• Participating in the “hey let’s make a game in 1 hour” minijam.  (We took 1.5 hours, but it was fun anyway.  We weren’t the only ones who went over.)  The inestimable Brendan Mauro handled the art, while Jim Crawford and I sat and stared at code.  We made a game about steadily expanding sumo wrestlers, and maybe when I get some time I will post it here because it is rad.
• Eating lunch with random indie people who were visiting from Canada, making jokes about how everyone in Canada knows each other, bringing up Kate Beaton as a shining example of Canadiosity, only to discover that not only does he, in fact, know her personally, but he used to be her roommate.  Inescapable Conclusion:  Everyone from Canada knows each other.  This has now been proven by Science.
• Admiring Brendan’s fine collection of Lego art, depicting various indie games.  (It is a testament to his lego skillz that they were all quite recognizable in spite of the transition between mediums.)
• Discovering over lunch that Brendan was into Celtic tunes, and I am into Celtic tunes, and I had my tinwhistle, and he had an accordion, and having an impromptu jam session out in the parking lot.  (He actually didn’t have his accordion with him, but serendipitously, someone else had brought one which we were able to commandeer.)
• Watching the epic Red Ice tournament on the big screen.
• Watching Team Meat give out Meatboy sound tracks, and then write terrible, terrible things on them, at peoples’ request.
• Seeing all the simply amazing things everyone else was working on.  There was probably too much to list, but the one that sticks out in my mind the most right now is probably “Eels being dicks” simply because it had a name that was both awesome as well as incredibly apt.

So what have we learned from all of this?

Jams are Awesome.

IGF time!

It’s mid-October, and the pumpkins are out.  And, potentially more interesting, the list of IGF entries for the year is out as well.  There are some fantastic things on that list!  And while there is one of them at least, that I have a certain amount of bias towards, I think I will highlight a few of the others that caught my eye!

Below the fold, of course.  I still have some sense of decorum.

Right.  First off lets get some out of the way that are made by rad people I actually know or have met, and thus are rad by association.

• Jamestown is a shmup, designed from the ground up to be to shmups what Left 4 Dead is to first-person-shooters:  Namely, a tuned experience for for cooperative players, all running around, saving each other from certain death, and generally having a blast.  Made by the fine folks over at Final Form Games, it is looking really cool!
• Under a Different Moon is being created by some fine fellows over at Engient.  I will be honest.  I don’t really feel like I understand this game.  It still looks entertaining though.  I like the bull in the trailer in particular.
• La Mulana is of course a classic game of legendary difficulty.  But much like Cave Story, it is in this year’s IGF due to its imminent rerelease/graphical upgrade on the Wii.  It is looking fantastic!  Also, several of its creators sing some mean karoke.

Now that those are out of the way, here are some other random things that have caught my eye in the list:

• 

  Pretty!

  Hohokum has some of the most fantastic, eye-catching, stylized and whimsical art I have seen in a long time in a game.  It also has a snake that perfectly captures what is fun about the venerable Nibbles game, while still looking modern and fresh.  I really like their style!

• Recettear is a game that has already swallowed multiple hours of my life when it was released a month or two ago.  Who knew that trying to get a fledgling business out from under the burden of crushing debt could be so much fun?
• Nidhogg is Messhof’s most recent minimalistic offering, and it looks surreal as always.  It also looks extremely fun to play.  It also is extremely fun to play, as I can tell you after getting a chance to do exactly that at a party a while back.  (See, sometimes I DO get to go to fun parties.)  It’s sort of a low-fi mashup of the best parts of Karatika and I don’t know what else.
• 

  Stylish!

  Dustforce caught my attention for simply having fantastic visuals.  What’s that?  Tight looking platforming controls, with a focus on ninja-like speed runs, all beautifully and stylistically animated, and even managing a more unique premise than just “kill all the dudes?”  Yes please!

• The Cat and the Coup – I basically just love the idea behind this game.  Even if the art crosses the line sometimes from “stylistic” to “low budget”, the premise is fantastic.  It’s a historical game, reenacting the CIA-engineered coup in Iran.  You play the prime minister’s cat, and help(?) him through this difficult time by knocking things off his desk and jumping on his lap at inopportune moments.  Genius…

This is looking like it is going to be an interesting year, IGF-wise!  Whether or not they win, I now have a lot more games on my radar that I’m watching.  It is a good time to be someone who enjoys games!

Game of the year, 2010

This is a headline that I will freely admit I never thought I would write.  But this is too good to pass up.  It is genius.  For a couple of reasons.

Let me list them for you!

But first, here is what it is.  It is a youtube video or several.  Also, the best twilight-themed game I have ever played.  Play/watch it here:

8-Bit Twilight – The game

So let’s get started.  Reasons that I think it’s genius.

Lets just get this reason out of the way early:  Part of me loves it because it richly mocks Twilight, and Twilight is something that I feel roundly deserves mocking.  (Or at the very least does not deserve exemption from mocking…)  So the fact that the game delivers on this is great.

The Vamps have the advantage of numbers, but the wolves are TWO SPRITES BIG!

Also I really like it because of how it was constructed.  It is a series of youtube movies, with annotations at the end that link to other movies.  These form a sort of choose-your-own-adventure series of links, which make up the game.

This is clever to me!  It represents someone who saw how youtube was set up, realized it could be hijacked to give the viewer a choice, and realized that that was all you needed to make a game.  That’s some pretty cool emergent behavior, in my opinion.

I also appreciate the craftsmanship.  Someone went to some effort to make all these little 8-bit screens.  Someone made an 8-bit Edward sprite.  For you.  Think about that.  Someone spent actual minutes of their life, making an 8-bit representation of a sparkling glitter-vampire.  For you.  How can you not appreciate that?

Have you?

And finally, I appreciate this whole effort because it is a game that someone made, which required zero programming knowledge to make.  This part is incredible!  Someone made a web game, which you can play on your computer, and they didn’t need to know how to program to do it.  That’s awesome!  Talk about a democratizing force in game creation!  I for one, hope that we see a ton of games like this now, since it represents one less barrier between someone who has an idea they’d like to see made real, and realizing it.

So yeah.  I, for one, welcome our new sparkly glitter-vampire game overlords.  Go play the game, and then bask in the knowledge that if you so chose, you too could make a game using youtube as your engine.  It’s a bright future we live in, folks.  Bright and glittery.

Give it a glance!

One thing that I’ve noticed though, is that the game features an almost comical profanity filter.  To, you know, keep people’s delicate sensibilities intact in the in-game chat.  Happily it can be easily disabled or circumvented (standard tricks like putting spaces in the word work) but so far we’ve left it on, figuring that most people will leave it on by default, and we’d rather make sure we know when we’re being bleeped out.  Because you see, it is a bit… overzealous… in what it considers inappropriate.  Read on for our inappropriate findings!

It is very common to see phrases like “I @#$! as fast as I could!”  You might think this meant that you had an uncouth partner, but really, it is just because blizzard/activision is of the opinion that “came” is a naughty, naughty word.  And it doesn’t stop there!

For fun, Hal and I spent some time finding bad words.  All the old standbys seem to be covered.  (Standard grade-school swear-words like the f-word, and racial slurs such as n-bombs.)  But then it starts getting downright weird.  W discovered that the following words are also too delicate for users’ ears.  (Gentle reader, if you are easily offended, avert your eyes now, for the list that follows will shatter your innocence like glass!)

• backdoor
• dominate
• trans
• came
• suck
• crap
• blow
• dong
• negro
• white
• black
• Hitler
• Stalin
• terrorist
• Hamas

It is surprising how often a lot of these come up in regular conversation.  “Your base defense sucks”.  “I came as fast as I could.”  “We can just blow past their sentries on the way in”.  Suddenly they all become rather comically censored.  Backdoor comes up in standard gameplay.  (Many maps have a back door way into bases that you can open up, if you want to attack someone from a direction that they aren’t likely to have as well guarded.  Also, it censors parts of words.  So if you say something like “transform the vikings!”  (Vikings being jet-fighters that can transform into robots) it will come out “@#$!@# the vikings!”, which is a bit more ambiguous.

As for the rest, they’re kind of absurd.  The colors black and white?  Seriously?  Their potential abuse now outweighs the fact that by default, they are standard adjectives taught to first graders?  And names like Hitler and Stalin?  Really?  (Churchill and Roosevelt are curiously absent…  Profanity filters are written by history’s winners, I guess?)

In a way the result is kind of comical.  It’s the lesson of the Unnecessary Censorship videos.  When you start bleeping things out, it doesn’t matter what the original was.  We’ve been so trained to assume that whatever was bleeped must have been bad that we automatically fill in the blanks in our mind.  So with Activision/Blizzard bleeping out fairly common words, that come up in fairly common conversations relating to their game, suddenly everything is naughty.  And frequently hillarious.

I’d still rather have the ability to communicate unencumbered.  But if the consolation prize is hilarity, I guess I won’t turn it down!

All of that is interesting, fascinating and tremendously important for the future of the industry, etc.  As a programmer, the “is programming free/protected speech” issue is naturally somewhat important to me.  I would be saddened to see a law that made it illegal for budding programmers (who are minors) to make crappy remakes of Double Dragon and show them to their (also minor) friends.

But that’s not the part I want to talk about right now.  All of this got me curious enough to look at the law in question, and one part in particular seems really really odd to me.  I realize that reading through legal texts isn’t everyone’s idea of a good time, but bear with me for a moment, and check out this part:

It would include within the definition of harmful matter prohibit a person from knowingly distributing or exhibiting to a minor any video game that appeals to minors’ morbid interest in violence, that enables the player to virtually inflict serious injury upon human beings or characters with substantially human characteristics in a manner that is especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel, as defined, and that lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.

So far pretty much as expected.  Don’t give violent games to minors where the get to pretend to do horrible things to people or things that look like people.  But then it throws out this curve-ball:

The bill would exclude from this  prohibition any game in which the visual depiction of violence occurs as the result of simultaneous competition between 2 or more players, as specified.

So let me get this straight.  I’m no legal expert, but this seems to read that shooting dudes in the head in GTA = bad, while shooting dudes in the head when they are controlled by real people, like say, Modern Warfare II = A-Ok?  Is this really the message we want to be sending?  Virtual violence is only permissible when it is inflicted upon real people?

Also, it seems to cause some funny situations where things like Street Fighter become illegal to play (as a minor) against the computer, but are fine if you can lure a friend over to play vs. with.

How did this provision get put in, and what is it trying to accomplish?  I’m really kind of at a loss.  Maybe this is just a sign that Goombas have one heck of a good lobbyist on their side?

Sadly, for various (amicable) reasons, they weren’t able to keep Shih-Tzu’s excellent translation, but from everything I’ve seen and heard, the replacement is still quite good.

And if you’re reading this and you still don’t know what Cave Story is, then it is possible you have wasted your life, and there is nothing that I can say that will make things better.

Your first big risk/reward choice.

I’m trying to avoid having Touhou games take up too much space here.  I don’t want to turn into “another guy on the internet who won’t shut up about ZUN’s Shmups.”  But deconstructing them lately has been fairly fascinating stuff, and I wanted to take a moment to talk a bit about what seems like a high point in the series – Touhou 8: Imperishable Night.  It has a lot of neat things going for it, but I’m going to focus on one particular aspect of its design:  Layered risk/reward mechanisms.

Imperishable night has a surprising number of places where you have to make choices while playing – tradeoffs between risk and reward.  They tend to have varying game effects, ranging from higher scores to harder patterns.  The most basic is at the beginning, when you pick a character.  One character is far more survivable.  Another has better score potential.  Others have different tradeoffs.  After the game starts though, it gets a lot more interesting.

Scoring

Hideously unsafe, but look at those points!

And naturally, the top of the screen is generally a lot more hazardous, since enemies tend to approach and attack from the top.  So choosing to go for more points almost always puts you in harm’s way.

Just to sweeten the pot further though, there is also something called the “Point of Collection”, usually abreviated POC.  It is a sort of autocollect zone.  If the player moves high enough up on the screen, they reach a point (usually around 75-80% of the way up) where all items on the screen suddenly home in on them and are collected automatically.  In addition to making it much easier to collect widely scattered items, any point items collected in this zone are worth their maximum value.  So not only are players encouraged to collect items higher up, but the POC means that even if they missed an item and let it fall, they can still get it at max value…  As long as they’re willing to make a foray into a highly dangerous area.

Grazing

Of course, sometimes it's hard to avoid grazing even if you want to...

It’s a pretty direct encouragement of  risky player behavior:  The game flat out rewards you for flirting with death.  Flying close to bullets without getting hit yields powerups called “time orbs” which directly contribute to score.  So this one is pretty blatant:  Want more points?  Live on the edge!  Even when not trying for a high score, it’s often worth engaging in this sort of behavior, since more points still mean more 1-ups.  (And collecting enough time orbs per level effectively gives you extra continues as well.)

Bombs

Final Spark: It's like Master Spark, but it costs two bombs. And it's more final.

And then there’s bombs.  That staple of SHMUPS, which I already spent too much time gushing over in an earlier post.

Bombs have some interesting properties in Imperishable Night.  On one hand, they still fill the same general function they do in most shmup games:  They hurt everything on the screen rather significantly, and make you invincible for a little while.  They are the ultimate “ack I don’t want to die” card.

They usually do around 40-60% of a boss’s lifebar in damage.  So while they don’t allow you to completely skip a boss form, they still let you skip most of it.  And since they usually clear all the bullets from the screen, they at least make bosses significantly easier.  Using a bomb on a boss does mean you won’t get the score bonus, but that’s usually secondary to survival.

The fun part though comes from what the game calls “Last Word” attacks.  When you get hit, you have a very short window of time where you can fire a bomb to save yourself.  It’s not very long, but it is [barely] possible to do on reaction in response to getting hit.  And if you trigger a bomb this way, it does about 50% extra damage, killing or gravely injuring most boss forms in one shot!  Except… it costs you two of your bomb stock instead of one.

So even if you’re not going for score and are just going for survival, you have an interesting choice here.  Bombs are almost like one-ups.  You can spend one to keep playing when you would otherwise die.  So imagine:  You have just reached a boss that you know is hard.  Do you use a bomb early, even though you’re not yet about to die, to guarantee it costs you exactly one bomb to make it through?  Or do you try to tough it out, trying to save your bomb for later, but knowing that if you do screw up and get hit, it will cost you two bombs?  Choices, choices…

Familiars

The moon princess, hiding behind a wall of familiars.

Finally, there is an interesting risk/reward mechanic inherent in the enemies themselves, in every single game level:  Powerful enemies will spawn “familiars”.  Familiars are basically little linked sub-enemies.  They frequently follow their master around, and often shoot at you, or are part of bullet patterns.  They can be destroyed individually, or you can just blow up their Master, and they will all explode as well.  Destroying familiars doesn’t directly kill the master, but he does take half the damage you inflict on his little friends, so it is still useful.

Familiars are often annoying.  Destroying them can significantly reduce the number of bullets being shot at you in a pattern.  But it also means that you have to endure the pattern for longer, because you’re blowing up the little buggers and not their boss.

Destroying familiars can sometimes remove a lot of bullets.

So already there’s an interesting choice to be made.  Destroy the guns, or go straight for the core?  The game makes it easy to act on this choice – when focused, (using your more powerful, narrow shot) you can’t shoot (or collide with!) familiars, so even if the boss is hiding behind them, you can aim straight at them.  If you’re unfocused, then you attack familiars as normal.

It gets better though.  If you blow up an enemy and cause their familiars to explode as a result, those familiars will clear bullets in a small area around themselves.  Since those familiars are often the source of those very bullets, in some cases this can be a tremendous help, if you think you can destroy the master quickly enough.

Conclusions

So I’ve listed here a bunch of interesting mechanisms whereby the player gets to choose how risky they feel like being.  All of these are interesting examples of risk vs. reward in a game.  But what makes them particularly interesting to me isn’t just that they are choices.  Most games have choices.  What makes these interesting is that they are all present and happening at the same time. They are all choices that the player can make at any time while they’re playing, and which overlap in some interesting ways.  But even more than this, they are choices that can be skipped, as well.  You can easily play the game without knowing how point scoring works, or about the exact mechanics of familiars.  This is frequently called depth in a game, and is generally the mark of a good one.

As Sid Meier once observed, games are a series of interesting choices.  I am beginning to think though, that good that a series of choices may be, choices in parallel are better.  No other Touhou game has had as many of these mechanics layered together as Imperishable Night.  (Most have some subset of the list above.)  And (in my humble estimation at least) no other Touhou game has better basic gameplay either.  I’m suspecting it is not entirely coincidence.

Ahh Touhou!

I had the chance recently to sit down with Tim and Hal of Final Form Games, and talk shop on shmups. I mentioned that there were at least a couple of good lessons that I felt I head learned from playing Touhou games, and Hal asked what some of those might be.  While I was able to glibly rattle off a nice truism or two, it got me thinking.  Just what had I gotten out of trying to deconstruct Touhou?  I felt like I’d received a lot of good info from playing it…  What things had worked well, and what things hadn’t?

So I started a small list, and was somewhat gratified when it quickly became a moderately large list.  Not knowing what else to do with it, I now post it here, since that’s the sort of thing I do with lists that I find interesting and want to share.

Warning, long post ahead!  (To keep it from getting [even more] unwieldy, I’m going to restrict this to “shmup-specific lessons”, since it’s lengthy enough as is.)

Here we go!

Errors in the players’ favor make the players feel cool

The actual hitbox is far smaller than the character sprite.

One thing that the developers at CAVE figured out early was what if they made the player’s ship’s hit-box much smaller than the ship itself, then in general, the player felt cooler.  The really hard-core players would still figure out exactly where their limits were, but the casual players would occasionally be faced with certain death, only to miraculously survive.  As it turns out, people like this feeling!  So having the game actively encourage this sort of situation is something of a win.

Errors in the computer’s favor make the player feel cheated

On the reverse side, if the player feels they should have survived/achieved/accomplished something, and instead the computer says “hah hah, turns out you didn’t”, then the player just generally feels angry.  If a game, for example, had a hit-box that were larger than the player sprite, this would not go over well.

You want the player to understand your patterns

Easy to tell the different sub-patterns apart.

This is a generalization, but is still true often enough to be worth keeping in mind.  If you make a challenge that the player doesn’t understand, and they fail, they just feel frustrated, because their failure is (in their mind) arbitrary.  They don’t understand why they failed, so they don’t understand how to not fail.  If they fail but understand the challenge, then they know what they need to do to succeed.  It might be hard.  It still might not be within their abilities.  But they’re more likely to try again, because they know what they’re aiming for.

In a shmup, this means making your attack patterns comprehensible.  People should be able to tell where things are going, and what their threats are.  If they die, it should be because they made a bad choice, not because they couldn’t figure out what was going on.  In general, anything you can do to make the patterns more understandable is a good thing.

The board should be understandable at a glance

So many identical bullets. This pattern is difficult to see at a glance!

Shmups often have parts that are very hectic.  These are often some of the most fun parts!  But because they are so hectic, the player seldom has much time to study the board.  They may even be relying on peripheral vision to keep track of large segments of it, while their eyes are glued to their ship, frantically dodging.  So anything you can do to make the board easier to read at a glance (while still keeping the frantic pace) is generally a good idea.

The best way to do this seems to be to vary the look of bullets that do different things.  If a bunch of things all fly the same way, from the same source, they should generally look the same.  It is still just as frantic, but now the user is better able to understand the board with less time to study it, and can spend more time on dodging frantically (the fun part) and less time on dying because something killed them that they didn’t notice as different.  (The less fun part.)

Color matters

These bullets are color-coded. The pattern is much easier to see!

If you take a group of particles that all move the same way, and color them similarly, then players will have an easier time following them.  This is important if you expect people to be able to track your patterns well enough to dodge them!  Especially since many shmups use a “layered pattern” technique, where there are several different patterns happening at the same time, overlapped.  Making each sub-pattern a different color makes them easier for the user to track, which also means that you can get away with harder (and generally prettier) patterns.

Shape matters

It's easy to tell where these are going.

Bullets are also a lot easier to deal with if you can tell their direction at a glance.  Circular, omnidirectional bullets are far harder to track than bullets that have a definite direction to them.  If the bullets actually change direction mid-flight this becomes vital, but even for straight bullets, (especially if they are in any kind of starburst pattern, radiating out from a central point) it can help tremendously.

Smallest on top!

This pattern would not be possible without z-sorting by size.

Do you have multiple sizes of bullets?  Do they ever overlap?  Then you should almost always make sure that you sort them properly.  If large bullets can obscure small bullets, there exists a very real chance that the player will try to dodge a large bullet, only to have some tiny bullet come shooting out of the center and kill them, because they couldn’t see it.  This frustrates players!  Players hate dying to that sort of thing.  So while varying bullet sizes is a great way to add variety to patterns, (and make bullets easily differentiable at a glance) make sure that the large bullets can’t actually hide information.  (If you have a situation where small bullets are dense enough to hide a large bullet, then the player already has other problems.)

Don’t go overboard with the shakes

Not fun to dodge with the screen shaking.

Having the screen shake is a great way to add extra “punch” to an effect.  Especially if something is blowing up, or hitting something else very hard, or otherwise a significant event that needs emphasis.  Do not go overboard!  Especially if your game requires precision!  A perfect example of both ends of this spectrum exist in Marissa, a character in Imperishable Night.  If you select to play as Marissa, you get a giant, screen-obscuring death laser as your bomb.  It makes a satisfying droning sound that increases in pitch, and shakes the screen around while you lay waste to everything in front of you.  Fun!  This is a good use of screen shaking!  It emphasizes that this is supposed to be one heck of a laser!

On the other hand, if you don’t play as her, there is a chance that you will have to fight her instead, as the stage 4 boss.  While generally a fun boss, she has one especially frustrating attack, in which she uses her giant laser on you. All well and good, except that the screen shaking is still intact.  And, as it turns out, trying to dodge a screen full of bullets, requiring careful placement and precision, with the screen shaking wildly for 4-5 seconds at a stretch is…  less fun.  Frustratingly so.

Good != Bad

Powerups vs. Bullets. Which is which?

Players should really be able to easily differentiate between game elements.  If the elements serve the same general purpose, then it’s less important.  (People don’t complain as much if they thought they were picking up a powerup, and instead collected a point-up item, for example.  Since they wanted it either way.)  If the elements are wildly different though, (like say, a powerup vs. a bullet) then you should make sure that there is no chance that the players confuse the two.  (People do tend to complain if they tried to pick up what they thought was a powerup, and it killed them.)

Ideally, powerups should be on their own unique group, with no bullets sharing their color.  What you don’t want is a situation where the three main colors of bullets in the zone (red, green, and blue) are also the colors that the three types of powerups come in.  And even if you run out of colors, you certainly wouldn’t want to have the bullets the same shape as the powerups in that case…

I’m looking at you, Subterranean Animism, stage 4!

Avoid (Good) Spam

Too many powerups!

So when playing a shmup, the biggest priority for the players is to not die.  You die by hitting bullets!  So even if there are so many bullets on the screen that they blot out most everything else, that’s generally ok, since anything the bullets might be blotting out is generally of lesser concern to the player than the bullets themselves.

The secondary priority of most shmup players is to collect the good stuff, as long as it’s not going to kill them to try to get it.  But since this is less important than not dying, it is a problem if the good things start outnumbering and obscuring the bad things.  I didn’t realize how important this one was until I played UFO.  (Touhou 12)  With even minor enemies releasing a hail of powerups when killed, they frequently obscure the things you care about most, the bullets that you’re trying to avoid colliding with, especially at later levels.  (The fact that they are similarly colored does not help matters either…)

That’s all folks!

So there you have it.  I tried not to let this list turn into “things that bug me about Touhou games”.  I think there are a lot of things they do well, actually.  (Pretty much the first two-thirds of the list, really.)  But like most things, they’re not perfect, and I think the places they fail are at least as instructive as the places they succeed.  But either way, food for thought!