Month: November 2011

I think we need more design-ders. Or code-signers. Whatevs.

The argument against it is that a lot of successful game designers don’t code at all and that it’s going to give something else as a result in games compared to the classic designers/coders team.

How is that not great? We need that. I wish I could like Jon Blow, Chris Hecker or Eskil code my ideas, right here. I’m trying, copying and pasting code, battling with assemblies in Unity and it’s awful and it’s barely the start. Ew.

For some reason, having a coder doing exactly what you want or sharing the same aesthetics, or making him work on what you need right now is not as easy as it sounds. Plus, doing a game is hard so you need a really strong relationship with him on top of that. That’s the reason we see more and more successful coder/designer teams being siblings, couples or friends from kindergarten. I wrote about it two years ago and in my case, it’s not easy to get someone to work on my concept and maybe because I’m a crazy control freak or so ferociously independent, I want to do it myself or understand as much as I can how it works.

So, good for Ueda san or Miyamoto to have a team of people dedicated and paid to please them and I wish I could have the same, but I don’t! And a lot of game designers don’t either.

The problem is, transferring ideas and mechanics into working code in the same brain, hurts. A lot. But it’s doable and as tools are making it easier and easier, more and more people will do it, just to go faster, spend less or stay truer to the original, designer vision, all of them being really good reasons. It sure will bring new challenges and its own share of conservatism, but I think that the business side of games is calling for people like that right now. People who can sustain a vision, thanks to having a precise design/build view. It’s still so rare!

This breed of game developers needs to get bigger, as we are stagnating so much in our little worlds. We can’t afford to be conservative in this area, as we are in others (fuck you WASD, fuck you; please no more pixel art chiptune, pleaaase).

Examples:

Soul Bubbles on the left, Spirits on the right.

Same kind of universe, theme, mechanic around wind, both very well crafted by small teams. Soul Bubbles is anterior, being out on the DS in 2008. Spirit was out on the iPad November, 2010. Soul Bubbles HD will be out soon on it too.

It’s interesting because according to the team’s blog the idea behind Spirits was to do a Lemmings-like game. Soul Bubbles comes from a programmer and a designer doodling with a custom 2D physics engine and developing a game around it. One is a copy/paste with a twist, the other is a unique, fresh game. And that’s why it’s a better game, with a 10 pages thread of dedicated fans on Neogaf and unanimous critics.

Other case:

Radical Fishing on the left, Ninja Fishing on the right.

Here we have a blatant copy/paste with Radical Fishing being the first out, for free and being remade for Apple devices in order to cash in on develop’s work. Too bad, Ninja Fishing is out on this platform, “stealing” all the money.

What strikes me here is that it shows how games are all about mechanics and that tacky, not hip visuals are good enough, if you want to make a fun game and make money. Which is an important part in crafting, too.

So Daniel as often, is butthurting the industry. I agree with him because I’m kind of a romantic I guess. But I also don’t agree in the way that well, there’s no moral in business.

But Daniel has a point. Just in terms of settings and themes, I’m not even entering the world of game design. Just in these terms, you know we are lazy as fuck: heroic fantasy, Indiana Jones stuff, sci-fi and war, war, war. Don’t tell me that it’s what’s work, it’s a really bad argument, as Daniel points out:

We look at our current derivative behavior, acknowledge that it is harmful and then proceed to dogmatically justify its continued pursuit based off economic, legal, historical and short-term selfish reasons.

We just stay in our comfort zone over and over, game writers and reviewers included. Guys working on all these 3, 4, 5, 12 iterations of games love what they do, game writers can pull out tons of stuff about legacies and articles about series over and over and love that, nobody wants to change anything. And there’s a public for these games, end of the story. And end of the medium too.

A lot of people in the industry know this. The excellent Tale of Tales interview shows in the comments that it inspires people. Whatever you say, we need innovation and new games.

So if we go further and search for different game design ideas and mechanics and synthetize them, there’s a lot to do. How about the crazy sniper feature (100X zoom!) of MDK, mixed in a first person view AAA game about photography in a Laputa world? Ideas of games are so cheap, I’m surprised people don’t search a bit more. A Lot of projects get rejected in AAA studios because of risks involved in making them, I’m sure a lot of them are original and disregarded to death. Sigh.

What’s kind of depressing is that I get that 300 people in a game studio are going to do what they’re told to, but indies? VVVVV’s clone with a twist, really? If you’re doing something indie, you’re not making a living building polished iterations of a successful franchise, so why trying to copy so much? Why blatantly steal? What is up with this scummy mentality growing up with app stores? Geez.

Incestuous industry is incestuous. The amount of nostalgia through game writing and game developers on Twitter, is sickening. Nostalgia is bad for change. It feels like the game culture is all about celebrating the past and being really happy or really mad about the last iteration of [enter your game of choice here].

For a medium where we can do whatever the fuck we want, it’s disappointing. Again (I know, I repeat myself).

Saints Row: The Third.

Yes, this game is offensive. Yes, it is absolutely weird and doesn’t make any sense.

Yes, this games has bad taste, childish humor, is sexist and everything. But it’s also a very well crafted sandbox game with a shit-ton of content to play with. Freedom in games is something very valuable and pretty rare (see Skyrim fanboys or see rollercoasters like MW3 or Rage).

In three iterations, developers have been smart enough to stop trying to make a highly customizable GTA clone and simply go for what people were doing with an open, urban world: messing with it.

It also feels really good to me as an old fart because that’s what games during the 8/16bits era were about; weird stuff, weird settings and themes that don’t matter as long as you have fun. The over dramatic tone and false maturity brought by a lot of games these past few years? Fuck that. I was watching Uncharted 3 and the last Batman, holy shit it’s so boring and pretentious and yet, doesn’t deliver much.

So honest AAA developers focusing on interaction, freedom, fun, listening to players feedback and bringing a big dose of WTF and chaos on the table, I say “yes, please”.

http://kotaku.com/5730637/ aka, The Year I Gained The Courage To Ignore Video Game Music.

Two things: multitasking and dullness of games today. One feeds the other and vice versa.

We don’t multitask. We simply don’t. True, we can process music in the background and we definitely can listen to something else than the in-game music. Today’s games’ dullness allow us to do something else meanwhile but games requiring more input, more thoughts, need our complete attention. Then, you pause it and check Twitter or kick the dog.

Also, game designers know about this bad trend of doing multiple micro tasks at the same time. “Yeah, this phase can be annoying and useless but after the wow effect being gone, the player will probably be all over his smartphone or taking a crap so whatevs man; plus it looks like a cool screen saver”.  One feeds the other.

Daniel Cook has an interesting take on game audio:

I play most games with the sound off. The fact that I’m missing the ‘best experience’ means little to me. Such a claim is a red herring goal promoted by the immersion nerds, but isn’t a meaningful goal for most players. First and foremost, I need a game that fits into my life. Music, 9 times out of 10 is a distraction due to how I play games. It is a distraction for most people playing games on phones. It is a distraction playing games on the computer. It is a distraction if there are other people in the room. It is only not a distraction for the small portion of the population who has isolated themselves in man caves. For the anti-social man cave dwellers: Enjoy your game music. I put the option in there just for you.
Disrespecting the developers is also a BS argument. A game is an entertainment tool that I will use as I desire. And when a designer choice hurts the tool’s utility, I will either use it in a different way or move onto something else that doesn’t have an unfortunately design flaw like relying on music to create the main experience of play.
The best games happen in my head and that really requires no external soundtrack.

It’s funny because Spryfox, his company just launched Triple Town on Facebook. I tried it and there wasn’t any sound at first. Absolutely tasteless feel to me. Somehow, they quickly managed to put some sound fxs and ambient noise, and it’s so much more addicting this way. I suspect players asking for audio feedback. Otherwise it’s just sad, just about numbers and game mechanics for which of course, you don’t need audio (or angry bears). But only a game designer like Daniel can appreciate that.

Steambirds from Andy Moore, had a surprisingly low amount of people muting sound, 11% on Steambirds Survival and only 6% on the original, which had at first a mere 1.3% of players hitting the mute button. I suspect the rate going up because of the same players playing new versions of the game and knowing the music already. Still, 11% is much less than what I thought.

People expect sounds in computer games because it’s always been this way, almost. Even more for younger generations.

Sound and controls ARE the feel. They are triggered and processed by your brain before visuals. Visuals are the conclusion of the first ones. For instance in SFIV, you think about a move and hear if it hit, missed or has been blocked before looking at it. You actually don’t really care about the visual feedback and don’t have the time to process it at this point, you think moves and you listen to if they worked or not. You don’t even think that you are listening! Except when you play without the sound and that your response time gets much slower. Also,  you carefully get a sense of the health bar red/yellow ratio when you hear a big SMASH, not how Ken’s kimono moves. Seriously, playing SFIV without hearing fists impacts -and only real world arcade stick clickety clicks- doesn’t even make sense to me.

Sound triggers action faster than visuals, because of the way these organs are connected to our brain. We survived on this planet for so long, thanks to our ears, not our stupid blurry diurnal vision. Sound is a really low level access to the brain. No sweet and easy API like visuals, but access to the raw power of emotions that you can’t get with anything else, but sound.

So for most multi-player and competitive computer games, sound is very much needed.

For single games, it depends largely on what the game is about so the sound fxs or music or both are important or adding something. Even on casual single player games on Facebook, people want, appreciate something for their ears.

Sound is a really weird asset and a difficult beast to drive. But you’d be a fool to not take care of it in your computer game development plan.