It’s been a while over here – not that I wouldn’t have stuff to post, but been busy otherwise. Family’s expanding and all that :-)

So I got to borrow a PS3 from a friend and with it got Heavy Rain (my primary inspiration for  borrowing the console) and Uncharted 2. Heavy Rain was something that made me heavily consider purchasing PS3, but the fact that multiple game platforms increase the amount of good games available which increases the amount of unfinished games in the shelf.

So in the end, I decided I wouldn’t buy the console since there’s enough for me in the XBox360 and I would just miss out on Heavy Rain if needed. Luckily, thanks to my friend, I didn’t need to.

I did play through Quantic Dreams last interactive storytelling bit, Fahrenheit (or Indigo Prophecy) and apart from a pretty memorable beginning, I though overall the game absolutely sucked. It also strenghtened my belief in that games and stories are a paradox, which I wrote in my older blog.

While nothing much had really happened in games regarding stories after I wrote that, I was getting slightly curious what Heavy Rain would do to set a new course for stories in games. Overall, I think Quantic Dreams corrected some of the mistakes of Fahrenheit and made playing it a more enjoyable experience (and also something you could actually follow during the Quicktime Events), I don’t think it really brings that much to the table in regards to storytelling.

That said, let’s go into the review (with spoilers abound):

The Good

Where QD does right is the premise of the game. Whereas Fahrenheit started out great, but sunk into the depths of a B-class film, Heavy Rain takes a pretty basic concept and sticks to it the whole way. This is what great films do too. Your kid’s been kidnapped, whodunit, investigations, ending climax, roll credits.

Also, playing the game through for the first time is overall a nice experience. It opens up the world of possibilities to you (which sadly start to break down a bit if you replay through any chapters and see that your actions don’t necessarily matter that much except in a few specific bits). It’s a very cleverly constructed façade and probably is the main culprit why the game is so heavily louded. During the first playthrough, player is actually fooled into believing that even the smallest things he does are important.

Controls

The unique control system also works fairly well and actually allows for some very delicate and surprising screw-ups. When P.I Scott Shelby is slowly sneaking towards a stick’em-up guy robbing the store, a chance during the walk allows you to grab a nearby bottle so you can smack it in the robber’s head. Of course, the window for grabbing the bottle passing next to you as you walk is rather short. So what happened for me is that I did grab the bottle, but didn’t grab it promptly enough and I fumbled, crashing the bottle to the ground and changing the course of the scene. This was great, surprising and I was in total connection with how the controller interpreted what I was going to do and how I failed in a successful fashion. It was almost as if I could feel the bottle slipping from my hand, but all I was doing is pressing down on a joypad.

There’s been some talk that people who have kids experience Heavy Rain with a bit more depth since it involves a kid being kidnapped. Whereas my kid is still on the way, I can attest that certain scenes in the game are evoking in that sense. Ethan talking to Shaun in the playground and getting a bit more relationship going than earlier, the frantic search in the mall during the prologue etc.

The Bad

Lack of Storytelling

Still, there are plenty of scenes that could really evoke a nice feeling, but the pacing is drastically off due to either player interaction or just a poor construction of a scene. When the P.I, Scott Shelby saves a suicidal mother and takes care of her baby, any film would have delicately paced the whole scene around the mother that was just saved from a tragic circumstances. Instead, the scene spends about 10 minutes taking care of the baby (feeding, changing diapers, putting it to sleep etc) and makes it all feel very B-gradish.

When Ethan saves Shaun from the storm drain and carries him towards the exit, a collision bug left me walking around for 5 minutes looking for an “exit” out of the area. An area I had just previously walked through into the other direction. The feeling of reunification and closure for the story was abruptly cut and the following tragical turn of events didn’t feel as punchy.

There are many additional bits in the game which sound like what I described above and what they all have common is the age old paradox of games and storytelling. Stories require carefully constructed structures with millisecond strict timings and pacing to deliver the full emotion of played out scenes. Any interference in that structure will greatly diminish the impact of the scene. It’s like a film editor who makes all scenes last 1 minute longer than the director wanted.

Play it like you feel it

Another gripe I have to mention is something that the game actually encourages YOU to do, but fails to follow it’s own advice is the fact that you can control how fast or slow you do any particular movement. If you open a door, for example, you can move the joypad controller reeaaally slow to open it carefully. The starting tutorial of the game really emphasises this so that you could really get a connection into whatever action you are doing.

But what the game does after this completely breaks the pacing and feeling you were trying to draw from the experience. After you open the door slowly, the interactive part ends and a character animation starts playing. Guess if the character animation takes into account the speed in which you did the action or not? Nope. So when Ethan with trembling hands slowly opens the cardboard box which has in it the fate of his son, it’s all business as usual once he’s opened it enough to start the non-interactive animation. The sense of dread just evaporates within a second as he steadfastly and with great speed opens the box. This is something that can be replicated in nearly every action of the game, which is just unforgivable seeing how in the first few minutes of the game, the game pleads you to follow this course of play.

The Verdict

Even though Heavy Rain was an interesting experience and it’s overall story was a very adult-like and solid, it still suffers heavily because of the paradox. Heavy Rain would make an absolutely great movie. Even a great book. It has so many nice moments that just ooze of theme and environment, but what just breaks it all apart is the player interaction.

Now you might go “What the fuck, games are about player interaction and I still enjoyed what Heavy Rain told me”. That’s right, I enjoyed it too. But in terms of what the game was mainly trying to, I think it ultimately failed. What my main gripe about games and storytelling is that I personally feel that people take a lackluster approach into their appreciation of a story. They give games a free pass in telling any shitty story as long as the great action (where games always shine at) is there.

If we want to talk straight about stories in games, then I feel we should hold the stories accountable to the same criteria as we do with films and books. Anything else is a fraud. Heavy Rain (with it’s most tragic ending) would be something that would have people crying over or be highly emotional if it were a book or a movie. It wouldn’t be a surprising event since both of those would have been honed down to the millisecond to deliver the maximum emotional response from a typical moviegoer or a book reader. The amount of people crying over Heavy Rain’s tragic ending of Ethan getting shot and Shaun living without a father is probably a two digit number, on the low scale.

As a game, I probably will remember Heavy Rain even after a few months, but as an evocative story, I probably won’t remember it after a few weeks.

This is not really a review, but more of a remembrance.

I think any proper gamer has certain classics in mind in terms of what games have stuck with them from childhood. Something that really defined a particular period of childhood and influenced drawings, writings and so on. For some, it’s the Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Bros, Donkey Kong, Ice Climber (the favorite NES game of a certain old Finnish president) or Halo. Then there’s the guys who spent countless days and nights with roleplaying games or old, incomprehensible Avalon Hill strategy boardgames. For me, it was something different…

Space Hulk and it’s little brother Space Crusade were one of those memorable games. And just recently, I found out Games Workshop is coming out with a 20th anniversary edition. This opened the floodgates for a lot of memories, back when I used to play Warhammer Fantasy Battle, 40k or Space Marine.

A lot can be said about Games Workshop and the way it operates, both good and bad things. One thing at least for me, is certain. Space Hulk’s 1st edition rules were one of the finest bits of game balancing and gameplay ever devised to a boardgame. It was an obvious ripoff of the groovy science fiction film Aliens, but it doesn’t matter since it so fiendishly captured the struggle between heavily armored and armed squad of Space Marines and the quick and mean Genestealer aliens.

The term “Space Hulk”, from which the game gets its name, is used within the Warhammer 40,000 universe for any masses of ancient, derelict starships, asteroids, and other assorted space junk drifting in and out of the Warp that eventually merges into one massive form, ranging from the size of a small moon to a large planet, which drift through the territory of the Imperium. Because a hulk may contain bits of lost information or technology, or hostile life forms that pose a threat to mankind, the Imperium often sends teams to search for and secure these entities. The hulk may not stay in real space for very long, eventually slipping back into the Warp, so retrieval operations must be rapid and efficient. – Wikipedia

The Game

Space Hulk is divided into a campaign of different missions, all taking place within the space hulk. It is played between two players, one taking the role of marines and the other the role of genestealers. The marines make an entry and try to reach their objectives, always under an imminent threat of genestealer attacks. At first, the genestealers are only shown as blips on a radar and the genestealer player is the only one knowing what the blip is about.

To put it simply, if the genestealers reach the marines and engage in hand-to-claw combat, it’s bye bye space marine. If on the other hand the genestealer runs through a corridor with a space marine locked and loaded at the other end, the genestealer will easily turn into mincemeat in the hail of bullets. It’s a delicate balance for both sides.

The most powerful ability of the space marines is usually also part of their downfall. They can set marines on Overwatch, which makes them stay put for the most time, but they can react to genestealer movements. It’s a good way to secure a spot and make sure whatever crosses your path, dies. But the time you spend on overwatch is time away from moving towards your objective or imminent escape and all this time the Genestealers keep coming and coming through all manner of air ducts and vents. So you have to stay moving, but you can’t get too close to the genestealers.

Of course, for the genestealer player, he’ll have to know when to push and when to pull back. The rules for the game are pretty simple, involving a few dice, skill checks and use of action points to determine what each individual member of the squad or genestealer can do. Of course, the space marines must also make all their moves within the timespan given by an 3-minute hourglass.

Overall

I’ve heard that Games Workshop is doing the anniversary release because they want to renew the trademark and that they aren’t actually making a huge profit per sold game. Whatever the reason, I think it’s one of the best decisions the company has made. Games Workshop actually has a pretty nice catalogue of good boardgames if you forget Fantasy Battle and 40k for a while, but the company focus has for a long time been divided between FB and 40k. So thus for me, Games Workshop isn’t really a game company in the typical sense.

Still, I’m more than eager to dole up the 78 euros for the anniversary edition of Space Hulk, which will only get one big print run (and that’s it). It’s a great game, the components and figures of the boxed set are clearly a huge labour of love and I’m glad the designers at Games Workshop have done it. It’ll also give me a good reason to restart my old hobby of figurine painting, which I used to do almost 20 years ago.

Invisible Elegancy

Race for the Galaxy is another card game of recent times that has really struck a chord. Already sporting two expansions, it has been playtested and experimented on to death and even the expansions were ready before RftG was even published. It is a game of subtle elegance, which looks like a solitaire game with multiple people for the new players, but once it opens up the subtle and often important interactive elements pop up.

I didn’t like it at first, but it has grown on me, just like any other good boardgame.

The Basics

The game is won by the player with the highest victory point total. The game ends either when the victory point pool is exhausted or one player manages to play 12 cards on his table.

The game is played with a single deck (about 150 cards with the game and two expansions) and each player has a hand of action cards which are the same for all. In the beginning, players simultaneously and secretly select one of the five available phase cards; Explore, Develop, Settle, Consume, or Produce. In the main part of the round, all players may perform a specific activity related to the phases that at least one player has chosen, in the order above (Explore, then Develop, then Settle, etc.). This is all pretty similar to Puerto Rico, for example.

At every phase, every player can do whatever is allowed during that phase. In “Settle” players can play and colonize planets, whereas “Explore” allows them to draw new cards. The players who played specific action cards get an extra advantage to those phases. So the player who decided to explore, draws and keeps more cards during the “Explore” phase whereas other players are more limited in their card draws.

Each player has two values, the playing cost and the victory point value. The cost for each card is simple; Depending on what number is shown in the top left corner, the player discards this many cards from his hand.

Players can approach the game from different strategical points which are even more fleshed out with the expansions. Players can decide to take an overly militaristic approach which creates an engine that allows players to play military planets (these cannot be otherwise played) with an increasing pace.

Some can decide to concentrate on item production and consuming. Certain planets create a specific type of good (4 different types) which can then be consumed. This grants the player cards and/or victory points, depending on how the good is used.

Each planet or development somehow takes the player’s game further by making certain phases more powerful for the player. Exploration based developments allow the player to draw more cards during exploration phases whereas others deal more victory points and produce more goods.

Nuances

So far, the game seems a bit one sided. There’s no real conflict between players akin to more conflict-oriented games. You don’t go and wipe out the opponent’s planets or do diplomatic agreements with fellow players.

But that doesn’t mean there’s no interaction. But it all boils down to knowing the game well enough that you can do some rudimentary thinking about what kind of strategy your fellow players are playing. This then allows you to plan out your action cards so that the other players don’t necessarily get the full advantage of the phase. It also allows you to anticipate what the other players are playing so that you don’t necessarily don’t have to play that action card yourself.

For example, if a player has only a few cards in hand, it’s probable he is going to play an “Explore” to draw new ones. If this is the case then you too can draw cards during that phase – so perhaps it’s more useful to play some other action. If you can take advantage of your opponent’s actions whereas he can’t do anything with your actions, you have the keys to the game.

In the end

The game is richly themed and the designer incorporated many aspects of different science fiction novels into the game. Each expansion also takes the story forward starting with uneasy settling of the galaxy and ending in the brink of a war.

Race for the Galaxy is not an easy game to master, can be a bit intimidating to teach, but for those that stick with it, it offers many enjoyable games for the future.

If you haven’t played this gem yet, go do it now. For those that require some extra convincing, here’s some. Dominion is a game of reverse deck building and making your deck eventually to be the lean, mean machine that starts getting those points before the game ends.

I got this for christmas present last year and even though it took a few games to get the gears rolling, I’m nowadays absolutely in love with the game.

It shares many qualities with MTG, most importantly the deckbuilding that you actually do on the fly and also hand-management and combos that you can hopefully generate. It’s about having a deck where each draw should be useful. Add in to the mix the fact that each game is different (since a different mix of action cards is always chosen) and it gives you plenty of playability.

The Basics

Each player starts the game with a deck of 10. Three 1-point cards and seven money cards, each worth 1 coin. Each turn is very short, consisting of the player playing one action card (which neither has in the beginning), then using his money, buying cards that are available on the table. After this, he discards his remaining hand and pulls a new hand of five cards from the deck. If deck runs out, the discard pile is shuffled back in.

The Action Cards

The cool thing about the game is the action cards. The basic game comes with 25 unique action cards, a set of 10 cards of each. For each game, you can either choose or randomly pick 10 cards out of the 25 which are then set on the table as sets of 10 (So there’s 10 spies, 10 festivals etc).

Each card has a value of coins it costs (bottom left, see below) and once you buy it, the card is added to your discard pile and eventually through deck reshuffles, it ends up in your deck and eventually in your hand. During the buy phase, you can only buy one card, but action cards allow you to increase this amount and also can give you additional money to use.

Now, the first phase of your turn is to play an action card and the magic starts happening once you have a few in your deck. So the Market -card below would, upon being played, allow you to instantly draw one additional card from your deck, allow to take one more action (you’re limited to just one normally) and perhaps play another card and it also grants you an additional buy and 1 coin of money to boot.

Of course, with additional actions, you can probably start seeing all kinds of combinations you can do. With the Market -card being played, following up with Laboratory (see below) allows you to draw two additional cards and continue on with the actions.

This could lead you up to a big hand size, full of money and the possibility of doing couple of purchases in the upcoming buy -phase.

The Goal

Of course, building a deck and buying cards is all fun and good, but you are also pressed for time. The game ends when three full stacks of action cards have been bought away (so 3 stacks out of 10) or when the highest pile of score cards have been bought (there’s a pile of 1 point, 3 point and 6 point cards).

Of course, the point cards are only good when the game ends and are completely useless during the game. So the more point cards you buy, the more chances you have of drawing a hand of cards with useless point cards in them. And useless hands lead to one of the worst situations in the game which is to have a hand that you can do nothing with and just have to pass and discard.

On the other hand, if you start buying point cards too late in relation to your opponent’s actions, it might be you’ll never have time to buy enough.

Verdict

The beauty of the game is the simplicity. You can teach the game in about 5-10 minutes and a game shouldn’t last longer than an hour. Veterans will play through a game in 20-30 minutes and no matter which group you belong to, this game will hit you like a bag full of crack.

It has all the nuances of collectible card games, but none of the blindfolded booster/deck-buying and not knowing what you get. You can construct your decks on the fly and have different kinds of games each time.

The basic set is a little light on player interaction, but allow for a few kinds of nasties to be thrown at opponents. There’s an expansion (Dominion: Intrigue) out which adds more scheming and player-to-player conflict and the grapevine tells there’s about 6-10 expansions ready to roll.

So go buy it or try it out at Brettspielwelt. You won’t regret it!

And with that, this blog is off to a summer vacation and the boardgame shops of New York. See you in august!

edit: The Escapist has also noticed Dominion and writes about it here.

Here at Digital Chocolate, we recently released California Gold Rush for both iPhone (get it from AppStore) and Mobile and here’s some design insights into the development of the game that has already garnered some critical reviews.

What is the game about?

You are Mandy, a steadfast gal in the 1848 era California and you help Mr. Marshall to mine designated mining spots and prove they are good enough to start a proper mining operations.

Each mine has three designated goals in terms of how much money you need to make. In the mine, you can find gold veins which deposit gold nuggets in your backpack when mined. You can also find other treasures which cash in instantly.

You return to the surface and empty your backpack at the store where you can use part of that money to buy explosives, supports, maps and hear rumors about hidden mines etc.

Each movement or action you take drains your stamina and once that runs out, the level ends. If you meet any of the designated goals, you can unlock additional mines.

It’s not all about gold digging though, along the way you battle with fields of lava, ice, angry bats and less-than-expert miners who have collapsed the mine on themselves – so they need a bit of rescuing. Mandy gets her share of troubles as well as every bit of tunnel in the mines is susceptible for collapses. Collapses drain your stamina and take a chunk of money as the shopkeeper digs you out.

Original Concept and Design

The original concept was to do a game set in the 1800′s Gold Rush in California and the Sierra Nevada mountains. Why? Because of Risk vs Reward. At the start of the project, that term really solidified what the game was about. In effect, the deeper you dig, the more dangerous it would get (due to increased chance of collapsing tunnels). If you stay near the surface, it’s easier and less dangerous, but you’ll never find a huge gold vein by staying there.

The game was meant to be a slight tactical game where the player didn’t need to hurry with his decisions. We also wanted the game to land in-between the fast-paced arcade games and the faceless tycoon games. So little bit of action, little bit of thinking and a cherry on top with the buying and customization aspects.

The overall starting points of the game were:

Mine gold and turn it over for money

Use money to purchase items that help you dig deeper

Performance is based on how much money you have in the end

All this is done within a limited time per each level

Another great influence along with Risk vs Reward was the the tight decision making that goes on in boardgames with a German/eurogame flair:

Limited amount of time/turns to carry out actions

Tight decisions either through limited turns or cost of actions

Luck present, but not in a game changing fashion

Psychological aspects in the form of Greed and Exploration were also taken into account. Psychology is a big part of game design and game mechanics and is often overlooked.

Greed manifested through different size of gold veins, from tiny to huge and on to diamonds and hidden treasure chests.

Exploration was mainly on the shoulders of the fog of war system where the level is completely hidden for the player, until he digs a tunnel and starts discovering what is around him.

These two formed a good bond. The players always wanted to see what’s revealed in the fog of war, and each discovery of a gold vein grew their greed for more. Ultimately, gold allows you to beat the game and unlock real historical tidbits of the Gold Rush era.

Game Changes

The vision for the game stayed the same from the beginning, but small tweaks here and there were introduced – you can’t design games 100% on a paper, after all.

Here are some examples of areas of iteration.

Digging Gold

At first the player was meant to pick up gold nuggets from the floor, but it was too much of a burden and not really contributed much to the game. Instead, you mine gold and it goes straight in the backpack. When full, you empty it in the surface.

We played around a bit with cashing in instantly, but it broke part of the game. It’s important for the player to deliver the gold to the surface as this measures his ability to create a good tunneling system and also use supports in critical spots to prevent collapses. If you get caught in a collapse, you are returned back on top, but you lose a chunk of stamina and money.

Time

Originally, the idea was that we’d use a real calendar and the player character has about a month in the mine to get as much gold as possible. The backstory used to be that Mr. Marshall owned these gold lands, but was about to lose them since he hadn’t started his mining operations properly. So our protagonist, Mandy, comes along and helps Marshall to get underway.

Ultimately, showing the length of the day and the amount of days left didn’t really register with the players. Even with warnings, the need to hurry never materialized.

Later on this was changed into an overall stamina where a single meter was used to describe when the level is going to end. Of course, everything from walking, digging, running away from lava and getting pestered by the bats is going to drain that stamina. It’s up to the player to decide how to use his stamina most effectively.

That’s it!

The game of California Gold Rush might start slow, but it sucks you in after a while. The palpable greed for gold, the need to see what the fog covers and the ultimate prize of finding and solving the legendary mine gives the player a tightly packed experience.

You can get California Gold Rush from your local mobile deck carrier or check out the iPhone version. Pick up the shovel and get mining!

-Reko

PS. Here’s a sneak peek video of the gameplay with narration from our producer.

After that, well, it seems platformers must include lot’s of guns and shooting stuff. Whereas the first Jak was one of the best platformers I’ve ever played, the second one with it’s guns etc. was one of the most frustrating ones. I think I even completed it to 94%, but after that I’d had enough.

Luckily, the new Banjo-Kazooie does things right. The challenges are nice and multilayered, Banjo can fall from god knows how high and still survive. Of course, there’s the open world, the tightropes, jumping and smashing things to pieces.

The coolest thing, though,  is the vehicle workshop and the multitude of parts you can scavenge and earn throughout the open world. It’s like playing with Legos and using your creativity to solve the challenges the game throws at you.

User-created content

In Banjo, players can create multitude of different kinds of vehicles from the parts they have. They can consist of maximum of 200 parts (which is alot) and create anything that has wheels, propellers, wings, etc etc.

The game’s engine tracks how the vehicle is built, ie. engine power vs. mass, where the wheels are, can they turn, what’s the center of gravity and so on. It seems fairly complex, but for the player, it’s easy as pie.

I’m not a big fan of having a game which relies heavily on the specific few players to create experiences for the others. Give me a well designed levels from the actual developer over going through hundreds of user created submissions in hopes of finding that good one.

Jackpot!

Banjo does user created content right. It has some limits, but within the game they work well and it’s never really aggressively pushed onto the player. It also feeds the player’s imagination very silently and just makes it fun to construct your own vehicles.

Of course, with user-created vehicles, game balance flies right out the window. During the game, about half of the challenges are stuff where the player can choose his own vehicle or create one instead of grabbing the “default” one given by the computer. This creates some hilarious problem solving spots.

Need to grab and antenna and drive high up to get reception? Ditch the wheels, add a few propellers and fly instead!

Need to crash the opponent’s vehicle off the road and steal something he’s carrying? Add a big A.C.M.E fist in the front bumper and knock him senseless. Bonus points if you catch the cargo he’s carrying without it touching ground. I did it in three seconds btw :-)

Of course, if you’re ever in trouble in any of the challenges, you can check the leaderboards and hopefully spot a replay of some of the best scores in there along with blueprint specifications of the vehicles they were earned with! Of course, you can also view the user-created content in the game’s Showroom website.

Overall

You can get the game for a bargain prize, so there’s no reason to go and grab this gem. After all the recent punching, ground’n'pounding and submissions I’ve done in the latest UFC title, it’s a welcome breather and a very colorful one :)

Developing games isn’t an exact science. It requires pain and iteration to make a good game and very rarely it’s a slam dunk from the beginning. Especially with new IP, the growing pains can be immense, but should be expected.

Here’s a brief article about the bane of professional game development and some ideas that can start bringing in the remedy.

The Crunch

I know developers who absolutely refuse to do a crunch and for them, it is the ultimate evil in game development. I can’t speak for them, but the middle ground for me is a crunch that is done in a sensible fashion and where the people doing the crunch are paid accordingly. Also, remember that Overtime and Crunch are two different things. One is occasional, the other is prolonged and continuous.

Crunches should be done in either one or two week iterations with normal weeks and weekends in the middle. You can balance it any way you want, either do longer hours per day or then work during a set day of the weekend. Still, there is a maximum of hours per day and each has his own threshold regarding how productive they are after a given amount of hours.

If you make the crunch endless, everything suffers, from productivity to social ties. The compensation for crunches should be negotiable, either by taking it as money or as free time. With free time, you should make sure that you can actually have that vacation within a sensible timeframe. With a horrendous supercrunch, you can be sure that people will have their freetime, one way or another.

My worst experience comes from a summer years ago with around 350 hours of overtime done in a matter of months. My days consisted of waking up at 8am, heading to work, being there until 12pm or 1am and then heading home, waking up again at 8am and so on. I can’t remember if I had sunday off or not… as a matter of fact, I can’t really remember anything of that summer apart from my daily rhythm.

The Origin of Crunch

Crunches come from multitude of places. Scheduling that is too loose, task estimates that are done hastily. Design that is re-worked dozens of times and crucial people who are sick too often. Crunch can also be the result of miscommunication and instances where a person is responsible for something, but doesn’t really have the power to carry out with his tasks.

Agile Methods

By now, I’m sure most of the game development studios worth their salt have adopted some kind of Agile methods in their development and production process. You can have Agile be a part of management as well, but that’s a topic for another post.

In a nutshell, with agile methods your team does short (1-4 week) iterative sprints where at the start of each sprint, the upcoming features are decided and estimated. Throughout the sprint, the progress is tracked and an overall picture of the project will form. The burndown chart (pictured above) is crucial in keeping track as it shows the estimated velocity of task progression and also the reality of how things are going.

During a sprint week, your team will have daily meetings that are max. 10 minutes long where you go through every team member with each one stating what tasks they accomplished yesterday and what are they working on today. You can have each task posted on a whiteboard and each individual member can go and check a task out of the board and note that it’s underway or it’s done etc.

But to know the tasks, you need to do some task estimation and scheduling.

Scheduling: Ideal Days

Typically, task estimations are done in “ideal days” which is understandable since it makes more sense to people outside the project: Coding this takes 6 hours, designing that takes 4 hours and so on. If you expect that everyone will work the 7,5 hours a day, you can fit the tasks pretty well.

You can then sum up the tasks, see that you get your fill of weekly hours and project how long the project will take. In a perfect world.

Of course, Frank’s ideal day is not Bob’s ideal day and you can’t be 100% certain who does a given task. Throw in a couple of overlong meetings per week, other problems and the ideal day will shrink for any given person. And the bottom line is, for every person the amount of work they can manage during a day will vary.

I’m used to scheduling tasks with ideal days, but seeing how much false security this can bring, I’m not that convinced that this is the best way.

Scheduling: Story Points

Another way to do task estimations is by having story points instead of hours and days. It takes a bit longer to adapt into use, but in the end should be more flexible. The key tenet is the separation of task duration and size.

With Story Points, a task is given points usually in-between 1 to 8, but it’s not set in stone. Typically, the Fibonacci Sequence is used. In here, you estimate the size of the task and leave the duration of the task completely alone. Since estimations are always done in a group and you compare the task in relation to another, a concensus usually forms for the group where each task is given it’s story points.

Now, how do you know how long it takes for a 2 point feature to be completed? Velocity will tell you. During the first iteration, you simply need to make an educated guess, but in the future after more sprints are completed, the velocity will step in. You might find out that for a two week sprint, you complete an average of 20 story points.

So what’s good about story points? Mainly that the points track the size and complexity of a task instead of duration. It is also a relative unit of measurement which doesn’t have a false sense of security created by the “I’ll do it in 2 hours” -tenet of Ideal Days. It doesn’t bother with individual estimations since tasks should be group sized anyway.

For more on story points, read the excellent wikipedia article.

All this basically just scratches the surface of the intricate world of scheduling, but I think it’s an important aspect of game design as well. Learn to divide your game mechanics into bite-sized bits and know what are the crucial ones and the ones that are just eye candy. Prototyping goes a long way and for that, you don’t necessarily even need a coder. More on that later.

Originally, I didn’t really pay much attention to Burnout Paradise. I tried the demo briefly and left it at that. During that time of absence, Criterion added all kinds of content to the game, making it better and when the Ultimate Box came out at a nice price, there was no reason for me not to jump in.

It boasts an open world, where every street is a chance to prove yourself either ingame or online and also there’s tons of cars and motorcycles to try. Visually, it looks as it always has, but the user interface is a bit weird. Even if I went throught he mandatory tutorials, I didn’t really soak in everything and for a while, I played the game as any regular racer. Only after I started wondering where do you access those famous Burnout crashes? I read that from a forum, and one LB+RB later I was wiser.

The Grind

Since every crossroads in the Paradise world contains an event and you need to pass a set amount to update your driver’s lisence, the game actually feels a bit grinding since you can pass from event to event really fast. And with those events lasting a short time, your only visual guide becomes the number of events you still need to pass for the lisence upgrade. I’m almost to the A-level, but can’t really recall many memorable events from my career.

Also, for some reason or another, I think I’ve mostly completed races in the game. There are crash and stunt events, but either I just haven’t found and stumbled on them, or there’s just way more race events in the world than anything else. Sometimes the game does feel more like Ridge Racer than a Burnout :-)

The problem with open world

Now, Burnouts are always easy to jump right in and just crash, but in terms of the grind, Paradise clearly separates from the rest. Because of the open world nature, the crash mode (or “Showtime” as they call it) really suffers. Previously, every crash level felt a bit different with some kind of a trick to it. In here, the crash mode is so bland that it’s unbelievable.

You can activate the crash mode from anywhere and from thereon, you can just fly around the world with your lightweight car and try to catch the constantly spawning cars and crash them. Every once in a while, you might encounter a bus that gives you a multiplier.

There are really no memorable highlights or anything that distinguishes one showtime from another. The car spawning is adequate at best and you can re-spawn cars in your front by rotating the camera to your back and then front again. That’s a good way to spawn those busses btw.

Racing game, really?

One thing that pops it’s head up in Burnout is the way the whole racing and crashing mechanic is tuned. The same old “keep the throttle down and you’ll do good” still applies for Burnout and you don’t really need to care much about your driving line unless you want to get smart and take shortcuts. Racing is still fairly ok, but it’s still in another dimension from the rest of the car game population.

Crashing, on the other hand is in a realm of it’s own. As your license goes up, so does the “difficulty”. Whenever you play the takedown races, even a slight nudge from an opponent’s car can force your car into a different direction and no matter where you steer, your car will hit that wall. So, it’s not really a matter of physics, mass or velocity, but the takedowns sometime play like a rock-paper-scissors. Even a ridicilously slight touch from an opponent’s car can send your car screaming towards a wall. This doesn’t necessarily hold true for the player where I’ve found that you definitely need to pack more punch in order to take the computer players down.

The Bottom line

Although the review has been a bit negative, I still enjoy the game. You just to enter with a mindset that whatever you do and wherever you go, the game will keep you entertained for a brief while. If you set down for a two hour gaming marathon, I think the game will start to blur and leave you with less satisfaction as those bite-sized gaming experiences.

It looks good, it sounds good, the crashes are satisfying as ever and the game is full of DLCs. All this costs a maximum of 30 euros so all in all, the game is definitely worth it. I just feel it could have been better.

Seth definitely has the credentials to write a book about leadership. His credits date back to 1995 and he’s worked his share of Command & Conquer, Mechwarrior, Civilization etc. to name a few. Currently an Art Director at Firaxis, Seth visited Finland couple of years ago and I briefly met the guy while working at Bugbear. Unexpectedly, part of his experiences with finnish game studios has been recorded in the book, in a positive light.

The Basics

First of all, the book is short. Spanning only 274 pages, it’s a quick read for the busy middle and upper management types etc. who will be in the best position to benefit from the book along with those wishing to rise to the ranks of team leaders.

The chapters are easy to go through, their arc makes sense and one of the first big things the reader will notice is the nice division between small, medium and large studios and the probable leadership problems that arise, such as lines of reporting and communication. For a book of 274 pages, there’s nothing that feels like empty fluff and it’s all reinforced by interviews from other industry greats from artists to producers and their experiences in team leadership.

It deals with all kinds of problems; from leads with too many responsibilities and not enough time for them all, to the pessimistic leads who bring down the whole team in their wake. From how to divide a team so that responsibilities flow evenly and lines of communication stay open to the correct way of giving feedback without breaking the chain of command.

It’s good

I can say without a doubt that pretty much all of the good and bad sides described in the book, I’ve experienced in and out of game industry. As a leadership book, it certainly works for companies other than game studios and any leader isn’t worth his salt if he doesn’t pay heed to the advice given in the book.

I’ve read the book twice as I’ve really tried to soak in the advice in the book, reflect situations I could have done better and reinforce my experiences from things I handled well. The book makes you think further in the chain, the consequences of your decisions and how you handle situations. So it is well recommended for anyone who acts as a leading position and should be a mandatory book in the Great  Game Development Library.

Hi there!

My name is Rafael Kuhnen and I will be collaborating with Reko on this new blog. On this post I will be talking about my experience in changing from the a more hardcore MMOG (Massively Multiplayer Online Game) Industry to the more casual Mobile Industry.  Please keep in mind that all of this is a real wrapped up, over-simplified summary of my experiences. The Job is a lot more complicated then this. :)

The Beginning

As I started to work professionally  as a game designer, I had to first put behind all the knowledge I previously had about being a game designer. I knew what a game designer was suppose to do, but hardly had a clue on how everything was suppose to be done. It was a harsh learning period.

As an MMOG designer the first thing that I had to learn was that I was not designing for a single player experience. Everything on the table had to account for interaction among large groups of people at the same time and the rules were the same for everyone. No pause menu, no difficulty settings, only a gigantic world where players could achieve their objectives.

As a mobile game designer the first thing i had to learn was that mobile games are all about instant fun. Players want to get their devices and have fun instantly. If it will be for a long period or a short period it will be up for them to decide, but the game has to always be ready to give them instant fun.

For starters, MMOGs and casual Mobile games have completely different business models. In the first, you have to keep players there for as long as possible, be it so they will pay a monthly fee or realize that buying items to use in-game is a good idea. In the second, you will be selling instant, short-term fun. On both cases the question is: Why will you play this game?

From MMOGs…

In my journey on designing an MMO as my first job, I was already pretty sure that what had to be done was to create an environment, create a world, where players could take for theirs and setup their own plans and objectives. No matter how much story and content you put into a game, sooner or later it will end, and there will be no reason to come back. However if you empower players with the option of planning a path for their character’s lives, it will be infinite content generation.

Ok, so you design the setup, solid rules that can apply to everybody at the same time, and there you have it. Please do not take this as “Give the players the freedom to do whatever they want”, because that would be really lazy of you to let the players do all the work. Even though you want to give players the sense of freedom, they should clearly know what they are suppose to do, the maximum you can do for this is to give players multiple options and let them decide what’s best for them in any given time.

You have to keep in mind that there are players that like to explore, achieve, socialize or just kill. Creating game layers for these different types of players will put you on the right track.

… to Mobile Games.

Just before coming to Finland to join Sumea studio I had an idea of how everything I knew about game design would soon get a new point of view. It is kind of obvious that I would be designing for completely different audiences but the question was how different exactly?

In mobile games, I realized is that clear objectives should be given. The whole “give players opportunities to create their own objectives” doesn’t work that well here. Players will get the phone to play usually for short periods of time and they can’t afford to lose any of those precious minutes trying to figure out what to do next. There is not much room for setup of complex mechanics that will let players study to maximize their performance for days, as they want to have fun right away. Time spent learning how to play is less time having fun, so mechanics should be really easy to grasp be consistent during the whole game.

Main differences being said, these are the easy stuff. Designing for mobile has proven so much challenging then I first thought it would be and I still learn new stuff everyday at work.

Conclusion

Mobile games being simpler doesn’t make them easier to design, just different. There are different challenges, different content, different schedule, budget, controls, expectations, feedbacks and everything else that I consider myself a lucky designer that had the opportunity to work with different kinds of games and to learn so much with them. I encourage anyone in the industry or anyone that is looking to break into the industry to try designing completely different games from the ones you are used or like the most. The varied experience will only help you out.

Cheers!

Above: Part of our lego collection at Sumea for prototyping ideas

There are a few things essential for any game designer who’s job out there is to take a game from a concept/vision stage into full feature specs, to production and finally onto the shelves or in digital stores.

This is a list of what a good game designer should do and have.

Have a game palette

Play a lot of games. Not just video games. Boardgames, roleplaying games, pub games, everything. Go play with children. Soak in why something works the way they are made and what makes it entertaining and fun.

Don’t play just the hits, but try the poor ones as well. You’ll appreciate the good ones even more after that and hopefully don’t follow in with similar mistakes.

Know the How & Why

You need to be able to answer the questions “How & Why” all the time. You need to know the ins and outs of the game from a grand perspective in how the game fits to the current portfolio/market to the most smallest detail.

If someone asks you a question, don’t say “I don’t know”. If you don’t know, who the hell does? Instead, let the person know you’ll get back to him in an hour/day etc. Not knowing just brings the morale down bit by bit since it increases the possibility of people working on something that has to be revamped altogether later on.

Idea Evaluation

Learn to evaluate and distinguish good ideas and let go of the bad ones faster. This can take over 20 years to master according to some, but in order to speed it up, keep up a designer diary. Write down your mistakes, keep design postmortems and generally look how you did after every project. What idea was kept on board too long and was it really worth it in the end?

Communicate

Know your game throughout, make people excited about it, but also listen to them.

You are the only guy who knows what the final product is going to look like. Everyone else is emerged into the details. The artists are jazzing up the graphics on level 2, programmers are trying to figure out the most nicest way of doing AI pathfinding and the producer is looking at the schedule and pouring that vodka shot.

Tell about your game in a way that excites the person. If it’s an artist, pour a few art challenges at him. If it’s marketing people, talk about the scope of the project and the whole IP and what it could be in the future.

Make decisions

It’s a skill in itself. In pre-production, it’s ok to get a concensus decision, but within production make decisions faster – and be aware that not everyone will share your view.

Still, making fast decisions doesn’t mean you should do them without thinking. If someone asks you to make a decision here and now, it’s probably better to still wait a few minutes and get rid of the “heat of the moment.”

Have a thick skin

Separate good criticism and constant whining from each other. Give time to the criticism and leave the whiner to himself. Get to the bottom of criticism and see if there’s something that warrants attention.

Also, give proper criticism. If something looks bad, don’t call it “shit” no matter how bad it looks. Always talk about the good points and then come with a way to ask the guy to improve. If you’re giving critique to a junior position, it’s probably better to give a bit more hands-on advice and reasoning. If it’s senior, it’s probable that you just weren’t on the same page to start with.

If you talk to other disciplines, don’t cut through the chain of command. If you see an artist do something, you can tell him about what you’d like to see, but tell him that you’re going to talk to the lead artist about it before making any decisions.

Bitch up, not down

Game designers typically have people underneath them who ask on how a certain aspect should be done. It can be about what a specific feature is trying achieve or how something should look (done in conjunction with the lead artist), but overall, recognize who is part of your immediate team and ultimately responsible for making a great game

Now that you know this, don’t spill shit downwards. If you feel like things are going wrong or the way you like them to go, don’t bitch downwards. If the artists and programmers hear you constantly whining about “this’ll never work” then you are just tearing away at the team morale. If you want to bitch, bitch upwards. For the team, do everything in your power to make them feel comfortable.

Uphold vision

You are the only person who knows what the game is ultimately about or how it’s going to work. Everyone else has more or less a vague guess. While in-production, situations arise where people will question if this or that will work. If you’re 100% certain it’ll work, stick to your guns. If you have 10 people against you, reconsider your stance.

The most important bit: If you have too many spoons in the soup, the whole soup is going to taste a whole lot of nothing. With a clear vision, sticking to the crucial options that make the game what it is, the flair for it is created. If there are too many compromises, the whole game tastes, feels and looks like a compromise. It’ll have fix upon fix of weird decisions since at some point or another someone felt scared about a prospect of someone not getting this and that.

Set Goals

Amidst all the development chaos, remember to set goals for yourself. When you are designing a feature, set goals in what the feature is really trying to accomplish and what it’s about. What facet of gameplay does it increase and why is it crucial it’s in the game?

Consider this from all sides. How much art does it need? Is there way too much art in terms of how much actual gameplay fun the feature provides? Is it impossible to program? Is there a way you could do the thing with a more simpler approach?

Understand games

Games are not ultimately about the tightest graphics or the latest programming gimmicks, but they are about learning. Behind every facade of any game is the player’s primitive want to learn and utilize what is learned. This makes a game designer’s job easier since the human mind is essentially rigged. We look for signs and patterns even if we don’t want to. We want to collect and protect, achieve and solve, socialize and explore, and ultimately emerge as a winner.

In “The Job” articles, we look a bit of what game designers should actually be doing, what are the fun and less fun aspects of the job and possibly in the future, even interview some designers.

So what’s it all about?

The “Game Designer” is almost like a blanket term for the people in the industry who fall in-between the artists and the programmers. They are the curious kind that always evoke the question “So what do you really do?” whenever the job title is mentioned.

“A game designer is not necessarily a programmer, visual designer, or project manager, although sometimes he or she can also play these roles in the creation of a game. A game designer might work alone or as part of a larger team”.

- Katie Salen, Eric Zimmerman “Rules of Play”

There’s a saying that two game designers from two different companies can never talk to each other since their job description varies so much. One’s game designer is actually just concepting and coming up with game ideas while the other is actually designing levels for the players to have fun with.

In the most traditional sense though, the game designer is the person responsible for the game mechanics and experience, that defines the gameplay. He is also responsible of creating the rules and structure of the game that allow for some kind of resolution in the end.

Game designers marry the game mechanics with the game experience. Game mechanics tell us how and why something works. Experience gives us the feedback from which we learn. In a first-person shooter, we solve the issues and make sure that the two aspects of our field stay uniform:

Game mechanics

Who do I shoot at and with what?

How fast can I move the sight?

Can I dodge bullets?

What happens when I reload?

Experience

How do I tell enemies from innocent bystanders?

How does the weapon function when I fire – do I get tracers?

How do I know I’ve successfully hit something?

How to I distinguish when I do well and when I do poorly?

If you have lot’s of game mechanic, but not much experience the gameplay or mechanics can feel disruptive or hard to understand. This is usually the case if you plan too much on paper and constrict your thought process into tons of writing.

If you have lot’s of experience (of the audiovisual kind) and poor game mechanics, your gameplay immersion is broken up every once in a while. In the original F.E.A.R, every time you reload, the weapon is raised up, the targeting reticle removed and you are visually shown how you replace the magazine. It’s a small thing, but prevents you from accurately aiming your weapon and needs you to mentally re-adjust your sights after reload. It’s realistic, but it’s not fun.

If you look at how miniscule in the scale of the game the above issues are, you are beginning to see how vast the field of game design is. Of course, in bigger projects, there are multiple designers each with their own area of expertise, but the details are still there for all of us to solve and plan.

Wasabi is a recent boardgame published by Z-Man games that could be compared to the match-3 games like Bejeweled, but with a few twists that make it more interesting.

In short, up to four players draw ingredients from the pantry and put them behind their covers, where they also hold up to three different recipies. Recipies range from easy 2 ingredient pieces to a maximum of 5 piece culinaristic explosions of gastronomy.

Above: A selection of recipes requiring two ingredients

Players take turns placing ingredients on the board, drawing new ingredients and upon recipe completion, new recipes.

Recipes are scored by having the ingredients listed on the recipe card on the play area either in a horizontal or vertical line, adjacent to each other. Each recipe gives a certain amount of points depending on how complex the recipe was and also style points depending if you can manage to make the recipe in the exact order displayed on the card. Style points are awarded in the shape of wasabi cubes, which the players amass on their cute little wasabi cups.

Above: The pantry on the left, play area in the middle and special cards on the right.

After a recipe is completed, players also earn additional cards which give special powers. The dreaded Wasabi! card blocks a portion of the play area, Stack! allows the player to play an ingredient on top of another, Spicy! allows for two ingredient plays on a single turn and so on.

The game ends when one player completes all his challenges first (a specific amount of completed recipes) or when the board is completely filled with ingredients. Note that nothing on the board “belongs” to any specific player, but can be freely used. After the game ends, the recipe point values are scored and all the wasabi accumulated from stylistic top chef actions earns additional points.

The verdict

Wasabi suffers from a bit of analysis paralysis, since the board is constantly changing and is perhaps not the most social boardgame out there. The enjoyment comes from cleverly managing to play the toughest 5 piece recipe (which needs an unique ingredient – and getting that from the pantry raises a red flag for everyone else!) or just by cleverly utilizing the board and what other people have played.

It is certainly a delicious looking game, which shouldn’t be played with an empty stomach. At first, I felt a bit distant from the game, but after a few more plays it has grown on me a bit. It certainly shows that a proper theme can turn a possibly bland abstract game into something more meatier.

IT-viikko has a short story about Habbo’s path to profitability. It’s in finnish though, but very interesting nevertheless. You can find the figures here in english.

In the beginning, they didn’t want to brand themselves as a game, but more of an “Multi-user application”. Lives got better as they decided to be a game, finally. Another strongpoint of Habbo has always been the very loose restriction on user actions, which has created many kinds of unforeseen uses for their game mechanics. And turned the game more into a play.

Gaming vs. Playing

This sandbox element has allowed their users to create their own rules and actions. This brings the point of play versus games into light and it is one of the major distinctions of Habbo in comparison to most other games. A Game always implies a beginning and an end, rules to define a winner and so on.

In play, it is about imagining what is not there, creating roles and acting upon them, and not necessarily determining winners at all. You can use tools and toys in the context of recreation and learning. Some play do have goals and structured with rules it turns into a game, but play is also a basic need for everyone and a way to learn.

This is most evident in documentaries. People find it fascinating to watch young tigers cubs prowl in the savannah, which might look even dangerous, but all they are doing is playing. Even though it is play, they are also learning for the future when instead the other cub is replaced with a piece of prey. Without the element of play in their early stages, they would never learn how to hunt properly in “real-life”.

Most people seem to mix play and games together, but it’s a narrow and limiting view, especially when it happens in the game industry. Most current MMOs could have a much larger userbase if the ability for play would be involved. Instead, they concentrate more on the gaming itself, the issue of having challenges and ways to beat them, emerging victorious in the end.

Ultima Online was probably the last of the current mainstream gamey MMOs that had a real playful element to it, mostly because the guys didn’t know any better and just did what they felt might work. The ability to drop and see items where you left them allowed users to decorate and be creative, which evolved into an art of it’s own later in the game when you had real-estate to buy and sell.

The abilities for playful interaction

When designing games, it is often valid to look what kind of playful elements you could add in before you restrict everything with rules and boundaries. Even a small amount of customization in game elements can go a long way. This pays dividends in games where you most likely expect to have some aspect of customization anyway. For example, if you take the role of an architect, hopefully you have a chance to design buildings instead of just choosing where to place them.

One more recent element was the difference between Grand Theft Auto IV (although very sandboxy and playful in itself) and Saints Row 2. Both games boast the gangsta theme, which already pushes some people away from both. But the winning factor in Saints Row 2, especially for female players, has been the ability to customize everything from your looks and posture to walking styles, speech and clothes. For some, this is the dividing factor in order to accept the game as it is, since the draw to play around with just how your character acts and looks is so strong.

I’ll blog about all things games related, be it traditional board games or more fancier video games. I’ll share reviews, interesting articles and stuff I encounter in daily life within the industry.

I mostly do this for myself, apart from writing game design stuff, I like to write in general, which is why I typically carry around a few notebooks for ideas. Some of that stuff is visible in the background of this page. Still, after Facebook came along, my blogging ground to a standstill and this is one aspect of booting it up again.

Hope you enjoy!