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March 31, 2009

In-Depth: Xbox 360 Community Games Devs Talk Successes, Failures, What They Want

[Hopefully we haven't been overegging the XNA Community Games topic, but ex-MTV Multiplayer editor Patrick Klepek was nice enough to write something custom - and balanced - about it for big sis site Gamasutra, and we're happily reprinting it here.]

Has Microsoft's Xbox 360-based Xbox Live Community Games service been a success? That's the question on everyone's mind, following the anxiously awaited release of sales data to developers.

The answer: it depends who you talk to. There have been successes and failures in the Community Games marketplace, with hard lessons being learned by both developers hinging their futures on the service and Microsoft as a platform holder.

It's been four months since Microsoft launched Community Games, an independent games focused compliment to Xbox Live Arcade fueled by games created with the company's free-to-download XNA Games Studio software.

During these four months, however, developers have had no idea how well (or poorly) their games are selling, the only metric being Major Nelson top-ten lists or user created leaderboards.

The numbers are finally in. The first response came from what many believed was an early success story, trippy side-scroller Weapon of Choice from ex-Insomniac Games developer Nathan Fouts and his studio Mommy's Best Games.

"The results are, in one word, sobering," said Fouts on his developer blog. "I left one of the best video game employers to strike out and make my own games. This is my full time job, I am not a hobbyist and Weapon of Choice shows that. It is a full-fledged game, which took a full year to make. Not only did we hope sales would recoup the savings we spent during the year of development, we hoped it would provide enough financing to support the development of our next game."

Fouts expected Weapon of Choice to fall into one of three sales categories. 30,000 more was a hit, 20,000 or more was acceptable and 10,000 or less was disappointing. Weapon of Choice sold fewer than 10,000 copies, but Fouts told Gamasutra his game was downloaded roughly 130,000 times.

Though Fouts wouldn't disclose the game's specific numbers, let's assume Weapon of Choice sold 10,000 copies. That's a conversion rate -- which tracks if a consumer downloaded a demo and then purchased the full game -- of almost 8%.

Is that low? The developer of Word Soup, one of Community Games' biggest winners in its first four months, doesn't think so. A conversion rate that high is fantastic, actually.

Word Soup co-creator and Fuzzy Bug co-founder Scott Newby told us the traditional conversion rate with PC casual or indie downloadable games can be as low as 1%. Word Soup, which was downloaded 46,405 times and sold 9,153 copies, produced an impressive conversion rate of near 20% and generated roughly $32,000 for Fuzzy Bug.

By comparison, in 2007, Microsoft disclosed that Xbox Live Arcade games experienced a 17% demo-to-full game conversion rate -- though that rate is believed to have dropped significantly since then.

Weapon of Choice was downloaded almost three times as many times as Word Soup. Both games were released at the same price point: 400 Microsoft Points ($5). There may be an explanation for the discrepancy between the download numbers.

"Our title and screen shot is quite descriptive so most people would know what they’re getting when they download the trial," said Newby.

One difference between a developer finding happiness on Community Games and wondering if they gambled incorrectly may depend on the scale of their project.

Ska Studios' founder James Silva, the one-man-army behind this week's The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai on XBLA, treated Community Games as side projects and come out very profitable. Between ZSX4 Guitarpocalypse and ZP2K9, an experiment in multiplayer programming, Silva has come away with roughly $9,000.

"A lot of small studios are pretty mad about sales," he told us. "I would be too if I'd rented an office suite, hired programmers, artists, and a PR chick, and was looking at a few thousand in sales. However, since my costs are just... rent... I'm pretty happy... For a small studio, [Community Games] is sure to be a letdown, but for a guy coding in his pajamas (mine are chef's pants still, in fact, I'm wearing them right now), it's awesome."

Silva may highlight a central issue with Community Games at the moment. Some, like Fouts, left their jobs and took a risk with Community Games. It offered a chance to move around some of the headaches that come with publishing on XBLA and direct games straight to the consumer. But it's a new service with its own set of growing pains and perhaps not yet ready to support yearlong development cycles.

"My advice for developers would be to try and keep the development costs down if they can," explained Newby. "We only committed a couple of weeks to the project so we're happy with what we've recouped –- if we'd spent several months we’d be less happy. Developers should have an idea now based on the selection of sales figures on how games can fare. I'd use this as a rule of thumb for now and if you’re going to set off to spend a year writing a massive RPG I wouldn't expect hundreds of thousands back."

Developers have come away from the first four months of Community Games with some hard lessons, but that's not to say Microsoft doesn't have work to do, either. Many developers have had public issues with Microsoft's treatment of the service, starting with the lack of sales information. If Microsoft had released sales data earlier, they argue, more would have understood the realities of Community Games.

With that issue in the past, however, there's more work to be done. Of the many Community Game developers we talked to, there were two very common requests.

1. Better visibility on the Xbox Live interface
"Look, my old gaming friend just got a 360," said Fouts. "His first mission was to buy Weapon of Choice. He couldn’t. That’s right, he couldn’t find it. He’s a normal gamer, and he simply couldn’t find Community Games at all. Eventually he did in a really silly way (had to go through the Guide button!) but that’s just absurd."

2. Let users rate the products, a la iTunes
"Frankly speaking, Community Games is flooded with games, and in the future it'll be a ocean of games," said Colosseum developer and Shortfuse Games CEO Johan Hermeren, whose $10 game sold just over 4,000 copies but saw user downloads of over 120,000.

"Also, the quality differs a lot. In that kind of situation it's pretty important to guide the gamers to buy the games that they really want to buy, and I believe that a rating system is way to go."

Microsoft isn't yet saying much about the response developers are having yet.

"Sales and expectations vary from developer to developer," said XNA developer marketing manager Lisa Sikora in an e-mailed statement. "Although this is still a very early snapshot of the Community Games sales potential, we’re finding that several of our top sellers will be taking home almost as much income from four months of sales as the average U.S. citizen earns in a full year. We at Xbox are very proud of offering a direct distribution channel to developers."

"We’re confident that this business will only continue to grow as more and more Xbox 360 owners explore the channel and discover its gems," she continued. "We’re always looking for ways to improve the consumer experience, but we don’t have anything new to announce at this time."

It's also worth remembering Community Games is only four months old. The New Xbox Experience hasn't seen a cosmetic facelift since its launch, a move that could drastically help exposure for Community Games releases. Plus, despite all the talk of doom and gloom for Community Games, it's also creating awareness for them.

Developers aren't giving up on the service yet, either.

"All in all, I believe that both these figures are correlated with a too hefty priced Colosseum, and that [Community Games] is new to people," said Hermeren. "Still, we at Shortfuse think that Community Games is a good thing though. XNA is awesome, low entry barriers for indies are awesome, the 360 is awesome."

The question isn't whether Community Games has been a successor or not, it's what developers chose to do with the service, now aware of its heights and limitations.

[GSW sister site GamerBytes has been leading the collation and analysis of Xbox Live Community Games sales data, and a recent Gamasutra cross-posted story has much more context on the service's first public data.]

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

Column: 'Diamond in the Rough': How Does This Make You Feel, 'Partner'?

['Diamond In The Rough' is a regularly scheduled GameSetWatch-exclusive opinion column by Tom Cross focusing on aspects of games that stand out, for reasons good and bad. This week, Tom discusses questionable and offensive imagery and themes in Resident Evil 5, and how these elements undercut the rest of the game.]

One thing that has been repeated about Resident Evil 5 is that the game may include offensive imagery, but that you become inured to these images when you get in the thick of combat. This might be the case during certain sequences where you don’t have time to think, but there’s no escaping it for long.

As soon as you do, Chris and Sheva find a butcher’s block, topped with a dead animal and buzzing flies. The game’s helpful text blurbs will then say something like “The smell is awful. Why would this be here?” A butcher shop with meat in it isn’t offensive or out of the ordinary, and in fact is part of everyday life all over the world.

However, the peculiar Othering of normal occurrences (like a butcher shop having meat, knives, and flies) so that they fit into a frantically horrified conception of village life in Kijuju is pervasive and carefully orchestrated.

This is What's Horrifying

This kind of characterization is prevalent throughout the first two chapters. Some of the initial establishing shots are careful to emphasize the flies that are everywhere, and thus, the unclean, eerie aura that such sounds bring to each scene. If you are going to depict this kind of situation, you need to have a strong authorial voice, one that presents the events either as “objectively” as possible (a task few, if any, attempt), or one that clearly directs the player and takes a side.

Art does not exist in a vacuum, nor do any forms of media or entertainment. You cannot make this game and portray these events and not telegraph your feelings as regards the proceedings. And Capcom hasn’t; from every “creepy” slaughtered animal to every collection of skulls and candles in a shack (”It must be some kind of ritual,” Chris advises us), Capcom’s intentions are transparent.

They work very hard to show you that this particular West African Town is poor, dirty, and dangerous: that people are vicious, violent, and skulk around the heroes. Furthermore, their houses and places of business are even more alarming, filled with “bizarre” practices. It should be noted that this kind of ignorant, traditionally stereotyped imagery is considered to be a good way to scare Capcom’s audience. Stop and think, why is it “scary.” What’s being coded as horrifying and alarming in this game are poor, “West African,” people who froth at the mouth and cannot be trusted due to their violent natures.

This is brought home hard when you realize what other “scares” the game has in store. It doesn’t have any, aside from the well done “partner has to hold the light source” section in the mines. The game is really about two things: it’s about a really excellent action game, and what the designers hope will scare you in their portrayal of these people and their homes.

Spreading the "Infection"

Another defense of Resident Evil points out that you are killing zombies just as you’ve always killed them. It’s not like you treat them different than Leon treated the Ganados, right? This does not take into account how the game depicts the “African” zombies’ violent nature and activities, as well as the spaces they inhabit within the game. Early in the game, you are treated to a scene where a white woman is dragged off kicking and screaming, only to be found infected with the virus, and thus, no longer pure.

There are other characters that you’ll see killed by the infected humans (and other enemies), but none are treated in this way. When Chris and Sheva find a black villager who has just been infected, Chris wearily approaches the infected man, not realizing the danger, but quickly withdraws when the man screams in pain as the virus takes over his body. When Chris finds the white woman, he grabs her, and supports her, before she turns into a vicious member of the infected.

There is a way (among many) that a designer could humanize the victims of the virus, before they were infected. It’s a very straightforward technique, and one that even the most by-the-book movies include. Before the dehumanizing, physically disfiguring virus or condition affects the victims, the fiction can try to show what their lives were like before the infection. People going about their business, children going to school, social gatherings, etc. have all been used in countless movies to show what “the people” are like before the war/virus/disaster.

While this does of course lead to other problematic characterizations (the “innocent,” “humble,” townspeople who need saving, for instance), at least it shows that the authors of the fiction want to emphasize the difference, the before-and-after nature of the infection. In Resident Evil 5, there are no such characterizations. From the first frame, the villagers you see are either infected or acting violently, suspiciously, or both.

Capcom has pointed out that everyone’s infected, so none of them are “people” anymore, which makes it acceptable and necessary to kill them. By not including images and videos of uninfected villagers, Capcom is making it clear (possibly accidentally) that none of them are human. They barely take the time to stop and amend this issue, at they only do it once memorably.

Too Little, Much Too Late

There’s a boy’s diary that you find in a village in the wetlands, that delivers the kind of humanizing look at the pre-infected society that would have changed the beginning of the game, to some degree. However, it’s power to amend Capcom’s mistakes is blunted by the fact that it’s tasked with explaining the villagers’ propensity for wearing “traditional” African garb. The problem here is twofold. First of all, Capcom stuck this document (an optional read at that) in the tail-end of the 3rd act. The second problem is more serious.

The reasoning they give for these villagers dressing up in “traditional” garb (clothing that has no basis in any regional traditions but is instead pulled from the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull roster of “primitive” clothing) is paper-thin. Apparently the villagers just started dressing in this fashion and murdering each other after being infected. Why did they do this when the other infected failed to do the same?

Apparently this is a symptom of the version of the Progenitor virus specific to that part of Africa (and specifically, the marshlands and the nearby caves), which only affects men. Men who kill their families and villages as they become infected. This may be explained as “how that version of the virus is,” but it also happens to fit conveniently into popular, old, stereotypical visions of what unpredictable, violently traditional African people are. Again, the problem is not necessarily that Capcom is “racist,” it’s that they uncaringly used very old, very vicious racist caricatures and stereotypes to create the foundation of their game and their “new brand of horror.”

The argument that Capcom and the gamers who see this game as being perfectly acceptable just doesn’t understand or are ignorant of these stereotypes is a problematic one. If this is the case, why would Capcom carefully construct Sheva in the way that they have? She’s there for a reason, and it’s to deflect flak from people calling them out on the problems with RE 5’s depiction of violence, white military intervention, and every day life in this particular version of “Africa.”

Thanks, Partner!

It is worthwhile to look at Sheva and the way her Blackness and African-ness is coded as opposed to the way the villagers' Blackness and African-ness is coded. Whereas the villagers are dirty, violent, inhuman, and dark, Sheva is fairly light-skinned, well-kempt, and respectful of Chris and the BSAA and its hierarchy. She is, essentially a “safe” black person, whereas the villagers are “the worst kind.” Also, the inclusion of white and “Muslim” enemies in no way helps the situation.

It’s true that there are people in various nations in Africa who are “white,” but it’s just as true that sing skin color and other ethnic “identifiers” is almost meaningless in parts of the world where being a Muslim does not mean your skin has to be any particular shade. Simply put, this is a red herring: the problems the game has are not alleviated by the inclusion of vaguely area-appropriate non-black enemies.

The game consistently, forcefully presents Kijuju as a dangerous, primitive, scary place, where good, nice white people really don’t want to be caught hanging out around. I want to reiterate that I am not accusing anybody of meaning for this message to be sent, but it’s such an old and time-honored way of portraying Africans that it can’t be swept under the rug. It’s so regressively, unthinkingly stereotypical, it’s almost hard to explain or view in its entirety.

There’s no point at which it’s self-aware, post-modern, or aware of the history of Colonial, Imperial, Neo-Colonial or military trends and actions in various parts of Africa. At its best, it vaguely gestures toward the bad things that have been and are still being done in Africa by foreign, white-owned companies. It never makes it this far, however, muddling in the same direction all Resident Evils have muddled: corporations tend to think only of their research and hurt people.

Something that should be noted is that the game obviously codes these villagers as Poor, Vicious, and Animalistic, but it’s not alone in this. Resident Evil 4 may have been about “Spanish” villagers, but it could have been set in any poor village in any part of the world. It could have been set in America. The significant elements of the initial stages of RE4 hinged on the player’s fear of poor, vicious, strange villagers. It’s not like poor rural people are strangers as villains in the horror genre, they’re often used by directors and writers as the receptacles for various societal fears and repressed urges.

It’s just that RE 4 was the first game in the series to so clearly emphasize their poverty and “uncivilized,” inhuman ways. It doesn’t matter if you, as a developer, don’t bother to humanize those who haven’t been infected. It doesn’t matter if the developer says “they’re all infected.” The onus is always on you (designers and artists) to show the humanity of these people, otherwise you slip dangerously close to the trap that many zombie movies fall into: using zombies as a convenient “inhuman,” “cleansable” population, as has been done in zombie movies (and comics, tv shows, etc.) for years.

Acceptable Losses

Post-Night of the Living Dead, George A. Romero was alarmed at how zombies were being used to make the slaughtering of marginalized people acceptable. Romero directly worked against this trend. In the original Dawn of the Dead, an early scene depicts S.W.A.T. members “cleansing” or “clearing” a ghetto.

It’s made clear that the soldiers shoot people who are obviously still human (or show every appearance of humanity); they are not zombies. They’re “being sure,” and it’s acceptable for them to kill these people to be sure, because they’re black and poor. Resident Evil 4 and 5 do the same thing, and they’re not trying to make a point like Romero was. For these games, these players, and these designers, it’s acceptable to depict this kind of situation and present it in this fashion, because of how it “scares” people and makes for a “good setting.”

This is by no means the last word on whether or not “the game is racist.” What it is is an analysis of broader, more easily identifiable trends in the presentation of Resident Evil 5. It’s something that we all need to discuss, and I really do mean “we all.” This can’t be something that gets discussed for five seconds and then thrown out of the bigger sites and forums, only to be caught and rejected again by the smaller sites.

This is a dialogue that we need to have, and it should be as inclusive as possible, featuring voices from various communities and points of view, not just your average 20-30 year old white gamer. If we don’t have these discussions, we’ll repeat this highly regrettable, extremely harmful mistake again and again. If we want to be taken seriously as a form of media and as a block of consumers, we have to take our media seriously, and we have to actually listen to points of view that we don’t necessarily agree with.

[I’d like to conclude this article by saying two things: first, this is a combination of various posts by myself about Resident Evil 5, as well as new ideas I’ve had as I’ve played the game. Second, it should come as no surprise to anyone that this is one of many articles written before and after the release of RE 5 that discuss the imagery and themes within RE 5 that are offensive or troubling.

It would be impossible for me to link to or mention all of them, but I’ll try to link to a good deal of them. You can find a lot of interesting and intelligent discussion going on, in the articles themselves and in the responding posts. I’d recommend checking out as many of them as you can. Related posts and articles: Acid For Blood, Brainy Gamer, The Iris Network, Evan Narcisse, Racialicious, Tom Chick. And those are just the ones I've been reading recently, there are many more great discussions out there]

Posted by Thomas Cross at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (16)

Best of FingerGaming: From Wolfenstein 3D to Noby Noby Boy

[Every week, we sum up sister iPhone site FingerGaming's top news and reviews for Apple's nascent -- and increasingly exciting -- portable games platform, as written by guest editor Danny Cowan.]

This week's notable items in the iPhone gaming space, as covered by FingerGaming, include the debut of a reworked Wolfenstein 3D, news of an upcoming port of Noby Noby Boy, and the release of PopCap's Bookworm.

- iPhone is 'Better Than the DS, Better Than the PSP,' Says ngmoco's Young
"Speaking today at a Game Developers Conference Mobile keynote address, ngmoco CEO Neil Young praised the iPhone as being 'better than the DS, better than the PSP,' citing its always-on functionality and lack of first-party games as critical factors for mobile game developers."

- Free Game App Roundup, March 19th - 27th Edition
"This week's free releases include demo editions of WordJong and Wild West Guns, along with free full versions of Bottleneck'd and Mugen Pop Pop."

- Keita Takahashi's Noby Noby Boy Bound for iPhone
"The need for an iPhone version arose when Takahashi noticed that at the current rate of GIRL's growth, it would take around 820 years or so until it lapped the entire solar system. 'This is a problem,' he noted. 'I'm going to be dead by then.'"

- Top Free Game App Downloads for the Week
"Manic Marble Free makes a promising start this week at second place. Bike or Die 2 also makes significant headway in this week's rankings, jumping up to third place after finishing last week at tenth."

- Apple Spotlights IGF Finalists in App Store
"Finalists in the 2009 Independent Games Festival Mobile are now getting more recognition than ever, as Apple has collected the competition's nominated iPhone and iPod Touch titles in a section featured on the front page of the iTunes App Store."

- id Software Releases Wolfenstein 3D Port for iPhone
"id Software founder and Doom programmer John Carmack has released an iPhone port of the classic PC first-person shooter Wolfenstein 3D. Built from the ground up with the iPhone in mind, Wolfenstein 3D Classic features an all-new slide-based control scheme."

- PopCap's Bookworm Debuts in iTunes App Store
"Today, PopCap ports another one of its most popular franchises to the iPhone with the release of Bookworm. Bookworm's premise should be familiar to iPhone users by now — players must link connected letters to form words."

- Top-Selling Paid Game Apps for the Week
"This week's results are weighed heavily in favor of popular recent releases like AirCoaster 3D and Metal Gear Solid Touch, which push longtime chart favorites like iDracula, Tetris, and Touchgrind out of the top ten."

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

March 30, 2009

GDC: The Mega64 Chronicles - Pt.1, Metal Gear Solid 4

Since I was involved in co-organizing the IGF Awards and Game Developers Choice Awards this year (although full credit to Izora DeLillard, Stephanie Nix, and a host of other amazing people for actually, uhh, doing the hard work!), I had a chance to interact with those beautiful lunatics at Mega64, who did five custom skits for the awards this year.

They'll be rolling them out gradually onto YouTube and their own site (psst, support them and buy stuff!), I'm guessing, but I'll probably link them here too, with some fun, bonus facts, if I know anything about them!

First up, Metal Gear Solid 4, with not one but TWO special guests, at least in this version:

Bonus facts alert:

- This was the only Mega64 skit we didn't see significantly in advance of the awards, for obvious reasons (they were filming on the day before the show!) We saw it for the first time about two hours before the awards started.
- Presuming you know this, but the setting where the 'reveal' comes (at the Moscone Center in San Francisco) is exactly the same location (and camera angle) as the New Super Mario Bros skit they did for the Choice Awards in 2007.
- The version of this skit shown during the awards is a little bit shorter and doesn't actually _have_ the micro-cameo from, uhh, the second person who I won't name for spoiler reasons. I was pretty surprised when I saw the extended version this morning.

(The show version is viewable on GameSpot's video coverage, for Mega64 completists, but don't look at the other skits!)

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

GamerBytes Analysis: XNA Community Games Sales Data Revealed

[Compiling many of the statistics from XNA Community Games' first data dump, sister console digital download site GamerBytes' editor Ryan Langley takes an in-depth look at what the divulged sales numbers mean for the future of the service.]

Since the start of the XNA Community Games on the Xbox Marketplace it's been well known that the developers had no way to look at any data about their titles. As of Saturday however, download history is now available to game submitters, complete with specific details on how many trial games have been download, the amount of sales they make on a daily basis, and which regions they were bought.

Many developers have openly discussed their sales through the XNA Creators forums, or on their own websites. Several others have been in contact with us and are allowing us to display their own totals. I thank every developer who was willing to speak with us and be a part of these statistics.

Below is a chart of sales for 24 different games - the amount of trial versions downloaded, and the amount of games bought. Some of the data is incomplete, but we've done our best to be as accurate as possible.

The earnings are based on the 70 / 30 scale suggested by Microsoft for how much developers will earn through XNA Community Games, but this might change in the future, with Microsoft taking an extra 10-30% depending on the amount of promotion they give a game. (However, right now, the XNA admins says: "For the time being, we've decided to maintain the 70/30 split across the board whether your game was featured or not"):

These games are sorted by the date that the games were released on, to help us understand the long tail that a game may have. Those titles with an asterisk next to their names only gave rough estimates on their sales.

From the statistics, we can tell that the XNA Community Games have not gotten off to the best of starts. After nearly six months of being available most games have done very little, and the amount of trials downloaded per game is still very small compared to the online Xbox user base.

Back in 2007 Microsoft cited that the conversion rate between those who downloaded the demo for an Xbox Live Arcade title and bought the game was 17%. While this conversion rate has most likely dropped by as much as 50% since, the expanded userbase of the Xbox 360 has made up for it. For the XNA Community Games we're seeing a wide variety of sales between two different pricing SKUs.

The 7 Community Games we've tallied that sold for 400MSP we can see a low amount of people who decided to upgrade to the final game. Games like Blow, Exhaust and Snake360 all had a large amount of content. But much like the iPhone app store, it appears that few people feel the urge to spend $5 on a quality product, even when Xbox Live Arcade has been keeping mostly to higher price points.

While most of the 200MSP titles have had similar conversion rates, there have been some breakout hits that have done much better. Johnny Platform's Biscuit Romp, Groov, ZP2K9 and Solar have all sold better, with Johnny Platform being the top seller within our data.

Each one of those games are a quality product for the 200MSP they cost, but one thing that these games also got was exposure through other mediums. Johnny Platform's Biscuit Romp and Groov were discussed on the popular Rebel FM and Listen UP podcasts, which spread the word of mouth for the game.

Speaking to Groov developer Julian Kantor, we found that after the podcast plugs the game rose from 93 sales the previous week to 157 the next. During March Groov achieved an conversion rate of 37.8%, with the help of being discussed on both podcasts again, and was mentioned in the Community Games column in latest issue of OXM UK.

Solar is one of the most recent additions to the XNA Community Games, and the sales show it's doing well for itself. It's one of those games that brings a different experience to the platform, something along the lines of flOw or Braid have beforehand.

One thing Solar has done is advertise, and in a way that no other has - through Flash. The developer has created a altered version of the game and released it through flash portal Newgrounds. Currently there have been over 11,000 views of the version, which specifically states you can now get the game on XNA Community Games.

ZP2K9, created by Ska Studios, did well despite being an online multiplayer shooter, which is difficult to cater for, as XNA titles do not support leaderboards or any way to know which of your friends currently own the game. It will be interesting to see how well their game goes this week with the addition of Dishwasher: Dead Samurai to the Xbox Live Arcade.

Another high profile Community Game title was Weapon Of Choice by ex-Insomniac Studios developer Nathan Fouts. While we do not have any specific data for the game, Nathan has come out and said that the game has had less than 10,000 sales.

This is far better than the 3,500 we've seen here, and in comparison to the other 400MSP titles that's still a good amount of sales. However Nathan intended to become a big part of the indie game movement, and for someone who wishes to make a living off XNA Community Games it doesn't appear to be as well as hoped. Weapon Of Choice, like the other 400MSP titles, had quite a low conversion rate from demo to full game.

For the few applications that have made it to the XNA Community service, EZMuze, Remote Masseuse and Clock 24-7 did quite well for themselves. Remote Masseuse, which itself got a lot of attention for its "partner" based rumble feature, got a lot of plugs on gaming blogs like Kotaku and Joystiq, which the large amount of trial downloads can be attributed to.

There are numerous high interest titles that have decided to not openly discuss their sales, including Colosseum, Biology Battle, RC-AirSim, CarneyVale Showtime, Easy Golf, FirePlace and Miner Dig Deep which were most likely in the upper threshold of sales. We currently know that the Biology Battle developers will be issuing a press release by the end of the week.

To many developers, these statistics have been quite disappointing, but there certainly is a quality bar that many of these small developers must attempt to hit and exceed, particularly in the user interface of their games.

Some hear that developers on the iPhone are making thousands of dollars a day, but the reality is that they are the minority, and the other 19,000 apps have probably not made back the development costs. For those in it to make good, quality products - don't give up on your dreams just yet, we're only 6 months in.

Over the coming days, GamerBytes will discuss other sale statistics for XNA Community Games, including average sales per day, where in the world the sales are coming from, as well when games have gotten their peak sales. We will also be analyzing what the developers of XNA Community Games need to do in order to increase their sales, and what Microsoft have to do to bring XNA Community Games to the forefront. Stay tuned!

[UPDATE: Sister site GamerBytes has added some more stats as revealed by developers, including impressive numbers (9,153 sales and $31,000 in revenue) for perenially popular XNA casual game Word Soup and less impressive sales for some other titles, plus daily and first-day numbers for a variety of games.]

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

COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': COMPUTE This

['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.]

If there was such a thing as a "scene" of people scanning in old computer magazines and releasing them on the Internet, then this guy DLH would be the hot new rising star in it. His site offers torrent/newsgroup links to all manner of neat old US mags, not to mention PDFs of all manner of old Commodore 64 and Amiga books and hardware data.

UK fans have already scanned in every great game and computer mag of their past (and lots of not-at-all-great ones), but the Americans have always been behind the trend. A lot of the mags DLH has been scanning and/or collating have been pining for a full digital version for years now, two of which you see the premiere issues of above -- COMPUTE! and the Amiga-exclusive Amazing Computing.

Both of these mags started out with two feet firmly planted in the user-group scene, COMPUTE! originally a newsletter devoted to Commodore's PET machine and the first issue of Amazing typeset off a dot-matrix printout (they went for laser printing starting with issue 2). Both got enormous in their heyday, the December '83 issue of COMPUTE! clocking in at 392 pages.

Both also launched all kinds of spin-off mags, from the equally-successful COMPUTE!'s Gazette to Amiga programmer reference AC's Tech. COMPUTE! was one of the few consumer computer mags to weather the brutal post-game-crash era of 1984 and beyond, but it was never quite the same, eventually fizzling in 1990 and being reborn as a PC-centric mag. Amazing, on the other hand, kept right on truckin' through 1999, long after the Amiga market died in America, a feat that shows the sheer tenacity of the Commodore faithful in the '90s.

Thumbing through COMPUTE! from a 2009 perspective, one may wonder why this mag got popular at all. It was aggressively multiplatform, devoted space to a lot of quixotic subjects (including one infamous multi-part feature that attempted to implement a computer language in Commodore 64 BASIC) and was often so text- and program listing-heavy that it looked like a Sears catalog from the turn of the century.

The same could be said of AC, a lot of the relevence of which is lost if you aren't in tune with the state of the computer it was covering. But they are both undeniably valuable primary sources for the US home computer scene, and the enthusiasm both mags are packed with is something you're never going to see again, now that computers are essentially furniture. Besides, there are one or two good games among COMPUTE!'s endless BASIC listings. I think.

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

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

GameSetLinks: GDC 2009 Special - Part 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.]

Finishing up a reasonably gigantic GDC 2009 round-up, at least until RSS feeds can be further scoured, this set of links includes the Tale Of Tales folks on how they think the indie scene is expanding, plus long-time stealth indie supporter Martin Hollis coming out with a WiiWare title - seemingly out of nowhere - that looks pretty darned interesting.

Also in here - IGF's reception in Japan, a little more Steenberg, a little more Eden controversy, a little more BBC write-up, and a lot more miscellany. Huzzah to the nth degree.

Go go go:

Tale of Tales» Blog » GDC impression: indie games have levelled up
'Rather than sitting on our mini-laurels, I hope we continue on this path and make games that push the medium into territories that it always hoped to reach (or falsely claimed it had).'

Wear silly hats. » Infinite Lives
Phil Fish/Fez IGF-ish fan art? Oh yes.

AVC at GDC '09, Day Four: Wake Me When Your Game Does Six Dimensions | Games | A.V. Club
This has an interesting interview with PixelJunk's Dylan Cuthbert about his IGF eligibility controversy in it.

4Gamer.net — ［GDC 2009＃27］IGFで大賞受賞した作品「Blueberry Garden」はこんな癒し系ゲーム
Cool that even Japanese sites have write-ups (with some nice pictures!) of IGF winners.

Video: 'Love' of the Game - Game Hunters: In search of video games and interactive awesomeness - USATODAY.com
The deliciously crazy Eskil Steenberg, in full effect at GDC - also see this USA Today post.

The Associated Press: Experimental games highlighted at game conference
Indie games get a lot of love in the AP piece highlighting GDC - neat!

Intel details future graphics chip at GDC | Nanotech - The Circuits Blog - CNET News
The Larrabee announcements at GDC are probably quite important for high-end devs - would that I could make head or tail of them, being a programming dunce!

Video game developers meet reality: Joblessness - Los Angeles Times
There's still hiring going on, but people are being super-picky - maybe opportunities for people to carve out their own niches in indie/alternative methods? Good Alex Pham piece during GDC.

The Best (and Worst) of GDC 2009 - PC World
Darren Gladstone does some excellent game reporting, and here's a neat trends piece on the GDC week.

IGN: Bonsai Barber Preview
Showing at the end of GDC (Gama has an interview coming up about it), the enigmatic and indie-friendly Martin Hollis has busted out what looks to me to be a signature WiiWare title. Can't wait to play!

BBC NEWS | dot.life | A blog about technology from BBC News | A walk on the fun side of GDC
I like that the BBC reporter went and spoke to some of the regular booth workers - that's very BBC, in some indefinable way.

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

March 29, 2009

GameSetInterview: 'All You Need Is A Little LOVE: Eskil Steenberg'

[We like the chutzpah behind goodcrazy Swedish coder Eskil Steenberg, which is why we gave him a speaking slot at the Indie Games Summit during GDC this week. He's put up the basic text of his talk - which went super-long but showed some serious flecks of genius - on his own blog. Just before the show, Phill Cameron caught up with Eskil to talk to him about his plans.]

Eskil Steenberg is the sole creator of LOVE, which is one of the few indie efforts on the broad range of MMOs currently in development - check out an X-Play/Hulu.com video preview for a good idea of the game's engine in action.

It is almost entirely procedurally generated, and features a very distinct art style and mood that has already set it apart from most of the competition. From what's been said of the game so far, it is almost entirely focused on the community rather than the individual, so expect to be building cities rather than harvesting loot from special monsters.

Talking with Eskil, I found out about the challenges of making such a massive game on your own, how much you have to rely on your community when you don't have a big publisher with bottomless pockets, and why procedurally generated content is the way forward.

Can you explain about your background in game development?

Eskil Stenberg: I have worked on some crappy games I had very little control over in the past, but as a programmer I have mostly developed tools, like my 3D modeler Loq Airou, my asset management tool Co On and the network protocol Verse. These tools where developed to increase the productivity, and in part, LOVE is a project that tries to prove that they work.

How far along is LOVE now?

Eskil: This is always hard to tell, but my feeling is that with the things I show[ed] at GDC, I'll have one system left to implement before the came is "complete", that doesn't mean that it is done, it will mean that every peace that needs to be in the game is there. After that point it will be a matter of polish and adding more stuff. As any subscription gate the development doesn't really stop.

Endeavouring to create an MMO almost entirely on your own is a startling undertaking. Why did you decide to go it alone?

Eskil: I didn't have much of a choice, it was either get a job and have very little control over what I do, or go at it alone. I don't have the funds to hire anyone. With all the press I have gotten I'm now stuck with it.

Why are you making a procedurally generated MMO?

Eskil: First and foremost out on necessity. Working alone you simply just can't build a massive world all by yourself, so you need to do something smarter. Given that I am forced to solve this problem, I get some added bonuses like being able to constantly generate new content while the game is running.

As it turns out I think this could be the key to gaming in the future as the game is able to develop and change in response to the player's actions. Rather then having a few binary plot choices the world becomes far more dynamic and responsive to your actions.

By going with procedurally generated content, you’re obviously avoiding large headaches of getting enough world in your game, but how have you managed to keep it looking fresh and interesting when it’s entirely generated by a computer?

Eskil: This is the very hard part and all you can really do is experiment until you get something you like. I look at a lot of concept art and then I try to implement systems that can do the kinds of things I see in the images. Sometimes the things you generate surprise you and that's when you know you are on to something.

As time goes by you add more and more code that lets you generate more diversity and eventually you will get a very diverse environment. A big part of my development has gone in to being able to art-direct the look of the content being generated. I do thing by hand modeling very small parts of the environment and then have the engine use these fragments to build a huge complex world.

What are your expectations for LOVE? How many people are you looking to get playing the game?

Eskil: I have fairly low expectations. You never know if something will stick so it's best to keep them low.

The art style of LOVE is, at the moment, one of the key aspects that people seem to focus on when mentioning the game. How important do you think art style is to a game in general, but also specifically for an MMO?

Eskil: I don't think it is very important when you play it, but it does draw people in. I think it goes for all types of games. In some games, like Flower, that's all there is, but my hope is to create a game like Counterstrike that people play long after the graphics have lost their edge or even meaning. I have a background in graphics programming so for me graphics is just the most fun part to develop, and that is why I tend to over-develop it.

How do you see the MMO genre evolving in the next few years?

Eskil: My feeling, and I am in no way an expert, is that MMOs haven't developed much at all, other then becoming more polished over the last few years. So I'm not so sure much is going to happen. MMOs have become so expensive to develop that it is less likely we will see big risks being taken.

Do you think indie efforts like yours will become more common?

Eskil: No, I don't think you will see many indie MMOs, I don't even think my game would qualify as an MMO, but then again I don't think it qualifies as any ofter genre either.

How much of the game have you outsourced or collaborated on? Was it easy to find people to work with?

Eskil: None has been outsourced, its 100% me. Outsourcing to me is very stupid because you don't get to keep the talent in the building. If what you are doing is so boring that any sweatshop can do it, you should spend time developing tools that do the job for you. Anything that isn't crucial for what the game is should be done by automated tools.

With the rewards of making your own MMO quite far off and intangible, do you find yourself making the game mostly for yourself? While it may seem slightly paradoxical, but is the development of LOVE quite insular?

Eskil: It is very insular, I'm a social person, so that part of it is hard, but I try to find joy in the very act of game development rather then just the results. If you know any nice girls who would like to date me please, send them over.

Are there any particular conventions of the genre you particularly dislike and have avoided putting in your game?

Eskil: My game is different enough not to be compared to most MMOs, but if there is one thing I wanted to avoid, it was the character focus. Rather, I have a focus on the communal aspects of the world. People are very adaptable and will behave according to their surroundings, so to create a game where everyone is driven to care just about their own stats seems counter-productive to a multiplayer game.

Likewise, is there anything (beyond the obvious player to player interaction) that you’ve deliberately tried to implement?

Eskil: The things I have mostly been inspired by is the simplicity and agility of early FPS games like Quake. Having said that, I still try to innovate at every step of the way. It's the best way to fend off boredom when developing. I recently gave my game to a few friends, and found that it is much more different from other games then I thought.

Has the rise of awareness in indie games affected you at all? Do you think the gaming community is now more open to something like LOVE then they were before?

Eskil: Possibly. I don't feel LOVE has too much in common with other indie games. Indie game development should be about making something small, simple and fun that doesn't compete with the big boys. My game is not small in any way, it is not simple and it is going head to head with some very big games. I don't want to be the poster child of indie development, because if people think they need to do what I do to make an indie game they are
missing the point.

Without a large budget, are you going to be relying heavily on fans for beta testing?

Eskil: Yes, It is a very scary prospect, because I will need testers very early on while the game will be very rough.

Do you think the contribution of the community is important in the development of lower budget games?

Eskil: Often I think they are, mostly to get the game out there. Fans can be very good, but they can also easily represent a very narrow view. So as always, it's good to listen to others but not always do as you are told.

Are there any particular indie developers or games that you pay particular attention to? Do you have any games you’re looking forward to?

Eskil: I don't have time to pay very much attention or hang out in communities and forums, but I am good friends with the guys and gals over at Introversion.

Posted by Phill Cameron at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Best Of Indie Games: Mind the Path

[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 commercial release of the long-awaited horror game from Tale of Tales, an unlikely casual hack and slash game, a short interactive fiction work, a rather unique roguelike, a Flash wonderfl creation from Kenta Cho, and a cool psychedelic puzzler that will literally blow your brains away.

Game Pick: 'The Path' (Tale of Tales, commercial indie)
"A horror game inspired by the story of Little Red Riding Hood. Developer Tale of Tales calls it a 'Slow Game' for the simple reason that nearly every activity in the game is optional - you can volunteer to do as little or as much as you want. There are no difficult puzzles to solve or raging monsters to defeat, because the game is all about how keen you are on deviating from the path."

Game Pick: 'Dead Like Ants' (C.E.J. Pacian, freeware)
"Dead Like Ants is another well-written interactive fiction work created by Pacian, developer of Gun Mute and Snowblind Aces. In it, you play a young daughter who had been requested by the queen to carry out a special task for her majesty. The game is playable on Linux and OS X as well, although you will need to download the correct TADS interpreter to get it working on your choice of operating system."

Game Pick: 'Kivi's Underworld' (Soldak Entertainment, commercial indie - demo available)
"Kivi's Underworld leads with a simple premise - make your way through dreary dungeon after dungeon laying into every skeleton, zombie and undead being who happens to cross your path. Great fun for everyone with even the most casual player spending at least ten hours on it, while completists will find themselves still at it for much longer than that."

Game Pick: 'DungeonMinder' (Adam Gatt, freeware)
"In DungeonMinder, you play as an invisible fairy tasked with assisting an adventurer as he makes his way into the catacombs in search of treasure. This requires casting spells which immobilize enemies, increase the adventurer's stats or even change the shape of dungeon walls and floors."

Game Pick: 'DefeatMe' (Kenta Cho, browser)
"A new wonderfl experimental work from the legendary Kenta Cho. This seemingly simplistic shooter involves destroying enemy ships with as few shots as possible, because the problem is that on every subsequent level you're put up against clones of yourself from each of the previous rounds. The less shots you fire off, the less shots will be fired back at you in the next round."

Game Pick: 'King' (Buster, freeware)
"A retro 2D platformer by Buster, developer of notable releases such as the memorable Akuji the Demon and a Zelda-like action RPG tribute called Guardian of Paradise. In it, players would have to assist a sovereign in acquiring as much points as he can, simply by jumping and stomping on the enemies found in each level."

Game Pick: 'Imagination Reality Paradise' (kanoguti, freeware)
"Possibly one of the strangest acid trips you will play this year, kanoguti's I.R.P. is an adventure game where players would have to figure out the solution to the puzzle found in each room, simply by using the right combination of buttons on their keyboard. Every playthrough yields a different set of random sequences, so by replaying the game you might find some new areas that were never discovered in previous attempts."

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

GDC: Inside The Experimental Gameplay Sessions 2009

[We're almost done with Gamasutra's GDC 2009 live coverage now, of course, but we'll still crosspost the odd GSW-relevant piece. And the extremely popular Experimental Gameplay Sessions is one, of course - thanks to Mathew Kumar for the excellent write-up.]

“This is the eighth year in a row we’ve been doing this,” opened moderator Jonathan Blow (Braid), introducing the Experimental Gameplay Sessions at Game Developers Conference 2009, before claiming that this was the “most interesting year yet.”

The reason? A “drastic, discontinuous change” had occurred in the games industry in recent years -- an explosion of creativity that had led to “the most consistent collection of designs that push the boundaries in the most interesting and thoughtful ways.” After briefly introducing each, he allowed the designers to speak for themselves.

The Unfinished Swan - Ian Dallas (Giant Sparrow)

Though Dallas has been working on The Unfinished Swan -- a first person title that made an impact late last year with an online video showing its central gameplay mechanic of using black paint to navigate around an entirely white world -- he stated that it was “nowhere near done,” but that he at least now knows where he is going with it, using his time on stage to discuss his processes.

According to Dallas, game development is about offering the player experience that they have never had before, but while The Unfinished Swan did do that, after only a couple of minutes, the gimmick became flat. It was “too pure,” he contended, offering little more than the exploration of a space as a driver.

His challenge, he found, was in figuring out what kind of space existed, what kind of framework (or context) the game mechanic existed in, and what he could offer over and above throwing paint.

Structurally, Dallas knew he didn’t want to “create a puzzle game, an arbitrary series of challenges that tweak the mechanic,” but instead something “continually wonderful across 60-second increments.”

After wasting six months on dead ends, he found himself reading a childrens' book and, captivated by the “gentle relationship” between the reader and these books, he was inspired to create a title in which the player is a young boy chasing after a swan, inspired directly by the story of Alice in Wonderland.

Dallas admitted, though, that in fleshing out this story, he had to “cave in” on avoiding puzzle-based gameplay, showing us one example of an “Escher-like” space that formed an early puzzle in the game.

Shadow Physics - Steve Swink, Scott Anderson (Flashbang Studios)

In an amusing footnote to the previous session, Steve Swink showed a prototype that he had created that was astonishingly similar to The Unfinished Swan except with more of a spray-can aesthetic, revealing that after finishing the prototype, they discovered that The Unfinished Swan was in development independently. Swink moved on to display their project, Shadow Physics, which had a similarly unique take on the concept of in-game space.

The player takes the role of a shadow, therefore, a 2D character, cast upon a wall that exists in a 3D world. Other shadow objects, cast on the wall by 3D objects, could be moved, and in turn move the real world objects.

This had “really interesting ramifications,” with objects able to be hidden in the 2D space by hiding them behind objects in the 3D space; light sources moving around to warp and modify the shape of shadows, and the player character able to be made larger, smaller, or even create multiple player characters due to multiple light sources.

“Our game is taking a technology that has been developed to be subordinate to the characters, just casting their shadow,” said Swink, arguing that the effort required from technology seemed such a waste. “We’re reappropriating this technology and using it as part of our game design. It’s sort of ‘punk rock’.”

Miegakure - Marc ten Bosh

A puzzle platformer in four spacial dimensions -- where Marc ten Bosh took special care to note that time doesn’t count as the fourth -- Miegakure had to first be demonstrated to the audience in only three dimensions for the high-level concepts at work to start to make sense.

Bosh displayed a character living in a 2D plane within a 3D world, similar to Flashbang’s Shadow Physics, except in this case, the player could switch the plane across the X, Y and Z planes, allowing him to move across or around objects that he couldn’t move around (through 2D movement) on another plane.

So, in his 4D demonstration, the 4D space featured a character living in a 3D plane (able to move around and jump over things) that he could swap his dimension across. Initially mind-boggling, the audience began to grasp the concept more clearly as it was explained that the 4th dimension was simply another way to move between the other three dimensions, even when he added more complexity by allowing objects in the fourth dimension to cast shadows in other dimensions!

“I could actually do five dimensions,” said Bosh, “I’m a programmer, so to me, I know locations are just a list of numbers.”

Spy Party - Chris Hecker

Chris Hecker’s project was inspired by the simple fact that “spies are cool”, particularly early Bond-esque spies who have the ability to “hide in plain sight.”

Hecker’s design in turn was inspired by the Turing Test, and the difficulty in which a computer has in fooling the user it is human when asked to do natural language processing. But what if, Hecker considered, you only allowed the player a “simpler, more responsive” form of interaction with the computer? Could he be fooled?

The perfect setting, Hecker decided, would be a cocktail party, where a variety of people interact in an already very stylized way and the social rules are an already tight subset. So Hecker’s prototype asks one player to take the role of a spy attempting to complete missions at a party filled with other AI characters, while an opposing player observes the party (as a “sniper”) and must attempt to observe the player enough that they can work out who it is and kill them before they complete their missions.

In Hecker’s current, “very early” prototype, the gameplay was formed around “tells” -- observable, if subtle, occurrences such as a brief look to the left when stealing a book rather than returning it to a shelf -- but he hoped that, in time it would evolve to become a game about observing subtle differences in behaviour.

Moon Stories - Daniel Benmergui

Daniel Benmergui opened by showing his trilogy of work I Wish I Were the Moon, Trials and Storyteller.

I Wish I Were the Moon used a “snapshot” mechanic to move characters so they would interact with each other in a scene, as did Trials (with more of a puzzle-orientated design), whereas Storyteller relied more on moving characters around to modify the story across three scenes simultaneously.

Storyteller in particular featured some interesting bugs or, more accurately, accidental features -- the ability to make a tombstone fall in love, or another, described by a comment on Kongregate Benmergui showed, as “HA HA GAY GUYS.”

This idea of changing scenes to modify a timeline intrigued Benmergui, so he began to prototype, creating a game based on Super Maro Bros. where you would choose where Mario would jump in the timeline and that would affect his future possibilities, a game in which you would “play together with fate,” (fate wishing for you to “win”).

If you tried to jump into a block to die, fate would move it. If there was a block fate could not move, it would attempt to move other blocks to stop you hitting it. If fate couldn’t stop you committing suicide, it would create a parallel state where fate would “give up” on keeping you alive.

However, this remained a prototype concept (despite its potential) and so Benmergui closed by demonstrating his next game, Today I Die. The title allowed the player to change the words of a poem -- “dead world, full of shades, today I die” to change the world of the game, and in turn change the world to find new words.

Flower - Jenova Chen, Nick Clark (That Game Company)

“If you played Flow, you may think of Flower as ‘adding 3D movement, but removing AI’ so wonder ‘what the heck have they been doing for the last two years?’” said Jenova Chen, explaining that this session would cover exactly why.

“We start from the experience that we want to deliver, then work out what we want the gameplay to be,” explained Chen. “Not very efficient, but it’s the way we do things. So, we wanted to create a game that offered a safe, free space ‘filled with love’. So we wondered how we could create gameplay that would generate those feelings?”

Chen revealed that they used Microsoft’s XNA for their rapid prototyping stage -- “at the Sony office, too,” he quipped -- as they quickly worked their way through different designs, including a procedurally generated flower growing sim before they set upon the idea of flying through a field of grass.

“But who are you?” Chen considered. “Our first attempt was to create the player as the consciousness of the space, but that was very ‘out-there’.”

After discarding that, they tried the role of a seed travelling on the wind, before deciding it felt “too much like a golf game,” turning the terrain into a goal rather than a backdrop and frustrating the player when they didn’t hit key areas.

Next they tried a swarm of petals, collecting more petals by flying into flowers. “We liked this prototype because...” said Nick Clark, being cut off by Chen joking that it was “just like Flow
.”

“We presented this to Sony, saying ‘this is just like Flow, but cooler,” continued Chen, but he noted that they quibbled over the lack of depth and challenge.

Further prototyping led them to a survival challenge with spells, a time limit, the ability to boost and deadly areas that led to the loss of petals, and another prototype that required players to deposit petals into orbs to unlock checkpoints.

But “sometimes cool mechanics go against your goals,” said Chen. In their attempts to make something classically fun (hard and challenging), they found it went against their original plans to create something peaceful. “Graphics and music evoke different feelings, so gameplay should be able to do the same thing,” concluded Chen. “Game developers need to think of other kinds of experiences other than just ones which are ‘the most fun.’”

Achron - Chris Hazard, Mike Resnick (Hazardous Software)

“Imagine an RTS where you can send your units back in time to destroy your opponent's units before he’s even built them,” opened Chris Hazard, thoroughly confusing everyone in the audience, a confusion that never quite seemed to lift.

A complex RTS which features a “timeline” across which players can leap across, the game worked as a “race to the past” by players who understood it. Hazard found it easiest to describe the gameplay through tales of previous plays, such as a battle over a mining base that he won only to find his opponent going forward in time, researching nuclear technology, sending that technology back in time to before the mining base battle and nuking the area—only for Hazard to go back in time, avoid sending his men to the location, and watch his enemy nuke his own troops!

The game features multiple aspects of time travel -- such as paradoxes and the requirement to send units either backwards or forwards in time to maintain causality; with characters even able to fight along side multiple future or past versions of itself -- under the knowledge that any damage their past versions receive they also do.

Closure - Tyler Glail

Borne out of Tyler Glail’s frustrations with “dark levels” -- levels where you can’t see anything but are asked to navigate through them -- Closure is a 2D “dark level” platformer where anything in the darkness does not exist. The player carries a light and can use other lights to illuminate the playfield, but a lack of light is important to players, as it allows them to jump over or through walls or obstacles that, illuminated, would cause a problem.

“I wanted to make a game that defies expectation,” explained Glail. “I wanted to play on the player’s prior knowledge of dark levels. Our brains fill in the blanks about where the walls should exist, but in this game they don’t.”

Where is My Heart - Bernhard Schulenburg

A difficult to explain single-level prototype, Bernhard Schulenburg’s Where is My Heart was a fairly classic character-switching 2D platformer, featuring three characters attempting to make their way to a “heart tree.”

“The world is not displayed coherently,” Shulenburg informed the audience. “That’s on purpose. It’s a comic panel effect -- you could say a representation of the idea these characters are lost in the world.”

Rom Check Fail (Farbs)

The WarioWare-esque retro game-themed Rom Check Fail has been described as a “desconstructivist concept mashup,” according to Farbs, “but in my head, it’s something much nerdier -- it’s an experiment in gameplay variation.”

“Gameplay” is generally considered the interactions you ask the player to perform and what they perform them with, so for example creating a character that can shoot and then giving them a variety of monsters to shoot. If you create one player character and 14 monsters to shoot, you have 14 gameplay variations, but if you use all 14 monsters as playable characters too, you end up with 49 gameplay variants -- “over four times as much game,” laughed Farbs.

Of course, this amount of variation had an effect on the variance -- Rom Check Fail has a “high level” of variance as each round both the player character and the enemy could be different.

“When you change what the player is doing, they have to re-learn what they’re doing, and when you prepare to chance what the player is doing, there’s also an anticipation. Both of these things have an important role in pacing,” concluded Farbs. “When you’re thinking about pacing, don’t just think about changing the speed and don’t ever just make your game harder. Think about what the player is doing, and how you are changing that.”

Extreme Consequences (Derek Yu)

Derek Yu’s closing session was an exploration of roguelikes—procedurally generated dungeon exploration games. “The most exciting things about these games is that each time you play them they are different,” explained Yu, but he found it disappointing that so many roguelikes somehow offer similar experiences, relying on traditional fantasy settings and turn-based, top-down gameplay.

“The things I really like about roguelikes is their random level generation and that when you die you are dead and can’t continue. Even though I’m a huge fantasy nerd, D&D doesn’t really have very much to do with either of these things.”

When working on his own roguelike, Yu considered other genres, and thought about his own feeling that platform game design is entirely arbitrary—“why place that platform there?”—and that you would find yourself playing the same levels over and over again.

So Spelunky was his attempt to create a roguelike platformer. “My model for making this game is that death is fun! Players are not condition to think that way—after all, death is a bad thing for most living things—but the random generation means that you don’t have to play the same thing over and over again.”

Yu concluded, “there are lot of things you can do with roguelikes rather than make a typical dungeon crawl.”

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

March 28, 2009

GameSetLinks: GDC 2009 Special - Part 1

Well, that ws the week that was, and I always find it's a good idea to sit down after Game Developers Conference and round up a lot of the most interesting coverage - both from mainstream and enthusiast sites - before it disappears too far back in the Google News/Blogsearch matrix.

When I finally pick up on my RSS downtime, we'll probably see a few other GDC links pop up, but mainly, in two parts, here's the interesting reporting on this week's event, from the BBC and Crispy Gamer through The Onion AV Club and beyond.

Cha cha cha:

The Independent Gaming Source - 1UP - Indie Game Special Podcast
With Scott Sharkey hosting a bunch of interesting indies, woo - they're listed in the comments.

IGN: GDC 09: Meet the Gaming Press
Brief write-up of a GDC panel that our own Brandon Sheffield was on, alongside Crecente and others - interesting to hear PR vs. media issues discussed.

GDC Videos: Indie Games, Nintendo Keynote, Zelda Trailer | Game | Life from Wired.com
Nice IGF video from Kohler and his cohorts.

Crispygamer: 'In Deep'
A blog post about what indie games means which is _really_ interestingly thought out, w/regard to IGS rant, etc.

GDC: A view from above | Gaming and Culture - CNET News
'Look closely at this 177.5 degree wide panorama image of the expo floor. Inside the 302227x8715 pixel, 263 megapixel photograph, you can see some of the forward thinking people and companies who are shaping the future of the industry. What can you find?'

AVC at GDC '09, Day Three: Shigeru Miyamoto Does It Over The Shoulder | Games | A.V. Club
The AV Club pieces on GDC are excellent.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Indie game awards showcase future
Really nice IGF piece from the Beeb - fanks!

Game Developers Conference 2009 - a set on Flickr
_All_ of Vince's pics of GDC are just amazing - check 'em all out.

GDC 2009: Fallout 3, Little Big Planet big GDCA winners, Modern Warfare 2 teased
Video of both IGF and Choice Awards in here, if you haven't seen.

Kotaku: 'Awkward Moments At GDC: Neil Young Tuck in Your Shirt'
I heard about this from Gary Whitta (also pictured!) and it sounded a bit hilarious.

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

GDC - The Game - Part 5, Friday: Infectious Design

[Every day during GDC, Everybody Dies creator Jim Munroe is blogging for GameSetWatch discussing the creative process for the GDC-related text adventure he'll be building for us. Here's part five, following Monday's, Tuesday's, Wednesday's and Thursday's entries.]

I heard some of the Mirror's Edge guys talk today about how they achieved the feeling of first person running.

At first, they simply attached the camera to the head of the model, but this lead to a very jerky, motion sickness inducing perspective. They eventually animated it by hand -- it was less real, but it ended up giving the effect they were looking for.

This idea of verisimilitude, or the appearance of reality, is an important part of storytelling -- you don't need to detail every pee break in a person's life to make it come alive for the reader. I'm wondering if this holds true for systems as well.

Time passing is one example. The model of one minute = one move feels like it might be too literal. I think certain moves -- going into a lecture, for instance -- should take longer than talking to someone.

On the other hand I think moving around the conference center will take longer for someone with many friends -- they can't go anywhere quickly, as they're often stopped and chatted up.

This might be a good dynamic -- as someone's network increases, their mobility decreases.

I'm also seeing the "interest" tokens that the player can "pick up" in going to a talk would be interesting to model.

As self-replicating and contagious ideas or memes, the player could use the "procedural gameplay" interest as a way to make friends (if the person shares it) or can spread it to people who are already friends.

It might be fun to see how many people you can infect with an design idea.

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

GDC: Hothead Duo Talk DeathSpank, Indie Experience, Episodic Gaming Retreat

[Still going through some of the 'best of' from the GDC write-ups as we unwind, here's one from earlier in the week which has some interesting comments on where episodic gaming is going.]

In a talk at the Independent Games Summit at GDC, Hothead's Vlad Ceraldi and Joel DeYoung (Penny Arcade Adventures) discussed episodic gaming, digital distribution, and their games in intriguing detail.

Firstly, Ceraldi discussed the history of the medium, and referenced VCRs and DVDs doing for movies as what digital distribution is currently doing for games, where access to the medium was "previously very limited".

But he quickly commented, there was some notable downside. He suggested forcefully: "The fact that we don't have a relatively uniform platform is really going to hurt our medium in the future", and went on to criticize the existing tightly-controlled console (XBLA, WiiWare, PSN)and PC (with Steam's current domination) platforms.

Particularly noted by Ceraldi, whose company has published Penny Arcade Adventures on Xbox Live Arcade and PSN - on these services, for the most part, you don't control pricing (he commented: "that's insane"), and you don't always control promotions and sales.

In addition, he noted forcefully, pricing structures are limited, with no bundles and a $20 limit. In addition, you can't pre-order on consoles, and for episodic games, that is "severely damaging" - you can't sell the whole season upfront. It's unclear if this commentary was aimed at particular hardware providers, but they are compelling examples.

DeYoung then went on to explain the history of the company, which now has 35 employees, 3 projects in developments, and the indie-focused Greenhouse digital distribution service, and has shipped two episodes of Penny Arcade Adventures.

Explaining the genesis of the Penny Arcade Adventures game, in which Hothead worked very closely with Gabe and Jerry from the popular webcomic, they mentioned that they were considering what genre to make the game in, and were concerned that "modern gamers might not appreciate a classic adventure". In polling Penny Arcade users, they realized RPG was high up the list of wants, so they decided on an RPG-adventure hybrid.

The good in creating this game, for Hothead, was that the relationship with Penny Arcade, who "speak it like it is", opened a lot of doors. Also, the game was well-received by critics and Penny Arcade fans, helping its launch significantly.

On the other hand, since they were self-publishing, Hothead has some issues with sales and marketing, since they were pure developers, and had to work out how to expand past the hardcore fanbase and target a wider market.

He also commented: "We didn't ask hard questions about how many people... are just going to sit down and buy this game", admitting: "We feel like we spent too much money making the episodes." The Hothead creators then announced that they are going to finish the Penny Arcade series, and are considering going into retail channels with bundled copies.

The duo also incuded a brief discussion on Swarm, which is an environmentally-themed AI learning game which won local government funding in Canada, and is still in the process of incubating - to the game's advantage, they claim.

Then to DeathSpank, which is designed by Ron Gilbert and is "in full production", and is described as "an RPG with Monkey Island humor", and apparently is a Diablo or Zelda-style action RPG. Ron came in with an engine to build DeathSpank, and is an updated SCUMM-style engine. So they now have two almost completely different engines in development - but it's still possible to work.

Hothead are also starting up indie partnerships, porting The Maw to PC and Braid to Mac, and are looking for more in the future, also adding an achievements SDK to Greenhouse.

Then Ceraldi returned and announced a markedly reduced emphasis on episodic gaming for Hothead, going forward. He did say: "We're not going to stop doing it entirely", but Hothead is not going "as full ahead with it" as they did before.

Hothead did think that, with episodic gaming, they thought that they could get revenue sooner, and could add good stuff to future episodes and remove bad.

But they ended up seeing a few problems - particularly that there's also a perception from users, according to Ceraldi, that you're perhaps trying to charge them over the odds, over an entire series, and so they could wait until the end and just pick up the whole season.

He did note that fellow episodic creators Telltale are doing a good job but he believes that "most of their sales have come from pre-sales of the whole season" - and you can't do pre-orders on consoles, of course.

In addition, putting out regular releases on consoles are difficult, he noted - adding "are you even going to get three or four [release] slots from the console guys" for all the episodes? He concluded: "Realistically, episodic is a... challenge", revealing that DeathSpank will not be an episodic game - though it may have some added DLC for fans.

The duo then stepped up and showed relative sales percentages (though not totals) for Penny Arcade Adventures: Episode One, revealing around 45% sales on Xbox Live Arcade, 15-20% on PSN, just over 25% on Greenhouse, and 10-15% on Steam, judging by the pie chart. They also showed a similar percentage breakdown for Episode Two but with what they described as one third the sales of Episode 1.

The duo also explained relative percentage sales on computers for the series, noting that Mac counted for 25%, PC for 70% of sales, and Linux for 5% of sales. They concluded: "if you can afford to do crossplatform, it's well worth the effort."

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

March 27, 2009

GDC: Keita Takahashi - The Complete GDC Lecture

[Our gigantic GDC 2009 coverage is still on Gamasutra, and adding things all the time, but will crosspost a couple of key highlights here - such as Brandon Sheffield's write-up of the Noby creator's super-fun talk.]

In his inimitable style, Keita Takahashi began his Game Developers Conference session by demonstrating a hand-made scarf knitted by his mother.

“It’s Boy (from Noby Noby Boy)," he explained, "but also a scarf, and here you can put your hands in. So, when you’re cold, you can use this. Even when it’s cold, you are safe.”

“Most people may not know what I tried to achieve here, or why I tried to do this,” and so he attempted to explain.

“First, I came up with my own idea, then talked to my teammates. Sometimes, they might think I’m a bit weird for making this kind of crazy game; I’m very normal. I don’t use drugs, or drink at all. Please don’t worry about me, I’m okay.”

Creating Katamari Damacy

“In [Katamari Damacy], I wanted to show an ironic point of view about the consumption-based society," he revealed. "But I wanted to make more objects -- if it were empty, I would feel empty or lonely. But when these objects are rolled up and absorbed by the Katamari, they’re gone. Then I felt empty.”

“I feel the same way about disposable society. I think I could successfully express my cynical stance toward consumption society with Katamari, but still, I felt empty when the objects were rolled up.”

Takahashi decided that he wanted to make something with fewer stages, and less of a "goal." "My answer was Boy, who has a long body. He has a long-winding body. This is fun, right? I was also thinking I wanted to create a game where I didn’t need to worry about boundaries."

"The boundaries I was concerned about were time, and money," he continued. "To be able to create a game that’s not limited by time and money is impossible. So, I thought about not worrying about these, and just being able to create freely.”

He noted that games typically have goals, or "carrots on sticks." His personal goal was to create a game which presented no goals for players, which he admits might seem somewhat abstract. Takahashi also hoped to create something that designers wouldn't be able to control or predict.

“Katamari had rules in there," said Takahashi. "You had the Katamari size goal, and the time limit as well. I wasn’t happy with that existing. In the last remaining one second, it’s perhaps possible to create a huge Katamari, and maybe use your time well. But even that doesn’t quite make me happy. This was a formula, and I felt like it somehow betrayed my vision."

“There are some games that follow the rules and make something wonderful, but I wanted to throw that out and start from scratch, from the beginning of what games should be," he added.

“In Japan, people who play games are called ‘users.’ Maybe it’s just the game industry. I always thought this was bad. Why do we call them users? Aren’t they supposed to play? We throw around the term users without thinking about it, so perhaps it’s about consumption.”

Consumers, Not Players

Takahashi cited a quote from animated film director Hayao Miyazaki, stating that children today are not playing, they're consuming.

He conceded that one has to create something that's consumable in order to maintain a company. “But I hear executives talking about users, users, and I just want to hit them. Sometimes I think maybe they should just die. But I’m getting sidetracked.”

He then drew a graphic of a person playing games on a train, with his face down, staring at the screen, while his parent is sitting nearby, being ignored. This is not how things should be, he says.

"Maybe it’s a bad thing if a game sells," he posed. "So, I thought maybe it should only be on PS3 and maybe only download. That’ll mean it’ll not sell that much," he joked.

"It’s been about one month since we launched, and I was right, it didn’t sell that much. Though I guess maybe that’s bad.”

Noby Noby Beginnings

Takahashi started thinking about developing a new game in 2005, and sought out a programmer for the project. Most didn't really understand his goals. "I showed one programmer this, and he said ‘Yes, I’ve been thinking about these kinds of things as well!’ He showed his wife, and she said ‘You should work on this as though your life depends on it.’ So, we have a collection of crazy people working on it."

He also revealed that the original 2005 prototype was developed on Xbox 360, despite it eventually being released exclusively for PlayStation Network. “There’s some stuff that wasn’t in the PS3 version, but it’s pretty much there," he said.

“In 2006, it was decided we’d put it on PS3. At the time, the 360 wasn’t doing well in Japan, so maybe there were some political reasons for the company to do it on PS3. For me, it was important that the PS3’s sticks were straight across from each other. For the 360, they’re not, and that was enough for me.”

He had difficulty with the physics engine, though, and initially sought outside help. “I’m sure developers know, but Havok is a physics engine, and if you use it, you have to show their logo. I didn’t want to do that. I thought it would be awful to have to put a logo on the game every time, so instead we used physics effects that SCE puts out.”

“But I still had to put the Namco Bandai logo, so I guess putting a logo on wasn’t something I could avoid," he said.

“Before we knew it, it was 2009," he said of the game's long development cycle. "People higher up were really mad at me, and some of them really glared at me if they saw me in the hall. I don’t know how many we’ve sold really, but if you go to web web boy [which shows stats from the game], there are 55,768 players now.”

“In spite of the fact I said the game shouldn’t have a goal, but Noby Noby Boy does have a goal,” he admitted, and that goal is growing Girl.

“The goal is to connect the solar system," he said. "I thought it was such a huge goal for a game that it wouldn’t really count as a goal.”

“Within one week after sales, girl was able to reach the moon," he noted. "I was very moved by this. But as I showed you earlier, there are 55,768 players right now. At the average, girl is growing 40 million meters per day. If we go at this rate, in order to connect the entire solar system, it will take 820 years. This is a problem, I’ll be dead by then.”

What He Couldn't Do

“There are tons of things I couldn’t do," Takahashi admits. "I don’t want to say I’m making excuses, though. But girl goes around the solar system, starting with the moon, then mercury and so on. We accumulate points to go around the universe. I wanted the top players to get a gift. The first is this scarf. Then here’s a long pillow.” [Shows images of gifts on screen.]

His mother made the scarf, and the pillow was made by his younger sister. “Why did I want to do this? It’s a gift to say thank you to players. But also I wanted everyone to enjoy this game. I wanted to give actual gifts to players, this is just my style, and how I feel. Games have their own rewards, but if we give actual gifts to players, maybe they will feel there’s an actual goal.”

“I didn’t want it to just be a gift like a download or something like that," he said. "It should be something real."

"I couldn’t do this, partially because of privacy issues, and we also needed a very secure distribution platform,” he continued. “Also people might put this up on an auction site, and then I’d buy it back and re-deliver it. I thought that would be pretty amusing."

“Another thing I couldn’t do was having to do with Girl’s ranking," he said. "I really wanted it to just be fun, but if there’s ranking, people may just keep trying to extend girl, or give up halfway. I wanted to use more fuzzy ranking. Boy, and Girl should move around regardless of ranking, but there was no time and programming resources for this.”

“I also wanted to do a search system, with some sort of Google type system, so if you Google within Noby Noby Boy, characters will bring some results and you could eat it and open the site. But a popular site can run very fast. It’s tough to get. It’s kind of meaningless, but maybe fun?”

“The face of Noby Noby Boy is simple circles, and I thought it’d be nice if you could customize it, but I couldn’t. I also wanted to use Youtube uploading so players can report bugs. That might be really convenient. Also players could suggest things through Youtube, and then the players and the development team could exchange ideas.”

Why make this game?

Continuing with his musings: “Why did I want to do this? Well, because I felt constrained," he said. "In the last four or five years, the world has become much more of a cramped place. This is not a game world, it’s the real world we live in. It has nothing to do with the recession, it just feels constraining from a different perspective. Maybe this is just me, but I feel like there’s something physical that is tying me up. I feel everything is controlled by systems.

Takahashi added: "Maybe this thing that’s tying me up is Namco Bandai, but there’s a much bigger cramping happening in this world. The word Noby Noby means to not be constrained, and to be mentally liberated. Maybe this is a little dramatic, but Noby Noby Boy is a way to fight against this constraining world."

"Maybe that’s why I created this game. But ultimately games don’t need these kinds of goals, honestly. Games should just be fun, and if that’s the case, what I said is just nonsense. But personally I needed this kind of explanation.”

Noby Noby update

He continued: “Before PS3, we thought it might be fun to do it on the iPhone. So we're in the process of making it for the iPhone. I thought if we used the boy from the iPhone as well, girl can reach the solar system in only 400 years.”

“In the [PSN] update, it’s possible to do multiplay,” says Takahashi. He then demonstrated a local multiplayer mode, in which players could also each eat each other and connect. “At maximum, four people can play at the same time,” he said.

What's in a game?

“A lot of people ask me if Noby Noby Boy is really a game," he says. "Basically this is from the time of Katamari Damacy, but I don’t really think of creating a “game” when I’m making these. I’m just trying to create something fun. Parties, festivals, that sort of thing.”

“People who ask whether it’s a videogame, I’d ask them what a game is. Is it good level design? Is it good AI? A good story? Important goals? Great music? People say without these, one won’t be motivated. But even using at the catalog for GDC, there’s no definition for a game. The games we make aren’t about level design, or a sense of accomplishment.”

“I’ve been complaining a lot now. People call me not Keita Takahashi but “Hater” Takahashi,” he joked. "But I think there is a lot of potential in games, and I am just frustrated that they don’t reach their potential. I’m sure there’s something more that we can do. If we love video games, we have to think about this more. We have to observe more, and have more fun while we’re making these games.

His conclusion? "There is no completion in the industry games, it’s always developing. But despite that, we believe there are certain ways that games have to be. Perhaps we’re also hiding behind these rules, and maybe just relying on past experience. I’m sure you’re going to misunderstand this, but I think perhaps we have to ignore the players, and our companies."

"Maybe we should just try creating a game that we like, rather than thinking about what’s going to sell or what’s popular, or looking outside for the standard. We should look inside to see what’s fun. Games aren’t created by management. We have to rely on hardware, but hardware doesn’t make the games. It’s humans that do. Se whouldn’t be afraid of being criticized, and just create what we want.“

Takahashi ended by noting of this freedom: “This will create something fantastic, or something fantastically awful. But even if it is awful, it still has value. So I think we should all keep trying. I think that is our mission. There are other missions certainly, but crating something new is something that should be a goal for developers. I hope you will join me.”

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

GameSetPics: 2009 IGF Pavilion & IGF Awards!

[Continuing the series from the marvelous Vincent Diamante (also the soundtrack composer for Flower!) here's some more really nice pictures of IGF Pavilion and the IGF Awards - sorry if you're getting IGF overload, but hey, only once per year.]

At the Pavilion, with all kinds of people checking out the IGF finalists.

Another picture from the ever-ready IGF Pavilion on the show floor.

Matthew Wegner and Steve Swink (Flashbang Studios) on stage introducing the Independent Games Festival Awards.

The IGF host for the evening, the most excellent Andy Schatz (Pocketwatch Games).

Dan Tabar from Data Realms, in his classy first appearance.

The ever-addled BrainPipe guys collect their Best Audio award.

Erik Svedang, on stage to collect the the $30,000 Seumas McNally Grand Prize for Blueberry Garden - congrats!

[Vincent also took pictures of basically all of the other IGF award winners, so if you are them - or their families - check out Page 3 of his GDC 2009 Flickr page for those!]

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

March 26, 2009

GDC - The Game - Part 4, Thursday: Systematic Socialization

[Every day during GDC, Everybody Dies creator Jim Munroe is blogging for GameSetWatch discussing the creative process for the GDC-related text adventure he'll be building for us. Here's part three, following Monday's, Tuesday's and Wednesday's entries.]

What I took away from Hideo Kojima's keynote was the following: the genius part of Metal Gear came from a technical constraint, and the flaws come from being technically unconstrained.

Originally, Metal Gear was supposed to be a combat game, but the hardware wouldn't allow for enough sprites for the bullets and enemies, so he worked around it by creating the stealth game. The oft-criticised cinematics in the game, on the other hand, were made possible by increases in disc storage space.

While I like the idea of making this GDC text game have thousands of non-player characters with individual interests, introversion/extroversion levels and social connections, I know there's a technical processing limit even for text games.

But I expect I can get a pretty interesting result even with a limited amount of non-player characters. Here's a sketch of the basic, rule-based system I'm imagining, before I layer in the colour and detail.

You are in the hallway of the Moscone Center. There is a design talk to your north, and a programming panel to your south.
>inventory

You are wearing a t-shirt with a quote from Toru Iwatani, your big inspiration as a game designer. "I would like to make the people who enjoy playing games cry."

>go south

You go in and sit down.

An hour later, you come out with nothing more than a befuddled feeling.

>go north

You go in and sit down.

An hour later, you come out with a new excitement about emergent gameplay.

>inventory

You are wearing a t-shirt with a quote from Toru Iwatani, your big inspiration as a game designer. "I would like to make the people who enjoy playing games cry." You have an excitement about emergent gameplay.

>look

You are in the hallway of the Moscone Center. There is a design talk to your north, and a programming panel to your south. There's a guy here looking at his conference schedule.

>talk to guy about emergent gameplay

He's not really interested in that, so after a few blank looks you stop.

>examine guy

His badge identifies him working for a branding agency.

The marketing guy leaves to the east. A tall man with wild hair stops here, orienting himself.

>talk to person about emergent gameplay

You have a spirited discussion on the topic.

>introduce yourself

You shake hands. You have gotten to know Tom.

Tom is here, talking to you about prototyping.

A girl in a red hoodie comes by.

The girl in the red hoodie recognizes Tom.

>examine tom

He is a tall man with wild hair. His interests include prototyping and emergent gameplay.

Tom introduces you to the girl in the red hoodie. You have gotten to know Maggie.

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

11th Independent Games Festival Awards Topped By Blueberry Garden

Erik Svedang's Blueberry Garden, a charming exploration game set in an ever-changing ecosystem, received top honors - the $30,000 Seumas McNally Grand Prize for Best Independent Game - at the 2009 Independent Games Festival Awards.

The winners were announced this evening at the eleventh Annual IGF Awards ceremony, hosted by the Game Developers Conference at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco.

The IGF awards are often referred to as the Sundance Festival of the video game industry, and offer both global exposure and over $50,000 in cash prizes to each year's winners.

Previous breakout IGF award-winners include titles such as Braid, Audiosurf, Castle Crashers, and World Of Goo, and this year's awards saw 226 Main Competition entries from all over the world - and over 450 entries in total.

Other IGF award recipients for 2009 include Amanita Design's evocative adventure game Machinarium, which took the Excellence in Visual Art Award, and KranX Productions' Musaic Box, which won the Excellence in Design Award thanks to its cunning combination of music game and block puzzler.

The first ever Innovation (Nuovo) Award, honoring a title that advances the art of gaming, went to Jason Rohrer's two-player collaborative title Between, while Digital Eel's BrainPipe received the award for Excellence in Audio, and Data Realms' Cortex Command was recognized for Technical Excellence, also picking up the Audience Award, after receiving the largest share of thousands of public votes cast at IGF.com in recent weeks.

Finally, the award for the Best Student Game went to DigiPen Institute of Technology's paint-splattering action title Tag: The Power of Paint, and download sponsor Direct2Drive's $10,000 D2D Vision Award was won by Hemisphere Games' Osmos.

The IGF judges are made up of over 50 industry game creators and journalists, including the makers of previous IGF honorees World Of Goo, Braid, Aquaria and N+; industry veterans from studios including Maxis and SuperVillain Studios; and noted writers from Wired, Kotaku, Newsweek, Joystiq and MTV.

"Yet again, we've been blown away by the quality and diversity of entries in this year's Independent Games Festival," said Simon Carless, IGF chairman. "Every year, indie games seem to get more and more vital, and we're pleased to be able to help honor the very best."

The IGF awarded the following games in each category of the main competition - each received a cash prize of $2,500 as well as sponsor-related prizes, apart from the Grand Prize of $30,000:

Seumas McNally Grand Prize ($30,000)
Blueberry Garden, by Erik Svedang

Innovation (Nuovo) Award ($2,500)
Between, by Jason Rohrer

Excellence in Visual Art ($2,500)
Machinarium, by Amanita Design

Excellence in Audio ($2,500)
BrainPipe, by Digital Eel

Technical Excellence ($2,500)
Cortex Command, by Data Realms

Excellence in Design ($2,500)
Musaic Box, by KranX Productions

Best Student Game ($2,500)
Tag: The Power of Paint, by DigiPen Institute of Technology

Audience Award ($2,500)
Cortex Command, by Data Realms

D2D Vision Award ($10,000)
Osmos, by Hemisphere Games

The eleventh annual Independent Games Festival is supported by Platinum Sponsor Mountain Dew's Green Label Gaming which contributed $10,000 to this year's record-breaking Grand Prize amount, official download partner Direct2Drive, Gold Sponsor Microsoft's XNA, Silver Sponsor Sony, and Student Showcase Platinum Sponsor DigiPen Institute of Technology.

For more information about the IGF, the finalists and the winners, please visit the official Independent Games Festival website.

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

Fallout 3, LittleBigPlanet Reign Supreme At Choice Awards

Bethesda Softworks' epic post-apocalyptic open-world adventure, Fallout 3, received the Game of the Year Award at the 9th annual Game Developers Choice Awards, presented at a ceremony this evening the 2009 Game Developers Conference. Bethesda also received the Best Writing award for the game.

Media Molecule's imaginative user creation-centric platform game LittleBigPlanet, which was first unveiled at GDC 2007, was the recipient of the most awards of the evening, taking four awards for Best Game Design, Best Technology, Best Debut Game and Innovation Award.

Other winners at the Tim Schafer-hosted event included Ubisoft's hauntingly beautiful update of the Prince of Persia franchise, which won the prize for Best Visual Arts, and Ready at Dawn's portable action-adventure, God of War: Chains of Olympus, winner of the Best Handheld Game award. EA Redwood Shores' shocking horror title, Dead Space, won the prize for Best Audio award.

Additionally, successful independent developer 2D Boy, winner of the 2008 Independent Games Festival's Design Innovation award and Technical Experience award, snagged this year's Game Developers Choice award for Best Downloadable game for World of Goo.

The Game Developers Choice Awards, which honor the very best games of the year, are voted on by developers and created for developers.

They are produced and hosted by the GDC and presented by Gamasutra.com and Game Developer Magazine, with the aid of a distinguished Advisory Committee that includes many of the world's top game creators, and each award is decided by thousands of votes from game professionals worldwide.

This year, Hideo Kojima, the Corporate Officer, Executive Producer and Director of Kojima Productions and creator of the seminal Metal Gear series was presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award for his influence on the craft of game development and his twenty years of work on Metal Gear and other notable franchises.

In addition, Harmonix co-founders Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy, co-developers of a groundbreaking decade-plus long line of music games culminating in the Rock Band franchise, received the Pioneer Award for their work; and Tommy Tallarico, co-founder of the Video Games Live concert series and founder of the Game Audio Network Guild (G.A.N.G.), received the Ambassador Award for helping to advance the game audio community.

The recipients of the 9th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards are:

Game of the Year
Fallout 3 (Bethesda Softworks)

Best Game Design:
LittleBigPlanet (Media Molecule)

Best Writing:
Fallout 3 (Bethesda Softworks)

Best Technology:
LittleBigPlanet (Media Molecule)

Best Visual Arts:
Prince of Persia (Ubisoft Montreal)

Best Debut Game:
LittleBigPlanet (Media Molecule)

Best Handheld Game:
God Of War: Chains Of Olympus (Ready at Dawn)

Innovation Award:
LittleBigPlanet (Media Molecule)

Best Audio:
Dead Space (EA Redwood Shores)

Best Downloadable Game:
World Of Goo (2D Boy)

Recipients for the evening's special awards were:

Lifetime Achievement Award
Hideo Kojima

Pioneer Award
Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy

Ambassador Award
Tommy Tallarico

"Over the past nine years, the Game Developers Conference has become the premiere video game award show because it gives voice to those who understand games better than anyone; the people who make them," said Meggan Scavio, content director of the Game Developers Conference.

"The games being recognized here are virtuoso efforts that have truly advanced the state of video games. Our congratulations to all the talented and hardworking teams that put so much of themselves into their art."

For more information about the awards and all the recipients, please visit the official Game Developers Choice website.

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

March 25, 2009

GDC - The Game - Part 3, Wednesday: Funeral Plot

I ran into Ernest Adams yesterday, top hat and all, on my way home from the Ten Bit party. His thoughts on interactive narrative have strongly influenced me.

I'll rant to anyone who will listen that interactive andnarrative are not this simple thing to combine -- they're not the chocolate and peanut butter that people seem to imagine. The more the player tells the story the less the author tells the story, and the inverse is true.

So I've been trying to come to terms with the idea that as a fiction novelist a lot of the tools in my toolkit aren't that useful to bring to bear on game making. I personally believe that a linear plot doesn't suit the medium.

Despite that, my recent well-received text game has a completely linear plot. While I spared Ernest the role of Father Confessor while we chatted, I have a weird feeling that this linearality is a kind of backsliding on my part. Linear plotting in games is just wrong.

It's kind of like the beginning of music videos -- they often literally acted out the lyrics of the song, modeling themselves as mini-movies.

And they were usually bad, though in retrospect hilariously so. and eventually grew out of this literal phase to become the much less linear and more evocative creatures they are today.

Happily, Margaret Robertson's "Stop Wasting My Time and Your Money: Why Your Game Doesn't Need a Story to Be a Hit" has re-calibrated me.

She's an advocate for great writing in games, but makes the case that linear storytelling is intrusive, expensive and usually unsuitable thing in games.

After highlighting what went right in games like Ico, Eternal Darkness, and Half Life 2, she challenged the audience to explore different methods of creating richer games with creative solutions native to the form.

For this GDC text game, I'm starting to imagine a game that pivots on social interactions. By modeling the conference as a kind of social ecosystem full of people that I can simply drop my player into, I'm hoping for a baseline dynamism that won't have to rely on a linear plot for a compelling experience.

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

GDC: Indie Games Stuff @ GDC: The MegaLinkDump

So, as per usual, I'm typing up things when I should be going to GDC parties, but don't worry, the horribly indie shindig in question runs til 1.30am, and I just wanted to make sure all those folks who didn't get to go to GDC could check out the coverage.

Please post in comments if you've found more write-ups of sessions, too, but here's what a quick scan produced - thanks to everyone who wrote up the IGS panels this year.

We're hoping to make a few (everything was video + slides recorded this year!) available for free on the new GDC Vault service - maybe the 2D Boy day 1 keynote and the plain insane Indie Game Maker's Rant? Maybe take a few days, though!

Anyhow, here's the marvellous coverage, please to have fun reading:

- Destructoid: GDC 09: The Indie Advantage?; GDC 09: Beyond Single Player; GDC 09: Making Web Games: The Indie Experience; GDC 09: The Indie Game Maker Rant; GDC 09: Crayon Physics Deluxe postmortem; GDC 09: The Four-Hour Game Design; GDC 09: Everything you wanted to know about going indie....

- TIGSource: IGS '09: The Four-Hour Game Design (Cactus); IGS '09: The Indie Game Maker Rant.

- GameSpot: The Art Of Promoting Indie; GDC 2009: Ranting, indie style; GDC 2009: The Art of Promoting Indie; GDC 2009: EA Play head explains indie advantage.

- Joystiq: GDC09: IGF Mobile Award winners announced; GDC09: IGF showcases 'the next great mobile game' concepts.

Offworld: Indie Games Summit: 2D Boy/Polytron's top 10 ways to market your indie game.

IGN: GDC 09: Making LOVE in Your Bedroom.

RANDOM BONUS: DoubleFine.com: 'Host Master and the Conquest of Humor' (Tim Schafer hasn't finished his Choice Awards script yet, but he HAS finished an awesome Flash game about, uhh, not having finished his Choice Awards script. Ohdear.)

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

GDC - The Game - Part 2, Tuesday: 'Fear of Focus'

I loved Petri Purho's graphs yesterday. His candid post-mortem on Crayon Physics Deluxe detailed how he used player testing to fine-tune the difficulty between the levels, after having discovered that players continued to improve on levels with similar difficulty.

I think his craftmanship is laudable because testing and refinement is underrated in not just indie games, but indie arts in general.

While "It didn't test well in focus groups" is a tool marketing uses to bludgeon things they don't like in big companies, doing thorough playtesting and responding to what you learn is not tantamount to diluting your artistic vision.

Getting feedback and doing testing -- so long as you feel like the creative control is in your hands -- can be a hugely useful part of the process. Just because you can say "fuck the audience" doesn't mean that you should: and even if your intent is to frustrate or irritate the player, it's a good idea to see if people get pissed off to the pitch you expected.

I was talking to Farbs, the creator of the great Rom Check Fail today about player experiences. He was saying that everyone talks about the first ten minutes of a game, but not the last ten minutes.

I wonder if this is because most games aren't finished, except by the hardcore that simply care that they beat it (and that it was too short/easy). I'd be interested in stats that compare completion of movies to books to games.

I also think that few game designers put a lot of thought into when a player quits, maybe because the ideal player in their head never does.

It's one last opportunity to connect with the player -- sometimes there's a little funny jab at the player, or some variant on that, but it's usually a static stock response.

I'd like to make some use of the player data that the session has collected in this GDC text game. Even if it's just letting the player know how far along they are, or some other interesting stat. Something a bit more thought out than "Are You Sure? Y/N"

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

March 24, 2009

GDC: Crayon Physics Creator Purho Prototypes Hard

[Continuing our GDC coverage - also see official Gama microsite - here's the awesome Petri Purho talking about crayons, physics, and things.]

In a humorous speech on the Monday of the Independent Games Summit, Kloonigames' Petri Purho talked about what he learned in creating IGF 2008 Grand Prize Winner Crayon Physics Deluxe, stressing the importance of rapid prototyping in its genesis.

As he noted in the speech, "doing prototypes really worked out well for me," and it also gave him a hint towards which of his seven-day-created Kloonigames freeware games would break out, based on download counts.

He averaged 2,000-3,000 downloads of his previous prototypes, until the Crayon Physics prototype did around 25,000 free downloads in one month, and increased again to 250,000 when his YouTube demonstration of the game became incredibly popular.

Prototypes were great, Purho said, because you can "get the bad game ideas out of your system," and also pointed out that keeping to strict monthly prototypes helped him explore ideas that might not work, but he can also sometimes tell partway through that the game isn't up to snuff.

As to how the game was conceived, most other physics games like Armadillo Run are engineering-like, and have only one or two solutions -- on the other end of the scale are sandbox-like titles like Line Rider. Purho was looking to split the difference and get both sandbox-style and goal-centric elements into his game.

He explained the concept behind Crayon Physics Deluxe: "The game is not about finding the right solution to the puzzle, it's about finding a creative one." But, he asked, how do you detect when players are being creative?

In addition, Purho noted, a lot of people are lazy and will go for the easiest solution possible. In the end, for many of the core gamers who had interest in Crayon Physics Deluxe, the game was somewhat too easy -- something Petri didn't expect because his idea of the target market for the game was not that clear, he thought.

One of the biggest issues Crayon Physics had was the number of clones it created online, and Purho actually said at one point that an iPhone game called Touch Physics offered him money as a tribute, but he felt uneasy about accepting it. Overall, the clones made him initially angry, but his game sold well despite them.

The end result was an influential and playable title, and Purho said over 80,000 people signed up via email alone to find out when Crayon Physics Deluxe was going to be released, and his method of allowing pre-orders helped to get people to sign up before the game actually debuted.

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

GDC: 2D Boy's Carmel On The Goo Route To Indie Success

[We're covering GDC lots over at the official Gamasutra microsite for the show, but we'll crosspost GSW-friendly stuff here, starting with a couple of Indie Games Summit write-ups, such as this handy 2D Boy one!]

In a keynote at the Independent Games Summit on the Monday of Game Developers Conference, 2D Boy co-founder and World Of Goo co-creator Ron Carmel presented a forthright talk about how to succeed as an independent developer.

One of Carmel's key points for success? "What you need to remember is that you're not starting a company, you're making a game."

Along the way, he revealed a lot of specifics, including exactly how much money his two-man company spent making the WiiWare and PC hit. He revealed that they spent $4,000 on hardware, $1,000 on software, and $5,000 on QA, plus $5,000 for localization and $5,000 for legal fees.

Including living expenses of $96,000, it cost $116,000 for the two years they spent making the game. Even with $60,000 in pre-orders for the PC version of World Of Goo, the 2D Boy duo were each $28,000 out of pocket when the game launched.

Basically, Carmel explained, it's as simple as this - you need to "make a good game" and have something unique about it. But as an astute businessperson, he launched into some very helpful sales specifics. He revealed, via a chart, that 25 percent of all World Of Goo sales in 2008 came from 2D Boy's website, and Steam was a smaller slice.

Retail was only responsible for between 2 and 3 percent of their revenues, and WiiWare was a majority, around 55-60 percent -- though he did note that Steam was a much larger percentage in 2009. Interestingly, on 2DBoy.com thus far, 65 percent of paid PC downloads were for Windows, 25 percent for Mac, and 10 percent for Linux.

Carmel then asked the question -- why go with a publisher? He doesn't believe that publishers are that important for digital distribution, and for 2D Boy's publisher relationships, they started out okay, but after time, "the wedding band started to look something like this," Carmel said, showing The One Ring from The Lord Of The Rings.

He listed his publisher offers -- starting with an $180,000 advance on 10 percent royalties, though the unnamed publisher said it was "not original... a niche product." Then there was a $225,000 advance, then a $425,000 advance on 20-24 percent royalties, and finally a $700,000 advance on 30-35 percent royalties.

But the cost of goods, shipping, and marketing would be deducted from the royalties. That offer also came with the publisher holding rights to DS and XBLA versions, and right of first refusal for sequels. A final offer ended up being $700,000 advanced on a 15 percent royalty rate.

So the 2D Boy duo worked out whether they could beat the $700,000 with a combination of their own site, Steam, and WiiWare, thought they could, and decided to "dump publishers altogether." Carmel concluded, when it comes to pairing with publishers, "don't do it," and suggested a flat-fee upfront deal for regional retail publishers. He also noted that for digital distribution, you should focus on the big guys to get your game into a prominent distribution area -- PSN, XBLA, WiiWare, and Steam.

Carmel did regret the non-simultaneous Western release of World Of Goo, and said it "made it difficult for people to get the game...that enhanced the piracy rate, I believe." But on the piracy end of things, he explained, "Don't bother with DRM...it's a waste of time," noting that the cracked version ends up having a better user experience than the legitimate version.

He also believes that there is no change in piracy rates between their game and other games with DRM. He added, later on in the lecture: "Anybody who wants the game is going to find it on a BitTorrent site. We just don't see the point in trying to fight that."

The 2D Boy co-founder then showed a graph of direct, WiiWare, and Steam sales over time, although not with exact numbers. He particularly noted that a Steam 25 percent-off sale quadrupled the revenues for that week.

Interestingly, total 2D Boy website sales on the Linux release were double that of launch day -- even if you can't make money just from a Linux port, "publicity from the community is huge" for major Linux titles, he noted. The final, insanely large bump was due to the 75 percent off sale on Steam.

In the Q&A section at the end of the talk, Carmel explained that the title had no design document, and a "very iterative process" overall. He claimed that not having a design document "allowed us to create lots more positive things with the game."

He also commented, "Our philosophy was to value design over finances," although this created stress in the game's second year when the two were running out of money.

So what is 2D Boy's next title? According to a comment at the end of the lecture, it's going to be The Sophomore Effect: An Intentionally Mediocre Game.

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

GameSetPics: 2009 Indie Games Summit - Monday's Highlights

[As GDC 2009 kicks off, the marvelous Vincent Diamante (also the soundtrack composer for Flower!) has been taking some really nice pictures of the 2009 Indie Games Summit for posterity - so here's a quick look at them.]

Ron Carmel kicks off the Indie Games Summit to a completely full room at GDC 2009, talking about the making of World Of Goo and their business and practical lessons.

2D Boy's Ron looking happy, presumably cos he has that really kickass Japanese World Of Goo T-shirt (?) on - where do we get one?

Last year's IGF Grand Prize winner Petri Purho has released Crayon Physics Deluxe, and talked about it in a hilarious Indie Games Summit lecture.

A picture of the 300+ happy indie folks packing the Summit on Monday, the first day of GDC.

Later in the afternoon, Stardock's Brad Wardell explained how the 'core' gaming audience has made his company's titles like Galactic Civilizations II and Sins Of A Solar Empire into massive indie hits.

[You can check out the rest of Vince's GDC pictures over at Flickr, including plenty of other neat snaps of the action so far.]

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

GDC: Independent Games & Sales: Stats 101 - The Slides

So, one of the main things that I was doing today (the Monday of Game Developers Conference) was presenting a 30-minute Indie Games Summit presentation called 'Independent Games & Sales: Stats 101'.

Since I founded the Independent Games Summit as a GDC Summit a couple of years back, it's been clear that getting good sales data (or at least decent estimates) on indie game prospects on various platforms is really important for creators. And here's the talk description:

"So sure, everyone wants to make a living from independent games. But how much money can you actually make out of PC web, casual, and downloadable indie titles, iPhone games, XBLA, WiiWare, and PlayStation Network titles, to name but a few? What's the royalty and revenue split, how well have some of the highest-profile IGF award winners done, and how well might the average indie do?

IGF Chairman and Gamasutra/Game Developer magazine publisher Simon Carless collates from his sources to examine the cold, hard financial realities of sustaining yourself by making an indie title in today's game market."

This talk, honestly, was a bit overstuffed for a 30-minute lecture, but there was so much important information I wanted to include, and I do believe this is the first time anyone has tried to collate all public sales information and estimate sales ranges from that:

At some point, video and slides combined of this talk should be available to GDC attendees via the GDC Vault, but in the meantime, I've uploaded my slides to Slideshare.net - here's the viewing link, and below are the embedded slides (which you may need to fullscreen to read properly.)

Independent Games Sales: Stats 101

View more presentations from simoniker.

I did my best here, collating from both public and private sources. But I'd love to hear from independent creators to point out anywhere you think I've gone wrong in my estimations - and to offer any more data (on or off the record) that'll help me refine this. So please do ping me if you can help out, and any feedback is welcome.

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

March 23, 2009

GDC - The Game - Part 1, Monday: 'I'm Stuck.'

[Every day during GDC, Everybody Dies creator Jim Munroe is blogging for GameSetWatch discussing the creative process for the GDC-related text adventure he'll be building for us.

He says: 'This is the first of my daily dev diaries for the text game set at the GDC. Needless to say it is an honor and a privilege, and I hope I don't fuck it up too badly.']

At lunch today Erin Robinson (who made the excellent adventure game Nanobots) mentioned that she was stuck at a point in my last text game and she couldn't figure out the right verb.

While I would like to claim that "guess-the-verb" is a bonus minigame, I largely consider it a failing of my own when people get too frustrated to continue -- especially due to parser limitations, but even due to making the puzzles too difficult.

In Erin's game, one of the nanobots is a built in hint system, and unlike most hint systems, I used it.

For me, this is significant because as a teenager playing text games (including GDC speaker Steve Meretzky's Planetfall and Sorcerer) I prided myself on solving games without hints.

When I have taken hints, I've felt like I've cheated, and it's tainted my experience of the game somehow. Silly as it sounds. But when the game itself includes a system for unsticking you, and it's not a separate menu or walkthrough, then it feels like "in-world" and officially sanctioned.

So in regards to how I can see it working in this game set at GDC is: there's this guy you know. He's been to the GDC since the beginning -- he's a vet. He's able to give you all kinds of information about what you might like to try next, if it's been a certain number of turns without much forward movement.

He's also blaringly obnoxious and hard to ditch. I think I'll make it the default behaviour that he'll come and hint you, but also make there a way for you to dodge him if you want to be hardcore and pure about it.

And no, he is not based on anyone I know.

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

GameSetInterview: 'The Merits of Novamente's Parrots and the Arrival of Advanced AI'

[Another GameSetWatch-exclusive interview from the ever-neat and quirky Jeriaska, this time he talks to a blue-ish sky AI expert about making virtual pets a bit... smarter?]

As AI developers are convening in San Francisco this week for GDC, another artificial intelligence conference is wrapping up in Arlington, Virginia, a short walk from the Pentagon. AGI-09, the second conference on artificial general intelligence, brings together researchers attempting to create learning, reasoning agents with broad, humanlike intelligence.

Organized by Dr. Ben Goertzel, chief science officer of Novamente LLC, the AGI conference series is a motivated effort to steer research back in the direction of the original intents of AI, namely to make a thinking machine. Goertzel's plan is to inch up the cognitive ladder by incrementally developing more cleverly adaptive pets in virtual worlds and massively multiplayer online games.

This discussion with the AGI designer focuses on the prospects of introducing general intelligence to non-playable game characters. The topics addressed include contemporary examples of game AI and what steps need be taken for game designers to foster MMO environments suitable for genuinely clever artificial general intelligence.

GameSetWatch: In your presentations at various science and technology conferences, such as last year's Singularity Summit and AGI-08, you have brought up the development of virtual pets in games as a pathway to humanlike artificial intelligence. What games did you look at in researching the current landscape of virtual pet design?

Ben Goertzel, CEO/ CSO of Novamente LLC: There are an awful lot of virtual pet games out there, and my daughter has played a good percentage of them. You can look at Nintendogs, which is a Nintendo DS game, or more sandbox style games like Animal Crossing, Harvest Moon, and The Sims 2: Pets. One of the things you see that surprised me is how attached people can become to these pets, even though there's nothing to them. It's a cute picture that moves around according to some pre-programmed rules, yet there is real emotional feeling toward these animals.

GSW: What would you say are the major stumbling blocks of the AI found in the games you just mentioned?

Goertzel: In Animal Crossing or Harvest Moon, the animals are automata. They have deterministic behavior with a bit of randomness thrown in. They cannot adapt or personalize their behavior or learn anything new, so the gameplay is focused elsewhere.

What I have found is that you cannot usually take an existing game and work adaptive, reasoning AI into it. Whatever system of rewards is set up to accumulate money or points in the game would break. This is a big issue for the invasion of advanced AI into videogames because game designers are not used to thinking: What could I do if I had an AI that could learn and adapt, that could surprise the player with different behaviors?

GSW: What might be a good testing ground for the first generation of AGI in games?

Goertzel: The most obvious way to put intelligent pets into games would be in sandbox type games like The Sims 2: Pets. There, you are trying to make money, but if the pets do random, funky, non-deterministic things, that could still be okay. In games that are more tightly controlled, it would be harder to make the animals adaptive without throwing off the core gameplay.

GSW: You spoke at the Foresight Vision Weekend in Palo Alto about Novamente's flocks of virtual parrots sharing a store of knowledge. What is the purpose of having a collective parrot unconscious?

Goertzel: That is part of the secret of making it scalable. The only way on current processors you are going to get hundreds of parrots per computer is to have them share a lot of their knowledge. Anything that two parrots both know should be shared in some abstracted format rather than redundantly, which is of course different from you and me.

Of course, you don't want to have so much collective knowledge that you squelch all the diversity and variance. Each agent in our system has something called a personality filter, which tells us what knowledge from the collective mind to bring into each personal mind. If it's a game where each little girl has her own personal pet, and the charming thing is how each pet is really different, you would not want to overdo the collectivity aspect.

GSW: You have mentioned that part of what allows for adaptivity in your agents is their ability to learn new behaviors through a variety of approaches. What are some of the methods you use now to train your virtual pets?

Goertzel: For one, they can learn through explicit or implicit reinforcement. Explicit reinforcement is like saying, "Good dog!" "Bad dog!" Implicit reinforcement is life lessons: the dog goes without food and learns that's not a good idea. There is also imitative learning: you see what some other agent does, and copy it. That can both be unsupervised (copying because you like copying) or it can be reinforced. Then there is what I call "corrective learning:" you want your dog to sit down, so you push it down. You see some of that if you study yoga or tai-chi. The instructor will actually straighten your body out. That can be very valuable with motor learning in particular.

GSW: Is there a behavior you could look for in an artificial agent that would signal it's an AGI?

Goertzel: It's really not any one behavior, because that could be scripted. It is more the ability to generate new behaviors adaptively and to react to what happens.

Take the example of making friends with an AGI squirrel with its own motivational system. A traditionally scripted AI squirrel could of course be provided with a bunch of rules telling it when and how to make friends with you. But an AI squirrel with its own motivational system and some deeper intelligence tied into that, could make friends with you in all sorts of unplanned, spontaneous ways, and that makes for a lot more interesting gameplay.

But the game environment has to have a fair amount of richness to make this kind of advanced AI worthwhile. For instance, if it happened that there were not many acorns that year in the virtual environment of the game, you could put out food and bowls for them. Right now there is not that much richness to these virtual environments, so acorns are not going to stop falling one year, which leaves AGIs with not that much to do.

There really is not much happening in virtual worlds these days. If you go into Second Life, it's empty and kind of bleak. Part of it is the lack of AI and artificial life--you should have squirrels running around and birds landing on your shoulder.

GSW: In the AGI conference series, have there been any talks that you felt were particularly applicable to the videogame industry?

Goertzel: One of the stronger talks was about the combination of evolutionary and analytical methods for program learning, which is a fairly technical topic. There are many examples of genetic algorithms in gaming, such as in Grand Theft Auto IV, where NaturalMotion used evolutionary methods to evolve natural-looking animations for the characters and the cars. On the other hand, there are plenty of uses of analytical methods in gaming, mostly decision tree models. In a gaming context, you don't see those combined very often. That combination could provide a lot of power to flexible learning, especially in transferring learning from one domain to another.

GSW: You have mentioned that games today are generally too rigid to support the inclusion of general intelligence? How would it be possible to make an MMO for an AGI?

Goertzel: You could make a genuine AGI system that learns through its interaction with the players, where the game would be massively stickier. It would make for a longer lasting game experience because the game would change while the AGIs get smarter and smarter.

GSW: What are the major challenges at this point to making this design concept a reality?

Goertzel: The interesting and difficult question is whether it can be done in an economically viable way. I'm quite confident it can be, but this is where I see the biggest challenge lying. Because the AGI we are running now requires a number of Linux boxes running together to make one mind, just from an economics perspective you can't have a game where each non-player character is an AGI. The real obstacle to be overcome is making the AGI code efficient enough where it becomes economical to put AGI-powered non-player characters in games. In that sense, game AGI is at an early stage of development.

GSW: How much space do they take up currently?

Goertzel: I can run a few parrots on my laptop, but they take up a lot of RAM. This code is at the border of research code and product code, so if you are going to run that on a console or a PC together with a game that is really intensive in terms of graphics, it's not going to work right now. This is why we are focused on MMOGs, because there you can run things on a server.

GSW: How could AGIs operate in an MMO world that is familiar to game players today?

Goertzel: Well, there's a huge number of different ways, of course. Virtual pets are just one example, though they're one I've been thinking about a lot. To put pets in an MMOG you would not necessarily need to make everyone's pet a powerful AGI. You might use pets at the border between AGI and narrow AI, where they could learn new tricks and have some personalized spontaneous behaviors. That's one thing we've been experimenting with already.

Going beyond pets, I suppose that in some MMOGs you could make a few high-level bosses these powerful AGI gods that players did not get to all the time. Maybe each of those gods uses ten servers. They could communicate using some natural language and try to outsmart you, maybe even in some cases succeeding. Because there are only a few of them, it would be more tractable in terms of compute resources.

GSW: These AGI opponents would be more difficult to defeat because they would be picking up strategies from players they encountered?

Goertzel: Exactly. You wouldn't be able to fool them the same way three times. That makes the gameplay really different, because a lot of the time we rely on the fact that you can fool the boss the same way every time you confront it.

GSW: Do you see there being a clear path to putting together the hardware requirements for a school of AGI pets?

Goertzel: It's a very clear path. You would need a lot of hardcore code optimization, taking stuff that we are doing in AGI research projects and implementing it in a more efficient way. That would be aimed at packing a lot of intelligence on something like a single blade server, while using clever techniques to offload some of the intelligence algorithms onto NVIDIA PC supercomputers with a bunch of GPUs. I think it could be done.

[Images courtesy of Novamente. Video from AGI-09 can be found on the AGI-09 website.]

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

In-Depth: Tetris' Legal Clone War Versus Blockles

[We don't run many articles by lawyers on GSW, but I think this one's worth it, since it has interesting ramifications. The Tetris Company, well known for protecting its property, has taken legal action against VC-funded social games portal OMGPOP, which it believes is infringing on its works, and IP attorney Jed Spencer examines the issue and its ramifications.]

Last week, Tetris owners Tetris Holding and The Tetris Company sued BioSocia, the owner of social games site OMGPOP, and Charles Forman over the game Blockles, claiming that Blockles infringes numerous intellectual property rights of its famous puzzle game.

The suit, made in the U.S. District Court, S.D.N.Y., claims that Blockles infringes numerous Tetris intellectual property rights, most notably copyright of the visual game displays and the Tetris trade dress.

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Tetris is probably one of the most lawsuit-prone games of all time, with multiple lawsuits around the time of its popularity. In recent years, The Tetris Company has been notably proactive in enforcing game rights against 'clones'.]

Absent from Tetris' complaint is any allegation that Blockles copied Tetris' source code. Instead, it focuses on Blockles' graphical similarities and style of gameplay.

While the "idea" of a falling-blocks puzzle game cannot be protected under copyright law, the expression of that idea can be.

Typically, there are multiple, separately-protected layers of copyright protection in video games. Copyrightable material ranges from the actual lines of source code to characters, sounds, songs, video clips, and artwork included in a game.

In addition to registering the underlying code for its game, Tetris owns multiple copyright registrations for the audiovisual displays in its games.

In order to prove copyright infringement, Tetris must show that the owners of Blockles had access to a Tetris game to be able to copy Tetris’ visual elements and that Blockles’ visual elements are substantially similar.

Unlike copyright, trade dress rights don't subsist from the moment of creation. Like trademarks, trade dress rights arise from use. Trade dress in a video game is best defined as the overall appearance of a game.

In order to establish trade dress rights in product designs, the trade dress must acquire "secondary meaning," That is, consumers have come to associate the "look and feel" of the product with a single source -- Tetris, in this case.

To prove trade dress infringement, Tetris must articulate the elements of its distinctive trade dress, show that it has acquired rights in those elements as a whole and that the overall appearance of Blockles is likely to cause confusion in consumers as to the source of the game (i.e., consumers may believe that Tetris created Blockles or granted a license to the owners of Blockles).

The elements Tetris has detailed as its distinctive trade dress are:

- "Geometric playing pieces formed by four equally-sized, delineated blocks;"
- "The long vertical rectangle playing field, which is higher than wide;"
- "The downward, lateral and rotating movements of the playing pieces;"
- "The appearance of a shadow piece at the bottom of the playing field matrix to indicate where the Tetrimino will drop;"
- "The appearance of a trailer effect after the Tetrimino during a 'hard drop' command;"
- "The display of the next Tetrimino that will fall down the matrix in a small box next to the playing field;"
- "The disappearance of any completed horizontal line;"
- "The display of a flash effect when a completed horizontal line disappears;" and
- "The subsequent consolidation of the playing pieces remaining on the playing field as a result of the downward shift into the space vacated by the disappearing line."

While one of these features alone would probably not be enough to show that consumers associate it with a single source, Tetris is hoping to prove that taken together, these elements can only point to Tetris.

Regardless of the outcome, this case illustrates an important point. Even in relatively simple video games like Tetris, there are many forms of intellectual property present.

As a developer or publisher, understanding how these rights are created and enforced allows you to potentially avoid infringing others' rights and provides insight of how best to protect your own intellectual property.

[Jed Spencer is an attorney with Ober|Kaler, a firm that frequently works with video game companies at all stages of product development.]

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

March 22, 2009

GameSetIntroduction: Jim Munroe's GDC 2009 IF Experiment

Ah yes, so with the start of Game Developers Conference 2009 just hours away, we promised that we'd reveal our guest blogger for this week's conference, and just what they'd be up to.

For those who recall, for last year's GDC, we recruited Waxy.org's Andy Baio, who reported in a a guest 'Web 2.0/geek culture/game culture crossover' observer stylee - Harmonix Vs. Jonathan Coulton, and all that good stuff.

Well, this year, our guest blogger - who will hopefully be posting daily on his GDC experiences - is Canadian author and game creator Jim Munroe, whom, as his Wikipedia page explains, is a former editor at Adbusters Magazine and a HarperCollins-published author ('Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gasmask').

Nowadays, he works on DIY interestingness under his No Media Kings outlet, and does a lot of neat things in the video game area. For example, he runs the Artsy Game Incubator project, which combines non-game artists with easy to use tools to make really neat art(sy) games.

In addition, his poignant illustrated text adventure, 'Everybody Dies', took third place at IFComp last year and picked up a number of honors, including being named by Variety and Gamasutra in game of the year countdowns, and an A review from The Onion AV Club.

Anyhow, what's he doing here? The deal is that Jim is going to write about the things that happen to him at GDC and what he finds out, and then he's going to use that as inspiration to write a text adventure with some kind of Game Developers Conference theme, heh.

(We're imagining that this week's regular posts might give him the germ of the idea, and then he'll post irregularly in April as he puts it together, and then by the end of that month, it'll be ready to play and we'll post it online. Or that's the plan. Keep checking back to see how we do!)

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

COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 3/20/08

['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.]

The 200th issue of Edge (which I write more about after the cut) arrived in my mail this week. It reminded me of all the reasons why I love Edge and would continue my subscription to it even if I weren't writing this column, but it's worth putting down an extra word or two here about their well-publicized massive 200-cover split run.

Despite what readers may think, it's actually pretty simple to do a split-cover run like this. Magazines do it all the time, occasionally producing different covers for different regions. Tips & Tricks, for example, did a Canada-only cover one month in 1998 -- their main strategy guide was for a game based off the TV show ReBoot, which was only running live up north at the time. I probably would never have been aware of this fact if it weren't for EIC Chris Bieniek himself being nice enough to give me a copy. Thanks much.

I think EGM's Super Smash Bros. Melee was the largest split-cover run in game mags until now, a record held before them by Official PlayStation Mag and their Def Jam: Fight for LA 20-cover collector's nightmare. Edge's cover selections are nothing all that special when taken individually -- basically, pieces of clip art on a simple color background -- but in terms of drumming up hype for the mag, I think the split run's already served its purpose. (You'd have to be nuts to collect them all, though, because -- assuming an even distribution of all covers and checking Edge's ABC figures and sub rates -- there are likely only 120 or so of each one being distributed.)

My favorite of the covers, despite all the nostalgia of the first 199, is still #200, the subscriber-only piece:

Edge April 2009

Cover: Many

If you're going to do a commemorative issue, this is the way to do it. There's the requisite "best 100 games to enjoy today" feature, yes, capped off by a six-page love letter addressed to Zelda: Ocarina of Time (the subject of four out of the 200 covers). But that's the only really trite, predictable thing here.

Many other features dovetail very elegantly with Issue 1, interestingly enough. There's the interview with Trip Hawkins about EA and 3DO, which was the subject of #1's main feature (already, even at the time, highly skeptical of the Interactive Multiplayer). There's four Brit-devs chatting about how games will change over the next 100 issues of Edge, following up a similar discussion the mag organized for #100. There's an interview with Yuji Naka about his work, concentrating on the mid-1990s.

There's another interview with Ted Dabney, the guy who co-engineered Atari and Pong with Nolan Bushnell but never talked to the press about it much until now. There is -- and this is my favorite -- a feature that collects quotes from the past 199 issues, including such winners as "3DO is the videogame future" and "A rejuvenated Mac games market is there for the taking" (that one's from 1998!). There's Phil Harrison and the former SCEE head discussing the history of the PlayStation, complete with all sorts of lovely concept art and controller models.

In sort, this is the first "anniversary" issue since GamePro's 200th in 2005 that I am really, really amazed at. Everyone should buy one. (Or 200.)

Nintendo Power April 2009

Cover: Pokemon Platinum

The subscriber edition cover looks pretty bland this month compared to the newsstand version. Maybe there coulda been something better done here, like a large map or a hum'rous anime screengrab or somesuch. I dunno. Just not a picture of a Pokemon with some photoshop effects applied to the background. At least the interviews in the included feature are interesting -- you never heard enough from the devs for these projects, for some reason.

A great deal has already been said about A Boy and his Blob on the net, so I won't go into how pretty this hot-sclusive preview is in the mag, but you should have a look.

Game Informer April 2009

Cover: BioShock 2

There is a poster pull-out advertisement for BioShock 2 tucked right in between the opening spread for the BioShock 2 hot-sclusive preview feature. Is this proper? That's your homework assignment for this week, gents. I'm not sure Shoe woulda allowed it in EGM, however.

The two features are ok as always (the printing is a little off in my copy of the magazine and both features have white text on colored backgrounds, making them hard to read), but the Game Infarcer april-fool section is the highlight for me, from the Yuji Naka editorial pleading for hedgehog death to the blockbuster review of Shenmue III (finally!!!).

Official Xbox Magazine April 2009 (Podcast)

Cover: Wolfenstein

Rad cover art, brah! The feature inside is ok enough, too, but the fun features that follow -- what your gamertag says about you, and some crazy 360 modding stuff -- are more entertaining.

PlayStation: The Official Magazine April 2009

Cover: 150 new games

Woohoo lots of tiny previews! The features on Riddick and Singularity are way better.

Play April 2009

Cover: Kingdom Under Fire II

The news section this month includes a piece where "cord" is repeatedly misspelled "chord." Ohhh, Play!

Game Developer March 2009

Cover: FarCry 2

Ohhh I'd never forget GD! The "dirty coding tricks" feature is actually a pretty amusing collection of geek anecdotes. I am not sure if it's online, but if it is, I am almost 75% certain that Simon will insert a link to it for me right...here! [SIMON'S NOTE: it's not online yet - soon!]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

GameSetLinks: The Queen Of Wishful Thinking

This'll be my latest set of GameSetLinks before GDC, and I'll actually be a couple of weeks behind on RSS when I get back to it next weekend, but hey, needs must as the Moscone Center rides, or whatever.

In the meantime, here's a marginally bumper link round-up that includes, among other things, a great chiptune history, 1UP's new indie blog in full effect, Charlie Brooker on the British games industry, and lots more besides.

Clunk click clack:

Journal Of Transformative Works: 'Endless loop: A brief history of chiptunes'
Completely brilliant history of chiptunes article - via Grand Text Auto.

GDC Heads Up: Prove I Was There » PixelVixen707
Some ARG-related weirdness here!

1UP's Free and Indie Gaming Blog
Sharkey joins the Parish and Barnholt niche blog dream team for a stab at an indie games blog, HURRAY.

Joystiq: Weathering the economic storm: Start-ups speak out
Nice piece by ex-Gama editor Jason Dobson on how developers are faring in the rough economy.

Charlie Brooker: If videogames are to become as popular as TV they need to exploit our humblest fantasies | Comment is free | The Guardian
'The resulting lack of mainstream coverage means that, despite being about 10,000 times more successful than the British film and TV industries combined, the British videogames industry continually balances a pathological inferiority complex with a wounded sense of pride.'

The Plush Apocalypse » Blog Archive » You got some narrative in my system. Hold on, I’ll get a paper towel.
'It’s interesting to me to think about how to build systems that encourage the player to narrativize their experience - to view their play as an exciting story that they have had, at least in part, some hand in creating.'

Roflopolis - NCSoft Europe's Xmas 2007 ARG
Wow. This is insane, and cool, but quite over the top. But COOL!

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

March 21, 2009

GDC: Independent Games @ GDC 2009 - The Round-Up

[Having prepped this information to update IGF.com, thought it might be useful to GSW readers - here's one of the reasons that updates may be a little sluggish this week, even with our still-sekrit 'special guest' blogging from GDC.]

We're all very busy preparing for this week's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, but here's all the information you'll need to know about the awards, summits and showcases taking place this week:

- The Independent Games Summit takes place on Monday and Tuesday, March 23rd-24th from 10.00am to 5.30pm, during GDC 2009 at the Moscone Center, with some of the top independent game creators talking about the art and business of making indie games.

- The IGF Mobile awards ceremony takes place on Tuesday, March 24th at GDC Mobile, from 10:45am to 11:30am, immediately following the morning keynote. (The ceremony's winners will also be highlighted at the main IGF Awards on Wednesday night.)

- Starting Wednesday, March 25th through Friday March 27th (Wed and Thur, 10am-6pm, Fri, 10am-3pm), the IGF and IGF Mobile Pavilions will be open on the show floor in the Moscone Center. All GDC attendees will be able to play the Independent Games Festival Main Competition, IGF Student Showcase and IGF Mobile finalists, and the developers will be on hand to talk and demonstrate the year's leading independent games.

- Finally, on Wednesday, March 25th, the Independent Games Festival Awards will be held in the Esplanade Room starting at 6.30pm, with thousands of developers on hand to see this year's IGF Awards given out, before the Game Developers Choice Awards take place.

Once again, Pocketwatch Games' Andy Schatz (Venture: Dinosauria) will be giving out the IGF Awards, with video skits from Mega64, introductory comments from IGF co-content directors, Flashbang Studios' Matthew Wegner and Steve Swink, and last year's Grand Prize winner, Crayon Physics' Petri Purho, giving away this year's $30,000 Seumas McNally Grand Prize.

- BONUS: other indie happenings at GDC that I'll note in this blog post include Student IGF Postmortems on Tuesday as part of the IGDA Education Summit, plus Experimental Gameplay Sessions, Jon Blow's unmissable 'extending the boundaries of games' session on Thursday 26th from 3pm-5pm (check out the speaker list!) And LOTS more, I'm sure.

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

Sound Current: 'Traversing Castlevania's Musical Timeline with Noisycroak'

[Continuing the prolific GameSetWatch-exclusive output of Jeriaska, he sits down with the folks at Noisycroak for an interview about the soundtrack for the latest in the seminal Castlevania series, fighting game Castlevania Judgment.]

Since its inception in 1986, the Castlevania series has witnessed its fair share of lasting musical creations. Joining us for a discussion of this auditory history are two members of Noisycroak, the videogame music studio responsible for original compositions and rock arrangements found on Konami's Castlevania Judgment soundtrack.

With a score directed by Hideki Sakamoto, the game features remixes from prior titles in the series for such game consoles as the 8-bit NES, Super Famicom, original Playstation, and Nintendo DS, arranged for the Nintendo Wii by composer and guitarist Yasushi Asada.

The familiar melodies are a reminder of past encounters with Simon Belmont, Maria Renard, Shanoa and Dracula. This discussion centers on an artist's personal rock music signature, an approach to the challenge of unifying selections from the long-running adventure series' musical timeline.

[Interview conducted by Jeriaska. Translation by Ryojiro Sato. This article is available in Japanese on Noisycroak via Game Design Current and in Russian on Game-OST.]

Hideki Sakamoto

GameSetWatch: Sakamoto-san, thank you for joining us for this conversation on the subject of the Castlevania Judgment soundtrack.

Hideki Sakamoto, Noisycroak Music Director: Good to have the opportunity.

GSW: Previously you have shared with English-language readers details on your compositions for Echochrome and Yakuza 2. This is our first time hearing about your supervisory role on game productions. How did it come about that Noisycroak was invited to contribute to the development of Castlevania Judgment?

Sakamoto: To start off with how we joined the Castlevania Judgment project I should mention that a certain person at Konami has been very supportive of Noisycroak since the company was founded. The offer was extended by this individual, which greatly motivated me to have it be a success.

Personally, I have always been a tremendous fan of Castlevania, so the idea of Asada-san writing original tracks and arranging familiar classics from the series brought with it some trepidation, together with a great deal of excitement.

Castlevania Judgment OST track list
Sound samples courtesy of Konamistyle

GSW: You served as a composer on the Wii exclusive sound novel "428: In a Blockaded Shibuya," which is one of few games to have received a perfect score from Famitsu Magazine. How did your responsibilities on the production of this title differ from your role on Castlevania Judgment?

Sakamoto: For "428: In a Blockaded Shibuya," I participated as a composer, while for Castlevania Judgment my role was as music director. In that sense the responsibilities were quite different. However, both as a director and as a composer a concern for maintaining the highest possible quality on each track remains the same, so these roles do share some commonalities.

To put it another way, the hurdles placed in front of me on "428" may have been more numerous, as it involved composing various styles of music. It was an eclectic mix, including everything from techno and funk to bossa nova and classical. Clearly, the genres were very diverse. By contrast, Castlevania Judgment was working with a comparatively consistent musical concept. While it was less difficult to dive right in, providing the needed variation between each track was where the difficulties lied. In that sense the challenges were of a different kind.

GSW: Whose decision was it to offer Asada-san the role of arranger on this soundtrack?

Sakamoto: In our first meeting, the formula we came up with for this project was "orchestral gothic horror meets rock." Naturally, this concept had been informed by long-running traditions of the series. Once this approach had been decided upon, it seemed completely appropriate that Yasushi Asada take on the role of composer.

Asada-san is dexterous in his treatment of genres and someone you can trust will invest tremendous effort in his work. He has a clear vision for his music. It should also not go unmentioned that he has world class competency with the guitar. Those were certainly some fitting qualifications for this project.

Yasushi Asada

GSW: Asada-san, thank you for joining us for this discussion of your music for Castlevania Judgment. How long have you been a member of Noisycroak and what originally made you decide to lend your musical training to the sound design company?

Yasushi Asada, composer on Castlevania Judgment: It was around 2005 that I began working at Noisycroak. I had been focused on making MIDI data for ringtones at my previous company, and during that interval I was writing demos and sending them out to music studios. I gradually began landing some jobs in videogames.

GSW: In terms of your background knowledge of the Castlevania series, what did you feel were important elements to bring to this game in offering a unified feel to two decades of Castlevania themes?

Asada: Overall the most important quality I could bring to these arrangements was my own performance style as a guitarist. After that, it was a matter of finding surprising new chord progressions for the original tracks. It also came down to an endeavor to get the most out of the sound equipment at my disposal at Noisycroak.

GSW: Did you consult with sound producers at Konami Digital Entertainment during the making of the game?

Asada: We got together for a meeting once all of the remixes for the game had been completed. They mentioned that the arrangements could deviate more from the source material, but beyond that I was left to my own devices.

GSW: On your staff bio listed on the Noisycroak site it says that you are a hard rock and heavy metal guitarist. How has this background helped to shape your work as a game composer?

Asada: To play the guitar well, I believe you have to pay attention to your form to bring both passion and control to your music, while electronic music allows for more leeway. Videogames often take the license to pick up cues from exotic or regional music sources, which I find to be a very attractive prospect for a composer.

GSW: For a rich history of rock music in videogames, you could hardly do better than Castlevania. Were you familiar with the game series or Konami's rock arrange albums prior to joining this project?

Asada: Certainly, I have strong memories of playing these games since the 8-bit era, when I was just a kid. I knew of the arrange albums, but I thought it would be a bad idea to listen to them while working on this project. I wanted for my personal interpretation to bring something new to the listening experience.

GSW: The Castlevania Judgment music includes arranged songs from different videogame consoles, though there is consistency in the game's musical style. What quality were you looking to achieve overall on this score?

Asada: I began thinking about the style after Sakamoto-san had met with Konami and I was assigned the job of composer. There are classical music conventions to be found in the Castlevania games, serving as threads that thematically unify the individual titles. What I sought to emphasize was the presence of this gothic horror component, one that was crossed with rock, something that had been in our minds at Noisycroak from the outset.

GSW: Compositions that originated as streaming music and as chiptunes are represented in Castlevania Judgment on tracks like "Bloody Tears" from Castlevania III and "Dracula's Castle," the theme of Alucard from Symphony of the Night. In the broadest sense, what are some of the differences of approach that were necessary in adapting these songs of different game hardware eras for the Wii title?

Asada: The audio on these versions were not created on internal synth, which allowed for more freedom in the kinds of compositional structures that could be employed and the various instruments that could be introduced in layered arrangements. That said, a lot of effort went into making sure that the familiar melodies remained recognizable on the new versions.

GSW: Maria’s Theme “Slash” will be familiar to anyone who has played the remake of Rondo of Blood for the PSP. Were you interested in conveying aspects of the character, such as her youth, through this theme?

Asada: Maria is very energetic and innocent, so I was looking for that quality in arranging the music theme. When I heard the original version, it somehow struck me as having a melancholic quality, despite its Latin rhythm. I felt that instruments like a nylon string guitar and accordion would help match the intensity of the character.

GSW: Another of the songs that many players are likely to recognize is "An Empy Tome," Shanoa’s theme from Order of Ecclesia, whose soundtrack is by Michiru Yamane and Yasushi Ichihashi. Shanoa is a very stoic character, but her theme is full of energy. How did you go about adapting this song from the version that appears in the Nintendo DS title?

Asada: On this track I was using orchestral instrumentation and was conscious of preserving the integrity of the composition. Including a rock-style drum and guitar combination lent the track some force, but fundamentally my concern was with carefully handling the original melody.

GSW: "Dance of Illusions" is Dracula's theme, which appeared in the score to Symphony of the Night. Seeing as this is the main antagonist in the game, and the only character to tie the entire series together, was it important to you to have this particular track stand out from the rest?

Asada: I was not paying special attention to this one song, but I wanted to give it a different quality from the original arrangement. The chords are a bit different. Incidentally, the latter half of the track is a nod to the Castlevania song "Black Night."

GSW: Castlevania Judgment places a strong emphasis on fighting, but there are also some subtler songs featuring wind instruments, harps and gentle percussion. Was it considered important to offer the player a breather amidst the battles?

Asada: Yes, though in addition to lending a cool and pleasant sounding atmosphere, on these peaceful songs I was looking to include some suspenseful and ominous qualities.

GSW: Your original song "Darkness of Fear" has a novel quality to it, while establishing itself thematically within the world of Castlevania. Can you tell us what concepts informed the sound of this song?

Asada: Thank you for saying so. The sound directors at Konami responded favorably toward this track. It was important here to stress originality, so it diverges thematically from prior Castlevania music. If asked to describe the category of music, I would have to call it neo-classical styled heavy metal. From listening to the song, perhaps you can also tell that I enjoy film soundtracks.

GSW: Most people who play Castlevania Judgment are likely familiar with the character designer Takeshi Obata through his illustrations for Death Note. In creating the soundtrack for the game, did the design of the characters offer you an indication of what style to employ on the various stage themes?

Asada: At the outset, when I was given the documents outlining these various characters, I was taken with the astonishing illustrations. It was another source of enjoyment in working on the project. Of course the artwork was able to capture Dracula's world of uncanny dread, but within that context the illustrator was providing a cool surface and beauty to the characters that I wished to reflect in my music choices. Even on tracks that foreground the electric guitar there are touches of woodwind instruments and the harp. These are ideas where the illustrations served as a valued reference. They compelled me to express feelings that were correspondingly intense and refined.

[Images courtesy of Konami. Photos by Noisycroak. Castlevania Judgment Original Soundtrack can be imported from Amazon.co.jp.]

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

Best Of Indie Games: Inside Pandora's Box, Indie Games

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

The delights in this edition include three roguelike picks from the recent 7DRL Challenge, a new seven-day project from up-and-coming developer Alex Vostrov, a collection of minigames in the style of WarioWare, a unique puzzle platformer, a strategic arcade game by the creator of the Advance Wars-styled Battalion, and a puzzler based on the idea plucking leaves from trees.

Game Pick: 'Pandora's Gearbox' (IndieBird, freeware)
"A physics-based puzzle game in which players must work their way through darkness, finding paths and moving machinery. At your disposal is a small flying robot which can shine a light through the pitch-blackness, allowing you to see the surrounding walls. Using this source, a ball must be guided through a maze and into the drop zone. It's interesting to see just how much the lack of light is a factor in these puzzles - simple switch flipping, bridge building solutions become so much harder when you can't see what you're doing."

Game Pick: 'Tiny Trials' (TinyMania, browser)
"A fast-paced minigame bonanza in which lots of small games are thrown at you, and the speed at which they are each completed will determine how good a score is achieved. At the end of each minigame you're given a star rating and a score and clearly the better you do, the higher you'll fly on the scoreboard. It's all wonderfully fun and definitely worthy of your free time."

Game Pick: 'TetRLs' (John L. Greco, freeware)
"TetRLs is a roguelike take on Alexey Pajitnov's classic puzzler, where players assume the role a prisoner forced to participate in a series of experiments inside the laboratory of a mad Soviet scientist. A new block is dropped at the starting point in each room with the press of a button, and it is up to you to shuffle it downwards and arrange them so that there is enough space to place the next one."

Game Pick: 'Fruits of the Forest' (Ido Yehieli, browser)
"Created for the 2009 edition of the friendly 7DRL challenge, Fruits of the Forest is a simple roguelike based on the idea of foraging food for the villagers in your town. Purple berries have to be collected and passed on to hungry villagers to feed them, but watch out for the bandits who are roaming around the forest in search of wanderers to murder and loot."

Game Pick: 'The Favored' (Joseph Larson, freeware)
"A loose remake of robotfindskitten with some changes to the original rules, created by Joseph for the 7 Day Roguelike Challenge. The game involves collecting rabbits by walking over them, then depositing enough of the creatures at the exit point so that the passage to the next level can be opened. Of course, there's an element of danger as one rabbit has the ability to strike you down if you accidentally attempt to catch the all-powerful creature."

Game Pick: 'Bloody Fun Day' (Urbansquall, browser)
"A strategic arcade game where players control the Reaper as he ploughs his way through little critters. Everytime Death sticks his scythe into one of the creatures, he gains points but loses health. Destroying red creatures will bring his life back up. It's all about bagging as many points as possible before you run out of life."

Game Pick: 'Leaf Blight' (Terrapin Games, browser)
"A puzzle game where picking dead leaves off trees is the order of the day. Gameplay starts off fairly easy with only a couple of different colours to begin with, but the puzzles start to become more tricky as certain sets of leaves need to be removed at specific points to stop bad ones spreading. It's a nice little thought-shaker with some great ideas, there's plenty of levels to plough your way through, plus a level editor is included so you can make your own tree puzzles."

Game Pick: 'Transmover' (Polygon Gmen, browser)
"A platform puzzler based around the classic 'grab the key, take it to the door' scenario. Our little stickman can walk over obstacles which are just one block in height or depth, but to get past bigger problem areas, the zapper must be used. When the zapper is fired at one of the moveable blocks in a level, our hero and said zapped block swap places."

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

March 20, 2009

GameSetPlaying: Mister Raroo's Moments

Game Time With Mister Raroo logo [Mister Raroo's been a very busy man in the past few months, which means his regular GSW column has been a little on the sparse side a of late. However, anyone looking for a Raroo fix should note that he has been quietly chronicling the games he's been playing on his relatively new blog, Moments. Here's some highlights...]

Mass Effect (Xbox 360)
As my party and I approach the Presidium on our way to the Wards, we encounter an argument between a Turian officer and a Hanar evangelist. The poor officer seems at wit’s end trying to dissuade the Hanar from continuing to preach without a license. Even though I’ve got more important business to take care of, I decide to step in and see if there’s anything I can do to help.

The Hanar claims to have no money but feels it’s wrong to have to pay to spread its message. The Turian, on the other hand, is just trying to do his job and obviously would rather not be dealing with such a trivial issue. After hearing both parties out I decide to pay for the Hanar’s permit and everyone is happy. I linger for just a moment to take in the strangeness of the jellyfish-like Hanar’s appearance before continuing on my way.

Lumines Supernova (Playstation 3)
It’s nearing 10:00 and my son is sleeping on my chest, breathing deeply. My wife sits near me, knitting and chatting with me about nothing in particular. My eyes are focused on the television, watching Lumines Supernova on the screen. Even though I’m playing the game, my mind isn’t paying attention.

Instead, I’m content to enjoy a quiet, relaxing Saturday evening with my family. I notice the blocks rise and fall, the music periodically changes, and the visuals shift from one scene to the next, but the game seems more like something far off in the distance. Happily, so do the worries and responsibilites that usually consume my thoughts.

Ridge Racer 6 (XBox 360)
I make the first turn on my favorite course, Airport Lap. It’s sunset and the sky is adorned with a beautiful orange hue. My car drifts through the curve and I power ahead. “Whoa-ho-ho! Nitrous ready!” The game’s announcer is extremely excited. “Watch out! Someone just fired off some nitrous!” A rival car speeds up behind me from the left. It’s time to take action.

I use a can of nitrous and regain the lead. “Woo hoo! Nitrous!” Turn after turn, drift after drift, “nitrous” is the only thing the announcer is concerned with. As the race progresses, planes come and go all around the course, but I’m too focused to take much notice. I speed past the finish line with the help of my last bit of “crazy” nitrous. “Ha! Ha! You did it! First place!” How I love that nitrous-obsessed announcer.

Tetris DS (Nintendo DS)
My wife and son are in bed next to me, fast asleep. The sound patterns of their snoring intertwine and create an odd but calming unison of white noise. Lying on my back with my head propped up on a couple pillows, I’m holding my Nintendo DS overhead. I’ve got the system tilted away from the sleepers so as not to disturb them with the light of the screens. Too lazy to put in headphones, I have the volume all but turned off, with only a faint sound effect or hint of music escaping the DS’s speakers from time to time.

As I arrange the falling blocks to clear lines, I smile at Mario adorably running across the top screen. My eyes are getting heavy and harder to keep open, but I want to play for just a few minutes more. I know that once I turn off the DS and close my eyes, I’ll be fast asleep, speeding towards the sound of my alarm clock barking at me to get out of bed and get ready for work.

Trax (Game Boy)
At first glance, my tank doesn’t seem like it has what it takes to topple the enemy. In fact, it’s downright cute. But take another look and you’ll see that not only can it move in any direction in a flash, but it’s easily upgradable with formidable firepower. In other words, my tank may be small but it is definitely mighty. That’s a good thing, too, as I’ve got to charge through plenty of hostile territory before the day is done.

I’m being blasted at from every direction, but my vehicle is deft enough to dodge the attacks and lob plenty of explosives back at ‘em. Still, it seems amazing that one vehicle can topple such a massive army. Then again, with enemies including a dragon-headed tank wearing boxing gloves, a gigantic mech that keeps tripping over its own two feet, and a lunatic metal clown whose main weapon appears to be its long tongue, perhaps my enemy is more comedic than fierce after all.

Opoona (Wii)
Opoona the Ranger has been assigned to patrol a nearby mine in order to keep it free from monsters. However, he’s standing behind a counter at Eat Everyday taking orders. The current customer has asked for popcorn, minestrone soup, and eel sushi, and Opoona is scrambling to fulfil the order quickly and accurately.

Should he impress the manager, not only will Opoona earn his pay, but he may improve the chances of getting an assignment at the Blue Desert Hotel, where there is a man who can help him get his Miner’s License. As a Ranger assigned to patrol the mine, a Miner’s License would come in very handy. But for now Opoona needs to focus and make sure not to goof up any of the customers’ orders.

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

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

In-Depth: Successful Indies Discuss Routes To Success

[We had some neat coverage of the recent SXSW Interactive show in Austin, thanks to local journo N. Evan Van Zelfden, and here's his report on an indie summit starring a lot of the obvious, but obviously cool indie types.]

Games like Alien Hominid, Flower, and World of Goo all have a certain level of name-recognition -- so it's no surprise that the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Texas featured a panel on not just indie games, but successful indie game developers.

When first asked how to define being indie, Kellee Santiago, president of thatgamecompany (flOw, Flower) says, "I do think that’s an important distinction to make in some circles." Because of the business relationship with Sony, they’re not financially independent. Santiago sees indie as process, or content, or both.

For John Baez, producer at The Behemoth (Alien Hominid, Castle Crashers), it’s the company itself that defines it, but adds that many companies calling themselves indie actually have two-hundred employees. "It’s really all about the mindset," he says.

And Ron Carmel, half of the team at World of Goo developer 2D Boy, remarks: "I don’t know how to define indie per se, but I do notice a lot of things that indies have in common."

Small size is one factor, he says. "Another thing is an emphasis on design over finance." Larger companies have a top-down direction, looking at when a game needs to ship, and therefore what features to invest in. With an indie studio, says Carmel, there’s the need to create a good game, which results in the typically-indie question: "When’s the latest we can ship?"

Santiago adds she believes it’s detrimental to the sector for people to believe that indie development is about not having cash flow.

"Early on," says Baez, "We knew we weren’t going to make money. We needed to find alternate revenue streams." The Behemoth did that with selling the game rights for other territories, and through toys and t-shirts.

"Discovering alternate revenue streams was the most exciting," recalls Baez. "None of us has a business background. I was an artist."

Santiago agrees, saying that ownership is an incredibly powerful thing. "Even when things are crap, we like, at least own it." She says she’s learned more in the first year than she ever would have at an established company. When something goes wrong, "We can’t blame a boss -– we have to fix it."

Carmel adds that it’s good to "keep things balanced, despite a sense of ownership."

Meanwhile, Baez tells the story of mortgaging his house –- twice -– during his company’s early days, and only having $500 left in the bank, and how being indie is a risk. "That’s why it’s important to work on quality games that you want to see through to the end."

He notes that it gets "really tough, especially when you have kids and family." The only thing that sees you through, believes Baez, is a good game that you’re driven to complete.

Santiago also warns: "Someone once told me, 'Don’t start a game studio if you like making games – start a game studio if you like running a business.’"

Having defined indie, the panel moved on to broader topics. Santiago, whose games are available through the PlayStation Network, talks about digital distribution taking hold soon. "I remember when people thought you wouldn’t watch content on YouTube. And a year later, they completely flipped around."

Baez warns that the business of indie games will change. Currently, major publishers are ignoring the sector, but: "Once real money starts being made, we can be marginalized. It’s a real danger."

"2008 was a great year for indie games," adds Carmel. But he adds his opinion that publishers will look at the market. "It’s already happening at EA," he notes, detailing the indie team within Electronic Arts at work on Henry Hatsworth.

Carmel wishes them the best, and the panel speculates that a successful indie team inside a publisher will be free to leave at any time, replicating their success on their own, outside the walls of a publisher –- but there’s a certain uneasiness about this new development in a clearly passionate corner of game development.

Turning to the subject of the recession, Baez says, "Downloadable games are a good niche to be in." Santiago looks at it from the console standpoint, saying that, for a platform holder like Sony to attract people, "you still need to be funding content for your platform."

Santiago expressed her interest in pursuing the Facebook platform, saying the company had looked at it, but would be exclusive to Sony’s PlayStation Network platform for the next several years.

Part of a successful business is knowing what you’re good at, and what you’re not good at. When asked about indie game developers being represented by agents, Baez says agents are to be avoided.

When an audience member specifically asked about Creative Artists Agency, whose game program is headed by former Xbox mastermind Seamus Blackley, Santiago said that her company was repped by CAA.

Baez advised against such representation, saying The Behemoth had relationships with Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony. And anyone who’s able to stand in front of a crowd, articulate a question, and is dressed normally meets the publisher criteria for presentability.

Baez concludes with the story of meeting with a development relations manager from a console maker, who remarked: "I don’t’ know why anyone would use an agent, because what we’re looking for is really good work."

[Photo Credit: Ryan Chahanovich]

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

GameSetLinks: Casual, Hard, Magical, Wasteland

[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.]

Catching up with some notable GameSetLinks from earlier in the week, here's the results of our RSS machinations, headed up by Matthew Wasteland discussing lyrically why games "help us postpone the end of childhood" over and over.

Also in here - Hardcasual continues to get funny, games and music videos compared, Clive Thompson on Peggle's goodness for both the casual and hardcore, and plenty more.

Chuckle brothers:

The Madeleine in Eight Bits (Magical Wasteland)
Just beautiful writing from the Game Developer magazine columnist and mysterious auteur.

Fan Petitions For More Innovative Games He Won’t Buy « Hardcasual
HC is really hitting the spot on parody, recently - nice idea to relaunch with that bent.

Experience Points: Video Games Should Watch the Watchmen
Kinda an unholy combo of Watchmen and top list, but I liked it!

Daniel Primed:: Gaming Analysis, Critique and Culture » Likening Games to Music (Videos)
A nice idea, and something I've meant to get round to - Mr. Primed does a good job here.

Vorpal Bunny Ranch: You're brilliant, gorgeous, and ampersand after ampersand
An interesting discussion of romance in games.

Wired.com: 'Getting Lucky: Hard-Core Gamers Penetrate Peggle's Physics'
'Bejeweled, PopCap's single biggest hit with casual gamers, is in reality far more luck-based than Peggle.'

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

March 19, 2009

Gamasutra Expert Blogs: DS Game Insights, Engine Specifics

In our weekly Best of Expert Blogs column, we showcase notable pieces of writing from members of the game development community who maintain Expert Blogs over on Gamasutra.

Member Blogs -- also highlighted weekly -- can be maintained by any registered Gamasutra user, while the invitation-only Expert Blogs are written by development professionals with a wealth of experience to share.

We hope that both sections can provide useful and interesting viewpoints on our industry. For more information about the blogs, check out the official posting guidelines.

This week's standout expert blogs are as follows:

Five Years, 20 Lessons, 20 DS Games
(J.C. Connors)

Everyone making a Nintendo DS game will want to read this excellent compilation of mini-postmortems from Griptonite Games studio head J.C. Connors -- and, for that matter, so will anyone making a game for pretty much any platform, because nearly all of the lessons learned can be applied to development at any scale. (Griptonite's Spore Creatures is pictured above.)

The Engine Survey: Technology Results
(Mark DeLoura)

Continuing the release of his impressive and exhaustive data about developers and game engine solutions, Mark DeLoura delves into concerns about licensed engines, important engine capabilities, crucial tools, and why developers say they would rather use an in-house engine if they could -- another must-read.

Cross-Platform Development For A Single Platform Game?
(Glenn Corpes)

In his ongoing progress blog about his upcoming iPhone game, longtime programmer Glenn Corpes, a Bullfrog veteran, thinks back to his time developing Populous to explain why simultaneous multiplatform development can pay dividends in knowledge beyond simply reaching a broader audience.

How To Replace Levels In MMOs, Part 2
(Brian "Psychochild" Green)

In his previous Gamasutra Blogs post, MMO consultant and Meridian 59 lead engineer Brian Green proposed eliminating character levels from MMOs -- and in his followup post, he delves into what's wrong (and right) with levels, and points to some design routes that have mitigated their negatives.

Class Acts: Getting Girl Scouts in the Game!
(Stephen Jacobs)

Compared to their male counterparts, young girls tend to be less often courted by the game industry. Here, RIT associate professor (and father of a Girl Scout) Stephen Jacobs recounts a Girl Scout badge program he designed to expose girls to game mechanics and design, with the help of some of his female students as well as some notable game industry women.

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

Interview: Fallout Co-Creator Anderson Goes inXile

[A treat for you RPG and Fallout fans - after being named creative director at inXile, Fallout co-creator Jason Anderson spoke to sister site Gamasutra's Chris Remo about his career history and plans -- and Fallout 3 impressions. Neat.]

In 1997, Interplay shipped the post-apocalyptic RPG Fallout, which received considerable acclaim and established a reputation that only increased over the years.

Now, inXile Entertainment -- headed up by Interplay founder Brian Fargo -- has hired Jason Anderson, one of Fallout's original leads, to serve as creative director on a new game to "push the boundaries of RPGs."

Before the completion of Fallout 2, Anderson and fellow leads Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky departed to form Troika Games, which existed from 1998 to 2005 and developed the ambitious Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magic Obscura and Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines.

More recently, Anderson was briefly reunited back at Interplay with another Fallout designer, Chris Taylor, on the company's MMO codenamed Project V13 -- widely speculated to be the Fallout MMO to which Interplay retained rights after selling the franchise to Bethesda Softworks.

Following the inXile announcement, we sat down with Anderson for a chat about his plans on the new team, what he learned at Troika, and what he thinks about Bethesda's recent Fallout 3:

What can you say about the project you're making? You're pitched as an original Fallout designer; is the game in line with Fallout at all?

Jason Anderson: I basically bring all my experience from Troika and all the games we did there were RPGs. When they tapped me and asked if I'd be interested in coming over, it was a perfect fit. Working on an RPG is the thing I really know how to do. Before that, I was involved with the project V13 at Interplay. But definitely, we're going to be doing an RPG. I don't know to say whether it would be in line with Fallout.

Troika's games developed a dedicated following and a good deal of acclaim, but were often plagued by technical issues that arguably led to the company's closure. Are there lessons learned you'll be applying to inXile?

JA: Well, just on a personal note for me, one of the biggest things, especially being part of a smaller development house, is that you wear so many hats. In the early game development days, that worked really well. Even on Fallout, I was responsible for many things other than art, which is what I was originally hired for.

But games became much more demanding with the amount of content and their sophistication. That was kind of a growing pain, and Troika was right in the middle of that. For example, I took on a lot of different responsibilities -- art, design, running the company -- and I think in the end that was detrimental to the company.

After Troika, I actually took a short break from the game industry.

That was in real estate, right?

JA: Yes, sort of. My wife was going to take a shot at real estate. We actually ended up putting our money into houses in Arizona, which is probably the worst thing anyone could ever do.

But going back to Troika, I really loved the creative process of making games, and that's just where I wanted to be.

Heading up Troika for many years, my art skills kind of fell behind, even though I tried to stay current. So my strongest thing going for me is that I have a really good sense of design. When I got back into the industry, it was very clear that that was the position I wanted to be in -- to oversee the creative side of development.

How do you see that role?

JA: To define creative director, at least for me, the creative director keeps the focus on what's the game is to be, facilitates the creative process, and helps everyone's ideas all come together. The creative director hones in everyoene's creative visision into one vision. But I'm not coming in as the be-all, end-all, "my word is law" kind of thing; it's really a facilitator's position.

By joining up with inXile, you're in a way returning to working with Brian Fargo, who founded Interplay. Did you actually work with him much during the Fallout days?

JA: He was actually more a step away from me. When the Fallout team had interactions with Brian, it was usually through Tim [Cain]. I never really had personal interaction with him.

Presumably you are working more directly with him now, given the setup.

JA: Definitely. When I came on, I spoke with Brian a number of times. It was a very hard decision to leave Project V13. I loved the project, and we spent so much time on it, and it was not an easy decision to make. But in talking with Brian, it made it a lot easier. We really clicked, and saw eye to eye on what we wanted to see happen to RPGs.

In what sense do you see eye to eye?

JA: Well, RPGs have been kind of in a lull as of late. But there have been a handful of good ones out there -- especially with Bethesda successfully rebooting the Fallout franchise, and generally showing that RPGs are viable forms of entertainment.

I want to get back to RPGs that are very story-driven and character-driven. Personally, I've never gotten out of [single-player] RPGs. There was the short stint working on the MMO for the past year, but that was pretty much it. I've always been about RPGs and RPG design. Even before Interplay I was a big RPG player.

Have you displaced inXile creative director Michael Kaufman, or is he taking a different role?

JA: No, no. I'm going to be a separate team. He's still there.

Is there anything you can say about the design direction for the new game?

JA: We're still very much in the early stages.

Going back to Project V13, you worked worked with Chris Taylor, another Fallout co-creator, right?

JA: Yes.

Did you leave that project because of internal factors, or simply because inXile seemed better for you?

JA: The future of the -- well, I don't know if I want to go there. [inXile] was a more stable opportunity. I wasn't even in the process of looking when this opportunity arose. It was a perfect fit.

So have you played Fallout 3?

JA: Yeah.

What did you think?

JA: I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. In some ways I really felt they captured the Fallout feeling, and other things were somewhat different than what I expected from a Fallout game. That being said, I definitely understand that these things take on a life of their own. All in all, I felt it was really good. I liked it.

Did you play the other pre-Bethesda Fallout followups, Fallout Tactics and Brotherhood of Steel?

JA: A little bit. Well, not Brotherhood of Steel. I could tell from the screenshots I didn't want to play that one.

So it sounds like you felt Bethesda was a better caretaker than some.

JA. Oh yeah.

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

IGF, Direct2Drive Announces $10,000 D2D Vision Award Finalists

[As well as the >$50,000 we're giving out at the IGF Awards next week, download partner Direct2Drive are kicking in another $10,000 for their own special award, which is nice of them.

Oh, and check out their indie games section if you haven't seen it, we helped A&R games for it and it has pretty decent stuff in it.]

IGN's digital retail store Direct2Drive announced the four finalists for the Independent Games Festival's D2D Vision Award, which seeks to celebrate independent developers exemplifying innovation in design coupled with excellence in game-play.

The sponsored award will be presented at 2009’s Independent Games Festival on March 25 in conjunction with the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco.

The team behind the winning title will take home a $10,000 cash prize and will be recognized during the 11th Annual IGF Awards show taking place in conjunction with the Game Developers Choice Awards at GDC.

The four finalists include Data Realms' Cortex Command, an offbeat real-time strategy 2D title featuring fully destructible terrain; Hemisphere Games' Osmos, an elegant "orbital osmosis simulator"; Rudolf Kremers and Alex May's Dyson, an RTS/colonization game where players try to gain control of an entire asteroid belt; and Pieces Interactive's Puzzlegeddon, a "puzzle brawler" with action and strategy elements.

IGN insiders voted on the winning game based on five criteria: game design, innovation, visual arts, audio and overall enjoyment. Three of the four finalists have already signed agreements to make their respective games available to consumers through Direct2Drive.

"Indie games and the developers that are creating them are incredibly important to the future of the games industry, and with that in mind, we can’t wait to reward one of these deserving developers with a $10,000 prize to help them continue to build new and unique games," says IGN Entertainment Digital Content VP Sutton Trout.

"Our independent games channel on Direct2Drive, partnership with the IGF, and D2D’s Vision Award are testament to our commitment and support of the independent game development community," he continues "We expect these games to continue to become increasingly popular with gamers and thus we will continue to promote indie games via Direct2Drive."

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

Interview: Metalocalypse Animators Birth Titmouse Games Division

[We're running just a prodigally large amount of interviews on big sister site Gamasutra right now, and here's a fun little one I conducted with the Metalocalypse animators at Titmouse, who are teaming up with an ex-Neversoft dev to do their own neat-looking console game.]

Los Angeles-based Titmouse, the animation studio "creative force" behind Adult Swim's Metalocalypse animated series, has started its own game studio, Titmouse Games -- and Gamasutra had a chance to talk to Titmouse Games creative director Aaron Habibipour about its plans.

Animators at the studio have worked on series like Avatar: The Last Airbender, Afro Samurai and the Amazing Screw on Head, but this won't be their first outing into the game world. Titmouse also created the cartoon rock cinematics for the last four Guitar Hero series, and most recently finished work on the upcoming Guitar Hero: Metallica.

As Neversoft veteran Habibipour is announced as the new division's creative director, Titmouse also announces its first project: Seven Haunted Seas, an original console action-RPG.

Described as "...a mixture of steam-punk and graphic novel-like artwork", the game is a dark comedic tale about an undead pirate, Scurvy Pete, that "returns from hell to find a dark, post-apocalyptic future where he must right all his wrongs to restore the world."

We sat down with Habibipour to discuss the forming of the division, their first title, and whether a Metalocalypse game might possibly be on the horizon:

Why set up a new studio division now? What opportunities for smaller developers really excited you?

Aaron: Well, for me, It was time to break out on my own. As much as Guitar Hero is a great property to be attached to, I was looking for something quite different.

I left before the holidays to take some time and figure out a plan of attack, and the Titmouse guys told me that they had been looking to work on games for a while. it seemed like fate honestly, to combine what we were wanting to do and make something that had a much stronger chance of coming together.

The best thing about being a small developer is the ability to stretch your imagination and really try new things, and not have some massive corporation hanging over your every move -- and telling you what can and can’t be done, because you have demographic A and retailer B to appease.

Let’s make something that we will love to play, and hope that others will enjoy it as well.

Is your new RPG title planned for retail or digital download release?

Aaron: Seven Haunted Seas is going to be a console game, so we’re working within the confines of how those games are currently distributed. If there was a way to get the whole game to folks via the Internet, I’m all for it. If we can only do retail, then I would love to look into ways of getting more content to players after a retail purchase.

The scope of the game will totally support having new content piped into it, and that’s one thing that I’m really excited about with where games are going. Episodic content.

Given the company's background in rockin' Cartoon Network series and animations for the Guitar Hero series, are you at all tempted to try a music game?

Aaron: Music games are fun. I like to play Rock Band and I like to play Guitar Hero. And while I wouldn’t rule out an opportunity to make a rhythm game or something with rhythm elements, I just don’t see us making a music game.

I believe that game mechanics need to serve the theme of the game. If some fantastic idea comes along and a rhythm/music based mechanic is what best suits the situation, then I’m all for it. But there’s already a Rock Band and there’s already a Guitar Hero. It would have to be one hell of an idea.

Do you think you have advantages in terms of art direction compared to game studios, having worked on complex animation projects?

Aaron: Having worked at it from both ends, I would have to say there is a lot that the game industry still needs to learn about story telling and presentation. It’s still very much a fledgling medium that needs people breaking new ground to truly come into its own.

The great thing is we’ve already heard a lot of interest from non-game oriented writers/creators that want to work with us in an interactive format to create something altogether different, and that’s what we would love to do.

I’m completely stoked that we’re one of the first hybrid studios out there that’s going to be doing both – and I'm tremendously excited about cross-media immersion.

Any chance of a Metalocalypse game? Who owns the rights?

Aaron: Brendan [Small, co-creator] is down for it, Chris [Prynoski, Titmouse CEO] is down for it, and I’m certainly down for it. Beyond that there’s not much we can really talk about here at this time.

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

Best Of GamerBytes: Astro Tripping Beats

[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 on GamerBytes, it was all about the special features. We chat with Steve Fawkner on Galactrix, stroke our beards about the future of the Xbox Live Marketplace, and become armchair analysts with the XBLA and PSN sales ranks. We would track WiiWare numbers, and others certainly try, but without completely certain data, it's a difficult task.

This week on XBLA we've got Connect 4, Battleship, Scrabble and Yahtzee now available for 800 MSP each. The PlayStation Network got Astro Tripper, Buzz Jr. and Red Baron Arcade, while they will also be getting Wheel of Fortune this week. European Wii owners can now grab Jungle Speed and Family Table Tennis, while North America now now enjoy BIT.TRIP BEAT.

Here are the top stories for the week:

GamerBytes Specials

GamerBytes Interview: Traveling The Galactrix With Steve Fawkner
We speak with the head of Infinite Interactive about their upcoming Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network puzzle action game, and what they'll be working on in the future.

GamerBytes Analysis: Top 10 XBLA Games For February 2009
We grab the official lists of Xbox Live Arcade sales and see what's hot and what's not.

GamerBytes Analysis: Top 10 PSN Games For February 2009
The 10 best selling games of February were released through Sony's Pulse program, and we dig into it to see how the latest releases are faring.

GamerBytes Analysis: NCAA Basketball MME - The Beginning Of Something More?
NCAA Basketball breaks all the rules, and doesn't even consider itself to be an Arcade title. Is this a look at the future of Xbox Live Arcade and the Xbox Live Marketplace?

Xbox Live Arcade

Hasbro Family Game Night - Connect 4, Scrabble, Yahtzee, Battleship Now Available On XBLA
EA's testing the waters with 4 new releases this week.

XNA Roundup Episode #9 - SLAM
SLAM is Arkanoid in a circular arena - check out the latest episode of XNA Roundup for the latest information about it.

The Behemoth Game #3 Teaser Trailer Released
The Behemoth go back to straight-up block based platforming - but with coop and multiplayer modes!

PlayStation Network

NA PSN Store Update - Red Baron Arcade, Buzz Junior, Astro Tripper
Surprise release of Red Baron Arcade this week, as well as PomPom Games' latest space shooter, and their first for PSN.

EU PSN Store Update - Even More Burnout DLC
You want a car? I can get you a car. I can get you a car by three o'clock.

Creat Working On Wakeboarding, Kart Game For PSN
Creators of Magic Ball and Cuboid move onto bigger and brighter games for their next PSN releases.

WiiWare

EU WiiWare Update - Jungle Speed, Family Table Tennis
Europe gets to pass the totem and hit some balls with bats this week.

NA WiiWare Update: BIT.TRIP BEAT
It's Pong meets Rez in this bit trippy game.

Scale Walls With Rock N’ Roll Climber
The ESRB spies us a new WiiWare title about the sport of Rock Climbing.

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

March 18, 2009

GameSetInterview: 'The Maw's Deleted Scenes - A Twisted Pixel Approach to DLC'

[Continuing a series of exclusive interviews for GameSetWatch from Jeriaska, this one strays out of his normal audio-specific territory, and into downloadable content for the IGF-nominated indie studio Twisted Pixel, which is trying DLC for its digitally distributed game, with some interesting results.]

Game company Twisted Pixel captured the attention of Xbox 360 owners when their action adventure title The Maw was chosen for the 2008 Audience Choice Award at the Penny Arcade Expo. The Xbox Live Arcade game has since been named a finalist of this year's Independent Games Festival.

Following up on previous coverage, this interview with Twisted Pixel CEO Michael Wilford focuses on the approach to recently released and upcoming downloadable content, which will debut on both XBLA and PC, the latter thanks to the Steam service. In addition we hear about some of the core audio design concepts, including the minimalistic yet effective use of voice acting and the score by composer Winifred Phillips.

The discussion centers on how the game company has gone about building on the framework of The Maw's core experience by introducing the movie metaphor of "deleted scenes" for DLC.

GSW: To start off, it's been a couple months since the CTO of Twisted Pixel mentioned in a GamerBytes interview that the company moved its headquarters to Austin at the end of the year. Has the change of location in any way influenced the downloadable content for The Maw?

Michael Wilford, CEO of Twisted Pixel: It's true, we relocated our entire operation from Madison, Indiana to Austin, Texas. We needed to make the move in order to tap into a broader talent pool for a new project we were starting up. Plus we like sweating. Aside from taking a week off to drive to Texas and get all set up, the DLC development hasn't been affected. We planned the move pretty well, so we minimized the downtime a great deal. We'll see if we can come up with a way to incorporate BBQ and spurs into the new levels.

GSW: Can you tell us how with co-founder Josh Bear the three of you have managed to reinforce each others' strengths and build a successful game company?

Wilford: Every now and then you meet someone that is so good at what they do that you can build an entire company around them. Twisted Pixel is lucky to have two such people. Frank Wilson is our CTO and there is no technical problem he can't solve. And he usually does it in a day.

Josh Bear is our CCO and I have yet to meet anyone that knows as much about games and movies as he does. But most importantly, just like any good script writer, Josh is really good at designing around the resources he has available at the time. He knows where to spend a lot of time for the big moments and where to conserve. If you met Josh you'd know how he's an avalanche of energy, personality and ideas.

As for me, I stepped into the business role to keep money coming in so everyone can do what they do best. As a generalist, I get to throw in my design or art ideas into the mix and occasionally toss in a few lines of code into the engine. Together, I think we have the three major bases covered: technical, creative, and business. It works really well for us.

GSW: At what point did Twisted Pixel commit to creating downloadable content for the game?

Wilford: When you pitch a concept to Microsoft you have to tell them your plans for downloadable content up front. Being that this was our first game, we didn't plan on going too crazy with our DLC plans, like turning the whole game into a zombie game or something. Doing new levels seemed like a pretty good way to go, so that's what we told Microsoft. Since we could add three new achievements, we figured we would start with three DLC levels and if people wanted more we could always add more later.

To answer your question, we knew we were going to do downloadable levels before we even started the main game, but we didn't work on them in any way until after the main game was wrapped. The main game's development wasn't affected at all by our plans for DLC. Once the game was out of our hands, we went back to the drawing board to design everything from scratch, but we obviously had a lot of half-finished pieces on the cutting room floor that we could leverage.

GSW: What is meant by dubbing the new levels "deleted scenes?"

Wilford: Good question. This seems to have caused some of confusion amongst fans. Since Maw starts out as a basketball-sized blob and grows to be planet-sized by the end of the game, we had to be creative about how the new levels fit into the continuity. If you finished the game, then you know that we couldn't just tack on three more levels to the end. So we decided to interject them into the main game's storyline.

Once we did that, it seemed natural to call them "deleted scenes" like you'd find on a special edition DVD or something. We thought it would be cool, but I think some people took it to mean that we intentionally stripped out levels that were 100% complete only to sell them as DLC, which is not the case.

GSW: What do you feel are some of the potential risks that attend taking a fully-developed story, one that people already associate with the game experience, and then adding additional content through downloads?

Wilford: The biggest risk that caught us off guard is the public perception that you're trying to rip them off. DLC is an experiment for us since we never tried it before. It's always a financial risk to do something when you don't know how well it's going to do or how well it's going to be perceived, but we decided that we would give it a try so that we could learn about it. At this point, I think the argument could be made that DLC just has so much negative stigma attached to it that it's not even worth attempting. There are obviously examples of successful DLC, but they seem to be far and few between.

GSW: Now that the first new scene "Brute Force" is online, what direction can we expect for the as of yet unrevealed stages?

Wilford: Like "Brute Force" the other new levels will be larger than the levels in the main game. The next level "River Redirect" will offer what a lot of people seem to be looking for, which is a challenging level that requires using more than one of Maw's powers in order to solve the puzzles. The final level "Speeder Lane" will offer a completely new gameplay mechanic where Frank must ride a speeder bike alongside Maw and face off against a boss soldier base.

GSW: The soundtrack to The Maw was written by Winifred Phillips, who a lot of people know from her music for the God of War series and more recently SimAnimals. In what context had you worked with her prior to The Maw and how did she go about creating a soundtrack that was unique to the game?

Wilford: A few of us worked with Winifred on a retail title at a previous company. The game sucked, but the music was really awesome. So when The Maw concept was formed, we had Winifred in mind right away. Her style and approach to composition was perfect for The Maw.

The music in The Maw is interactive, so when you start the game all you hear is a bass line, but as you progress and solve puzzles you'll hear additional layers of music come in. Each level has several "stems" that kick in based on player actions. Winifred actually scored each part of the game as if she were scoring a movie and she sent us a Quicktime movie of what she wanted. We then had our programmers go in and introduce the themes the way she designed them. It was a lot of fun and she was great to work with.

GSW: While still on the subject of the audio, Frank has a very distinctive high-pitched voice. How did you find the right actors to voice for the game?

Wilford: We worked with an Austin-based company called Gl33k for all our sound design. They hooked us up with Chris Sabat (Maw) and Brina Palencia (Frank), who were perfect. They have extensive experience voicing animated characters such as those in Dragonball Z. Chris is the voice of Piccolo.

GSW: There isn't a lot in the way dialog, though much is communicated through looks and gestures. Was this a strategic decision for making the title easy to localize for other regions?

Wilford: Yes, definitely. As our first indie title, we knew that localization costs could balloon out of control if we weren't careful. So we intentionally designed the game from the start to keep translation costs to a minimum.

This left us with the interesting challenge of communicating a lot of personality and humor through animation. In the middle of development WALL-E came out and reassured us that it was possible to tell a good story and convey a lot of emotion without dialog or text. Our Art Director, Dave Leung, is the man responsible for making it work.

GSW: There's one gameplay element in particular I wanted to bring up. It seems like these days we are seeing a lot of bullet-time events in high intensity action games. It makes it fun to see the convention implemented in a humorous context, namely when Frank pulls off a slow-motion somersault to dodge a projectile. How did this come about?

Wilford: This was an idea Josh had early on in the project. I don't think the rest of the team was convinced that it would work, precisely because it can be super cheesy when every other game is doing it, but once we got it working we all saw how over the top and funny it was. We all laughed immediately. That's how we knew it had to stay in the game.

[Images courtesy of Twisted Pixel Games.]

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

Game Developer March Issue Showcases Far Cry 2 Postmortem, Dirty Coding Tricks

[We've just debuted the bumper GDC issue of Game Developer magazine, which you can pick up at the show next week, and has also shipped to subscribers - lots of goodness in here, and the 'dirty coding tricks' article is particular fun.]

The March 2009 issue of Game Developer magazine, the sister print publication to Gamasutra and the leading U.S. trade publication for the video game industry, has shipped to print and digital subscribers and is available from the Game Developer Digital service in both subscription and single-issue formats.

The cover feature for the issue is an exclusive postmortem of Ubisoft Montreal's open-world first-person shooter Far Cry 2. The article offers insight on the challenges and successes experienced by Ubisoft Montreal while developing the ambitious title. The piece is described as follows:

"Far Cry 2 had extremely lofty goals. The aim was to create a first-person shooter with an engaging and truly dynamic narrative, in a vibrant persistent living world. After three and a half years of development, creative director Clint Hocking shares the hits and misses of this fascinating and rather under-discussed franchise reboot."

Another major feature in the issue is "Dirty Coding Tricks," a compilation of sometimes-shifty shenanigans perpetrated by professional programmers:

"In this tell-all article, eight programmers share harrowing tales of last-minute hacks performed to ship or save game projects. These often humorous anecdotes contain a lot of lessons for programmers, but should also be quite amusing for anyone who's ever worked with one."

In addition, University of Zielona Gora electrical engineering faculty member Korneliusz Warszawski argues for particle effects rather than more traditional deformation when creating terrain:

"Why build general terrain the hard way, when you could have a particle system generate it for you? Korneliusz Warszawski proposes that particle-based terrain generation can save both coders and artists plenty of time."

Finally, David Sirlin delves into the oft-overlooked principles of subtractive design:

"The idea behind subtractive design is to start with the core of what a game should be about, and then cut away everything that doesn't fit as the game progresses. This method, or something like it, is what led the Ico and Portal tames to such critical success."

In addition, our regular columnists contribute detailed and important pieces on numerous areas of game development.

This issue, we include Bungie's Steve Theodore on tiled textures, Noel Llopis on dynamic memory allocation, BioWare Austin's Damion Schubert on focusing innovation, LucasArts' Jesse Harlin talking with female sound designers, and Matthew Wasteland with his monthly humor column.

Worldwide paper-based subscriptions to Game Developer magazine are currently available at the official magazine website, and the Game Developer Digital version of the issue is also now available, with the site offering six months' and a year's subscriptions, alongside access to back issues and PDF downloads of all issues, all for a reduced price. There is now also an opportunity to buy the digital version of March 2009's magazine as a single issue.

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

COLUMN: Pixel Journeys: 'Corewar - The Ultimate Game?'

['Pixel Journeys' is a monthly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by John Harris discussing games with unusual design attributes that have lessons to teach modern game designers. This month covers the competitive programming game of Corewar.]

When we think of computer games, what is the image that comes to mind?

Often, these days, it is something that involves a control pad or analog stick. It might instead have a keyboard and a mouse. There’s usually some kind of 3D graphics involved and some kind of soundtrack, and to facilitate those you’d need a monitor and some speakers.

At a deeper level, there’s the presumption of interactivity, that something you do is countered by the machine, and then you do something to counter it, back and forth in an iterative fashion. And after all that, many people then go on to claim that the game requires some degree of something called immersion.

But how many of those things is actually necessary? This month, we talk about an essentially computer-oriented game that relies upon absolutely none of these things: the awesome and unique game of Corewar.

Introduction

Corewar was first popularized in a series of articles printed as part of the Scientific American column "Computer Recreations," a successor of Martin Gardner’s legendary Mathematical Games. This puts it in the same kind of company as John Horton Conway's Game of Life, the prototypical cellular automata. It was created by the column's author A. K. Dewdney, and the columns themselves, linked above, are still a decent introduction to the game for programmers. My own description here is simplified by comparison; if you become further interested in the game, the linked columns are the best place to start.

Corewar is a battle for survival between two or more opponents, all of whom happen to be computer programs. There is no monolithic shell to host the battles, the same tools are used to write them as one might write in C. These programs, or "warriors," are written in a language similar to assembly called Redcode, and are submitted to a MARS, or "Memory Array Redcode Simulator," a simulated computer that runs both programs in a shared memory space called the core. The programs do not manipulate vehicles in a physical system in an attempt to vanquish opposing vehicles, as with some other types of programming games. Instead, the programs try to directly destroy the opposing program by overwriting their code. A program thread dies only when it executes an illegal instruction or tries to divide by zero. A program wins when all opposing threads crash in this manner, and it loses if it, itself, is entirely crashed.

The warriors take turns executing, first an instruction from one, then from the next, and so on until they've all run an instruction, then the queue starts over from the first. All instructions take the same amount of game time, one "cycle," to execute. As with ordinary machine code programs, after an instruction executes that program's instruction counter increases to the next instruction in memory. (In most traditional machine languages instructions consist of multiple memory locations, each comprised of a single byte. Under the Redcode system all instructions, including arguments, are only one memory location in size. The word "byte" is not used.) The warriors are loaded into memory at random locations before the match starts, and their counters set to the appropriate starting points. Memory is cyclical; programs falling off the end of memory wind up back at the start, and all accesses that overflow will similarly wrap around.

The random starting points are an essential aspect of the game, and are the sole element of chance in the simulation. If a warrior always knew where to find its opponents it could crash one immediately by copying an unexecutable DAT instruction right over its initial instruction. Still, some warriors lash out and try to hit an essential memory location without taking the time to look first; these are called "bombers." Some other warriors, "scanners," look first and attack when they think they've found a competitor. Then there are warriors that copy their code elsewhere in memory in case of attack. There are a surprising wealth of strategies in what may appear at first to be a rather simple game.

Competing programmers must strike a careful balance between size and complexity. The shorter a program is the harder it is to find and attack in the large core, but with fewer instructions the less nuanced its strategy can be. But a well-written long program can be faster than a short one because it doesn't have to waste time looping. Because keeping size down and speed up are so important, successful Corewar programs can be fiendishly elegant, and like many assembly programs, may be hard to read.

Here are some additional quirks of the Redcode language of interest to programmers, so other readers may want to skip to the next paragraph....

Corewar's instruction set is fairly small: the original version of the game only had ten instructions, and the version most-often played today has just 18.
All addresses are relative to the current value of the instruction counter, so "MOV 0, 1" would copy the current instruction one space ahead.
The size of memory is always exactly the same as the size of the maximum integer, and all integers are considered signless. Overflows and negatives are handled by replacing the value with (itself % coresize). Because of this, negative numbers can be used in source listings, which will be increased by coresize at compile time.
There are no numeric values other than integers.
All memory locations actually contain three spaces for values, or "fields": an instruction, and A and B fields that can be used as arguments for the instruction.
There are many addressing modes that can be used; some of them can be used to refer, or even incidentally modify, the field values of memory locations.

Playing the game

Because the act of playing consists solely of writing a warrior's code, watching battles and learning their results, this section is going to look over the sources of three prominent warriors from the game's earliest days, all drawn from the pages of Scientific American.

Imp, written by A. K. Dewdney

MOV 0, 1 END

The oldest and simplest useful warrior, Imp is as short as possible, as fast as possible, difficult to attack, and surprisingly effective for its limitations. All it does is move the contents of the current location of the program counter (that is, itself) one space ahead. When its execution turn comes around again, it'll find the new copy of its sole instruction, which will then also be copied ahead. It will continue on like this forever unless stopped by another program, leaving a trail of MOVs behind it at a rate of one per cycle.

When Imp reaches another program, it'll just bulldoze over its code with copies of itself. When a bulldozed program tries to execute its next instruction it'll find a MOV 0, 1 there, lobotomizing it, basically turning it into an Imp! And to destroy an Imp, a write must hit its current memory location, since it'll copy over whatever lies in front of it on its next turn.

All these advantages come with a huge drawback however: Imp cannot win the game on its own. All it can do is copy self-perpetuating MOV instructions. It moves no DATs, which are the only way to halt an opposing program. An opponent who is Imp'd is just as hard to kill as Imp itself, so although it's doing no attacking it's still not dead, and so still has not lost. Because of this, unless a coding error causes the opposing warrior to halt accidentally, the best Imp can do by itself is tie. However, because it's short and easy to set up, Imps are a useful weapon for more sophisticated programs.

Dwarf, original version by A. K. Dewdney, modified for modern Redcode by Ilmari Karonen. Obtained from The Beginner's Guide to Redcode.

ADD #4, 3 ; Adds a literal 4 to the value in the DAT, below, and stores the result there. MOV 2, @2 JMP -2 DAT #0, #0 END

The DAT instruction here holds a pointer, initialized to zero. MARS provides no accumulator or registers, so all pointers and temporary storage must be kept in main memory. (Or in PSpace, but that's an advanced topic beyond the scope of this column.) Execution begins with the ADD instruction, which immediately adds a literal value of four to the B field three locations later in memory, that is, the second value of the DAT. The MOV then copies the DAT instruction to the location pointed to by the DAT's B field. After that, it loops back to the ADD. In this way, it methodically peppers memory with walls at four-location intervals.

Since it drops its mines quickly without checking first, Dwarf is classified as a bomber. It can drop a mine every three cycles, which means it extends its reach faster than Imp, but it leaves holes through which a very small program, like Imp or another Dwarf, might slip. In fact this is by design, since if it didn't do this Dwarf would bomb itself when the pointer came back around through memory. Since Dwarf is only four locations in size, the DAT copy will neatly miss all of Dwarf's executable code.

Take note of two things: one, the core is initialized with DAT 0, 0 instructions, so the last line is actually unnecessary. And second, under modern Redcode, the ADD could be used on the MOV instruction directly, removing the reliance on one more memory location. Self-modifying code is not a sin in Redcode. Programs are always getting changed at runtime, whether on purpose, due to opponents, or accidentally. In fact, making use of it can help keep code sizes down, reducing vulnerability.

In Redcode, no instruction can modify more than one memory location at a time, and the most locations that can be read, using compare instructions, is two. It takes extra instructions, and more time, to make sure a location contains an opponent before writing to it. Dwarf uses up a lot of time bombing empty memory, but it takes about as much time to find opponents as to attack, and the process of searching looks a lot like bombing anyway, just with compares instead of writes. There are programs that take advantage of the fact that compare instructions reference two locations to each other to effectively search twice as fast, and there are even programs that copy themselves around specifically so those comparisons will find identical contents waiting for them.

Mice, written by Chip Wendell

ptr: DAT #12
prg: MOV #12, ptr
loop: MOV @ptr, <copy
DJN loop, ptr
SPL @copy
ADD #653, copy
JMZ prg, ptr
copy: DAT #833
END loop

(The listing above, which I won't step through, is the original version written in Redcode '86.)

Mice is classified as a replicator. It makes a copy of itself to another location in memory, then forks execution to it with a SPL instruction. The old copy then starts making another copy, while the new copy makes a copy of itself. This continues until memory is filled with copies of Mice, the reasoning behind its name hopefully obvious by now.

When a program splits execution the task of the opposition becomes substantially harder, since all threads must be terminated before victory can be declared. It should be noted, though, that Mice does not gain speed with its many additional copies. When a warrior splits execution, its various threads must take turns with each other for execution time. So if there's three Mice running around the core, but an opponent only has a single thread, then that thread is operating three times faster than each individual copy.

Mice does gain longevity with its endless self-copying, since only one Mice has to survive to continue the battle, which propelled it to victory in the first Corewar tournament, held back in 1986 in the days before the internet.

Beneath the surface

There are three primary tactics in Coreware strategy today, roughly corresponding to (and named after) the throws in a game of Rock-Scissors-Paper:

Replicators like Mice are called "papers" in Corewar lingo. They get their power from the longevity provided from having many threads running at once, and from being able to work on different things at once. With many copies in operation, the task of the opposition becomes that much harder, although each individual thread operates more slowly.

The best way to beat replicators is by using a scanner, also called a "scissors," a program designed to look for replicators and hunt down their many threads. One way to do this is by, instead of bombing each copy with a DAT instruction once found, to instead hit it with a SPL 0 instruction, causing it to endlessly generate useless threads and drag its execution down even further. The advantage here is only one thread must be found in order to be effective; the more copies there are in the core, the easier it is for the attack to hit.

Scanners must be fairly long in order to house the logic needed to hunt down replicators, making them vulnerable to bombers like Dwarf, which take the name "stones." But bombers, while fast, will often lose to replicators and their many hard-to-kill threads, completing the triad.

There are many variants of these types too, going by exotic names such as imp spirals, vampires and quickscanners. They're detailed at the Wikipedia entry for Corewar.

What can we learn from Corewar?

First: computer games can come in all shapes and sizes. Corewar is a game that is sometimes played without even a UI, with only the results of matches presented to a user. It is work done for the sake of enjoyment. There is nothing interactive or immersive about it.

But what makes the task of playing this unusually studious game fun? Part of it is something that is easy to forget, sometimes: the act of programming, itself, can be fun. This is why people do insane things like hack Linux kernels as a hobby, in their spare time; these crazy folk actually like it.

But in order to create a game in which developing solutions through programming is the objective, the people creating the game must foresee all of the outcomes and make sure the tasks are possible and balanced, a task tantamount to being smarter than all the players who might play it. This, itself, is impossible, especially when they collude through avenues such as message boards and FAQs. Corewar's solution, then, is to pit players against each other, making those opponents into the "designers" a player is pitted against.

A system like that requires a certain degree of open-endedness and richness, and it is by no means simple to create. Care must be taken that the first side to act (or second for that matter) cannot act upon it to immediately win, or receive some overriding advantage. Corewar's rules are carefully balanced so that a warrior's resources may change from moment to moment, but do not actually increase or decrease. Splitting execution reduces the number of instructions each thread can process. Longer programs can utilize more complex algorithms, but are easier for other programs to find or bomb.

The fascinating thing about this balance is that it comes about by taking the behavior of real processors from the time of its creation as an analogue. The limitations of those processors match up nicely with the limits on warriors executing in a MARS.

Appendix: Getting involved in Corewar

Corewar has declined in popularity since its introduction in Scientific American but people still play it today.

Here are those Scientific American articles, once again.

More basic information can be found at the rec.games.corewar FAQ.

For personal simulation, the two most popular simulators for running the game are pMARS, for many OSes, and CoreWin for Windows. A Corewar battle taking place on a modern computer, it must be said, goes by almost faster than the eye can see unless it has been slowed down.

A good number of tutorials for the game can be found on this tutorial links page.

One of the most interesting ways to play is by participating on "hills," automated, perpetual Corewar tournaments scattered around the internet. One will typically upload or email his warrior's source code to the hill, which will then be scheduled for playing against the warriors already there. When its turn comes up, a large number of trial matches is staged between it and each of the ranked opponents, and score is kept. When the matches are complete, its score is compared with that of the other warriors. If the new program ranks above one of the others, it'll be placed as the new warrior at that slot and those at and below that level pushed down. The lowest is bumped off. There are also "infinite" hills, which don't bump anyone off but continue ranking new warriors indefinitely. A beginner's hill, which automatically removes warriors who remain on the hill for a period of time, can be found here.

An interesting thing about Corewar is that some genetic algorithms, given enough iterations, do a good-enough job of writing programs for it that they occasionally win tournaments. It might have something to do with the value placed on brevity and the relatively low number of opcodes (although there are plenty of addressing modes to make up for it). The Corewar Info page has a listing of useful tools in this area.

Posted by John Harris at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

GameSetLinks: Pimp My... Blockparty?

[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 return to GameSetLinks then, even in this super-hectic pre-GDC time, oh, and look out for a special guest blogger on GSW next week, related to a special Game Developers Conference-related project that is wacky, hopefully cool, and... you'll find out about soon!

Hanging out in this round-up, we see game quality over time discussed, demo-scene goodness explored in not one, but two posts, and PSP indies sharing time with Clay Shirky on the future of journalism.

Huzzah, huzzah, huzzah:

Man-Months to Quality - Zack Hiwiller
The claim - if you spend too long on a game, the quality goes down again. No 'real' stats, but some fun graphs!

How the 2600 forged the home video game future. - By Michael Agger - Slate Magazine
'What still amazes me, in spite of my scholarly concerns here, is the nostalgic punch of early video games—how transporting the blocky sounds and sights can be.'

8bit today: SCENE.ORG AWARDS 2008
Good explanations of the retro finalists in the demo-scene category - always worth checking out for bleeptastic inspiration, even for gamegeeks.

No Gravity - The Plague of Mind: Indie PSP space shooter hotness - NeoGAF
Download-only, and this is pretty interesting overall.

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky
Tremendously important in the game biz, too: 'Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.'

ASCII by Jason Scott / Blockparty! April 16-19th. Be there.
U.S. demo-scene party goodness, next month in Cleveland - don't forget!

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 17, 2009

Interview: Loudcrowd's Alternate Approach To Music Games

[Seems like a lot of the music-themed games out there so far have been either classic rock or J-Pop/K-Pop themed. So it's interesting to see Gamasutra's Christian Nutt interviewing Loudcrowd on their music game/social network hybrid that caters very much to the hip Pitchfork-y music crowd.]

Today, Conduit Labs launched the public beta of Loudcrowd, its online music game-social networking hybrid.

Developed by a staff with a mixed web and game development background, Loudcrowd hopes to blend the social aspects of a music site like Pandora or Last.fm with the gameplay appeal of a Rock Band -- while leveraging the design concepts behind hardcore MMOs, Conduit Labs' CEO Nabeel Hyatt says.

"I would call it more of a music games channel than I would a single game," says Hyatt. While the Loudcrowd dance game is a "a very quick 30-60 seconds" of gameplay, according to Hyatt, "the DJ game has a competitive leaderboard mode similar to the way you might be competitive in Rock Band or Guitar Hero or any Xbox Live game."

Tracks from artists like Cut Copy, Santigold and The Twelves are included, and special items can be unlocked and stored with the player's persistent character. While there is no navigable virtual world in this version of the game, players can network and exchange info, tracks, and playlists. The game will support microtransactions for both music tracks and character items.

Conduit's Background

Hyatt, who characterizes himself as a "serial entrepreneur" formed Conduit Labs with game designers "mostly" from Harmonix, as well as MMO front and back end engineers and designers, many from Turbine. The Harmonix ex-pats are "focused on trying to make games that fairly universal, the way that you really try and make kind of a Guitar Hero or Rock Band appeal to both a hardcore gamer and the casual gamer," says Hyatt.

On the other hand, the MMO vets' skills are leveraged for their expertise in using "game mechanics to encourage community development," he says. "And that's kind of our approach. I don't think most people who would ever play this game would say, 'Oh, this is an MMO I'm playing?' And that's certainly not what we were going for. But I think we've used a lot of those lessons."

Interested to find out more? We present here a full Q&A:

You have people with backgrounds in both the game industry and also on the social web space. Why is the composition of the team important to Loudcrowd?

Nabeel Hyatt: I think the core of our team is a mixture of understanding the fundamentals of game mechanics and how to use that to grow a community and to get people to interact, and then the kind of universality that comes with the social web. So, our backgrounds are from building consumer web start-ups. They're also from building launch titles for the PlayStation 3 like Resistance. And they're from building somewhat universal games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band.

And I think it is those combinations that are the strength of the company. We have constant discussions about where we should lie in a certain area. "Should we lean more on a consumer community in this service? Should we create more game mechanics around this situation?" I think it actually allows us to draw from more lessons than just say what I would have learned from just building websites or what I would have learned from just building Xbox 360 games.

Do you find these kinds of collaborations offer more give-and-take in terms of shared knowledge? Was it surprising?

NH: Yeah, and differences, too. I think there's a little bit of tension between the way a web company is built, where you build this tiny little nugget, and then you put it out there and try to grow it, and grow it, and grow it.

The opposite, which is the way most games are built, which is you built a whole package over a certain amount of time, and then you try and release it to the public. We definitely had a process that was kind of like that where our vision for what Loudcrowd is as a product is still not complete, and we're going into public beta.

We went into private beta with probably five percent of the features that we thought would really make the full product, but we felt like it was a compelling enough offering that we wanted to get feedback from our consumers early. That's very much along the line with what you do with a web product. That's certainly, for some folks who had come out of the game business, an adaptation.

You talked about people having MMO backgrounds -- what role do those skill sets play when they're translated to a new medium like this?

NH: I think it's really the core of the kind of product we're building. We're first and foremost building a community, but I think you hear people who build music websites, like imeem say that. And then you hear people who are building World of Warcraft say that. And yet, they go about that process very, very differently.

Yeah, it's been incredibly enjoyable to have people like Dan O'Brien talking about the lessons they learned from when they were building Asheron's Call, and the way certain types of game mechanics went awry and messed up the community. We learned from that -- on my side, I learned from that.

The hallmark of an early web community is the amount of freedom they're given to shape their own community. The idea around user-generated content is that the community really is shaping the product in a way that people talk about MMOs, but don't really execute on. And that's a scenario of cross-pollination in both directions.

When you went in beta, you said that about five percent of the features were available. Now that you're on the other side of the beta and about to launch publicly, are you planning additions over time?

NH: Yeah. It's a very large-scale product vision that we have, and this is not a small product by any stance. I think it's not completely unheard of in a game. In game development, people do talk a lot about getting to first prototype as quickly as possible, having something within a couple of weeks in some cases where you can do internal demos so that everyone can find the fun fast.

That said, it's usually only for internal demos, right? I think the big difference with the path that we walked was, "How about if we polished it up a little bit, and we get it to a point where we can actually get direct feedback from users from day one, and start building the product with the community?"

So, I think at this point, it's a really solid product. There are multiple types of interactions that you can have with users. There's a real depth to the amount of music content that we have on the site. Certainly, we're seeing now users logging in twenty, thirty times a month; they're logging in daily.

People in a web context versus a game context seem to have very different expectations. Can you talk about working within those expectations?

NH: Exactly, exactly. And we also think about the lifecycle of a customer differently. Having them involved early and help shape the product is only going to keep them more engaged for a longer period of time.

You know, I was a very early user of Flickr, and watching that product evolve over time, watching them engage the community and shape the product based on community feedback, made me all the more loyal to that product. And we've seen the same thing.

We started out with something that was very overtly more competitive in the early dance game days, and it became very apparent that people were really enjoying the music an awful lot, and in some cases wanted to play with more light social type of interaction. And so we ended up kind of augmenting the dance game and the scoring in that direction.

We ended up programming a lot more music and a lot more variety of music to kind of listen to the community and grow with the community in a way that we would never have gotten if we had decided to build the whole thing for two years and then released it to the public.

There's a big question about monetization with a product like this. You could sell tracks, you could sell avatar updates -- am I on the right track here?

NH: It's a completely free to play game, and we rely on virtual goods.

I think that aligns us with the customer in the right way, which is to say our job is to make experiences interesting enough and engaging enough and fun enough that you want to buy music to use on the site. That means we continue to try and make more interesting and engaging experiences to try and reach that threshold. You can earn music tracks through playing the game, but if you want a very specific music track, very soon you'll be able to buy that track.

There are also areas of the game that will be blocked off, that you'll need to pay to get access to, but never in a way, of course, that will allow somebody to get more powerful by paying their way to get more powerful. The way you grow in the game is always through gameplay itself and skill.

It's interesting that you say "more powerful" because we're talking about the evolution of developers with MMO knowledge applying it to a game that has a very different feel. What does "more powerful" mean here -- like, "Are you the most disdainful hipster on the block?" (laughs)

NH: (laughs) Well, you know, power is really two things in an MMO. There's status, and then there's game effect. I might want to wear the fancy red cloak because everybody knows it's a rare item when they see me. I also might want to wear the fancy red cloak because it does more damage to the ten rats I'm about to kill.

So, I think the analogy is that you want to make sure that when you see somebody in any kind of community, if they have a position of respect in that community, that they've earned it, they haven't bought their way to it. And that's just a sense of justice that isn't really from MMOs necessarily, but certainly you can see it there.

That's just from the offline world, that's from our real life. The debutante who didn't do anything in real life but somehow became a celebrity is someone who usually isn't seen with high respect.

Gee, who could you be talking about?

NH: (laughs) Yes, exactly. No need to name names. The person who has scrimped and saved, and worked their way from the garage up to starting a major corporation is someone who's seen in high esteem. A lot of I think what MMO design has done is that it surfaces things that already exist for people. It puts them down on paper.

I'd say that a primary difference [between Loudcrowd and an MMO] is -- you can probably see it from the site -- we think of ourselves first as a community and as a game, not as a virtual world. In other words, I don't think that our primary value to users is that we have created a virtual space, which you can navigate in 3D.

Which means that despite the fact that we're actually using some very unique proprietary 3D in Flash software that we build and patented, we didn't actually create an environment that you can walk around in because I don't think it added anything to the experience.

The interesting thing about being in a space is that sense of presence that you have with other people, that sense that you get in instant messaging as well, where you know you can do something and immediately get a reaction. You get that same thing when you're playing online in Rock Band as well, and you don't have a virtual space you're walking around in either.

And so, for us, we wanted to focus on the gameplay. We wanted to focus on the interaction with people, the feedback that helps build relationships and make you have fun, and less on the hard to navigate interfaces that MMOs and virtual worlds bring along with them.

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

Best of FingerGaming: From Eliss to The Oregon Trail

[Every week, we sum up sister iPhone site FingerGaming's top news and reviews for Apple's nascent -- and increasingly exciting -- portable games platform, as written by guest editor Danny Cowan.]

This week's notable items in the iPhone gaming space, as covered by FingerGaming, include a port of the classic PC educational title The Oregon Trail, a review for the abstract space puzzler Eliss, and the debuts of free titles like One-Dot Enemies and Anamusu!

Here are the top stories for the week:

- Review: Eliss
"Eliss's vector-styled graphics work incredibly well in its space setting, and every sound effect and musical cue is perfectly suited to the on-screen action. It creates a soothing vibe similar to the kind you feel in games like Katamari Damacy and the WiiWare title Art Style: Orbient; it's the sort of game that just feels good to play."

- Top Free Game App Downloads for the Week
"Tap Tap Revenge 2 tops the free app charts for the second week running, achieving daily download numbers that surpass those of all competing titles in every App Store category. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire Lite also makes an impressive showing this week."

- LuckyWheel, Wheel of Fortune Battle it Out in App Store
"The Wheel of Fortune clone LuckyWheel was approved for sale in the App Store earlier today... mere minutes before the release of Sony’s officially licensed iPhone version of Wheel of Fortune."

- The Oregon Trail Debuts in App Store
"It's been a long wait since Gameloft first announced its iPhone version of The Oregon Trail, but the title finally hits the App Store today, arriving as what looks to be a fully featured port of the classic educational PC adventure game."

- Free App Roundup for the Week
"This week’s free releases include demo versions of Cameltry and Diner Dash, along with full versions of One-Dot Enemies and Anamusu!

- Skyworks Releases Four New iPhone Games
"Skyworks has been busy lately, following up on its hit iPhone apps Arcade Bowling and Arcade Hoops Basketball with a quartet of new releases that hit the App Store this week."

- Top-Selling Paid Game Apps for the Week
"It's been a slow climb to the top, but Flick Fishing has at last surpassed the reigning chart champion iDracula in daily App Store sales. Zombieville USA premieres this week at third place, meanwhile, as ngmoco's WordFu finishes its debut week at fifth."

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

Game Time With Mister Raroo: Gaming in the Now

[Returning to his GameSetWatch-exclusive column after a break, gaming's very own Garrison Keillor, the permanently sunny Mister Raroo looks at why, although many gamers are accustomed to certain types of structure in games, the moment-to-moment enjoyment of playing may be even more important.]

Just Noodling Around

Recently I was trying to describe the Playstation 3’s delightfully odd Noby Noby Boy to some of my friends, but the same question kept coming up: “What do you do?”

I tried to explain how basically you control a kind of a stretchy noodle that can make itself longer and shorter, and you can direct the noodle to eat objects in its environment only to expel them out of its rear end. Noby Noby Boy is certainly more of a plaything than a game, and this concept was difficult for many of my friends to grasp.

As for me, some of my favorite video games are those in which there really isn’t a point to them. I can lose myself for hours in a title such as Electroplankton on the Nintendo DS.

Though many people may not understand the appeal of what is essentially a musical toy, Electroplankton’s allocation for seemingly infinite sound combinations is like heaven for me. There are no levels to complete, no Achievements to unlock, no story to keep track of. Some gamers may get frustrated and ask, “How do I win? When does the game end? What am I supposed to be doing?” Instead, I can just have fun with musical experimentation.

In fact, being left with no bearing is perhaps too much for some gamers to handle. Even games that have overall objectives and goals, such as Animal Crossing or The Sims, can prove upsetting to some individuals because the games lack any true direction other than that which players create.

Looking further at a game like Animal Crossing, most gamers eventually find their own rhythm and work toward general goals like collecting bugs or paying off their mortgage, but what about the games in which there really is no rhythm to find? I’m not a fan of games that hold gamers’ hands as they play, but I can understand why many developers feel the need to guide players so as to avoid frustration.

Sometimes it’s nice to not have a reason to play a game other than for the sake of enjoying it. In fact, in some cases it’s not so much that I even “play” a “game” in so much as I immerse myself in an experience. Take a piece of software such as My Aquarium on the Wii, which is truly nothing beyond a virtual aquarium. You decorate an aquarium, select which fish to put into it, and pretty much just watch them swim around.

It’s even less of a proper game than Noby Noby Boy and Electroplankton in that it lacks almost any type of interaction. As the title suggests, it’s your aquarium, and that’s about all there is to it. However, even though My Aquarium isn’t even what one would consider a game, I believe it holds the same potential for providing players with satisfaction as any other video game does.

Letting the Next Level Stay There

It’s not difficult to realize that games like Electroplankton and My Aquarium represent in-the-moment experiences above all else. Other than perhaps unlocking some additional features, these types of games provide little to look forward to in subsequent plays. That is, while other games may have additional levels or worlds to explore, combatants to fight, or puzzles to solve, a title like Electroplankton provides nothing more than what the gamer is experiencing at any given moment. To me, that is not a bad thing.

Even though the “non-games” described above are easy examples, I believe the truth of the matter is that any video game has the potential to be enjoyed in a similar fashion. Sure, this sounds obvious, but I don’t think the vast majority of gamers stop and smell the flowers in the games they play, so to speak. Rather, gamers are often looking ahead to reaching a certain goal.

I tried playing Final Fantasy XI for a few months and even though I had a splendid time exploring the online world of Vana’diel, my personal life left little room for dedicating a lot of time to the game. Just about every player I encountered in Vana'diel was obsessed with one thing: Leveling up their character as high as possible.

For me, there were only a few reasons to do the same, with the largest being to have access to riding chocobos, which made traversing the landscape much quicker and easier. But for the most part, I was content to spend my time traveling between the game’s different cities, exploring the countryside, and just enjoying escaping from the real world, if only for a short while. By the time I stopped playing Final Fantasy XI my character’s level was still embarrassingly low, but I had a nice time playing all the same.

The Parts Versus the Sum

I believe the enjoyment that comes from playing video games is king above all else, but there exist gamers whose main concern is to boost their virtual reputations. More specifically, the Xbox 360’s “GamerScores” and Playstation 3’s “Trophies” seem to be the focus of their game playing.

Fulfilling in-game objectives just for the sake of unlocking Achievements or earning Trophies just doesn’t appeal to me, but it has caused countless individuals to spend tedious hours playing games they aren’t necessarily having a good time with.

Even worse, some people will chose to play games with “easy” Achievements even if there is absolutely no pleasure to be had in the gaming experience. Perhaps the argument can be made that the satisfaction that comes from fulfilling Achievements is worth the hassle, but with so many fantastic games to play, it seems silly to spend one’s precious spare time doing something that’s not very rewarding.

Personally, I’d rather just play a video game for the pure satisfaction that comes with doing so. Of course, like all other forms of art, there exists a great deal of diversity within the medium of video games, and different gamers play for different purposes. Still, it seems with each passing day I have an increasingly limited amount of time available to enjoy my favorite hobby, and I’d rather not waste it doing something that I don’t like.

I can appreciate games on many levels, be it their control schemes, art design, music, storylines, characters, gameplay mechanics, and more, but if none of these factors equate to me enjoying the act of playing a game, then in some ways they’re all for naught. I don’t play to boost my virtual reputation or grind my virtual character to the next level. I just play video games because I like the act of doing so.

I can enjoy the overall experience and appreciate elements such as plot pacing or character development, but for the most part I just want to lose myself in the moment and enjoy the games I play.

Sometimes the games I end up liking may not sit atop the higher echelons of aggregate review score sites such as Metacritic, but personal, moment-to-moment enjoyment doesn’t always fall in line with professional scores. So although I can recognize that Castlevania Judgment is far from being an exceptional game by any standard, that doesn’t mean I don’t have a blast whenever I play it.

While I believe the encapsulation of video games as a whole is important, for me my satisfaction mainly lies in the time I’m actually playing. If video games are a journey I’m taking the time to embark upon, I believe that as many steps along the way should be worth my while. Some people may view their trips through video games in terms of the destination, but to me it’s the actual parts, not necessarily their sum, that may actually matter the most.

[Mister Raroo is a happy husband, proud father, full-time public library employee, and active gamer. He currently lives in El Cajon, CA with his family and many pets. In addition to writing for GameSetWatch, Mister Raroo irregularly writes content for his blog, Moments. You may reach Mister Raroo at mister.raroo@gmail.com.]

Posted by Bill Sannwald at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

GameSetLinks: Which Mountain? That Mountain!

[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.]

If we're known for anything here on GameSetWatch, apart from strange columns from odd, wonderful coves, it's for lists of links from RSS-land - and this latest set of GameSetLinks is headed by strange video game songs from actually not Chris Remo this time.

Also hanging out in here - strange Vienna-based residencies for game historians, further explanations of the Dr. Dobbs Silverlight platformer we helped to make, competition in gaming, strange game-related Dwayne Johnson CG from the movie _before_ Witch Mountain, and, uh, more.

Up up up:

the doyouinverts: New Track: "Fingers Turned Into Fists"
Our own Kumar + video game band + One Life Left = excellent.

subotron.com » Blog Archive » open call : SUBOTRON artist in residence fall 2009 wanted
'As part of the air-program of MuseumsQuartier´s quartier21, SUBOTRON invites international artists in residence to work here in Vienna on a regular basis. Artists get a studio at the Museumsquartier for free and money to cover expenses.' And it's 'the history of digital game culture' this time - neat.

dobbschallenge2.com - Getting Started Creating Your Own Levels
A handy guide to Adam Atomic's Silverlight-based platform game creator/UCC thing that I produced, and Mathew Kumar is community managing. Includes some stuff I didn't know! Here's my amazing level, if you haven't seen it.

Tony Hawk :: Official Website
Hey, nice, the official Tony Hawk site linked Barton and Loguidice's history of the skating game franchise.

Strange Horizons Articles: Playing Fair: A Look at Competition in Gaming, by Mark Newheiser
'Unless they bet large sums of money on the outcome of every game they participate in, most people will probably end up playing video games and tabletop games just to have fun. Since there's no end goal in mind other than the game itself, a person's willingness to play a game depends on whether it's enjoyable for them.' A great point!

It's in the details: Utah's Sandman Studios contributes to 'Witch Mountain' - Salt Lake Tribune
Funny game-related sidenote here: ' Sandman landed the "Witch Mountain" gig after impressing Disney and director Andy Fickman with its work on "The Game Plan." For that movie, Sandman created a realistic copy of the Madden '07 video game, featuring Dwayne Johnson's character.'

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

March 16, 2009

Column: 'The Interactive Palette' - Personality in Team Fortress 2

['The Interactive Palette' is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Gregory Weir that examines the tools and techniques of the digital games trade with a focus on games as art, using a single game as an example. This time - a look at character roles in Team Fortress 2.]

The concept of character roles in video games is a common one. It's most common in traditional RPGs, where the player chooses a certain character class with unique skills and abilities. In the mid-to-late-nineties, the concept of class or character role spread to other kinds of games, with one of the first examples being the original Team Fortress mod for Quake.

The Team Fortress series features first-person, multiplayer, team-based gameplay where each player selects a class and the classes compliment each other. Each class has an important role, and the strength of the team as a whole depends on each player properly fulfilling their role. The series came into its own with the release of Team Fortress Classic, an official mod for Half-Life. TFC refined the classes and reinforced team-based goals like capturing the flag or protecting territory.

Multiplayer class-based games like Team Fortress can be quite entertaining. The separate character roles make it necessary to work together, which promotes socialization among teammates and increases the feeling of accomplishment when the team succeeds.

The multiple classes also broaden the appeal of the game; a player who doesn't feel comfortable dodging and weaving can choose a slow-but-strong class like TF's Heavy Weapon Guy, and there are even roles for players who like to avoid combat, like the Medic class.

However, these roles also mean that there is a bigger barrier to entry for the game, as new players don't necessarily understand their role or how to carry it out. Additionally, everyone's experience in the game can be hurt by a player who doesn't serve their purpose.

Anyone who's played with a medic who doesn't heal people knows the frustration that can cause. In the interest of fun and accessibility, it's important for players to comprehend their character role as quickly as possible, and to be interested in fulfilling that role. The latest game in the series excels at this.

Valve's Team Fortress 2 was a bit of a surprise for eager fans. Many were expecting a World-War-II-themed, realistic war simulation, as described in previews years before the release. However, in the intervening time, Valve completely changed their design, and the final product was a silly, colorful game with cartoon characters inspired by early 20th-century commercial illustration.

One of the most memorable parts of the new game is the cast of colorful characters. Each character class in TF2 is represented by a quirky, distinctive personality with an easily-recognized voice and appearance. There is discussion in the game's commentary of how the distinctive class silhouettes enable players to easily identify opponents, but there's little mention of how these characters enable the team-based gameplay by allowing class roles to be easily understood and internalized.

"We Make Good Team."

In most games with character roles — including the previous TF games — there's little individuality to the classes. Yes, characters look different, and have different effects, but they lack identity. Sometimes, this is a good thing. In World of Warcraft, for example, race and gender give a distinct appearance, but not a strong personality. This allows players to roleplay a character of their choice. However, it does mean that character personality has little affect on gameplay.

In TF2, things are different. Comparing the old Heavy Weapon Guy to the new Heavy, or the old Spy to the new one, shows that there has been a drastic change in character design. Previous games in the series let you play a scout, but in TF2, you play The Scout. The Scout has a distinctive accent, appearance, and personality. He is conceited, sarcastic, and sadistic.

Through Valve's "Meet the Team" promotional videos and through the in-game voice taunts and reaction sound bytes, each class is provided with a unique and easily-identified identity. This is amusing and easy to identify with, but it also serves as a simple introduction to the class.

By looking at and listening to the Scout, new players immediately know several things about him. The Scout is thin, but wiry, implying his speed and lack of fortitude. His rapid-fire taunts match the class's preferred fighting style of circle-strafing around enemies. Because of this, players can easily tell what role the Scout is meant to fulfill, and are encouraged to roleplay the character and therefore be a useful member of the team.

As a contrast, we can look at the Spy. He is dressed in a suit and balaclava, implying that he is perhaps not the most physical of classes. His voice is haughty and sly, which matches his sneak-and-stab play style. A player who sees the Spy in action understands that he is a tricky character who is meant to attack from the shadows.

The same inferences can be made about the other classes. The Heavy is slow but sturdy, while the Medic is a weak technician. The Soldier is, well, a soldier. The Demoman makes clever use of explosives, the Sniper calmly waits, and the Engineer makes intelligent constructions. As for the Pyro? He (or she?) clearly just likes fire. These are not complex, deep human beings; they are stereotypes. That's fine in TF2, a game with little emotional depth which demands quick thinking and trained instincts.

Not only do the personalities educate new players, but they also help players pick a favorite class. Someone who sympathizes with the slow-but-forceful Heavy is likely to also enjoy the class's methodical approach. Likewise, a player who identifies with the Demoman will find herself satisfied by bouncing grenades off of walls and laying explosive traps.

"I am Credit to Team."

The technique of giving character classes distinct personalities can be applied to any game which separates players into distinct roles that should be understood quickly. A similar thing was done in Blizzard's Diablo, which gives the Warrior, Rogue, and Sorcerer unique appearances that helped to indicate their roles. In Diablo, however, there is little personality assigned to each class, and teamwork is much less important than in TF2.

The primary lessons to take from TF2's personalities are to create unique identities for each class, to make the identities reflect the class's role, and to make the identities easy to identify and identify with.

Making the class identities distinct allows players to easily differentiate the classes by sight, sound, and behavior. Matching the class identities to the class roles allows the player to easily understand and remember a class's strengths, weaknesses, and responsibilities. Lastly, when the identities are memorable and likable, players are more likely to feel connected to their character and to pick a class based on personality.

Few people would claim that Team Fortress 2's world is especially deep, or that it has a particularly complex storyline. What the game does have is a distinctive, appealing cast of characters, and it portrays its characters in a way that supports the gameplay. TF2 is so easy to learn and fun to play in part because of the excellent character design, including appearance, voice talent, and personality.

[Gregory Weir is a writer, game developer (The Majesty Of Colors), and software programmer. He maintains Ludus Novus, a podcast and accompanying blog dedicated to the art of interaction. He can be reached at Gregory.Weir@gmail.com.]

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

Previewing GDC 2009: The Top 20 Design Talks

[For possibly self-flagellatory reason, but more likely a desire to make sure people go to as many of the awesome Game Developers Conference lectures as possible, we'll be finding the top lectures in each major GDC track this week - starting with game design goodness.]

With the 2009 Game Developers Conference's start just one week away, GameSetWatch will be spending all week previewing the major conference tracks, starting out with 20 of the top lectures (in no particular order) from the Game Design track.

This major discipline-specific track, to be held from Wednesday, March 25th to Friday, March 27th at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, with a multitude of highlights, including a newly announced lecture with Will Wright, Lorne Lanning and Bing Gordon discussing gaming and social change.

The list of twenty of the top GDC 2009 design lectures is as follows:

1. Ubisoft Montreal's Clint Hocking, fresh from Far Cry 2's positive critical reception, discusses 'Fault Tolerance: From Intentionality to Improvisation', discussing "how game systems can be designed to encourage the player to improvise and recover from incremental failures and set-backs."

2. In an all-star, relatively underdiscussed panel called 'Stretching Beyond Entertainment: The Role of Games in Personal and Social Change', industry figures including Maxis' Will Wright, Oddworld's Lorne Lanning, Lionhead's Peter Molyneux, former Electronic Arts CCO Bing Gordon, and Ed Fries discuss "what we can do with the creativity of design to help inspire a better world."

3. An extremely rare public design discussion sees Blizzard's Jeff Kaplan present 'The Cruise Director of Azeroth: Directed Gameplay within World Of WarCraft', specifically focusing on "focus on the original development of WoW's quest system and how it has changed over time."

4. Media Molecule: 'Winging It' - Ups, Downs, Mistakes, Successes in the Making of LittleBigPlanet features the firm's Mark Healey and Alex Evans discussing "the processes behind the making of a game designed to bring creativity to the masses."

5. In From Counter-Strike to Left 4 Dead: Creating Replayable Cooperative Experiences, Valve South's Michael Booth talks about "the high-level design of Left 4 Dead, how it evolved from Counter-Strike, and the importance of procedural systems such as the AI Director in creating replayable and compelling cooperative experiences."

6. Far Cry 2 narrative designer Patrick Redding has a 20-minute lecture called 'Aarf! Arf Arf Arf: Talking to the Player with Barks', identifying "...both common pitfalls and practical solutions that keep NPCs sounding smart." (This is in addition to a previously highlighted 60-minute lecture on 'Read Me: Closing the Readability Gap in Immersive Games'.)

7. Lionhead's Peter Molyneux (Populous, Fable series) is presenting a special lecture called 'Lionhead Experiments Revealed' including prototypes of "a range of ideas which are bubbling under the surface at Lionhead Studios which may or may not make it into full games."

8. 'Balancing Multiplayer Competitive Games' is a lecture from controversial Street Fighter HD Remix and Kongai designer David Sirlin, discussing "how good games designed balance into their systems."

9. Continuing the always packed series, Braid creator Jon Blow's 'Experimental Gameplay Sessions' 2-hour lecture will highlight the most interesting experimental, innovative titles from major studios and indies alike.

10. Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi puts forth a lecture simply called 'All About Noby Noby Boy'.

11. Former Maxis developer and Spore Creature Creator lead designer Chaim Gingold presents an intriguing design discussion in the form of 'The Human Play Machine', analyzing "how existing game genres map onto the human brain and body, and how our design decisions affect who will be attracted to our games, and how they will play."

12. In a rare hardware design lecture, Nintendo's Masato Kuwahara will discuss 'The Inspiration Behind Nintendo DSi Development', focusing on "how the company came to develop the system with all these new features and what kind of new software development opportunities the team had in mind."

13. An all-star panel called 'Evolving Game Design: Today and Tomorrow, Eastern and Western Game Design" features Fallout 3's Emil Pagliarulo alongside ICO/Shadow Of The Colossus' Fumito Ueda and No More Heroes' Suda51 talking about trends and the future in open-world game design.

14. Game design veteran Ken Rolston (Oblivion), currently at Big Huge Games, presents 'Vast Narratives and Open Worlds, Part Deux -- Big Huge Problems' alongside Mark Nelson, discussing "new approaches taken on the speakers' current open-world RPG."

15. Harmonix's Dan Teasdale rocks out with 'Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap: Design Lessons Learned from Rock Band, discussing the series and why "yearly sequels and design innovation arguably don't mix", but the Boston-based team has strived to accomplish this.

16. Discussing Volition's Saints Row 2, Scott Phillips presents 'Breathing LIFE into an Open World', in which attendees "will learn about the inspiration, organization, methodology, successes and failures of the LIFE system used to add life to the open world city of Stilwater."

17. As recently highlighted, the latest iteration of the Eric Zimmerman-organized Game Design Challenge is 'The Game Design Challenge: My First Time', with Portal's Kim Swift, Habbo's Sulka Haro and Infocom veteran Steve Meretzky all participating in a challenge to create "a concept that brings together two unexplored themes for games: sex and autobiography."

18. The fourth in a popular and long-running GDC lecture series, 'Game Studies Download 4.0' sees : Ian Bogost, Jane McGonigal, and Mia Consalvo present "the 10 most surprising and relevant [academic] insights for game designers and developers" published this year.

19. Maxis' Caryl Shaw will talk about 'Spore: Fulfilling the Massively-Single Player Promise - How'd We Do?', covering "the specifics of working with the community-created content in Spore during the first six months after ship."

20. EA Montreal creative director Alex Hutchinson discusses 'Making Friends is Hard: Social Mechanics in Contemporary Design', which will "survey social mechanics between player avatars and simulated characters in several recent titles", including games like The Sims 2 which Hutchinson worked on.

There are multitude of other notable lectures in the GDC 2009 Design Track, among them 'Valve's Approach to Playtesting: the Application of Empiricism' from the firm's Mike Ambinder, 'Paper Prototypes Of Spore from Stone Librande, Naughy Dog and Big Red Button design guru E. Daniel Arey on 'Master Metrics: The Science Behind the Art of Game Design', and writer and design Ian Bogost on 'Learning From The Atari 2600'.

We'll be previewing other tracks from the 2009 Game Developers Conference, held in San Francisco's Moscone Center from March 23rd-27th, all of this week. (For those overwhelmed by choice, every single GDC 2009 lecture is being recorded for the GDC Vault, with some free lectures available, and GDC 2009 All-Access Pass holders getting access to video and slides from every single lecture this year.)

For more information on Game Developers Conference 2009 track schedules and registration, please visit the official GDC 2009 website.

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

GameSetNetwork: Best Of The Week

So hopefully you won't be tiring of these cross-posted roundups (look for some GameSetWatch changes and enhancements after GDC which should space 'em out, yay!), but we're ever-expanding Gamasutra coverage after our redesign, yay.

Here's the most notable new features of the week, including an excellent Alex Evans/Media Molecule interview from Brandon Sheffield, our Games Of 2020 winners, the history of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, some neat magazine column reprints on audio and art, and lots more.

Here's the week's highlights:

LittleBigGalaxy? Alex Evans On What's Next For Media Molecule
"LittleBigPlanet co-creator Alex Evans has a multitude of fascinating opinions on development, game criticism, and where his company is going next, all showcased in this in-depth Gamasutra interview."

Game Artists: The Three Cardinal Rules
"What guidelines do video game artists need to follow to succeed? Volition manager Self-Ballard draws from his experience to suggest three key traits of the best game art creators."

Gameplay Fundamentals: The Identity Crisis in the Racing Genre
"In this design article, veteran EA, Radical and THQ designer Mike Lopez looks at the make-up of the racing game genre, asking what factors truly differentiate one title from another, and how we can communicate them effectively to players."

The History of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater: Ollies, Grabs, and Grinds
"In a detailed historical article, Loguidice and Barton chart the $1 billion skating game franchise's genesis and evolution, from its antecedents to the present day."

Ahead of the Curve
"In this specialized audio article, LucasArts' Harlin discusses crossfading and shaping for good music edits."

Can You Create A Must-Have Wii Game?
"What are consumers looking for in Wii games? Producers from Ubisoft and Midway and analyst Michael Pachter weigh in on making a successful Wii title, from developer choice to box art and beyond."

Games Of 2020 - The Winners
"What will games be like in the year 2020? Gamasutra's competition gave away 20 GDC All-Access Passes and had more than 150 excellent entries -- here are the winning essays."

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

March 15, 2009

The Game Anthropologist: 'Shoryuken! How SFIV Made Its Niche More Mainstream'

[The 'Game Anthropologist' is Michael Walbridge's GameSetWatch-exclusive column about communities built around gaming. This week features the real life adventure of going to a complete stranger's house just to find a challenge in Street Fighter IV.]

Recently I found myself going to a stranger’s house to play video games with a bunch of other strangers. No one knowing anyone. This is not a typical occurrence, not even for someone who writes about the way gamers organize themselves, but here it happened.

I really think there’s only one kind of digital game that has that intense of a driving force to make a bunch of awkward nerds come out of their crawling places to meet someone, anyone who will play the game they play.

Fighting games, especially Street Fighter, have the peculiar property of turning its most devoted players into the subject material, and I say this with all seriousness. Pokemon fanatics might actually strategize like some of the characters, but they don’t spend their lives like the characters or Pokemon.

Those who admire science fiction and fantasy characters are often subject to ridicule because they don’t know how little they resemble the characters when they imitate them. But fighting game fans become like the characters: glory is important, and they do anything to find a good fight.

Even the strategy guide by Prima has tiers, notes on competition and how seriously to take online play. “There will be many occasions when you’ll face a well-known Street Fighter player in online combat. If you beat this player, even if you didn’t abuse online tactics, it’s almost guaranteed that the outcome will be very different if you played this person at a major offline tournament,” the strategy guide chides. References to EVO and Devastate follow.

There is no game love deeper than the love given to fighting games. This is the only genre of digital games for which people will travel long distances in order to play others. Even though you can play fighting games online now, the old memories of arcades and neighborhood friends doesn’t die. Plus, in the mind of competitive players, the lag affects the action much more than it would even an FPS.

This is why, even though we can now have each other’s GamerTags, we will travel across counties and go to strangers houses just to play other people at a game. If you play Street Fighter enough you become a street fighter of sorts, complete with the grudges, friendly rivalries, an earnest desire to prove one’s worth, and a desire to achieve glory amongst one’s peers.

Even the way the game plays—the difficulty of the moveset, the ability to execute them all in practice but rarely able to execute them all on command at a moment’s notice (and even then, there is always a challenge awaiting); all of it turns the players into street fighters; people who take incredible beatings on a frequent basis but don’t actually get hurt, people who are always looking for a fight, usually of the friendly sort.

This diaspora of player-traveler-fighters has always existed; the EVO tournament has been around for years, and the forum at Shoryuken.com have regional sections so people can find their local scene. Even Salt Lake has had one for a long time.

Some people went way back. Someone commented on what looked like a new poster: “Konqrr...dude. YES! I'm glad that you're back. I'm guessing that you never left, though. Guys, this is quality people right here. He used to play up at Trolley Square when they had a scene...early 2000's? Late 90's? Anyway, when I got active with Tekken, he'd travel from Tooele to be a part of things. Good, good times.”

At the stranger’s house, it turned out to be only partly a stranger; HadoukenMD was my high-school valedictorian, now a doctor. The only other two of about five or six who said they’d show up had driven over 30 miles. They’re twins.

“We’re triplets,” they tell me and HadoukenMD. “The third one has a girlfriend, so he doesn’t really play so much anymore. But his favorite is Zangief too. All three of us love Zangief.” After they leave, me and Hadouken catch up.

“Well, I get out almost every night off with the guys at the hospital,” he tells me. “But none of them game—they don’t get it. I miss Street Fighter. I’ve been itching to play it again,” he tells me. “I know how you feel,” I say.

There’s another meetup soon after. Lured perhaps by the reports on the Utah thread that HadoukenMD is not crazy or weird and also gives free pizza, the twins brought another friend from the adjacent county while four others in Salt Lake showed up. The mix was curious: the two youngest were highly quiet brothers that mostly played Smash Bros. but were interested in trying something new; another fellow with the most expensive stick looked like Chuck Klosterman, only with darker hair.

He casually mentioned a Street Fighter IV podcast. I thought, “listening to a podcast about something proves you care a lot.” He tells me to go to Gootecks.com. Another guy is young and only vaguely gamerish: he doesn’t seem to try very hard or take it very seriously but is highly talented and versatile. Lastly, there’s a 30-year-old father of two children who has been out of the loop but is so interested he travelled with the two triplets. He now wants to organize a tournament.

Talk was typical and masculine, but it mostly focused on all things Street Fighter: characters, experiences, EVO (“You going this year? We can carpool”), 360 vs. PS3, Street Fighter III, our schedules, and of course the pricing, differences, and preferences of arcade sticks. Plenty of matches were played. Only two people can play, but it’s so fun to watch and analyze that no one seemed to mind waiting his turn.

I’ve seen HadoukenMD three times already, and there are even more people to meet and play. Meetups seem like they will be occurring frequently in the future and perhaps for a very, very long time.

Posted by Mike Walbridge at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Best Of Indie Games: Catch! But Don't Look Back

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

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

The goodies in this edition include two music rhythm games, a stitching simulator from an IGF finalist, a challenging platformer from the developer of Pathways, an intense arena shooter with plenty of enemies to shoot at, and finally a new puzzler from the creator of (I Fell in Love With) The Majesty of Colors.

Game Pick: 'Music Catch 2' (Reflexive Games, browser)
"A simple browser game which asks the player to catch notes with their mouse. Reflexive Games have taken a great concept and improved on it in this sequel, adding a host of beautiful arrangements to listen to and making the game look and play a lot nicer."

Game Pick: 'Sew 'Em Up' (Kian Bashiri, freeware)
"A stitching simulator with an arcade feel to it, created by the developer of IGF finalist You Have to Burn the Rope. The game is surprisingly relaxing to play, and your performance is rated by the amount of thread used to stitch all the patterns."

Game Pick: 'Death vs. Monstars' (GameReclaim, browser)
"A Geometry Wars style blaster containing such gimmicks as 'Berserk Mode' and 'Bullet Time', plus it's great fun. The game even has a Boss battle to deal with at the end which is pretty challenging."

Game Pick: 'Raycatcher' (Thinking Studios, commercial indie - demo available)
"A unique offering from the fledgling development team which demands quick reactions and a sturdy music collection. Utilizing the ability to import all your musical purchases into the game, each song is transformed into an array of rays which must be caught appropriately. It's a simple premise and, for the most part, is pulled off fashionably."

Game Pick: 'Don't Look Back' (Terry Cavanagh, browser)
"Don't Look Back is a challenging platformer with quite an evil side. Everything from the dark visuals to the atmospheric soundtrack set the scene perfectly, and it has all the elements you'd expect from a platformer - pitfalls, speedy baddies and big boss fights."

Game Pick: 'Exploit' (Gregory Weir, browser)
"Exploit is a puzzler about terrorism through hacking. By using ports to fire packets of data, the objective of the game is to break the code and access the root node. It's a great little brain teaser which very early on feels extremely complicated, yet once the solution has been identified, it exposes itself as actually quite a simple set-up which makes you feel rather clever from figuring it out."

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

Interview: Namco Bandai's Iwai Talks Tricky Topics In Western Markets

[Another one of those Brandon Sheffield interviews for big sis site Gamasutra that I think show humor, insight, and general readability, thus the GSW reprint, he gets Namco's Makoto Iwai to open up about the company's plans for the West.]

Like many of its fellow long-standing Japanese publishers, veteran creator Namco Bandai is making a concentrated push for Western markets -- and Makoto Iwai, EVP and COO of the company's American operations, admits peers like Sega and Capcom are "a little bit ahead" in that respect.

But Iwai's entering the fight swinging, promising to get ahead before long, and in this frank discussion, he talks about the company's new Western-focused Surge label, the disappointing reception for Afro Samurai, the tricky situation with Bottlerocket and Splatterhouse, and what it'll take to get ahead in the U.S:

What was the decision behind making Surge as kind of a new publishing brand?

Makoto Iwai: There was always a discussion internally - I don't know how you describe our company logo, but some people describe it as a pig logo; it's not the official way of describing it (laughs).

So, under the Namco Bandai logo, we'll be releasing Tamagotchi, Naruto, or one of the lower teen or high teen [titles]. And now we're releasing some more M-rated games, which we believe are more appealing to Western audiences.

There was a question, like, "Can we just keep releasing mixed genres under one company logo?" This is expressed the sort of interlocking logos of Namco and Bandai, which we currently use.

Bandai is a toy business. One of the philosophies that the founders had in the past, and still have, is that there should be no violence, no blood, no sex -- that kind of thing.

Some people were worried, even myself, with trying to create Afro Samurai and saying that this is one of the ways we should take to be successful. So, we tried to come up with something new as a label. Of course, before reaching towards Surge, we tried to do some enhanced Namco logo, for instance. You know, 3D, or a black label even.

Then again, Namco is a well respected IP, and attached to the memories of Mr. [Masaya] Nakamura. I've been trying to get like a Namco black label; I thought it was cool, and Namco is well known to begin with. But it can't happen because not many people are willing to talk about it to Nakamura-san face-to-face.

You know, he's retiring. So, to show some respect, we don't want to disrupt his process. And there was a deadline that we needed to come up with because Afro Samurai's release was around the corner.

So, we came up with several ideas, but after research, not many of them were available. So, we ended up with Surge. To sort of sum it up, we wanted to promote it as a new brand to represent us and our U.S.-developed titles. That was the idea.

How have you felt about Afro Samurai's performance so far?

MI: The team did a great job with the limited amount of time, which allowed them to make improvements up to the last moment. But again, this is the very first internal project that we have started as a newly born Namco Bandai Games America. And, of course, there are many things that happened [bad and good].

And, so, the result is that it's not really a 100 percent achievement, but it's still receiving repeat orders. I was not really happy to see some brutal reviews. At the same time, I was happy to see the reviews from the end users who really actually played the game.

I knew those kinds of licensed products always -- just because it's licensed, the review gets lower, it's a tendency. Everybody has that sort of prejudice about licensed products. We knew it, and we tried to make a change. Well, it's working in some way.

Can you talk a little bit about Bottlerocket and Splatterhouse, and how that went?

MI: So, basically, the only reason why publishers pull the project out from the developer is when the developer isn't really meeting the requirements. So, unfortunately, this was the case.

I have to be very careful so we don't make any direct comment on it because whatever we say, people will try to be on the developer side. You know, "The developer is an independent developer trying hard, and evil publishers are trying to get rid of the business by doing whatever they feel like."

That's not the case. I just want to be 100 percent clear. There was a performance issue.

How do you make sure your U.S.-developed games still retain the Namco Bandai flavor to them?

MI: Good question. It's kind of like the Wii. I'd like to change the people's perception of Namco Bandai. In the past, people never thought about Namco Bandai releasing bloody games, for instance.

But why not, if there's a market? Why don't we just make a zombie game, for instance? --Though that doesn't mean we're making one! (laughs)

But every company has got some sort of corporate image created internally or by outside people. I just want to change it, because we don't want to rely just on the good old franchises anymore. Rather than having those big franchises, and revitalize them... We'd like to create a new idea.

So it's not too important to you that the new games have kind of a Namco Bandai feeling to them so long as they're good? Is that kind of what you mean?

MI: Yeah.

One thing that someone was complaining to me about [at DICE] is when Japanese companies still send very, very Japanese executives to come and run the studios in the U.S. More companies are trying to move toward getting people who actually have some experience in the West. What is your perception of that? I feel you're doing a good job, based on what I've seen.

MI: Thank you. Let's keep it that way! You might view these sorts of organization changes in line with the changes happening in Japan, but it's going more in a positive direction, I think. People in Japan want to communicate more, so they start coming [to the West].

We have global meetings internally, share ideas, criticize each other, try to streamline and make uniform the process and terminology as well. But if you take a term like "Vertical slice" - their definition [in Japan] and our definition are different. "High concept" - what is that?

Even a number of my people, local American people, their definitions can be different from each other.

That can be difficult with job titles, because we don't have a "planner" in the U.S., though that's a common Japanese game job, and a director in Japan actually means something very different than what it means here.

MI: That's true, that's true. But again, the important thing is trying to understand how different the development approaches are. We're doing that, too.

Then there's a tech meeting, where only those engineers get together, exchanging information, and talking about the glossary and stuff. It's happening for us now, which is good, because it never happened before.

I believe all Japanese companies are trying to go to the Western market. We are not the only one. Capcom and Sega -- let's be honest, they are a few steps ahead of us, maybe. But I'm sure we'll catch up, and we'll be ahead of them in the near future.

Oh yeah? You think you can get ahead of Capcom? That's the toughest one.

MI: Ah, we will be.

I'm going to hold you to that.

MI: Okay, we'll try!

What do you think is the best philosophy for bringing stuff to the Western market? A lot of companies seem to be approaching it in a less-progressive way -- [Jun Takeuchi] said in his DICE talk, 'if we put an actor in it that many people know, then it will sell,' and that's what it takes. To you, what is the best way to tackle the Western market?

MI: Well actually, the company needs to have the eyes and ears for specific market demands. That's something where we can't rely on Japanese people.

You need to have a willingness to listen to local people [in Western markets]. They have to be good people who can talk about markets and end-users. More communication, more delegation. I think those will be key.

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

March 14, 2009

Opinion: How Indie Video Games Helped Bridge The Culture Gap

[How is the rise of independent video games accelerating the cultural integration of the medium? In this opinion piece, IGF chairman and publisher/journalist Simon Carless looks at why equal coverage for indie games in the independent media is a big deal.]

The evolution of all forms of creative culture inevitably means the establishment of an initial niche, and a gradual leaking out of that medium until it permeates popular knowledge, almost without notice. And clearly, we're quite a long way down that path with video games.

But the fact that we're ever speeding towards our destination was brought home to me by Paste Magazine's latest print issue which I just got in the mail today, and seeing alternative game coverage so seamlessly integrated with talk about music and film.

As Gus Mastrapa recently Twittered, "My Spelunky review is in the new Paste (March/April). Thanks Jason [Killingsworth] and co. for dedicating an entire page (!) to a single indie game."

And this does feel like a big deal to me, too, because it's an adult discussion of how games are "one of the few means of expression that improve under constant, obsessive iterations" and an analysis of Derek Yu's clever Rogue-like platformer, all sandwiched between ads for the Sasquatch Music Festival and The Watson Twins' new album.

Even more notably, the 'Emergent' section highlighting interesting creators in this issue of Paste has a piece on Weapon Of Choice's Nathan Fouts, talking to the ex-Insomniac developer and Xbox Live Community Games creator about his deranged doodle of an action game, just next to a profile of alt.country singer Justin Townes Earle.

Another good example of this kind of crossover online - with some of the writers actually involved - is The Onion A.V. Club's game section. The site varies coverage of interactive fiction and indie game obscurity Cloudphobia with mainstream titles, all alongside a variety of independent music and film coverage.

What I'm trying to say here is that video games do finally seem to be developing a breadth of tone and criticism - and not just a breadth of conceptual genre. This allows mature discussion of them alongside other forms of expression that have been around for much longer.

On the other hand, there are still plenty of barriers to further evolution. There are intelligent mainstream magazines like Entertainment Weekly, which actually does an excellent job in cult and offbeat books, TV, DVD, movies, and even theater - but largely ignores video games (there's no category for it on the EW website, even).

In EW, games do get reviewed every month or so, but largely mainstream titles like Grand Theft Auto IV - and without the kind of profiles of independent creators or looks at alternative game styles that Paste Magazine or The Onion AV Club is helping to bring forth.

Other respected outlets do cover game and game creators on occasion, and I do think this is happening more and more often. For example, Will Wright's profile in the New Yorker was encouraging, even if Cliff Bleszinski's felt a little pitchy.

In particular, the featuring of auteur-style game designers in creative arts lists is on the increase (see Esquire's Jason Rohrer piece and Creativity Magazine's Top 50 for 2009 with Jon Blow, the Area/Code folks and the LittleBigPlanet chaps.)

Of course, I'm aware that there are ever-increasing amounts of game bloggers and sites that have a mature, culturally aware approach to game discussion. But a telling measure of games' integration is when there's seamless and thoughtful discussion of the medium in the same breath as music and film.

Now that this evolution of nuance is happening, we're moving inexorably away from the token one page 'pre-reviews' of the most obvious titles that have been sneaking into mainstream media in recent years. And things can only get more interesting from here on out.

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

Round-Up: Gamasutra Network Jobs, Week Of March 13

In this round-up, we highlight some of the notable jobs posted in big sister site Gamasutra's industry-leading game jobs section this week, including positions from Capcom, Volition, Monolith 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

Monolith Productions: Sr. Software Engineer, Animation Systems
"Join the award winning technology team behind the F.E.A.R., Condemned and Project Origin game franchises. Work closely with engineers, designers, and artists on building the cutting-edge technology powering the development of Monolith's next generation of console and PC games. This position provides the unique opportunity to bring our award winning AI and characters to life through new and innovative animation systems."

Capcom: Senior Product Marketing Manager
"This position will manage and lead the development, planning and execution of marketing and promotional product marketing campaigns. Will develop brand and product strategies, managed focused market research to analyze market demands and opportunities for assigned products."

Radical Entertainment: Senior Level Designer
"Working with a team to develop and establish both the conceptual and detailed elements of the game vision, the Level Designer is first and foremost a creative visionary. The incumbent’s experience in creative development will ensure the construction of compelling worlds and characters, while his or her interactive design experience and knowledge of gameplay will help achieve a successful top-selling game."

Volition: Senior Visual Effects Artist
"We have an idea for a game where things explode. There's fire and smoke all billowing and you're like 'Nooo, the humanity!1!' But THEN: gentle rain drops. Cascading down from the heavens, they jounce lightly off the pavement, seem to hover for just a moment, then gravity wrests them from the air and they vanish into the quivering pools that gather by your feet. Is it rain, or is it in fact your TEARS? That is really the eternal FX art question, isn't it. Anyways. Can you make those things? "

WorldsInMotion - Online Games

Tencent Boston: Senior Producer
"Tencent Boston is an exciting new start-up with a focus on creating top quality online games. We are a division of Tencent Inc., one of the largest internet companies in China. For more than 350 million people, Tencent is the internet, encompassing portal, shopping, community, and entertainment services. We are right in the middle of one of the most dynamic and fast growing game markets in the world and our mission is to create large scale, free to play, online games for this market both in China and worldwide."

NetDevil: Sr. Programmer
"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 architecture, system design and integration. Additionally, this role requires interfacing with other parties involved in MMO development including operations, deployment and publishing teams."

GamesOnDeck - Mobile Games

Namco Networks America: Mobile Games Designers
"Namco Networks America is looking for experienced game designers with the desire to create games for the ever-expanding mobile market. 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."

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)

GDC 2009 Additions Include Ono, Journo-To-Designer Panel, Interaction Innovations

[I checked in with my colleagues who organize Game Developers Conference in SF, and they pointed out that they're still adding some awesome lectures for GDC 2009 later this month, despite this late stage - so thought we'd highlight another three that just got put on the schedule.]

Organizers of this month's Game Developers Conference have revealed notable, late-breaking new talks from Capcom' Yoshinori Ono on Street Fighter IV, MIT's David Merrill on new forms of interaction, and a panel of journalists-turned-developers on crossing over to another side of the industry.

Street Fighter IV producer Yoshinori Ono will present a talk called "IV Style: Returning to the Roots of a Fighting Game Classic," discussing how the Capcom team approached the design and development process of the anticipating fighting game -- and promising "a rare behind-the-scenes glimpse into the inner workings of Japanese development."

Also confirmed is "Physical Play: Siftables and Other New Forms and Formats for Interaction, Collaboration and Creativity" from David Merrill of the MIT Media Lab, who will be showcasing his innovative 'Siftables' technology, "cookie-sized, computerized tiles you can stack and shuffle in your hands."

Over his entire lecture, Merrill will give an overview of his work "building new systems for physical, collaborative and multimodal interaction with digital content," asking the question, "What opportunities will arise from systems that make digital interaction more physical and less screen-based?"

Finally, a panel of one game journalist and five journalists-turned-game-developers, including Insomniac's Bryan Intihar, Bungie's Luke Smith, 2K Games' Jason Bergman and Capcom's Kraig Kujawa will present "But What I Really Want to Do is Make Games," relating their experiences in radically changing their job descriptions within the industry.

Game Developers Conference 2009 takes place at the Moscone Center from March 23rd to 27th, and more information on the event and registration is available at the official GDC website.

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

Road To The IGF: Nicalis Duo Talk Night Game

[Continuing our series of interviews with the 2009 Independent Games Festival finalists, Eric Caoili talks to Nicalis' Nicklas Nygren and producer Tyrone Rodriguez about Night Game -- a physics-based ambient action puzzler nominated for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize and the Excellence in Design awards.]

Nicklas "Nifflas" Nygren gained a strong fan following with his indie games Within A Deep Forest and Knytt, and IGF title Night Game marks his first WiiWare effort.

He's known for an innovative, dreamlike style backed by soft skies, detailed sprites, and ambient music and sound he usually composes entirely himself -- Night Game gets musical aid from Chris Schlarb, of Twilight and Ghost Stories and experimental jazz duo I Heart Lung.

Night Game also differentiates itself strongly from Nygren's previous work with a strong silhouette style outlined against vivid sunsets and surreal backdrops. He's working on it alongside a Wii port of Pixel's Cave Story, and ahead of the 2009 Independent Games Festival, We spoke to Nygren and producer Tyrone Rodriguez to get details on both projects:

What kind of background do you have making games?

Nicklas Nygren: I've spent a long time attempting to develop games, and when I learned how to complete them (which by the way takes many years) started to release games on a more or less regular basis.

Tyrone Rodriguez: Unlike Nicklas, I didn't really have a chance to make my own games. In the past, I've worked at publishers or developers that have created games for various platforms like the Genesis, SNES, PlayStation, Dreamcast, PlayStation 2 and GameCube.

When did you start working on Night Game? Have you been developing it alongside with your Cave Story Wii port?

NN: I started out conceptualizing Night Game quickly after Knytt Stories was released. Development on Night Game actually started in late '07 and began before we started porting Cave Story.

TR: We have since been developing them side-by-side. However, as Night Game is 100-percent original, it has taken longer than Cave Story.

What challenges have you found developing the two titles at the same time?

TR: On my end, it's primarily about how we handle bandwidth. Where the development of one game advances the other one might face some technical issues or bugs. But in a way, this has been almost helpful because we're able to move between the two.

NN: For Night Game, I made all the game design related choices, and designed the graphics, most levels, and sound. For Cave Story, I've helped out with music related things and a tiny bit of art.

I've been working with Yann van Der Cruyssen on the audio. I loved his revised Cave Story soundtrack, but knew it wasn't going to work with a cheap sounding standard general midi soundbank, so I pushed for creating our own soundbank, and helped Yann out a lot in this process.

He carried the heavy load, of course -- he both created the revised soundtrack and assigned new sounds to the songs, but I've created a large amount of those sounds as well.

What tools or lessons were you able to share between the two titles?

NN: For me, maybe just Photoshop. On Cave Story, I used AWave Studio, and a whole bunch of VST plugins for sound generation. We used a lot of sounds from GXSCC which is a really neat GM compatible chip synthesizer and I did all the work on my faithful laptop, the Sprünkelbox, a HP6820s with an extremely slimmed (nlite'd) version of Windows XP and all the bloated HP drivers on top on that to ensure the computer doesn't run too fast.

TR: Aside from some Adobe tools and the Nintendo SDK these have been very different projects. But even though they're each unique, they have both benefited from being on the same console, so we've been able to use a lot of tech on the SDK side to tie either game into Wii functionality such as the Wii Remote or even something as simple as the Home Menu.

Will Night Game see a release before Cave Story? Nintendo noticeably left Cave Story out of its recent list of upcoming spring releases.

TR: No, Night Game is due to be complete after Cave Story. Cave Story is pretty close to complete and we're shooting to wrap up it up really soon, in April. Night Game to follow later in the summer.

How was Night Game conceived -- what led you to create a physics-focused action/puzzler, and why did you decide on this silhouetted presentation?

NN: I've always liked games like Marble Madness, Ballance, Super Monkey Ball, Marble Blast Gold, Switchball, Hamster Ball, and well, you get the idea. I've since long had a vision to create such a game, but I got started when I realized I could go for a 2D take on the concept.

I didn't think that much at all when I decided to go for the silhouetted look, I just thought it looked good, created a few rooms with that look, and couldn't see a reason to change it.

Are there any specific games or other media that helped inspire Night Game or its mechanics?

NN: As I mentioned, there's that long list of games that I've been inspired by. Graphically, I don't know a specific source of inspiration, but there are plenty of "black silhouette on gradient background" games, so I must obviously have been inspired by a few of those.

Night Game is the final title? How did you decide on that?

NN: Night Game isn't the final title. I'm just not very good with titles, and it is important that a game really have a title that fits! It has to take its while, in other words. I'm still open to suggestions, but the G in the word "Night" blends so nicely into "Game" if it's written on two rows with a decreased line height with the font the game title is supposed to be written in :)

TR: As Nicklas said, Night Game is the sort of codename for the title and not its final name. We've been kicking names back and forth between us now for over a year.

When and why did you decide to make Night Game exclusive to WiiWare?

NN: I've always wanted there to be a PC build of NG, since many of my fans have been waiting for this game. I however respect Tyrone's decision here.

TR: Unknown to probably most people who have seem screens or the initial trailer for NG is that we've actually approached Nintendo very early on. They've been great to work with and have been very helpful during the development of Night Game and Cave Story.

Many have complained about the lack of original, quality releases from third-party studios. What's your opinion on the current WiiWare market?

TR: I think WiiWare is doing well for being such a young service. Big publishers are taking notice and creating games. Look at the money Hudson is putting into it with games. That alone speaks well for WiiWare.

But I'm not sure I agree with complaints regarding the lack of originality in games. Original games don't always sell enough to be considered worthwhile investments for publishers or developers so it's a tough situation.

Nintendo's Tom Prata recently stressed the need for the company to better support and provide resources to WiiWare developers. Have you benefited from this renewed focus?

TR: I'd say so. From what I can see, both Tom Prata and Dan Adelman have put a lot of effort into advancing WiiWare as a well-supported service for developers.

Nintendo maintains a website and support group specifically for developers. The site regularly updated and the company provides all the tools needed to get up and running from that location. Other things developer's summits seem to be more than just one-off, now becoming annual events--there's one this month in LA and another in Europe, too.

Nintendo's support group is also pretty quick at helping developers with technical issues on a regular basis.

What sort of adjustments have you had to make in your release strategy for WiiWare, as opposed to your typical plans when releasing to PC?

NN: I don't think I've really changed that much. I started out with Night Game as my own little personal project, and kept developing it the way I would have liked it to be for PC--although we decided that the game should have more levels than in the initial plan.

I also had to change the key layout a little bit to work with the Wii remote, but it resulted in an improvement that would have been an advantage even on a PC version.

How has the move to WiiWare affected your budget, compared to releasing indie PC games?

TR: The budget has definitely increased when compared to the original concept. Things like dev kits, copyrights and dealing with the ESRB wouldn't be required if this were a straight PC release. The scope has increased incredibly, where initially the game might have only been three or four levels it's about four times that now.

Why did you pick WiiWare over other platforms, such as PSN and XBLA, for this particular project? Have you explored releasing any other future titles through those services?

NN: When I was contacted by Kevin at GoNintendo who got me in touch with Tyrone, he was discussing developing for the Wii so it was sort of natural to stick to that console. I have nothing against PSN or XBLA, and would love to release games through those services, too.

TR: The game was designed with NTSC-like resolution and we have a strong concept making it ideal for WiiWare. We have a few other concepts that would actually be perfect for PSN or XBLA. We'd really like to explore those services as well.

What sort of development tools did you use for Night Game?

NN: I used Multimedia Fusion 2 to create the initial draft engine of the game, and the tool which we use to develop it's levels. The final engine itself is created in C using the Wii's hardware and software development kit.

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

NN: I would have written the level format very differently, now I know how to do it right, but I didn't when I started with NG. The final product would still end up being the same thing, I am really happy about how it turned out despite that I had to fix some more mistakes than I'd have to now.

TR: I agree with Nicklas, I think the external level format presents a challenge, but the game is thus far what we wanted it to be.

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

NN: It's awesome right now! There are lots of tools to develop in and all the consoles have network for games by smaller authors and studios. The hardware is becoming so powerful that the large companies are moving to huge sophisticated projects involving tons of programmers, animators, voice actors, modelers, and so on.

While more people get interested in gaming, a lot of people want those simpler 2D games too, like they used to be before. This has left a large hole that indie developers and small companies can fill!

TR: Yes, it is pretty awesome right now. There are so many opportunities and tools for would-be and veteran indie developers to utilize. Ten years ago tools were nowhere near where they are today, making it much easier to build a game, even if you're not a programmer.

What I admire right now? I just played a game called The Linear RPG -- it was cool, reminded me of a totally unrelated game called Vib-Ribbon. Legend of Princess and Snapshot are both pretty neat, too.

Many have wondered if Nicalis' attention to WiiWare could signal an eventual port of the Knytt series to the platform. Your thoughts?

NN: I like the idea of porting my previous games to consoles! At the moment we're focusing on the current projects, though.

TR: Well said.

Do you plan to work with [Cave Story creator] Daisuke Amaya on any other future projects?

TR: We'd love to. His understanding of design and art is so well-matched. Plus he's a great guy, I think he deserves to have more people play his games. He's working on a new project right now, but I have a feeling it'll be a couple of years before anyone sees that one--it looks pretty cool so far though.

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

March 13, 2009

Game Developer Magazine Gets 5 Maggie Nominations

[Delighted to announce that our very own Game Developer magazine has been nominated for a bunch of Maggie Awards - congrats to EIC Brandon Sheffield, editor Jeff Fleming and Cliff Scorso and the other art staff on the honor. Here's the details...]

GameSetWatch sister publication Game Developer magazine has been honored with 5 nominations to the prestigious 2009 Maggie Awards, including Best Technology Trade Magazine and Best Digital Edition.

Other nominations for Game Developer at the long-running magazine awards include one for its game postmortems of Call Of Duty 4 and Rock Band, as part of the Best Article Series category for trade magazines.

In addition, an article on creating ragdoll physics on the Nintendo DS was nominated for Best How-To Article in trade publications, and the Rock Band postmortem was nominated for Best Color Editorial Layout for trade publications.

The Western Publications Association (WPA), the creator of the Maggie Awards, is a non-profit association working to advance the business of print and online magazines in the western United States, and has been operating for more than 50 years.

The full list of nominated categories for Game Developer are as follows:

Computers/Software, Technology, Training & Program Development/Trade
-- Elearning! - February
-- Game Developer - February
-- Oracle - Jul/Aug
-- RTC - February
-- Tech & Learning - October

Digital Edition Magazine/Trade & Consumer
-- Game Developer - October
-- Launch Magazine - Summer
-- Massage & Bodywork - Nov/Dec
-- Personal Development - December
-- The Costco Connection Online Edition - December
-- URBiZ - November

Best Series of Articles/Trade
-- Buildings (Feb, Jul) - Energy Management Series
-- Elearning! (Jan/Apr/Jun/Sep) - Learning Leaders: Innovation
-- Game Developer (Mar, May, Jun/Jul) - Postmortem: Call of Duty 4, Rock Band
-- Insurance Journal (Various issues) - AIG Series
-- Pharmaceutical & Medical Packaging News (Various issues) - Reducing Risk Series
-- Police (Jan-Dec) - The State of American Law
-- Roast (Jan/Feb, Mar/Apr) - Blending for Italian Espresso

Best How-To Article/Trade
-- Buildings (January) - Succession Planning: How to Prepare Tomorrow’s Leaders
-- Game Developer (September) - Ragdoll Physics on the DS
-- NAILS (May) - Just Like You Picture It
-- Oracle (May/Jun) - Accelerating Data Warehouses
-- Public Safety Communications (April) - Seed Money: 10 Keys to Successful Grant Writing
-- Tech & Learning (May) - Making Students Info Literate

Best Color Editorial Layout/Trade
-- Beauty LaunchPad (July) - Through the Grapevine
-- emmy (June) - The Spotlight Serves Her Right
-- emmy (August) - Let’s Do Lunch
-- Game Developer (May) - Postmortem: Harmonix’s Rock Band
-- Nailpro (June) - Art Attack
-- Scotsman Guide, Commercial Edition (October) - 8 Creative Financing Methods (and How to Find Them)

The results of the 58th Annual Maggie awards will be announced at an April 24th ceremony in Los Angeles, held as part of the the WPA Publishing Conference in the same location.

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

Best Of Gamasutra Expert Blogs: From Used Games To Fallout Thoughts

[Following the Gamasutra relaunch, we're continuing to highlight some of the awesome Expert Blog posts from the relaunched site (there's an expert-specific RSS feed now!), and here's Chris Remo's picks for the best of the last week.]

In our weekly Best of Expert Blogs column, we showcase notable pieces of writing from members of the game development community who maintain Expert Blogs on Gamasutra.

Member Blogs -- also highlighted weekly -- can be maintained by any registered Gamasutra user, while the invitation-only Expert Blogs are written by development professionals with a wealth of experience to share.

We hope that both sections can provide useful and interesting viewpoints on our industry. For more information about the blogs, check out the official posting guidelines.

This Week's Standout Expert Blogs

Imperishable Night: Easier challenge means more adrenaline?
(Michael Molinari)

In one of a number of blog posts focusing on the methods and minutia of shoot-em-ups, animation student Michael Molinari hones in on Team Shanghai Alice's Imperishable Night to reflect on how simple focus -- rather than overt challenge -- can sometimes result in heightened intensity for the player.

Co-op/social Dungeon Master: Left 4 Dead as a proof of concept
(Jason Schklar)

Where is the line between gameplay and content creation? The question has been explored in a number of recent games, and producer/designer/analyst Jason Schklar frames it through the lens of Valve's dynamic director-equipped Left 4 Dead.

A New Frothy Bubbling Of The Used-Game Stew
(Kim Pallister)

The GameStop-dominated used game market is the source of seemingly infinite discussion and argument in the industry -- but Intel Larrabee content director Kim Pallister argues that additional competition (i.e., removing the "GameStop-dominated" bit from the equation) could make the whole situation a lot better for everyone.

How to replace levels in MMOs?
(Brian "Psychochild" Green)

Arguably more than any other element, the concept of character levels is associated with the RPG genre, massively multiplayer or otherwise. But here, MMO consultant and Meridian 59 lead engineer Brian Green kicks off a discussion as to whether they are even necessary at all.

Fallout 3 And The Sixth Sense Of Time
(Ted Brown)

For a medium in which the speed of progression through a given title is largely up to the player, many games fail to properly evoke a sense of time, argues designer Ted Brown. With a high number of capital letters, he describes how Bethesda's Fallout 3 succeeds in that respect.

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

Column: 'Diamond in the Rough': And Now, The Conclusion

['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 returns to Alone in the Dark to get an enhanced perspective of Siren: Blood Curse and non-episodic episodic content.]

Episodic content is becoming less and less of a joke. It’s gone from being a way to make fun of Valve’s release schedule to a clever tool for developers looking to maintain interest in their titles long after release.

When it works, episodic content can create an interesting mix of video game and television sensibility. It allows customers to pay for their entertainment in relatively small installments, and make decisions regarding the quality of the product based on smaller (and cheaper) portions of the game.

What’s interesting about companies’ approaches to episodic content is how they are and aren’t engaging players’ notions of what “episodic content” means. It’s obvious that designers want us to anticipate the next installment of episodic content, just as they want us to appreciate the smaller, easily beatable portions of their game. What they don’t often capitalize on is the baggage that comes with the term “episodic.”

I am of course referring to TV shows, and the tropes and traditions they’ve created for themselves as they’ve evolved as an entertainment. I can’t be the only one who has memories of watching the first part of a two-part TV episode, realizing that I have to wait a whole week (or, God forbid, until the next season) for the conclusion. It’s incredibly vexing, but when you get that feeling of longing and frustration, you know that a show has its claws in deep.

Not Very Episodic, Actually
It’s truly mystifying then, when games produce a TV-like atmosphere, without the traditional TV wait-and-see moments. Alone in the Dark does this, and while it can be a puzzling decision at times, in the long run it’s a decision that makes sense.

In Alone in the Dark, the story follows Edward Carnby. As he tries to stop Central Park, New York City, and more from being destroyed by a malignant, supernatural force. The story itself may not be the newest thing under the sun, but the flavor that its presentation creates is definitely memorable.

As you aid Carnby in his struggle, the game is parceled into episodes, within larger chapters. Each episode can be fast-forwarded through (avoiding an annoying car chase, say), replayed, r even skipped, so long as you’ve unlocked the capability to do so. Admittedly, I can’t see a reason why you would want to skip any portion of a story-heavy game, but the option is there, and the ability to minutely control the level of a player’s involvement with a game should not be overlooked.

I was interested to notice that a lot of vicious reviews thought that this mechanic was good for only one thing: skipping most of the game. I’m not quite sure how writers arrived at this conclusion, because I saw it as a way to skip certain parts and come back to them, or replay very specific game segments to get achievements

Previously...
What Alone in the Dark does well is something that a lot of people disagree upon, but I enjoyed the absolutely wonderful feature, “last time on Alone in the Dark.” Now, survival horror and action adventure games aren’t normally the games that cause me to quickly forget their plots. That’s normally a pleasure I reserve for lengthy JRPGs. However, it’s unrealistic to assume that players will be rolling through this game without any hitches, in one or two sittings.

It’s reassuring and grounding to see a quick, well-cut recap of the recent events within the story, just so you have context for whatever corner of Central Park you’re presently scouring for clues. It’s not only helpful, but also extremely evocative of those two-part TV episodes I mentioned earlier. It sets the stage for the mood of whatever scene you’re re-entering. Instead of hopping right into the middle of the action, you are quickly but effectively primed for whatever situation you may find yourself in, grave or no.

Documentary TV Format Plus Ancient Curse Equals Siren
If Alone in the Dark is good at quickly preparing you for your return to the fight, Siren: Blood Curse does a great job of piquing your interest about the next installment. The game is even more minutely segmented than Alone in the Dark, with each chapter divided into a multitude of episodes. Most of them time, your perspective will change from episode to episode. At the end of one episode you’ll witness or trigger events that affect multiple characters, one or more of whom you’ll control in the next episode.

This lends the game an exciting level of tension and consequence: regardless of whether your temporary avatar survives the newest episode, there’s no guarantee that in trying to survive you’ll be doing the best thing for the rest of the PC’s. The “next time on” feature emphasizes this facet of the game’s tension. At the end of each chapter, you’ll be given a glimpse of the terror and possible death that awaits your companions or yourself.

This is obviously a device that finds special importance in Blood Curse. The multiple characters and narratives, combined with each character’s different abilities and limitations, are pretty confusing, especially as the game tries to find its footing early on. The cinema appended to each chapter, providing a brief, focused denouement to the episode’s events, is always just informative enough of what you can expect from the next stage. It doesn’t hurt that it always managed to pique my interest.

Of course, in the case of Blood Curse, it’s unclear why the developers released it in 12 separate downloadable chapters. Since all twelve episode were released simultaneously, it’s not as if the developers were releasing each chapter as it was finished. Likewise, as Alone in the Dark proved, it’s possible to release a completely traditional game from a purchasing and playing perspective, while still implementing the trappings of an episodic story. If Blood Curse had been released as one title, with its episodic window dressing and gimmicks intact, I would have enjoyed it just as much.

If Not Next Week, Why Not Right Now?
Alone in the Dark’s system may be structurally and practically different from Blood Curse’s but both games are intent on evoking the aura of TV shows, while avoiding the week long wait between episodes. This isn’t a problem for me: I enjoy the dramatic angles that these games’ pretensions to televised drama afford the narrative. I like the in medias res sensation that arises from the mantle of televised drama worn by both games.

Still, it’s a strange match for Alone in the Dark, when all is said and done. Like I mentioned previously, the game’s story is hardly longwinded enough or convoluted enough to really need such a mechanic. Furthermore, there is nothing episodic about the narrative of Alone in the Dark, disregarding the episodic nature of gamers’ playtimes.

This assumed TV identity really does feel more natural on Blood Curse. There, the narrative is segmented already, and like a good TV show, concerns itself with presenting various disparate characters and situations, and then bringing them together.

I hope that more developers take a hint from Blood Curse, regardless of whether they present their games in an actually episodic format or not. I’m sure that there are more creative and interactive ways to leverage televisions (having episode cliffhangers with multiple choice endings – and thus multiple possibilities for the next episode – definitely comes to mind), but for now, I’d be happy if some other people out there besides Eden Games and SCE Japan will jump on the wagon.

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

GameSetLinks: Prescription For... Dr. Mario!

[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.]

Jeepers, GDC is coming up really soon, and I've been busy reviewing the video for the IGF and Game Developers Choice, giving some pre-show interviews (USA Today, most recently), and prepping my Indie Games Summit speech. (Well, a little behind on that, but I'm getting there.)

Anyhow, the GameSetLinks goodness is continuing, and this installment includes McSweeney's silliness, a new game-related iPhone app, BBC and The Guardian on interesting aspects of games from a mainstream perspective, and quite a few things besides.

Now you have a big problem:

McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Dr. Mario Weighs In on Universal Health Care.
'For nearly two decades, I have been a resident doctor at the Mushroom Kingdom Hospital, in the Division of Virus Research.'

Mission One - 'Prescription For Sleep' iPhone application
From MGS composer Norihiko Hibino, plus ex-Grasshopper programmer Mark Cooke and more - relaxing iPhone application neatness.

Should the United States ban RapeLay, a Japanese "rape simulator" game? - By Leigh Alexander - Slate Magazine
Leigh's last word on that whole furore, neat to see it on Slate.

NeoGAF - View Single Post - Idle Thumbs News PodBLAST - In two weeks, a videogame will make you cry
Useful info about why Idle Thumbs was a v.influential amateur (now spare-time and podcast-y) game editorial site.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Magical challenge of video game music
'How do you write a soundtrack for something which doesn't follow a conventional linear narrative? That's the challenge faced by composers when writing the music for computer games.'

Latoya Peterson: Those who identify as women or minorities are bullied into silence in online games | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
'Bullying people into silence rarely provides space for the perspectives needed to grow and improve the gaming industry. And the net result is that many gamers just leave large forums and go to seek out our own communities.' The shi*tcock argument writ large? Via Infinite Lives.

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

March 12, 2009

Opinion: Can The Industry Make A 'B Game'?

[Everyone knows low-budget, clumsy, charming B movies -- but can the industry make a 'B game'? Gamasutra's Christian Nutt examines the efforts -- and the key obstacles.]

If there's one conversation I've had several times over the years with other gamers that never ends with anybody satisfied, it's the B game conversation. Everybody knows (and many people adore) B movies -- whether they're intentional or not, they're films that tend to be low-budget, clumsy, and charming.

Sometimes they shoot for the bottom of the barrel; sometimes, they just land there. The best B movies have some intrinsic charm that elevates them in the eyes of their fans. They may do everything incompetently, but somehow there's just a certain something that makes them so much more enjoyable than they have any right to be.

Can our industry make a 'B game'?

The reason this came up again is because of last week's release of Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard, from Vicious Cycle and D3Publisher, for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. The game, for the uninformed, is a shooter with an elaborate back-story.

The marketing has been jokingly pretending -- for months -- that it's a re-envisioning of an (actually nonexistent) classic franchise from the '80s (compare to what Capcom is actually doing with its soon-to-be-released Bionic Commando.) The game features comedian Will Arnett in the lead voice role of a (parody of a) Duke Nukem-style action hero.

Wait, wasn't Duke Nukem a parody? Hold on...

Check out this high concept trailer, which itself parodies VH1's Behind the Music.

The result? As of this writing, a 56 on Metacritic for the Xbox 360 version. 1UP's Justin Haywald is particularly scathing, but his writing gets to the heart of why this is a dicey proposition:

"The only real laugh in this game comes in the opening introduction... The rest of the game is a plodding, boring mess that that forces you to play through the worst shooter genre clichés, and then asks you to laugh simply because the game's creators self-referentially point out how annoying those tropes are."

If ever there were a time where the gulf between games and movies were more obvious, it's hard to think of one. Put simply: playing an annoyingly bad game for 10 hours is too much to ask. The line between intentionally bad and unintentionally bad is probably too fuzzy in games.

Intentionally bad, even done with no subtlety whatsoever, is usually good for a chuckle in the right context. Scary Movie 4 may be a much worse film than Eat Lead is a game, but it at least functions as intended. And at least you can surf on by it when it gets boring, on cable.

The truth is, writing effective satire is extremely difficult. It's much more difficult than writing convincingly serious dialogue for all of the un-ironic bald space marines in gaming to grimly belch.

The Opposite Result

Perhaps the polar opposite of Eat Lead, and another good candidate for an intentional B game, is Indies Zero and XSeed's Retro Game Challenge, which came to the Nintendo DS about a month ago.

It's a jokey compilation of brand new faux 8-bit Nintendo NES-like games wrapped in a very silly story. You've been turned into a child and sent to '80s by a demonic digital incarnation of a gamer so frustrated he wanted to punish everyone with a Nintendo DS.

In stark contrast to Eat Lead, it has a very healthy 81 on Metacritic as of this writing. Why? Says IGN's Daemon Hatfield, "The developers of Retro Game Challenge didn't just accurately recreate 8-bit gaming -- they made a bunch of really good games."

Sure, the game is an intentional joke, and is filled with stuff that's actually bad in the real world -- poor translations, at-times frustrating or tedious gameplay. But that all evens out, because the whole package is creative, clever, and well-executed. It's aware of its limitations and finds ways to counteract them before they overwhelm the whole package.

To that end, it doesn't really succeed as a B game either.

Here's the Problem

Here's the problem with setting out to make a B game. Your game turns out to be a good game, or it doesn't, and that's the level on which it is judged, honestly and genuinely. Sure, gamers experience the whole of what's packed into a game experience -- but a game lives or dies by the quality of its gameplay.

Getting back to Duke Nukem, the character was an obvious parody of the over-muscled steroid supermen of '80s action movies. But the series has been taken purely seriously by fans on the merits of its core gameplay. They may enjoy the tawdry humor, and it definitely adds to the series' notoriety, but that's not the primary draw.

Think about Resident Evil. The first game had voice acting that was widely derided even in 1996 when it came out -- "Jill sandwich"? -- but the game was an instant classic regardless of this. And the games in the series have largely continued to have risible dialogue and bizarre and grotesque storylines that wouldn't make for compelling (or even comprehensible) films. Yet the series is continually lauded, and lauded even by people who will openly admit that they can't take its storytelling seriously.

Though it's more rare, this can even work in reverse. Consider Resident Evil's obverse, Silent Hill. The series has long been infamous for its weak and plodding gameplay, but the story, characters, and out-and-out scares are so compelling that its fans overlook its tedious combat. The games are simply that gripping.

The Old-Fashioned Way: By Accident

But what about the best kind of B movie -- the earnest failure? The B movie that sets out with big dreams but its cut down by a lack of talent, time, money, or expertise? Are there games like that -- ones that can exceed their boundaries and become B games by accident?

This is where things get really tough. Sure, there are niche games and genre games that do one thing well (or mine one specific fan base effectively, even if they do nothing with particularly remarkable quality). But there are very few games you can laugh at and still enjoy despite the derision.

Racking my brain, the closest I can come in recent memory is 2006's Wild Arms 4 -- a game that has a dreadful script and a host of annoying characters. But it somehow strikes enough of a balance gameplay-wise to remain engrossing -- and score a better-than-Matt Hazard 69 on Metacritic.

But no. When Wild Arms 4 is not being legitimately fun, it's just grating. The developers rolled back many of the gameplay innovations in WA4 for WA5; without them, I hated it, despite a mild uptick in both production values and storytelling.

Wild Arms 4 has the obvious low budget of a "true" B game, but the story of an F game. (You can see both here.) The result is confused; it's unable to be laughed with and too tedious to be laughed at, yet somehow still engrossing anyway.

A group of filmmakers can set out to make an intentionally terrible film. They can even force themselves to work within the limitations that were just happenstance for the last generation's unlucky filmmakers, and wind up with something that's still a good laugh. Anybody seen The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra?

But game developers don't have that luxury. Games are judged primarily by gameplay, and how you succeed or fail there determines your fate. Even a game with an overt grindhouse subtitle like Bikini Samurai Squad can't catch a break, at least not reviewer-wise.

Can we make a 'B game'? The question nags me. It seems that by either accident or intention, it's a very tough place to get to.

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Best Of GamerBytes: Peggle Fever!

[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.]

We missed last week's Best Of GamerBytes, so this week, you get double the info in just one update, and this week is a doozy for Xbox 360 owners.

Peggle finally makes its way to the platform, complete with brand new multiplayer modes. Alongside it is Square Enix's Final Fantasy-based Tower Defense-style game Crystal Defenders. The Maw also gets its second downloadable level pack for 100MSP.

But Watchmen: The End Is Nigh also came out last week for the XBLA and PlayStation Network. For $20USD, you can fight it out as Rorschach or Nite Owl in this hefty beat-em-up.

Finally, Wii owners can now buy Gradius Rebirth, a classic retooling of the Gradius games for digital download. Here are the full highlights for the last two weeks:

GamerBytes Specials

What Needs To Be A Digital Download? #11 - The Strike Series
We look at EA's classic classic games Desert, Jungle and Urban Strike, and discuss how the company could bring the games onto the digital download scene.

GamerBytes Preview: Grab Gold And Swap User Created Levels In Lode Runner
We preview the upcoming Lode Runner on Xbox Live Arcade, and discuss the online modes, as well as the level editor and the ability to create share lists for people to download multiple levels at a time.

GamerBytes Interview: Ronimo Games' Swords & Soldiers
We interview Ronimo Games about their upcoming side-scrolling RTS for WiiWare.

Xbox Live Arcade

This Week on XBLA - Peggle, Crystal Defenders, Maw DLC
Skateboarding woodchucks, defending pathways, and changing redirecting rivers makes up your superb set of Xbox Live Arcade titles this week.

Now Out On XBLA - Watchmen: The End Is Nigh
The first movie blockbuster of the year brings its game exclusively to digital download.

First Screens Of Worms 2: Armageddon XBLA And Worms PSN, First Alien Breed Details
A brand new Worms game is on its way for the XBLA and PSN - check out the first screens here.

Quake Arena Arcade On Track, Release Soon
Thought to be canceled, Quake Arena Arcade is very much alive.

Sam & Max Coming To XBLA In Season Packages
Full seasons of Sam & Max coming to Xbox Live Arcade, but what will the price and file size be?

Virtual-On Website Live - First Screenshots And Trailer
Virtual On officially unveiled, complete with the first trailer.

Leaked: Direct Feed Screens Of Sega Vintage Collection Vol. 2
Altered Beast, Shinobi, Sonic 3, Gunstar Heroes, Phantasy Star II and Comix Zone coming to XBLA.

Days Of Arcade Announced, Seven Games In Six Weeks
You'll be spending a good chunk of money over the next month and a half...

PlayStation Network

Burn Zombie Burn! Limping Its Way To PSN March 26th
Score based arena zombie shooter makes its mark on PSN in just a few weeks time.

NA PSN Store Update - Watchmen Game, Age Of Booty Online Demo, Burnout DLC, Bowling DLC
The Watchmen game makes its mark on PSN this week, while the Age Of Booty demo with online play is now available.

EU PSN Update: Watchmen, plus Burnout, Bowling, Lumines DLC
Sony Europe finally gets it with the third release in several weeks which gets released the same week as the rest of the world. Rejoice!

WiiWare

First Screens of Rainbow Islands: Towering Adventure And... Released Tomorrow In Japan
Rainbow Islands officially announced, and released in the same week.

Final Fantasy IV: The After Years, Crystal Defenders Coming To American WiiWare
The ESRB reveals Final Fantasy IV sequel making its way to WiiWare.

NA WiiWare Update: Family & Friends Party
Sometimes we have no idea what comes out on WiiWare. This was one of those weeks. Apparently not too bad either.

EU WiiWare Update - Tossing Snowboards
Europe gets to toss some bags and shred some snow this week.

NA WiiWare Update: Gradius Rebirth
Konami's shooter revival makes its way to WiiWare.

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

GameSetInterview: Flashbang Studios - Blursting Through?

[We're starting a new set of GameSetWatch-exclusive interviews from UK-based journalist Phill Cameron, many of which will explore the neater end of indie gaming. First up is a chat with Arizona-based Flashbang Studios, longtime GSW friends, about their smart 3D web browser indie game projects.]

Flashbang Studios are an independent studio focusing on making browser based games using the Unity engine, hosted on Blurst.com. While for the most part they've focused on bringing us Dinosaur based fantasies - for example, allowing you to kill dozens of velociraptors with a jeep in Velociraptor Offroad Safari.

Heck, that's not all. They also let you peek voyeuristically into the sleeping mind of an Aptosaurus as it dreams of a Jetpack Brontasaurus that sails lackadaisically through the air collecting various fruits, and they've begun to branch out a little more recently.

For example, they also made the absolutely brilliant Minotaur China Shop, where you played a mythical Bull-Man with an anger management problem trying to run a pottery shop, and they very recently released Blush, where you play a neon attack squid.

And that's just the first of this year. There are five more games that will be with us by Christmas. We talked to Flashbang - led by Matthew Wegner and Steve Swink [who also help to organize the Independent Games Festival for GSW parent company Think Services] - about their background, ideas, and crazy concepts, and this was the result:

For those unaware, can you explain what it is Flashbang Studios does within being a games developer?

Flashbang Studios: Flashbang's been around for awhile--the company turns 6 years old next month! We started out targeting the casual market (think "Bejeweled" casual, not "Madden" casual), making games like Beesly's Buzzwords and Glow Worm. Both games were IGF finalists, in 2004 and 2006, respectively. The plan was always to:

1) Make piles of money off the casual market
2) Giggle as we jumped into these piles
3) Fund our own games

#1 never materialized, and we actually canceled our final casual game. Then we did a bunch of random stuff, like corporate training games, affiliate websites, and who knows what else, before growing again and focusing anew on our own ideas. We're on step #3 now, despite skipping the prerequisites. Don't ask us how (hint: The Internet)!

We've always been self-funded; today we're supporting a staff of six developers, all working on Blurst . Blurst is a catch-all site for our random ideas, with leaderboards/achievements/magical-announced-things tying them all together. We're tired of playing the same games found on store shelves, and we think other players might be too!

We're also quite active in and around the indie games community. Matthew and Steve help coordinate the Independent Games Festival and Independent Games Summit, and Flashbang hosted the first TIGJam. We have other super-cool indie events bubbling around our mind grapes.

Apart from the work you do as Blurst, you’ve taken on quite a bit of contract work. Is this merely out of necessity or do you use it as a way to try new things which are then fed back into your other projects?

FS: The type of contract work we do does not exactly accommodate experimentation, at least in terms of 3D tech and game design ideas. We did accept our first Flash-based contract job before any of us had ever touched Flash, though (quickly followed by a trip to a nearby bookstore, and quite a lot of experimentation). But contract jobs are basically there to funnel sweet, beautiful, cash money into other projects.

Specialising in browser-based games seems to grant you the largest audience for your games. How has the Unity engine in particular helped you to keep some quite system taxing games within the browser?

FS: Simply put: If it weren't for Unity, we'd have to be pursuing a completely different business model or making vastly simpler games. It's the only technology out there that lets us make complex, 3D, physics-based games in-browser, plus facilitates our rapid development cycles. If that sounded like a junior high-schooler gushing over their big crush, well, that's pretty accurate.

Your previous efforts as Blurst have mainly revolved around some sort of anthropomorphic hero in an often ludicrous situation, but Blush, the game you’re currently working on, seems to be quite a departure from that. What made you decide to take such a different path?

FS: We didn't necessarily decide to go in any kind of an aesthetic direction. As with most things we've made it just sort of "happens". With Blush, it started as a prototype where the only recognizable element was a squid-like creature in a world of empty blackness, and wrapping an aesthetic around it was very organic. All we provided ourselves with were high level concepts like bio luminescence and deep sea darkness. In fact, we just posted about the visual history of the game over on our blog!

There always seems to be a little set up before each of your games starts, explaining the situation, be it a dreaming dinosaur, or a Minotaur with an anger management problem. Are these just loading screen filler or do you feel there’s a need to establish a story?

FS: We do those things because we think they're funny. We realize a little bit of context does grease the player experience (especially with ideas as unconventional as ours), which is why we bother to include them in the final product. It's not that we think of a premise for our games after the fact, though; the premise is usually what drives us to make the game in the first place.

You’ve stated that you want to create six entirely different games this year. Are you crazy? Is that even possible? Why?

FS: Can't it be both? Last year, including our contract work, we actually launched 12 products, depending on how and what you count. So if we forgo contract work this year, it should be possible to release six games with a scope comparable to what we have been doing. The trick, as we're already discovering, is that "production time" and "calendar time" are two very different things. Increasing the shelf life of a project has benefits, even if you aren't spending much production time on it. There are more opportunities to think about the game in the shower, more nights to sleep on it, and new solutions to long-standing problems might suddenly solve themselves. Having a 1-to-1 relationship between production time and calendar time is much more stressful. Canned game ideas rarely go bad, unlike pumpkin.

As for why, part of what we are trying to accomplish is putting more content into the hands of users more quickly. If we give our players more products that focus on instant fun, we get more feedback and are able to refine our processes much quicker. What happens if 14 months into a 2-year game we find out it's not fun? That's a bad situation to be in, and one some of us have experienced at larger studios. If we put out a game in a couple months and users didn't like some parts of it, the cost is far easier to absorb and we can more quickly integrate the players' ideas and expectations into our next game.

Have you already decided what the other 5 games of this year are going to be?

FS: No way! The concepts for those games will most likely be born randomly from the unprotected idea sex that constantly happens here.

With such quick development cycles for each of your games, are there a lot of ideas that don’t make it? Or are they all used eventually?

FS: There are tons of ideas that don't make it. Our policy here is to spew out whatever coagulates in our brain soup. Naturally, most things are not going to make the cut. Part of this is because there isn't enough time in the day or an idea is too complex, part of it is that some ideas aren't any good, and part of it is that some ideas are just too genocidal, demeaning, horrible, abusive, disrespectful, and hideously irreverent to thrust upon the world.

A variation of Off Road Raptor Safari is now on the iPhone. What’s the response been like?

FS: Meh, with a side of "who cares". A few people like it, though! Mostly our friends. And our moms.

It's easy to get lost in the shuffle. The last numbers we heard were something like 15,000 applications--6,000 of them games--available on the App Store. None of our games have had a tremendous amount of traction. The sales curve is horribly nonlinear; the response has been pretty lackluster.

Presumably the ease with which your games run in a browser makes them ideal for mobile use. Are you looking to port more onto the iPhone?

FS: While it's a damned powerful mobile device, most of our games won't actually run on the iPhone without a bunch of reworking. Physics and graphics are the big bottlenecks, and we tend to push both of those in our web games. Not to mention the different control paradigm. We're more likely to do "spiritual successors" like Raptor Copter, or whatever irresistible idea succubi invade our dreams, like Rebolt. Blurst is our main priority now, though, so anything for iPhone will be a side project.

You’ve cited Flight404’s ‘Relentless, the REV’ as inspiration for Blush. Were there similar inspirations for your other games?

FS: Interestingly enough, thatgamecompany's Flow was sort of an anti-inspiration for Blush. And not because we don't like it; it was because we do like it! Very much so. Early on there was a company-wide fear that Blush might end up looking too much like Flow, and we wanted to make sure we were doing our own thing. We figured we'd give it an honorable mention since the concern pervaded us for a few days early on in the cycle.

Our other games haven't been directly inspired by any particular media or work, other than our obvious love of dinosaurs and physical-based gameplay.

You recently started to broadcast a webcam from your offices every Friday. What’s the reason for this, apart from letting your rabid fans pore over your every move?

FS: It's also to let the people that hate us and want to see us fail pore over our every move. That, and to build a connection with our fans. They say you only need 1,000 True Fans in order to succeed. We have at least two, now, and sometimes they argue about who is the bigger fan. So we're getting there.

We're also posting more video snippets from the studio (like this Minotaur China Shop postmortem).

Are you finding that, with the ‘indie’ scene on the rise, your games are getting more attention?

FS: Yes!

Longer answer: The rising tide of indie awesomeness, what Jenova of thatgamecompany calls the current Videogame Renaissance, floats all boats. The indie movement is creeping into mass consciousness. As it does, player expectations are changing, and that change benefits us. Instead of expecting all games to be Gears of War 3 or Madden 2010, a game might be about a little white guy with a hat who discovers the third dimension, or a minotaur with anger issues. That broadening perception can only benefit fringe developers like us and all our like-minded friends.

Are there any particular indie developers that you pay particular attention to? Is there anything on the horizon you’re particularly looking forward to being released?

FS: We've got a soft spot for local friends, Coin App. Their game Max Blastronaut is looking like some damned excellent arcade-style action! We're keen on what we've seen in progress from Infinite Ammo, as well -- Heroes and Villains is looking sweet, and the concepts for Marian are lovely. We'll actually be announcing a Blurst-related deal with Infinite Ammo soon! Our new favorite hobby is driving out to LA and partying with thatgamecompany. They know where to find the best breakfast spots and hedonistic drug orgies in Venice.

Posted by Phill Cameron at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

GameSetLinks: Wrenching Fly, Finishing Combo

[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.]

Continuing with the GameSetLinks RSS goodness, this set of eclecticism starts out with the New York Times highlighting new art that includes, yes, an art game in the form of Mark Essen's Flywrench (pictured). I do believe we are getting somewhere in terms of integration with other creative arts, folks.

Also in here - GameCyte tails off, Western games that were big in Japan wayback are discovered, some art from one of my old games surfaces, Daniel Cook drops more awesome science, and lots more.

Final justice:

33 and Under, Please - ‘The Generational’ at the New Museum - NYTimes.com
Nice, Mark Essen's 'Flywrench' indie game being shown at a major NY exhibition.

R.I.P. GameCyte, 2008-2009 | GameCyte
Not totally surprised, but the site was actually trying to do decent journalism, despite the PR kerfuffle.

Hypercombofinish :: How to Be Me: Leigh Alexander, Video Game Journalist
Not just linking this cos Leigh is nice about me in it, promise - there's some good advice for game writers in there.

Evil Genius [XBOX/PS2 - Cancelled] | Unseen 64: Beta, Unreleased & Unseen Videogames!
This was actually the last project I worked on before I left game development - there was a decent prototype up and running, too, but hey. A number of the principals behind it are at Double Fine now, and are much more talented than I ever was, which is why Brutal Legend should be rawk.

Lost Garden: What is your game design style?
'I've noticed that games have distinct styles. These are not visual styles. Nor are they styles associated with prefered process of development. Instead, they are unique styles of game design, how you mix and match mechanics, story, player agency and feedback.'

1UP's Retro Gaming Blog : 8-Bit Cafe: Big in Japan
'Yet looking back into the 8-bit era, you can find a number of curious exceptions to this rule: western games that did fairly well for themselves in the U.S. and Europe, but that took on new lives of their own in Japan.'

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

March 11, 2009

Q&A: The Travails Of External Design On Battlestations Pacific

[Another notable interview from Gamasutra that's worth recounting here on GSW, Christian Nutt talked to Eidos' Alistair Cornish about working as a game designer in a different country to your core team - interesting stuff.]

Alistair Cornish is a designer at Eidos London -- who works externally from his development teams on titles such as Championship Manager and the upcoming Xbox 360/PC action/strategy title Battlestations Pacific.

The latter title, developed by Eidos's Budapest-based Hungary studio, allows players to become the Americans or Japanese in a post Pearl Harbor World War II scenario, with real-time switching between multiple combat units. It follows up 2007's Battlestations Midway, also created by Eidos Hungary.

In this in-depth Gamasutra interview, Cornish discusses the community-driven process for improving the sequel, the external designer as, in his opinion, an integral role, and working with a developer in another country -- all hot topics in today's development landscape:

Did you work on the original Battlestations Midway?

Alistair Cornish: I didn't. I came in at the inception of Battlestations Pacific, and my first task was really to trawl the forums and the boards and see what the fans were saying -- going through the reviews and trying to pick out what we were going to improve on and fix and change.

What were your priority items, when you came to the project as a designer, to bring into the new Battlestations?

AC: Two things, really. The first one is accessibility. That was my kind of big remit -- that the first game had a pretty notorious tutorial. I don't know if you remember it. It was quite dry and it was very, very long. And what we've done now is that you learn on the job. So there's a gradual revelation of units and there's lots of pop up hints and tips, and you can review them any time in the pause menu.

So you learn to bomb on an exciting bombing run in the middle of combat, rather than a naval academy. If you want to just practice, if you're worried about that, you don't want to get your feet wet, then you can go to a separate naval academy and drill yourself. But that's something you can elect to do -- you don't have to do that.

And you that's not the only way to learn. So, that's a really big deal, just accessibility. And keeping players in the action was another part of that. So, if you remember the old repair menu, you're taken to a separate screen. Now we try to keep everything in pop-up screens. So you can be in the cockpit of the Zero, and from there you can choose planes to launch from aircraft carriers and airbases.

We've got a really good fan base, and not only are they passionate but they're also very vocal and can express themselves very clearly in the forums. You know, they just come in and go, "this rocks," "this sucks," and then they tell you why, and what they want.

So, we've listened to them at every step, you know, from minor things -- like they ask for cockpit modes, we gave them a cockpit mode, they asked for this kind of unit type, we gave the most popular unit types they requested -- up to big deals, like skirmish mode, which was a huge thing that fans wanted to extend the longevity in single player.

Do you have a specialized community site for this game?

AC: Yeah. Fans can go to BattleStations.net. Previously we had official forums for it, but I go to trawl everything. I go to GameFAQs, I go to fan sites, and I go to our official forums. We kind of cast the net as far and wide as time allows, really.

And you often get people in the forums who are very, very active. You see them pop up in every post, they post multiple times, and we've tried to get their involvement. We've had events for them to get their opinion on things, and solicit their feedback.

Did you actually bring them into the studio?

AC: Yeah. So we've tried to give back. We've had them up, flown them into Budapest and put them up and had events for them. So, you know, part of it is to thank them, and part is to really get their honest feedback on what we're going to do.

Was that the primary kind of research you did into the features you should make in the new game?

AC: It's a real mixture of things. Obviously, the team had their own ideas of what they wanted to put in to drive it forward. We obviously had an understanding of what our strengths were, the pillars of the brand, the split of action and strategy.

There's obviously a drive for more content, so we've doubled the content with the Japanese campaign. All the multiplayer modes, the great addition of skirmish mode. And then one aspect of that was the fan feedback, another aspect was review feedback. You know, what the reviewers like, what they think was lacking, if anything, what we can improve. So it's a real multifaceted approach.

But I've worked on a fair few games, and I think this is the one that's taken the most direct fan feedback and just put it in the game. And part of what's allowed us to do that is the fans themselves. they've been very vocal and verbal, and they made good sense, they made their points well -- they haven't come on and just gone "ah, this is terrible" and left it at that.

They explained what they didn't like, what they wanted to see, what they would like changed, what they loved and wanted more of. But it's a real multi-faceted approach. The trouble with some fan feedback is you can't possibly take into account all of it because it contradicts itself. But it was a great experience.

As a designer, when you knew you were going to be leading this project, I'm sure you had preconceptions of what you wanted to do with the game before you started collating the feedback. How far did you go in directions that you weren't anticipating, or change your viewpoint?

AC: I think I'm very happy with the amount of input I've been able to have, and how the project's gone. I think my primary focus was accessibility, and I think that's something that we've driven towards so far, and so well. So I'm very proud of that -- that was a key thing.

Does this game have a narrative?

AC: That's something we changed from the first game, because it's quite limiting to try and follow a character through events. The other thing is it's quite contrary to the spirit of the game -- you can jump into that ship, and that submarine, then another plane. It doesn't make sense to follow one character's story when you can jump into any. So that's gone now -- you're some kind of nebulous floating Commander, as you'll see is atypical of any type of real-time strategy game.

I feel narrative can be a bit superfluous, at times, to some games. This strikes me as a game that's very mechanics-based, and then, as you said overall, it really wouldn't really logically make sense to follow one person's journey...

AC: That's exactly the conclusion we came to, hence our direction... I mean how narrative we're going to go really depends on genre, depends on goals, a bit of the design there. So in some games it's absolutely what you need it should be the focus, in other games it shouldn't.

We felt that with Battlestations it was about controlling over 100 different war machines, jumping between them at any time. That was the focus of it, to try and artificially squeeze in a person's story... We want to focus on the epic. The epic scale's a really big thing; you can't get too much of a sense of the epic scale if you're locked down to one person. So we brought this much more overall feel to it.

You work out of London, but the game is developed in Budapest. How does that work, from a pure logistics perspective?

AC: It's hard being an outsider, at a publisher... Initially, when you go from development to the publisher's side it can be a bit of a jolt. But early on on my career, I started at Sony, so I have experience on the publisher's side. So it wasn't too big a jump, to be honest.

But that's one of the challenges to be a designer on the publisher side -- you have to have really open communications channels, constantly be on the phone, or messenger, or emails, or writing documentation, or visiting a studio, to work harmoniously. So that's a window into my world!

Honestly that seems a bit rare, to have a designer on the publisher side; usually it's a producer.

AC: I'm not sure if things are going that way more, but Eidos is certainly not the only company that does it. Konami does it, for example.

I think it is the way to go, because good producers are great -- time/costs/staff, keeping things on the rails and everything else. But he doesn't necessarily have any design background. I've been a designer for over 12 years and have 25 published titles. You get to know what works in a game and what doesn't.

I don't have to worry about spreadsheets and Microsoft Project, or any of that stuff. I care about one thing, the quality of the game. Meeting specific goals -- like accessibility, in this case -- are being laid out. I think it's the right way to work, really.

Producers have their strengths and designers have their strengths, so I think it's a nice combination to have them both on the project.

There's sort of a blending or ambiguity of director, producer, and now maybe even designers. Go to different studios and go to different publishers and you'll find that these roles entail different things, or that there's overlap.

AC: My kind of role is occasionally referred to as "gameplay producer." I'm not sure if it's only EA that has that title.

That's sounds like an EA title, yeah.

AC: It does, doesn't it? There are about three or four different titles that basically mean the same thing. But I'm very, very positive about it. I know the changes that are effected on this title and other titles.

I'm confident that if I had to go to a publisher tomorrow, that's absolutely the structure I'd use. Producer and designer working together and all the brand managers, PR managers, associate producers to get the project to be the best it can be.

When they're in balance and in harmony, the yin and yang, it's all good. If it goes too much one way, if the designers get their way, it's probably going to take six years to come out. If the producers get their way, it'll come out in a couple of weeks with no features. [laughs] It's getting that balance right. That's industry-wide, internal and external.

And even though it's an Eidos studio that you're working with, it's still got to be somewhat like working with an external studio that's not really part of the company. Probably the politics are the big difference -- as opposed to dealing with the studio, because it's remote.

AC: Exactly. Day-to-day, it's exactly the same challenges and opportunities as you get from an external developer. As you say, it's more politics and down to really boring stuff, like how the payroll is handled. So that's very different. But from my end of things, it's very similar. As I say, the same opportunities, the same difficulties.

What are the major difficulties you've run into? Have you come up with any processes that you've now followed?

AC: You just have to be very, very agile. If you know your craft and you know what's missing or what's needed and you can communicate that well, work within the realities of deadlines and budgets, work in structures, then you can see what you should be doing in terms of the project.

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

Column: 'Homer In Silicon': Green and Sparkly

['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 "Emerald City Confidential".]

Emerald City Confidential is a graphical adventure by Wadjet Eye Games, under the creative direction of Dave Gilbert. The protagonist, Petra, is a film-noir-esque detective led to explore deeper and deeper into the web of lies at work in the Emerald City of Oz, which is not really at all the way you may remember it from the books; she spends most of her time questioning people and solving some not-too-difficult puzzles.

Structurally, ECC is not doing anything especially new. It is a very linear game with carefully directed gameplay. The magic system's Enchanter-esque spells are strangely specific in their effects and conveniently work only when the designer wills that they should.

There are many fetch-quests, and the occasional lock-and-key or get-x-use-x puzzle. The game unabashedly repeats character dialogue verbatim if the player needs to hear some hint over again. Moreover, when it wants to represent characters who are "busy", it will sometimes put them into a loop of repeating dialogue while the player solves some puzzle.

In other respects, the gameplay is fun but sometimes too directed. The puzzles are fairer than graphical adventure puzzles of the past, but many of them are so blatantly hinted that the player is deprived of the pleasure of really solving them. I suppose that this is partly because a) this is an adventure game marketed to a casual game audience, so difficulty expectations are lower; b) this is an unusually narrative adventure game in which getting stuck for a long time would be a disruption of the intended pacing.

So I'm sympathetic to the tuning considerations that may have gone into this. All the same, I felt that the game already had an excellent external hint mechanism -- one can always consult the journal for suggestions -- so it wasn't always necessary for the game itself to make the logical connections for me.

Another small disappointment: Emerald City Confidential is a bit buggy here and there. There are several dialogues that can happen in a sequence other than the one the designers intended, with awkward and comical effect; and the enforcement of game logic breaks down even further in the final portion of the game.

At one point I got an actual error message on the screen in a final battle and had to restart the sequence; at another I managed to leave a room in which I think I was supposed to be confined, and was unable to pick up the narrative thread until I returned to it. But since I played a first-day release of the game, it's possible that some of these problems will be patched.

These were unfortunate blemishes on an otherwise highly polished and entertaining piece of work: the art is vibrant, the voice acting strong. (Particular favorites: I especially enjoyed the vocal performance of the Tin Man, and the visual punchline of walking into the Frogman's office for the first time.) The music worked, too, which is to say that I noticed it several times with enjoyment, and it never annoyed me enough to prompt me to turn it off. This is rare.

Still, the real strengths here are strengths of writing and characterization. The Oz setting works out well, and not just because of the initial thrill of subverting childhood icons like Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion. The appeal of the Oz books, at least for me, lay very much in their curious imagery: the sorceress able to swap heads, the Gump, the knowledge pills.

The combination of the vivid and the slightly grotesque makes for a memorable adventure game setting. Besides, many of the Oz stories read like adventure game puzzles to start with, full of characters who trick one another, hide things in inventive places, and aren't what they appear to be. It's a natural fit to translate all this into an interactive format and give the player the satisfaction of resolving these problems herself.

I especially enjoyed the tribute to the Nome King's ornament collection from the original books, and several of the other puzzles I might also have recognized if I hadn't forgotten so much Oz lore. (I think I was about nine the last time I read one of these.)

But it is not necessary to be an Oz fan to appreciate the story. In fact, the game has merits that the original series does not -- not least that it knows what its story is about, and knows also when it is over.

Emerald City Confidential digs deep into the Oz material and comes up with some characters not found in any of the major Oz movies -- which is not difficult, considering that most treatments of Oz only cover the first two or three books at most, out of a collection where the canon runs to forty volumes and the apocrypha into the hundreds.

From the vast collection of available witches, magicians, mechanical persons, talking animals, and flying

March 31, 2009

In-Depth: Xbox 360 Community Games Devs Talk Successes, Failures, What They Want

Column: 'Diamond in the Rough': How Does This Make You Feel, 'Partner'?

Best of FingerGaming: From Wolfenstein 3D to Noby Noby Boy

March 30, 2009

GDC: The Mega64 Chronicles - Pt.1, Metal Gear Solid 4

GamerBytes Analysis: XNA Community Games Sales Data Revealed

COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': COMPUTE This

GameSetLinks: GDC 2009 Special - Part 2

March 29, 2009

GameSetInterview: 'All You Need Is A Little LOVE: Eskil Steenberg'

Best Of Indie Games: Mind the Path

GDC: Inside The Experimental Gameplay Sessions 2009

March 28, 2009

GameSetLinks: GDC 2009 Special - Part 1

GDC - The Game - Part 5, Friday: Infectious Design

GDC: Hothead Duo Talk DeathSpank, Indie Experience, Episodic Gaming Retreat

March 27, 2009

GDC: Keita Takahashi - The Complete GDC Lecture

GameSetPics: 2009 IGF Pavilion & IGF Awards!

March 26, 2009

GDC - The Game - Part 4, Thursday: Systematic Socialization

11th Independent Games Festival Awards Topped By Blueberry Garden

Fallout 3, LittleBigPlanet Reign Supreme At Choice Awards

March 25, 2009

GDC - The Game - Part 3, Wednesday: Funeral Plot

GDC: Indie Games Stuff @ GDC: The MegaLinkDump

GDC - The Game - Part 2, Tuesday: 'Fear of Focus'

March 24, 2009

GDC: Crayon Physics Creator Purho Prototypes Hard

GDC: 2D Boy's Carmel On The Goo Route To Indie Success

GameSetPics: 2009 Indie Games Summit - Monday's Highlights

GDC: Independent Games & Sales: Stats 101 - The Slides

March 23, 2009

GDC - The Game - Part 1, Monday: 'I'm Stuck.'

GameSetInterview: 'The Merits of Novamente's Parrots and the Arrival of Advanced AI'

In-Depth: Tetris' Legal Clone War Versus Blockles

March 22, 2009

GameSetIntroduction: Jim Munroe's GDC 2009 IF Experiment

COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 3/20/08

GameSetLinks: The Queen Of Wishful Thinking

March 21, 2009

GDC: Independent Games @ GDC 2009 - The Round-Up

Sound Current: 'Traversing Castlevania's Musical Timeline with Noisycroak'

Best Of Indie Games: Inside Pandora's Box, Indie Games

March 20, 2009

GameSetPlaying: Mister Raroo's Moments

In-Depth: Successful Indies Discuss Routes To Success

GameSetLinks: Casual, Hard, Magical, Wasteland

March 19, 2009

Gamasutra Expert Blogs: DS Game Insights, Engine Specifics

Interview: Fallout Co-Creator Anderson Goes inXile

IGF, Direct2Drive Announces $10,000 D2D Vision Award Finalists

Interview: Metalocalypse Animators Birth Titmouse Games Division

Best Of GamerBytes: Astro Tripping Beats

March 18, 2009

GameSetInterview: 'The Maw's Deleted Scenes - A Twisted Pixel Approach to DLC'

Game Developer March Issue Showcases Far Cry 2 Postmortem, Dirty Coding Tricks

COLUMN: Pixel Journeys: 'Corewar - The Ultimate Game?'

GameSetLinks: Pimp My... Blockparty?

March 17, 2009

Interview: Loudcrowd's Alternate Approach To Music Games

Best of FingerGaming: From Eliss to The Oregon Trail

Game Time With Mister Raroo: Gaming in the Now

GameSetLinks: Which Mountain? That Mountain!

March 16, 2009

Column: 'The Interactive Palette' - Personality in Team Fortress 2

Previewing GDC 2009: The Top 20 Design Talks

GameSetNetwork: Best Of The Week

March 15, 2009

The Game Anthropologist: 'Shoryuken! How SFIV Made Its Niche More Mainstream'

Best Of Indie Games: Catch! But Don't Look Back

Interview: Namco Bandai's Iwai Talks Tricky Topics In Western Markets

March 14, 2009

Opinion: How Indie Video Games Helped Bridge The Culture Gap

Round-Up: Gamasutra Network Jobs, Week Of March 13

GDC 2009 Additions Include Ono, Journo-To-Designer Panel, Interaction Innovations

Road To The IGF: Nicalis Duo Talk Night Game

March 13, 2009

Game Developer Magazine Gets 5 Maggie Nominations