Presenting: Hex Tile Blending!

This was a presentation that I gave to the Drexel Game Developers. It's a little light on details, since I spent more time discussing than just showing it, but you should be able to get the jist of it.

GameJam 2009!

Wow, I can't believe it's been over a month since I last posted. So much for my "every two weeks" update schedule. It seems that once I start working full-time, my attention to the blog drops off. I'm hoping to change that, but we'll see how that goes.

Either way, here's some news! The weekend before Halloween, I participated in the 2009 Philly GameJam. It was a competition where my team and I had 48 hours to create a game completely from scratch. We were up against some pretty solid competition, including a team that was sent from Kaos Studios! Needless to say, there was little sleep to be had (I got a total of 3.5 hours over the entire competition), but we were very proud of our submission. In the end, we ended up taking 2nd place in the two available categories, earning the most total points overall. While it wasn't great having to walk home essentially empty-handed (there were no prizes for 2nd place), we were very proud to have competed, and pleased with what our sleep deprived minds were able to create.

Here is a link to the game we submitted. This version is actually slightly modified post-gamejam to clear up a few bugs. Also, beware, for there is sound, and you cannot turn it off (sorry). Also, it requires significant CPU resources, so if you're on low-end hardware, it might chug for you.

Dr. Spock's Guide to Caring for Minions

Anyone who has been a leader in any capacity knows that success hinges heavily on the team that you have. Even an ineffectual manager can generate halfway decent results if their subordinates are rockstars. What does this have to do with video games? Plenty, and not in the way you'd think.

A while ago, I was at a talk given by Corvus Elrod, on storytelling and immersion in games. I asked him how a genre like strategy games could create a story without explicitly hand-holding the player through cutscenes and succeed-or-retry missions. I forget what his exact words were, but the overall message was "make the player care about their units". I thought that it kind of made sense, but sent it to the back of my mind until just a while ago.

I've recently been addicted to Blood Bowl, the PC version of a tabletop miniatures game made by Games Workshop in the 80s. It's the definition of a strategy game. You have two teams, each team takes their turn, the other team takes their turn, everyone's happy. Your team is made up of 11-16 players, which is relatively small for strategy games, but anymore would make the game take forever and feel clunky. At first, I really didn't care about my players at all. They were nothing but short, clumsy, relatively indestructible pawns thatI shuffled towards my opponents' endzones. However, as they leveled up and got more skills, I realized that they were less disposable than I had originally considered. When one of them went down with an injury, I had a momentary panic that they would die, and I'd never be able to use them again. In fact, there was a very sad moment when I had to let a player go because he had suffered a smashed collarbone, making him barely useful as a blocker. At that point, I realized what Corvus had meant. I had formed a story in my head about these characters, who had their own triumphs and failures, without ever needing to see a generated cutscene. One was the dedicated passer, who picked the ball and lobbed it to the runner, who'd already be halfway to scoring. Some blockers were better at tailing opponent's players who were trying to get into our half of the pitch, and others were as immovable as boulders, refusing to break the line even when they were seeing stars.

In his review of Overlord 2, Yahtzee mentions a mechanic where you can bring certain minions back from the dead, for a price in other, less-experienced minions. He felt that it was a stupid mechanic, designed for players who get overattached to specific minions, which I agreed with at the time. Why bother wasting resources on identical units, when for almost-free, you can just bring up a new one? So I picked up a copy of the game myself to check it out. I realized then that the minions actually leveled up and became more effective in combat than fresh ones. At that point, I realized that the mechanic was there not as an emotional crutch for people that get too attached to artificial constructs, but so that you could, in theory, bring back your best fighters. Satisfied in this knowledge, I paid for the two best of my fallon peons, and went on my way. In the next mission, however, I noticed that I was being much more careful with my minions. Before, I'd send my horde careening at a force much larger than them, content in the awareness that I could raise another batch when they died. However, once I was aware that some of them were veterans, and losing that type of combat effectiveness would be costly (either in time or resources), I was using a much more strategic approach, sending in smaller parties to agitate and bait enemies into a trap. I realized again that I was conscious to how my minions were being treated. They were no longer (or at least less) disposable, and I took steps to avoid their untimely demise. I'm not sure if this is what the Overlord 2 design team was hoping for, but it certainly worked in my case.

This is something that I feel is prominently lacking from the arena of strategy games. I don't necessarily want players to bawl their eyes out when their basic infantry unit gets taken out (like in this CAD comic), but it deepens the experience when they care enough to not sacrifice units in a kamikaze run for slight tactical advantage. In my mind, it actually makes the game more realistic. Most generals (managers, etc), can't get more battle-ready units in seconds, with the expenditure of a trivial amount of resources. The suicide run is a last-ditch effort, reserved only for the direst of straits.

While there is risk inherent in any endeavour, a good leader does their best to minimize costs, and maximize reward. In most resource-based strategy games, the goal is to farm up a larger horde of resources than your oponent, build one giant strike force, and then steamroll the enemy. Any units lost in the fray are just lost firepower. If you've done your calculations correctly, you'll only lose so many that you can still eliminate the enemy base. Games like that become less about strategy, and more about who knows the optimum build tree and can click 8000 times per second. After seeing both Blood Bowl and Overlord 2 in action, I remain hopeful that this is a trend that is being reversed.

5 Suggestions to Make Mobile Games Not Suck

I wanted to call this list the "5 Laws to Make Mobile Games Not Suck", but I realized that calling them laws would make me seem like some sort of "Game-Dictator" in my own little "Game-Country" telling all the other "Game-Countries" that they had to bend to my will. And if I am one thing, it is not a game-fascist. Also, my game-country is like the size of Sealand, so it's unlikely that anyone would listen anyway.

Anyway, this list is a compilation of observations about mobile games, and what needs to be done to make them suck less. Mobile games are not the kings of the market at the moment, partially because they have been traditionally treated as normal video games, just smaller and on less powerful hardware. They also still carry the stigma of being "kids toys", due to their generally lesser difficulty curve. However, with the iPhone, DSi, and Android phones gaining popularity, they are certainly becoming more and more popular. Therefore, with

1. You should be able to pause at any time. Also, whenever you're paused, you can save. This has been a pet peeve of mine ever since elementary school, playing Pokemon on my Game Boy Pocket, getting pissed off that I had to restart a battle just because someone was forcing me to go to a funeral or something. Being able to play games in a mobile setting means that people are going to play them whenever they can. The corollary to being able to play wherever you are is that you might not know when you need to take a quick break to board a plane, deal with a teller, or smack your kids around a little. Should this gamus interruptus invalidate the progress you made, even in the short time you may have had? No, it shouldn't.
2. Make the sections short. This is especially true if you don't follow suggestion #1, but generous even if you do so. It's one of the reasons that tower defense games do so well nowadays. The enemies come in a big, short wave. You kill them all dead. Good job, you stock up on weapons (and save!), and then get ready for the next wave. The gameplay comes at you in short, digestible pieces, so that you can decide whether you just have time for just a can or the whole six pack. One way to kick the childish/loser stigma of mobile games (besides making jokes about higher-class liquor) is to not require gamers to play these games at home. Yeah, if you're playing cell phone games when you're sitting at home while there are perfectly good consoles, PCs, or (heaven forbid) sports equipment available, you probably are a bit of a loser (or just stuck on that damn final boss). Mobile games are thusly named because that's when you should be playing them. When you're mobile.
3. Realize that human fingers are not mice, they do not have pixel-perfect precision, and most of the time, the cell phone keypad (or board) is generally difficult to use, hidden (by a slider or flip), or even nonexistent. Even the DS's famed touch screen can be troublesome sometimes. The action that needs to come from this realization is that mobile games have different requirements from other games. You cannot just assume that they are going to work just as well on the mobile platform as they will on another. Developers need to take advantage of the hardware. The best example I've seen of this so far is am Android game called Abduction, where you're a cow bouncing up to an alien spaceship trying to save your cow friends. The thing that makes this game great is that your left and right movements are controlled by the accelerometer. Tilt the phone left, you go left, and vice versa. This isn't a novel concept in the accelerometer-enhanced arena of cell phone games, but is one salient example of where it is not overkill or gimmicky, but just feels like it was the only way to truly control the game.
4. Give us high-contrast art. Yes, it plays into the "cartoony" look, but you know what, you're playing a game on a screen 6 inches square, so telling between different shades of grey is going to be nearly impossible. My heart truly goes out to anyone who decides to buy the iPhone port of RE4, because you are going to die so frequently because you won't be able to tell what you're shooting at in the sea of browns, tans, and blacks (and eventually reds when that crazy chainsaw dude cuts your head off). When you're already getting eye strain from having to hold your phone inches from your face, it doesn't help if you have to squint to figure out where the freaking exit to the dungeon is. It is in fact possible to make colorful games that do not look like their art director used to make Spongebob Squarepants. The original Final Fantasy Tactics DS (one of my favorite games of all time) is one of the most colorful ones I'd ever seen for the platform, and didn't come of as childish at all (except for when the damn moogles kept saying "kupo!").
5. Stop making crappy ports of old games. This goes for all platforms, but it's particularly bad on the mobile scene. Unless your poker, connect 4, or chess game is going to literally rock faces off, then just leave it as you practice project, don't clutter the stores with another $1 knock-off. Seriously, this point cannot be belabored further. Just stop doing it. I don't even know how these devs are able to get funding to make the same game over and over again, but it needs to stop.

There's a lot of potential in the mobile platform. No one expected the casual game market to ever be worth working in, and now it's practically the main driver for the next generation of games and consoles. US culture in particular has been moving towards total mobility at a quick rate. Those people are the ones who are going to want to be entertained. Would you rather give them something they'll like, or not?

On LEGO Battles and Intellectual Properties

I was able to pick up a copy of LEGO Battles cheaply, thanks to a personal connection and jumped at the chance to get a relatively new game (as a poor college student, I'm usually relegated to waiting months after release before I have the spare cash to get new titles). The LEGO game seriess have been fairly well received, both in terms of ratings and with players (my little step-brothers are always telling me about who they've unlocked in LEGO Star Wars), but I haven't played one since the original LEGO Racers. I've also been a huge fan of LEGO, so the chance to combine it with videogames seemed like a match made in heaven.

Don't get me wrong, I like LEGO Battles. It's a fairly solid, if simple RTS game. You have objectives, and can build bases, go out and smite thine enemies, et cetera. It's been dumbed down a bit, partially to cater to the younger players, and also to compensate for the fact that a more complex RTS needs a much larger screen, as well as a more complex control scheme. It's definitely not pushing any boundaries, but there's nothing wrong with that whatsoever.

My problem with it, however, is that there is no reason for it to be LEGO branded. The characters that were represented could have easily just been knights and pirates and whatever from a different art style, with the exact same story, without losing anything. In fact, the pixelization of lego blocks sometimes looked worse than an art style focused on pixelization, and was very noticeable at some points. There wasn't even the personalization aspect in the LEGO racers game I played, wherein you could design your own car. It's a LEGO branded game, with none of the things that actually make LEGO fun. After a while, I started to feel like I was just playing an extended commercial for the LEGO pirate, space, and castle sets, rather than playing a game that was supposed to be based off of those source materials. Even a cursory mechanic wherein you have to build your units out of larger pieces would have been interesting.

To be fair, though, I wouldn't have bought this game if not for the LEGO branding (and my discount). It's actually the only RTS I've heard of for the DS, which is surprising given the DS's potential for strategy gaming. It is unfortunate that for the game to even be recognized, it had to have an existing IP shoehorned into it, without much consideration of what makes the IP popular. However, when playing through it, I feel a sense of dissonance because I'm expecting RTS fun combined with LEGO fun and only getting one. This happens less frequently nowadays, especially since the "bad old days" where almost every movie had a boilerplate 2d platformer to go along with it are gone, but it is still unfortunate when it happens.

What I'd like to see, going forward, is that when a game is based around a specific IP, that the developers take the characteristics of that IP into account when making their game. I mean, honestly, a LEGO game with no more building than Starcraft? It's akin to making a Transformers game where the main characters are all humans, and not giant robots.

This is actually a problem I've been running into with creating a "campaign" for Hexcape, to be used in a box set. I designed the rules to be IP-independent, so my current attempts to make an IP around these rules that make sense seems forced. Striking a balance between total IP independance, which can give a ruleset a breadth of applications and IP dependence, wherein the rules are so engrained into the IP that there isn't any potential for independent expansion, is a difficult task indeed. Like just about everything else in this process, however, it has been a great learning experience indeed.

Map Template!

Hey Everyone!

Not a lot of news (that I can release), but here's a freebie! I recently updated the templates that I use for making maps. These templates are now going to be used for all official Hexcape maps, and you're more than welcome to use them for un-official ones as well! Here are the links to the files, though they're fairly large, so be patient. Enjoy!

http://kavwoosh.s3.amazonaws.com/maptemplate8halfby11.png

http://kavwoosh.s3.amazonaws.com/maptemplate11by17.png

May 18th Photos

I know that these have been a long time, but I've been very busy with the wrapping up of this term, not to mention looking for my next co-op position, and applying for my BS/MS program. These are the photos from the Hexcape day on May 18th, which coincidentally was my birthday! A good time (and cake) was had by all!

Also, in nice news, Hexcape (the game) is the first 3 results when you search "Hexcape" on Google. Hooray!