Hey guys,

the last 48 hours were quite exciting, I was taking part at the world wide game jam Ludum Dare #48 – 21 The Theme was “escape” this time. While that is a very good theme for a computer game, its actually used in lots …

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Hey guys,

the last 48 hours were quite exciting, I was taking part at the world wide game jam Ludum Dare #48 – 21 The Theme was “escape” this time. While that is a very good theme for a computer game, its actually used in lots of games already, so its hard to come up with something entirely new.  I did the game “Lost in the Shadows“.

The game is a rogue like adventure game where a dwarf is lost in the mines and tries to escape without dying. You have to find the exit, dig for water to survive and collect as much gold nuggets as possible on the way.  Sounds fun, but actually the game gets boring too fast. Its probably a content problem but also a design issue as well.

So here is my post mortem:

What when right…

Level generation
Level generation was done very fast and the rocks are layered, rooms where cut in after the rocks were calculated. There are 4 different rock types, the easiest which the  level is filled from the start. The second rock type is generated with rectangles. The third layer is more complicated, because it can only exists on the second type of rocks and the same with the forth type. So when you dig the rock gets harder step by step. This makes the game much better and more appealing. The rooms where cut in after the rocks where generated. That was ok, but I would change the now and cut the rooms after the first rock type is set. That should make the levels even better. The hardest rock types sometimes reveal hidden items. You can find gold nuggets and water. While the distribution is ok for this small short game, it needs much more improvement  for a decent experience.

Sfx
The sfx creation was a lot of fun. I went out with a hammer to hit some stones in the park, fiddled around with water in the sink, walked around to record footsteps and so on. That was really cool and exciting. The recordings have a not so good quality due to the iPad2 microphone, so I pimped them a little with audacity. That was fun and didn’t cost too much time.  The mining sound worked quite well, so I synchronized it with some particles. That is actually my most favorite part of the game yet.

Character pixel art
The character creation was ok as well. You have to know, that I am very inexperienced in creating pixel art, so it was really ok for my knowledge level!

Gameplay and gui implementation
The implementation of the gameplay and the GUI was working out very well. Actually I had only a few minor bugs nothing I to worry about and it was done quite fast. Well the code is far from optimal, but that was not the purpose of that competition.

I got it done:
Well it was my first official game jam ever and I got the game done. That’s was and still is really good for my ego! I overall invested around 20hours into the game creation.

What went wrong…

Tileset creation
The tileset creation was really bad,  it took me ages, at least 2-3 hours which is, compared to what is looks not worth 15 minutes. There is still a bug in the tile set. Connected to this my biggest time consumption was the FlxTilemap class from flixel. I never used that before and it didn’t work at all for my game. So I decided to implement it by myself, which isn’t too complicated, but I was a little frustrated already about my progress and made bad mistakes.

Game design and game mechanics
The  idea was to create a rogue like adventure, but without monsters, just the mine and the dwarf with a tight storyline etc. Sounds ok so far, but the most important part, the storyline, was done in the last half an hour before submission. So  just a few atmosphere texts made it into the game, thats it.  Well, actually the story wouldn’t have made sense at all, at least for what I have planned for, because you can die quite fast and so everything gets repeated, which is not a good game experience.
The water and the nuggets worked ok as items, but I would have needed some traps and enemies overall. The game is lacking lots of content here and so its really not that much fun. So all in all the game mechanics are quite poor. You walk around dig some rock, try to find water to survive and if you are lucky you will find some nuggets.  I have to invest much more time thinking about the concept before starting coding and art creation.

Music
No Music, I have never done music and I started to use musagi 2 hours before I wanted to submit. I realized that this would take me at least several days, because I have never created any music. The game doesn’t feel complete now.

Overall I am quite happy and I am will pimp the game so I can release it con kongregate or newgrounds. Thanks to the ludum dare team for all their hard work. I am happy to be part of such a great community and this was definitely not the last ludum dare for me!

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A little later than promised. Here is my little list of things I have done for Alien Invasion until to now. I have translated and pooled the tasks, to make it more readable for you. All figures are calculated in work hours.

Protoype and design

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A little later than promised. Here is my little list of things I have done for Alien Invasion until to now. I have translated and pooled the tasks, to make it more readable for you. All figures are calculated in work hours.

Protoype and design

10 hours design sounds ok for this little game, but honestly I should have put much more thoughts in the concept. That could have saved me a ton of work. The prototype was done in a time of 1 week, 2-3 hours in the evenings.

Player programming

The player programming was the most work yet. So I wasted about 18-20 hours on dump weapons. A little more thoughts on the design side could have helped, but well you never know. 4 redesigns on the weapon selection was necessary and I am still not 100% happy, but its ok for now. I got lots of help from friends, which suggested what should be changed. Thanks guys!

Enemy Programming

You see, I wasted too much time on the enemies. Way too much. I should have used splines from the first minute…but I wanted to have a really cool movement behaviour patterns. I tried different steering behaviours etc. Nothing really worked out well or was slow as hell. I got frustrated of that topic a several times. Using splines was my best choice until now. Some enemies still use parts of the steering behaviour. Anyway, lessons learned.

GUI Programming

I am quite happy with the GUI so far. Flixel and Flixel power tools don’t have that much GUI stuff so I thought I would spend much more time. But I reduced everything to the bare minimum. I am quite happy with the outcome. There is still some work to do, but that’s easy stuff like achievement and credits screen.

Effects Programming

Well this is my favourite part. Just 19h for such an outcome. I am really thankful for the FLINT particle system. I will need some more polishing time, but I have not wasted much time.  Good stuff!

Other Programming

Premature optimization!! I should no better, I watched this video from Jonathan Blow! Well to be honest, this was a necessary optimization. My frame time on my 5 year old laptop went from 10 frames up to 20 frames with all the particle action. I could throw away hundreds of lines of code as well, so that was worth it.  The port to Flixel 2.5 was not a big pain and worth the work as well.

16h bug fixes sounds not that much, but I have not tracked everything, its probably much more time which went into bug fixing.

Not much hassle with the asset management, just a few centralised files and I use .txt files for my levels. XMLs would be too complicated for my efforts.

Leveldesign and Tools

Skyline and spline editors were easy to implement and worth their time. Very useful tools. The tutorial mission was a complete waste of time. I did this far to early in the process and had to throw it away completely. Most of the work left is on the level design part. You could spend endless hours. I have not much experience in level design and this is really the hardest part for me at the moment. I got a little better already, but I am a complete noob. It can only get better .

The graphics part is only integrating graphics and doing some additional ones. The most graphics are done by Chris Noeth. The music is done by Cain German, so I need only to give feedback and integrate the music. The sound effects are created with the great sfxr and there is a iPhone version of this cool tool which I use as well! So this part is mainly outsourced. But I get better in doing some art myself using gimp. I lately started using sprite something on the iPad, not for Alien Invasion but maybe for the next game.

Marketing

Well not much up. Spent a view hours making video, screenshots, forum posts and writing blogs, what I should do more often. Twitter sucks a lot of time, but I think its the best marketing tool for indie game developers.

Whats left?

Well theoretically I am done in a week, but as you know yourself, the first 90% are done, now I am at the second 90%. Well I hope not, because I did a lot of polishing already, but 42 hours is probably the best number which could be left. The meaning of life and such….:)

Well to be honest there is some stuff missing like integration of the kongregate, mochi or newsground APIs, but I will try to sell it first on FGL.

So the total numbers are 370 hours of work until now and 51 hours wasted. I did work 2 month parttime work in the evenings and one month full time work. I hope I can finish the game within the next two weeks.

Ok thats it for now. Hope you enjoyed reading it!

Oh I forgot something, I think I played my game for at least 40-50 hours. I have just not tracked that time…

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Hey guys,

I am back with some excellent news!

The start screen has made some great progress. I am not completely satisfied, but its much better than I thought it would get. It took me around 2 days to complete it.

While doing the start screen I …

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Hey guys,

I am back with some excellent news!

The start screen has made some great progress. I am not completely satisfied, but its much better than I thought it would get. It took me around 2 days to complete it.

While doing the start screen I thought I need a little more entertainment for the user. Thats why I integrated rescue helicopters and some helpless people which need to be picked up in the city, as soon as buildings get hit. My intention was, that the player realizes that a city is under attack and needs his help!

I had this idea quit a while ago, but I thought it could wait. Well now its inside the start menu as well as inside the game. If you safe your citizens and your helis you get extra bonus while playing.

Here is a little video:

Did you realize that it is the helicopter art from Fort Apocalypse on the C64. I loved this game, so I thought I make a little tribute.

Next two big things are story mode and the mothership attacks. Stay tuned!

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Hi there,

as promised via twitter yesterday, I reveal some information about my project called ALIEN INVASION. Its a small Flash game with some elements from to Missile Command. Please checkout the video for some ingame footage.

The game is done with AS3, Flashdevelop,

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Hi there,

as promised via twitter yesterday, I reveal some information about my project called ALIEN INVASION. Its a small Flash game with some elements from to Missile Command. Please checkout the video for some ingame footage.

The game is done with AS3, Flashdevelop, Flixel, Flixel Power Tools, Flint, Singulartiy and some own tools like a Splineeditor for enemy movement etc.

Alien Invasion is still in development. The full game will have a story and a survival
mode and a ton of weapons for your defending convenience. If the flash game will be successful (either on FGL or Chrome Webstore), the game will be ported to iOS and Android.

I don’t have a final release date yet, but I currently working fulltime on it. I hope to finish all features in 2-3 weeks plus an unkown time of polishing.

P.S.
Sorry for the quality of the video, it was my first try

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Most computer game designs of recent years conspicuously neglect level design. A level designer’s job isn’t limited to level architecture and scripting — a game can benefit immensely from consistent atmosphere and psychological steering of the player. Modern level design should also be understood as a reality …

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Most computer game designs of recent years conspicuously neglect level design. A level designer’s job isn’t limited to level architecture and scripting — a game can benefit immensely from consistent atmosphere and psychological steering of the player. Modern level design should also be understood as a reality check for game design ideas.

Instead, many current games have filled this position inadequately or even tried to make it into a (minor) part of the game designer’s role. Ideally, the game and its scenarios should be believable and understandable, and the player’s actions should be cool and fit into the world; instead of adapting real life to achieve this, new games have introduced specialized, more or less awkward mechanisms.

In earlier games, all openable crates looked the same, and any slope that could be climbed had the same vine hanging from it. Such conventions were tolerable in the graphics of the time.

Such repeated elements aren’t welcome in today’s nearly photorealistic games, which makes levels harder to “read”. Thus, the aforementioned new mechanics:

Wolverine offers “smell-o-vision”, which highlights interactive elements and the path onward. However, this only forces us to play much of the game in false colours.

In Watchmen – The End is Nigh, a button press turns the character to face the direction in which he should next go, rather than designing the level so that the player can figure it out, or at least including a compass in the HUD.

The first clips of the new Splinter Cell show a system in which the character is shown as a ghost in the last place he was seen by the guards. Also, we can storm a room in the style of a modern action film, quickly and precisely eliminating multiple opponents that we have previously observed and marked. This will probably push the game toward an arcade feeling, because it doesn’t allow the player to know intuitively where his enemies are hunting him — it just breaks the atmosphere to show him directly. Also, storming rooms won’t feel fast-paced and cool, because it’s achievable only after a planning phase rather than simulating rapid and accurate shooting through e.g. discreet autoaim.

There are, however, counterexamples: while fleeing on the jetski in Half Life 2, for example, the level design uses the size and lighting of areas and scripted events to push us subliminally through the canals, so that we feel as if we were spontaneously choosing the right path from several alternatives. If we examine the map afterwards, though, it turns out that all of those (not so appealing looking) branches are actually dead ends. Skillful placement of eyecatchers makes the rail feel like a huge open space.

Clearly, there is much to do in the discipline of level design if the next generation of games is to offer a play experience as beautiful as its graphics…

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Greg Costikyan is an idealistic game designer and critic who has been trying¹ to foster innovation in computer games since 2000. Back in 1994 he wrote a famous² game design theory essay: I Have No …

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Greg Costikyan is an idealistic game designer and critic who has been trying¹ to foster innovation in computer games since 2000. Back in 1994 he wrote a famous² game design theory essay: I Have No Words & I Must Design, with which I mostly agree… but I’m going to take a bit of it out of context and pick on it anyway. Here’s the quote:

If the game has more than one ‘resource,’ decisions suddenly become more complex[...] If I declare against the Valois, Edward Plantagenet will grant me the Duchy of Gascony, but the Pope may excommunicate me, imperilling my immortal soul.

These are not just complex decisions; these are interesting ones. Interesting decisions make for interesting games.

The resources in question have to have a game role; if ‘your immortal soul’ has no meaning, neither does excommunication[...]. Ultimately, ‘managing resources’ means managing game elements in pursuit of your goal. A ‘resource’ that has no game role has nothing to contribute to success or failure, and is ultimately void.

Costikyan is 100% right that dilemmas are interesting, but are the only interesting dilemmas game-mechanical? Well, when it comes to the current state of computer games, yes. “Hard core” players separate the game’s mechanics (e.g. the way the chess pieces move) from its “colour” (the pieces’ shapes and names) very quickly, and ignore the latter. But does it have to be this way? I say no! There are other ways to play. In a game that engages the player’s emotions — in particular a role-playing game in its true sense, in which the player strongly identifies with the character she controls – “colour” can dominate game-mechanics in the subjective play experience. Emotionally loaded decisions are interesting even if they do not affect your progress towards a goal — in fact, especially if they don’t: if the cowboy in the white hat accepted the reward for killing the bandits, he’d be a mercenary, not a hero³. Moral decisions become especially interesting if being virtuous actually makes the game harder.

The emotional impact of decisions increases if the game world reacts to them. For example, the quartermaster in Deus Ex reacts disapprovingly if the player decides to massacre all enemies in the first mission, although that is a game mechanically acceptable victory. Such reactions require a light touch to avoid becoming puerile and a lot of cleverness to avoid being very expensive (since the game developers must determine what behaviours they want to measure, how to measure them, and how to make the world react to them), but even in rudimentary form they are hugely rewarding for some players.

¹ And so far, alas, failing. In 2000, he hoped cell phone games, being cheap to make, were going to become a fountain of creativity. In fact, because potential players just see lists of titles (rather than demos or even a box blurb), licensing tie-ins or massive marketing are even more essential than in the “classic” games industry.
² “Famous” in a tiny niche of game design snobs, anyway.
³ Mercenary attitudes can be emotionally involving too, of course, but if they have no hidden heart, they get dull fast.

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It’s always impressive, right after E3, to consider all the games that I could (or will) buy this year. The graphics and environment get more and more realistic, the heroes cooler and cooler. So shouldn’t that indescribable excitement — the release day fever, the “just can’t wait” …

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It’s always impressive, right after E3, to consider all the games that I could (or will) buy this year. The graphics and environment get more and more realistic, the heroes cooler and cooler. So shouldn’t that indescribable excitement — the release day fever, the “just can’t wait” trembling — have hit right about now? Well, it should have, but…

The developments of recent years provoke in me, an active gamer for a quarter century, the opposite feeling. The ever-increasing pressure to add unique selling points, better graphics, physics, etc. has decreased the willingness of the developers (or rather the publishers) to explore new directions, and in the end, they mostly produce interchangeable pablum.

Back when blocky pixels and abstract forms invited us to fill their gaps with our own stories; when we waited for minutes in a submarine off Gibraltar for the sun to set; when, after endlessly repeated runs through a level, we finally found the hidden key and with it an indescribable joy, games were primarily sparks for our imagination. Today they simply fulfill our expectations. We used to buy the key to a new world; today, a consumable product.

Today’s gamer has been squeezed into a mold of expectations. He expects games to work in certain ways; any deviations must be carefully explained in advance. Confronting the player with a task that he must solve by his own efforts, without hand-holding, is no longer allowed. Recognizing the patterns and mastering new skills was part of the attraction of earlier games. These days, games have degenerated to pure entertainment. They no longer challenge, they simply divert. This parallels the development of films, which have gone from providing a topic of conversation for post-show socializing to grabbing our attention with ninety minutes of bombast that are immediately forgotten.

Whether lack of design imagination will eventually lead games to follow another film industry trend, namely remakes, remains to be seen. Regardless, throwing away the chance to create high-quality games will certainly confirm a widespread and long-held gamer prejudice: anybody can design a game!

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Using a vocabulary of only 25 words, I have written a simple random generator that generates disturbingly plausible computer game names. Here are some samples:

• Eternal Shadow
• Shattered Empires
• Star Masters
• Blood Knight
• Silent Commander
• World of Eternal Blood
• Hero of the Shattered Throne
• Silent Worlds
…

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Using a vocabulary of only 25 words, I have written a simple random generator that generates disturbingly plausible computer game names. Here are some samples:

• Eternal Shadow
• Shattered Empires
• Star Masters
• Blood Knight
• Silent Commander
• World of Eternal Blood
• Hero of the Shattered Throne
• Silent Worlds
• Knights of Legend
• Blood Empire
• Star Wars
• Dawn Commanders
• Time Ninja
• Lost Swords
• Stellar Throne
• Heroes of Legend
• Forgotten Realm
• Time of the Unknown Master
• Legend of Legendary Legends

Except for the last one¹, these could easily be real titles — and not of embarrassing B-list products, either. What does this tell game developers? It tells us that game settings choose to live in a ghetto. It tells us that what we consider mainstream is  a sideline in other media. It reminds us that the “niche market” isn’t casual gamers, but ourselves.

…

Or maybe I’m reading too much into this and really just wanted an excuse to write that name generator.

…

Anyone up for a game of Time Ninja?

¹ Actually, since there is a real game called “Divine Divinity”, “Legend of Legendary Legends” should get greenlighted no problem.



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]]> http://blog.rough-sea.com/2009/02/hardcore-games-are-a-niche/feed/ 9 http://blog.rough-sea.com/2009/01/why-grind/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=why-grind http://blog.rough-sea.com/2009/01/why-grind/#comments Sun, 18 Jan 2009 18:55:33 +0000 Rafael http://blog.rough-sea.com/?p=469

Almost all computer games with “role-playing elements”¹ force the player to spend a lot of time on boring, non-challenging, repetitive tasks. These tasks, called grind, translate play time into in-game power. Often, they are disguised as something vaguely heroic — killing ten orcs, for example …

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Almost all computer games with “role-playing elements”¹ force the player to spend a lot of time on boring, non-challenging, repetitive tasks. These tasks, called grind, translate play time into in-game power. Often, they are disguised as something vaguely heroic — killing ten orcs, for example — but sometimes, especially in online multiplayer games, designers seem determined to rub new players’ faces in the fact that they are worthless nothings by sending them off to collect ten balls of lint instead. In either case, the question is “why deliberately include grind?”

The advantages for the game developers are clear:

1. Grind slows content consumption.  You can have a pretty small world and still write “50 hours of excitement”  on the package if the player has to spend ten hours in each new region walking back and forth between the lint orchards and the marketplace.²

2. In an online game whose income is based on advertising or monthly subscriptions, grind ties player success to developer income. The more powerful a player wants to become, the longer she must play — and hence, the more money she generates for the developers.

Why do the players accept this?

For one thing, grind often comes packaged in fancy visuals and perhaps a new world to explore, so it doesn’t feel like work until the novely wears off. But there’s more to it:

3. Steady progress is seductive. In real life, achievement involves hard work and often risk. Computer games offer an easy sense of accomplishment; their challenges are designed to be overcome. Grind distills this:  if you put in the time, you are guaranteed the reward, which is the way we’re taught as children that life is supposed to work.

4. Competition motivates. If there’s a chart somewhere that says that I’m better than you, I get a satisfying feeling of superiority, even if the chart only measures our respective willingness to have our time wasted.

5. People will put up with a lot of crap to feel cool. Games with grind are often designed so that increasing power means prettier equipment, fancier special effects, etc. This also explains the humiliating newbie lint-quests: increasing the coolness gap between new and experienced players increases the incentive to level up.

So grind is tempting… but it has dangers:

• Grind at the beginning of a game, before a player becomes hooked, can cause her to stop playing before “getting to the good stuff”. And if there is no “good stuff”, those who do stick it out will be very disappointed.
• Grind consumes bandwidth and server resources for online games, and these cost money, so it actually reduces profits for games with a flat monthly fee.
• Grind plagues the game designer’s conscience — or should.

Is it possible to get the good parts of grind without the bad?

I’m not sure, but I’m doing my best in our game. My approach is two-pronged:

a) Grind is optional. Our game can be played, even at a high level, in a few minutes a day. However, to satisfy those who crave grind, or who simply would like to invest more of their time, there will be special, grind-based tasks and rankings that interact only weakly with the core gameplay

b) Grind isn’t too boring. I don’t think it’s possible to make grind really interesting, because interest arises either through challenge (which would void benefit 3) or appealing content (which contradicts 1). Still, there’s a world of difference between an entertaining mini-game and just clicking a button repeatedly.

I don’t want to bore my players unless they insist. Time will tell if I can avoid it.

---

¹  Unfortunately, “role-playing” in the context of computer games just means “you have a game token or tokens that becomes more powerful the longer it is used”. (back)

² And if you’re willing to  lie about the “excitement” part. (back)



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]]> http://blog.rough-sea.com/2009/01/why-grind/feed/ 7 http://blog.rough-sea.com/2008/12/escaping-the-tar-pit-called-game-content/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=escaping-the-tar-pit-called-game-content http://blog.rough-sea.com/2008/12/escaping-the-tar-pit-called-game-content/#comments Sun, 07 Dec 2008 23:59:49 +0000 Rafael http://blog.rough-sea.com/?p=310

How can a small developer produce enough content to keep a massively multiplayer game interesting?

Fun is not a full time job

More and more browser games want to be World of Warcraft, which, in practice, usually means that they try to suck …

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How can a small developer produce enough content to keep a massively multiplayer game interesting?

Fun is not a full time job

More and more browser games want to be World of Warcraft, which, in practice, usually means that they try to suck you into spending your whole day grinding. Our game is designed to be played for about fifteen minutes per day. Why? Mostly because we expect that our players will have lives outside the game, and we don’t want to ruin them. The side benefit is that we don’t need to produce content as quickly, since players can’t burn through everything in a single insomniac sitting.

Rough Sea needs you

The MMOG content problem arises because there are more players than developers. So why not allow players to make their own content? Everyone wins: creator players get in-game rewards and the pleasure of seeing their work in the game world; consumer players get more copious and varied content.  Of course, vetting submissions is a lot of work, but we may be able to use voting, etc., to get the players partially to supervise themselves! Many web sites (eBay, flickr, facebook) and computer games (Sims, Spore, Little Big Planet) are either founded on or enriched by “user created content”, but browser games haven’t twigged yet.

Use your words

The convential wisdom is that people hate having to read while playing a computer game — it’s a visual medium, like film — and that “reading” on the web consists of skipping as much text as possible. Our game, while primarily graphical, uses text to describe special events that occur in the course of play. Are we crazy? Possibly — and if playtesting shows that reading sucks, we’ll scrap it and redesign. But since players will only see a couple of text-based events per day (and since we hope to attract literate players, not twitch monsters), we hope that these will be seen as welcome variety, not as a chore.

And what are the advantages of text?

• it’s faster to write an atmospheric text than to create the same mood with art or sound. That means we can deliver more content.
• writing requires no special software or equipment, which makes it especially suited to user created content as described above.

Left to Chance

Computer games discovered early that a computer, given the right formulae, can create a huge, complex world much faster than a human can. The procedurally generated approach isn’t suited to text, nor to our style of graphics, but it is excellent for creating spaces for people to explore.



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]]> http://blog.rough-sea.com/2008/12/escaping-the-tar-pit-called-game-content/feed/ 5 http://blog.rough-sea.com/2008/10/content-vs-mechanics/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=content-vs-mechanics http://blog.rough-sea.com/2008/10/content-vs-mechanics/#comments Tue, 14 Oct 2008 19:39:00 +0000 Rafael http://blog.rough-sea.com/?p=136

Game design distinguishes between mechanics — the rules of the game — and content — the stuff in the game, like art, music and story. Good mechanics tend to be fairly simple, so that players can understand them, but provide enough flexibility for expressive play (consider chess …

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Game design distinguishes between mechanics — the rules of the game — and content — the stuff in the game, like art, music and story. Good mechanics tend to be fairly simple, so that players can understand them, but provide enough flexibility for expressive play (consider chess and go). This often makes them cheap to implement: a clear, simple set of rules is a programmer’s dream. Good content, on the other hand, tends towards the elaborate and expensive: if you want your game to contain a city teeming with life, you’d ideally want every one of its thousands of citizens to look different, and possibly even behave uniquely. Big budget titles like content, because if you have money, it’s the safer bet: it’s hard to come up with good new mechanics, and even if you do, gamers may reject them. Content allows you to distinguish yourselves from the competition without that risk, and you can produce it pretty reliably (of course, there are brilliant and incompetent digital artists and authors, but for an average team, more time & money => cooler content).  On the other hand, Indie games tend to emphasize clever mechanics because that’s all they can afford. Also, games intended for brief play sessions, like arcade or casual games, simply don’t have enough time to show off much content, so they can and do skimp.

But there’s the rub: people associate content-light with short! If someone sends you a link to a browser game with little content, then you will almost certainly play it for only a few minutes, regardless of how brilliant its mechanic may be. If it were boxed for retail sale, you wouldn’t play it at all. There are too many games available to expect people to have the patience to let a mechanic unfold unless they are seduced by content. If chess were invented today, it would fail. A few people would play it, sure, but if only a few people played chess, it would never have reached the depth it has; the scholar’s mate might still be state of the art (unless it got nerfed in a patch).

We here at Rough Sea are making a game that is not short. It’s intended to be played in brief daily sessions, but the world and characters are persistent, so each session contributes towards larger goals. Therefore, we need content. But how will we keep up with the consuming hunger of our hoped-for hordes of fans? That’s a subject for another post.



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]]> http://blog.rough-sea.com/2008/10/content-vs-mechanics/feed/ 4 http://blog.rough-sea.com/2008/09/rafael-van-daele-hunt-game-designer/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rafael-van-daele-hunt-game-designer http://blog.rough-sea.com/2008/09/rafael-van-daele-hunt-game-designer/#comments Wed, 17 Sep 2008 17:36:42 +0000 Rafael http://www.rough-sea.com/wordpress/?p=75

This blog is going to be tricky. What I’d like to write is detailed discussions of the design decisions that arise in the course of developing this game. Not only does that seem most likely to interest you, the readers we someday hope to have; it would …

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This blog is going to be tricky. What I’d like to write is detailed discussions of the design decisions that arise in the course of developing this game. Not only does that seem most likely to interest you, the readers we someday hope to have; it would also help me organize my thoughts and steal ideas gather inspiration from your comments. However, our game is a BIG SEEKRIT, so I’ll have to come up with some way to disguise it for blog purposes. Perhaps a simple substitution code in which “artichoke” means “ship” and “umbrella” means “laser cannon”¹….

And who am I? Well, I was lead programmer for a bunch of games that you haven’t heard of. Not because they were terrible, but because they were solidly mediocre. Any why would anyone play such a game, when sitting right next to it on the shelf is a similar but superior game for the same price?

Before I entered the game industry, I used to wonder why there were so many unremarkable games. Why would anyone propose such a game? Why would anyone spend years of their lives developing it?  Bad, I could understand: bad can happen through honest incompetence, or even a really creative, fresh idea that just doesn’t pan out. Bad can be noble. But average?

I concluded that people didn’t know in advance that their game was going to be merely ok. They must have been trying for “great” and run out of money, ideas, or talent. Then I joined the biz, and it turns out that it does sometimes happen that way. More frequent, though, are projects where almost everyone involved knows from the start that the result will be pap. So why are they made? Well, some publishers believe that also-rans bring reliable profits. Many Developers are just desperate for whatever project they can get, to avoid going bankrupt, and they live from the hope that someday, they’ll get the chance to work on something that they can be proud of.

Screw someday. I am sick of working on mediocre games, and that’s why I’m here today, working on this game with these people. I probably won’t get things right the first time — even talented, experienced designers can fail, and I’ve got nothing going for me but a big mouth so far — but I will not rest until this game is worth playing. Or until I discover that I just don’t have it in me, in which case I will sink into depressed obscurity (and hey! What better place to blog from?). Either way, it will be a ride.

Want to watch?

–Rafael

¹ There are no actual laser cannon in the game, although there may be umbrellas. (back)



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