Game Design • Andy Moore

Word Game DevLog: Day 7

Feb 022012

Today is day 7! I was really hoping I would have the game finished today, just to say I made the game in a week – but after 7 hours of work I’m having to forfeit. I’m travelling out to see the Indie Game: The Movie screening in Winnipeg early tomorrow morning, so I’ve got to pack and get prepared tonight!

The done stuff

The game is pretty much feature-complete. I took the two divergent core gameplay mechancis and mixed them together into a single, fun unit. There’s all sorts of polish – screen shakes, particle effects, animated (tweened) characters, high scores, game center integration, etc… All the little details that turn a game from a “good mechanic” to a game that actually feels good.

I’ve been playing a lot of the game between builds, which I think is a really good sign. I’m really enjoying how the game feels, and it’s an actual challenge for me.

Sven also got me a set of new art (some of it placeholder, but at least it’s better placeholder than my own stuff!), and I have to say.. it makes the game look completely different. I avoided sharing any screenshots of the game, and was very possessive of who got to see beta copies… Once you see the beta-art, the game is forever stained in your mind, I think. It’s hard to get over that first impression. This new stuff – even half-done placeholders – is way better and I’ll start sharing screens soon!

The not-quite-done stuff

Sven is making some glorious art for the game, and it’s really coming together in a rapid fashion. Unfortunately for me, he has a day job and lives on the opposite side of the planet – so a lot of the assets are still placeholder, and little things like static animations (to make the game really pop) are probably a few days away at the earliest.

But I think one of the worst things, is the game name isn’t settled on anymore. “Word Fishing” was going to be the title, but it’s already a title in the AppStore – time for more brainstorming! (and of course: it’s hard for Sven to do art for the title screen when there’s no name yet).

The official changelog for the day

Local high score storage and ranking
End-of-game best words list with point values
Better GameCenter score handling and timing
New set of art – backdrops, character, tiles. Makes the game feel way different already!
Gameplay balance tweaks to score and combo cooldown rates
Screenshake! Aww yes. Every game feels better with screenshake!
Aesthetic changes to particle effects, their numbers, and their behaviours
Built a system to swap in random art assets for variety
Added the ability to give up mid-game and not lose your score
End-of-game screen does a bit more hand-holding
Lots of little bug fixes and performance optimizations

Word game DevLog: Day 6

Code, Game Design No Responses »

Feb 012012

After Global GameJam, I took some time off to recover. Yesterday (Tuesday) I put in about 6 hours of work… My heart wasn’t really into it (I had a really rough sleep) so I started by kinda just poking at things.

The Evil that is Refactoring Code

I’m a big fan of “just get it done,” and doing it as fast (and as messy) as possible. It’s this skill that allows someone to finish a game for a 48 hour game jam… Or heck, even in the 5 Minute Game Challenge I hold at OrcaJam. I think these skills translate very well to managing deadlines (in more structured environments) or actually finishing your game for the indies out there.

Your biggest enemy in rapid game development is that desire to do things right the first time. Over engineering is the devil! There’s time for that later.

For day 6, though, I was really not feeling that creative. Scrolling through my mess of code wasn’t making things better, and I decided I’d spend some time cleaning up. I shuffled out some new classes and moved things around – ultimately, simplifying and marginally speeding things up. I largely look at it as a waste of time, but there is one small benefit I gained: The exercise of cleaning up the code for 3 hours managed to dust all the cobwebs out of my brain, and I was able to actually get some work done for the remaining 3 hours.

Implementing GameCenter Support

Getting your AS3/AIR application to access some iOS-device functions (such as GameCenter, iAds, and in-app-purchases) is really tough. Sarah pointed me towards Milkman Games and their suite of tools for AIR/AS3 developers, and I thought I’d give the GameCenter component a whirl before I implement highscore functionality.

Yeah, it costs money – about $70 for this piece – but I swear I couldn’t find a single thing that came close to free in months of casual web searching. Getting this kind of thing working takes some talent, time, and some core development skills.

I am pleased to say that with about 10 minutes of reading the documentation and typing out the code, I had a complete GameCenter tie-in working (with score submissions and table browsing)… and it worked on my first compile, with no tests at all. (I spent another 20 minutes setting up my Apple Developer account, but that’s because their forms kept timing out on me. *shakes fists*)

MilkManGames did an excellent job of documenting this package, and even covered some gotchas at the end of their documentation, with sample code too. All in all, it was well worth the money and the package was very well put together. It’s not 100% perfect, and integrating it with FlashDevelop has a few minor quibbles, but I hear FD is working on a fix for that (not MMG’s fault).

Some other stuff

I managed to get a nice tweened animation for the main character as you’re playing, which helps give the game a bit of flow. I also settled on a core mechanic and re-introduced certain elements, like combo-multipliers and timer cooldown systems. I also did some work on the end-game to make it a bit less weird (but still retaining that not-so-jarring experience).

All in all, a good day, considering how I felt at the start. :)

Llamas to Space: Complete, for now

Events, Game Design No Responses »

Jan 302012

Wow! What a rough Global Game Jam. I didn’t get very much sleep – a lot of laying in bed, thinking about code. I missed out blogging about development on Saturday; I worked for around 8 hours then.

Sunday was the final day, and I only got in 2.5 hours of work before the 48 hour buzzer rang.

Llamas to Space: A success?

I’m not sure how to measure success here. Llamas to Space’s core mechanics – essentially, two games that affect each other – were very new to me. I was building for a platform that I am not entirely familiar with (the iPad). The game I made wasn’t super fun and I probably won’t release this iteration on the AppStore, but I do still feel like it is a success:

I was able to show off a complete, functioning build – with art assets, audio, a goal – I mean, the game is actually playable. That, to me, is a successful “jam game.”
The game has hints of fun too, and I like how the mechanics for the two games mix. It’s not “mega awesome fun” and definitely needs tweaking, but it’s good to play once or twice and think about sequels.
I tried out some new things, stepped outside of my comfort zone, and learned. New graphics display techniques (blog post on that soon!), multiple-touch-point support, and refinements in my development pipeline for mobile apps. Everything I make from now on will be better.
I successfully educated at least four people that it’s possible to transfer your AS3 coding skills to mobile devices. This makes me feel really good.
Someone said what I made was “some epic shit” :D
I met several new folks and even worked with a new partner (on the artistic side of things).

All of that – and I only put in 13.5 hours of work in the allotted 48 hour span. Something to be proud of! That’s a standard crunch-day in a AAA game factory.

Anyway, after this weekend I’ll be happy to lay it to rest for a while, and get back to the word game I was building last week!

One small sigh

Of course, the biggest compliments I was getting on the game were for little animated things; items falling off the screen in a bezier curve, a spaceship bouncing off the ground and arcing away, grenades being lobbed in nicely timed arcs over the battlefield.

Of course, none of this was thanks to me; it was courtesy of an awesome tweening library (called Tweener) that emulates a lot of Flash CS’s built-in transitions. I had used Tweener to do the airplane transitions in SteamBirds as well, so it’s an old friend of mine (and I LOVE looking at their animated examples page. Simplicity, and beauty!).

It’s always the flashy stuff that gets the credit. :(

Want to try it out?

The game isn’t in any sort of state to release. It requires a bit of explanation; there was no time to build tutorials or finish touching up the art. If you’re dying to see it, meet up with me in Winnipeg next week, GDC in March, or the local bi-monthly Victoria meetup group and I’ll be happy to show it off. :)

Llamas to Space: GGJ Game

Events, Game Design 2 Responses »

Jan 282012

I’m taking on a side-project from my side-project this weekend in celebration of the Global Game Jam. They’re a bit related, though!

The Diversifiers of Inspiration

GGJ does its best to help spice things up a bit by posting not only a theme, but also “diversifiers.” Diversifiers can be thought of as challenges or achievements to strive for you in your game development, and are usually a diversion from “standard” gameplay mechanics. I particularly like them as they spark my imagination.

The list of diversifiers this year was full of inspiring angles on gameplay (even if they are a bit technically heavy this time around). The ones that jumped out at me were numbers 3 and 4:

3. Asymmetry
(Every player is different)
The game requires more than one player, but each player has entirely different goals and rules.

4. Collaborative Casual/Hardcore
(Two players: one casual, one hardcore)
Collaborative play for two, but one player has more to do than the other (or the difficulty level is different between them).

I’ve been on a recent co-op kick; the barren wasteland of co-operative video games drove me to board gaming, where I’ve been having a lot of fun. I’m often pining for titles I can play at my computer – and with my girlfriend, who has significantly different tastes in games.

This particular mixture of asymmetry, differing skill levels, and my own personal desire for co-op play, seemed to open up several doors in my imagination. Maybe I could fill this void! Llamas to Space was born!

Setting Up

I’ve been developing for mobile devices for the last week, but a lot of my time spent has been learning the ropes. I feel like I know enough now to make something much faster than before, if I build on what I learned. I decided right from the start that Llamas to Space would be:

iPad only
Co-operative, 2 player
Simultaneous gameplay
With two very different games for each player
… but the two games have intermixed mechanics; one players performance can effect the other player.

I hope that mix will make engaging gameplay, encourage discussion between players, and be a fun game that can be shared across diverse gameplay preferences.

I also settled on a bit of a backstory and plot to help guide the style and development. I’ll save that for later. :)

I slapped together a few placeholder pieces of art, and set out to do what I do with all my jam games: learn something new.

Work so far

The first thing I needed to tackle was handling simultaneous touch inputs for two different players. This is something I’ve never done before, wasn’t sure was possible using AS3/AIR, and I definitely had no way of emulating it on my PC dev environment.

After some scouring of the internet I figured out how the touch event listeners worked, I got my first tech-test app built surprisingly fast! Took me about 30 minutes to have the basic arena setup with two player inputs being tracked seperately.

I actually spent much more time figuring out how to work around the PC emulation problem. I can’t develop very quickly if I have to push a build to my iPad every time I compile. I didn’t find a good solution so I just hacked another layer of mouse event listeners on top of everything else. It’s messy, but that’s what gamejams are for: messy code!

All in all, I only put in 3 hours of work today (we had a late start and some technical issues at the GGJ venue). But I manged to pull off this:

Glorious programmer-art! The brown line is the divider that cuts through the middle of the iPad screen; one player plays on the bottom (cropped in this photo), the other player plays on the top.

What I’m demonstrating here is a basic “castle defence” style of gameplay; badguys stream in, and you have to repel them by hitting them with lobbed mortars (missle-command style, I suppose). I’ve got a lot of ideas for making this a difficult, unique action-gameplay experience. For now, I’m happy to say that player 1 actually has something to do, with actual win/lose conditions!

I’m also excited to have implemented what is, essentially, mini-blitting for the first time. The backdrop gets “stamped” with death and crater images; they aren’t unique gameplay objects, and they don’t fade with time. I’m guessing the battlefield will be pretty piled up at the end!

I haven’t worked on player 2′s game yet so I’ll save that for another post. :)

Hope everyone else is having fun at GGJ this weekend!

Word Game DevLog: Day 5

Game Design 2 Responses »

Jan 272012

(Check out the first 4 days here)

It’s Thursday! Party time!

In these devlogs I’m trying to avoid describing the core mechanic of the game; I’m not absolutely certain it’s final and I’m still experimenting. So if things seem a bit vague: don’t worry! It’s intentional.

I didn’t get a whole lot done today. Probably only put in about 2 hours of work, but that’s allright. The big changes for today? A brand new game mode, and some tweaks to the scoring and gameplay start/end. Most exciting though: solidified an artistic relationship!

Artistic design in games

I want to stress here that I put a huge amount of value in artistic direction, and significantly less value in actual artistic execution. Not to be unfair to the more artistically minded, but to be frank: a simple artist is a dime-a-dozen. I get emails from talented folk on a monthly basis; all they need to work is a specific direction, and plenty of hand holding.

For example, you might ask for an image of a penguin. The artists in question might say “sure! but… How big should the beak be? Should the eyes be big or small? What palette do you want to use?”… The level of hand-holding here is very aggravating. It’s like the easiest way to communicate is to just mock-up all the art assets myself and just have them draw over it, but better.

And that’s exactly what I don’t want. Sure, I have preferences and intended artistic themes for my games. But I also have enough experience to know I don’t know what’s best, and I should just shut the hell up and leave it to the pros. This is one of the reasons that I fawn over amazing designers like Greg Wohlwend and Dan Cook so much: They can completely design – from the ground up – a projects entire image, and execute on it with amazing talent and precision. I wish I knew appropriate artistic lingo to drool over them professionally.

Another name to add to that list is Sven Bergström - an indie developer with a lot of passion from South Africa. I’d say he’s a newcomer, a rising star on the horizon – but really he’s just new to my personal network; he’s been making games for longer than I have, and knows a lot more about – oh, let’s say mobile development, than I do. I wish I knew he existed sooner! He’s the one that helped revamp the visual design on my personal blog here a few months ago, and he’s super talented in all that he does. I’m excited to have him on board!

Sven just started working on this mysteriously-titled “Word Game” yesterday, and I asked if he could put together an image to share with you.

Check that out! Character design for the game. This is the first stage of evolution for our lead character! I love reading about this kind of stuff. I learned things today about character design!

Two types of player

When I take a look at most word games, there seems to be two camps.

On one side is the person that likes to find long words. These are the people that like Boggle, or a lazy Sunday spent staring at a Scrabble board. In the mobile space, you pretty much just look at the games that have no time limits or external pressures. The goal is to be your best. I like to put SpellTower in this category.

On the other side is the person that likes action, and would be just as happy dazzling you with an array of 3-letter-words. These types of players tend to play the faster-paced, more hectic games. Games like PuzzleJuice, or tournament Speed Scrabble. Sure, there’s bonuses in it if you have long words, but the score to be gained by just going fast is the prime target here.

I like both styles of play, and I’ve been trying to work them into a single game mode. This has been failing! Balancing long words versus big “combo multipliers” is very tricky indeed. I fought my urges to unite these two camps and instead built a second mode into the game.

Now, without changing any mechanics (just the scoring algorithm), I have two different game modes: one that rewards long words, and one that rewards lots of small words in rapid succession.

The jarring end

One thing that is a common occurance in word games is that brick-wall ending. Maybe you have a word half-spelled, maybe you are massaging your temples as your brain cascades through all the potential letter combinations. Then BAM! The game suddenly ends, your tiles disappear, and you are left holding nothing.

I think this ending is hugely anti-climatic and I really dislike it. I reworked the game to instead allow you one more super-move after the timer expires. Sure, you can sit there for as long as you want and hunt down the best possible word – but in Speed mode, your combo multiplier soon runs out and you’ll not gain much for it. In LongWord mode, it’s the final cherry on top of your sundae.

I’m playtesting this new feature now; I hope some variant of it will stay make it into the final game.

On a smaller, but similar note: the big mean ol’ nasty countdown clock doesn’t start ticking until you’ve actually made your first word. Terrain in this game changes a lot in just a few seconds, so being able to plan out your first move isn’t a huge advantage.

Other odds & ends

I got TestFlight setup so I can start an actual iOS closed-beta program for the game, and get some feedback before launch. I also made my first iPhone build (so far it’s been iPad only) and I was very pleased to see that the game was simulating nicely without any modifications at all. I’ll have to actually see it on-device before I declare it a success, though.

There’s a few mobile-specific features in the game now too; things I consider housekeeping: rotation locks, proper (mockup) icons and loading images, pivot behaviour hooks, specific code for android “back” button mis-presses, and customary stuff like remembering to pause the countdown timer if you swap out of the game (and reducing the game to 1FPS in the background, so it doesn’t suck up your battery). Whenever folks talk about mobile development having a lot more “gotchas,” this kind of work makes it seem very true. However, I did all of these tweaks in about 30 minutes of code. The only trouble they’ll give anyone is if they simply forget about them before launch!

I think the most notable thing about today is that I spent way more time playtesting than I did coding. I think that’s a very good sign.

Word Game Devlog: The first four days

Game Design 11 Responses »

Jan 252012

Hey everyone! I haven’t spoken a lot about game dev recently, but I started doing a side project and thought it would be good devlog material.

The Inspiration

Last Saturday (January 21st) I topped off my evening by rocking all the high score tables in the new word game, PuzzleJuice. I really love that game, and as I drifted off to sleep that night I started thinking about how easy it would be to make a word game of my own.

(EDIT: My girlfriend informs me that I had the idea a week before PuzzleJuice, but my brain has re-written history and I don’t believe her.)

I mean, how hard can it be? Get a little dictionary of words, spell some things out… Should be no problem, right? I decided to find out. Laying there in bed, I wasn’t heart-set on releasing a commercial product; I just wanted to see if I could make something up quick.

Day One: Sunday

I spent my morning coming up with a theme. I wanted something casual and cute; my girlfriend suggested penguins as a central theme, so penguins it was! I thought up a quick and easy central mechanic (a variation on a Boggle-like interface) and started prototyping what was initally dubbed “Word Fishing.”

I spent a lot of time toying around with different UI design elements, and fleshing out the codebase for what was to come (game-jam style, not proper-engineering style). I only put in 3 or 4 hours this day, but it was good start. Most of all, I got a bunch of research done on what lay ahead of me.

Day Two: Monday

On Monday I setup my first dictionary-lookup chunk of code – an older, out-of-date word database with an OK search algorithm. The best part was that it was mostly cut-n-paste from some fellow devs – it pays to network!

I then moved on to actually implementing the gameplay. I got some temporary art in place, implemented a simple mouse click-to-select interface, and was able to actually play what I had envisioned less than 24 hours before. Hooray! Prototype #1: Complete.

As I was playing the game into the evening, I was surprised at how fun it was. I mean, I love Boggle to start with – but this new twist on mechanics seemed to be playing out really well. There was no timer implemented yet, so it felt somewhat freeform… That would go on the to-do list.

It was around this point I decided to make this a proper commercial application!

Knowing a word game would work much better as a mobile application, I started eyeballing my 2-year-old Nexus One (Android phone). I’ve never made a mobile application before… could I do it?

Monday night was spent downloading Android development interfaces, debugging tools, and drivers of various sorts – the whole time being hand-held by the wonderful FlashDevelop documentation. That’s right, I just pressed “New Project > Mobile App” and my folders came pre-stocked with all the batch files and automated certificate generation routines I could ever want.

I got the app working fine in the Android simulator on my desktop, but I couldn’t manage to get it over to my phone… Very frustrating. But still, I put in about 6 hours of work this day, and I’m starting to get really stoked.

Day Three: Tuesday

The first thing I did on Tuesday morning was fix my deliver-to-phone problems. Turns out it was really stupidly simple: the USB port at the front of my computer wouldn’t maintain a debug connection to my drivers. Everything else worked fine, but moving it to the back panel solved all my problems. Sometimes computers are really really frustrating!!

I was avoiding implementing a touch-friendly draw-to-spell interface (it just felt like grunt work!) but I managed to pull it off with just an hour of work. I patched all the memory leaks, converted all my graphics to cached bitmaps, switched my phone to GPU-rendering, and generally worked on mobile optimizations. For my first stab at doing all of this, it was much, much easier than I expected.

In the evening I implemented some visual pizazz – particle effects, simulated gravity for falling blocks (instead of prototype-instant-teleportation), and other things that just give the game a bit more “crunch.” It was around this time I started looking for a proper artist to dress the game up for me.

I topped the night off by updating the dictionary words to the official, tournament Scrabble word list (the tournament version includes naughty words, unlike the home version).

In total, the day was probably 7 or 8 hours of work, and the Android app was running really nicely on my older Nexus One. My thinking was, if I can get the game performing really well on that old equipment – I wouldn’t have to worry about further optimizing for newer equipment.

Day Four: Wednesday

After not getting enough sleep, I spent Wednesday morning trying to cut down on the CPU overhead. One of my best optimizations was rewriting the dictionary search routine – now implementing a Binary Search Algorithm. I also implemented “live spellcheck” (it detects proper words while you are spelling, instead of waiting to search after you’re done), which changed the game a surprising amount.

More mobile optimizations in the afternoon – in this case, the simple act of deliberately manipulating the frame rate to very low numbers when there’s no action. Other than saving CPU time, this also has the benefit of not bleeding your mobile battery dry. No reason to render the motionless Main Menu at 60 FPS!

In the evening, I finally bit the bullet: I signed up for the $99 Apple Developer account, installed iTunes, and created some certificates. With only 2 hours of work, I had my first-ever iPad app running on my device!

Of course, transitioning my app from the smaller-screened Nexus One to the larger-screened iPad2 unveiled a bunch of scaling errors I made in my code. I spent the bulk of the evening fixing up all of my dynamic-screen-size handling classes and trying to make things pretty.

And that brings us up to date. It’s Wednesday night as I write this! I’ve put in about 6 hours of work today and the game could be launched in the app-store right now, if I wanted to shoot myself in the foot marketing-wise.

Coming Up

Now that I’ve got the last few days out of the way, I’ll try to update my blog once-per-day with more details on what’s going on.

I think it’s really exciting that I was able to take my AS3 coding skills and a free IDE (FlashDevelop) – and use them to generate a market-worthy Android and iOS application in just 4 days of part-time work.

Project Corona: TIGJam Game

Events, Game Design 1 Response »

Jan 252012

Global Game Jam is coming up, and that reminded me: I still haven’t talked about my last jam game! I made a video here (the first 3 minutes is talking about game jams in general, the rest is about the game):

So the last half of the video there, I start summarizing the new things I’ve learned with Project Corona. Here’s a list:

First time to not over-think pre-game organization
First time drawing exhaust trail things
First time rolling own mini-physics engine
First time implementing inverse kinematics
First time making fast-paced action game
First time making an action game with no “badguys”
First time making a monochrome game
First time making all audio myself (except midi source) (and it being decent)
First time making all art myself (and having it look good)
Based on a true story – educational game I guess
First time implementing deep parallax

Anyway, if you want to check it out, here’s a link to the last build I made. It’s meant to run 800×600 or so, so if your browser window is huge you might have to resize to get the right performance out of it.

Some tips while playing:

The point is for you to grab the film cannisters from the sky and return them (gently!) to the airbase.
Your maximum velocity goes up with your score.
The “end game” (at least for me) is discovering the moon. Can you make it there?

I’ve pretty much abandoned the project at this point, but I still go and play it once and a while. Let me know what you think!

PUZZLEJUICE review

Game Design, Game Industry 7 Responses »

Jan 162012

I first heard of the iOS Game Puzzlejuice via Greg Wohlwend’s blog post on the subject just a few weeks ago. I’m always a fan of the work Greg does (he is the art behind this game, and some of my old games too), and I was looking forward to playing.

I was expecting good things from this game. What I got was a face-full of unexpected awesome from indie developer Asher Vollmer.

But first: What is it?

The recipe looks a bit like this:

Start with 2 parts Tetris
Mix in 2 parts Boggle
Stir in 1 part Bejewelled

After some solid gameplay balancing, throw in a dash of powerups, challenges, and package it all up in a wonderful UI.

Instead of your Tetris-like rows disappearing when you clear them, they instead turn into letters – that you must make words with to clear from the screen, in a similar fashion to the iOS game Wurdle.

The gameplay is balanced beautifully. I have just enough time - and not a second more - to ignore the falling blocks and spell a few words, before I must switch back. I find myself constantly juggling between Tetris skill-set and my Boggle skill-set… But my Tetris skills are old and rusty, and my Boggle skills are not accustomed to this speed of processing and level of perpetual distraction.

If I was a particularly good player, I might even start paying attention to what colors my falling blocks are – as the match-3 component appears to be pivotal to keeping my score multipliers alive.

It’s about managing priorities.

Any other match-3 or falling-block games get increasingly stressful and difficult as you begin to lose at the game and screen real-estate disappears. Not so with PuzzleJuice. Being close to failure on the falling-block game probably means you have an entire screen full of letters to string words together with. The longer your words, the bigger their “explosive block-clearing radius”, thus dramatically decreasing the height of your stack.

From where I’m standing, the idea behind Puzzlejuice is to give you three things to think about, which ends up being one too many. – Greg Wohlwend

It’s all about managing priorities. I’ll admit I’m fairly terrible at it now, but I’ll bet in 4 months I’ll be astounding myself with the leap in mental processing I’ve made.

The execution is awesome.

PuzzleJuice isn’t just a well-designed, incredibly-balanced game, though. It’s polished in just about every way. Sure, it has a minor technical glitch or two, but I am playing a pre-release version still in development. Even then, there are some really nice chromed bits – it even has one of those “under-the-finger” pop-up windows that is so useful on touch devices, and yet so conspicuously absent in actual availability.

In pursuit of enjoyable scaling difficulty: you are now guaranteed to have a vowel next to a consonant (and vice versa) early game. – Asher Vollmer

The menus are slick and fast, the design easily leads the eye to where it needs to be, the interface is clean, and the whole ordeal is just incredibly polished. From the font selection, the tone of voice and language used (more on that soon), the pacing, the tutorial, the awesome tunes by Jimmy Hinson, the unlock progression…

This game obviously reflects the ton of work that must have gone into it.

The interface language is human.

There’s no “OK” buttons or “NEXT” prompts. Everything is spelled out, as if the game was an old friend encouraging you on. I chuckled when I unlocked an item, and the dialogue box was closeable by clicking “SO COOL!”. It’s little touches like this that not only humanize the game, but also help my own mindset on the right path. This isn’t some cold, Russian game of skill - this is a friendly, fun jaunt with an awesome game.

I’m even inclined to call the “Tutorial” the “Introduction.” This game places a hand on your shoulder and introduces you to every single awesome guy at this party.

The challenge system is great, and way better than achievements.

The one thing I really liked about the iOS game JetPack Joyride (by Halfbrick) was their awesome “Challenges” system. Instead of a long list of possible achievements, JPJ and PuzzleJuice both present you with three clear, distinct goals that you can focus on right now to get to the next level of gameplay.

This kind of direction (and structured design in the challenges themselves) makes the gameplay last a lot longer for people easily distracted, like me.

As a final word.

As a developer, this game makes me feel downright shameful for all the corners I cut. My levels of polish were never this high, not even with SteamBirds or Protonaut (my two most polished games to date). I am humbled.

I hope PuzzleJuice goes on to see a bajillion sales. You should be a proud owner of this gem – even if you are just a developer with no interest in the gameplay, you can learn a lot from the amount of polish and solid design here. As an artist, you can pick up some amazing cues from the art direction. As a gamer you’ll have a lot of fun, actually learn some things and improve your vocabulary and such. And if you just don’t care about any of that? Own it, just to own a part of indie history.

Feel free to add me to your GameCenter list if you want a challenger! My username is “weasello”.

(PuzzleJuice launches January 19th 2012 on the iPhone/iPad/iTouch AppStore)

From Dust review

Game Design, Game Industry 3 Responses »

Jan 112012

I picked up From Dust in a pre-order sale, and held back from playing it until just yesterday (due to all the press about horrible DRM and such). All this time it’s been sitting on my PC, installed, in my “pending” folder on Steam, taunting me.

And now I’m terribly disappointed.

But first, about the game

The game is reminiscent of the old Populous games, where you play a super-powered God and you have to guide your little tribesmen to various goals. They usually want to travel to some nearby marker to build a village, but an inconvenient river (of water, or sometimes lava) is in the way. From a top-down perspective, your main tools are landscaping-oriented; picking up and dropping down sand will be your primary duty in this game.

To add a bit of spice, the game also contains three unique plants: one that absorbs water (and releases it if the surroundings get too hot), one that randomly bursts into flames (and evaporates nearby water while doing so), and one that explodes, leaving nothing but a crater, if hot stuff gets nearby.

The good stuff

The game is beautiful. The way the waves slosh around in your lakes, the way rivers erode sand (and even rock!) over time, the way the whole landscape slowly becomes more and more real is just phenomenal. I love the aesthetics of the game and the liquid physics engine is awesome.

And it felt good to toy around with, too; crafting new valleys to redirect rivers gave me a nice rush. Directing the off-flow of a volcano to skirt my villages was neat. Tidal waves were entertaining to deal with, as was magically shifting terrain.

I think that’s where the game falls apart, at it’s most fundamental level, though: I didn’t have fun playing with it. I had fun toying with it. Which brings me to my long, bullet-pointed:

The bad stuff

This game had a lot of bad things hanging about it. I’ll try to touch on the most important ones:

There was no challenge to the game. Nothing was particularly “hard.” There were some glimmers of hope here, but they cocked them all up. Here’s just a few off the top of my head:

The name of this game is resource management. You only have so much sand to distribute around, and making smart choices with it is key. Sure you can change your mind and re-allocate the stuff, but do you make an isthmus to another area you need to access, or expand your vegetation? Build a wall to protect yourself from a threat or create a path to safety? Oh wait, you unlock the “unlimited sand” button in the second level. No more hard choices.
Sometimes a tidal wave could wipe out your village. The challenging solution is to build a wall to protect your village; or perhaps raise your village up high enough on a mountain of sand that it exceeds the height of the wave. The game’s solution? “Water invincibility shrine“.
Sometimes an erupting volcano will send a landslide of hot magma towards your village. It’s a fun challenge to divert the lava flow by molding it into a channel; you can blow up channels using explosive plants; you can even redirect a river to meet the lava and turn it all into cool rock. These are fun. The game’s solution? “Magma invincibility shrine.”
Sometimes a small dribble of water slowly builds over time to completely swamp your village and drive the people out. Channelling this water away is my go-to solution; but you can even evaporate some or all of this water using a fire-tree plant, and it’s fun to balance the danger of it setting your village in blazes too. Oh wait, did I mention the “magma invincibility shrine” also protects you from all forms of fire? Challenge erased!
Even then, if your village is in danger of being engulfed in flames, you can likewise balance the water-plant to put out the flames automatically, but risk it flooding your village. Did I mention the water-invincibility shrine?
And if all of those horrible game balance decisions didn’t impress upon you with how easy this game is: if all else fails, you can MOVE YOUR VILLAGE TO A SAFER LOCATION. Sure, it takes about a minute for your villagers to pull it off, but you can easily say “screw you!” to the map designer when he tried to force you to live on the side of a volcano. I can build my own paradise over here, thanks.

The cutscenes were terrible. I started up the first level, and there was a nice video showing my tribe’s journey to the location. “Neat!”, I thought. I kinda looked forward to unfolding the continuing adventure… Except they used the same cutscene between EVERY SINGLE LEVEL. It was basically a fancy loading screen.
Maybe the cutscenes weren’t totally at fault; the narrative was completely terrible. Maybe they just had nothing to work with. The game never really made clear if YOU are a God, or if you are just representing the power of the shamans in your tribe. They seem to summon and control you? But you have free will and can be a dick to them? I don’t get it. They tried to build on some story where you are looking for your lost ancestors, but I didn’t buy it. Why was I doing this? I had no motivation!
The big payoff ending was eye-rolling-ly uninspired. I won’t spoil it for you, but I can feel the game trying really hard to say the end scene was a big deal, but it just wasn’t.
The game is too short. From first load to finish – including bathroom breaks, eating, reading blogs and doing other stuff alt-tab’d out, and a 3-hour evening reprieve in which I left the game open, I only logged 8 hours. I figure the in-game content is only 3-4 hours long. They try to tack on more content by introducing “challenge mode,” which is essentially doing all the levels again but this time with a time limit.
The controls are awful. The game plays like it was designed for a console (it was). Moving around the map with a mouse is haphazard and I’m often over-correcting or under-compensating for my movements. I feel like nobody play-tested the PC version.

Allright, I’m stopping my list now mostly because I’m getting bored of typing them all out. I could go on quite a bit longer.

Conclusions?

It feels like a nice upstart (very talented!) programmer created a neat toy that included some great dynamic water modelling. He ran up to his boss at Big Studio X (Ubisoft?) and they tried oh so hard to turn it into a game, but it fell flat on it’s face – probably because of time or budget.

It feels rushed, like it’s still a prototype. This game has all the hallmarks of Awesome Tech, but developed via document and not via iteration. They tacked on a bunch of features that sound cool up front, but just didn’t pan out to a fun experience.

This game is particularly agonizing to me because – with a few months(?) of iteration, cutting, and adding features – this game could be awesome. Because half the features were essentially cheats, you could just CUT things from the game to make it more fun, more challenging, and more rewarding.

And this is exactly why smaller studios – and indies developers – can do so well in our field: We ship when it’s fun. Not before.

Is XBLA Past its prime?

Game Design 1 Response »

Oct 032011

Yes.

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