[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)