Mandible Games

Last night I found myself unable to stop thinking about Mass Effect 2. Not about to the gameplay, or the plotline. I just couldn't get my mind off the bizarre social effects that the universe implies.

For a bit of backstory, the critical bits of plot go like this. Humans join a galactic civilization with a bunch of alien species. One species is a bunch of blue women who sleep with other races.

Alright. First off, this is obviously only "the critical bits of plot" for the purposes of this particular blog post. I'm not arguing that. Second, the Asari aren't technically women, it's a single-sex race, but, come on:

That's female.

Now, it's reasonably clear in the game that Asari are bisexual. But humans, as far as we know, generally aren't. Humans tend to be heterosexual. I'm pulling this claim out of nowhere but I feel reasonably confident in it. So take the human race as it stands today, and then, out of goddamn nowhere, introduce an entire new race full of reasonably attractive and sexually compatible females.

What the hell does this do to gender balance? People are worried about China's gender balance, which is leaning 55% male. Even assuming the Asari population is no larger than Earth's, this leaves us with a stunning 75% female ratio. And according to the chronology, the Asari were colonizing space before the rise of the Persian Empire! Human growth rate is around 1% right now. Let's assume the Asari have a growth rate a mere tenth of that – 2500 years of growth leaves the Asari with more than twelve times the population of Earth.

(If you assume they actually have a 1% growth rate, then each male human could have literally an entire planet full of Asari women while still occupying less than 10% of the entire Asari population. Though I admit "occupy", despite the somewhat misogynistic double entendre, isn't really the right word when there are twice as many women on your planet as you'll have heartbeats in your life.)

"Oho," I hear you saying, "but why would the Asari mate with humans?" Well as of the time of Mass Effect, an Asari mating inside their species is considered a mark of shame. So basically you have a civilization of a hundred billion females who want nothing more than to breed with aliens. Now, in their defense, they're not picky about gender – but humans are, and I don't see that changing without some truly unbelievable cultural shifts. Not the kind of thing that would happen in a mere five hundred years, I feel.

"But wait! What about other species?" Yeah, sure, the Asari mate with other species too. No arguments there. It happens. There's the species of giant armor-plated killing machines that weigh a literal ton each and are infertile. There's the species of lizard men whose food is poison to most other races. There's the species of . . . well, we don't know what they are exactly under the biological containment suit, besides "humanoid", but we do know that even opening the suit for a few seconds is incredibly dangerous for them. And then there's the species that doesn't consider it "incredibly dangerous" but rather "instantly fatal".

And there's the floating luminescent jellyfish.

If you were an alien, and I showed you pictures of all the Mass Effect 2 races, and asked which were most likely to be sexually compatible, you'd pick the Drell, the Asari, and the Humans. And the Drell are nearly extinct. And they don't travel much.

Bioware, I love you guys. I really do. But did you stop to think for a second about the social consequences of this?

I spent most of last week at the Game Developers Conference.

It was fantastic, because it always is – it's a solid week of jamming new game development knowledge in my head, and, y'know, there's nothing bad to be said about that. There were many good talks. Talks about game philosophy. Talks about game design. Talks about game implementation. Talks about marketing. Talks about business models. Talks about target users and monetization.

I realized, somewhere in the middle of these talks, why I was having trouble moving forward. It was because I was moving to the iPhone, not because I was excited about the iPhone, but because I was trying to sell a game. A game which – let's be honest – I wasn't really excited about either. I wasn't working on what I loved. I wasn't working on what I'd gone into this crazy industry for in the first place.

I was trying to change from an artist to a producer. And I'm not a producer. My business cards say "Director", but I'm not sure even that is accurate. I'm an artist, and games are my canvas.

When I talk about the people I respect most in the industry, I don't talk about the people making 99-cent iPhone games with three million downloads. I don't talk about thirty-million-player Facebook games, or the latest Madden game. I talk about Cactus. I talk about Johnathan Blow. I talk about Derek Yu. I talk about Jenova Chen.

I talk about the people who make the game they want to make. And, sure, they pay attention to marketing, to business, to target users. But in the end, I think these people all make games they're proud of, and they all make games that are meaningful beyond the next five minutes of our collective attention span. And that's what I want to do.

I'm still going to be doing my monthly experimental games, at least for the immediate future (and, hell, I've only got three months until I've been doing this for a year, it'd be a shame to stop now.) But I think it's time to buckle down and make something that I can be proud of, and I think it's time to start making waves and trying to wrench myself into the public eye instead of running dark.

If I'm gonna be a rock star, it's time to start acting like one.

2010 is a good date for that.

I had an idea for a game design. It turned out to be . . . shall we say . . . dubious.

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

I'll just write up a postmortem here.

The theme for this month was Rejection. The idea I had was to take some basic swarming behavior, then make the creatures in the swarm gradually pay less attention to you. Your "livelihood" depended on influencing your friendly swarm creatures, and thus, as they ignored you, you'd die.

The problem with behaviors of this sort is that it's tough to accomplish both "interesting behavior" and "sufficiently controllable with the user". Even in the current version – the best balance I was able to get – some of the interesting swarm mechanics go away when the user gets close. I had some versions where the player was fundamentally unable to interact with the creatures in a predictable manner, I had some versions where the creatures essentially became mindless slaves of the user.

Fundamentally, I wasn't able to come up with any really interesting mechanics. Nothing I did was fun, and I didn't find myself enjoying playing my own game. That's a bad sign.

I don't think anything really went directly wrong with this – it was an experimental concept, and it didn't pan out. These things happen. Hopefully next month will be a little more successful.

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.