Scanline Forests

This time it's a hiatus

2010-04-25T05:45:00.000-05:00

Scanline Forests is going on indefinite hiatus for a number of reasons, mostly real-world ones.

More Gems

2010-03-20T20:31:00.000-05:00

More XBox Live Indie games that show some sort of competency:

Arkedo Series - 01 JUMP! — in the same series as PIXEL from my earlier post, this is an homage to classic platformers where your character is a six-by-eight pixel sprite, only now the pixels are really, really huge. It reminds me in a good way of Montezuma's Revenge for the Apple II (and about a billion other similar platforms). It also has a nice sense of humor, especially the comments when you die (and you will die a lot).

Miner Dig Deep — this is sort of a combination puzzle, exploration, and building game, with very primitive art that somehow doesn't really detract from the quality of the game. It's very sedate with minimal penalties for error, which makes it good for balancing out games like the following one.

Shoot 1UP — ignore the giant breasts on the logo. This is a very fun, very fast shooter that borrows from the "bullet hell" genre of games for obsessive Japanese men, but combines it with a number of new mechanics which make it less insanely difficult while still having thousands of things on the screen at once. I'd like to see these guys make a larger game based on the same gameplay ideas.

Square Off — another game in the "let's convert our primitive art assets from a liability into a design point" style, this is a pretty basic shooter that plays well, is nicely manic, and has a lot of personality.

Difficult versus Annoying

2010-03-18T00:31:00.000-05:00

Bastet stands for “bastard tetris”, and is a simple ncurses-based Tetris(R) clone for Linux. Unlike normal Tetris(R), however, Bastet does not choose your next brick at random. Instead, Bastet uses a special algorithm designed to choose the worst brick possible.

Bastard Tetris was an experiment in making a game deliberately difficult in a way which makes it unfun to play. I was under the impression that it was purely an experiment, but apparently the design philosophy has escaped into the wild, so to speak.

Yosumin is a puzzle game by Square/Enix, which started life as a phone game, was ported to the Nintendo DS, and eventually ended up on XBox Live Arcade and the PC. I played the demo about a year ago, enjoyed it, bought the game, played it a while, put it down, didn't get back to it.

I reinstalled Yosumin last night, thinking I would kill some time, maybe finally get to the end. I ended up uninstalling it after doing some analysis.

As you progress through the game, the difficulty level of Yosumin ramps up very, very steeply. The basic mechanic of Yosumin involves multiple kinds of puzzle pieces which have to be matched up in the correct patterns. It starts out with three kinds, and ends up with six, so just by doing the math it's obvious that the complexity level rises significantly. This is understandable and the game is still fun up to a point.

The thing is, even after you reach the point where you are dealing with six kinds of puzzle pieces, the game still keeps getting harder, and not just because the puzzle requirements require more effort to get. In particular, there's a certain point in the game where suddenly the frustration level spikes, and I did some analysis and figured out why. It's because Yosumin eventually stops generating new pieces and game events randomly and instead starts giving you deliberately counterproductive ones. It goes into Bastard Tetris mode.

This is a really good way to prevent people from seeing the final content in your game, mind you. I have to assume that someone at Square/Enix was really ashamed of whatever happens at the end of the "Adventure Mode" and wanted to make sure as few people saw it as possible. I have certainly ceased to care about seeing it.

The poor treatment of the player by Yosumin is even more frustrating since I've been playing Cogs quite a bit lately. Cogs gets very, very difficult as the game progresses, but it never feels unfair, never feels adversarial. When you can't finish a puzzle in Cogs, it feels like you're just not doing it right. In Yosumin, being unable to finish the later levels feels like you're playing cards at a crooked table.

Diamonds in the rough

2010-03-13T00:18:00.000-06:00

The "Indie Games" section of XBox Live Marketplace is usually something of a wasteland. Now, don't get me wrong, I think that Microsoft did the right thing. XBL's Indie Games are allowing huge numbers of people to create their own content and learn how to develop console games without having to worry about publishers and profits and the like. Even the people who never actually finish their XBL games will often get farther than they would have otherwise, because they knew from the beginning that their project relied on their own talents and not their ability to impress an executive at a game publisher.

The problem, of course, is that when you have a huge collection of unfiltered material by amateurs, the majority of it is going to be incredibly terrible. This makes finding the occasional gem even better. Here's a few that I've been impressed by.

Arkedo Series - 03 PIXEL! — the "Arkedo" series of games are all designed to resemble some sort of archaic gaming system, usually with big pixels and other effects that remind people of games they played a long time ago. "PIXEL!" emulates hand-held games played on a cheap LCD screen, like the ones found in the original Gameboy, complete with ghosting and partial translucency. The gameplay by itself is okay, not spectacular, but the atmosphere of the game as a whole is fantastic.

Platypus — this is a very, very simple side-scrolling shooter game, like "Gradius" and so on. The difference is that all of the visual assets are claymation-style sprites. I don't know if they are actual photos of clay models, or if they were rendered in 3D using a clay-like surface, but it looks great. The gameplay is exceedingly simple but it's fun.

Soulcaster — this is another retro-looking game, this one sort of resembling a Super Nintendo-era game with its low resolution and small color palette. It is basically a "tower defense" style game combined with a console RPG feel, and while I am utterly terrible at it, it's very well-made.

I've got a bunch more XBL indie games in my queue, and hopefully some of them will be worth talking about too.

Cloning A Critical Success

2010-03-05T12:49:00.002-06:00

I'm going to be totally direct, here. The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom is a poor attempt to cash in on the critical success of Braid.

Now, I could be wrong here. The motivations of the Winterbottom developers might be more noble than that. But if so, absolutely none of those motivations come through in the game itself.

With Winterbottom, I didn't feel like I was playing an independent game. I felt like I was playing some sort of gimmicky shovelware rushed to market by a major publisher to keep a franchise afloat, sort of like Soldier of Fortune: Payback. (The fact that Winterbottom is published by 2K Games probably contributed to that, but only after the fact.) The best way to explain why is to go through the features that made Braid so good, and why most of those features are badly emulated in Winterbottom.

First of all, Braid featured a unique enhancement to your standard platformer gameplay, the ability to rewind time to undo your mistakes. This feature was never abused, it was very simple to grasp, and every puzzle using that feature built upon the previous ones. There were no repeats, no "now do that again" sort of extensions to bulk up the game. Later areas of the game added new motifs and gameplay concepts, and when those concepts were exhausted, the area was over and you moved on to something new. And, I think most importantly, the actual platforming part of the gameplay was very well-done. Even without the time control features, the controls were firm and your movements fluid.

Winterbottom attempts this sort of gameplay, and fails for several reasons. For one thing, the character movement is very poor. Braid felt very solid; Winterbottom feels floaty and disconnected. The character animation isn't very good (you'll never see something like this for Winterbottom) and you don't feel like you're in control much of the time. The gliding-with-the-umbrella mechanic makes this even worse when it's used. There just isn't a solid foundation for the quirky gameplay add-ons to attach themselves to, which is the same problem that many games with a time control gimmick have. (TimeShift, I'm looking at you.)

The time travel mechanic in Winterbottom is also badly implemented. It is not nearly as simple to grasp as the basic mechanics in Braid, and its introduction in the game itself is poorly executed. The expansions upon the base mechanic do not feel elegant, they feel tacked-on. And finally, the gameplay is repetitive. Within minutes of starting the game, you will be repeating the exact same motions, only (for example) you are going to the left instead of the right, or you have to stack three things instead of just two. This is not helped by the presence of multiple goals in a single area. It is possible to get something "right" but miss one out of four or five items that you're trying to collect, causing you to have to repeat the entire sequence. Braid got this right; there is only one thing to collect per puzzle or new gameplay concept, which means you never have to repeat anything because you didn't do it correctly enough.

The second major way in which Winterbottom fails is the art direction. On top of the poor character animation and unattractive character designs, its black-and-white color palette is used very badly. The levels do not feel alive, but are instead flat and uninteresting. Braid has a quality of art direction which is nearly legendary with its emulation of watercolor paintings complete with brush-strokes, and it feels like Winterbottom tried to ape that with its attempts at an "old-fashioned" film reel look. The problem is that it just doesn't work. The art direction in Braid made it easier to play, since the characters and foreground elements were always strongly distinct from background elements. Winterbottom, on the other hand, makes all of its visual elements sort of blend together into an unappealing grey mush, to the point where it's often hard to tell if something is a background element or something you can actually interact with.

You can sort of see this coming by comparing the two games' websites. The Braid site is simple, colorful, understated, and easy to navigate. The Winterbottom site has an auto-playing music track (which is always a mistake) and an obtrusive Flash interface complete with Mystery Meat Navigation.

The music track itself is very annoying and repetitive as well, which extends to the music in the game. Surely they could have found better music than the horrible attempst to emulate a player piano with a cheap synthesizer that they actually used. The work of Scott Joplin is in the public domain now, as are nearly all of the other great composers of the era they're trying to emulate, so there was no reason at all for the appalling music in the game. This is another unfavorable Braid comparison, for obvious reasons.

Finally, there's the story. This is one place where I think the Winterbottom developers weren't trying to emulate Braid in any way, and that's because they didn't even try.

Braid features a story that's complicated, meaningful, and detailed enough to cause people to argue on the internet about what is actually means. (I personally think the "Trinity" folks are on the right track but I like that it's largely open to interpretation.) Winterbottom is about a thief with a big nose who likes pies, and it never gets more complicated than that. When Super Mario games have a more compelling story than your game does, you've done something wrong.

All these problems are why Winterbottom feels like a rushed attempt to ride the coattails of a much better game. It's simply not very good, and by appearing to try to emulate the quirky, original qualities of Braid, is suggests that publisher 2K Games was trying to grab a piece of the independent games market.

Joke's on them, we're all broke anyway.

Anyway, some people might think it unfair to make a comparison like this. I don't believe that's true. A game like the new reboot of the Medal of Honor franchise is going to invite comparisons to Modern Warfare 2 because both games have extremely similar ideas behind them and (so far as we can tell) very similar executions. It's possible that the new MoH game is going to measure up to the bar set by MW2, but the folks at EA and DiCE cannot possibly expect people to not make the comparison in the first place.

The same can be said for "The Odd Gentlemen", the developers of Winterbottom, only I expect that they were hoping people would make a favorable comparison instead of a negative one.

In other news, combining my last post and this current one, the creator of Braid talks about Activision and Infinity Ward as part of his announcement of Indie Fund, a new funding source for independent game developers.

How To Make No Money From A Billion Dollars In Sales

2010-03-04T23:32:00.001-06:00

The answer: be a studio under contract to Activision. This also allows you to get fired from the company you founded because you want to get paid for your work.

Something to remember for people who want to get into "the industry".

More here.

A Traditional Game Review

2010-03-03T16:40:00.001-06:00

A review I wrote for GamesXtreme has just made it onto the site. You can read about Tales of Monkey Island and how it compared to previous MI games here.

2010 Indie Game Challenge

2010-02-23T14:59:00.002-06:00

Congratulations to the winners of the 2010 Indie Game Challenge.

Interactive Fiction and Natural Language

2010-02-20T12:15:00.002-06:00

One of the numerous holy grails of software development is "natural language programming", the ability for computer software to interpret normal human language as instructions. This (theoretically, anyway) would remove the need for people to learn specific programming languages, and they could instead instruct computers through normal English, or more likely a specific subset of it.

A very simple example might be our ability to ask Google to "convert six liters to gallons" just by putting that phrase into the search field. Other slightly more complicated examples are Wolfram Alpha and its ability to convert normal nouns into complicated sets of data, or Mozilla Ubiquity, a Firefox plugin which aims to allow you to create complicated browser tasks with normal language.

At the top end, you have tools like sEnglish, which lets mathematicians and engineers create very detailed mathematical statements in human-readable (or at least grad-student-readable) language instead of having to translate these tasks into a programming language.

For those of us who have been playing video games since the early 80's, a lot of this seems rather familiar. This is because the idea of instructing a computer to do something in a pidgin form of English is something we've been doing for decades via interactive fiction, also known as "text adventures".

I'm exaggerating, of course. The ability to type simple text commands into a game is not really the same thing as natural language processing, but there is a convergence I'm going to get into later.

In any case, the history of interactive fiction is much too long to go into here (see the wikipedia page above), but the important thing is this: due to the rise of more advanced graphics and the death of the commercial market for text-only adventure games, modern interactive fiction is an entirely independent field. Nobody writes text adventures for money (with a few exceptions) because there is almost none to be had. They are almost always purely artistic endeavors, with the sort of motivation that I discussed in a post last year.

You can explore the world of modern interactive fiction at the IF Archive and its associated wiki. I would particularly recommend giving "All Roads" a shot if you've already somewhat familiar with the medium, and "Pick Up The Phone Booth And Die" just because it's absurd. Their description of "cruelty levels" in games is also worth reading because it can apply to all sorts of other game mediums as well. But what's really interesting here is one particular tool that some IF authors use.

In 2006, Graham Nelson released a new and highly innovative version of his IF authoring system called "Inform". Inform v7 was a radical departure from previous methods of developing adventure games; it was based on natural language programming theory. Creating a game in Inform7 consists of writing statements and instructions in normal English which the software can then compile into a functioning, interactive game world.

This is one of the canonical examples of Inform7 code (incomplete and minus some of the formatting):

"Hello Deductible" by "I.F. Author"

The story headline is "An Interactive Example".

The Living Room is a room. "A comfortably furnished living room."

The Kitchen is north of the Living Room.

The Front Door is south of the Living Room.

The Front Door is a door. The Front Door is closed and locked.

The insurance salesman is a man in the Living Room. "An insurance salesman in a tacky polyester suit. He seems eager to speak to you." Understand "man" as the insurance salesman.

A briefcase is carried by the insurance salesman. The description is "A slightly worn, black briefcase." Understand "case" as the briefcase.

The insurance paperwork is in the briefcase. The description is "Page after page of small legalese." Understand "papers" or "documents" or "forms" as the paperwork.

Instead of listening to the insurance salesman for the first time:
say "The salesman bores you with a discussion of life insurance policies. From his briefcase he pulls some paperwork which he hands to you."; move the insurance paperwork to the player.

Even if you know next to nothing about adventure games, the functions of all of this code are obvious. Just these statements and instructions are enough to allow you to interact with a very simple environment containing an insurance salesman carrying a briefcase.

I think that it's a very interesting fact that this sort of technology arose out of the non-commercial field of interactive fiction. Commercial games are constantly pushing the technology used to render more and more realistic and believable visual worlds, but this nearly unknown world of purely text games has made strides in what I believe is a much more important technology, the ability for people to explain things to computers in the same terms that they use to explain them to other human beings.

This post was inspired by yesterday's post, obviously. The semi-hidden image on this new Infocom site appears to be a mockup of a box for Trinity, one of the best (if not the best) commercial text adventure games ever written. This mockup has the words "for Windows and Apple" at the bottom. What this means is anybody's guess at this point, but I'm hoping it means they are going to be re-releasing the classic Infocom titles for modern platforms, even though they are already playable if you own the original files.

Oh please oh please oh please

2010-02-19T20:12:00.000-06:00

I hope this means what I think it means.

Not Dead, Vectors

2010-02-03T23:43:00.000-06:00

I'm still alive and this blog hasn't been abandoned. It's just that the real world sort of kicked me in the head this month and I'm still sort of getting back up.

In the meanwhile, go check out Vectorpark, and in particular Windosill, which is kind of like a game and kind of like a piece of art and kind of like an interactive museum piece. You can get the complete version on Steam for three bucks, and while it's a rather short piece, I think that's a three dollars worth spending. Bring your lunch to work tomorrow instead.

Gears and Steam

2010-01-11T17:02:00.002-06:00

During the big holiday Steam sale, I picked up Cogs for half off. I'm feeling a little guilty about that, because I've since found that it's worth the full price.

Cogs, as mentioned in a previous post, is one of those indie games (with just two main developers) that is at its core a classic game mechanic with a nice graphical overhaul, and with some sort of unique addition to make things more interesting. This is a fairly common theme in indie game development, and sometimes it works amazingly well, and sometimes it doesn't.

In this case, Cogs is basically a series of sliding block puzzles, but rendered very prettily in 3D and with a number of interesting game mechanics on top of it. For example, this is the most basic kind of puzzle, with sliding blocks on a 2D surface, and each block having parts of a system of steam pipes on it. In this case you're trying to link the bottom left to the top right, without having any leaks:

This later puzzle is on four faces of a 3D cube, which can be rotated with the right mouse button, and you're arranging the gears in order to turn the crank in the middle of one side:

A much more complicated puzzle combines pipes with gears that sit on the same block area, this time wrapped around a cylinder. You arrange them in order to drive a propeller:

This is the core idea of Cogs, an increasingly complicated series of puzzles involving the interaction of a handful of basic elements. Steam pipes combine with gears and gear ratios to drive bells and rocket engines and helicopter blades, across a series of 3D objects. The fact that you cannot simply place elements at will, but that you must work with the parts you've been given and place them using sliding-block puzzle techniques, creates multiple layers of problem-solving, and more importantly it generates the good kind of frustration.

Cogs is maddening, and I say that in the most positive way possible. Very quickly into the game you will start making "NNNNNNNNG" noises. But what keeps you from turning off the game and uninstalling it is a very clever system of rewards.

For one thing, there is no bonus for finishing a puzzle on the first try, nor is there any penalty for doing them one at a time. This means that you can quit for the day right after you've solved that one goddamn puzzle that took an hour to do, and you can go away feeling like you've accomplished something. There are no arbitrary starting and ending points. You are also free to skip any puzzle and try another one that you have unlocked, and that's where the cleverness shows up.

Cogs works on a point system represented by stars. A certain number of stars are required to unlock each puzzle in "inventor mode", where you progress through the game. (Those of you who have played the Banjo-Kazooie games by Rare may find this similar to its system of unlocking levels, especially as used in B-K: Nuts & Bolts.) Each puzzle offers up to sixteen stars to be won, depending on how extensively you've solved it.

In "inventor mode", you get three stars for solving a puzzle in the first place. You get up to three additional stars for doing it quickly, up to three stars for using as few moves as possible, and an extra bonus star for using both the smallest number of moves and doing it as fast as possible (although thankfully you don't have to do both at once). In addition, you can get another three stars each for solving the two parts of the "challenge mode", which are variations on the puzzles that require taking either thirty seconds or using only ten moves.

The widely varying amount of effort you can put into each puzzle means that it's possible to achieve all of the awards from a particular one, but skip other ones entirely, without missing out on any of the game's content. This nonlinear progression method rewards both casual players, who just want to see the cooler puzzles, and the competitive players who absolutely must get all the stars from all the puzzles.

In the end, Cogs contains an enormous amount of value. The puzzles can be very difficult, but the method for progressing through the game means that you will rarely if ever be stuck on a single puzzle. The puzzles get continually more complicated, but they always build on what you've previously learned. In fact, they build on what you've learned in a way which tends to make you say to yourself "that's impossible" when you first see the more difficult ones, and this only increases the sense of accomplishment when you do, in fact, solve them.

There's only two things that Cogs is missing. First, some kind of sandbox mode where you can build your own puzzles and send them to other people (like the one in Crayon Physics) would be hugely entertaining and increase the life of the game immensely. I can certainly understand why one was not included, however, given the complexity of the system. Still, if Lazy 8 ever releases a game editor I will be one of the first people to grab it.

Second, Cogs could use a leaderboard system of some sort, to allow other people to see your best times and the like. The Steam version of the game already supports Steam Achievements, which is good, but not as fun as an XBox Live-style leaderboard would be.

These two minor nitpicks aside, Cogs is amazingly well-polished, entertaining, and addictive. At $10 it is an absolute steal.

[addendum]

It turns out that I was entirely wrong about Cogs not having an editor. It's a fairly complicated process, involving the editing of text files instead of using some kind of 3D editor tools, but it's there. Details are here. This will teach me not to read a game's FAQ file before doing a review.

Speaking of which, the Lazy 8 FAQ file has cheat codes in it for those folks who want to see all the puzzles but don't have the patience to do it the right way.

In addition, Lazy 8 has a game postmortem with a lot of interesting information for wannabe game developers.

Documents For Game Design Nerds

2010-01-04T17:10:00.000-06:00

Transparent Optimizations

2009-12-31T21:49:00.002-06:00

The other day I ended up reading this article on level design optimization in the Source Engine at the excellent (if rather technical) NoDraw site, and I started thinking. There is a whole science of game design where the creators make artistic or gameplay decisions based on technological limitations, but make these choices in a way which is invisible to the player.

The opposite of these transparent fixes are extremely obvious fixes, such as invisible walls that block access to unfinished areas, fog to hide a limited draw distance, doors that lead to loading screens, inconvenient mountain ranges that seal off the gameplay area, and all of that sort of thing. These are often seen as lazy by the experienced player because it's obvious why they are in the game. The really excellent fixes are the ones that the player doesn't even realize are there.

One of the best examples of this, I think, is the gate-lifting minigame in God of War and its sequels.

What most people who play GoW don't realize, because the implementation is so transparent, is that these gates are not there to add extra gameplay. They are there to give the player something to do while the rest of the level loads, because the enormous levels of GoW will not load all at once into a PS2's memory. This extremely simple button-mashing minigame replaces a short loading screen, like the ones seen in the Resident Evil or Devil May Cry games. By doing so, the player's energy stays high because he is both given an activity to perform, and the movement from one level area to another feels seamless.

Another example of transparency, this time from game level design, can be found in the series of Halo games. In the very first Halo game for the XBox, an architectural formation can be found all over the structures built by the "Forerunners", a long-extinct alien race of tremendous technological might. Most Forerunner buildings have their larger rooms and corridors separated by a room which looks something like this, viewed from above (and rendered by my clumsy hand):

Once this was established in the original Halo game, future games in the series re-used this piece of architecture as the player explored further Forerunner structures, and structures built by other alien races who were trying to emulate them. This was very convenient for the game developers, because the point of this structure was specifically to improve the speed at which the game could render interior areas.

This structure, like many other ones found in 3D games, is designed to ensure that a camera placed in area A will never be able to see anything in area B. This way, the game's engine can safely ignore areas on the other side of these structures, without having to perform any complicated line-of-sight techniques to figure out what areas are visible to the player at any given time. This can make the game run much faster, as long as the artists responsible for creating these game levels use these sort of structures effectively.

3D games tend to use these sorts of structures extensively, often in "transition" areas that separate two different environments. Some examples that many people will know about come from World of Warcraft, where structures basically similar to the Halo Hallway are used as the entrances to major cities. The WoW cities of Stormwind and Ironforge both use this same method of blocking line-of-sight in order to prevent players who are outside the city from experiencing game slowdown as they approach the city gates. Here are the appropriate sections from the game maps, with my crudely-added outlines demonstrating the design:

The cities of Thunder Bluff and the Undercity use vertical separation to achieve the same effect, Darnassus uses a teleporter, and Orgrimmar uses a simple bent hallway. In addition, all of these cities use similar methods to separate different city districts from each other.

There are endless different varieties of structures designed to block line-of-sight between areas, and these sorts of structures are extremely common in 3D titles because they provide an almost completely transparent way for the game developers to improve game performance. Most players will never realize the reason for these structures unless they themselves have done 3D environment design, or at least studied up on the theory behind it.

I wanted to come up with more examples for this article, but I thought it would be more interesting to see what ideas other people can come up with. What game design elements have you found in games that you only later realized were there for technical reasons, because they were implemented so transparently? I'd like to hear your ideas.

Also, new color scheme for the blog. Hope it looks a little nicer, or at least more unique.

No Excuses

2009-12-24T12:49:00.003-06:00

Machinarium is on sale on Steam for $10 during the holidays. And lots of other good indie titles are on sale too.

Easily Distracted

2009-12-17T18:46:00.002-06:00

Another short one, since at the moment I am working on a couple of long commercial articles.

First, Francis Coulombe (a game developer himself) suggested in the last entry's comments that people check out The Ludum Dare and The Poppenkast for more indie game developer competitions. I would like to second his suggestions.

Second, I finally got the chance to check out Igneous, a DigiPen student project. I am absolutely terrible at this game, just like I was terrible at the original Sonic games, and that's probably the best way I can describe exactly how pure this game's adrenaline rushes are. Not since Sonic has a game given me this sense of speed.

Watch the trailer, and if you're not overwhelmed with a sense of motion sickness, download the game. It's quite amazing.

Experimental Gameplay Project

2009-12-11T11:07:00.003-06:00

Working on writing a longer update, but in the meanwhile, I'd like to share the Experimental Gameplay Project with everyone. In their own words:

We're a group of indie game developers, running a friendly competition every month. The rules: Make a game based on the month's theme, and don't spend more than 7 days. New games posted at the end of every month.

The results are usually interesting from a game design perspective, but not very playable. I suggest that people go in without any expectations because you'll enjoy things more that way.

There's also this related piece on Gamasutra.

[edit] A friend just described the EGP as "the game-making equivalent of microfiction", which I think is apt enough to share.

Knytt and Subtractive Design

2009-12-02T22:21:00.010-06:00

There's this very minimalist adventure game by Nicklas Nygren called Knytt. To give you some idea of exactly how minimalist this is, here is a screenshot.

This screenshot is not scaled. That is the actual size of the window as it appears on your screen. The game does not scale the graphics to larger sizes because as much as Knytt is a game, it is also an extended piece of pixel art, a style of computer graphics where pixels (the "dots" on a computer display) are placed one by one to produce a recognizable but deliberately artificial and retro-looking image.

Knytt is vaguely similar to the Small Worlds game I linked to earlier, as both are exercises in minimalist exploration gameplay with a pixel art style. However, the world of Knytt contains characters, dangers, and multiple goals, and is therefore more traditionally game-like, although they are both examples of what I would call "subtractive design".

Games using "subtractive design" are by definition going to be minimalist in some way. The idea is the removal of traditional game elements that would interfere with the atmosphere of the game, decrease the ability of the player to place himself in the role of the game's protagonist, or cause the development expense of the game to increase unacceptably.

In the case of Small Worlds, nearly everything has been removed. What remains are the most basic of controls, environments to explore, and music. There is no named protagonist, no background to the very simple story, no characters to meet, no conflict, no adversaries, and it has the simplest art assets possible. And yet it works, because the missing elements are not important to the goal of the game creator, which in this case was to provide a purely atmospheric, explorative game experience.

Knytt, on the other hand, is not quite so subtractive. The author of the game wanted to provide a sense of danger as part of the atmosphere, so there are hazards (like spikes or lava) and enemies (spiders and slimes and less categorizable things). The price for encountering one of these dangers is not harsh, since you are simply taken back to the last "save point", and there are no "lives" to lose. You just try again.

There are also other characters in Knytt (although you only interact with one of them), a simple backstory, a named protagonist, and so on. What has been removed from the traditional "platformer" adventure game is the fear of losing the game through character death, the need to find keys (or key-like objects) to progress further, and any sort of fighting or combat (since you can only avoid enemies, not destroy them).

Both Knytt and Small Worlds work wonderfully because it's clear that the authors knew exactly what they wanted to do with their games and did not feel the need to add any elements to them that were not required. When you compare these games to modern mainstream platformers (like "New Super Mario Bros." and the like), the mainstream games seem positively baroque. They feel complicated due to the addition of new "features", they have unnecessary backstories, and they hold on to traditional gameplay elements because the developers fear that leaving those out would alienate the people who played previous games in the series. They may still be good, fun games, but they have unnecessary baggage.

Subtractive game design is one of the hallmarks of independent game development. This is due to a combination of low budgets and well-defined artistic intent. Since the goal is not sales, the design does not have to include things which might hurt sales if they were left out, and the creators are free to experiment with things that a purely commercial title might not want to risk changing.

Cold and Gears

2009-11-26T05:04:00.004-06:00

Start a blog, plan on very regular updates, and you guarantee that you will be ill within the week. So it goes.

No extended article this time, haven't had the time to think about something interesting. On the other hand, I ran into Cogs a few days ago, and it's very pretty and the demo is fun. Not sure yet if I want to spend $10 on what is essentially a sliding-tile puzzle game with very pretty tiles, but I'll probably do it eventually. It's representative of a whole genre of video games which are classic puzzles with a fancy coat of paint and a gimmick; this isn't necessarily a bad thing, though, and I may write something about it later.

I also discovered that one of the puzzles in Machinarium is loosely based on a real-world Russian puzzle called a Minus Cube. I'm tempted to try and get one of these now.

A Clarification and Some Small Worlds

2009-11-21T11:19:00.000-06:00

Yesterday, I had a discussion with a friend of mine who is a professional game developer with several shipped titles under his belt. He pointed out to me that it is very easy to interpret my "Machinarium and Motivation" essay as suggesting that games developed for the commercial market cannot be "art" in the way that Machinarium and other works are.

When I re-read the essay with that in mind, I realized that he was completely right. And so, I'm following up with what I hope is a useful clarification, instead of going back and re-writing the original essay. (I'm doing this because this is a bloglike thing, and the whole point of this format is that everybody gets to see the writing process as it happens, mistakes and all.)

Obviously, that interpretation is not what I had in mind when I wrote the essay. Machinarium, the primary focus of the essay, was developed with commercial distribution in mind, as were other games with similar levels of quality. Nearly all of the greatest pieces of classical art in the world were created on commission for a wealthy sponsor. It would be ridiculous to disqualify something from being "art" just because the creator intended to make money off of it.

The actual distinction, I think, is not dependent on how the creator intends to share his work. It is, I think, dependent on the motivation for the creation of the work, and not the final method of distribution. The easiest way to tell with a commercial title is how you would judge its success or failure.

Take a game like the recently-shipped Modern Warfare 2. It is a fantastic game. It is gorgeous, it plays well, it is well-written, and it completely deserves the record-breaking sales that it has achieved in the last two weeks or so. That said, MW2 was designed primarily to appeal to a certain market and achieve maximum sales within that market. It has succeeded beyond expectations, but if in some alternate universe it failed to sell well, then the game would have to be judged a failure, because the development of the game did not have a goal aside from generating sales. There is a financial motivation to make the game good, which affects the entire hierarchy of development, from management down to the guys making the box art.

On the other hand, games like Machinarium are judged on their success or failure, not based on sales, but on the actual quality of the work. In the case of games which are released to the public for free, the quality of the work is the only way to judge success or failure.

This is what I mean by "motivation". This is the hallmark of "indie" software development. Developers of the game can look at extremely poor sales and still consider their game a success because it meets their own artistic standards, and meeting those standards was the reason for making the game in the first place. Choosing to make a game commercially available because game developers have to eat and pay rent too does not invalidate the fundamental motivation for the work.

I promised myself when I started this thing that I wouldn't let a post go by without giving the readers something new to go look at. This time, it's "Small Worlds", a competitor in a "casual gameplay" design competition. I'm really fond of this piece because it is completely minimalistic and yet incredibly atmospheric. (Make sure you play it with your speakers on.)

One of the reasons I'm sharing this, is that in a future essay I'm going to be talking about applying various literary analysis methods to games, in particular Umberto Eco's concept of the "model reader", and how the way that a player experiences a game can be radically altered by their previous game experiences. To give some of you an idea of what I'm talking about, think about how "Small Worlds" feels when compared with "metroidvania" games that you've played in the past. Those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about? The fact that you don't have this previous experience to shape the way you play this new game is exactly the point.

"A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships."

— Jorge Luis Borges, "Notes Toward Bernard Shaw"

Machinarium and Motivation

2009-11-19T06:59:00.001-06:00

How do you describe a game like Machinarium? Superficially, it is a point-and-click adventure game, created in Flash, with hand-drawn artwork and no dialogue, starring a little robot character trying to rescue his girlfriend. But bullet-point descriptions of works like Machinarium fail to describe the essence of the piece.

If I sound like I'm describing a piece of art, that's deliberate. Machinarium is less the product of a game studio as much as it is the product of a collection of artists. It feels like something out of The Animation Show instead of the summer blockbusters that we are used to seeing in the video game market. Every little detail shows that Machinarium was a labor of love and not an attempt at widespread commercial success; you do not have to be told that the creators of the game worked without pay to create it, because you somehow knew this within minutes of starting it.

This is that element, that difficult to define thing that distinguishes the independent game developer working out of love of the medium from the developers of "triple-A" titles with monster budgets and huge advertising campaigns, the Flash games written to draw people to sites to view advertising, and the amateur games created out of a desire for another thing to put on a résumé. This thing is obvious to anyone who plays the game, even if they don't think about it consciously.

I'd like to propose that this thing is a purity of purpose that expresses itself through the game's design choices, art direction, and polish. This is how you knew that Machinarium was made by human beings and not a corporate committee, that purity that is obvious from the very beginning.

(This is a theme I'll be returning to in later articles, but for now let's stick to this one example.)

In the case of Machinarium, the art direction is the most obvious expression of that purity. Everything from the menus to the character animations feels like a seamless whole. There are no visual elements that will draw you out of the game, no jarring or inappropriate moments. The lack of dialogue aids in this, as the game avoids the usual problem of voiced games, that of the suddenly terrible piece of voice acting, often a background character, that reminds you that someone somewhere was trying to come in under budget.

But on top of the art, there are the design decisions. Machinarium draws on the design techniques of classic Lucasarts adventure games, in the way that it is impossible to put yourself in an unsolvable situation. There are no "Game Over" moments, no times you are forced to load from a saved game. The savegame feature in Machinarium exists so that you can peel yourself away from the screen, not as a way to punish the player for making incorrect decisions. The people who made this game want you to see everything and take your time doing so; there is nothing to "unlock", no secrets which only the most die-hard players will find, no leaderboards for solving the game the quickest.

However, the quality which makes the independent nature of the game most obvious is the polish. It is clear that the people who made Machinarium would not show off their creation if there was any hint of sloppiness. It resembles the personal works of the most talented artists, whose own internal critics are far, far worse than any they might encounter in the outside world. A great painter will refuse to share a piece which he feels does not meet his own standards, not because he is afraid that the world will not like it, but because the artist himself will always know that he could have done better. Machinarium exudes that sort of polish, that attention to detail, that you only see when someone needs to satisfy their own internal standards and not the standards of an industry or medium.

This may all sound rather pretentious, and the "video games as art" discussion gets a lot of derision in popular games journalism, but I feel that it's true. Games like Modern Warfare and other huge titles, the slapdash little Flash games on large "casual gaming" sites, or the shoddy work you see on XBox Live Community Games, have something fundamentally different about them when compared to the work of the small independent developer. I think it's a matter of the source of the motivation, in much the same way that you can tell when an artist works for purely commercial reasons, or produces art because they desire acclaim of some sort, and when an artist produces work because they need to, and will not settle for "good enough".

More on this later, I think.