Archive for the 'Games' Category

Indie Game Dev: UI Study

Published on September 23, 2011 in Design and Games. 6 Comments

I was talking to David Evans (of Hybrid Mind Studios) earlier today, and we were discussing how the lowest common denominator for mainstream mobile games seems to be an ever-evolving glut of functionality and features that definitely posit a challenge for a small team of developers to consider undertaking. Whether you argue if it is feature bloat or merely an evolution of the mobile space, there is no argument that gamers even in the casual space are developing a literacy for mobile games. Ignoring or poorly implementing common features that they have come to expect could translate into bad reviews or a lack of interest in your game.

On that note, I figured the best thing would be to visually compare these games, and see what I might gain from sheer observation from the developers choices of their UI and Menu design.

I took four well-known games, and one successful newcomer to the App Store: Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, Jetpack Joyride, Peggle, and Tiny Wings. It is not lost on me that I chose both level-based puzzle games, and “runners”. I’m personally interested in these titles for their ability to either have continuously iterated gameplay through level design and challenges, or to keep a basic gameplay altered by the way you guide the player to interact with his or her surrounding environment.

Screenshots are provided in sections where they are applicable.

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Indie Game Dev: The Jumpoff.

Published on September 21, 2011 in Games and Personal. 0 Comments

I have been in the game industry for almost three years, and it has been quite the ride thus far. I graduated a Computer Scientist from Syracuse and only had decided that I would make my mark on the game industry months before I received my degree. Not phased by my lack of personal development experience, I was determined to find a way into the industry, knowing that I could find my way once I got in there. Through a ridiculous amount of networking, I started at Harmonix in their QA department as a tester in March of 2009.

Almost two years later, and four products shipped with my name on them (The Beatles: Rock Band, Rock Band Network, Rock Band 3, and Dance Central), I came up for air. I had learned a ton about game development at (relatively) larger scale for the industry — at it’s peak, Harmonix was around 350 people, and has multiple projects and teams working on new stuff all the time. With such a large company, however, it is important to have some people be dedicated and focused on a particular task. By developing and harnessing experts for very specific parts of your pipeline, you can create a really strong foundation for the rest of your development team to flourish. I found my work becoming more and more pigeonholed to a direction that I wasn’t comfortable with (it was far more directed at tools than it was at game development), and I decided a change would be appropriate for me. I wanted to have my fingers in a bunch of proverbial pies, so to speak. I am fairly certain that games are my passion, but I wanted to take some time actually trying a bunch of different facets of it before I settled down into something.

Through some networking, I managed to land one of the most rewarding three months of work I have had yet, doing some development on a demo for Moonshot Games. The game is called Fallen Frontier. I did some light work in their engine, worked with the designer, implemented auto-aim, created a crowd system, and even got to design and develop a fun cannon-fodder enemy, the drone. If that experience wasn’t mind blowing enough, I got to present the game with the team at PAX East 2011. Check out some of the gameplay footage, I think everyone who worked on that is very proud of what we managed to put together for that show.

After PAX, I went full time as the lead developer on a game I had been working on in my spare time. A company in DC who does training for the DoD wanted to add a game to their training to help instill the issues that they are trying to teach their students. The game puts a player in the role of the people that they will be working with to help the player gain a broader cultural awareness of the communities, views, and goings-on of the location they are being deployed into. At a basic level, the game is a resource management and decision making game, supported by primary source information that is showing to be very successful in generating meaningful conversations in the classroom setting during the training. Being the lead developer on the project has taught me some invaluable lessons about creating systems that can systematically grow very large over the course of the project. Forcing the team, at times against their will, to deal with these larger systems during the build out caused changes much later in the project to be much smoother and understood by everyone. I can happily say that most of the requests that we get for feature additions play into the original design of the game’s system.

After about six months of full time work on that game, my tasks are starting to wrap up, and I’ve reduced my time to a four day workweek so that I can (finally?) open up some time to do some game development on my own and discover what to focus my energies on.

I bit the bullet and purchased a Unity 3 license, and am determined to release something. I hope to share some of that experience of the games I make here, not only to review the decisions I made down the road, but to hopefully help others learn from my successes and missteps, IN REAL TIME.

My first game jam!

Published on February 21, 2010 in Games. 1 Comment Tags: , , , .

This weekend was an awesome experience for me. I have never done a game jam before, but jumped at the opportunity when told about it. A few people showed up to see what they can do, and I had the opportunity to team up with Adam White, who did some amazing art for our little game.

I had jumped into the jam knowing little of what I wanted to create, but knowing full well I wanted to have made something with flixel by the end of the weekend. Needless to say, I was incredibly impressed with how much I got done with the framework in such a short time.

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Basic AI: Building a Finite State Machine (FSM) in C#

Published on February 19, 2010 in A.I., Code, Design and Games. 2 Comments Tags: , , .

I figured this information may benefit a few people, as well as allow me to get my thoughts out, I’ll be documenting the process to building a finite state machine (FSM). My main use out of this project will allow me to assign an object a FSM, assign that object specific states, and allow the object to make weighted decisions through a transition table. I plan on using this decision-system to aid in both creating a foundation for the AI of my games, as well as aid in the animation systems that I concoct.

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This is how you make a music video!

Published on June 15, 2009 in Games and Personal. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

So a month back there was a little contest at work to who could make an awesome music video using a RB2 song. Needless to say, some coworkers and I threw a little something together. :)

Enjoy!

Homework: Definition of Play

Published on June 6, 2009 in Books and Games. 0 Comments

A coworker was kind enough to procure a copy of “The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology” by the MIT Press. My intention was to flip around now and then, read and reflect.

The first entry I ended up jumping to seemed like an awesome start; “The Definition of Play and The Classification of Games” by Roger Caillios, 1958“. I was able to find the full version of the document, and uploaded it for reference, or the curiosity of others.

Important to note, games of chance are excluded. [This is a] discussion about games and rules when profit is not obtained, and it is merely the existence of the absence of reality. (p.124)

While it was not an article that redefined what I thought of “play” as a individual and social construct, it was interesting to see how the observations of a document in 1958 translates to electronic entertainment in the modern day.

Play is an occasion of pure waste: waste of time, energy, ingenuity, skill, and often money for the purchase of [gaming] equipment… (p.125)

The industry may not be so quick to agree, but this rings true if wasted time is seen as a reflection of not accruing income. However, most if not all would agree that if play results in some form of entertainment, time and money may have been well spent.

A game which one would be forced to play would at once cease being play. It would become constraint, drudgery from which one would strive to be freed. (p.125)

I found this quote quite humorous with regards to my job, and I know some QA testers that might agree, I can’t say I “strive to be freed” from the games I play at work. :)

“In fact, the game is no longer pleasing to one who, because he is too well trained or skillful, wins effortlessly and infallibly.”

(In classifying games of sport) The goal of the encounters is not for the antagonist to cause serious injury to his rival, but rather to demonstrate his own superiority. (p. 132)

Both of these remind me of what the inherent draws in competitive gaming that kept such a stranglehold on me.

“Industrial civilization has given birth to [...] the hobby, a secondary and gratuitous activity, undertaken and pursued for pleasure, e.g. collecting, unique accomplishments, the pleasure in [...] inventing gadgets…” (pg. 145)

Did he just predict Achievements and LittleBigPlanet? :)

Wait and See: OnLive @ GDC

Published on March 26, 2009 in Games. 0 Comments

I waited, and slept on it, and I’m still hesitant about how OnLive is going to turn out. For those of you who haven’t heard of the service, it was recently announced at this year’s GDC event. The basic concept of OnLive is simple: you sign up for an account, and connect to their service either by software on your PC or Mac, or you connect through a small networked box that plugs into your television. From there, you select a game that you want to play from their extensive library, and you choose to rent or buy it.

After that, the software transmits your input to the server-side, and the server sends back the video. Quality is dependant on your bandwidth, giving you 480p with 1.5mbps downstream, and 720p with a 5mbps downstream.

They have a very sizable booth at GDC, with a bunch of setups supposedly interacting over a 5mbps conncetion to their servers in Santa Clara, CA. They were using MacBooks, Dell Laptops, and their “MicroConsole”. People were playing games like Crysis Wars, Burnout Paradise Ultimate, and Mirror’s Edge on what appeared to be very stable, very good looking gameplay.

While the service ultimately leaves a sour taste in my mouth, it has some decent selling points (some of which I am pulling right from the press sheets they were handing out).

For one, this service transforms any mediocre PC into a legitimate gaming system. The majority of the systems they were using to stream their service had integrated video cards, which is pretty incredible, but makes sense given the technology. Since this is streaming, there is relatively no waiting time once you’ve purchased and selected your game; you make your selection, and start playing almost immediately. On top of that, the games that were being played were not altered in any way in order to be playable on the OnLive service, they were simply approved by the developer, and thrown up on the service. OnLive is gearing itself up to be a bit more integrated than that, and is offering a SDK to developers so that you can integrate some community, statistics, and “Brag Clip” features into the game. The “Brag Clip” is interesting, and is something that has begun to catch on already – the developers either allow you to record your playing, or take clips of special types of extraordinary gameplay (such as achieving a hard task/trick), and saving it to your account as a clip to share with your friends. Also, on top of being able to be run on middle-end systems, there are really negligible space requirements for the computer using it. This is huge, especially when you have games like Crysis Warhead requiring a dedicated 15GB for the install. Users are also seamlessly kept up to date with any patches that are released for their games. Lastly, and most importantly in my opinion is that while this service will probably launch with some big name game publishers, I see this as another easy way for indie developers to get their games out to a mass audience, and help push the community forward again.

There are many more reasons why potential investors of this service should be worried however. First and foremost, OnLive cannot promise the pristine connection, and stability of each of their customers internet services. Seeing as how quality of service can change almost from neighborhood to neighborhood with the same provider, this is a huge issue that could be a potential thorn in the side of OnLive. In the case that there is an unruly customer with the service because of their dismal internet connection, it would be easy to see OnLive pass the buck from their tech support and have these customers deal with and complain to their ISP. Secondly, as stories in the past have surfaced from heavy bittorrent users being throttled because of their constant taxing on their communities pipe, could you not see the same response to avid users of the service, playing hours upon hours of games a day, and filling their pipe by streaming the 720p video to their system constantly? They begin to get throttled, OnLive starts to suck, they call OnLive to complain, OnLive sends them to their ISP, rinse and repeat. Now, one of OnLive’s boasted features are: take your games with you wherever you have an internet connection. Okay – so I pay for my games, get them on the service, and then I go on vacation where I don’t have access to the net. Whoops, too bad; no connection to the net, no games. They claim to be the end all solution to the DRM woes the industry is facing nowadays, but I would say Steam (and possibly Stardock Impulse) is doing quite well on that front as well; not only that, but you can play your Steam games offline! Also, since this is PC-only, the majority of your gaming paripherals for your consoles will *not* work with the OnLive system.

Some major issues I have with the service which have not been covered through press material as of yet:

  • Achievement Tracking
  • Voice Communication
  • Ability for individualized, saved DLC
  • Customized/saved game configurations (This has to be in there, just not a major selling point for them right now)

I could go on, and I’m going to stop by the booth again today to ask some questions on the Developer’s end, but I’ll leave you with a few questions that I got the same answer to. (There were more, but I’m drawing a blank right now.)

  • What are the minimum system requirements?
  • How is the pricing model going to work?
  • Will there be a charge for the MicroConsole?
  • Can this stream at 1080p?

The answer? “We can’t comment at this time.”

I’ll come back with some pros and cons that are faced as a developer deploying their games on the service.

As a side note, I would check out Penny Arcade’s blog post and comic about this service as well, pretty funny. :)

Review: Mirror’s Edge

Published on January 26, 2009 in Games. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Wow, the Holidays have been crazy. I have now been able to successfully round out my collection of the current generation of systems, and now own all of them, consoles and handhelds. While I haven’t been writing feverishly, I have been getting through some games, and falling back on some old fail safes. I have been playing LittleBigPlanet on my PS3, Crush on my PSP, SSF2THR on my 360, and today I should be beating the New Super Mario Bros on my DS. I’ll admit though, a good amount of my time has been spent getting back into Defense of the Ancients with the TDA community. It’s great to have a large community where the competition bar is high enough to get a pretty good game whenever you feel like it. I just seem to be getting the luck of teaming up with everyone who is seemingly new to both the community and the game itself. :)

A few months back I beat Mirror’s Edge, here’s my take on it!

Overview

From Wikipedia:

Mirror’s Edge takes place in an unnamed city where a totalitarian regime monitors its citizens through invasive surveillance, tracking all forms of electronic communication in order to reduce crime and quell any challenge to its power. An upcoming mayoral election seeks to retain Mayor Callaghan in power to keep the government’s control on the city, though a new favored candidate Robert Pope promises to bring change. The Eurasian protagonist, Faith Connors, is a “Runner”, a person trained in parkour, to stay out of sight and to use rooftops and other means to help deliver physical messages between revolutionary groups within the city. Faith along with another Runner, Celeste, were both trained by Mercury who also provides radio support for the two.

Impressions

Not too long ago I played Assassin’s Creed and fell in love with a chunk of the game. It looked great, had a few choice design elements that I truly enjoyed (mainly, the “teleport” system for major cities), and I absolutely loved the movement. I had mentioned to friends that if there were a game where movement movement felt this fluid, and the major part of the game, I would snap it up instantly. Needless to say, Mirror’s Edge was that game for me. I had followed the bits of information that came down the stream counting down to its release, and I had preordered my copy months in advance. Needless to say, my experience with the game was fairly positive. I thoroughly enjoyed the movement system, went along with the story, and dealt with the fighting.

What makes this game important to me though, is it took something that we are so completely familiar with (the First Person genre) and turned it on its side. Rather than act like every other shooter out there, and be another Halo, or Counter Strike, or Call of Duty, or Far Cry, or Resistance (I could go on..), they made a First Person game revolve around tactical movement, and tried to create an open system (in terms of the paths you take, and moves you perform) for the player to decide how he or she progresses through each obstacle set. The game itself isn’t about mowing down tons of enemies, its about avoiding them. Mirror’s Edge doesn’t focus your attention to specific groups and NPCs within the game, but forces you to soak in as much of your landscape as possible to decide your next move. And in this day in age where shooters and rockers (while still good products in their own right) dominate – Mirror’s Edge succeeds at delivering a package that is perpendicular to current consumer expectations and offers a breath of fresh air to the industry. Sadly, in the current economic situation that we are in, people perceive risk at a much higher value, and a $60 game that doesn’t conform to a standard that the consumer might be looking for, the game’s sales are going to take a hit.

Issues (Possible Spoilers Ahead)

Shoddy story. The story was fairly shallow – yes, there was an arcing story, but it left much to be desired, less to be explained, and far more to be questioned about how exactly everything panned out at the end. The story seemed to end far too abruptly, as if the writers were implicitly cutting us short to either meet deadlines, or to scream “WE NEED SOME CONTENT FOR THE SEQUEL!”

Cutscenes. Rather than use the engine for cutscenes between levels, (and to mask loading time), DICE used animated movies to show the progression of the story. This concept slightly reminds me of the “Story Time” you can get with the princess in Super Mario Galaxy. While it’s not the same story that you’re currently progressing through (in the sense that the cutscenes are filling in narrative gaps) you are definitely breaking out of the beautiful world that Galaxy presents to you in order to follow a side story. Some people argued that with such a great engine and implementation that DICE did that the cutscenes should have just stayed ingame, but I’m inclined to enjoy the switching between story and gameplay as the mode progresses. With a game as intense and fast paced as Mirror’s Edge, an animated sequence can provide a rest to the gamer.

What I didn’t like about these animated shorts was that sometimes they seemed like they were rushed (production wise), or done in Flash with some awful tweening/repetition. Two ‘broken’ scenes off of the top of my head that I still remember: Faith running around the time she meets up with Celeste for the second time, and one time when Faith is walking back into the shadows. The perspective on this scene tween is all types of skewed, and too easily noticed from even my untrained eye.

Fighting System. Simply said, the fighting system in this game is pretty bad. It is incredibly easy to die – which is acceptable. Your a runner with no protection on whatsoever. Taking more than a few bullets and not dying would be too far a stretch of the imagination. The enemies placement can be frustrating at times, and downright infuriating towards the end of the game. My first run through of the game I was going for the “Pacifist” achievement, where you cannot shoot anyone. Towards the end of the game though, I was looking to put a bullet through my TV. I ended up resulting in taking quite a few near death leaps in the “circular” staircase level, and resorted to hiding in corners in the levels that had an absurd amount of enemies, and took out the baddies one by one until I had cleared enough of them out to make it to the next exit.

In Left4Dead’s commentary, they talk about how they automatically do some things for a player when they get near certain areas (they were talking about automatically ducking when walking towards a vent) so that the player focuses on the fear and survival and bigger picture of the whole situation, without having to worry about a simple game movement like ducking. In this sense, isn’t Mirror’s Edge about the movement? So why not make the fighting system be a little more forgiving? Rather than having multiple whiffs when you’re trying to kick someone in the balls, let the game have a larger acceptance of error, and auto-aiming those crotch shots / uppercuts to make things go a little more smoothly, and let the player focus on what’s important: getting the hell out of wherever you are.

Linearity. In retrospect, this game was a bit too linear for me. While you could definitely take the scenic route in certain areas, there was definitely a best route for everything. I think this was partly due to the fact that the only real goal Faith had throughout the entire game was simply to run. “Getting away” can be a fun thing to do, and it can easily be a good reason why the game was on the shorter side – you can only run away from so much before the idea starts to become boring. But when you have such an open setting such as the rooftops and indoors of a city, and my choices are to either jump over or slide under a pipe that is in my way, the magic of the game seems to slowly fade away.

Consider this though: make the game a little more open-worldish, a little more Half-Life 2. Since Faith is explicitly a courier, working for what the government considers criminals, there are a myriad of things that could have been added to the story more than simply delivering packages. Interacting with NPCs to find out more about her sister’s issues, dive deeper into the corrupted body that the government has become, rather than it just being some ominous, sentient machine that deploys foot-soldiers in the proper areas at the worst times. Faith could have missions in areas, help other runners accomplish their tasks. If this were so, Merc wouldn’t actually look like he is running an operation, rather than being a guy who keeps tabs on (from who we met ingame) three runners from his computer. With respect to Valve’s shooter, put a bit more emphasis on physics, and throw some puzzles into the mix. Why not make Faith rearrange the landscape to be able to make jumps? Kick down a sign to make a bridge, or move the construction vehicles to line it up with a proper jump. Just a few of these would have added to the variety that this game could offer, would easily work well in the first-person view, and would have added to the total gameplay time offered to the user.

One more note, there’s DLC coming out for Mirror’s Edge in January 2009. They completely weeded out everything that the game provided before, and went for an abstract, texture-less (minus some coloring) design of a bunch of downloadable levels. It simplifies the game down to the basic element – movement. Penny Arcade had said something like “this is the game style that we fell in love with when watching previews about Mirror’s Edge”, and I couldn’t agree more. Personally, I stand by this game, as the successes in what Mirror’s Edge achieves to do outweighs the shortcomings.

Link: Torture in Video Games

Published on December 15, 2008 in Games and Personal. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Love them or hate them, video games pervade our society. Sometimes they act as social commentary, sometimes they guide social behavior. Clive Thompson from Wired talks about the latest episode in how games affect society with an interesting response about torture in video games.

A quest in the recent WoW expansion pack Wrath of the Lich King poses a big cultural, aesthetic and political question: Should games include torture? To which the answer is simple: Sure they should. In fact, I’ll go further. I think we need more torture in videogames.

The article is thought-provoking and a quick read. I have to say, if games can spawn healthy debates about interesting and important issues in society without breaking the player out of the box, I’m all for it.

Coming up this week (hopefully) my thoughts on Mirror’s Edge and Psychonauts.

My Dirty Little Secret: Warhammer Online

Published on November 19, 2008 in Games. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Yes, for about a month there weren’t any posts for game reviews. That happened for two reasons: 1) I don’t like posting a review mid-game, and 2) I didn’t want to admit I had fallen in the clutches of my first MMORPG.

I had always been cautious about MMOs, as I have seen many of my friends get themselves drawn deeply into the games, only to emerge months later, scarred and beaten by the speed at which the real world has passed them by during their virtual incubation. However, in giving myself a truly broad experience of the various genres available to the present day market, I couldn’t hide from MMOs forever.

So what better time then a budding new MMO released by DAoC creator Mythic Entertainment? I would be on the same starting plane as everyone else, minus the fact that I wasn’t really used to the gameplay mechanics. I had a few other friends who were interested in giving it a shot – so we took the plunge. We preordered the standard edition, so we’d get a two day start on the game, and be able to get our grips before the masses jumped into the servers. I got sucked in fast – within a few days I had brought my first character to level 20, within around 60 hours of in-game time. I then had a friend convince me to start another character on a server he was playing on, and we played all the time for the next few weeks on that server. Over the span of about a month, I had three characters: a level 31 Witch Hunter, a level 12 Iron Breaker, and a level 20 Disciple of Khaine (on a different server).

All in all I had played over 200 hours of gameplay, in an insanely short amount of time. While I wouldn’t say I had become “addicted”, I definitely wasn’t going out of my way to make other plans when I had free time to spare. The gameplay drags you in; you create your virtual likeness, and you work to improve him/her by learning new abilities, obtaining (either through fighting creatures or purchasing) new weapons and armor. One game reviewer said it best: Warhammer is a game of increasing numbers. While this is true of many MMOs, this is something that you are truly striving to do throughout the entire time that you’re within the game. You strive to increase your renown, your experience, your damage or healing stats, your guild’s rank, the amount of gold you have, etc.

Since this is my first MMO that I have gotten involved in, I can’t really compare the game to know what could be better or worse. I know that I loved playing with my friends, and when they moved on to other games, my interest and enjoyment of the game soon dwindled. MMOs (at least this one in my case) truly thrive on the “massive” part: the game itself is not mind blowing, it does not shatter gaming boundaries or introduce incredibly innovative gameplay mechanics never before seen elsewhere, but it provides a social experience that is entertaining with the company of a few like-minded friends.

If I could have changed anything to this game though, the kill-quests seem to be this recurring theme in most MMOs, and they are simply mindless, gameplay extending pieces that add very little to the game. While I would be understanding if it were simply included to acquaint a newcomer with the fighting mechanics of your character, I was constantly seeing these quests pop up along my entire trip to level 31 – and I would be willing to bet they continue to exist even past that. Taking this complaint to the next level: the majority of the quests really weren’t impressive to me- the majority boil down to kill quests, fetch quests, or meeting quests. I did enjoy some of the public quests that were available in the game (where you would usually need a few people to beat the final level of the boss), but getting people into these was not always easy.

The one thing that made this game shine for me was the Realm vs. Realm (RvR) combat, where you would either jump into a scenario and fight up to a 12v12 battle against the opposing force, or you could find characters of the opposing force simply in the world that you were in, and fight them. It was in these instances where it was truly a battle of wits, outsmarting your opponent, and being able to outperform them with the knowledge you have of yours (and their) tactics, and what you can do to defeat them. One time a friend and I came up to a few people and we were able to defeat them. Since we were near their base, they would spawn and try to chase us down again in vengeance. We ended up killing these two guys about three times before they brought a few other players with them, at which point we retreated. It was a memorable thirty minutes within the game where the mechanic truly shined.

From what I’ve read and heard from other MMO players, WAR stands out in how much emphasis it puts in RvR combat. Hopefully it is successful enough to show other developers that this is the type of gameplay we like, and are looking for.

While there aren’t any MMO’s that I’m looking to jump in anytime soon, especially not Wrath of the Lich King, a good friend has pointed me to All Points Bulletin which looks like its going to be awesome.