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Good Games, Bad Design – Episode 2: Repeating Chaos

  • Reading time:3 mins read

by [redacted]

Sonic Team has always had trouble finishing its projects. The Sonic Heroes demo had a great premise and played well; then after E3 they just dumped in a bunch of content and called it done, without adequately bug-checking or thinking through the actual game progression. The first release of Phantasy Star Online was bare-bones, with a rushed cut-and-paste level structure, a fraction of the planned races and locations, and a tacked-on offline mode (albeit with a well-written story). Even the final, International edition of Sonic Adventure was weirdly abbreviated and riddled with bugs.

This tendency goes all the way back to the Genesis. The otherwise streamlined Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is famously crammed with unused material, some of which made its way into the third game. That right there hints at Sonic Team’s problems; they’re fine when they keep small and simple. ChuChu Rocket! is glorious, if confusing; Samba De Amigo is respectable enough. Although Sonic 2 is less diverse and quirky than the first game, it is more focused and polished — but given a hint of scale, they quickly lose perspective.

Rather than extrapolate a premise to its logical extremes, Sonic Team overloads a simple game with details and systems and drowns it in a deluge of random content, then calls it epic. Then, more often than not, they fail to complete the content in time, resulting in a half a game of padded level designs and incomplete ideas. Sometimes, as with Phantasy Star Online, they get a second or third chance to finish what they started, which basically means packs of content lumped on top of the existing unfinished structure — resulting in, well, an underdeveloped game straining under an inappropriate weight. Which is much better, apparently.

The problems first showed themselves in 1994, with the release of Sonic the Hedghog 3. The game was a slight departure from its predecessors: different music staff, different visual style, different level pacing and structure. The game was to be huge, with three characters and battery backup. Instead of blindly racing through the levels as in the previous game, players were encouraged to play over and over from multiple perspectives, to explore the game thoroughly.

Therein lay the problem: the plans were too huge to complete in the allotted time and memory constraints, and no one was willing to strip back and look at what was really necessary to make the point. The clever, if perhaps ill-advised, solution: break the game in two, and release the halves eight months apart.

The solution might have been brilliant, had their ideas stretched far enough to allow each half to be unique and vital. Unfortunately they barely had one game’s worth of ideas.

( Continue reading at Game Career Guide )

The Game-Maker Archive—Part 14: Laser Light

  • Reading time:3 mins read

by [redacted]

My association with Recreational Software Designs started early, maybe around the time of my first game. I don’t remember the circumstances. Maybe I wrote in with some suggestions. Maybe I was trying to show off my work. Whatever my motivation, I was fourteen and unhampered with caution or tact. I mailed a letter and maybe a 3.5” diskette, and then forgot about it. Weeks later, the phone rang. Against my normal habits, I picked up. The voice, which asked for me by name, sounded uncannily like one of my friends. Being fourteen and tactless, I told the voice that it was an idiot. The voice was confused. I unleashed more rudeness. The exchange continued until the voice identified itself as the president of RSD, a certain Oliver Stone. Tickled with the oddness of the situation, I laughed for a minute or more.

I’m not sure why he stayed on the phone, or indeed continued contact with me. Eventually we developed a rapport. He would mail me pre-release versions of new Game-Maker updates; I would scour them for bugs and inconsistencies. I would mail in my newest creations; he would introduce me to other Game-Maker users and show me their work. This went on for a few years.

For the 3.0 release of Game-Maker, RSD chose to transition from floppies to CD-ROM. In 1995, this was a big step. It was like having a book or an album published. Within a year AOL mailers and demo discs would render the CD common; in 1995, it was still a magical endless data well. So RSD now had a whole CD to fill, and to justify the leap they needed to fill it.

I was prolific, and able to hide my ineptitude behind polish and an intimate understanding of the game engine, so evidently I was just what RSD needed. They contracted me to design six games, and to sign over another two. My rudeness persisted; when asked to contribute, my first impulse was to toss them a couple of my least favorite games. It was only with later discussion that I twigged their desire for new, flashy, and instructive content. With that goal in mind, a certain inspiration struck me. I progressed at about a game a week. Some of the games served to demonstrate certain design concepts; others spun themselves out of a whim.

At reader request, here are those six games, in the rough order of development. I’ll hold off on the overt criticism, and instead try my best to explain what was going through my head. We’ll just see if a sensible train of thought develops.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Paul Greasley takes you Under the Garden

  • Reading time:1 mins read

The same game jam that brought us Whale of Noise and Pigeon Racing (and indeed Deltoid Onions) has inspired Edmund and My First Skydiving Academy creator Paul “Farmergnome” Greasley to contrive a side-scrolling survival-based take on Animal Crossing. At least, that was his stated goal. The end result is a highly original cross between Lost in Blue and Metroid. Sort of, not really.

You take the role of a middle-aged farmer whose house has collapsed. You collect your tools and you set out into the wilderness to gather much-needed supplies while your stamina drops from the cold. You chop and gather wood to burn and restore your stamina. You kill rabbits for meat. You chip at rocks to find, er, cookies and bullets. Never mind; you gather bits and pieces to help you rebuild your house, and to expand your range thereby to find more stuff, thereby to get hardier and further expand your range.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Deltoid Onions Will Puzzle You

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Deltoid Onions, AKA Onion Warriors, is one of those single-player cooperative puzzle games where you play as a character then switch roles then switch again to accomplish tasks. In this case the enigmatic Fabienne has unleashed on us a Kwirk-flavored push-and-pull action-puzzler. In place of a tomato, we’ve three onions with slightly different mustaches.

To move forward you push rocks, stand on switches, plug holes, and lower barriers. The goal is to get all three onions to the goal, signposted with an energetic camel. Overall I’m pretty impressed with the level design. The game is a little glitchy and bare-bones, but it’s got oodles of personality and it’s legitimately clever.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Tiptoe the Tiles in Meong

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Kyle “Neonlare” Riley has reforged the baffling Action 52 opus Meong into a NES-styled action-puzzler reminiscent of Adventures of Lolo. The story involves a blue-robed thief who goes tomb raiding in China. Avoid traps and occasional mind games to get to the next screen.

The game uses just the arrow keys and a single button, which is used to reset the level when you get stuck. Unlike its older cousins, Meong comes from the modern indie school — so don’t worry too much about dying. You fail, you just try again from the start of the screen. Sometimes the music restarts; usually not.

As it stands, Meong has a great tone and some pretty good level design. It’s worth an eyeball!

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

The Meganode

  • Reading time:2 mins read

by [redacted]

When I want to read Catch-22, what are the options? I can go to a library, and do it for free. While I’m there, I can browse the rest of his works or nearby, possibly similar, books. I can search by topic, author, or year of publication. If I want my own copy, I probably can find it at a nearby bookstore. Failing that, I can order it online for a pittance.

Thanks to Gutenberg, books are indexed and ageless. They may go out of print or become obscure, but one way or another you will always be able to find a copy. Then with a copy in hand, the only thing between you and their ideas is the work of digesting them.

How about if I want to watch Nosferatu — not the Werner Herzog one; the Murnau version? If I’m near an urban center, it may be showing at an indie theater or festival. If it’s October, I may track it down on a classic movie channel on cable. Or I can rent the DVD or VHS (or indeed borrow it from the library). If I go to a video store, there’s a good chance it’s in stock. Or, again, I can just hit up Amazon.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Jam Together—Thinking Inside the Box

  • Reading time:2 mins read

by [redacted]

A medium goes through its phases. Generally it starts off piecemeal, little snippets of ideas that stand alone, each studying the nature of the medium. What’s possible? How do things look? How do people respond? Later the ideas coalesce into short subjects, often delivered through a reservation in some passing medium. Periodicals set aside pages for short stories. Networks set aside airtime for TV episodes.

Later, as the public becomes accustomed to format and language of the medium and as its authors start to understand its implications and potential, the ideas will get more complex and demand more room to develop. That extra room in turn demands new methods and understanding of the changed space and its implications for communicating. Thus we have long-form subjects — your novel and your Sistine Chapel and feature film and television serial.

Although videogames have been around for a few decades, they have spent about half of their active life spinning their wheels. Part of the problem, I think, is in the eagerness about twenty years ago to move on to long-form subjects before anyone really mastered the short form. If we’re to look to any model for a healthy development of what we now know about game design, that model might be the golden era of television.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

The Game-Maker Archive—Part 13: The World Wide Haystack

  • Reading time:2 mins read

by [name redacted]

Over time Recreational Software Designs’ Game-Maker may have become obscure, but in its time it was both progressive and widespread. From a small family business in New Hampshire, the software traveled to Russia, to South America, to Singapore, to Australia. It sometimes seemed that every other game was from a new country. This was before the Web, when consumer software spread through magazine advertisements and shareware spread through bulletin boards, so people had to spend some real effort to seek out the software and trade its games.

Then attention shifted to the Web, and those BBS archives started to gather dust. It’s kind of like moving to a new computer; you transfer the most relevant files, then leave everything else sitting around on your old hard drive. Maybe, months or years down the line, you will remember an old file or application and dig it up again. Mostly, you forget. Somehow, despite its pervasiveness in the BBS scene, Game-Maker never quite made that transition.

And yet because of that pervasiveness, you can find echoes of Game-Maker everywhere if you know how and where to look. The Web contains huge unfiltered archives of content gathered from bulletin boards, dumped either directly from those boards or from late-’90s software bundle CDs. Abandonware and DOS software archives, in languages from Russian to Esperanto, are dotted with Game-Maker games. You just need the right search keys.

Obviously it helps to know a game or publisher name. Failing that, you can recognize the Game-Maker file structure at a glance. Every game consists of an unusually large collection of raw data files — some combination of .PAL, .BBL, .CBL, .MBL, .CHR, .MON, .MAP, .SND, .GAM, .VOC, .CMF, .GIF, and .TXT files, with a handful of others. Furthermore, nearly every Game-Maker game contains a few common files: SNDBLAST.DRV, CONFIG.DAT, CONFIG.BAT, CONFIG.HLP, GMHELP.TXT. A few other files pop up frequently enough: GMTITLE.GIF, GMTITLE.CMF, GMSONG1.CMF.

Not every game you find will be a winner, but if you keep poking around you will find a few weird gems. Like, for instance…

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

The Game-Maker Archive—Part 12: Cut-and-Paste Opportunism

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [redacted]

For its time, Recreational Software Designs’ Game-Maker offered users the world over to put practice to their game design ambitions, within certain strict limitations. Mostly this ambition took on an informal shape. Users connected with each other through bulletin boards and shared ideas and resources. They explored how to subvert the engine’s limitations, and how to adapt their own wild ideas to practical realities. A few users, like Mark A. Janelle, took the business implications of shareware very seriously, while still contributing to the overall Game-Maker culture. Other users kind of took the engine and ran.

Instead of seeing Game-Maker an opportunity to explore game design and to make social connections without any of the usual hurdles, they saw it as an opportunity to turn around a quick profit with a minimum of investment. Although I admire a certain ambition, I’m not sure if Game-Maker was really the best tool for the job.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Nitrome makes you Worm Food

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Not to be mistaken for Unnatural Selection, Fault Line creator Nitrome has unleashed its own subversive worm-based browser game. This one, though, takes more of an arcade route and seems to follow the example of Taito’s Syvalion. Mechanically, it seems to; thematically, it’s… you know those old 8-bit games based on horror movies that got flak because you played as Leatherface or Freddy Krueger? Imagine a game like that, based on Tremors.

In Worm Food you play as a ravenous sand worm. Left and right turn; up speeds up; down speeds down. You can burrow through dirt and swim through water. Doing either speeds you up. You can also use your momentum to burst through and leap into the air. The goal is to gobble up as many villagers as possible within the alloted time, and maybe smash as much as you can along the way. As you progress the game introduces new twists, including spike traps, bottomless pits, and impassible stone walls.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Theta Games paints the world Orange

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Orange, from Ceramic Shooter: Electronic Poem and Composition Piece developer Theta Games, is kind of like Ed Logg’s Asteroids, if instead of clearing away hunks of space rock you were being set upon by the Blob. That said, it controls more like Robotron — or indeed Echoes. The game also supports mouse aiming, which is probably the way to go.

The storyline sets you, essentially, in the Vietnam War. The amorphous mass that threatens to smother the player’s ship is supposed to be analogous to the jungle, and the player’s shots analogous to agent orange. The game is set to a tranquil soundtrack, though at times becomes tense as the screen chokes up with obstacles.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Kloonigames Cuts It Out

  • Reading time:1 mins read

You probably know Kloonigames from Crayon Physics. So hey, here’s a pseudo-sequel called Cut It. As with the original Crayon Physics, and indeed most of Petri Purho’s games, Cut It is brief, simple, a bit tenuous-feeling. It’s more a rough idea of a game than a complete and polished project. Then again, that’s the idea behind Kloonigames.

At least once a month, Purho makes a new game. Every game takes seven days to make. He’s been doing this for a while now, and has built up a large and varied back catalog. The point isn’t polish; it’s to throw new ideas at the wall and see what patterns they make. Sometimes, as with Crayon Physics or Sticky Notes Shooter, they’re remarkably inventive. Other times, as with The Truth About Game Development or Grammar Nazi, it’s more chin-stroke fare.

Rough as it may be, Cut It fits in the first category.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Fishbane Puzzles Absolutely

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Probability 0 designer Alexander “Droqen” Martin has developed a new puzzle platformer for Newgrounds. Fishbane is a little like Miles Drummond’s Jigsaw, except weirder, tougher, and stricter.

You play as… I guess a diver guy, throwing harpoons at walls and collecting incidental goldfish. At the end of every level is a golden harpoon; snag it to move on. The main mechanic involves the harpoon; lodged in a wall, you can use it to clamber up and over surfaces. If you run and jump on the harpoon in mid-air, you can ride it like a broom. The levels will introduce gizmos and complications, but these are the basics.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Primrose DSi now available

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Jason Rohrer, of all unlikely yet worthy candidates, has been making a few recent motions to the mainstream, with a DSiWare anthology of his early art-narrative games and a hugely successful pay-what-you-want sale for Sleep is Death.

A couple of months ago the Latin America-based Sabarasa Inc. announced, alongside the aforementioned anthology, a DSiWare port of Rohrer’s iPhone puzzle game, Primrose. That port has now materialized.

The game is a bit like a single-player Go or Othello, in that it involves surrounding tiles with tiles of an alternative color. The developer describes Primrose as a relaxing, free-form experience.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Phantom Fingers: The Series – Part Four: Gobble Gobble

  • Reading time:2 mins read

by [redacted]

To bring you up to speed, in 1976 Breakout came along to refocus Pong as a single-player experience, to redefine the videogame in terms of the player’s relationship with the gameworld, and to inject a remedial sense of narrative.

This had profound effects technologically, in terms of design theory, and in terms of the narrative application of videogames. Three threads would arise: the home PC, and two distinct schools of design; one focused more on the the pure theory, and one more on the storytelling potential of the form.

Two years later, Space Invaders reinvented Breakout as a tense battle between the lonely individual and inevitable doom from above. Suddenly players could reach out and touch the targets, and it mattered if they did. Add in a high score table, and a cultural phenomenon was born. Arcades were established just to fill with this one game. The videogame had become a summer blockbuster, its audience’s emotions and impulses carefully orchestrated for word-of-mouth and return visits.

Yet all was not well. Just as Pong had enjoyed several years as the generic videogame, overnight Space Invaders became the only game in town. Every game on the market, from Galaxian to Radar Scope, was an Invaders clone. And yet its appeal was not universal. Somehow, as the young Toru Iwatani observed, those dingy, smoke-filled arcades were filled entirely with socially-inept males. Furthermore, the game’s bleak tone and the mental state it aroused through constant repetition was a bit worrisome.

Clearly there was something wrong with this picture, and Iwatani set to figuring it out.

( Continue reading at Game Set Watch )