Mandible Games

A few months ago I went to GDC. Something came up surprisingly often at the Indie Game talks – a course at Carnegie Mellon called the Experimental Gameplay Project. The EGP is about making games. Lots of games. One person spending one week on a game as an experiment to see if it's even a good idea.

Usually, it isn't.

Sometimes, it is.

It turns out going through tons of games means, eventually, you get something extraordinary. It seems to take about a dozen tries in general. But you've got to start somewhere, right?

So I'm doing it. One game per month, one week per game. They'll all be posted here. Here's the rules I'm following, for the sake of future reference.

* For the sake of easy bookkeeping, games will be posted once per calendar month. If I post a game on the first of July, I'm not required to post another until the end of August. If I post a game on the last day of July, I'm still required to post another before the end of August. Easy to check.
* Only one game per calendar month counts. I can't post three games in a month and have that count for three months.
* A game's development will end, at most, exactly 168 hours after it begins. There are no excuses given for sleep, or being sick, or anything else. "PR materials", like screenshots or explanatory text, are not counted in this development budget, and bugs may be fixed after it as well, but game mechanics may not be changed unless I'm actually turning it into a full game.
* Games will be developed solely by me. I'm not making these games polished and gorgeous and perfect, and I don't want to deal with any kind of managerial issues. So. My games, one developer, me.
* A game must be technically playable and interactive in some sense. It does not, in any sense, have to be fun, or winnable, or have goals, either explicit or implicit. They're experimental, folks. Sometimes we're gonna have disasters.
* A game must be distributed publicly and for free. Otherwise, how can everyone laugh at it?
* Within two weeks of the game's release, I will must post at least a cursory postmortem of what was intended, what worked, and what didn't. The goal's to get better at writing games, not to release a bunch of crappy games! The delay is included so I can get commentary on it before having to guess at whether people will like it.
* Withdrawal from the Game Project must be announced at least two game releases in advance. I can't do "well I'm busy this month so no game, sorry guys", or "alright here's a game, by the way this is my last one!" If I do, I'm a sissy.

That's the plan.

Let's see how it works out.

I'm afraid I've lied to you all.

In a previous entry I explained in depth why game worlds need to make sense – not just in terms of Game, but in terms of World. I claimed that your world needed to be consistent, to feel like a living, breathing, realistic location, not like it was summoned out of the ether to provide a backdrop for a half-naked Greek dude to violently slaughter things.

This is actually a load of horse hockey.

But it's important to realize when it's a load of horse hockey.

God of War. It's one of the more successful recent franchises. God of War 1 was a Playstation 2 game, in which you played Kratos, a half-naked Greek dude who violently slaughtered things. I'm going to assume I don't need to continue the joke here – you can probably figure out what God of War 2, God of War: Chains of Olympus, God of War: Betrayal, and the upcoming God of War 3 are about.

The important thing to realize about the God of War series, which sets it about as far away from Dead Space as is possible for it to be set, is that God of War is a myth. It's not about some average-Joe engineer, thrust into a terrifying situation against his will. It's about a living legend. Kratos, the Ghost of Sparta. Kratos, the Hand of the Gods. Kratos, the God of War. Kratos is the main character in a world which fundamentally revolves around him – he is Revenge, he is Fate, he is Destruction.

On top of that, Kratos is the main character in a game that is, itself, fundamentally about fate and gods. Scratch that – fundamentally about Fate and Gods. Both of those tend to bend the laws of probability around them. Unlikely things become expected when prophecy is involved. When Kratos makes his way through a half-destroyed forest of columns, swinging from one to another as they topple around him, we don't think "ha ha, how silly, why were they all so precariously balanced in the first place, this game sucks" – we think "this is a test, we will vanquish the test and fulfill our destiny". When you realize that half of the puzzles involve destroying large blocks of stone, thereby proving that the puzzle has never before in the history of the universe been solved, and that some of them actually rely on certain parts of the puzzle being age-worn and easily shatterable, we don't think "ha ha, are we seriously expected to believe that Kratos was the first one here?" – we think "see how everything falls into place! Truly, we are the chosen one, and we cannot be stopped!"

This wouldn't work in Dead Space. Dead Space is not a myth – Dead Space is a story. Isaac isn't a Chosen One. Isaac is an unfortunate man in an unfortunate situation. The world does not care if Isaac lives or dies – Isaac can be shredded by industrial machinery, or devoured by zombies, or simply freeze to a cold lonely death in space, and fundamentally, nobody in that game will care (besides, obviously, Isaac.) Isaac isn't being pushed through by the Forces of Fate, there is no greater being controlling his actions – he's just a guy, trying to survive.

And this, incidentally, is one of the curious things about Star Wars. Star Wars is a myth about a random guy. On one hand, it is a myth – Luke Skywalker is the Chosen One. But on the other hand, Luke Skywalker is just some backwards hick from Tatooine. Most of the time, Star Wars feels like a story about some poor teenage dude who's way, way, way in over his head. Luke gets his hand cut off. Han gets frozen in carbonite. Luke gets beat up. Luke gets dropped into a fighter cockpit and told "we're all counting on you!" and, holy shit, they're all counting on him! Even when Luke is being ridiculously badass and slaughtering dozens of stormtroopers, you kind of get the feeling he's not quite sure what he's doing here.

And then he ends up in the Emperor's quarters, and everything shifts a little . . . and suddenly it's not a story about Luke Skywalker, Desert Farmer, it's a myth about Luke Skywalker, Jedi Knight, and oh hey lookit that, there's a reactor vent in just the right spot. What a coincidence! Almost as if it were fated to happen.

I'm not entirely convinced that shift was intentional. I think it was a lucky accident, and that the writers never sat down and said "okay, and here we change from story into myth". I think they just wanted to throw the Emperor into a reactor core. If anything, this is what I want people to get out of this:

Myth is good. Story is good. But you have to understand which form you're writing, and why.

And for bonus credit:

Arguably, I lied to you again. Sorry. Figure out where, and explain why it doesn't matter. (You'll need to know one of the two games I talked about in order to do so.) I'll post more about this later.

Games, movies, and magic have one major thing in common – misdirection. Show people one thing, then indicate to them that they saw another, and usually they'll believe you. In magic, it's harder because they're trying to figure out what you're doing while you're doing it. In movies, it's easier because the person is really just going along for the ride. In games, it's really easy, because the player is being assaulted by zombies and doesn't have any attention to spare.

At least, they don't the first time they play the game.

The second time, they're probably paying a lot more attention to what's going on around them. The zombies attacking, yeah, sure, they're a problem – but we've dealt with them before. Let's look at the other things around us!

This is when they discover how careful the game is at showing you exactly what they want you to see, and keeping you from doing anything besides what you're supposed to.

Not supposed to go through a door yet? It's locked. Got a cutscene to watch? I can guarantee every door leaving that room is locked – even if you just came through it ten seconds earlier. You can walk through a door, have it lock behind you, and then have the very same door unlock the instant you're done with a cutscene or a movie. Happens all the time.

Sometimes they even force you to look in certain directions. Sometimes, this is to make you look at something you're supposed to see. Sometimes, this is to make you look away from something you're not supposed to see. In the first level, there's an exploding shuttle. I bet you remember seeing it explode, right? It was really cool? No! You didn't. Because you can't have. The camera is jerked away from it at the last second, and when you turn back to it, it's already exploded. You're carefully prevented from seeing the exact moment it explodes.

The reason for that, of course, is that animating something large exploding in a realistic manner is expensive and hard. It's easier to just not show it. And it works great . . . up until the person realizes what's going on and decides to try exploring the boundaries.

This is a common issue in games. There are a good number of games out there that pretend you're given choices, but actually prevent all choice. The Half-Life 2 series is a perfect example – the first time you play it feels like an exploration, but every time after that you realize, hey, wait, I'm not allowed to go anywhere else! That exploration feeling was a ripoff!

I should mention that this is not necessarily a bad thing. The fact is that most people will never start a second playthrough – in fact, many people won't even finish the first. It's arguably kind of silly to triple your budget by making content that 95% of your users will never even see. (It's also arguably not. I'll post an entry about this someday.) But it does mean that going through the game a second time is kind of like being invited backstage at a live performance, or having the magician explain his tricks – all those cute things you noticed the first time turn out to be your own fevered imagination running a bit too fast.

Solution? There isn't one, besides solving the hard AI problem and writing programs that can generate content for us. Unfortunately, this is a ways off, and if we ever do solve it, we've put ourselves out of a job.

All I can say is: be aware of it, and try hard to keep the player from feeling constrained. At least, on the first playthrough.

Dead Space takes place on board the the USG Ishimura, a colossal "Planet Cracker"-class mining ship. It's a ship designed to literally rip apart planets to feast on the tasty, tasty ore inside. The ship's architecture varies from tight constricted maintenance corridors to huge open industrial spaces. At various points you visit the hydroponics bay, personal quarters, the medical bay, the bridge, and pretty much the entire set of possible important ship locations.

Most of the places you travel make sense in context of the ship's purpose. There's equipment suitable for its purpose, the layout is at least plausible, the lighting looks like it would be acceptable before zombies smashed up the place, etc. Some of the places do not make such sense. The ship is weirdly infested with inexplicable circuitous corridors. There are industrial areas that can best be described as mazes of walls. Why is there a maze in this ship? Did the crewmen just want a maze in their ship? There are strangely-placed high-speed trams that lead from one near-dead-end to another (the asteroid cannon being the most notable WTF moment). Why isn't, you know, there just a door which is closer? Are you seriously saying there aren't any other corridors within a kilometer? Overall, a good chunk of the ship just plain doesn't make sense.

Now, if the ship were designed by zombies – yeah, sure, go for it, zombies are crazy, who knows how they'd design it. But they aren't. It was designed by people. And when you're told that you're walking throughout a human-designed spaceship, and 3/4 of the ship makes perfect logical sense, those moments when you find yourself thinking "wait, why does this area even exist?" are painfully jarring. Why does this maze exist? Well, it exists because the game plans called for a maze, and by gum, we're putting a maze in!

What's the fix?

The only fix I can think of is to be excruciatingly careful that each location makes perfect sense, both for the game and in the context of the universe. It's hard, it's really hard, but I think it's important. This isn't an issue that's restricted to games – it's something movies get constantly wrong as well (please, explain to me why the Emperor's chamber on board the Death Star has a hole leading directly to the reactor core without even a guard rail) – but that's not an excuse, it just means we get more people to laugh at when we finally get good enough to avoid it.

For each zone, for each object in the game, you have to answer two questions. Why does the game contain this? Why does the world contain this?

If you can't come up with good answers to both questions, get rid of it.

Traditional game animation is (mostly) pregenerated. An animator sits at a computer and carefully poses the motion of each limb. Eventually, you have a spider that crawls across the ceiling and shoots acid in your face. Done!

In motion, this looks pretty good. In death, it's problematic. First, unless you've gone to the trouble of multiple death animations, creatures always die the same way. If you kill five hundred Basic Guards, you'll end up with five hundred identically-posed corpses lying around. Uncool. Second, death animations have nothing to do with the weapon you kill them with. Poke them a thousand times with a needle? He'll scream, fall over, and lie with his face on the ground. Shoot him with a portable nuclear warhead launcher? He'll scream, fall over, and lie with his face on the ground. Uncool. Third, death animations tend to "snap" from other animations. Basic guard takes a flying leap, jumps at you, you kill him midair . . . and suddenly he plays the Death Animation, which involves him instantly standing up in midair, then screaming, falling over, and lying with his face on an imaginary ground, while his corpse eventually falls into a pit. Uncool.

There's a solution to this. Games have gotten sophisticated enough that most modern 3d games include a basic physics engine. You don't need perfect physics for this, something simple is pretty effective. Animations are already based on a simple skeletal model – arms have two "bones", legs also have two "bones", etc – and it's easy enough to allow these bones to just move via the laws of inertia and behave properly on impact.

So you kill someone on a tower of boxes, his corpse will tumble down the boxes. You shoot someone with an air cannon while he's standing in front of a railing, he'll backflip over the railing. Rocket launcher to the feet? Flying guard corpse! Cool.

There's problems. (Of course there's problems. You think I'd be writing about it if it really were that simple?)

Ragdolls tend to be used only for actual death. It's just too hard to recover from a ragdoll collapse if the creature isn't actually dead. You knock a Basic Guard into a pile of boxes and he gets jackknifed between two – how does your Basic Guard recover from this? He doesn't, but now there's a living Basic Guard jammed uncomfortably into a pile of boxes. It doesn't work well. So ragdolls are only used for death.

But that introduces a new, irritating problem. Ragdolls can be used to detect death. Dead Space includes a gun that fires a shockwave which knocks things down. When knocked down, a lot of the zombies will cheerfully play dead, only to eviscerate you when you turn your back on them. However, it's trivial to determine if they're dead or not. See, when you knock them down, they always fall on their backs, with their legs facing you, and their left leg (from your perspective) slightly lower than their right leg. I know this very well from knocking down dozens and dozens of zombies this way.

When I see them fall down this way, I know they're just going to get up again in a few seconds. When I see them fall down any other way, I know the ragdoll mechanic kicked in, therefore I know they're dead, and therefore I can forget about them.

It's not very suspenseful.

I'm not sure what the solution is. It really is incredibly hard to recover smoothly from a ragdoll-based collapse. On the other hand, unless you have your artists make dozens of death animations, it'll always be easy to distinguish a "real" ragdoll death from a "fake" non-ragdoll death.

But it's a problem, and in a game like Dead Space, where detecting Proper Death is a very valuable skill, it's distracting like you wouldn't believe.

Dead Space is a fantastic, fantastic game.

Dead Space is a third-person science-fiction horror game. Your character exists. A large spaceship exists. A shitton of zombies exist. Mix and enjoy. Technically, other humans exist as well, but in terms of gameplay they're really only there for cutscenes.

There is you, and the ship, and zombies, with the zombies attacking you when you do not expect it and scaring the crap out of you. This is not Doom-style "a closet opens in the wall and a monster pops out, and you kill it, and you grab the health pack in the closet, and a second, smaller closet opens up and another monster pops out". This is "you hear a squeaking down the hallway and moving shadows, and you inch around the corner and finally see a bloody corpse hanging from its neck through a vent shaft, and then you turn around and something tries to claw off your face before vanishing through a hole in the floor. Also, there's clanging noises and screams coming from around you."

It's actually quite, quite creepy, and extraordinarily well-done. I quite recommend picking it up, assuming you enjoy playing scary things.

As anyone who's been reading this journal knows, this means I'm going to complain about it. That's just the way things seem to be going.

Dead Space is an immersive game. If you're "playing a game", zombies aren't going to scare you. If you're actually fighting your way through a derelict spacecraft, they are. One of the critical and most difficult parts to any immersive game is to not break immersion. This is hard. Very hard. Dead Space goes to extraordinary lengths not to do so. For example, there's no HUD in Dead Space. You can see your health by looking at your character's back (third-person, remember). Your inventory screen, and any windows or tooltips that pop up, do so via in-game holograms that exist in 3d space. Turn the camera and you can see the hologram from another angle. Monster jumps at you, and, well, it's not like the game pauses – now you've got a monster on your face with an inventory screen obscuring your vision. Good move, dude. Video cutscenes? Another hologram projection from your helmet. "Click here to pick this item up"? Another hologram projection, centered on the item. Everything – and I do mean absolutely everything – exists within 3d space in the game world.

Largely, it works. We, as game developers in general, have gotten better at this sort of thing. It's a constant battle, but one we're winning.

Mostly.

Dead Space has three problems that I've found. Three big, complicated problems, that deserve their own entries. So I'm giving them their own entries. Yeah, this is a series. So there'll be another post in a few days.

But I'll end this with a question:

What common, constantly-ignored immersion issues do you see in games? What common problem causes you to go "hey, wait! This isn't real!"

And how can it be fixed?

There are, as I see it, two main forces involved in the plot development of MMORPGs. They are the Force of Awesome and the Force of Progress.

The Force of Awesome is the group that wants new, exciting things to occur. They want the world to be torn asunder by eldritch powers beyond the ken of any current player (and then they want to level up and wipe the floor with said eldritch powers.) They want something new. The Force of Awesome is not named so because it's a superior, more awesome force, but because of what it represents. "Sure! Change everything! Let's have a global invasion! It'll be fuckin' sweet!"

The Force of Progress is the opposing force. They do not want change. They want to keep doing the same thing they've been doing for months, and continue making progress along the same lines that they have grown accustomed to. High Tinker Mechanopants over in Dwarfholm wants you to retrieve 18 bear butts, and by gum, we're going to go find those bear butts! (This will probably involve killing at least 60 bears. Surprisingly, most bears don't have butts. This is a different article that I will write someday.) This desire isn't necessarily a bad thing – the player just has goals in mind, and those goals do not involve eldritch powers besides their own.

The problem with reconciling these two viewpoints is that neither of them is wrong. There's no way to say that either one makes for a better or worse game – they just make for different games. Most of the time, MMORPG staff looks at this, realizes that following the Force of Awesome costs money, and lets the game go entirely unchanged.

Last week, the entire game of World of Warcraft was under assault by zombies.

At the beginning of the week you couldn't get infected unless you actually tried. Infected boxes appeared off in the middle of nowhere – you could fly over to them, wait ten minutes, wander around as a zombie while attacking people, and quickly get killed. You could in theory infect other people, but it took about ten minutes for them to become zombies as well (minus five seconds every time you hit them, which was rather inconsequential), any Shaman or Paladin could cure them before they became a zombie, there were NPC healers littering every major city, and overall force-conversion just wasn't practical. Fun, for a while. But that's it.

By the end of the week, things were different. There were infected boxes, infected cockroaches, and infected rats in every major city. Infection took one minute, not ten . . . minus five seconds every time you were hit, which suddenly became a serious issue. Cures had perhaps a 10% chance of working. The NPC healers were almost entirely gone, and the few remaining ones were frequently swarmed and slain by dozens of zombies. Entering a major city would result in zombification in minutes at most, frequently seconds, and even minor cities were often zombie-infested wastelands.

It. Was. Awesome.

I imagine you can see where I'm going with this.

As awesome as the zombie invasion was, people who simply wanted to level their characters found this impossible. You couldn't enter major cities, you could barely enter minor cities. If you weren't level 70, or near to it, you expected to die instantly if you got anywhere near civilization. Realistic for a zombie assault, perhaps. Not fun for World of Warcraft.

There were complaints like you could not imagine. Wars on the forums. Screaming matches in trade channels. One group of players claimed it was the worst thing the developers had ever done, one group claimed it was the best thing. (And then the latter group attacked and zombified the former group, which didn't really help matters.) Amusingly, the latter group was divided on its own – some people set about zombifying everything they could, some went on a zombie-hunting and disease-cleansing rampage, with righteous anger flung between both groups whenever possible. Every group insisted that their method was the One True Way To Play The Game.

Skeletons carpeted the ground. Literally.

Then a cure was discovered, and the zombies vanished, never to be seen again (unless they repeat the event next year.)

It remains to be seen whether it was a savvy business decision.

Hundreds (if not thousands) of people posted loudly that they were canceling their subscription for World of Warcraft. I imagine most of them have quietly resubscribed by now, though certainly not all. Some people still grumble, of course, about the wasted time and the wasted money spent repairing equipment.

But then others tell war stories.

We held them off for two hours – Alliance and Horde, side-by-side, no common language but a common goal.

I entered Ironforge not knowing what to expect. I barely escaped with my life.

We started the infection in the Spirit Rise. Within half an hour, the city was infested. I personally converted two dozen guards. All hail the Lich King.

The cockroaches are gone, the corpses removed, but the sky is still black, the air still smoky.

The Argent Dawn set up a place of worship. We knelt, and prayed for the horror to end. A wave of the Scourge would attack, and we would raise our weapons against them. Afterwards, the survivors knelt again.

And that's why the Force of Awesome is a force to be reckoned with.

I imagine they lost a few subscriptions from the Progress camp – but I imagine they've gained a few as well, from people hoping to see, and participate in, the next zombie invasion.

There's a very common comic-book writing technique focusing on the last panel on a page.

The idea is that the last panel is incredibly important. People reach that panel, and they have two options. They can turn the page and see what's next. Or they can stop reading. Now, technically, you can stop reading at any point – but how many people stop reading in the middle of a page? Nobody does. You reach the last panel and you decide then.

Therefore, you want that last panel to encourage the reader to turn the page. There is something exciting on the next page! You'll never know unless you turn that page! You have to see it! And, of course, once you do . . . well, you have to finish the page . . . and then, well, one more page won't hurt. Right?

I imagine there's a similar concept involving movie scenes. It's not much of a stretch to imagine a playwright equivalent. Books are trickier, as there's no particularly obvious "common break point" besides the end of the page, and there are a lot of pages in a book.

Extrapolating to video games isn't hard either.

I've been playing Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction. It's a science-fiction action game, broken up into somewhere around 15 levels. Each level takes place on a unique planet – you travel to a planet, walk around killing things, then travel to the next planet.

There is almost no hook to keep you playing the game.

Oh, sure, there's another planet out there. Maybe this planet has a superpowerful world-destroying device on it! Maybe the next planet will contain some crazy alien artifact! But you quickly realize that the plot of the game has no effect whatsoever on the gameplay. You could be playing Ratchet and Clank's Grand Tour of the Galaxy for all the gameplay cares. That superpowerful device? It'll only factor in as a plot point, it's not like you'll get to use it yourself. Crazy alien artifact? Bet it'll just tell you where another planet is! Oh look it did, guess we'll go there now. Ratchet and Clank is still a fun game, but I never once found myself saying "one more planet", "one more quest", "one more zone", because the only reward to "another planet" is the ability to go to the next planet.

Start at point A, travel to point B. Find new planet. Repeat. It's a very linear game.

Conversely, there's a game called The World Ends With You. TWEWY is divided into "days". You have tasks to complete each day, and when you've finished them, the day ends, whether you want it to or not. Then the next day begins. There's no going back, at least until the end of the game.

TWEWY goes to incredible lengths to put a hook on the end of each day. Sometimes it's just a plain cliffhanger ending. Sometimes it's such a huge cliffhinger you can't imagine how the game can even continue after the events of that day. Isn't, like, the game over? Aren't we done? No. No, you are not done.

And sometimes – I love these – sometimes they show you half of the end-of-day events. Then the day ends, leaving you confused and wanting to know what actually happened. (Save your game! Continue to the next day? yes/no) The next day begins, and you get maybe five minutes of gameplay at most, and then they have a flashback to the section you just completed showing you what actually happened. And then the next day's plot seriously begins.

But, wait, you're already playing the next day! You can't stop now. You'll have to wait until the following day to turn the game off.

Start at the beginning of the day, go to the end of the day. Start another day. Repeat. TWEWY is an even more linear game than Ratchet and Clank is – and yet, it's far more interesting, and it does a far better job of making you want to play more. I'd argue that a lot of this is simply due to TWEWY's end-of-day hooks.

When it comes to game design, it's easy to spend too much effort on the game design part itself. Combat mechanics. Stats. Interfaces. It's important to remember that, with few exceptions, games also involve plot and writing. Weak writing can kill a game, and we don't actually know much about how games should be written yet – so we'd better steal as much as we can from other mediums.

Okay. This time I'm not really talking about a game. This time I'm talking about a game, and an expansion, and a magnificent complete failure at building a good community. Today is about what happens after you release a game.

A bit of background first. There's a dude named Chris Taylor. He made a real-time strategy game named Total Annihilation, released a bit after Starcraft. Now, obviously Starcraft was just a teensy bit more popular, but TA was interesting because it was a somewhat different style of RTS from the standard. Most RTSes have very flat tech trees, with at most an order of magnitude power difference between the biggest units and the smallest units. TA had a deep tech tree, with the most expensive biggest units able to take on moderate-sized armies of the smaller units. Blizzard's real-time strategy games love loading up their units with crazy special abilities, requiring massive micromanagement, while TA was more about building armies of military units and sending them against each other in bulk. RTS games rarely provide UI features to automate dull repetitive processes, and yet TA was (for its time) full of them – a thorough waypoint system, the ability to set factories to automatically build units and even automatically give orders to newly-built units, and some controls on unit behavior that were, strangely, actually useful.

The company that made Total Annihilation, Cavedog, was eventually reabsorbed into its parent company, and any hope of Total Annihilation 2 vanished with it. Chris Taylor went on to form a company called Gas Powered Games (I bet you are shocked by that, given the subject of this entry) which made a few dungeon-crawler games and eventually announced Supreme Commander, a spiritual successor to Total Annihilation.

Everything that TA did well, SC was meant to do better. A larger tech tree, with humongous, army-crushing ultimate units. More automation, less micromanagement. Supreme Commander was advertised as a strategic game, not a tactical game – a game where you would direct the flow of battle and not micromanage every unit in a skirmish. In a genre where "large battles" consisted of perhaps forty units, Supreme Commander advertised battles consisting of four hundred units, spread out across five hundred square kilometers or more.

So there's the background.

Supreme Commander was not a great game on release. Many of the features that had been promised were simply missing – the automatic base construction, joint attacks . . . even the pathfinding was hideously flawed, frequently turning your base-crushing attack into a five-minute-long trickle of easily-destroyed units. Multiplayer was imbalanced – not painfully so, but significantly so, and enough that many units were almost entirely unused. GPG promised improvements in patches, so we settled down to wait and see what improved.

Now, if you're changing the game substantially, there are things you have to do. You have to talk to the playerbase, for one thing. You have to give them some idea that things are being worked on, that their opinions are being heard, and that the game is actually getting better. GPG did none of these. Patches were released with changes – usually either minor changes, or gamebreaking changes – with little explanation or warning. Gamebreaking bugs remained unfixed. The balance was tweaked one way, then the other way, with no particular rhyme or reason to it, and little-to-no developer feedback.

There are a few events which, together, made me give up on the game and its developers.

GPG started a series of advertisements on their multiplayer application. "They're coming!" "What you asked for!" With a countdown – a month-long countdown. Surely this would be important, right? What we asked for – well, those are bugs fixed, pathfinding improved, and all those features we were promised originally! This could be awesome! And they're working on it for at least a month!

What we got were three units. One unit per race. Two bombers, and one hideously, hideously unbalanced guided missile, which seriously damaged competitive play since only one faction was now competitive.

People were pissed. People made threads on the forum talking about how pissed they were. A month! A full month of countdown, for three painfully unbalanced units! What were you thinking?

The threads were immediately closed and frequently deleted.

As a brief drop out of the timeline: THIS IS A BAD IDEA. NEVER DO THIS. People want to feel like they're being heard. People want to feel like their opinions matter. Take a look at the World of Warcraft forums, in comparison – the forum mods rarely delete threads and rarely censor anything. Want to talk about how the game sucks and they couldn't balance a scale if it came with marked weights? Go for it! It's allowed. People even argue GM decisions on the forums. (Unsuccessfully. But they do.) Back to the timeline.

Then the expansion showed up. With a full rebalancing of all the units, a huge modification of gameplay . . . and a complete abandonment of the original, non-expansion game. And an entire new set of bugs. A new set of balance issues. A new set of problems.

I gave it a month or two, the biggest problems weren't fixed, and I left.

I haven't written this just to vent about a game being screwed up by crummy customer service. I mean, it does still annoy me, and I do still want to play a working version of the game. But the real point is: your customers are fickle, capricious beings. They will leave if they think they're not being respected. They will leave if there are gamebreaking bugs. And they will leave if there is no evidence that the bugs will ever be fixed.

Contrast GPG's behavior with Blizzard's behavior. Blizzard's beta process is open and transparent. Blizzard employees talk about their balancing efforts, talk about what's coming up in future patches, and listen to customer feedback – or at the very least, read enough of it that they can pretend they're listening to it.

The second thing any game studio needs is a good game – but a good game won't help if you don't have people who want to play the game. And if you have people who want to play the game, and they give you suggestions on how to improve it? A lot of those will be terrible – but you still have to listen, because chances are they've played the game more than you have, and some of them will be good.

If you pay attention to your customers, you'll get more.

LocoRoco: Cocoreccho

Developer: Sony

Completion level: Not even close

Spoilers: I'm not sure how this would be possible.

I just got a PS3.

What this means is that you may be bombarded with short dissections of short downloadable games. I might eventually make a post about the PS3 in general (summary: it's pretty dang awesome now and Microsoft's lunch is about to be eaten by Sony) but I may not.

The thing about small short games is that some of them are really really weird. Cocoreccho is an exception to this, mostly because I'm not entirely sure it's a game.

LocoRoco was originally a PSP game. You played the Earth, and tilted your surface to help a bunch of singing blobs defeat a small army of flying dreadlocked heads. I swear I am not making this up. If you think the gameplay sounds distinctive, the art style was even more so, consisting entirely of deformable solid-color 2d cutouts – on the PSP, no less, where most people were expecting gore and explosions. Add to that one of the most catchy and cheerful soundtracks I've heard in a long time (keep in mind your blobs sing along, with lipsynched animations, in chorus) and LocoRoco made Nintendo games look dull, stodgy, and moderately depressed.

It's a great game, and I highly recommend it. It's also a near-natural fit for the PS3's tilt sensor. All they had to do was port it over, add a bunch more levels, bam! Game!

What they actually made was, in the words of the lead developer, an "interactive screensaver".

You still have a large number of singing blobs (it wouldn't be a LocoRoco game without singing blobs) but instead of getting from one side of the linear level to another, you are instead exploring what can be best described as a humongous Thing. Its behavior will be familiar to anyone who's played the PSP game, as it includes spinny things, bouncy things, sloped things, things with holes, and every other joyous device that we're used to from the PSP game. Your goal is to move a magical butterfly around which attracts singing blobs, use that explore the Thing, find more singing blobs, and wake them up.

That's the game.

Unlike the PSP game, your little blobs have more autonomy than they did before. The Thing has several large "loops" of behavior in it, where the blobs will naturally wander down slops and jump into new areas with wind blowing them back up to the beginning, and your blobs will generally follow the loops on their own, meaning that even if you're not really paying attention they'll be wandering around the level without any help required. This is pretty dang neat – in many places you can just point the screen at a segment and let it sit while blobs fly through it. I'm pretty sure this is where the whole "interactive screensaver" part comes from.

Unfortunately, as a screensaver, it's a bit of a failure. You see, the screen itself doesn't move around. Wherever you leave it, that's what you're going to be looking at until you move it again. And while the blobs are largely self-motivating, the areas they travel through automatically aren't really particularly interesting. In order to make them do anything of interest, you have to not only control the butterfly manually, but you have to know where the interesting things are – making it impossible to just sit down and poke at it for a few minutes. Getting anywhere really interesting can easily take fifteen minutes to half an hour of work.

Which is a pity, because I think the idea of an interesting interactive screensaver that could be left on is a really cool one.

I'm going to diverge into philosophy here for a second. Games started as a thing that was Not Business. If you were using a computer for it, it was either Business or Games. It took quite a while for computers to be used seriously for any other sort of recreation (like reading blogs) and even then, it pretty much came down to Business, Games, or Communication.

We're finally moving into using computers for other things. Cocoreccho is something I would consider Art. It's clearly meant to be art, on some level. Unfortunately, it's art jammed into the mold of Game. The artistic things they could have done have been hampered by their desire to make something that should be both played and won. Which is, I have to say, sad. It could have been something More – but it isn't, and it won't be, because it's a game and it's proved unable to break out of the template of Game.

Cocoreccho is interesting. I'm not sure it's good. But it's interesting, and if what I've been talking about intrigues you, and you have a PS3, you might want to check it out.