor reviews and performance from their online storefront, but I don’t know if that’s quite the right solution.

Like I said before, it’s up to gamers to do their homework by trying out a demo or reading up on impressions and reviews before paying for a game. Thankfully, purchasing a crummy game via digital distribution is a lot more financially forgiving than doing the same from a retail outlet.

Sure, you might be out $10 if you download a bad game, but that’s a lot better than the alternative of $60. And with the rise in episodic gaming, developers have the ability to not only have the ability to provide a gaming experience that can be purchased in installments—allowing for gamers to bail out if the game is not to their liking—but many nagging issues can be addressed and improvements can be made with each subsequent episode.

Angel Raroo, again your sunny disposition disgusts me. Episodic gaming may allow for developers to improve a game with each release, but will most of them take the effort needed to do that? I have a feeling that most of them will be lazy and just siphon out a completed game in chunks in order for it to count as episodic.

Or, on the flip side, developers might delay the subsequent episodes for who knows how long, leaving gamers with an unfinished product. Plus, when tallied up, the price for each particular episode of a game can equal or even surpass the cost of a full-priced retail game. Episodic gaming sounds good on paper, but it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.

You have to remember that episodic gaming is, in many ways, still in its fledgling stages. There are already some companies that are doing things right. Telltale Games, for instance, not only gives a discounted price for gamers that subscribe to a full “season” of episodes through their website, but at the end of a season the company will mail subscribers a disc that contains all of the episodes -- as well as bonus content for just the price of shipping.

I understand that Telltale’s practices are not yet the norm for the industry, but they are blazing a trail that I hope other developers and publishers take note of and follow. Sending a disc-based copy of the game is not just a great way to thank loyal supporters, but it provides them with a hard copy of the content as well.

Hold up just a minute, Angel Raroo. You just brought up a crucial point. With the transitory nature of digital files, what’s going to happen to my downloaded games when my computer’s hard drive crashes or the next generation of home consoles are released?

For the time being, I can most likely re-download games free of charge, but will I be able to do so years down the road? What if ten years from now I want to play Castle Crashers but my Xbox 360’s hard drive has crashed? Will my digitally-downloaded games transfer to the next Xbox system? Don’t tell me that I’m going to have to repurchase games I’ve already paid for.

I’m no fortune teller, but I think it’d be foolish for a company such as Microsoft to make a move that would alienate its loyal user base who purchase and play games via Xbox Live.

When the Xbox 360 was released, gamers were permitted to transfer their Gamertags from the original Xbox, so I’d imagine that they will be able to do something similar when the next Xbox hits store shelves. Besides, I’m sure by that point there will be plenty of new digitally-distributed content for gamers to purchase, so Microsoft won’t need to make gamers repurchase games they bought for the Xbox 360.

You’re forgetting that companies love money and consumers are often stupid enough to purchase games they’ve already paid for. Just look at Mister Raroo’s collection. How many copies of Pac-Man or Super Mario Bros. does he own? It’s pathetic. Why should Nintendo include free NES games in Animal Crossing games when people will pay five bucks a pop for them on the Virtual Console?

When the next Xbox comes out, all Microsoft will need to do is offer the same catalog of Xbox Live Arcade games and there will be plenty of gamers who will pay to buy them all over again, especially if there is “new” content like a slight graphical upgrade or a handful of new Achievements. People like to spend money and they need little incentive to do so.

I’m going to remain more optimistic. Digital downloads are still a relatively new and developing form of distribution. Naturally, it’s going to take some time and a lot of trial and error before digital distribution becomes more standardized and widespread. Nobody can necessarily predict what will happen in the coming years, but I think it’s clear digital distribution is not only here to stay, but it may very well become the leading way in which publishers will sell games to consumers.

The days of having to preorder games and drive to a brick and mortar establishment to pick them up on release day may soon be behind us. Even now gamers can purchase digital equivalents of disc-based games through outlets like Steam and the Playstation Store.

I’m still not convinced. I have no doubt that digital distribution will become even more commonplace than it is now, but I don’t foresee discs going away any time soon. Have you tried downloading a retail-sized game from the Playstation Store? It takes forever!

You can drive to the store, buy the game, and play a good chunk of it by the time the download is finished. Also, as long as people continue to be happy to be pay through the nose for unnecessary downloadable content and add-ons, I refuse to concede that digital distribution will become the be-all, end-all it could be. I do think things will get better, but there are still too many problems with digital distribution for me to fully embrace it.

Phew! All this discussion has me tired out. Let’s tell Mister Raroo to go get us something to drink while we kick back and enjoy some video games. Let’s play Burnout Paradise. I just downloaded it last night from the Playstation Store. It was so nice to download it from the convenience of my house. No driving to the store, no dealing with pushy clerks. Digital distribution is awesome!

Downloaded it? You fool! I went to my local game store and bought a used copy of the game for even cheaper! What are you thinking? Even with heading out to the store I was probably back home enjoying the game before your digital copy was even halfway downloaded. What do you have to say about that?

[Mister Raroo is a happy husband, proud father, full-time public library employee, and active gamer. He currently lives in El Cajon, CA with his family and many pets. You may reach Mister Raroo at mister.raroo@gmail.com.]

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

[Every week, GamerBytes' editor Ryan Langley passes along 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.]

This week's top story is our interview with Craig Forrester, creator of the popular XNA Community game Johnny Platform's Biscuit Romp. Originally a Nintendo DS homebrew title, it's made its way onto the Xbox 360. We discuss the time and effort required to bring it over to XNA.

Outside of that, this weeks XBLA's releases are The Maw and possibly FunTown Mahjong (read that article for the whole ridiculous antics behind this).

The PlayStation Network got its hand with Magic Ball, a new take on Breakout; and GTI Club+, a remake of a classic Konami racer that Gamasutra publisher Simon Carless is quite fond of. WiiWare got the latest game from High Voltage Software, Hot Rod Racing, as well as Family Glide Hockey.

Here's the top news in the space:

Xbox Live Arcade

The Maw And Funtown Mahjong (maybe) Now Available On XBLA
The one-eyed purple beast of the apocalypse makes its way onto XBLA. And in another example of not knowing what's coming out, possibly FunTown Mahjong. Some 5th Grader DLC too.

GamerBytes Interview: From Nintendo DS To XNA Community Games -- How The Cookie Crumbles
We interview Craig Forrester about his recently released XNA game Johnny Platform's Biscuit Romp, and its history of originally being Nintendo DS homebrew.

Try Defense Grid: The Awakening Right Now On PC
The upcoming Tower Defense game for the XBLA has released a demo for the PC version -- try before you buy!

Try Out Puzzle Quest Galactrix Via Online Demo
Another PC demo released for upcoming XBLA and PSN title -- give Puzzle Quest Galactrix a shot now.

PlayStation Network

EU PSN Store Update -- Magic Ball and An Explosion Of PSN DLC
Creat Studio's Magic Ball is released, and about a year's worth of High Velocity Bowling DLC released along with it.

US PSN Store Update -- GTI Club+ And Magic Ball
People in North America now get a chance to drive around in a remake of a classic Konami racer, and smash down pirate ships Arkanoid style.

First Footage Of NHL Arcade Revealed
Title says it all -- watch big-headed hockey players slip over banana peels.

Flower Out On February 12th
The PlayStation Network's wind simulator is only three weeks away.

OutRun Online Arcade Not Coming To PSN In America
If you love OutRun and live in America, you're going to have to grab it on XBLA.

WiiWare

NA WiiWare Update: High Voltage Hot Rod Show And Family Glide Hockey
High Voltage Software's latest foray onto WiiWare is now up, along with a lower-budget rendition of air hockey.

EU WiiWare Update -- Lonpos
One of the Japanese WiiWare launch titles finally makes its way to Europe.

Hudson Announces Pop'em Drop'em SameGame
Hudson continue their market flood on WiiWare with a new rendition of SameGame.

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

[We're talking to this year's Independent Games Festival finalists, and this time Eric Caoili interviews 24 Caret Games' Matt Gilgenbach about Retro/Grade, a rhythm game and shoot'em-up -- played in reverse -- which is nominated for the Excellence in Design and Audio awards.]

Far from a traditional shoot'em-up, Retro/Grade has players guiding their spacecraft in reverse through stages where the action has already played out.

To prevent damage to the space-time continuum, players dodge lasers returning to the enemies that fired them, while also positioning themselves to "catch" their own reversed shots. Power-ups enable players to temporarily restore the flow of time and correct their movements.

Retro/Grade features rhythm game elements, in that the timing of all the shots are based off beats in the music. Players also have the option of using either a keyboard/gamepad setup or a guitar controller, the latter control scheme allowing players to quickly maneuver their ship through different lanes by hitting corresponding frets.

We spoke with 24 Caret Games' co-founder, game director, and gameplay programmer Matt Gilgenbach about Retro/Grade, nominated for both Excellence in Design and Excellence in Audio awards at this year's Independent Games Festival (part of Think Services, as is this website).

Gilgenbach discusses how the team stumbled upon the game's novel design, the differences between its two control schemes, and the need for publishers to fund innovative, low-budget projects:

What kind of background do you have making games?

Matt Gilgenbach: I’ve been working in the game industry for over five years and have worked on titles for Xbox, Xbox 360, PS2, PS3, PSP, GameCube, PC and Mac.

Before co-founding 24 Caret Games, I was the lead gameplay programmer at High Impact Games, where I worked on Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters and Secret Agent Clank. I also worked at Heavy Iron Studios (THQ) as a gameplay programmer on several licensed games.

How did you develop the idea to present a shoot'em-up in reverse?

MG: When we started 24 Caret Games, we wanted to put together a demo in order to get interest from publishers in our company. We were working on something that we’d like to make into a full game, but after almost two months of development, it seemed like the budget required to make it would be too high for it to be successful as a downloadable title in the current marketplace.

Right now, it seems like few indie downloadable titles sell over [100,000 copies], which means that if you want to stay in business, you have to have a very conservative budget. It was a tough decision, but we decided to go back to the drawing board and work on something that stood a better chance of keeping the company afloat.

On our initial demo, we implemented a debugging mode for backing up time in order to repeat sections and fine tune gameplay. My co-worker, Justin Wilder, had the idea that it’d be really cool if we could actually play our game in reverse. I couldn’t think of a way [for that] to work with the gameplay we had, but when we decided to start over, I thought about how to make a game that could be played in reverse.

The idea of repeating predetermined actions is a bit tough to make interesting. I thought the best way would be to constrain the movement of the player character as much as possible because trying to match an arbitrary position in space would be very difficult. As well, I saw that this would make a great rhythm game since we’d need a good indication of timing.

Making it a reverse shoot’em up met all the constraints. As well, in many rhythm games, the visuals are pretty dull, so we thought making the reverse space battle would be cool for any onlookers as well as the players.

In the more difficult modes, you increase the number of space lanes and enemy fire. Did your team explore any other changes to provide more challenging levels to advanced players?

MG: We’ve been very fortunate to get many volunteers from friends and family who are at all different skill levels to focus test in order to help balance the game. One of the main design goals is to make the game accessible and enjoyable to everyone regardless of skill level.

There are a few rules right now that I’ve developed for each difficulty level. They are a work in progress, but currently the rules are as follows. For easy, all the lasers fall on quarter notes, and the patterns are all very simple and repeat often in order for the player to get the hang of them.

For medium, the patterns are more complicated and have less repetition, and there can be lasers on the offbeat, but no eighth notes together. For hard, there are eighth notes together, but always in the same space lane. The hard patterns have little repetition.

For expert, we have eighth notes in different space lanes and some tricky patterns involving the player needing to change lanes rapidly. I’d like to add another difficulty, but I haven’t quite decided where it should go in terms of the difficulties we already have to create an experience that everyone can enjoy.

For a shoot'em up, Retro/Grade's music is, at least in its gameplay trailers, a lot more subdued than the songs you'd find in other titles in the genre, like say Gradius. Could you share how your team came up with the game's sound?

MG: It was difficult to come up with a style that we felt would work well as a rhythm game. Since this is an indie title, we don’t have the resources to license music from [insert your favorite artist here]. However, since this is a rhythm game, we needed to make the music stand out and be something that gamers would enjoy.

We thought it would be cool to do a chiptune/8-bit influenced soundtrack because it matched the retro feel that we are going for and would be appealing to gamers. However, we wanted to take advantage of the high quality sound hardware and not alienate younger audiences that missed out on the 8-bit generation, so we didn’t want something that is pure chiptunes.

We were fortunate enough to be able to contract Skyler McGlothlin, one of my personal favorite musicians, to do the original music and sound effects. It’s very difficult to describe to someone what you want music to sound like, but we did our best to give him an idea of what we were looking for, and he really blew us away with the songs he delivered. I often find myself listening to the MP3s of our soundtrack.

What other music styles did you experiment with?

MG: For the demo we submitted to the IGF, we didn’t have time to create original compositions, but before we contracted Skyler, he was nice enough to give us permission to use tracks from his first album called “Are You an Axolotl” (released as Nautilis).

The style is a bit hard to communicate because it’s quite unique, but I think it would be best described as IDM or glitch. Unfortunately, the intricate drum rhythms made it difficult for the less rhythmically inclined players to place the beat. We decided that to reach the largest audience, we’d need to carefully compose songs that would be easy to follow the beat.

Why did you decide on a horizontal-scrolling shooter, instead of a vertical-scroller? Wouldn't it have more resembled the familiar layouts of music games like Guitar Hero or Rock Band?

MG: Most new displays for both both PC monitors and TVs are widescreen, so we wanted to take advantage of the additional screen real estate. Scrolling the gameplay horizontally on a widescreen display gives us almost twice the space. The extra space allows us to have bigger and better implosions, [and makes] the timing information easier to discern from the positions of the lasers.

You have a normal control scheme for game controllers and keyboards, but you also have a rhythm game control scheme for guitar controllers? Could you talk about how the game play differs with the two control schemes?

MG: I’m a huge sucker for peripherals. I have about every ridiculous peripheral made including the Onimusha Katana Blade Controller, Steel Battalion’s massive simulated cockpit, and The Maestromusic’s conducting baton. The only problem is that often these cool peripherals only work for one game. Although our gameplay differs from guitar-based games, I thought it’d be fun to give people the option to use their peripherals on a different title.

The two control schemes we support are a shooter mode and a rhythm mode. The shooter mode is simpler because you just move the ship up and down and there are buttons to fire and to use your power ups.

The rhythm mode allows you to jump to one of the five space lanes based on which button you press. The rhythm mode is supported on gamepads as well as the keyboard, but since there are five fret buttons, it is a good fit for the guitar controller.

The game is designed so there isn’t an advantage of one control scheme to another -- it just comes down to personal preference. Since in shooter mode, the ship can only move up and down one lane at a time, there’s a limit to how fast the player can move between several space lanes.

However, which space lane the player needs to be in doesn’t have too much of an effect on the difficulty when using the rhythm mode scheme, so allowing the gamers that play with the shooter scheme time to go between lanes doesn’t make the game any less enjoyable for people playing with the rhythm mode control scheme.

Were there any other elements from shoot'em ups, rhythm titles, or any other games that you tried to include, but decided that they got in the way of Retro/Grade's accessibility?

MG: I’ve played percussion since elementary school, so I wanted to support drum peripherals somehow. I tried mapping the controls in several different ways to different drum peripherals, but it didn’t pan out. I’d rather not support drum controllers if it’s not going to be enjoyable.

Were there any elements that you experimented with that just flat out didn't work with your vision?

MG: I tried to make the premise more detailed with a bunch of silly jokes, but putting a bunch of text at the beginning really made it slow for people who just want get to the game.

I’ve done two or three passes on the epilogue (the training mission for a game in reverse) to pare it down to the bare minimum to get people up to speed on the mechanics. I realized that people playing a demo just want to get to the gameplay and see if they enjoy it.

Going forward, perhaps I’ll be able to work more humor in between levels, or at the very least, provide some supplementary materials on the web for people who really dig our game.

What sort of development tools did your team use?

MG: We use Maya for 3d modeling and Visual Studio for coding.

If you could start the project over again, what would you do differently?

Ideally, we would have started on Retro/Grade as soon as we formed the company. However, that would have been difficult since the core idea came from something we thought of while working on our initial idea. We also spent some time early on looking at doing projects for other people, but we didn’t find anything that was a good fit for our strengths as a team.

What do you think of the state of independent game development, and are there any other independent games out that you currently admire?

MG: I think due to the rising costs of development for the average game, independent games are emerging as the main source of innovation in the industry.

Last generation when there was more titles being developed (all with significantly smaller budgets), publishers were willing to have a few risky titles in their portfolios on the chance that one would become a smash hit. From an economic standpoint, it doesn’t make sense for a large publisher to gamble $10-20 million dollars on something that is experimental.

However, passionate individuals are more than willing to bet on their ideas because they believe in them. This is the independent spirit that drives people to create some really amazing games that push the envelope of games as an artistic medium.

In particular, I admire the work of Jason Rohrer. He created Passage, which despite running at a resolution of 100x16, manages to create more real emotion than many of the big budget games with the most realistic graphics. I haven’t found someone to play Between with yet, but I’m excited to play it and will be rooting for him at the IGF.

One thing about indie games that I find pretty unfortunate is there is no publisher that focuses on funding innovative, low budget projects. The problem with self-funding projects is that if a studio’s first indie title flops, they may not be able to afford to create another title.

There are many reasons why an indie title can flop that aren’t a reflection on the skill of the developers. Perhaps a similar product came out at the same time and stole some of the spotlight away. Maybe word of mouth didn’t travel fast enough to keep the developer afloat. Or perhaps the harsh economic climate caused the developers to run out of money before the game was completed.

I would think that it could be quite profitable for a publisher to fund innovative, low budget XBLA/PSN/PC downloadable titles and take some of the risks away from the game developers.

Obviously, the small developers would be trading risk for a share of the profits because the publisher would have to amortize the games that weren’t profitable with the proceeds from the games that were. Maybe that would take some of the indie spirit away, but it seems like a business model that could be mutually beneficial to all involved.

As well, it could help push the medium forward by helping new ideas turn into fully-realized games that wouldn’t otherwise see the light of day.

I imagine that no major publisher would be interested in having a division that focuses on indie games because they would much prefer to devote their resources to their large financial risks, so they don’t have the bandwidth to put people on these smaller projects that could be profitable, but are a small fraction of the company’s revenue.

Perhaps one of the smaller publishers will move into this market and provide developers with financing, QA, localization, a small amount of marketing and put their games on all the popular digital distribution channels.

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

[GameSetLinks is GameSetWatch's daily link round-up post, culling from hundreds of weblogs and outlets to compile the most interesting longform writing, links, and criticism on the art and culture of video games.]

Zooming into the weekend, the GameSetLinks hath returned, with up front, a mysterious, now indie creator in Japan giving some rather handy tips on how to strike out on one's own.

Plenty more in here, though, with the Game Studies web zine returning with more smart articles, plus an awesome 1UP retro Konami music interview, plus Guitar Hero research, game journalism cheek tongue interfacing, IC's Sheffield ruling the waves Hirai-style, et cetera.

Forgive us:

Japanmanship: But more, much more than this…
Useful practical notes for the independent creator from the ex-pat in Japan.

Game Studies - Issue 0802, 2008
Aha, a new instalment, with World Of Warcraft talk and other neat semi-academic pieces - via Juul.

1UP's Retro Gaming Blog : An interview with Konami's Hidenori Maezawa, pt. 1
Absolutely excellent set of retro interviews with VRC6 guy - pt.2, pt.3.

insertcredit.com: 'Playstation 3 official leader of game industry, I am official leader of game journalism'
Sheffield is king! Long live the king!

Aion Gives NCsoft Triple Crown | Korea IT Times
With an oddly sandwiched interview with me about my judging for the Global Online Game Awards in December.

Alex Litel's Lackluster Emporium: What is games journalism?
Silly, still linking it.

guitar hero: a research blog: interview tidbits: on musicality in Guitar Hero and Rock Band
Kiri Miller, whose research we've featured on GSW a few times, has some good audio snippets about Guitar Hero as a cultural movement.

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

['The Interactive Palette' is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Gregory Weir that examines the tools and techniques of the digital games trade with a focus on games as art, using a single game as an example. This time - a look at the use of scale in Katamari Damacy.]

The narrative of most video games is one of increasing power. The player begins the game weak and unskilled, and gradually gains experience and abilities over the course of gameplay.

Typically, games start off relatively easy and become more difficult, with the hardest part of the game being the end. In some games, like roleplaying games, this character growth is explicit, represented by increasing statistics. In others, such as many arcade games, there is only the player's growing skill and experience.

Nowhere is the process of increasing character power made more concrete than in Namco's Katamari Damacy. The game begins with the player character smaller than an apple, rolling up tiny object into his ball, or katamari. By the end of the game, the player character is pushing a ball bigger than a city and tearing up continents.

Pac-Man

Katamari Damacy has essentially the same gameplay as Namco's most famous product, Pac-Man. The player overcomes navigational difficulties to collect a large number of mostly identical objects.

When a certain number of objects has been collected, play progresses to a different arena. Their settings and aesthetics are different, but the feeling of collecting "stuff" and the flow of an efficient path is shared between both games.

The biggest gameplay difference between the two games is how challenge is added. In Pac-Man, the player must avoid and neutralize malicious ghosts. If she is caught by the ghosts too many times, the game is over. In Katamari Damacy, the player is constrained by a timer and the scale of her character. Collecting objects increases the size of the player's ball, and the bigger the objects, the bigger the ball must be before the player can collect them.

It is the sense of scale, however, that truly sets the games apart. When playing Pac-Man, later levels mean faster and less vulnerable ghosts. The game is harder, but it is essentially the same experience. With Katamari Damacy, on the other hand, there is an immediate and dramatic difference between the early game and the late game. Because the objects being collected are recognizable, the player can see the difference between collecting a toothpick and uprooting a skyscraper. The ball itself even handles differently; the larger it gets, the slower and more ponderous its motion becomes.

This dramatic sense of scale greatly enhances the player's feeling of progression and accomplishment. By making the player feel increasingly powerful, the game heightens the emotional impact of advancement. The player's excitement over her progress causes her to become more invested and immersed in the game.

Techniques

Katamari Damacy achieves its sense of scale in several ways. The first is by using clear objects of reference. Second, it provides continuity as the player's ball grows. Finally, the player's sensory experience changes with the game's scale.

Katamari Damacy's setting provides it with clear objects of reference that help the player quickly and easily gauge her size. The game is set in a stylized version of the modern world, populated with many objects, from dice to people to cars to houses. These simply-rendered objects immediately provide a cue as to the size of the player's ball. Imagine if the game were set in a fantasy world. The modern player does not have a firm grasp of how big a castle or dragon should be, so scale in this hypothetical Katamari Fantasy would be much more vague.

Likewise, if Katamari Damacy's portrayal of its setting was more realistic, then there would be a wider variety of each type of object, and fewer objects scattered about. There would be several subtly different sizes of car and more variation of houses, while the ground would no longer be littered with neat rows of tulips or clusters of teddy bears.

Another valuable technique that Katamari Damacy uses is continuity of scale. Over the course of a single level, the player's ball grows from a few centimeters to a few meters or more. Objects that were once so large that they didn't register in the player's attention gradually become small enough to absorb. Because this process happens continuously, the player can say, "I recognize that tree; a few minutes ago, I was rolling among its roots."

The developers could have made each size class a seperate level, with one level where the player is the size of an orange, and another where she controls a katamari the size of a beachball. In this case, the player would still have an intellectual awareness of growth, but she would lose the visceral feeling of gradual growth, and the retrospective ability to see the now-tiny place where the level started.

The third technique for highlighting scale is the change in sensation associated with the change in size. A small katamari is nimble but light, able to turn on a dime but liable to be bounced around by larger objects and unable to roll over obstacles with its momentum. A large katamari is the opposite; it's slow and massive. At its largest, a katamari is hard to turn and slow to accelerate, but once it gets going, it plows through or over everything in its path.

In addition to this tactile sensation, there are effective visual cues to size. Each size milestone is associated with a woosh and a zoom out. This presumably serves to mask certain graphical anomalies related to the disappearance of small items, but it also is a compelling message that the ball is indeed getting larger. At the end of a level, when the katamari is as huge as it will get, the camera pulls out far, and the level is obscured by clouds or fog, highlighting the extreme size of the ball.

Applying Scale

Obviously, not every video game has a protagonist that grows extremely in size. The techniques for scale that Katamari Damacy uses cannot be directly applied. However, as previously discussed, most games have a gradual increase in power over the course of a level or the entire game. This increase in power can be highlighted in the same way that Katamari highlights its increase in size.

Katamari Damacy contains objects that serve as size reference points. Other games can use similar reference points. A combat game where the protagonist becomes more skilled with a gun can have easily recognized enemy archetypes. At the beginning of the game, enemy footsoldiers can be a challenge; by the end, the player is skilled and equipped enough to handle special forces. Half-Life does this well; headcrabs are initially a dangerous threat, but they eventually become tiny and simple-to-kill in comparison to the huge alien grunts.

Katamari Damacy's continuity of scale can be adapted by enforcing a unity of setting on games. Players can be shown familiar landmarks, which they return to repeatedly through the game with increasing abilities. If the player is able to return to easier areas of the game, she will have a more concrete idea of how far she has progressed.

Finally, the progression of a character can be shown through the feel and look of the game. Controlling a more powerful protagonist should be a different experience. Knytt Stories is an excellent example of this. The game begins with a slow, not-too-nimble protagonist, but as the character Juni gains abilities, she becomes faster, more agile, and simply feels more fluid. This is more than just the acquisition of a hookshot to bypass a barrier; a late-game Juni feels different from an early-game Juni.

By taking lessons from Katamari Damacy, developers can create game experiences that better portray the experience of gaining power that is essential to so many video games. When a player feels herself becoming more experienced or capable, she will have a stronger emotional reaction to the game and will feel more invested in her actions. When a protagonist is powerful, it should feel powerful to control. It's one thing to read that a character is level 20, and another for it to feel 20 times as strong as it used to be.

[Gregory Weir is a writer, game developer, and software programmer. He maintains Ludus Novus, a podcast and accompanying blog dedicated to the art of interaction. He can be reached at Gregory.Weir@gmail.com.]

Posted by Gregory Weir at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[In the third of a series picking out the most notable Game Developers Conference 2009 lectures, sister site Gamasutra examines the Game Design Track, with newly added talks from the World of Warcraft: Wrath Of The Lich King, Mass Effect 2, and Warhammer Online creators.]

Game Developers Conference 2009 (organized by Gamasutra parent company Think Services) is set to take place in San Francisco's Moscone Center from March 23 to 27, 2009.

With nearly 280 sessions now confirmed for GDC 2009, we'll be taking a track by track look at the conference's line-up over the next few weeks.

Third on the list is GDC's Game Design Track, which will help attendees "understand and exploit the possibilities of new technologies," and also explore the "challenges and ramifications of the interaction between new technologies and established techniques."

Notable highlights thus far announced for this track are as follows:

- The 'Cruise Director of Azeroth: Directed Gameplay within World of Warcraft', Blizzard Entertainment's Jeffrey Kaplan explains the guidelines and philosophies directing the creation of World of Warcraft content, and will also provide an informative look at the popular MMORPG's "quest system and how it has changed over time, with Wrath of the Lich King being the latest evolution."

- Project manager Corey Andruko and lead technical designer Dusty Everman will present a highly anticipated session on "The Iterative Level Design Process of Bioware's Mass Effect 2." The two will examine major issues encountered while building the original Mass Effect, and will share the sequel's new level-creation process.

- Mythic Entertainment's ribald Paul Barnett will share how his team managed to take a beloved franchise like Warhammer and "convert it into to an MMO that's fun in its own right", as he recounts humorous anecdotes from the Warhammer Online developer's process of 'Making an MMO Based on a Beloved IP (Without Pissing Everyone Off)'.

- Last year's Game Design Challenge champion, Infocom veteran Steve Meretzky, will compete against two as yet unrevealed combatants in 'The Game Design Challenge: My First Time.' The contestants will pitch a game concept that brings the themes of sex and autobiography together, providing for a session full of "extremely innovative and uncomfortably revealing design thinking."

- In his 'Vast Narratives and Open Worlds, Part Deux -- Big Huge Problems' session, Ken Rolston -- lead designer of the recent Elder Scrolls games -- will talk about his new open-world RPG with Big Huge Games. Along with BHG's lead designer Mark Nelson, he'll discuss the "unique and varied challenges associated with designing a vast open-world game, how to avoid them, and what to do when they inevitably occur."

In addition, a number of other already announced lectures are notable highlights in the Design Track:

- In 'Player's Expression: The Level Design Structure Behind Far Cry and Beyond?', Ubisoft's lead level designer Jonathan Morin will share "proven design tools to support extensive player’s expression," as well as "examples on how to use those in the future to expand beyond what was done on Far Cry 2."

- Lionhead Studios's Peter Molyneux will display visual and playable examples for a range of both successful and failed ideas from his studio in 'Lionhead Experiments Revealed', depicting "cutting edge technology from several different disciplines."

- In 'Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap: Design Lessons Learned from Rock Band', Harmonix senior designer Dan Teasdale looks to inspire designers to "subvert the yearly franchise excuses that kill design innovation, and strive to push forward on innovating in their own titles, regardless of development time, franchise, or mechanic."

The full Game Design Track line-up to date includes many more notable lectures and roundtables, including discussions on breathing life into open worlds, camera-based gaming, screenwriting techniques, and many more.

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

[In an excerpt from new book Rogue Leaders: The Story of LucasArts, an exhaustive Chronicle Books-published history of the veteran game company, author Rob Smith takes a look at Habitat, the innovative, ahead of its time 1980s-era virtual world that Lucasfilm Games made for the Commodore 64.]

Research & Development: Habitat

A couple of years into the [Lucasfilm] games group's existence, a sense remained that their work was all a big experiment.

Indeed, the entire Computer Division could be seen as an experiment, as it researched high-end digital-editing technology for implementation in all aspects of filmmaking. Still, the charter early on from Lucas was to be innovative, and that meant unique research projects within Lucasfilm Games.

Habitat (known as "MicroCosm" until trademark issues prompted a name change; earlier iterations were "Lucasfilm Universe," "Lucasfilm Games Alliance," and "Lucasnet") stands out today as an astutely forward-thinking project. It was philosophically in tune with what gamers wanted, and was technologically about ten years ahead of its time.

The Commodore 64 computer had a foothold in the U.S. home-computer market, and a 300-baud modem was the latest add-on gizmo that had captured the attention of hardcore enthusiasts.

To support the launch of the modem by ensuring that content was available, Commodore had invested in an online company called Quantum Computer Services. Commodore approached Lucasfilm Games in a search for content that could run through the online company's QuantumLink service.

Customers were paying online service providers such as CompuServe $12 an hour to access the fledgling network (and even $20 an hour for access during peak daytime hours). Q-Link, as it was known, undercut that price to around $3.60 an hour by renting out spare, unused server space during low-usage times.

Through this partnership a deal was hatched to produce an online game, with Lucasfilm Games creating the front-end game -- Habitat -- on the Commodore 64, and Q-Link producing the back-end, server-side software.

"We knew it was going to be hard, but we knew that connected storytelling was fundamentally where games should and would go," says Steve Arnold. Designer Noah Falstein had been working with one of the team engineers, Chip Morningstar, on the game concept. To capture the broadest reach of potential customers, they settled on a familiar modern day setting.

Development began in 1985 and sketched out a virtual world where each player had an in-game "avatar" -- a word defining a player's online representation (and still used today). These characters could interact with other players, connected in a massive online world composed of 20,000 "regions" -- essentially individual screens connected to as many as four additional regions.

Even within the company, explaining this brave new frontier of interactive entertainment wasn't easy: its concept simply hadn't existed up to this point, and so artist Gary Winnick created a storyboard to illustrate the idea in pictures.

Despite the apparent advantage of not having to program artificial intelligence for in-game characters, given that all the players were real people, creating rules for player interactions required the developers to broach subjects never before considered in game design.

Remarked Chip Morningstar in a long treatise on Habitat's creative process: "A special circle of living Hell awaits the implementers of systems involving that most important category of autonomous computational agents: groups of interacting human beings."

The team needed to ask innumerable questions about what was allowed and what rules or laws governed player interaction; for example, if you permitted an action like taking an object from another player, what happens when one character takes an item and runs or logs off?

To find workable answers took trial, error, and incredibly creative thinking—and also required a significant beta test among the Q-Link users.

The game debuted internally at Lucasfilm Games at a company meeting in early 1988, with Gary Winnick creating in-game avatars that looked like George Lucas and Steve Arnold. Only 500 disks of the beta software for this superbly innovative project were made available, and they were quickly snapped up by Q-Link users.

Chat rooms were the major entertainment source over these 300-baud modems, and the Rabbit Jack's Casino program proved popular among the 50,000 Q-Link subscribers. Some 15,000 Rabbit Jack's disks had been distributed to the subscriber list and players of that game accounted for about three percent of the total system usage.

Upon its beta release, Habitat's 500-disk distribution went to users who gobbled enough logged time to account for a full one percent of the entire system usage. Clearly the product spoke the language of early online-entertainment adopters, and this relatively small group of users was spending a vast amount of time exploring and interacting with the world and its people.

It looked like Habitat was a huge hit-in-the-making, and so in the fall of 1988 the beta was taken to a New York nightclub for a launch party as Lucasfilm Games and Q-Link prepared to revolutionize gaming.

But a problem lurked.

Essentially, if 500 users were so committed to playing Habitat that they remained online long enough to eat up 1 percent of the network's entire system bandwidth, a full-run production that could attract Rabbit Jack's Casino numbers could boost that bandwidth number to 30 percent. "The way the system was built, the server software wasn’t capable of hosting that population while still being successful," recalls Arnold.

Ultimately, these business challenges caused Habitat to be cancelled after the launch party, but before it had gone into full production and reached retail shelves. It would simply be too popular, and the necessary server fix would be too expensive to make the project viable. And so this massively original, inventive, and cutting-edge project was shelved for U.S. release.

From a business perspective, however, Habitat wasn’t a failure. The game was licensed to Fujitsu for use on its FM Towns PC-like platform, and the successor to Habitat was recast (with several of the original planned features now cut) as Corpe Caribe, described as an online Club Med, where it enjoyed some success.

Though Habitat never received a commercial release in the United States, Lucasfilm Games was able to recoup most of its development costs through these side deals. As for Quantum Computer Services, in 1989 -- just a year after working toward a launch for Habitat -- the company changed its name to America Online.

The pioneering work on Habitat by Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer, the two programming gurus who had built the system infrastructure, earned them a First Penguin Award at the Game Developers Choice Awards in 2001.

Conceived by co-worker Noah Falstein, the award [was given annually] "to recognize the courage and bravery of a developer who tested the proverbial waters, uncertain of success or failure. A 'First Penguin' served as a lesson, and inspiration, to the rest of the community over the years."

[Rogue Leaders is available now, and also includes "300 pieces of concept art, character development sketches and storyboards... to showcase the creative talent behind such video game classics as The Secret of Monkey Island Grim Fandango and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, as well as games that were never publicly released."]

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

[GameSetLinks is GameSetWatch's daily link round-up post, culling from hundreds of weblogs and outlets to compile the most interesting longform writing, links, and criticism on the art and culture of video games.]

Ah yes, the GameSetLinks slight return, and we start off this time with Steve Gaynor's 'getting into the industry' post over at Fullbright, which is correctly, usefully on topic as regards making the jump from interested gamer to actual game developer.

Also hanging out in the melting pot - MSX emulated games making another return to the West, a historical game jaunt in honor of Obama's presidency, Flash game postmortems, Ridge Racer retrospectives, and much more.

Flat Eric:

Fullbright: Informative
Good post by 2K Marin's Steve Gaynor on how he got into the industry - extremely, usefully practical.

How can a game teach a system? (Ethan Kennerly)
An interesting theoretical piece: 'Which games teach systems? And: What systems are they teaching? My experience playing games doesn't touch the tip of the iceberg, but here's a few of my opinions.'

1UP's Retro Gaming Blog : MSX digi-distribution to return with international Project EGG site
MSX is obscure, but lots of fun - and also notable: 'We expect to expand our cooperation with D4 Enterprise in many other ways as well, such as the distribution of games for the iPhone/iPodTouch via the Apple Appstore.'

Game Design Reviews: Excit: Post-Mortem
A fun to read postmortem of an Excel pastiche Flash game...

Vintage Computing and Gaming | Archive » The First Black Video Game Character
'In honor of this watershed moment in American history, I thought we should pay tribute to another African-American trailblazer: the first black video game character.'

Retrospective: Ridge Racer Revolution | Edge Online
These Edge mag retrospectives continue to be quite linkable. Shame they're now giving away basically all of their content online, giving me no motivation to subscribe, though.

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

[Leading up to the 2009 Independent Games Festival in March, Eric Caoili is talking with the finalists for the preeminent indie game competition, this time interviewing Kyle Pulver and Peter Jones about Snapshot, a 2D PC platformer with a photography twist and a Yoshi's Island-esque visual style.]

In Snapshot, players guide Pic through a colorful, pastel-hued world in which they can capture objects or creatures with a photograph, then place them elsewhere to reach previously inaccessible areas, complete puzzles, or move around creatures.

We spoke with the game's core team, designer/programmer Kyle Pulver and designer/artist Peter Jones, about Snapshot -- which was nominated for an Excellence in Design award at this year's Independent Games Festival (part of Think Services, as is this website).

Subjects discussed include how the team motivated themselves to complete the project, the designers' thoughts on I Wish I Were The Moon's photo element, and planned features for future Snapshot builds, which include a Portal-esque mechanic that allows players to record and redirect the velocity and direction of moving objects:

What kind of background do you have making games?

Kyle Pulver: Being fresh out of college, I don't have any actual games industry experience just yet. I've been making games in one way or another since I grabbed a copy of Klik and Play when I was 10 or 11 years old. And of course, [I've been] playing games all my life.

I didn't really get into this whole indie games scene until last year when I released Bonesaw: The Game after almost a year and a half of working on it. Since then, I've been just making some small games for the competitions at TIGSource with Everyone Loves Active 2 and Verge.

Peter Jones: I, too, have never really had any actual industry experience, but like Kyle, have grown up on video games. During college, I was involved with some personal projects like Splotch! and Puzmagraph with other students. Since Snapshot was submitted, a friend and I released Memix, a puzzle/memory game for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

How did you develop the idea to add this photography element to a platformer?

PJ: I actually had a really weird dream in October of 2007. I was being chased by this crazy animal, and for whatever reason, with a disposable camera in hand, I snapped a photo of it just as it lunged at me. After I lowered the camera, it was gone.

I like telling people it was this huge bear, but I think if I remember right, it was a squirrel or something like that. After that, I woke up, frantically wrote it all down, and spent most of that morning's Biology class explaining to Kyle how it would make an awesome game (without much resistance).

KP: It really seemed like the perfect idea to pursue. As for being a platformer specifically, I just happen to love platformers to death, and I think Pete and myself both knew that making the game a 2D platformer would be the best bet. I had just finished a rather lengthy platformer game, so that's the genre I have the most experience in.

PJ: That was a crazy dream.

The game has been in the works since November 2007, right? What has the development process been like?

PJ: Kyle and I had used Snapshot as our thesis project at Clarkson University, so we were lucky to have imposed deadlines to keep us on track. Our assignment was to create more of a proof of concept. The idea of moving objects around seemed pretty complicated to us, and we weren't sure how it would translate on the fun scale.

Since the thesis presentation (and graduation!), Kyle and I have been involved in separate projects with plans to pick up development after this year's GDC.

KP: The deadlines definitely helped when we were working on it last year. Either we finished the project, or we didn't graduate. That can really motivate you to work on something. We got a lot done while at school, but since then, it's been tough to pick it back up with both of us going separate ways. The IGF nomination has definitely put us back into the zone though.

Can you tell us about the game's hero, Pic, and his motivations in Snapshot?

PJ: We're still working on the details of Snapshot's story, but I can give you the general idea from a gameplay's perspective. Snapshot obviously revolves around a mysterious camera. Parts of Pic's camera are stolen and scattered around his world.

During his adventure to collect the missing parts, a separate more sinister plot will arise and Pic will find himself in the middle of a conflict bigger than himself.

KP: Whoa that sounds pretty epic. I can't wait.

What are some examples of some of the more clever ways players can move around objects?

PJ: One of my favorites is that Pic will eventually gain the ability to rotate pictures and also take "action shots." Any objects that are captured will retain their velocity and direction so that you might have a projectile that you can capture, flip 180 degrees, and fire back at its shooter.

KP: In the future we want to move toward more of a freeform physics-based gameplay environment. Rotating photos and carrying an object's momentum is a great example of something we want to achieve in upcoming builds of the game, and something that will add a lot of life to it.

Imagine that there's a box that falls down from high above, and if the player is quick enough, they can snag it in a photo as it's falling. Now, when they go to place that photo, they can rotate it in any direction they want before it gets pasted. The box will launch out of the pasted photo depending on how its rotated.

If the player finds a bomb that has a button on one side of it, they can snap a photo of it, rotate it, and drop it so it lands on the button and it blows up, and that can knock down a wall or damage a large enemy or something along those lines.

Were there any new ideas for new snapshot uses that you came up with while experimenting with the game's mechanics?

KP: One of the ideas we came up with while actually messing around with the engine was the idea that you can take pictures of a door and paste it back onto a wall to access a new area. We added this in at the very end of the level in the IGF build.

The player finds a door that seemingly leads to nowhere, but hovering the camera over it shows that it can be captured in a photo. If the player can find where to paste the door, they can walk through it and advance to the next area.

Have you played Daniel Benmergui's I Wish I Were The Moon? It has a similar snapshot mechanic, though presented on a smaller scale. What are your thoughts on that title, and its use of photos?

KP: I played I Wish I Were The Moon when the Redux version came out, I missed the first version of it. At first, when I played it, I thought, "Oh crap, there's a game that uses photos already."

It's a great sort of bite-sized game that's easy to enjoy. After spending some time on it, I still don't think I've found all the endings, but I don't want to resort to a using a walkthrough to ruin it. It's pretty awesome that games which are so different can share the same unique mechanic.

PJ: Now I have! I think the idea that your actions permanently change the final outcome is really interesting.

Can you describe how you developed the game's art style, and why you chose this particular look? It's very Yoshi's Island-esque.

PJ: We went through a few different styles for Snapshot and had a tough time deciding how our protagonist would look. Since its submission, we've begun determining a storyline that will probably dictate some sort of change in its general appearance.

However, from the start, we knew Snapshot should be a vibrant, picturesque environment almost out of a storybook. It was natural that we looked to Yoshi's Island as a source of inspiration. It has always stood out in my mind as one of the most beautiful games across the board.

We also never expected Snapshot to get this much attention, so we're excited to continue refining and refreshing its artistic development to provide the most unique and appealing experience possible.

The game is still in its prototype stages -- can you share some of the gameplay elements that you intend to eventually include?

PJ: We have a lot of exciting game play elements that we want to include. We hope to have a way for Pic to take a picture of himself, and create a copy that exists and moves like he does for a limited time. We'll have "gate keepers" that want a picture of something, not necessarily an object, before they'll let you pass.

It would be cool to use the negative space of a pasted picture in order to pass through certain barriers. Double-prints, enlargements, film negatives -- some of our best ideas have come up mid-development, so there are a lot more elements waiting to be discovered.

Oh, I've also always wanted passive animals in a game. Why is everything trying to kill you? That's not cool; so I thought it would be fun to have some animals that even run away at the sight of you. A side quest might be to capture every type of animal and enemy in the game. And then you'd have to build a team, to fight other animals ... just kidding.

KP: Most of the game will be based around the concept that you'll be able to deconstruct and reassemble the level through photos as you play. Besides the photographs, though, we also have plans to incorporate some grapple hook and climbing type stuff, because that's always fun.

We also want to try to appeal to the collectathon lovers out there by rewarding players for bringing back photos of objects, enemies, or anything else they can find, and displaying them in a big trophy room of sorts. The final game will definitely have a lot of layers so there will be something there for all types of players.

What sort of development tools did your team use?

KP: Everything that exists in the game right now is made with Multimedia Fusion. I had built a level editor with MMF, as well as the game engine. Unfortunately, we're starting to hit some of the limitations of MMF, and it has a lot of overhead for getting relatively simple things running, so we're going to have to explore other options in the months ahead.

PJ: We used some software called Adobe Photoshop too, you should check it out. It's pretty effective at creating images.

If you could start the project over again, what would you do differently?

PJ: We had such a small time span to get it ready for our thesis presentation. I think a second go-around would see a little more time spent planning on exactly what we wanted. Since we didn't have too much time, we had to dive right into it.

KP: I think that having a real programmer on board from the start would've been nice. I've been trying to do my best with Multimedia Fusion, and I think I've done a pretty good job so far, but it sure would've been a lot smoother if I wasn't the one coding.

Time wasn't on our side, as we had to have a polished presentation ready in about 10 weeks from when we actually started. Instead of having a lot of half-finished mechanics, we just decided to have a small set of polished ones.

What do you think of the state of independent game development, and are there any other independent games out that you currently admire?

KP: I'm brand new into this crazy world of making games, so I can't really offer any profound thoughts on the state of indie games. It's definitely a growing space with limitless potential (Could I say anything more generic?).

With tools out there like Game Maker, Multimedia Fusion, XNA, and countless others, anyone with access to a computer can make something, and having that kind of openness is going to result in (and has resulted in) some amazing things I'm sure.

I hope that the model of publishing games will evolve in a way that will really open doors for some of the small teams or individuals with great games. Crayon Physics Deluxe is among my favorites right now, and before that it was World of Goo and Aquaria.

I'm a big fan of Konjak's work and Noitu Love 2 was one of my favorite games of last year. Long before that, I really enjoyed Within a Deep Forest, and Lyle in Cube Sector, and so many more that I couldn't possibly name them all.

As of lately, all the indie games on my PC have completely taken me away from my consoles. There's just something about playing a game that was only developed by one person or a small team of people. The experience is just more personal than playing a huge big budget game.

PJ: There's so many great things going on that it's hard to keep up with it. We were both lucky enough to go to college in the same town that Jason Rohrer lives in. I love showing "non-gamers" and artists Passage to see their reaction. His titles reach an emotional level that I can only dream of achieving at this point.

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

['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist. This week she looks at Summer Session, a teen summer school PC casual simulation/story game by Hanako Games in collaboration with Tycoon Games.]

PC casual game title Summer Session is a dating simulation implemented in Ren'Py. That means that it belongs to a long tradition of Japanese dating sims, but is quite unlike anything in the U.S. casual or hardcore markets: it deals with the management of time and resources, certainly, but the chief goal is to connect with one or more of the girls you encounter.

Game-play in Summer Session consists of two kinds of interaction. One is pure resource-management: you set up your schedule, a week at a time, to determine what you'll do each afternoon. You're allowed one activity per day. Activities adjust your stats: studying makes you smarter but less cool, exercising makes you stronger, and so on.

In this respect, Summer Session is a lot like Kudos, only quicker to play through, and without the mini-games associated with some tasks. Also as in Kudos, you can go to the mall on weekends and stock up on objects that improve your stats or make your life easier somehow.

Unlike Kudos, though, Summer Session also allows you some direct conversation with your friends and potential girlfriends. These interactions can directly influence how people feel about you; the key is usually to demonstrate that you've been paying attention to the characterization by discussing topics that interest the person you're talking to.

In practice, I found Summer Session hugely more appealing than Kudos. For one thing, characters are presented as distinct individuals, and their interactions with you aren't purely dependent on their assessment of how cool you are. For another, the scope of Summer Session is more modest and the days play through faster, so that the experience is proportionally more story-content and less busywork.

Speaking of story, though: the first few times you play Summer Session, you probably won't experience much of a narrative arc. Instead, you'll bumble around trying to impress everyone (or even just a chosen girl or two); fail to do so; and possibly even fail the biology class that you're there to take. It'll feel like a somewhat aimless summer full of social near-misses, but no particular cohesion -- a lot like real life, as seen without the organizing structure of fiction.

Those near-misses guide replay -- not only replay to win, but replay to produce a narrative.

There are many possible encounters with other characters that depend on being at the right place at the right time; having them go well requires that you also have the right statistical profile. Some girls are interested only in a boy who is cool, or smart, or wealthy. Usually it's only possible to achieve the right balance if you go in knowing more or less what a given girl is looking for, and when and where you can expect to find her.

Getting any one of these girls interested in you will require a number of encounters. I found (somewhat to my surprise) that despite its straightforward-seeming choice-based gameplay, Summer Session is actually pretty hard. Several of the girls require that you be proficient in more than one thing, and you also can't win the game if you slack off too much: passing the biology course is a prerequisite for any other form of success.

So a fair amount of work goes into any successful ending; and, of course, it helps to have already had a number of passes through the early dialogue portions, so that you can be sure to say the right things to people early on to make them like you.

The tight structure gives the game a bit of challenge and more replayability, but it also has a narrative value. A winning playthrough not only has more meaningful events than an unsuccessful one, it also has fewer extraneous events.

The design of the game is such that if the player is pursuing one particular girl using an effective strategy, he'll necessarily be skipping a bunch of activities that he doesn't have time for -- and he's therefore less likely to have his playthrough contaminated, as it were, by encounters that really only matter to a different narrative arc.

That's not an absolute guarantee that everything you do in a successful story arc will turn out to be relevant to the story, and there are some events that happen consistently on every playing or that are significant in multiple story versions. Nonetheless, there's a strong tendency for coherence to go along with winning.

That design feature is helped along by a bit of player psychology. The game allows you to go into "skip mode" when replaying, which speeds through dialogue passages that you've seen before. Extensive use of skip mode makes the more mundane parts of the game fade into the background even more.

The realistic, life-like one-day-at-a-time pacing of the first playthroughs gives way to a more story-oriented pacing, in which the many afternoons you spend uneventfully studying or working in the computer lab are allowed to blur together, and only the highlights of the story get extensive attention.

In other words, the experience of the game changes not only because the program generates different output, but also because the player (encouraged by the presentation style) perceives, processes, and weights similar output differently.

This is really pretty ingenious. There are quite a few games in which the story ends well if the player wins, badly if he fails; there are many others in which the player isn't really allowed to fail permanently. Overall, Summer Session is unusual in offering a simulation to the player if he loses, but a story if he wins.

That's not to say Summer Session has a flawless design. It can be frustrating, in particular, to replay thinking you've got a likely strategy to win with a new girl, only to have it fail towards the end. If you get almost-but-not-quite the right combination, you'll have to restart from scratch.

And then there are limits on the ambition of the stories; however well you do, you still wind up with a lightweight tale of adolescent infatuation. Several of the characters are basic stereotypes; it makes sense for gameplay reasons that they need to have a complementary set of behaviors and preferences, but sometimes it all feels a little too formal and formulaic.

Then again, some of the characters rise above their surroundings -- I particularly liked the prickly, insecure Midori. And I was satisfied after my ambition to chat up my teacher ended in rejection when I failed my end-of-term test. (I don't know whether she would have gone out with me if I'd passed. Maybe. But as it happens, the rejection seemed fitting, and probably wiser on her part, too.)

I've played a few other games by Hanako, and while most of them shared the Ren'Py engine and the Japanese-styled aesthetic of Summer Session, none quite hit this narrative sweet spot in the same way.

[Emily Short is an interactive fiction author and part of the team behind Inform 7, a language for IF creation. She also maintains a blog on interactive fiction and related topics. She can be reached at emshort AT mindspring DOT com.]

Posted by Emily Short at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Here's the second set of IGF announcements for this year - and as always, the Student Showcase winners span an amazing variety of genres, countries, and styles - congratulations to all those honored, and thanks to everyone for entering.]

The 2009 Independent Games Festival (IGF) has announced the ten winners in the Student Showcase for its 11th annual awards, with games from three continents spanning ecological, paint-splattering and fantasy exercise games to be shown at GDC this year.

Chosen from a new record of 145 Student Showcase entries (up over 15% on last year's 125 entries), these games will go on to compete for an overall Best Student Game prize, to be awarded at the IGF Awards Ceremony on the evening of March 25th, 2009.

Some of this year's Student Showcase winners include CMU's 'active play' exercise-centered game Winds Of Orbis, quirky Danish first-person dish cleaning game Dish Washington (pictured), and ecological management puzzle game City Rain from Brazilian students.

Also honored are titles including USC's abstract painting game The Unfinished Swan and reality-manipulating German side scrolling shooter Zeit Squared:

All IGF finalist games will be exhibited at the IGF Pavilion at this year’s Game Developers Conference. GDC, Think Services' annual conference dedicated to the art, science and business of games, takes place March 23rd-27th at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco.

Each finalist in the IGF Student Showcase will receive a $500 travel stipend to help aid expenses for the trip to GDC 2009. The winner of the IGF Best Student Game Award will receive a special trophy and $2,500 cash prize during the ceremony.

The Student Showcase games and game mods that will be considered for the 2009 Best Student Game Award are all highlighted on a special page on the IGF website.

The full list of finalists is as follows:

- Tag: The Power Of Paint (DigiPen Institute Of Technology, Seattle)
- Feist (Zurich University of the Arts, Switzerland)
- Winds Of Orbis (Carnegie Mellon - Entertainment Technology Center, Pittsburgh)
- Dish Washington (The National Academy of Digital, Interactive Entertainment, Denmark)
- The Unfinished Swan (University of Southern California)
- Where Is My Heart? (Universität Ulm, Germany)
- The Color Of Doom (The Guildhall at SMU, Texas)
- City Rain - Building Sustainability (Universidade Estadual Paulista, Brazil)
- Kid The World Saver (University Of Southern California)
- Zeit Squared (Technische Universität Berlin, Germany)

The IGF was established in 1998 by Think Services to encourage innovation in game development and to recognize the best independent game developers, in the same way that the Sundance Film Festival honors the independent film community.

Notable previous IGF honorees include many of today's breakthrough independent games, from Number None's Braid through 2D Boy's World Of Goo and Invisible Handlebar's Audiosurf. Previous Student Showcase winners have included Narbacular Drop - subsequently evolved into Game Developers Choice Game Of The Year winner Portal - and Cloud, from the student team who then created downloadable titles Flow and Flower.

GDC 2009 will continue its support of independent gaming with the return of the Independent Games Summit on March 23rd and 24th. The IGF Pavilion, where GDC attendees can experience the finalist games in the IGF Main, Student, and Mobile Competitions, is open in Moscone West from March 25th to 27th.

For more information on the Independent Games Festival, please visit the official IGF website; to register for GDC, please visit the official Game Developers Conference site.

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

[Our own Game Developer Research division, which includes various of us including the redoubtable Chris Remo, has debuted its first-ever research into iPhone games, suggesting lengthening production cycles and a diversification of game genres away from the still-dominant puzzle & word game sector. Yep, folks, the cute lil' iPhone is growing up - here's the details.]

Game Developer Research has revealed select results of its first ever State of iPhone Game Development report, helping to illuminate the growing but still largely undocumented iPhone and iPod Touch game software market.

While the iPhone game development market is still in its relative infancy, evidence suggests projects are becoming more ambitious and studios are becoming more sophisticated in their approach.

Select report metrics have revealed a trend towards longer development cycles for iPhone games currently in production, as follows:

For example, the number of games with 1-3 month development cycles among survey respondents dropped from 61% of completed projects to 41% of in-development projects. In a related trend, the number of games with 4-6 month development cycles rose from 25% (completed) to 47% (in development).

The survey also hinted at upcoming changes in popular iPhone game genres. The majority of developers are still working on projects in the extremely popular puzzle and word game genre (53%), but that’s somewhat decreased from 62% who’ve worked on completed puzzle and word games.

Other uncommon game genres are also expected to increase in number as apps get more sophisticated. 11% of respondents explained they had worked on completed strategy games, but 15% were planning strategy titles. Similarly, 11% were already done on projects in the story-heavy adventure game genre, with 21% planning such titles.

The full 39-page report uses iPhone App Store data and an anonymous survey of almost 150 current iPhone developers to outline a number of important data points. These include purchase prices for iPhone games, the effects of and reason for post-launch price adjustments on games, download number ranges, game porting trends, and many other vital stats.

“This survey shows the increasing importance and maturity of the iPhone game market,” said Simon Carless, director of Game Developer Research. "The open platform seems to be encouraging a multitude of developers to jump on board, creating an intriguing melting pot of short form and more sophisticated game titles."

For more information on the report, which should be extremely useful for businesses and individuals considering pricing and genre possibilities in the packed iPhone game space, please visit the official Game Developer Research website.

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

[Developers are looking for a way to integrate narrative and gameplay effectively, and Gamasutra's Christian Nutt looks at a surprising, but -- he claims -- effective example: the slot machine-like DMW system in Square Enix's Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII for PSP.]

As I talk to developers and attend industry events, it becoming clear to me that designers and writers have a real thirst to see narrative and gameplay become more closely enmeshed in games.

Funnily enough, I played a popular game in 2008 that did an excellent job of effectively bringing these two things together, but I've rarely heard anyone discuss it in those terms.

Several people I've talked to personally have spoken highly of the way the title combines the two, but there hasn't been broad recognition, as far as I can tell.

That game is Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, by Square Enix, for the PSP. I have a feeling that there are a couple of reasons there hasn't been more dialogue about this title.

For one, it's a PSP game, so it doesn't have the same stature as a PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 title. For another, I don't think people outside of the fan base give the series a lot of credit these days.

I think many professionals, while recognizing the series' popularity, would be surprised to hear just how often it gets things right.

A Surprising Mind Wave

The most innovative element of Crisis Core is the Digital Mind Wave system. It may have a silly name (that's a weakness of the Japanese, for sure) but it is an ingenious gameplay system.

Most of the writing I saw (in reviews) was confined to confusion about the randomness of the DMW -- it's essentially a slot machine. When you hit onto the right combination of numbers you get stat boosts, powerful attacks, or even more impressive monster summons.

It also governs the leveling of your character, his special attacks, and spells. This is the bit people didn't like: though it wasn't actually random (since it masks a more-or-less standard experience point system) it appeared random, and that galls players.

I understand why, and I'm not here to defend that aspect of it, but pick up the conversation where I think the system really worked: the DMW's clever integration of character and story directly with the battle system, and the game's larger narrative.

As you fight battles, the DMW continuously spins, without your input, in the top left corner of the screen. When it gets close to making a beneficial match, the spinning reels zoom in to take over the entire screen.

Instead of fruit or other typical slot machine items, important characters from the game's story populate the DMW; when you first encounter those characters in-game, they're added to your DMW roster.

This is ingenious, because it ties what would otherwise seem very arbitrary into the game's narrative. Say what you will about Final Fantasy. Even those who do not enjoy the series must recognize that its characters are its strength, particularly with its fans.

This is so much so that Final Fantasy VII continues to produce successful products 11 years after its initial commercial introduction.

"Heightened emotions have affected the DMW!"

The way the package ties so neatly together within the context of the game is what makes it work so well. The DMW is affected by protagonist Zack Fair's emotional state (hence the quote above.) The more intense his emotion, the higher likelihood there is of a match. When a match is made, that might be it -- you just get a bonus.

But sometimes, a (very short) cutscene might play. This cutscene is always a memory Zack has of an important character of the game, and it's always from Zack's perspective.

This memory, just like memories do in real life, affects Zack's emotions -- and allows him to take advantage of his emotional state to perform more effectively in battle. This is what translates into the bonuses.

When you arrive at a combination -- say, FFVII antagonist, Sephiroth, who's also a major character in Crisis Core -- across all three reels, a cutscene displays an interaction between Zack and that psychotic silver-haired swordsman.

You'll see the scene -- for example, a simple training exercise where Sephiroth, who takes the role of Zack's superior officer in the Shinra army for much of the game, goads Zack into battling more effectively. At this point, the game reappears and Zack performs a devastating special attack against the foes he's facing.

We all know that our emotions and memories affect us in this way in real life, but when's the last time you've seen this communicated at all effectively in a game, particularly in the heat of combat?

When Zack remembers a particularly strong memory, he's filled with strength to fight even harder. This is rewarding both from a story perspective and from a gameplay perspective -- who doesn't want an HP boost in the middle of a tough fight?

Boosting the Story, Too

Even more cleverly, these memories show events that fall outside of the primary story sequences you've already seen. They are vignettes that logically follow from the plot of the game, but which were not part of the main narrative -- which makes them compelling to view, sometimes revelatory.

And, depending where you are in the twists and turns of the story, even a scene you've seen before (they're finite, of course, and do repeat) can be imbued with new shades of meaning. It's really clever.

And from a design perspective, it reminds the player that the story is integral to the Crisis Core experience. But it doesn't penalize the player who doesn't have much interest in it -- these scenes are skippable.

It also provides a respite from battle, which is a great chance to regroup mentally; and, as this is a portable game, allows you to shift position or look away for a moment to check which stop the bus is pulling into -- or whatever.

The Digital Mind Wave system, then, quietly does something we've been asking for -- but in a small, somewhat unassuming way, rather than suddenly delivering the revolution in gameplay and narrative concepts people seem to be waiting for.

The mechanic takes elements that already existed (chance, traditional narrative, RPG special attacks and stat boosts) and fits them into a larger, traditional game design (an action RPG with random encounters).

Thus, the developers of Crisis Core have nudged forward the evolution of their series, offered a fresh new gameplay system to fans. They've also put a few cracks in the cutscene/gameplay dichotomy that Square Enix is famous (or infamous, in some circles) for relying on.

To say that the developers use the DMW effectively by the end of the game would be an understatement. Its appearance in the final moments of the game -- which would be poor form to spoil here -- boosts that up another level.

Crisis Core is a game whose developers know how to use the tools they have given themselves. The DMW is the most striking example of that.

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

[GameSetWatch is extremely proud to debut the return - after a more than 2 year hiatus - of the column from legendary journalist Joseph 'BUZZ' Berkley. 'BUZZ' really has the measure of today's gaming market, and it's Sony's Kaz Hirai which has prompted his return from exile.]

There's been a lot of internet BUZZ over some comments that Sony Computer Entertaiment chairman Kaz Hirai made in the February 2009 issue of Official PlayStation Magazine.

For example, there's the following exchange to consider: "This is not meant in terms of numbers, or who's got the biggest install base, or who's selling most in any particular week or month, but I'd like to think that we continue official leadership in this industry."

These are comments which happen to mirror those that I made in my column of October 26th, 2006. But what Eurogamer didn't bother to cover was Kaz's refutation of the persistent claim that his pants are, in fact, on fire.

While the claim has gone unaddressed for some time, Kaz has finally deigned to deliver his own brand of PR to the situation. "These are not flames," Hirai was cited as saying, according to reliable sources. "I am not on fire. I just like having warm pants."

Kaz (pictured above, in earlier, less smoldering times) went on to explain that he was actually beta testing Sony's new Garment Heating Device, the Sony Pant & Suit Sweat Suite, or P3S.

He explained that any smoke, or appearance of a chemical reaction involving oxygen, fuel and heat resulting in the creation of light and heat were entirely within Sony's design specifications, and should not be construed as "fire", despite industry comments to the contrary.

Then, in his typical aggressive fashion, Hirai went on the offensive. "Sony's Garment Warming Device may be something of an expert level product. It's not for everyone. The Garment Warming Device offered by Microsoft may produce somewhat less ash, but the heating element tends to wear out in a year or two. These slacks will be hot nine years from now."

Hirai had less to say about Nintendo's offerings. "I think they're making glove warmers these days? What's with that?"

Finally, Kaz addressed those who criticize his pants-related comments. "You might think you know what fire is, and that there is fire on my pants. What I'm saying is, maybe you don't know what fire is? And maybe I do." He then ran off in search of cooling devices for his burning trousers, yelling: "FRIIIIIIIIIIDGE CHAAAASER!"

['Berkley's BUZZ' was a regular column from veteran game journo Joseph Berkley, whose illustrious career extends from the formation of Video Game BUZZ Monthly back in 1982 all the way to the founding of seminal teen game mag 'GameBUZZ - For Kids!' in 1992.

More recently, he was a regular columnist for much-loved late '90s game mag Big Important Thing, and the author of self-help manual: 'BUZZ Says - Less Drugs, More Games!' He has been unable to write for GSW of late, due to his demanding Managing Editor position at Official Phantom Magazine.]

Posted by jberkley at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

I had a doctoral student from Texas mail me the other day asking if I could track down any issues of RePlay and Play Meter magazines from the mid-70s until 1983 for her. She's writing a paper about the economics of the classic-era arcade industry, and she's interested in looking through all the little fine-print distributor advertisements in the back of both mags.

I'd like to help her out, but I regrettably don't have much of either publication. I used to own a fair bit of RePlay from the late 1990s, but I sold them out many years ago because the contents weren't of much interest to me -- endless pages about redemption games and Chuck E. Cheese kiddie rides and not very much you'd care about if you aren't a working operator. They are also very heavy and large, making storage a pain in the arse.

Still, both it and Play Meter (which, sadly, had most of its back-issue library destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, I hear) would be a nice resource to have available for reasons exactly like this, especially issues from the early years. If anyone has any sort of collection of either magazine, by all means let me know (kgifford at magweasel dot com) and I'll get you in contact with her -- 'ell, I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who collects either mag anyway, given that both have circs in the 5000-ish range.

Moving back to the modern era, click through to see commentary on all the mags that crossed my desk in the past fortnight. This is the first month without any EGM, sadly:

(Don't ask me when the retrospective piece I wrote for their phantom final issue will go up on 1UP, 'cos I sadly don't know. I did get paid for it, however, proving that Ziff is far nicer to its freelancers than most publishing houses that close mags. Thanks, gentlemen.)

Edge January 2008

Cover: Uncharted 2

This issue's a bit old by this point; I forgot to cover it in the last installment for some reason. The cover piece is nothing too new from GI's a little bit ago, just with some more concept screens, a wee bit more in dev commentary, and a great deal of tech detail. The nerd's version of the GI piece, in other words. More interesting is an interview with Apple's VP of iPod and iPhone marketing about his devices' gaming possibilities -- like any Apple vice president, he talks a great yarn about being "the future" and all that, and spins faster than the fan on my air-conditioning unit as his product's faults get brought up.

It's not a very big surprise that LittleBigPlanet wins most of the bigger awards in Edge's 2008 roundup. It's also no surprise, given that the holidays are over, that the reviews are pretty harsh this month -- nothing gets over 7 and most are a fair bit below that, such as the 5 Prince of Persia earned.

Game Informer February 2009

Cover: Singularity

Yep, it's another exclusive GI cover featuring a very brown game starring a futuristic, brooding army dude killing squadrons of enemies with his bare hands. I know it's my imagination, but GI seems to do 8 covers like this a year.

The interior succeeds in making the game look a great deal like BioShock, which might be the point, but unlike many GI features, both the devs and the visual accompaniment have a great deal to say to you. The secondary feature on Fight Night Round 4 is way more engaging in my opinion, but a) I am a boxing fan b) I know sports games never, ever make good cover subjects.

The Connect industry-news section is pretty packed this month -- afterthoughts on Far Cry 2, a quick bit with Nobuo Uematsu, and (most interestingly) a spread on Bang Camaro, a band who owes much of its popularity to being in Harmonix games.

GamePro February 2009

Cover: Halo 2009

The Halo stuff on the cover kicks off a big 360-in-2009 preview feature inside. Most of the feature isn't that memorable, but Halo's got awesome art and awesome design! Seriously, they out-OXM'd OXM here. No earth-shattering new information, but a great piece overall.

PC Zone January 2009

Cover: Warhammer 40K Dawn of War II

Reason why PC Zone is worth buying, part X: The opening paragraph to their Left 4 Dead review, which is as follows -- "Any game whatsoever can immediately be rendered fun through the inclusion of a co-op mode. A game in which four players stand around slowly getting buried deeper and deeper in sand would be fun, for example, simply for the witty repartee of your friends and glib remarks about its (presumed) crap framerates and crippline load times. A game in which you and your strangely dressed companions stand around next to a tree, discussing bags and boots while waiting for someone else to log on so you can get on with things -- that's pretty much World of Warcraft, and 11 million people can't be wrong..."

This month's PCZ (and PC Gamer UK, too) also comes with a booklet on "How You And Your PC Can Beat the Credit Crunch," except the "e" in "credit" is replaced with a pound sign, and it's just too cute!

PlayStation: The Official Magazine February 2009

Cover: Killzone 2

PTOM's got the hot-sclusive review of this very fine, very brown game, extending over eight pages and looking pretty sharp.

PTOM's also got engaging page design down to a science by this point, I think -- I'd like to believe that's part of why it's relatively successful today. Even their '08 game awards feature is neatly designed, which is more than I can say about any of the similar features in other mags this month, including Edge's.

Other highlights: a "how to get easy trophies" feature similar to what OXM's done with achievements, and a spread where the managing editor's son reviews PS3/PS2 kiddie games that's funnier than you'd expect.

Official Xbox Magazine February 2009 (Podcast)

Cover: Brutal Legend

Double Fine's latest is now an EA-published title, and OXM celebrates with five radical, radical pages with Tim Schafer, kicking off a preview feature/industry piece about the 100 most awesome things about '09. I like it, and while the "best of '08" feature isn't as nice-looking at PTOM's, it's similarly bite-sized and fun.

Nintendo Power February 2009

Cover: RPG special

I noticed this issue that Nintendo Power has a bunch of advertising that no other game mag gets. It's mainly DS/Wii casual stuff, but I wonder if it's that advertising that keeps NP vibrant.

RPGs are the top theme all issue, starting with PS0 (an extraordinarily long feature for a DS title, longer than even GTA Chinatown Wars a few months back) and continuing with Fire Emblem and a crapload of others. It's all your basic preview type coverage, but at least it's pretty and interview-laden -- in fact, kind of like the big-arse preview features of 2004-era EGM, complete with humorous boxes that link each game together (the "RPG Cliche Checklist," for example).

NP also talks to Uematsu this month, and they're kind enough to give him three pages instead of GI's 0.5 pages.

Beckett Massive Online Gamer March/April 2009

Cover: Guess

Yep, more Beckett MOG. I feel bad about it, but I've long since run out of stuff to talk about with this mag -- it's the same thing each month, fer Chrissakes. The same WOW stuff, the same strategy guides for Korean games you never heard of, and occasionally some hot cosplay. Yippee!

Game Developer January 2009

Cover: LittleBigPlanet

Aw, who can forget about Game Developer? The LBP postmorterm is worth reading more than others, since it's such a unique (and small!) team behind the game. (Good things about a small crew: smooth, informal company style: Bad things about a small crew: crunching for half a year before launch.)

[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 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[GameSetLinks is GameSetWatch's daily link round-up post, culling from hundreds of weblogs and outlets to compile the most interesting longform writing, links, and criticism on the art and culture of video games.]

Time to carry on with some GameSetLinks goodness, headed up by a great 1UP video special - and hopefully not the kind of thing there will be less of, post-UGO transition, given the costs and not always obvious returns of video content.

Also hanging out here - discussions of Sony and artsiness, indie games in New York magazine, a Proper Games profile, iPhone games sales stats (at least on the high end), and various other neatnesses.

Road to perdition:

1UP Specials: Street Fighter 4 with the Pros: News from 1UP.com
If you're going to do custom video, do it right, like this: 'We brought in three Street Fighter experts from Shoryuken.com, the community for hardcore Street Fighter players, for an hour-long video preview covering the new console characters (Gen, Sakura, Rose, Dan, Cammy), Challenge Mode, voice customization, strategies, and game mechanics.'

The Age of Indie Video Games - The All New Issue -- New York Magazine
'Unshackled from the blockbuster-or-bust mentality of the big corporations, these indie designers are ushering in a new golden age of smart, beautiful, and really weird games.'

Is Sony too artsy for its own good? - The Cut Scene - Video Game Blog by Variety on Variety.com
Completely agree, esp. if you look at investment vs. return for some of the PSN titles. Return is meant to be in prestige and hardware sales, of course, but... is it working?

Grey Alien Games » Blog Archive » Some Fantastic Indie Sales Stats!
Very useful discussion of what PC indie/casual folks can hope to make through selling their games online.

Flock and the art of downloadable game development | Technology | guardian.co.uk
Proper Games, I love the look of your game, but IMHO, you're scaled wrong in terms of project length/staff size for XBLA/PSN - the right size is 2-3 people plus contractors, I reckon. (I guess being privately funded and publisher-supported will let you get away with it, though.)

iPhone Savior: iPhone Developer Quits Day Job After 'iShoot' Hits Number One
Aha, single day iPhone sales to be #1 on store apparently confirmed: iShoot was the 'number one Top Paid App in the iTunes App Store with 16,972 downloads in one day.'

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

['Hit Self-Destruct' is a regular new GameSetWatch column by blogger and writer Duncan Fyfe, focusing on alternative approaches to game criticism. In this inaugural edition, he dips into the English Lit paint-pot for some musings on Fallout 3.]

The protagonist of Bethesda's Fallout 3 is a cipher, a window through which to view the gameworld, so if he had a LiveJournal he would not be writing about his feelings. He'd write about the post-nuclear Wasteland, about the slaves who rallied around the Lincoln Memorial, the android who wanted to live like a human, free elections in a one-man republic, the day the ghouls crashed the gated community.

He'd write about the young girl who fell in love with a priest, the father who took shelter with his injured son in a storm drain, the downfall of Vault 106 and the rangers trapped on the hotel roof. Fallout 3 is like any other RPG insofar as the player collects experience points, gear and currency, but it's essential to the experience that they collect stories, too.

Fallout 3 is easily cross-referenced and classifiable in the modern video gaming canon. The game grew up in an Elder Scrolls household where it aspired to be Fallout, it has all the trappings of a Western RPG and the unbroken camera of Half-Life, and gameplay buzzwords cling to it: non-linear, open world, emergent. Its least likely structural resemblance, though, as per the above paragraph, is to a book of short stories. Essentially, it's Dubliners with guns.

Holding forth on Irish municipal politics in a drunken stagger, this thought probably never even crossed James Joyce's mind. There was nothing to suggest the eventual similarity in the video games of Joyce's day (older games, they would have been in black and white). Dubliners and Fallout 3 compile isolated tales about unrelated people to establish the character of a city in decline: Dublin and a fictional future Washington, respectively.

They abstain from a central unifying plot (more on Fallout's exception later): Dubliners relies on its 13 vignettes, Fallout 3 on an array of sidequests, text and environmental tableaus for players who skip all the dialogue.

Joyce presents 13 drunks, writers, schoolboys and stage mothers whose collective epiphanies on themes of religion, nationalism and masculinity inform the artist's portrait of a city. The book is less a chronicle of individuals but of the social, religious and economic constitution of early 20th century Dublin. Fallout 3, obviously, is not nearly the literary equivalent of Dubliners: they are analogues in form, not in depth.

This is, in part, because Fallout 3 is collaboratively written and designed, and so lacks a prominent auteur as its figurehead. While critics can analyze Dubliners in the context of Joyce's personal history, Fallout 3 players don't know as much about the troubled Roman Catholic upbringing of Todd Howard or the trenchant alcoholism of Emil Pagliarulo, and so instead of subtle and deeply-encoded meaning we see plainness.

To be fair, some of it is plain: the Fallout 3 dramatis personae is not blessed with Joyce's lavish attention to detail: the Wasteland mercenaries, victims and general losers are thinly drawn, comparatively. However, they are sketched out enough to communicate their circumstances and contribute to the persistent mood which hangs over the world. Through this series of character interactions, players discover exactly what kind of place Washington is.

You, the player, encounter people trying to survive in peculiar ways, whether emulating pre-war domesticity or pretending to be vampires. You'll casually be asked to murder, as your prospective employer has no fear of recrimination and neither of you have any expectation that you'll be held accountable for your crime. Everyone assumes that they can put monetary value on your morality, because that's how it's worked there as long as they all can remember.

There's an alarmingly high proportion of slaves, addicts, thieves, nomads and beggars. This is the new society. All instituions and laws were erased after the bombs fell. Life is lethargic and brutal, the Wasteland is a nightmare with a dubious chance at survival, and it's no surprise the only bastions of normalcy have to aggressively barricade themselves from the outside world with walls of steel.

The archetypically evil slavers of Paradise Falls, the willfully ignorant ruler of the Republic of Dave and the Megaton bartender who hordes blackmail material on the town's secretly ugly residents have nothing to do with one another except that they all exist in the same game, and so they inform the player's perception of the setting.

There's a derelict police station in the game, whose computers can recall transcripts of 911 calls from before the war, one of them a realistically horrifying account of a home invasion in progress. That has nothing to do with a post-apocalyptic future but it's there to reinforce the point, in terms contemporary and familiar: Washington DC is fucking bleak.

The message is not all that sophisticated. A moody teenager scribbling "life sucks" in her diary has it beat. As always, the key is not what it says but how it says it. Fallout 3 unleashes anecdotes that cohere into a whole, and tells stories through characters instead of about them. Washington isn't explained in an opening crawl or an in-game textbook, the player learns by being there.

It's an uncommon narrative construction, especially in a medium whose great existential debate on storytelling sometimes feels like an argument over whether the cutscene proportion should be more like Half-Life 2 or Metal Gear Solid. Look at BioShock for an example of something similar: the posthumous histories of its characters, told via audio diaries, represent one sociological element of Rapture. The difference being that the stories run parallel and are paced out for the entire length of the game, where the Fallout 3 vignettes are segmented and sequential.

The separate chapters of Fallout 3 have a thematic unity that the content of other RPGs lack. This is why the short story associating doesn't apply to the whole RPG genre, even though the games usually have a comparable volume of sidequests and incidental characters.

Frequently, side content is more explicitly an elective method by which to improve skills and gather gold, but in Fallout 3 there's no reward for uncovering the diary entries of the war nurse succumbing to radiation poisoning the besides the story itself. Few RPGs share Fallout 3's subdued main quest or centralised setting. Mass Effect doesn't say much about the galaxy except that every planet conceals an artifact or a building of pirates.

While considering points of difference, here's where the Dubliners/Fallout 3 analogy fails. Fallout 3 quite clearly has a primary plotline, which would suggest the shorter, incidental stories, so highly prized by the thesis of this article, are in fact tertiary and do not bear the narrative weight of the game. If the comparison is to hold at all, it relies on marginalising the game's plot.

Fortunately the game itself does that, intentionally. In a departure from its predecessors, there is no time limit or even implied pressure on the player to finish the main quest; instead, they are encouraged to ignore it. Players following their progress on the in-game map will note that the ostensible "story" path only takes them through the smallest portion of the city. To adhere to the main quest is to visit the Wasteland by way of a Disneyland tour bus. Also, the majority of the questline can be skipped entirely without penalty. None of this negates the main story's existence but diminishes its traditional stature and renders it equivalent to the sidequests.

Fallout 3's non-linearity is an obvious distinction with Joyce's prose. Sidequests can be discovered and abandoned in no order, like short stories on shuffle. It therefore loses the deliberate escalation of Dubliners, which features progressively older characters and concludes with the longest instalment in the book.

Then, of course, Fallout 3 is interactive, and the player is forced to intervene in almost every conflict. This is how the player contributes to the game's greater premise, a referendum on whether the city unfailingly venal and corrupt or if it is capable of altruism despite itself. The ending of Fallout 3, thematically, rests less on a final binary choice but over dozens of encounters with strange people that coalesce to make the player's own point about humanity.

There's really a wealth of potentially very interesting and creative literary influences still unrealised by games. Lord of the Rings and Ender's Game are covered. The entire history of entertainment and art is available, inspiration can come from some pretty weird places.

Joyce never got the chance to consider Fallout 3, but we can leave Vault 101 with something as improbable as Joyce's prose in mind: "...real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad." Even if Fallout 3 is not consistently inhabited by the literary spirit of James Joyce, for a moment, it fits.

Posted by Duncan Fyfe at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

[Here's another alternative interview from big sister site Gamasutra that you might otherwise miss - this Brandon Sheffield-conducted interview talks to Koei about their intriguing push onto the DS with the thus far low-profile sidescrolling 2D racer Monster Racers.]

Japanese-headquartered publisher and developer Koei may be known for its Dynasty Warriors, series, most recently market-expanding in Japan via the Dynasty Warriors: Gundam crossover.

That Bandai Namco team-up may have seemed an unlikely combination, but was demonstrative of a surprising market savvy on Koei's part, and the firm is now trying to expand its reach further.

Koei is at work on DS title Monster Racers [video] -- which sidescrolls when most racing games are head-on, offers four-player multiplayer in a fashion more often the territory of the PSP -- and tries to challenge Nintendo's market dominance, with strong stylistic influences of Pokémon and Mario Kart.

In this interview, Gamasutra catches up with producer Hisashi Koinuma and Koei sales and marketing manager Jarik Sikat to talk Monster Racers, from the challenges of the explosive Japanese DS market to the subtleties of the company's bold strategy:

Since we spoke in 2007, which games have you been involved with?

Hisashi Koinuma: This title [Monster Racers] and a few others that I can't mention at this point.

Jarik Sikat: Dynasty Warriors: Gundam, Samurai Warriors: Katana... Samurai Warriors was the last project.

Looking at the art for Monster Racers, there seems to be some Pokémon influence there. Was that an intentional aim to capture that market, or was it a coincidence??

HK: Before, the object wasn't to make a Pokémon game. First, there was the vision to make a kids game; to focus on games that were more geared towards younger boys. So, when thinking about younger boys' games, there may be some references to Pokémon.

And, also [with] the fact that this game uses monsters, there is also that overlap in similarity with Pokémon. But we don't necessarily think that all monster games are Pokémon games, so it's difficult to make a kids', boys' monster game and not have people relate it to Pokémon, so that's very difficult for the team.

Another historical background of the game is Koei released a title [in Japan] ten years ago called Monster Racer that included monsters. It was quite successful, and is what this game is based off of. An additional reason why Koei decided to make this game is that our Nintendo category is weaker than our other platforms, so this --

JS: Say we wanted to grow our Nintendo...

Translator: "Improve our relationships with...?"

JS: Say that we wanted to grow our Nintendo library...

I could, but that's what he said! I heard it too! Well -- nobody's going to argue with that, really. It's not a secret.

HK: So that was a good challenge.

It's true that the old Monster Racers had a different style of character art, and this one leans stylistically more toward Pokémon -- but I guess I don't need to actually ask about that.

Translator: OK. (laughs)

How do you think you can strengthen the DS market right now, when the market is a bit bloated with titles from so many companies?

HK: As a video game entertainment company, we can't ignore the success that Nintendo is having with their platforms, and we want to challenge ourselves to release titles for the most popular platform that is out there.

We need to keep challenging ourselves, as a development team, regardless of the number of other developers and publishers that have released titles for that platform.

Many seem to perceive that there are a great deal of lower-quality titles on the DS. Is that also a challenge, since it can be hard for consumers to differentiate the quality products from so many other look-a-likes?

HK: First, we'd like to see it succeed in Japan, and to help it succeed in Japan, we'll be releasing demos, for people to try it, and we hope that people might soon find that they like it, and if they like the game, we hope that they might purchase it.

And, also, [we want] to push it with the publications and the media over in Japan, so that the game gets noticed and picked up. Then once we've developed a reputation in Japan, [we plan to] use that as a springboard to release it in the States and Europe.

It seems like very few non-Nintendo games have really used multiplayer functionality in a big way on DS. Monster Racers' four-player racing mechanic is the type of thing more common on the PSP right now -- are you specifically attempting to address this absence on DS?

HK: Maybe it's not quite the case in Japan, because Mario Kart has become quite popular, with the multiplayer.

Right. But other than Nintendo...

HK: We feel that the multiplayer feature is a communication tool, a social tool, that will bring people together, and if people can use this game to increase their communication with other people, we think that's a great thing.

The sidescrolling perspective is slightly unusual these days for racing games, which usually rely on a depth-based, front-bumper kind of camera. Why did you choose the side view?

HK: The main reason was that one of the appeals of this game is the monsters themselves; we wanted to see the monsters. In Mario Kart, when you're from behind the car, going forward, you can't actually see the character's face. That's why we chose the sidescrolling.

We are currently also working on not just sidescrolling, but moving up, or moving down, for different stages. It's easier for variety in the game.

That almost helps it become a cross between a racing title and a Smash Bros type of aesthetic, because there's some combat, right?

HK: Like you say, there is much more of a visual appeal when there's sidescrolling, because you can see how your opponent is reacting to the attacks that you've made.

This is very hard to express in games such as Mario Kart, where all you're seeing is the back of your car, and your opponents being attacked either in front or in back of you, where it's off-screen.

Is there a very effective way to release demos for DS games at this point? On Xbox Live Arcade or PlayStation Network, people can simply download them, so is there more work involved in encouraging them to try DS demos?

HK: In Japan, the Nintendo download station is very popular. When people go to retail stores, there's a Nintendo station, and you download demos or whatever into your DS -- and that's the way it is in Japan, and since it's popular, it's not very hard to do. But that might not be the case in the States or in Europe.

Obviously, the toy stores and the retail stores, but even the train stations and some restaurants are also carrying Nintendo DS stations.

I didn't realize it was quite that prevalent. Finally, as a developer-publisher, how do you feel about the DS market right now?

HK: In Japan, the DS sales have come to a point where it's so large that it's not just a target audience; you can't limit it to a younger generation or older generation, it's gone beyond a certain audience, to where they even have a term called 'touch generation'.

So, it's something that has become a very commonplace electronic device that can be assumed that everybody already has, and I think that will be the same in US and Europe as well.

So for a device that is becoming not just a game device, but actually a communication tool, as publisher and developer, you can't ignore that platform and not develop any software for something that is becoming not just a gaming device.

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

[GameSetLinks is GameSetWatch's daily link round-up post, culling from hundreds of weblogs and outlets to compile the most interesting longform writing, links, and criticism on the art and culture of video games.]

Starting out the week with a fresh set of GameSetLinks, and nice to see the UK Guardian go out and about to check out some of Scotland's more interesting indie developers - still a fun scene going on there, even if the alleged Crackdown 2 is so much haggis.

Also in here - the Forbes cover profile of Activision's Bobby Kotick, alongside Arc System Works analysis, another Mega64 video, Broken Toys on the adjacent history of Tabula Rasa, and more besides.

Cha cha cha:

Tag Games and the wonder of iPhone | Technology | guardian.co.uk
Really interesting discussion on what small developers can do - iPhone, XBLA, WiiWare all come up, but the volume of product coming through those must be getting crowded soon, right? It's still awesomely open.

selectbutton :: View topic - Useless Gaming Trivia: Star Control vs Little Witches
I knew about this game, but didn't know it re-used Unholy War enemies - totally weird! [Via TC]

Subatomic Brainfreeze: Talking back to Arc System Works WITH A WALL OF TEXT
Some good analysis of the recentGamasutra Arc System Works interview.

Activision's Unlikely Hero - Forbes.com
Notable because Kotick is on the cover of Forbes with a Guitar Hero axe, grinning demonically. (I believe I provided some background to the journalist for this piece, but did NOT tell him Rock Band was a 'shameless knockoff', sigh.)

Mega64 » Archive » Metaphors
On 1UP/EGM, and yes, very metaphorical (also, the dog is cute, and only acting.)

Broken Toys » Perspectives
Scott Jennings on NCSoft/Tabula Rasa and his own experiences there - just interesting from an honest inside game development perspective, really.

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

[Continuing the GameSetWatch-exclusive series quizzing rarely interviewed Japanese game music veterans, Jeriaska sits down with a Sapporo-based music studio, best known for creating audio for the Final Fantasy spin-off series starring the ever-fluffy Chocobo.]

The presence of the amiable yellow avian known as the "Chocobo" has been an indispensable part of the Final Fantasy series since the second title for the 8-bit Famicom console. In Final Fantasy V for the Super Famicom, the chocobo outgrew its role as a mere means of transportation, becoming a supporting character by the name of Boco.

Following suit, the mythical bird became the main protagonist for the game Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon on the Sony Playstation. Along the way, the chocobo theme song composed by Nobuo Uematsu has been treated to practically every remix style imaginable.

Now that the character has its own Nintendo series by the name of Final Fantasy Fables, the responsibility of scoring the music of the chocobo has passed to Joe Down Studio, located in Sapporo, Hokkaido.

Previously the company has arranged Uematsu's Final Fantasy themes for the soundtracks to Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungon and Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo Tales. The latest installment has just been released in Japan, a sequel to Chocobo Tales for the Nintendo DS, developed by h.a.n.d Inc. and published by Square Enix, titled "Chocobo and the Magic Picture Book: The Witch, The Maiden and the Five Heroes."

As the DS port of Chocobo's Dungeon was making its way to store shelves in Japan's northern island, we had the chance to visit Joe Down Studio to inquire into the making of the in-progress DS title. Shoji Tomii is the representative director of Joe Down and has overseen the company since its start two decades ago. Yuzo Takahashi arranges themes from the Final Fantasy series and writes original tracks.

Composer Chiemi Takano wrote songs for Culdcept Saga (her voice can be heard on the Chocobo's Dungeon soundtrack's "Memory of a Distant Day") while Kazunori Takahara creates sound effects and contributed the voice of Bahamut to the Wii title. Their perspectives help illustrate how the music of Final Fantasy has retained its luster over the years as the chocobo has become an increasingly recognizable figure in videogames.

Joe Down Studio representative director Shoji Tomii and composer Chiemi Takano

GameSetWatch: Tomii-san, thank you for offering us this opportunity to visit Joe Down Studio. Walking through the office, there appear to be an equal number of game consoles and exotic musical instruments in sight.

Shoji Tomii: There are many different instruments here at Joe Down Studio. Quite a few of them are stringed instruments like guitars, bass guitars, shamisen and koto. One of the rarest instruments here is this Egyptian oud. I traveled to Egypt a long time ago and found this there. I brought it back with me, holding it in my arms the entire trip. I've been fascinated with guitars for as long as I can remember, so whenever I run into an interesting instrument related to the guitar family I pick it up when I can.

GSW: What is the meaning behind the company name “Joe Down”?

Tomii: The name “Joe Down” comes from... well, let me start out with the disclaimer that I've always been serious about my work. Anyway, one of my friends who was senior to me by a few years used to say about my company, “I bet you’re doing this as a joke!” "Joke" translates as “Jo-dan” in Japanese. I thought about how this Japanese word would sound spoken by an American with a guitar and a Southern twang. I bet it would sound like “Joe Down.” That’s how the name originated, though I'd like to emphasize that all of us are very serious about the work we do here.

Sound designer Kazunori Takahara and composer Yuzo Takahashi

GSW: Takahashi-san, thank you for joining us. Could you offer us a brief introduction to give us a sense of your background as a composer?

Takahashi: I'm a 29 year-old musician, and I've worked on arrangements of songs for four Final Fantasy Fables titles. They include Chocobo Tales, Chocobo Dungeon, the sequel to Chocobo Tales and the Nintendo DS port of Chocobo Dungeon, known as Labyrinth of Forgotten Time in Japan. If given the chance, I'm interested in exploring this role further in the future.

GSW: What are some of the responsibilities attending working as a composer and arranger on the Nintendo DS series?

Takahashi: At the moment I'm writing songs for the next Chocobo Tales. For the first DS title, I only composed one original song, which was Irma's Theme. This time there will be a few more. Nobuo Uematsu's fans might be disappointed when they find out that it isn't just arrangements of Final Fantasy songs on the soundtrack. You could say the music of Final Fantasy Fables is beginning to set its own course.

This is a new Chocobo Tales, so there will be improvements upon the previous title. The staff is becoming more adventurous about exploring themes that are not directly related to Final Fantasy, so we are challenging ourselves to see how many new ideas we can introduce while maintaining a good balance between the novel and familiar.

Our goal with the sound design is to help create a fantasy atmosphere. What stands out about the sounds of the Final Fantasy series is that they are both beautiful and easy to remember. We set out to retain those two aspects in the new arrangements to the best of our ability. In terms of my work as a composer, I wanted to capture something of the texture of the music we remember from the NES and Super Nintendo era. If that comes across to the listener, I couldn't be happier.

GSW: Since beginning work on this series, has there been the chance for you to meet Toshiyuki Itanaha, the character designer for the Chocobo and Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles series of games?

Takahashi: Just briefly. (Oh! By the way, Hello Mr. Itahana, if you happen to be reading this!) We met at a party celebrating the release of the first game. I wrote the song for the character of Irma after being shown an illustration by Itahana, so it's fair to say that without him there would not be an Irma's theme.

GSW: What are your impressions of the music of the traditional Final Fantasy titles?

Takahashi: Uematsu's songs for Final Fantasy are pleasing and hard to forget. There is something distinctive about the flow and chord progressions of his songs. The emphasis is placed less on how complexly the notes are layered or how forceful the sound comes across than on the fact that so many listeners never get tired of the melodies, no matter how many times we hear it.

GSW: For the Nintendo DS port of Chocobo's Dungeon, which was previously released for the Wii, you have remade the score from the ground up. How would you describe the difference in the sound capabilities of these two game systems you have worked with?

Takahashi: The Wii features CD quality streaming playback. The DS is not quite optimized for the same level of audio quality. It puts a lot of strain on the processor if the music files are not compressed. Instead of streaming music, we have arranged the audio specifically for use on the DS. Basically it isn't feasible to reproduce the exact same soundtrack that appeared in the Wii game, so we remade all the songs so that the music would have a bright, crisp quality when heard on the DS speakers. In some cases, the arrangements turned out even better on the DS.

[This winter two Chocobo titles are appearing on the Nintendo DS featuring wireless inter-connectivity. The port of Chocobo's Dungeon (2008) features Cid as a playable character. The sequel to Chocobo Tales (2007) carries the title "Chocobo and the Magic Picture Book: The Witch, The Maiden and the Five Heroes." In addition, two original soundtrack albums, including arrangements by Joe Down Studio, have also been released in Japan. Cover art for Chocobo Dungeon OST and Chocobo Tales Series OST can be found below.]

GSW: How did it come about that your company became involved in the Chocobo Tales series of games?

Chiemi Takano: The game production company h.a.n.d. Inc. has been a client of ours for some time. They were the ones who approached us with the idea of collaborating on this project. We were, of course, very interested in participating on the sound design for Chocobo Tales. I think we were very fortunate to have been afforded the chance to join. Square Enix has been happy with our arrangements, and allowed us to stay on as the series has broadened in scope. We've grown a lot as musicians during this time and have done our best to offer a worthwhile experience for game players.

GSW: You are credited as a composer on the soundtrack to Culdcept Saga, whose score was written by Kenji Ito. As it so happens, the musician has made his own arrangements of the Final Fantasy songs for the Playstation title Chocobo Racing. What kind of work was involved in assisting the composer on this project?

Takano: Development on Culdcept Saga took place just over two years ago, and the game was released in 2006. Ito-san sent us various compositions and asked us to arrange them. He listened to these drafts and provided us with notes on how to refine them further. He gave us a lot of constructive feedback and I was very pleased with how our involvement in the project turned out.

GSW: What has been your experience in contributing to the Chocobo series?

Takano: Being in the position of working on this series has brought us tremendous enjoyment and pride. It feels wonderful that many people out there are listening to our music. It is the dream of many people to work in a creative field and reach a wide audience, so in that sense it is very gratifying to contribute to these titles.

GSW: Takahara-san, could you share with us a little about your role as a sound designer at Joe Down Studio?

Kazunori Takahara: Sure. I'm the sound effects creator for the Chocobo series. I've worked on Chocobo's Dungeon for Wii and Chocobo Tales for the Nintendo DS.

For Chocobo and the Magic Picture Book: The Witch, The Maiden and the Five Heroes, the approach to sound design has remained the same as on previous titles. Because the game is for the Nintendo DS, it was necessary to strip some of the sound effects from the Wii version down to their component parts to recreate them using less data on the DS. This is an entirely new game, so the graphics are improved over the original title, and we have been studying the storyboards to reflect that increase in quality in the sound design. Judging my own work, I would say that my skills have improved with time. All of us at the studio have been working to match the visual design team's high standards of quality.

GSW: In transitioning between the Wii home console and the Nintendo DS portable, do you make a point of keeping the effects consistent across the board?

Takahara: In terms of what we kept from the Wii game, the voice of the chocobo remains constant. We don't want to throw people who have an idea in their mind of how these characters should sound. The effects used for many of the attacks have been retained as well.

GSW: How do you approach the use of sound effects in full-motion video sequences, such as the monster summon segments in Chocobo's Dungeon?

Takahara: Sometimes cutscenes are not available for us to look at while we are creating the sound effects. We receive a script which contains detailed descriptions of these scenes and are left to imagine how this two-to-three second image will turn out. Once the computer graphics are finally completed, we take another look at the sound effects and adjust them as necessary to match the image. It's a multi-step process.

GSW: What goes into making some of the more layered sound effects for the Chocobo series?

Takahara: Some of the simpler sounds include things like a character jumping or taking damage. When it comes to more complex sounds, I take a look at the script and put together a mix of effects to match the situation. In Pro Tools there is a library of sound materials you can choose from. These include things like sounds heard inside a factory, a fire being lit, a spinning helicopter propeller, that sort of thing. You can put bits and pieces of these noises together to create a unique new sound.

There are sounds around us all the time that we are hardly aware of on a conscious level. In a game like this it's easy just to go ahead and present them as they naturally occur, but that's not so interesting. It's more fun to hear how the noise of a cork being pulled out of a bottle can accentuate the feeling of rocks crashing against the ground. A sound lasts only for a second or two, so it's all the more challenging to make it something to remember.

GSW: How often do you use the microphone to record audio effects?

Takahara: Using the mike is particularly effective for recording sounds for the monsters and summon creatures in the game. When the monsters strike or when they're vanquished I record my own voice, going "Aaargh!" Afterwards, I manipulate the sound to make it resemble the tone of the creature. It's a lot of fun. Also, if you listen to the sound that plays when Bahamut is summoned, you can hear the noise of some shattering glasses and cups I added.

GSW: Now that the series has grown to four titles, do you have a personal impression of this series as a whole, having been involved since the original DS game?

Takahara: My introduction to the RPG genre was with Final Fantasy III for the Famicom. Saying that I have grown up with the Final Fantasy series is no exaggeration, so it is personally satisfying to have the opportunity to contribute to the Chocobo series. As a child you don't really think about how it is that the sound effects in the games you play are created, but I've come to learn just how intricate a process it can be. It's gratifying to think that there are people out there immersing themselves in the game that you helped to create.

[The original soundtrack to Chocobo Tales Series, including songs on two Chocobo Tales games for the Nintendo DS, can be imported from Amazon.co.jp. The soundtrack to Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon is also available through Amazon.co.jp. Interview by Jeriaska. Translation by Kaoru Bertrand. This article is available in Japanese on Game Design Current. Images courtesy of Square Enix. (c)2008 SQUARE ENIX CO.,LTD. All Rights Reserved. Character design by Toshiyuki Itahana. Photos by Jeriaska.]

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

Breaking down some of the week's top features on Gamasutra - plus bonus features from our excellent student site GameCareerGuide - there's a bunch of neat interviews and design analyses posted over the past 7 days.

Notable pieces include interviews with PS3 and Xbox 360 chip co-designer David Shippy and the folks behind Guilty Gear at Arc System Works, plus a look at game playtesting for the Wii version of Speed Racer, an interesting WiiWare postmortem, and the human story behind the recent game development layoffs.

Here are the stories:

Processing The Truth: An Interview With David Shippy
"A new book claims that IBM's work on the PS3's Cell chip helped birth the Xbox 360's Xenon CPU -- and Gamasutra sits down with book co-author and chip architect David Shippy to uncover the facts."

Practical Game Playtesting: A Wii-Based Case Study
"Sidhe Interactive's Griffiths discusses in depth how the GripShift developer playtested and improved their Wii version of the recent Speed Racer game, from Wiimote tweaks to difficulty changes."

Postmortem: RiverMan Media's MadStone
"Gamasutra's first-ever WiiWare postmortem reveals the story behind overlooked block puzzler MadStone, with technical, design, marketing and productivity lessons galore."

Dodging, Striking, Winning: The Arc System Works Interview
"In a rare interview, Gamasutra talks to Guilty Gear creators Arc System Works on the state of the fighting game genre, new projects, and opinions on the Soulcalibur and Street Fighter franchises."

Game Developer Layoffs: The Real Story
"With layoffs hitting the allegedly 'recession-proof' game industry, Gamasutra talks to employees from Pandemic, Eidos, and Ensemble to find out the human story behind the corporate announcements."

Bonus GameCareerGuide.com highlights: Inside the IGF 2009: Sneak Peek at The Ghastleybriar Zoo Incident; Results from the Game Design Challenge: Dress My Sackboy; Inside the IGF 2009: Sneak Peek at Trino ; GameCareerGuide's Game Design Challenge: Balance Board; Why Design Games?; Ragdoll Acrobats: An Interview with IGF Finalists CarneyVale: Showtime Team .

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

['Roboto-chan!' is a column written by Ollie Barder, which covers videogames that feature robots and the pop-cultural folklore surrounding them. This column covers the recent shift in gaming that's included a greater aesthetic, rather than functional, approach to mecha.]

The Koei and Bandai Namco-created game whose logo is to the left is very much a branded Gundam title. You've got the V2 Gundam high fiving the Nu, whilst roundhousing twenty Zakus in the face. Yet, despite the presence of these mecha the game is functionally very much divorced from the pantheon it's visually representing.

When people define genres of gaming, like a platformer or a racer, they're specifically highlighting what those types of games functionally offer. The mecha gaming genre is no different in this regard; as it's offering a selection of playable rules that have been honed from over half a century of pop-cultural references. Games like Virtual On and Armored Core are trying to interpret the abilities of mecha rather than just anything superficially aesthetic.

So why does a game like the one I've been talking about, the Dynasty Warriors/Gundam crossover Gundam Musou, even exist and how should it be viewed in relation to the history of gaming?

Mobile Suit Salarymen

First off, it's worth clarifying that the Gundam Musou games aren't the first (or the last) that have offered playable mecha but without the attempt to re-create their abilities. However, these games are mistakenly thought of as being part of the mecha gaming genre. So that little chestnut needs some analytical distinction.

To the layman, it may appear that if a game contains a robot it's therefore trying to represent that in a functional form. Historically, this was the case but what with the increasing popularity of the mecha mythos both in Japan and abroad, gaming has had to keep up with a greater range of people who may just want something less functionally literal.

People, for instance, who grew up on Gundam but don't want to learn how to actually pilot a complex machine. This then creates a new kind of game that has the visual trappings that punters are familiar with but lacks the complex abilities that gamers would normally expect.

The Gundam Musou games are a very good example of this trend. As the Musou (Dynasty Warriors) series of games by Koei are basic stress relief for frustrated Japanese salarymen. They just want to hit lots of things but without the need to be overly dexterous or cognitively gifted. The design of those games is catered to specifically allow a relatively casual gamer to enjoy themselves without putting in too much effort.

So Gundam Musou uses that design to appeal to salarymen who remember watching Gundam as a kid. Yet, the game allows you to destroy hundreds of enemies at once. Something that never occurs in the original series (at best Amuro only ever managed to take out nine enemies in a single skirmish with the RX-78-2 and that was over the course of five minutes, not in a single beam sabre swipe). So this inaccuracy is acceptable, as is the simplified controls. They just want the visual feedback.

This screenshot perfectly encapsulates what I'm describing. In the foreground you have Kamille Bidan in his Zeta Gundam facing a swarm of mobile suits and the massive Psycho Gundam Mk. 1. This kind of face off would have never happened in the series, as Kamille wouldn't want to get into a situation where he'd be this massively outnumbered. In Gundam Musou 2 however, it's not a problem as the rule set has diverged enough from the host work to make this kind of skirmish feasible. It treats the mecha as though they were the functional equivalent of a Musou series protagonist, rather than as the fragile real robots they actually are.

The interesting thing is how the line blurs on other games that utilise designs from other genres whilst still retaining the visual mecha based element.

Capcom vs Gundam

A few years back, Capcom released a Gundam arcade game using Naomi hardware. It was an arena fighter essentially, with ranged and melee attacks. This may sound as though we're going down the Virtual On route but whilst SEGA's seminal mecha series had fixed vectored dashes interlinking the combat, Capcom opted for a far simpler and less faithful approach.

Capcom used a combat system not all that dissimilar to the orbital approach seen in Zelda Ocarina of Time. So the quick stepping, ground based, approach was merged with how Capcom allowed mobile suits to move.

Unlike Musou, the Capcom games did try (albeit simply) to mimic certain functional traits of mobile suits. Treating more like real robots that could only really handle one or two enemies at a time, all of which would be equally armored and equipped. Even the simplified movement, had enough restrictions to feel as though you were piloting a machine rather than an invincible mythical super being.

The series has evolved over the years and whilst it briefly flirted with space based combat (it used the ground based movement system, so it didn't really work), it's the latest iteration that I want to talk more about.

Gundam vs Gundam was released about a year ago in the Japanese arcades. It was similar to the original games and retained that focused arena based multiplayer combat. What was odd was how the narrative of the game had been explained and why all these disparate Gundams were facing off against one another. In short, the opening intro shows the old Gundam arcade machines becoming sentient due to the resurgence of the Devil Gundam. Only by combing their efforts can they thwart the Devil Gundam and return to their respective timelines. Now this may sound silly but it shows that Capcom know what these games fundamentally are in terms of functional complexity.

This is very much confirmed in the game itself, as each of the Gundams offer a special that is massively out of context. For instance, the Nu Gundam can call down the asteroid Axis from orbit to glide across the map, damaging whatever is unfortunate to be in its way. Even support units teleport into existence when called. The final stage is also a weird mix of virtual reality visuals and the sprawling mass that is the huge Devil Gundam.

The whole game is a post-modern nod to the fact that these arcade games are functional allegories to the Gundam franchise. That they aren't trying to recreate anything in a truly mechanical sense (after all games like Senjou no Kizuna are already catering for that).

Super Postmodern Wars

The final series of games I'd like to cover is that of Super Robot Wars. Since 1991, Banpresto have merged the respective anime series in an orgy of turn based strategy where Getter Robo can give covering fire to the likes Overman King Gainer, a mecha from a series that was created a quarter of a century later.

On the surface, the Super Robot Wars games look more allegorical than Gundam Musou above. In reality, Banpresto go to great lengths to recreate the abilities of each of the mecha as well as the skills of the pilots that sit in their imaginary cockpits. Whilst the games are in the strategy genre, the presence of the mecha is by no means an aesthetic consideration. Even the animation sequences for each of their attacks are painstakingly recreated from the host anime. To the extent that the older mecha retain the earlier stylistic approaches to animation.

The spin off Another Century Episode games probably demonstrate this subtle blend of postmodern functionality better. As they offer direct control of the disparate mecha available. Despite the narrative that justifies why the Nanajin aura battler is pitted against Gradosian super powered tracers, the abilities of the Nanajin are lifted from the series it was birthed from. You also require a greater level of skill to operate the Nanajin in ACE2 or 3 than you would the God Gundam in Gundam Musou 2.

Yet the control system is still "one fits" all, which denotes both series as being outside the mecha genre. As the YF-21 from Macross Plus utilises a brain control interface and I doubt From Software would want to pioneer that gaming peripheral.

Post Mechanical Theory

So what is game that sits in the mecha genre then? Is it a game that just features robots or one where it affords the player to control a robot with a unique and thorough approach to gaming functionality?

Containing robots isn't enough to be part of the mecha genre (that is if you follow the logic that genres represent gaming functionality). This is not say that these games are mecha themed and getting that right is important, after all if the mobile suits depicted in Gundam Musou all wore pink tutus, I doubt many Japanese salarymen would fork out the cash to play them.

The point is that games like Virtual On are trying to re-create something that is functionally inspired from the mecha mythos. Gundam Musou et al are just trying to make money via aesthetic association.

[Ollie Barder, formerly a freelance journalist, is now a senior games designer at doublesix. He also spends a sizeable amount of time playing robot games and dusting an ever growing collection of Japanese diecast robot toys.]

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

[GameSetLinks is GameSetWatch's daily link round-up post, culling from hundreds of weblogs and outlets to compile the most interesting longform writing, links, and criticism on the art and culture of video games.]

Spooling out some leftover GameSetLinks from earlier this week, we have some interesting developments - headed out by Giant Bomb making its API available.

This is another forward-looking move from the site that I think has Web 2.0 most sussed out when it comes to game information dissemination.

Also hanging out in here - a silly old Mega64 skit on a super-quirky Sega game, Kwakfest, the likely dangerous (logo pictured!) Xfuel, and, uhhh, Metal Steve in full effect. Here's the notables:

Giant Bomb API Now Available -
'But if you're out there wondering what to do next with your developer-savvy smarts, you've got another big source to pull data from. The Giant Bomb API is now available for non-commercial use.'

YouTube - Mega64: Feel The Magic XY/XX (2006)
Iloveyouiloveyouiloveyouiloveyouiloveyouuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu. Also, the bit at the end is priceless.

PowerHomeBiz: 'The Jersey Boys do it again! Teenaged brothers Along With Friend Launch Xfuel, The Energy Drink for Gamers by Gamers'
Complete awesome press release: 'The ingredients of Xfuel, although somewhat guarded, appear to be healthier than those of traditional Gaming snacks like soda and chips.'

Kwakfest - The Album
Jake 'Virt' Kaufman (Contra IV DS, chiptune insanity!) releases a special musical compilation of his super-fast-composed Kwakfest entries. Glorious.

Metal Steve's Game Riffs: Metal Steve Reviews The Korg DS10
'But I can't give my thumbs up to the Korg DS10 because unless you listen to the Cure or something and think keyboards are better than guithars but if that is the case you probably sit in the corner all day and cry about how the world is sad because you're so emo and nto METAL enough to be like a man and face your problems!'

BLDGBLOG: SuperMax
'The description of Prison Tycoon 4: SuperMax, a ValuSoft game released in 2008, urges players to experiment in the architectural framing and administrative implementation of prison life.'

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

[Originally run over at our online game site WorldsInMotion.biz, Mathew Kumar has been speaking to those interesting Austrians at Avaloop about Papermint, which is one of those rare things - a PC online world that's visually striking and interesting in terms of game design. Ignore at your peril.]

Avaloop's new online MMO Papermint, which has had an intriguing history and a distinctly different graphical style, entered Open Beta last month.

Papermint is a free-to-play, browser-based 3D MMO that combines casual gaming and social networking. Players create an avatar from "paper cut-outs" and can then play mini-games, design objects, and decorate their personal space.

They can also get involved in family networks, roughly described as "a web of fictional family relationships between players" -- which can include the possibility of getting married and having children, which are in turn new players in the world.

Avaloop is a fully independent company working out of a "former local cinema" in Vienna, Austria. Papermint has been in development since May 2006 and was in closed beta since May 2008.

The game world is modular, consisting of an ocean with different islands created in collaboration with different artists and illustrators, which allows "microlocalisation of in-game communities according to geographic and thematic differences," with different islands for nationalities or common interests.

In honor of its availability of the alternative online world, Worlds In Motion is talking to lead artist Barbara Lippe and creative director Lev Ledit about the development of this intriguing 3D world.

This includes an in-depth discussion of the striking art direction, the influence of games including Puzzle Pirates, andan exploration of their attempt to create a world where "people can feel physically connected without being at the same place in real life."

What set the development of Papermint into action?

Barbara Lippe: This is a question for Lev, as Papermint is his brainchild.

What I can say is that I got to know him when he was making feature films. For me, he was that typical artsy film guy, but with a lot of humor and drive, and the ability to motivate a team to execute almost impossible things.

I was interested in console games at the time also (and have been since my childhood in fact, when I fell deeply in love with Link), as I had worked in Tokyo before. Japan's game culture showed me a thrilling way to implement my characters into something exciting that people could use and play with.

However, one day Lev came to me with te idea of a virtual world, an online society. I was always glad to turn my characters into "living" creatures and agreed to draw for the prototype.

At that point, Papermint was more of a 3D chat client, but the game features were planned. Lev seemed to be obsessed with online realities (MUDs, MOOs, MMOs -- especially Ultima Online, as far as I know) and was also interested in political and social systems between humans and across civilizations.

Actually, I think he was even dreaming about online societies each night. Papermint was the manifestation of those dreams.

Lev Ledit: To be more precise, what I had in mind 2004, when I started Papermint, were two things:

1.) Giving people the license to communicate. A world where you have a clear idea of the people you meet, like in real life, where you just have to look into a bar, and in the first second, you know if you fit there, if you like the people, if they could like you, who they are roughly, and so on. No concrete information, but a pattern, and human brains love patterns.

You find this in Papermint ithroughthe profile. It's called square sole or sole pattern -- the colors and shapes and flags and symbols floating over every Papermintcharacter. It's not concrete information, but people start reading it unconsciously once they start to get a feeling for it.

Like in real life, some information is simple to set up (our clothing), some are hard to lie about (how we talk), some are dependent on the social surroundings (you can be a cool kid in your classroom when you're seven years old, but in a public space?) -- all of this you can find in the sole pattern.

2.) The sensual experience should not imitate reality. You should feel you're in a better world, a world where people think of sustainability -- looking after their resources; everything in the world should have a meaning, should be something you can use.

The art design is one of the most striking things about the world; how did that evolve?

BL: I never really took any marketing reasons into account when deciding on my art direction. I knew I wanted to create a place where nobody would feel really excluded, and I, of course, thought of the minorities in online worlds. However, I think our audience is much more style-conscious than tech-conscious.

Papermint also should never become a ... game-advertising/logo junkyard; any commercial promotion would have to go hand-in-hand with intelligent, symbiotic game design, not via visual marketing cues.

I was never a big fan of the tech-demo-based Western 3D aesthetics that have developed in games since the 90s. It seemed that instead of boosting an artist's fantasies to unknown limits, the new technology that would enable us to visualize the unreal drove artists to think in much more unfantastic ways. Realism replaced style for a long time.

I was never interested in producing a 3D still life of the perceivable world. For that, my fantasy is way too lively. I want to rebuild the fantastic in my head in a believable way.

I believe in style, saying that the decision to implement a certain, deliberate style has impact on the meaning, the semiotics of the game. If Papermint would look realistic, it would mean something else. But we decided intentionally to use the charms and the significance of 2D in a spatially navigable world. 2D is flat, and this fact does not make it difficult to come up with a paper metaphor.

Paper has a big advantage in that it is real (you can print your Papermint character, cut it, fold it, put it onto your desk—in that way Papermint is much more real than any digital hi-def-hi-res 3D world), but also fantastic (paper is able to do things a creature made from flesh and blood is unable to do).

This is great for a lot of slapstick humor. Just imagine paper people folding themselves to somewhere, turning into boats and planes and paper balls, getting wet in the rain or catching on fire.

All shapes and colors are explicit and clear-cut in their appearance as they all have a signaling or game play function. So, for example, every island has a color code of 35 colors maximum. This not only helps to keep the island pleasing to look at, but also includes great game design possibilities.

As you can collect colors and use them to express yourself (dye your outfit, paint your flat, etc.), you have to travel and explore to find new colors if you want something special. People will see your newly colorized feather boa and will become excited about where to get that unique piece. So, every island is worth traveling to just because of this little fact -- and among many other reasons of course.

Style is a message. Style is a decision. To create something in a certain stylistic way, a graphic artist can put his or her message into a whole thing. To develop a certain style also means to liberate the game from any constraints or the pressure to always be graphically up to date (and thus always too late) with any technological development.

Graphics which were just created with the latest technical milestones in mind will look old after the next step technology takes. Papermint is more than a tech demo! Anything that has been done with a stylistic decision in mind will always look stylish in this sense of the word.

I truly believe that the 3D technology we have so far is way too insufficient ... especially for a platform like Papermint, a world that is about and for real people, including their emotions, feelings, and the human interaction between them.

Almost-realistic 3D avatars don't look lovable in my eyes. I prefer to reduce human characteristics to the essentials. It's about the human essential, not about an almost-real-but not-real-enough-and-therefore-alienating 3D idol. A few smartly placed lines can express so much more than a multi-million polygon 3D character.

From a production point of view, this 2D style allows our artists (we invite guest artists from all over the world, especially non-game-artists like fashion designers, illustrators, architects, comic artists, stylists who don't necessarily use 3D software) to use our tool chain and implement their non-game graphics into an actual game.

Our graphics are based on vectors, but in a 3D engine. This is also an absolute novelty and not only keeps data sizes extremely small, but also allows us to make changes on the fly. This enables us to satisfy any user demands extremely quickly. And isn't that service really important for a world full of real humans?

Let me reference a concept expressed by Eiji Aonuma, producer of the later Zelda titles: "A game doesn't have to look real -- it has to feel real".

This is the principle of the art of Papermint, indeed.

Did you look at other virtual worlds and video games?

LL: Yes, and I can tell you, there is one game which really influenced me intensively -- Puzzle Pirates.

We even have a very cool feature directly taken from Puzzle Pirates: the "talking circle." We did this officially, because the people from Three Rings are some of the coolest people I've ever met. One of the many advantages of Puzzle Pirates over all other MMORPGs is identity fixation.

In other worlds, like World of Warcraft, the value of your character is mainly given by the tools and possibilities of your level. This is the reason why you can buy or sell WoW characters. Try this for Puzzle Pirates! It's impossible, because the qualification of your character depends mainly on you, not the game.

This is what I've tried with Papermint, too. Let the characters talk of the player and his/her qualification and not only their money or length of play.

BL: From an art perspective: I grew up with Japanese console game graphics and anime, without really knowing that they were from Japan, and I always appreciated their way of expressing complex things with just a few lines and colors. I liked the color schemes of many games, especially Konami's and Nintendo's games.

Despite the (often unconscious) pop cultural "Japanization" of Western generations since the late 70s, I did not want to mimic an Asian style too much as I also wanted other cultures to find themselves in Papermint. Therefore, we also invite other artists, in order to give mini-communities stylistically what they want.

I'm still not quite clear on how "family networks" work -- especially with new players being born into the world.

BL: In Papermint, you can flirt, fall in love, and marry. You can even have kids.

When you are married, experienced enough, own a flat, use the bed, and are successful in the child-making "game" (it still has to be implemented, but it will be something like a psychological game that feels like ballroom dancing where people have to move in harmony with each other), then the "most" pregnant person online will become the parent of the next real-player child. Parents don't know who their child will be, and the child doesn't know who the parents will be; it's like the real world.

And like in a better world: same-sex couples can also reproduce, and men can get pregnant!

The advantage of being a baby born into a family is that you already have a flat that a bed and, and you are already somehow tied to a family that can give you social power. However, as soon as you make friends or marry, you will rise in social status and can make connections as well.

You've been testing the world for a while. What have you learned from your users' interaction with the world, and how did that influence Papermint?

BL: We decided quickly to change the GUI (which will be finished next release), and we learned it really worked as we thought: People in Papermint take their relations extremely seriously. A wedding is prepared with all the love for detail and lots of care. So are divorces.

Lev's goal to create a world where people can feel physically connected without being at the same place in real life really worked out. I often used to meet a Japanese friend from Kyoto in Papermint while it was in closed beta.

While we sat on a bench and our characters slightly approached each other by sliding on that bench, we couldn't help but blush (putting red paper cheeks on). He also politely looked away when I undressed in order to show him some new fashion I created.

That's really impressive! It feels extremely real, and real world human rules of interaction have the same impact in Papermint.

LL: Additionally, players asked from the very beginning: where can I make money? Are there professions? We didn't expect that, but immediately started implementing professions. Now you can earn mint for many things, and people like it.

Barbara, your love letter really details the journey Papermint has taken...

BL: If I hadn't given my heart to Papermint I would live, love and work in Tokyo again already. But Papermint gave me so much more: true friends, true love, excitement, well... even the prospect of a multimillion Euro deal.

The money thing didn't happen (yet), but what stayed are these strong and warm personal bonds among a team that just will never give up. The victory of creativity over marketing; the victory of independence... this is Papermint!

So what is the future going to hold for Papermint and Avaloop?

BL: As our past is already like a Hollywood thriller, and as I can't remember a single boring working day at Avaloop, I don't dare say what the future will bring. As we are indie, everything can happen from one second to the next; heaven and hell are so close!

But whatever will happen, nobody can ever take us what we have accomplished. We have created a great virtual world as a small team and without big money.

The future will depend on how able we are able to make Papermint visible in this loud, flashy, blinking wilderness of the Internet. It's ot easy without a fat marketing budget. But fat budgets never were our thing anyway.

But we know that if there are people, Papermint can live. It's only the people who can make the world, which we have prepared with so much love and care, become a living place.

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

[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 goodies in this edition include two IGF finalists from 2008 (with one eventual Seumas McNally Grand Prize winner), a 2D puzzle platformer with mind manipulation as its central theme, a physics-based stacking game, and an arena shooter guaranteed to induce mania at its highest settings.

Here's the top indie titles of the week:

Game Pick: 'Crayon Physics Deluxe' (Kloonigames, commercial indie - demo available)
"The award-winning physics puzzle game is now available for purchase, and comes with no DRM attached. A 25 MB demo can be acquired from the official web site as well, should you need some convincing on how addictively charming Petri Purho's debut commercial release can be. Windows only, with Linux and Mac versions to follow shortly thereafter."

Game Pick: 'People Stacking' (Takaaki Ogiwara, browser)
"A physics-based puzzle game where players would have to stack people in different poses as high as they can without having the entire structure tumble over."

Game Pick: 'The Manipulator' (Virtanen Games, freeware)
"A 2D puzzle platformer created by the developer of Seven Minutes and Virtual Silence. In it, you play a psychic who has the ability to control the minds of others and influence them to carry out your orders. There are multiple endings to discover in this game."

Game Pick: 'Squid Yes! Not So Octopus!' (Robert Fearon, freeware)
"A new arena shooter from the author of War Bus and the Tempest-inspired G-Force. Alien robots from the planet Thwip are invading the home of a mutated radioactive squid, so you must assume control over this deadly creature and drive back the invasion with your patented beams of electro death."

Game Pick: 'Noitu Love 2' (Joakim Sandberg, commercial indie - demo available)
"The price for Konjak's gorgeous 2D platformer was recently reduced from $19.95 to $10. If you haven't played the full game, then here's the perfect chance to get a taste of what you've been missing out on."

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

['Diamond In The Rough' is a regularly scheduled GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Tom Cross focusing on aspects of games that stand out, for reasons good and bad. This week, Tom examines No One Lives Forever and other titles, and what makes their dialogue systems different from your average branching dialogue tree.]

Telling good stories in today’s games is a contentious issue. Different genres tend to approach storytelling from different points, some use CGI cutscenes and little else, some use in-engine cutscenes and even in-game cinematic moments (a la Half-Life 2), or just plain text dialogue.

Regardless of the method of delivery, the choice to be made when writing the scripts for such games is that of a single storyline or multiple story threads. A game like Final Fantasy VII has one script, on storyline, which never deviates from its set path. Other games contain key plot nodes that never change, but allow for multiple paths to each node. Prince of Persia, Assassin’s Creed and the Grand Theft Auto series are all practicers of this method.

Ambitious games feature multiple nodes and multiple paths, and these games require the most effort when it comes to hidden or optional content: games like Fallout 3, Deus Ex, and Mass Effect allow players to reach the same conclusion through two separate paths or different conclusions using the similar methods.

This necessarily causes a lot of trouble for game developers. Do they really want to write enough dialogue for 10 games, only to have one playthrough (which is too much for many players) encompass a fraction of their work? This is normally a problem faced by RPG and adventure game developers: they’re expected to produce convincing, branching story paths, and the trendsetters in these areas (Bethesda and BioWare are responsible for the mainstream examples of such games) are constantly upping the ante.

It’s fascinating, then, to find games that have nothing to do with RPGs, have extremely linear storylines, and yet still utilize certain branching story or script paths. Mostly I’m thinking aboutNo One Lives Forever, a game that was a stealth/action shooter through and through, yet featured long, interactive branching conversations within its cutscenes.

Cut The Chatter Now

NOLF was condemned for just this quality: people didn’t like the fact that they had to wade through long, input-heavy cutscenes in between missions. It seemed to them that they’d signed up for a sneaky, exciting spy shooter, and been saddled with a game that took its bureaucratic infighting and snappily written confrontations as seriously as it did its gunplay.

At the risk of beating an already beaten horse, this is the same problem faced (to a degree) by Prince of Persia 2008. This game also made the interesting choice to include story and dialogue segments that were entirely optional, yet also rather lengthy.

At any point in the game, one could initiate a dialogue between the two main characters. While it isn’t exactly the same method as that practiced in NOLF, it practices the same kind of tactis as does Monolith’s spy shooter. They both encourage the player to start up or continue conversations.

It’s apparent that some people don’t appreciate these kinds of antics in their non-RPG, non-puzzle games. It’s seen as a departure from form, obviously, but also as not in keeping with the tone of less “cerebral” games. More important than any such discontent is this question: how does this kind of inflection change these games, and does it change them for the better?

Part of the fun of NOLF’s story was always the ability to explore every possible conversation option within a given cutscene. Sure, not all cutscenes possessed such options, but the ones that did added a level of depth and involvement that games without such features lack. It sounds tacky, but there’s something to be said for even the most minor, superficial choice within such a scene. It not only gives the player a sense of agency and involvement, it allows them to explore the story as much or as little as they want.

This isn’t exactly a ground-shaking conclusion. Games have been doing this with great success for many years. Bioware’s Mass Effect was a game best played for its conversations, so beautifully and entertainingly were they rendered. Obviously NOLF and PoP don’t approach this same level of interaction: these are dialogues that happen with very limited options, in the case of NOLF, and with no options at all in the case of PoP.

Still, their contributions are noticeable and should be recognized. It’s perhaps true that such games don’t normally have this kind of accompaniment that makes even these minor contributions so influential. In a genre that features cutscenes as seen in Doom 3, Splinter Cell, and Halo 3, NOLF’s lengthy, branching dialogues are a welcome change.

Of course, this is not to say that storytelling of the kind used by Infinity Ward in CoD 4’s cutscenes is in some way deficient. In fact, that game is one of the purest examples of almost entirely first person, non-directed cutscenes. Still, what it lacks is that sense of agency, but more importantly, the sense that there’s more to the game than just what it’s willing to make you watch.

Delicious Decisions

In most games, you watch the story and narrative that developers desire you to watch. It’s intriguing to encounter completely non-mandatory, optional dialogue. It’s often of a more personal, character-driven nature, this dialogue: it adds little things into your body of knowledge concerning the fiction. It means that you can contextualize the characters and settings within the game as much as you want to.

Of course, one could argue that this kind of back-story and minor exposition can be provided by a regular cutscene: there’s no reason, you might say to make such content an unknown, something that must be discovered. However, it’s this unknowable quantity, this idea that such content does not, for the player, exist unless purposefully unearthed, that makes this kind of option special.

This tactic is one that game developers love to discuss. It’s this idea that allows them to make the claim that no two players will have the same experience, or at least that there are many different experiences to be had within one or more playthroughs. Doesn’t this sound like the kind of experience all games could use, not just RPGs and puzzle games?

This trick, the illusion of a new, increased level of confidence between you and the game, is something I cherish when playing. I know that everyone else (mostly) will listen to all of those little conversations between the Prince and Elika, just as I know that everyone else will explore all of Cate’s hilarious, venomous barbs directed at her superiors.

Still, the fact that I have to dig deeper into the game’s structure is something that gives me not only a sense of accomplishment, but also a sense of intimacy. It’s an intimacy not only with the characters, but also with the fiction as a world. It’s as if I was given an extra page to a favorite book, and told that that page would reveal non-crucial bits and pieces of the story. How could I not look?

A Little Bit of Talking With Your Shooting?

I think that people are starting to embrace this kind of approach, this broadening of conversational possibilities throughout genres. Obsidian, the people behind the upcoming spy action RPG Alpha Protocol, have the right idea. Sure, it’s still an RPG, but like the best action RPGs, it uses its conversation trees to bridge the gap between shooter and other.

Likewise, if Ubisoft’ tactics in the recent Assassin’s Creed (a game whose lengthy optional conversations were obviously developed using some of the same philosophies on display in Prince of Persia) represent a new unifying direction for their products, then we can expect to see more such conversational options in the future.

I see this as a good thing. People may say that these are just dislocated bits of story, meaningless due to their less than seamless integration with the rest of the narrative, but I’d like to remind them of an important fact. These are video games we’re playing, and if we can’t find a way to break away (even in the smallest way) from the steady, linear narratives of other fictional mediums, then we’re doing something wrong.

I’m a huge supporter of wonderful stories and strong narratives, even at the expense of other elements of video games. Even so, it’s obvious that there are stories of amazing depth, dramatic ingenuity, and potential that we can uncover using these methods. Here’s to shooters with lengthy, annoying conversations, and adventure games with pointless chatter. I’ll take what I can get.

[Tom Cross also writes for Gamers' Temple and blogs about video games at shouldntbegaming.wordpress.com. You can contact him at romain47 at gmail dot com.]

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

In this round-up, we highlight some of the notable jobs posted in sister site Gamasutra's industry-leading game jobs section, including positions from THQ, Rockstar New England, Vicarious Visions, and more.

Each position posted by employers will appear on the main Gamasutra job board, and appear in the site's daily and weekly newsletters, reaching our readers directly.

It will also be cross-posted for free across its network of submarket sites, which includes content sites focused on online worlds, cellphone games, 'serious games', independent games and more.

Some of the notable jobs posted in each market area this week include:

Gamasutra.com - Game Industry Jobs

Vicarious Visions / Activision: Senior Software Engineer
"A Senior Software Engineer is a highly capable individual with experience in many of the technical aspects of game development. A Senior Software Engineer mentors other programmers, lends expertise in company-wide technical direction, and seeks to improve engineering processes across the company. A Senior Software Engineer may serve as Lead Programmer on a project-by-project basis."

Rockstar New England: Lead Environment Artist
"Rockstar New England is looking for a Lead Environment Artist to help us create awe-inspiring and immersive worlds for our exciting line up of projects! Strong modeling and texturing skills are not enough! Candidates must be able to create immersive, living, and fully-realized environments through lighting, atmosphere, object placement, models, and textures. A portfolio demonstrating exceptional 3D environments is required. All applicants will be considered. Opportunities for growth and advancement are available."

THQ: Director, Video Services
"This position will oversee all video content development across the global publishing and product development organizations. The position will manage an in-house staff of three including a graphic designer, video editor and production assistant, as well as several, regular freelance resources. This position will also partner with various internal constituents in managing several external creative and production vendors. Key internal constituents will include the brand management, marketing communications, investor relations, sales and studio creative management teams."

SeriousGamesSource - Serious Games

Lumos Labs: Flash Game Developer
"We are an innovative, well funded, revenue generating startup focused on creating consumer facing applications that combine gaming with the latest research in neuroscience and cognitive psychology. Our web-based games, exercises, and training programs have received great reviews from consumers and the press). ... We share a vision to create a new kind of gaming company – one that makes a difference in the lives of its users."

Aechelon Technology: Senior Real Time Special Effects Engineer
"Aechelon Technology is a leader in real time computer graphics for the visual simulation market, focused on the creation of the World's most realistic visual systems for fixed and rotary wing flight simulation. We celebrated our 10th anniversary in 2008, and are headquartered in the heart of San Francisco's SOMA area."

GamesOnDeck - Mobile Games

Titmouse Games: Programmers
"Titmouse Games is looking to fill several Programmer positions across different skill sets. We're looking for Talented visionaries to help build tech and scalable pipelines for a company that is sure to grow. We will also need programmers interested in iphone and android, as we plan to support these platforms as well as major consoles."

To browse hundreds of similar jobs, and for more information on searching, responding to, or posting game industry-relevant jobs to the top source for jobs in the business, please visit Gamasutra's job board now.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Leading up to the 2009 Independent Games Festival in March, we're talking with the finalists for for this year's IGF competition, starting by interviewing Hemisphere Games' Eddy Boxerman about the triple-nominated Osmos, a serene and elegant "orbital osmosis simulator".]

In Osmos, players navigate through an indigo sea of wandering motes, absorbing smaller bits while avoiding collisions with larger motes.

Its drifting orbs, calm visuals, and minimalist soundtrack provoke comparisons with ThatGameCompany's fl0w or Nintendo and Skip's Orbital/Orbient games, but Osmos offers several significant differences in mechanics.

For example, it includes matter-ejection propulsion that shrinks the player's mote, time-warping for speeding or slowing down time depending on the player's needs, and intelligent motes that can avoid or destroy players.

We spoke with designer and programmer Eddy Boxerman about Osmos -- which was nominated for multiple awards at this year's Independent Games Festival (part of Think Services, as is this website), including Technical Excellence, Excellence in Design, and the Seumas McNally Grand Prize.

Subjects discussed include exactly what makes the osmosis sim unique, and why players might need to brush up on orbital maneuvers to take on the game's later stages:

What kind of background do you have making games?

Eddy Boxerman: I liked modding as a kid -- coming up with alternate rule-sets and tweaks for Monopoly, Stratego, etc. and then play-testing them. A good friend introduced me to Dungeons & Dragons when I was 12 years old, and that was it.

I've been making games as a hobbyist ever since. More recently, I worked for a few years at Ubisoft Montreal as a physics and animation programmer.

And it doesn't hurt that the friends who have contributed to Osmos are all super talented: Dave Burke worked at Epic as an engine programmer, Kun Chang served as cinematics art director on Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, and Andy Nealen has been teaching courses in game design.

Obviously, many will draw comparisons between Osmos and Orbient/Orbital, or even fl0w, due to similar design elements and the minimalist look and sound.

Could you describe how you developed the idea of Osmos, and what other sources that your team might have been inspired by while planning the game?

EB: As you can imagine, I've thought a lot about it, and there's so many takes on the subject - here's a few different personal points of view:

Mr. Denial - Orbient? flOw? Never heard of them! [phew, at least they didn't mention Spore's cell stage]

Mr. Storyteller - One conceptual germ dates back to a course I took (many years ago) on Spacecraft Dynamics during my Mech. Eng. undergrad (Thanks Professor Misra!). More recently, I had been toying with a game concept in which the player controls some blobby, deformable creature -- Gish-like, but different.

Then one evening in early 2008, several ideas that had been floating around in my psyche spontaneously came together, and the basic Osmos mechanics were born, all wriggly and eager to burrow themselves into a prototype, which I put together over the course of a few days.

Within a few weeks, I had a version with "spectacular" programmer art, sound, and music which I sent to a few friends. I've also been listening to a lot of ambient electronica in recent years, and really loving a few artists. Their music was a definite inspiration.

Mr. Alibi - I hadn't seen flOw until the initial Osmos prototype was completed. The same goes for the Spore trailers. And Orbient? It just came out. I'm innocent I tell you -- innocent!

Mr. Gloom - [sighs] It's true. Osmos shares an ambient aesthetic with those games. And the concept of eating/absorbing. And a 2D perspective. And Orbient even contains gravity! Why in the world do I continue with this dead end project?!

The Geek Lawyer - But in the final analysis, their fundamental gameplay mechanics are different. Navigation in Osmos is based on action/reaction, utilizing a matter-ejection propulsion mechanism that is unique.

That -- coupled with the smooth absorption of foreign motes -- presents the player with a non-linear optimization problem that is extremely deep and complex, leading to a rich and balanced game space. Osmos is about the exploration of that unique space. Plus it's sexy.

Me - I believe that what Osmos shares with games such as Orbient and flOw is genre, aesthetically and -- to some degree -- gameplay-wise. (For an even more long winded answer, I've posted about this here.)

If you liked those games, you'll probably enjoy Osmos. And if you didn't like those games, you may still enjoy Osmos! Try the demo, it's free.

As you mention, one way Osmos' gameplay really differs from Orbient is its intelligent motes, like the Scaredy -- can you describe some of the motes players encounter?

EB: The Scaredy is one of four AI personalities that exist in the development version at the moment. He's wily, but non-threatening -- good for tutorials. Wait until you meet some of his more aggressive cousins.

What new obstacles or elements do you introduce in Osmos' later levels to provide more difficulty?

EB: Currently there are three game branches: Ambient, Force and Smart. As I just mentioned, Smart levels get harder by introducing new and tougher opponents -- sometimes many on a level.

Ambient levels are what I consider "classic" Osmos. As the levels progress, the player begins at a smaller and smaller size, and the levels get bigger and bigger. By the time you're a few levels into the third zone (A3), you begin so small -- and are surrounded by such huge motes -- that it seems impossible to complete the level.

But if you look around, you'll start noticing some smaller motes -- far, far away; and with skill, planning and patience (it takes roughly 10-15 minutes to complete one of these levels), it's beatable.

This is also where the time-warping mechanic becomes really useful: the player can speed time up for those long, "deep-space" voyages, and slow it down to nail a tiny, high-speed collision. I sometimes feel that these difficult ambient levels are my favorites. They're tough, but still very relaxing.

The Force levels are where the player encounters Repulsors and Attractors. As multiple, powerful Repulsors get added to a level, things really start moving around, and the player has to move quickly and skillfully.

In the "solar system" style levels, the central Attractor gets progressively more powerful. By the third zone, I recommend for players to read a bit about orbital maneuvers, to understand how to navigate in these systems; unlike the easy versions of these levels, players can't just "brute force" their way through them.

That said, the difficulty curve is intended to give players the opportunity to build an intuition about it. There's also a branch which leads to "multi-Attractor" levels, which contain many, moving Attractors. Lots of warped trajectories in these levels -- fun for the whole family.

There's more, but, well, we have to keep a few secrets.

What reference materials did you use to develop Osmos' elements and look?

EB: Kun really helped out with this, and there are improvements yet to come. Our main references were from electron microscopy and deep space photography. And, though we wanted to distinguish ourselves and avoid flOw's look, we succumbed and gazed at a few deep sea creatures -- they're just so unbelievably incredible.

What sort of development tools did your team use?

It's a home-rolled engine built upon openGL (yay for NeHe), openAL, Freetype, and libVorbis. Big thanks to the open source communities! We also use Beanstalk and TortoiseSVN for source control, MSVC 2005 Express, Photoshop, Fraps, OggDrop, etc.

The game's dark blue hue, mellow soundtrack, and minimalist HUD all provide for a very relaxing game. Were there any other elements you consciously focused on to provide for that relaxing feel?

EB: A great deal of time was spent tweaking the controls and gameplay to give an intuitive, zen feel. I hope we succeeded. Oh, and I took a few liberties with the physics equations for the same reasons; they're loyal to the spirit of the laws, just not to the letter. I'm sure they reflect the properties of some universe out there.

Why did your team believe that sense of relaxation/zen was important?

EB: The initial intention wasn't to create a relaxing ga