My pal and FIEA classmate Corey Teblum just posted the post-mortem for BizarreCraft on GamaSutra’s Game Career Guide.
BizarreCraft is a sort of real-time strategy/capture-the-flag/Dr. Moreau mash-up developed by the other half of students in FIEA’s fourth cohort.
You can read the post-mortem [ here ] and see the project’s website [ here ].
Whether a gamer is looking to relax and just play or is looking for some sort of masochistic challenge, it is universal that they desire some sort of feedback that they have succeded in their task. At the most basic level, this can simply be the passing from one level/stage/world to the next. Or perhaps an incrementing score count.
These two concepts have gone hand in hand since the beginning of video games. When expressing your arcade achievements to a friend, you’d tell him you got to Wave 26 while defending the galaxy or had earned 306,225 points. Each of those means different things, though. When talking about levels (or stages, worlds), those are relatively large segmentations of progress. What constitutes a level? How long does it last? Did you die at the beginning or at the boss battle at the end? Regardless of your individual sub-progress within that level, you’ve at least reached a very definite milestone with very definite context relative to the overall length of the total game.
Let’s take Guitar Hero as a very modern example with several layers of goals. Â You can aim to:
Regardless of your level of dedication or “hardcoreness,” there’s an achievable goal for you. Â You can stop and be satisfied with the goal you’ve just achieved or aim for something loftier and more abstract. Â Note that the more specifically defined goals are at the most basic level, and they’re very broad in their definition of what it requires to achieve it. Â This gives the more casual player something to aim for. Â This kind of player has no concept of what 2,000 points means, let alone 200,000. Â They can beat a song by the skin of their teeth with a 4-digit score or with a 6-digit score; winning is winning. Â But as a player evolves, he looks for how he can do “one better.” Â Aim for that fifth star next time, but aside from passing an arbitrary checkpoint, the actual score still doesn’t matter. Â Aim for 100% notes; the score still doesn’t matter, either, so you don’t even have to worry about Star Power. Â But the ultimate level is where each individual increment of the score meter matters, and you want to milk it for all it can offer by perfectly timing Star Power deployment.
Score is a moving target. Â One day you’ll wake up and find that 5 million points isn’t all that great, especially when compared against the rest of the world. Â Modern day leaderboards are like the high score screen of arcades of yore. Â We didn’t really see much of them until consoles got back online, bringing with them the resurgence of heated competition. Â That score is a moving target means the game is never over for the most dedicated; each competitor continues to raise the bar for the others. Â A self-populating list for mere bragging rights is a cheaply designed goal/reward for players, but it doesn’t mean much and can even be intimidating for those far from the top. Â Sure, a player may add another 100,000 points to their old best (if they even bothered to remember their old score), but moving up in ranking from 538,923 to 537,201 is almost worthless in the grander scale.
To offer a wide range of stacked goals allows games to cater to both the casual “just have fun” game player and the fanatic “gotta get my initials on the board” player.
I’m not saying that’s the only way to go about things, but it’s just a warning that not allowing for “less than perfect” execution can alienate a player. Â Make sure the player knows that they’ve reached the milestone with some sort of positive feedback, like a text/icon pop-up indicating the end of a section, a new item, or an Achievement/Trophy unlock. Â Heck, even Ninja Gaiden litters the world with life-rejuvenating save points. Â That reward of a life refill is enough of a pat on the back of the player to say, “good job for making it this far.”
…but to be fair, Robin Hood was notorious for being a reheated mess and that ’80s period was a low point in general.
During the stressful development process, coming up with a title for your game is just about the least tangibly productive use of time. And because arguements rage for what seems to be forever, certainly a lot of time is spent on the subject. Just like the thought a parent should give to naming a child who must brave the school playground, a game’s title encapsules the whole thing’s identity in just a small handful of words. Very powerful, very evocative words. Or not if you do it wrong.
The original name of our game when it was first pitched was “Cardinal of Zephyr.” “Cardinal” being the name of our ship and “Zephyr” being the name of our gaseous, almost land-less planet. People are prone to split-second, gut reactions, and sometimes all that will ever be seen of a game (or company or anything else) is just a name on a long list of many other names. So, that name chosen has the unenviable duty of having to grab attention and tell a little something about the thing that it represents.
The other team of our classmates had diverted their attention to coming up with a clever name for their project seemingly got a good boost in self esteem out of it. We weren’t in the same sort of developmenrut that they were in, but it was about time to start thinking of publicity materials and setting up a web presence, so four of us producers/designers took an afternoon break and looked for a nice place in downtown Orlando to chill out while talking business. (In truth, we’d intended on talking about a completely seperate assignment but got totally sidetracked for the majority of our break.) We found a small vegan tea house just off the beaten path and sat down to one of their house blends.
We needed to determine what sort of imagery we needed to convey. Firstly, was there anything wrong with the existing title? “Cardinal” brings to mind red birds or church officials. Birds fly, but the closest our color palette got to red was a hazy dusk orange. “Zephyr?” It’s an interesting word. It means the west wind. Or the name of a Red Hot Chili Peppers song. This single word was the subject of enormous debate. One of the producers present was one of the two who presented the initial pitch; this game was sort of his brainchild, and he understandingly had a lot of passion for his vision. His big arguement for keeping the word is that it’s unique enough for someone to see on a shelf and say “Ooh, I’m curious about this, so I’ll pick it up and take a closer look.” My personal arguement is that people are stupid and scared of big words. They’re more likely to see the word and think that it’s too weird for them to bother with. They like simple action and visual words like: destroy, war, army, boat, battle, rage. Words that immediately inspire an image in someone’s head without needing a moment to search the depths of their vocabulary. On top of that, just how many people know what the hell a zephyr is? It’s only a clever name if you 1.) know what it means and 2.) know what our game is about. It only becomes significant after the fact. As masters degree candidates, we are a rare <1% of Americans, so we can’t possibly expect everyone else to be on our same level of intelligence. The simple fact is that if you want to be accessible, you need to target a 5th grade reading comprehension level. Now, I agreed that the word was unique, but it needed support.
What was our game about? What did we want people to know without having to read anything else or looking at a picture. Well, there’s the role of being the ship’s captain, of commanding a crew. There’s the vehicle: a ship, a boat. That flies. In the sky. Using wings. There’s the element of battle, war, combat, dueling.
Jokingly, I recommended that a great, simple, straightforward title would be “Shouting Ships.” Or “Flying Seamen.” The kids’ll eat it up. Eww…
Stupid as it sounds, studies show people really respond to titles that include the word “of.” Gears of War. God of War. Army of Two. Call of Duty. Pirates of the Caribbean. “Of” identifies belonging, ownership, context. It’s a cheap shortcut to place some object within some context.
Another odd little problem that many may not think about is alphabetical sorting. It’s a simple fact that the letter Z is 25 letters after A, and when you add more letters these become words. When you’re in a list, it’s best to be near the top because some people may just never get far down the rest of it. Did you know the computer company ASUS was named after the mythical winged horse Pegasus? They truncated their name so they could be at the top of lists of computer parts manufacturers. Think about it. How many companies do you know or see whose names start with the letter A? Or A1? Or 123? It’s all about placement. Since we were going to submit our game to the Independent Games Festival, this list placement was a concern, but the fan support behind “Zephyr” was just something that could not be bucked.
One strong candidate was “Skies of Zephyr.” It was no secret (or shouldn’t have been but somehow was) that the premise of the concept was to take the turn-based airship battles from Sega’s “Skies of Arcadia” and build a whole real-time game around it. Many felt it was just too direct, but I personally didn’t have too much of a problem with it. It has the components of context (“skies”) and curiosity (“zephyr”) that would catch interest, and those well-versed in games would get the allusion. Whether they’d appreciate or dislike the directness was another issue.
When we arrived back at school we dedicated a whiteboard to shotgunning ideas and invited everyone to contribute.
After several voting rounds and cuts, we came to “Zephyr: Tides of Combat” as one of the leading candidates. (Our lead designer is a big Halo nut, so this was a derivative of “Halo: Combat Evolved.”) We retained the fan-favorite word “Zephyr” as the primary title and were able to affix a “for dummies” description, well. “Tides” alludes to water, which makes people think of boats, but partnered with some description of fighting gives the reader a sense that the power over the battlefield is ever shifting. The great part about this particular iteration was the resulting acronym: Z-ToC–or “zee-talk.” Get it? It’s a voice controlled game. I personally enjoyed that last bit because it reminded me of the abbreviated label of a game I bought long ago at Electronics Boutique: Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee (or: “God:DAMM”). We had to revise it, though because “combat” is such a generic word. For a short time we changed it to “battle,” but we were able to argue the same fault. We landed at “war” because of the grander scale that the word imparts. Rather than one little bout, this brought to mind a bigger picture. Hence, “Zephyr: Tides of War.”
The big project I worked on during my time at FIEA (Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy) was a voice-controlled vehicular combat game that casts the player as the ship’s captain that we ultimately titled Zephyr: Tides of War.  (Follow that link to download and play it. Requires WinXP, not Vista compatible.) We were fortunate that the school believed in simulating a true working environment, down to the tools provided, so we were able to build on industry middleware including Gamebryo and Fonix VoiceIn.
I was leading the charge with voice-related design, including what commands would be available to the player as well as how the crew would respond to both your input and to things happening within the game world. One of the things we really aimed for was to make the most of using such a natural input as voice and not just make it a different way to push a button. To that extent, we labored to think of all sorts of variations and permutations of things that the player might say. For example, would the player use nautical terms like bow, stern, aft, port, starboard, etc? Or would they want to use layman’s terms like forward, back, left, right? How many ways can you say “move?” Go, forward, move, full speed ahead, set sail, etc. And of course gradations for different rates of movement or turning, etc.
I thought it would be a great opportunity to free up the player from the usual learning curve of memorizing what button does what. Look at a computer keyboard, there’s about 104 keys there, and modern video game controllers have almost 20 buttons and knobs. Who ever decided that pressing A would mean jump? It’s so arbitrary and it’s a dark art to cram in functionality onto a random mess of buttons. With voice, ideas are easily and instantly translated from thought. As long as we account for a fair amount of usual synonyms, we aimed to recognize any command by the third variation that a person might try. No tutorial would be necessary, and the software promised that no annoying individual voice-training would be needed.
Of course things never go according to plan. Despite the elaborate spreadsheets we made of various ways to say commands, the software just couldn’t process them reliably enough. One of our programmers created a tool that would run in the background while playing the game. It would listen to commands the players would issue and output a log of what command the software thought the player was saying (as cross-referenced off a database we fed to the game of phrases to look for), a numerical percentage of how close the match was, and if below a certain threshold, other phrases that sounded similar. Crushingly, our acceptable command list was chiseled down to something fairly bare-bones and far from robust.
How did this happen? Words are constructed from a collection of phonemes which dictate the individual sound components that make up a word. There’s a relatively limited set of them in any given language. So when you see spy movies like Mission Impossible, they carry a card with a pre-constructed set of sentences which contains all possible phonemes. When recorded and dissected, those phoneme samples can be fed into a vocal replicator that allows a spy to mimic someone else’s voice. Anyway, our software was tripping up and getting confused with many phrases. “Ascend” and “descend” sound like common words you should have in a game that requires you to navigate in 3D space, right? Sorry, they sound too similar. And unfortunately, if we told the computer to just make an educated guess, the two actions are direct opposites, so there’s an extremely high likelihood of the resulting action being not what was intended by the player.
As you can see above, since we had a much more finite list of commands, we put them on a slide-out bar that the player could toggle if they forgot what they could say. It’s a shame; we were going for a more minimal and voice-based UI where the crew’s shoutings and the ship’s visual state would tell you all you would need to know intuitively.
Nintendo games always have been the gold standard, the benchmark for making quality games. Like any other benchmark, though, competitors can rank above and below. There have been plenty of video games that exceed or have more depth than the Nintendo version, but Nintendo can always be counted on for nailing the basics and making the most of simplicity.
Let’s think about Mario at the most basic level. His original name in Donkey Kong was “Jumpman” because that’s what he did. Not quite as super-heroic as Spider-Man having the powers of a spider, but a marvel in mileage economy. With that single press of the A button, the character hops. Translated into various contexts, though, there are myriad outcomes (especially when coupled with a single additional input of forward movement). Let’s list them.
Man, that’s a lot of things with just one mechanic. Of course there’s a lot of contextual under-the-hood work being performed. Is the object Mario touched part of the environment? An enemy? A power-up, a coin? What part of Mario touched what part of the object? The important thing, however, is what was exposed to the game player: A means jump. Nothing more complicated than that.
Nintendo struck simplicity gold again with the WarioWare series of games. The original version was once again a one-button interaction. The team is doing the minimal-possible-inputs-maximum-possible-contexts thing once again with Rhythm Heaven Gold, coming in April on the Nintendo DS (available in Japan for some time on both GBA and NDS). Using the touch screen, the player either taps, holds, or swipes. Keeping it simple, you don’t even have to hit specific points on the screen; it’s just one large scratch pad for your gestures. Take a look at some videos on YouTube, and you can see all the creative ways they make the most out of so little. [ Just one series of many play videos available ]
No reason why I posted this video specifically other than I thought it was adorable.
Anyway, the reason I bring up this topic of simplicity is because an easy-access game will not scare off potential players. When you watch an expert PC RTS or RPG player’s hands fly all over a 104-key+ keyboard, doesn’t it make your brain hurt a little. That was Nintendo’s whole concept for the Wii: minimize perceived potential inputs. In fact, it’s been a joke for a while, especially with the Gamecube’s giant A button, that Nintendo’s controller of the future will just have a single “press to win” button. What’s wrong with that, if one doesn’t need to sweat, thinking of the appropriate arbitrarily mapped button to push? I think many gamers sometimes take a little too much pride in mastering complexity that they have a hard time appreciating elegance. A simple interface matched with a compelling game can appeal to all audiences, where a complex interface with compelling game still has that hurdle that will keep some away. “There’s only one chance to make a first impression.” This simple interface doesn’t mean that accomplishing the goals are easy or automatic. It’s not actually the “win” button; the mastery of timing is still necessary.
In this inaugural show, Carl and Chuck discuss video game DLC from a developer and publisher's perspective. Topics include:
When I first got hired on at my last job, I took the opportunity to splurge on additional hard drives. Because of the recent news of one blog company not having proper redundant backups, I felt that I should step up my CYA (“cover your ass”) game. I’ve installed a 1TB drive but have not yet selected and configured a software solution to automate my backups…
Today Yurani called me to ask for some advice on external hard drives. Apparently her Mac is now down to 24MB (!) thanks to music and all the high-res photos she’s been snapping of her clients with her new dSLR camera. Though I directed her away from the mini, portable drives to a much more cost-effective 3.5″-based drive, I still recommended that she investigate uploading her photos onto a website. I believe that an off-site backup is a great emergency measure. Sure, I’ve got plenty of my photos burned onto high-quality, long-life Verbatim DataLifePlus CD-Rs, but they’re in the same apartment as my computer. What if there was a fire? They’d both wind up in flames.
My favorite benefit of “cloud computing” is access anywhere; it’s great not to have to sit down at a specific computer, at a specific location to have access to my files or applications. Also, depending on your host, they certainly are likely to have their own backup methods, in case something happened with the particular server your information was hosted. Certainly there are issues with the concept. What happens to your files when the company goes under? What about hacking? A large corporation is a bigger, easier-to-find target than if you remotely log into your home desktop server. Also, privacy and ownership. Are you giving up certain rights to your work and information by agreeing to let your host sponsor the costs of your usage (particularly something to think about with free services)? (more…)