Mandible Games

So hey been a while. Let’s get this thing wrapped up.

I’ve gotten a curiously small amount of commentary on this game, and I’m not quite sure why. Doesn’t give me a lot to go on, and it worries me that, perhaps, I did something wrong that I will be unable to figure out.

Who knows!

What Went Right

I decided to tackle hardware shaders and higher-end graphical effects in this game. Overall I think this was an amazing success – there are a lot of effects in this game that are done entirely via hardware and on the graphics card, and the game comes across much better thanks to those. In fact, even something as simple as the lit-up paths are hardware processed. Wonderfully powerful and I’ll be using similar stuff in the future as needed. Huge success.

I feel that the sound effects turned out great as well, which is surprising because I maybe spent two hours on sound for the entire game. I wasn’t intending to end up with such a meditative soundscape but that’s kind of what happened, and I really rather enjoy it. Happy accident there.

The basic game design . . . I’m a little uncertain. I’ve had a few people suggest that it would be better with a touchscreen interface and a countdown, and I think that might be true – the “falling tiles” behavior doesn’t lend much of interest to the gameplay. However, the actual idea, linking things via wires one way or another, seems to be pretty dang fun. I think it’s got potential for tweaks and improvements.

What Went Wrong

Nobody anywhere has commented about the achievements. Did people not notice them? Did people not care about them? I have no clue! Tell me what you thought of them, or even if you noticed. The idea was to give people suggestions towards things that might increase their score, or towards things that they might not have thought of – essentially encouraging people to explore the bounds of the game mechanics. Hopefully it worked.

The hardware shaders ended up turning into a huge code and efficiency problem, and I ended up spending a week before the game making them work, plus a week after the game making them work fast. Ugh. On top of that I’m still getting frequent crash reports. I’m not sure if this is thanks to the hardware shaders or what – I’ll have to instrument some codepaths better to figure out where this crash is coming from. It may simply be that a lot of people are trying to run this game on low-end graphics systems.

I also still don’t have OSX crash reports working.

I didn’t have time to play around with the game mechanics much further. I wanted to have things like “score doublers” that you could drop in, that would double any points gotten “through” that link. Didn’t happen. I had some ideas about ways to modify the board layout after placing pieces, or letting the player stash a piece. Didn’t happen. This game was a huge time crunch from beginning to end, and I’m glad I did it because I ended up with some great infrastructure in place, but the game design suffered.

The Bottom Line

I feel like I’ve made my prettiest and most atmospheric game yet. That’s cool. I feel like the game design itself was kind of a failure, and I’m pretty much just gonna be moving on to whatever’s next.

Which, lately, has been an iPhone port. Getting close to the point where I can (relatively) easily build iPhone games!

My word this one was tougher than I’d expected.

Windows (.zip version available)
Mac OSX (10.6 or higher)

Things I’ve learned: hexagons suck.

This game makes far heavier use of graphics card hardware than any I’ve done before. Report any problems! With luck, there won’t be any. Luck is not something I have had during the design of this game.

I’m tweaking the terms of my Monthly Game slightly. March is going to be insanely busy thanks to GDC and PAX, both of which I’ll be attending, so I might not get a game done in March. If I don’t, I’ll get two done in April.

Leave commentary on the game. As usual, I’ll be posting a postmortem in a week or so.

THE BAD:

The original goal for this game was to rip off the Drawing minigame in Kirby Canvas Curse, then play with it a lot to see if I could come up with neat variations.

Fundamentally, I couldn’t. Ironically I’ve gotten a lot of really good ideas since finishing it. SO IT GOES.

One problem I hadn’t anticipated, however, is the issue with the user’s control scheme. People who use trackpads didn’t generally like the game or do well. People who use tablets generally liked the game and did really well. Tablet users might be, in general, more artistic in the first place, but I think some of this is thanks to trackpads being really really awful for this game style.

I’m not sure what a solution to this is. I should maybe just have added a screen at the beginning saying “plug a mouse in you doofus”.

THE GOOD:

The game balance is more subtle than you’d expect. Scoring is done by taking the average distance-squared between each of your drawn points and the closest point to it on the pattern, then adding the reverse of that, from the pattern to your points. I quickly realized that the big simple patterns ended up vastly harder than the small ones due to how large errors tended to be. The solution was to send a beta copy to all my friends and get them to play through all the levels, then average their scores for each level and use that as a scaling factor.

The spiral ended up being the “toughest” in terms of scaling, while the rabbit crouching next to a bed was the “simplest”.

However, once I’d done this, it just worked. A was tough, A+ was very tough. User balance: it’s a good thing!

The background color. This seems like a silly small thing, but the game completely opened up when I added the background image and I was no longer making gameplay while floating in a sea of black. Every other game I’ve made has started with a black screen. I think I’m going to start with a non-black screen on the next one and see what happens.

This is going to sound silly, but I really feel like the big thing I got out of this game was the background color issue. I think that’s been a recurring issue in a lot of my games, and I’m going to fix it, starting now. And by “starting now” I mean “I already know what my next game is, and I’m going to start working on it real soon now, no more five-days-before-the-end-of-the-month for me!”

WHAT IT ALL COMES DOWN TO:

I’m getting better at this. I think I did a good job of the atmosphere in Andre Copperman, and the game ended up roughly how I intended. I didn’t come up with clever gameplay elements but I made a fun game and that’s what I was going for.

As a side note, can anyone with OSX 10.5 let me know if the build worked? I’ve gotten a bunch of reports of it working on 10.6, and exactly one report about 10.5 (didn’t work.) I don’t yet know if this was a fluke or some actual incompatibility.

Well, here we are again. This month’s theme is Art Game, and I’ve provided you with a game that is all about the process of making art.

And appropriately, this is the first game of mine that includes OSX support. We now have even more download options than we did before!

Windows
Mac OSX

Windows .zip for those who dislike installing things.

Let me know whether the OSX version works, and what version of OSX you’re running it on. It hasn’t been very extensively tested.

As usual, commentary coming in a few days.

Ironically, the game during the “Art Game” month is probably the ugliest yet. Then again, it’s also the least polished and least gamelike. And, yes, I completely ignored the official theme.

Download GT Machaira (zip version).

I’m not providing a screenshot for this, but I am going to describe the purpose of the game and whether I felt it was successful. So yeah I’m basically breaking every convention so far.

My original plan with this was to muck about with sidescroller brawler balance and see if I came up with a game idea. To put it simply: sidescroller brawler balance is very difficult, and I didn’t come up with a game idea. I basically just spent four days learning about the genre from a development point of view and discovering a whole ton of stuff that didn’t work and mistaken impressions I had.

For example, sidescrollers? Really goddamn fucking fast. In WoW I’m used to cast times in the 1-2 second range, and effects that last multiple seconds. In order to make this thing feel good I was literally balancing single frames, and doing a bad job of that to boot.

So eventually I got it to its current state – which is actually kind of fun – and realized that I simply do not know enough to continue. I need to research. Lots of Super Smash Brothers playing, lots of old brawler playing, that sort of thing. I need to sit down with Super Mario World and really understand its physics. It will be a lot of work, and so I’m providing the game as it stands.

I’d be interested in feedback. I know the art sucks, I know the music and sound are . . . nonexistent. I may write up a bit more in a week or two once I’ve had time to ponder this a bit. I may also release a 1.1 – there’s one or two features I couldn’t provide due to some failures in the framework I’m using, but I’ve got to fix those at some point and might change things once I do. We’ll see.

GT means Gameplay Test. It is not meant to be a complete game, or even a particularly cohesive vision – it’s me mucking about with stuff and seeing what happens. There may be more GT games.

Next project: GT Machaira OSX. It’s time to go crossplatform.

And now, I’m going to go play New Super Mario Bros Wii.

Okay, let’s polish off the Number+ postmortem real fast.

Number+ spawned out of my recent thoughts about different kind of games. Number+ is a pure skill game. The challenge is whether you can react fast enough and accurately enough to all the shit that comes flying in. If you do, you win. If you don’t, the game ends after a bit, theoretically to keep you from being annoyed at being stuck in a holding pattern. You can absolutely get better at the game with practice, and that’s rewarded by higher scores and new notes about what your number is as big as. There’s some high variance later on, but the game’s really built heavily around slow-and-steady-wins-the-race, and playing conservatively is how you beat the game (in fact, it’s nearly mandatory near the end to play super-conservatively when adding a new digit.)

Two things that worked well: sound and graphics. I pulled (almost) all my sound off Freesound and, for the first time, ended up with a game that doesn’t sound tinny and painful. That was pretty awesome. I will be doing more of it in the future. The graphical style was a total accident, I was just using white silhouettes on black for debug art for a while. Then I decided they looked good and I stuck with it. I’m not entirely satisfied with how I did them – I have three separate styles of silhouette going on – but they’re easily good enough and I think they result in a rather neat feel to the game.

Two things that didn’t work well: rhythm and balance.

One of the ideas I had for this game originally was that there would be a lot of stuff going on, all rhythmic and on-beat, and you might end up with kind of evolutionary music coming out of it. That just did not work. There’s a lot going on, and most of it does in fact happen on beats, it’s just that it’s impossible for anyone to notice. Better programmatic control over sound would probably have helped – if you’ll believe it, this is the first game I’ve written where I have the capability to *stop* sounds, and I certainly don’t have anything fancy like pitch control – but overall, I think if I want a melodic game, I’m going to have to focus very closely on that aspect.

Game balance turned out to be a major problem, and I’m not sure it’s solvable within the constraints I originally wanted.

The problem comes down to a diminishing click budget. Let’s say we trigger a challenge for the player every four seconds. This is not hard at all. Nobody will find this difficult. Let’s say we add another challenge, again every four seconds. It’s slightly difficult, but any serious gamer isn’t going to have an issue. One more thing every four seconds, suddenly it’s hard. One more, suddenly it’s near-impossible.

If you want to introduce about eight different Things over the course of this game the user will have a shocking amount of trouble just clicking on them all. Worse, if you want them all to “trigger” at roughly the same frequency, the first five will be boring and the eighth will be impossible.

I tried to solve this by reducing the frequency of the later items, but that introduces an all-new set of problems – namely, that it’s hard to figure out how to interact with the gizmo in time. There’s always a limited amount of time to react, and by the time you’re near the end, any slipup is essentially fatal.

So the first half of the game is boring, and the next third is challenging, and the last sixth is near-impossible, despite the fact that the hazards actually get [i]easier[/i] as the game goes on. And in order to beat it, you have to sacrifice six playthroughs to the God Of Learning Game Mechanics.

This is bad.

If I were re-implementing it, I’d change it from a single large number into a series of smaller numbers, each one of which teaches you about some new gizmo, then challenges you with a set of things you’ve seen before in a new combination.

A few things got lost in design. I was originally going to have some kind of “store” where you spent your number in order to get gizmos that let you pass challenges. I couldn’t come up with a way to balance it that I liked, however – the game is kind of intrinsically exponential, so I’d have maybe thirty seconds of gameplay in which the gizmo was an interesting decision, and after that it’d just be another-thing-to-click.

This is the first game I’ve been tempted to release commercially, since it would be dang easy to rip out a few dozen levels and gizmos and put it on the iTunes store or something. (Multitouch would let me do some fancy stuff as well.) There’s little enough art and sound that I could probably hire someone for relatively cheap to do things better than I did. I don’t think I have time, but I kind of like the idea.

Learning continues.

Next month’s official theme is Art Game, which I have absolutely no interest in. I’ve been thinking about games that fit the theme and the fact is that all my ideas come down to “I am shoehorning this into the theme just so I can say it fits the theme.” So I’m going to be ignoring the official theme and doing something else.

I picked up a few neat games on Steam, and naturally that led to me picking up more neat games on Steam, and someone suggested I try out Dawn of War and that led to me grabbing a pack of like fifteen games including several I’d always meant to play and long story short I just tried out Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl.

Stalker is a game about a man in the wastes of radioactive Chernobyl who has lost his memory. He wakes up with very few possessions to his name – a leather jacket, a pistol, a knife, and a seemingly Godlike ability to rewind the flow of time.

The developers didn’t really intend that last one. But when they put in the ability to save and reload anywhere, that’s pretty much what they ended up with.

But oh boy howdy is he a lucky man! Because, see, the wastes of Chernobyl are deadly indeed. For one thing, they’re vastly radioactive, and a few steps in an unfortunate direction can pretty much instantly kill you. They’re infested with mutant wildlife which possesses the ability to leap out of bushes and also pretty much instantly kill you. And if the wildlife doesn’t get you, the bandits might. The bandits are unlike the other menaces – at close range they actually do instantly kill you.

And then you hit “reload”, only this time, you know where the bandits are.

Theory: Unlimited saving of your game is the worst thing that has ever been invented.

Alright. Not the worst. But it’s well up there, and its grip on the PC gaming world is seemingly unshakable. Imagine the following series of events.

First, people start saving their game. Everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. Get out of a battle in good shape, save your game. Prepare to go into a battle, save your game. Run thirty seconds across the world, save your game. Take five steps, save your game.

Get out of a battle in bad shape, reload your game. After all, why cripple yourself? You’ll do better next time. You can ace that battle. And you will ace that battle. And you’ll ace the next one, too, with your excess of firepower. And the one after that. And then you’ll go and complain on message boards that the game is too easy.

So what do the developers do?

Make the game harder.

And suddenly a new player can’t beat the game without doing the tango. Every battle is instant death. Every mission has to be done twice – once to scout, once to win. Every enemy outpost is a neon gravemarker, with words engraved upon, reading “Here, Jakob, Son of Smyth, Reloaded his Game Twyce before Going The Othyr Way, since Somehow he was now Psychically Aware of the Enemys.”

Does anyone enjoy this? Anyone, anywhere, ever?

And this is not a hard issue to solve! It’s been solved! Halo did it. Ratchet and Clank did it. Much more recently, Brutal Legend did it. In none of these games is it possible to lose, and in none of these games is it possible to do the save/reload tango. Death is handled by resurrecting you at the last checkpoint or at the beginning of the current mission. “Reloading” is equivalent to “dying” in that it drops you back to the same spot. In R&C and Brutal you can always abort a mission, going back in time to just before you accepted it, and go do something else. You cannot fail – only try again – and thus there is no incentive to stepping your way through the game five perfect seconds at a time.

And I look at this simple elegant solution, and I cannot help but think: why is this not used for every game? Why are games still made where you are even permitted to save whenever you want? Why, when it is so vastly detrimental to game balance, when it is so positively and thoroughly inimical to actual fun?

What game mechanic does save-anywhere actually allow?

I still haven’t come up with an answer to this.

It’s that time again! For those who were hoping I wouldn’t go back to sidescrollers, you shall be happy. For those who were hoping I’d stay away from RTSes, you shall also be happy!

Download installer here
(optional zipped version)

This game was fated to be. I came up with the idea, almost identical to what you see here, a few days before the new official Experimental Game Project theme was announced. What was the theme?

Numbers.

Numbers it is.

Let me know what you think. Postmortem will be incoming, once I have some idea whether it was successful or not :D

Thinking over my last entry, I’ve realized that – once again – I’ve lied to you.

Sorry. This will probably happen often.

I also plagiarized a little, but only a little.

“A good game is a series of interesting choices.” It’s attributed to Sid Meier, the genius behind Civilization. I am assuming you’ve heard of Civilization. If you haven’t, get the hell out of my journal (and then come back once you’ve read that page.)

Sid Meier has a very specific view of gaming. Sid Meier does strategy games – turn-based strategy games, at that, where there is always a button you can press labeled “stop, I want to think for an indefinite period of time.” In fact, in Sid Meier’s games, usually that button doesn’t exist. Instead, there’s usually a button labeled “I’m done thinking, you can do things now.”

In Sid Meier’s games, he’s completely right. Civilization without interesting choices is a terrible game.

What about Guitar Hero?

There aren’t choices in Guitar Hero. Guitar Hero is a flat-out test of skill. You are either good enough or you aren’t. (The actual definition of “good enough” depends strongly on the player.)

What about Braid?

There aren’t really choices in Braid either. You’re trying to learn how to solve the puzzles. There is no penalty for failure – you play the game inside a cheerful sandbox which is always willing to let you try again. In one sense, a random number generator could beat Braid, because it will eventually happen to solve all the puzzles . . . but it won’t understand them, and that is the interesting part of Braid. Which, it must be pointed out, can only be experienced once, because then you understand it and you’re done.

What about Samorost?

At first glance, Samorost may seem similar to Braid. I claim it is completely different. Samorost is not a puzzle game. There is no underlying logic to Samorost, there are no sets of rules to comprehend. Each screen is more of an experience than a level. In Samorost, the goal is the journey, not the individual puzzles – the puzzles are largely simple, but the journey is beautiful.

So I’m going to propose four rough categories.

* Strategy games, where your opponent fights you directly and must be defeated with skill and thought.
* Skill games, where your opponent is the game itself, which provides a series of increasing challenges to surpass.
* Puzzle games, where your opponent is your own limited understanding of the rules set in front of you.
* Journey games, where you have no opponent.

I’m going to have to mull on this one. Anyone got a counterexample to those four categories?

So. Mobius.

If you haven’t played Mobius, and plan to, stop reading and go play it, since I’m about to spoil the whole thing for you.

Still here?

The official theme this month was Failure. Usually, failure means you lose the game. Mobius is born out of the first idea I had regarding failure – a game where failure made you more powerful. Every time a character dies, the game counts up how many monsters you’ve killed and credits those to the person who “died”. He becomes more powerful, but is penalized with having fewer HP, making him more likely to die in the future. If the difference in experience gets too great, a death can actually result in real, true failure, coupled with Game Over.

That is pretty much the entire game.

For a variety of reasons, I don’t think it worked. And I could go into each one in detail, but to be honest, there’s one which is big, and important, and vastly overshadows the others.

Real-time strategy games are intrinsically not very much fun.

They suck. They are boring. They are awful, awful games. I am prepared to defend this statement, but let me explain what I mean first.

There are genres of game which are intrinsically fun.

First-person shooters: you get to blow shit up. That’s fun. You can run through an FPS in God Mode and still enjoy yourself, because, hey, kaboom! Kablammo! Look at all the shit I’m blowing up! Look at all the zombies/nazis/robots/robot-nazi-zombies I’m killing! This is so much fun.

Sidescrollers: The good ones are simply a joy to control. Look at Abe’s Oddysee for the best example I know of, but a far more well-known example is Super Mario World. Super Mario World is fun, even when you’ve played it before. And that’s not due to the inventive level design, or the “plot”, or the challenge – even after someone’s beaten it half a dozen times, they’ll go back and try it again. It’s simply enjoyable to play.

Anything involving leveling: We like leveling! People like to see a number that represents how awesome they are, and they like to see that number get larger. So you can have fun with RPGs even after you’ve beaten them once (plus it’s like re-reading a good book), and you can enjoy Civilization 4 many many times, partially because your empire is getting huge and you’re awesome. It’s fun. You’ve done it before, but let’s do it again, let’s become big and strong for the third seventeenth one hundred and fortieth time.

There’s one other aspect that can rescue an otherwise doomed game: Intelligent challenge. If fighting against your opponent is nontrivial, if it’s not obvious what the right choice is in every case, then you can get a great game out of it. See: Civ4. See: Starcraft multiplayer.

And that’s the crux. Starcraft multiplayer is a really good game. Starcraft singleplayer plot is really good. But nobody finds Starcraft singleplayer fun to replay.

Why? Well, it’s simple. There are no interesting choices.

A good game is a series of interesting choices, and once you know how an RTS works, the choices aren’t interesting anymore. You know the build order. You know the right units. And, let’s face it, even if you don’t know the build order or the right units, singleplayer RTSes can almost always be beaten with a few very basic steps:

* Defend your base.
* Build your economy.
* Create an army.
* Destroy the enemy.

That’s it. That’s the strategy. Now you can beat almost every singleplayer RTS ever made.

Now, you can draw this out quite a bit. Good singleplayer RTSes tweak the game subtly, many many times, so you never quite understand how it works. They disguise it as “unlocking new buildings and abilities” – in every level, you get More Stuff, changing the game balance and the optimal unit loadout slightly, and you only get the best stuff in the last level. Ever wondered why RTSes delay so much? Ever wondered why first-person shooters seem content to give you all their weapons about halfway through, or two thirds of the way through? It’s because the RTS game has nothing more to offer you once it’s shown you everything.

Because the game, itself, is fundamentally boring.

There are many ways I could criticize Mobius. It got less actual development time than any other game I’ve made so far, and the only reason it doesn’t look far worse than Too Many Guns is because I’ve gotten a lot better at making games. The writing suffered, the art suffered, it could have used more variety, it could have used more testing and more balancing.

But the single most damning criticism is a very simple one.

Mobius is, unintentionally, a puzzle game, masquerading as an RTS . . . and once you solve the puzzle, you’re left with a very simple RTS.

Single-player RTSes do not have interesting choices. Mobius does not have interesting choices.

And, thus, Mobius is not a good game.