Category: Audio&Games

Laralyn stroke again with a great post. I’m going to focus on point #8:

Make the shift from “I make games I’m interested in” to “I’m interested in making games.” Love your craft. It makes you more flexible, more open to unusual games and opportunities.

That’s great wisdom. But that’s also not really how the industry hires these days. The industry does not just want you to make games you’re interested in, the industry kind of demands you to be an expert in those games. it is not rare to be asked which part of universe X you prefer or what’s your favorite moment in campaign Y when applying for a position.

The reality is it’s impossible to play tons of games, extensively. While having a job. While keeping up with technology. While having a life. While getting better at your craft. It’s just a number game.

This is a selection of very different games on Steam. As you can see, simulators are doing extremely well. You would think game developers are interested in developing other simulators, that we are all talking about this trend, right? Nope, not at all. Simulators –and to some extent, Firewatch is one too- are kind of laughed at as… Weak games? Strong games being the ones that are goal-based, with a hardcore mode I guess? I’m not even sure.

But what I see is that an order of magnitude more people are playing Democracy 3 than Thumper, something that probably a lot of developers don’t think is happening.

Personally in my sound design domain, Call of Duty is the top of the top: the craft and care taken in building audio and sound in that franchise are quite unparalleled. It’s maxed out in a way. On the other hand, so many games in genres that are not trendy would benefit a much stronger and consistent sound design. I love making sounds for any game, that’s the craft!

Anyway, making the switch from “I make games I’m interested in” to “I’m interested in making games” is I think, crucial. Not just for you, but for all of us to get better and foster ideas and innovation.

Shitty title aside on a first impression, I really like it! Then I think of the business side and I can’t help but think that it’s not going to work.

Media and news will never show you that but it’s easy to understand why third-party developers don’t do much on Nintendo’s consoles. The best-selling games on those machines are Nintendo’s. Overwhelmingly. Don’t believe me? Let’s take a look at games that sold at least 1M units, Nintendo has:

SNES: top 3
N64: top 13
NDS: top 14
Wii: top 17
3DS: top 10
Wii U: top 14

Those tops represent hundreds of millions of games (Wii Sports, 80M. 80M units). ALL NINTENDO.

So good luck for anyone else to invest millions of dollars in a system where you are pretty much guaranteed to not sell enough to break even. Considering the past ten Nintendo years, very tough sale.

Good luck going back to retail with game cards, delays and what about DLC so pervasive now? They’d better not region-lock nothing because hello 2TB microSD card game cards.

The concept and the hardware are cool, way more attractive that this WiiU thing they did in the past. The same challenges remain though.

We always go back to talk about gamedev crunch without talking about its history. There is a history.

Back in the 80s when I was a kid trying to put my hands on magazines with pictures of game machines, Japanese game developers were working hard. Extremely hard. We’re talking months at work. People would not go back home (what’s the point when you finish working at 2am?). Meanwhile I was playing European and American games and all I could see was that they were so often vastly inferior in their polish.

A lot of my friends and people around that time started to fetish Japan but all I could think was HOW. How are they so much better, the attention to detail, the gameplay, the screen title everything demonstrated that Japanese game developers were serious about computer games.

The answer is clear now: they were simply killing themselves –literally- making those games. Outside technical reasons (Japanese machines had more game-dedicated hardware) the reason Japanese games were more fluid, more beautiful, had the best ideas and best designs was simply that those teams crunched and crunched and crunched until there was no bugs left, until the game felt right. I kind of knew that, but didn’t think it would be at that scale: apparently it was just the norm. There’s some sadness in that but also those designers and engineers didn’t quit. If you quit it won’t happen.

And yes, we all still do crunch regularly. For every game made someone or a full team is going to give everything they have at some point. Technology and tools are a thousand times better and easier than the 80s ones but we still crunch because we have a billion times more things to put in one game. Game developers have never been really able to catch up with what people want. People want more, all the time. And we game developers, always want the game to be what it should be.

Which is why IMO there’s no debate to have about crunch, it is not a matter of good or bad: even with seasoned professionals and money it just happens when you make complex things. Even a tiny bit. No one cares that rocket engineers crunch to send a satellite up in space or that smartphones engineers have to churn out a new, superior phone every 10 months and that for that to happen, they probably will not sleep enough or enjoy some family time. We don’t value Play and Games as much as we value getting a new phone or more DirecTV so crunching is bad. Yet people want 200hrs of awesome gameplay.

The only solution is for all of us to hold up and slow down our progress but yeah, won’t happen. Or WILL IT

Reigns, a mobile game that you pay for before playing it –which is a business model that isn’t supposed to work at all anymore ever again, so they say- has sold over 600,000 units in a month. $2.4M.

RPS was running this story last week: Why A Million People Still Play Multiplayer Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas Every Month and it comes down to three, simple things:

– No competitive behavior. People just go around, role-play and race. Racing is competitive but in a very light way compared to being constantly killed by bored, kind of psychotic people.

– It runs on old ass computers just fine. Game developers feel grossed out by old hardware I guess but machines are extremely resilient. I’d argue they are more and more because we underuse them so much (your quad-core CPU has probably been under-employed most of its life).

– Freedom+Bottom-Up design. Players do whatever they want, ask for features to scripters, who in turn make them available to players. Repeat. Not having to deal with marketing, PR, IP holders is a blessing to game development.

At the end of the day you need to craft something that people really want, something that you really believe in. Forget trends and media strategy, trust your feelings have good money on the side if possible, and ship.

Beat ‘em ups were and are my thing. I just think that the concept of going left to right beating people up is enjoyable and less brutal than first person shooting which is a good thing, probably? It’s relaxing, exhilarating, doesn’t demand a strong commitment in time or skills. That’s good entertainment.

I think that type of game would be great in lots of ways these days: a beat ‘em up where you go after cat-callers and rapists a beat ‘em up where you play the new Ghostbuster cast, a beat ‘em up where you punch politicians in the face before escaping the white house I mean, the list is endless.

I was there when they were popular in the arcades. A few notes on what they need to have in order to become a classic.

CAST

Look at Battle Circuit, the last Capcom beat ‘em up in 1997: you can play a woman in leotard, a Fantastic Four looking skinny dude, a carnivorous plant, a little girl riding an ostrich and a cyberdude. Maybe that’s a little extreme but you get the point, representation and diversity are important because it makes your potential audience happy. Don’t just have a dude and dudette, with the dudette being “fast” and the dude “strong”. We’re way passed that. Mix it up and go nuts on character design.

AESTHETICS

The beat ‘em up golden age is the 90s. 16bit graphics, 4096 colors. So I’m always kind of annoyed when I see that most beat ‘em all avoid that style for another “8bitHD” style, monochromatic and sad. The 16bit, Paul Robertson style is where it’s at. Bring me some colors, bring me some dynamic.

Audio is insanely important. Punches and kicks need to make you smile and feel like you’re actively beating the fuck out of those punks. Streets of Rage does beat ‘em up sound effects admirably. You need that high pitched, slap sound. That’s the feel good, hilarious, crucial part (Castle Crashers lets you abuse the slap sound as much as possible). SMACK THAT BITCH UP. Mid 90s is when we started getting sampled voices everywhere, so you would end up in a satisfying flow of punch and whoosh sounds, short screams and other digitalized cues with a punchy soundtrack that all together made the experience what it was. You need those whoosh sounds when you’re not hitting anybody, it helps solidifying the experience. Mother Russia Bleeds fails quite hard on the sound side when it could elevate that game soooo much.

DIFFICULTY

It has to be perfectly possible to beat the game on easy almost first try. It’s about having fun, not about spending hours you guys. Once again Streets of Rage and Castle Crashers do that perfectly –and that’s really hard to do- you can beat the game on easy or ruin your fingers on hardest. Health bars on all enemies is an awesome convention because it discreetly teaches you how to optimize your moves to get rid of them: two punches and a head butt or one uppercut and a kick in the face? And of course on bosses, it makes you realize how long it’s going to take, as well as putting pressure on you once you know you’re about to win. Not giving that precious feedback to players to force them to be as perfect as possible regardless is bad design. I don’t play beat ‘em up for a damn score or “be the perfect beast”, I play them to have a good time.

IT’S NOT THAT DEEP

I think beat ‘em ups can be serious in the theming –if you want to- but must use some kind of comedy in the delivery. I mean, it’s like any entertainment: violence is fine but you have to justify, wrap it into something that makes it less about just violence. I’d love to play a beat ‘em up where the plot is just you and your friends going to the beach and you end up in a riot beating up cops, rioters, scientologists and priests, destroying SUVs and fixies, sucker punching idiots on their phones, trying to go through to get there before sunset. The end would be like Inside’s end and that game would be the shit.

Beat ‘em ups could be so many things.

Have you listen to the UI sounds? Pretty great aren’t they.

That’s the screen that kind of killed the suspension of disbelief for me. Spaceports that are going to be empty as hell and way, way too clean. Forever. And stairs that people take once before they remember that they pack jetpacks. And of course the same four different crates you found everywhere.

I compared a lot NMS to Rebel Galaxy design-wise. How Rebel Galaxy did the spaceport thing? Interface only, no cumbersome walking or weird maneuvers to do in order to simply sell or buy things through a menu. RB still has 3D characters to talk to and ask stuff but the way they did it is smart. They keep your “flow”. They strip the game off everything that is kind of a boring task to do.

Both are space exploration games but in NMS you don’t really have a direct purpose to mining and stealing, destroying things from planets. In RB you have a purpose: you pilot a ship, you make money with it and you can choose to be a law-abiding citizen or a pirate or both.

It’s interesting to me that those small design decisions make RB fantastic and NMS feel hollow. NMS is immensely large but in today’s world it doesn’t really matter no one has the time to spend hundreds of hours on one game. It’s pretty rare. I didn’t finish RB and it’s probably a hundred times smaller.

Both are independent games made by small teams. But NMS is going to probably make a lot, a lot more thanks to a trailer that set all expectations all the way up and sold people on the game (RPS has a good article on that). I don’t think playing the hype game is worth it in the long term but Hello Games and Sony are printing money right now so, I don’t know.

Jesus the hype is on, init? Not even a week.

I summoned this old table from an old blog post because well, it’s still pretty good. I could make a better matrix adding Myers-Briggs indicators but you get the point.

So Pokémon is all about the guardian type which is according to Keirsey’s:

As Concrete Cooperators, Guardians speak mostly of their duties and responsibilities, of what they can keep an eye on and take good care of, and they’re careful to obey the laws, follow the rules, and respect the rights of others.

Wikipedia’s definition:

Guardians are concrete and organized (scheduled). Seeking security and belonging, they are concerned with responsibility and duty. Their greatest strength is logistics. They excel at organizing, facilitating, checking, and supporting.

Duties of training your little monsters, responsibilities of the gym, hatching eggs etc. It’s a type of gameplay that works for some people! A lot of people. Tons of kids. Of course! The problem solving style for guardians –persistence- is the one that requires the less skills making this barrier of entry a non-issue.

Personally the guardian type of play looks exactly like what we do for work so I’m not attracted to that. But it doesn’t matter if you’re 39 and you find that type of challenge fun and engaging. Don’t tell me that it’s great because people go out though: if you need a small screen to look around so that you walk around, from any angle this sounds sad to me because self-sufficiency and resilience are precious but hey, whatever.

Games are a matter of taste as much as any other entertainment. We live in the tyranny of the majority though so people feel like they have to play the game. You don’t have to, it’s not that deep even though virtual worlds have real life consequences. Let’s see how it goes in 6 months.

What do I like? I am into rational type of play, how surprising.

As Abstract Utilitarians, Rationals speak mostly of what new problems intrigue them and what new solutions they envision, and always pragmatic, they act as efficiently as possible to achieve their objectives, ignoring arbitrary rules and conventions if need be.

Wikipedia’s:

Rationals are abstract and objective. Seeking mastery and self-control, they are concerned with their own knowledge and competence. Their greatest strength is strategy. They excel in any kind of logical investigation such as engineering, conceptualizing, theorizing, and coordinating.

This so me. I always feel kind of guilty ignoring arbitrary rules but I really dislike them. I think I like to disregard them so that I can make up my own mind. Games based on that temperament are kind of rare to come by on mobile. It’s too demanding, in many ways. All good, only playing computer games at home isn’t a bad thing.

A lot of people get lost in this rational temperament (the “what do I do now?” feeling in first person exploration games for instance).

To Each His Own.

On Mighty N°9, via Rock Paper Shotgun:

First among them is the unwelcome inheritance of instant-death spikes on floors and walls, alongside many other environmental one-hit fatalities. The tiniest misjudgement or unfamiliarity around these things means instant death, and the frustration is because you have a positively archaic three lives and no continues per stage. It feels almost an affront, in an age where games save progress constantly, to be sent back to the start of the level to try again.

He continues:

At which point you have to acknowledge that this is a design choice, made thanks to nostalgia for a specific kind of challenge. And indeed some long-dormant region of my brain seemed to briefly stir, enjoying how easy it was to breeze through a level’s early challenges again, remembering to get a missed powerup, or take another route.

It really comes down to user experience and design going frontal against nostalgia and the trap of thinking that the past was really good.

It was not perfect, instant-death and boss battles were simply a design trend in the 80s because game designers were creating a lot of arcade games where the focus is to make you put more coins in the machine, thus hardcore difficulty and boss battles that you have to remember perfectly.

So playing Mega man was frustrating already at that time because it was super hard and it seemed kind of dumb because we were sitting in front of the TV in the living room, not standing in the arcade. Game’s style was so dope though. Fast forward to today where there are billions of new games each month, and we are more busy in our lives and I see how this design choice in MN9 still feels dumb.

However, and this is where things get interesting as the brain loves to grok when you go through something challenging, you will feel good. It’s not that it’s good game design, it’s just chemicals. But you will think, like a lot of gamers who can spend 5 hours straight beating a game that it’s a good game. Even if it’s flawed and that we know why (arcade influence).

Regardless of the type of game you’re building, I think being able to convey your game ideas, game designs without being brutal *while* being challenging is pretty much our main task. Which comes down to fairness to the player VS our systems. Example: instant-death on spikes is unfair and not consistent with the rest. Instant-death in Counter Strike is never, never unfair. Even when you’re a noob, you know or will know that you messed up.

That player’s feeling, happy and humbled and eager at the same time is really, really hard to convey and maintain. But when it happens bye here you go 200+ hours I’m coming!

Well,

Handhelds are definitely dead and for kids before they get phones and need laptops.

VR is in this super weird spot: expensive devices around, technology mostly working but not perfectly for everybody, and business-wise studios pretty much have to be financed by VR manufacturers because outside developers out there, I don’t think anyone bought a VR headset for the lulz in 2016 except for a bunch of enthusiasts. Manufacturers subsidies mean exclusivity which means more fragmentation and an artificial market… We’ll have 11 different VR headsets on the market soon. Yup.

What annoys me the most is to see critical advices not being followed: Jesse Schell is THE VR specialist, he said multiple times that headsets need 90 fps otherwise motion sickness happens real quick. Sony is about to ship a headset that doesn’t do 90 fps. Jesse said multiple times sound design is extremely beneficial to VR experiences. I have seen far too many demos and proof of concept with the most basic audio, it’s insulting.

Also, Magic Leap. Man that AR/MR thing just feels like the real deal. The last demo is very impressive. Not here yet though.

It’s impressive how crunch is never ever mentioned during E3 –not even as a joke-  even though organizations are so eager at GDC to talk about how it should never happen. Tell that to the Last Guardian team and gazillion others, I’m sure they’ll agree.

Zelda as main protagonist and the “what would Link be doing?” question couldn’t illustrate game conservatism more. It’s 2016 and that kind of stuff is frustrating. But it doesn’t matter Zelda was apparently the star of the week and Nintendo is about to play it safe and true to a 30 year old legacy. The usual.

Musically besides the little part in Watchdogs 2 with some refreshing classic everything is kind of the same vibe: epic orchestra and whiny pop music. And they all sound the same, exciting and extremely predictable. So it’s like eating pasta, basically.

So many things to get better at, folks.

Apparently, people have been asking for a story mode in Street Fighter V and I can’t believe I just wrote this, in a way.

Street fighter’s story is not a story it’s a setting: there’s a championship with all the best fighters in the world and you are one and you need to go at the top. The way SFII was dealing with fighters stories was perfect: it gave us a quick look at the possible reasons of a fighter entering competition once you won it all. We all understood that the story was an excuse to throw punches and kicks.

Here’s SFV story:

“Seven “Black Moons” are deployed by Shadaloo, granting M. Bison unimaginable power and enveloping the earth in total darkness. Seeing the moons mysteriously appear in the sky, Ryu, Ken, and Chun-Li embark on an epic journey around the world to retrieve fragment pieces that are the key to stopping the “Black Moons” before it’s too late. Along the way, they encounter the rest of the World Warriors, each of whom have their own agendas and motivations in mind. The final battle between good and evil begins now… who will RISE UP?”

It’s beyond corny and overdone. It’s made for the fans who demanded that story mode. And that’s where it’s interesting in the relationship between developers and fans.

I don’t think we should give them what they want all the time. It feels like we’re parents stressing out with crying kids asking for that candy and we finally cave in, make him happy but in the end it’s still a shitty candy that the kid didn’t need and didn’t even care about as much as he was expressing how much he wanted it.

That story mode is exactly that. The problem is that candy is costly as hell and Capcom is probably trying to make it as cheap as possible (it’s free DLC) so, no one will be happy.

In the end caving in for fans makes financial sense. But this thirst for having everything explained and edited and movie-fied that people have is weird to me like, people are too tired to use their imagination and play with it?

Or more likely, there’s an entire generation that doesn’t feel comfortable at all with scarcity of anything and will just demand to obtain what they want.