| Wednesday, January 28, 2009 |
  Magnetic Butterfly: Butterfly and a Wrecking Ball | 
Posted - 1/28/2009 2:57:56 PM | As I indicated in my brief update last week, I did indeed get a Unity Indie license after some time with the free downloadable trial. I've never been good at constraining myself to the feature set found in a given game engine or game development toolset before but just a few hours with Unity made me a very strong believer in the power the engine had. On the Saturday of this past weekend I sat down on a couch while I was away at my parents' house with my MacBook, opened up the Unity trial, and spent some time while I was watching movies with my parents just playing around with the engine. I was so impressed with what I came up with purely through trial-and-error and experimentation (as I had no internet connection for research/help) that I got the Indie license within an hour of getting back to my apartment on Sunday afternoon.
My goal over the next few months is to come up with and develop one game every four-six weeks that I will upload to this site (Unity has a 3D web applet). The first of these projects is Magnetic Butterfly which is, essentially, a game of King of the Hill where the player controls a tiny butterfly who was born with a giant wrecking ball attached to his body. As a result of this, the butterfly will be a bit unwieldy for the player to control, but the player will need to find a way to knock any nearby enemies off a platform before they do the same to him/her. The "catch" is that the player will have the ability to activate his magnetic charge which will lock the butterfly to the ground and allow players to drastically modify the momentum of the wrecking ball and then aim it in the direction of a nearby enemy for increased force. I got a very, very basic prototype of the gameplay up and running on Sunday night and was actually pleasantly surprised with the results.
Since then I have been spending some additional time setting up the PC in my apartment to serve as my content/asset creation machine -- installing Paint Shop Pro, XSI Mod Tools, and Silo for the texture/modeling needs that I figured would arise over the course of the next couple months. I have also been redoing some of the basic aspects the butterfly/wrecking ball; for instance, I am currently in the process of redoing the chain/rope that binds the ball and the butterfly together to not only look better but to be a much more elastic solution. Here are some screenshots of my development environment over the last few hours while I was screwing around with joints to bind various chain links together (I have since decided to create the chain procedurally, which is where I left off for the night):
 
I can't even properly convey just how much fun I've been having with Unity since I downloaded the trial. Not having to worry about the finer details of programming for a platform and, instead, solely focusing on the game design, gameplay logic, and the player's interactions with the game world has just been a fantastic change of pace for me. The most annoying thing at the moment is the lack of postprocessing shader support in the Unity Indie license (it's a feature reserved for Unity Pro) but that's only a minor aesthetic design annoyance.
I'll try to write some more detailed development entries in the future; though, preferably, I'll write those at some time that is not an hour or so after I meant to go to sleep.
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| Thursday, January 22, 2009 |
| iPhone Development Stuff | |
Posted - 1/22/2009 1:00:10 PM | It's been a while since I've just written a generic sort of site entry, but this seemed like a fantastic time to do just that. First, I want to thank everyone for all the awesome responses I got on the site, IRC, Twitter, and other mediums to my last entry. That was actually intended to be a useful piece to serve as advice to people looking to get into the game industry but I got carried away with my personal history as I started writing it and just rode that inspiration. I'll write up a proper piece on general advice on how to get into the game industry at some point in the future.
I'm still plugging away on my iPhone project on a daily (or near-daily) basis. I'm having a bit of trouble actually getting to work on the game as a result of deficiencies of the engine I'm using. If the engine I'm using doesn't provide an abundance of tools and scripts for game development then I feel compelled to add in some of the features that I'm certain I will need at some point in my game's development so, at this point, that endeavor is occupying the entirety of my development time. One of the things which interested me the most about the Oolong Engine was how it appeared to offer an abundance of features while still allowing a lot of room for a developer to customize his/her use of the engine. At this point I'm convinced that while the engine does have a solid feature set, there is nothing that really ties one aspect of the engine together with the rest; for instance, being that it's an engine for a touch screen-based platform I would have expected somewhat rigorous support for touch-screen input and picking within a 2D/3D scene. But alas, no such thing seems to exist. It does appear to be under heavy development but given the amount of development I do in a given day at work I like the time I spend with my side-projects to be as focused on core game design and game programming as possible.
That said, I do absolutely love not only my MacBook but also OS X and the development environment that the iPhone SDK and xcode provide. While the IDE is nowhere near the level of polish present in Microsoft Visual Studio, it's still a tremendously useful and functional programming environment. I'm also continually impressed by the capabilities and ease of development for the iPhone/iPod Touch as a platform. It's been a fascinating change from PC development and my XNA projects (which, C# aside, is a very PC-like platform).
I'm so impressed by the iPhone/iPod Touch as a gaming platform that I'm seriously considering putting some (or all, depending on the success or lack thereof) of the money from my first game towards an Unity 3D and iPhone license. Granted, I have absolutely no idea when my first game will hit the App Store (or even what that game will be), but I can dream. Everything I've seen from Unity has me endlessly impressed and I'd absolutely love to get a license for it at some point but it is, right now, a bit out of my price range. Especially given the impulse purchase of the MacBook. If anyone has used Unity for either Mac or the iPhone I'd love to hear some impressions. I also noticed that GarageGames has released a SKU of their Torque Game Engine for the iPhone; the license seems to be more expensive than their past engine releases though, which is kind of confusing. I always thought of GarageGames as offering low-priced alternatives to indies and the price point of iTGE is only $100 less than the indie license of Unity 3D along with its iPhone publishing license. And, from what I've seen, Unity seems to be a far more capable and thorough toolset.
Finally, since I don't believe I've thrown out a plug for these guys yet, Idle Thumbs is the best gaming podcast around. It's surprisingly hard to find gaming podcasts whose speakers have the abilities to move beyond the kind of tired, trite rhetoric you'd get from a typical IGN or Gamespot article without coming off as pretentious or, quite simply, boring. Idle Thumbs manages to do that in a way that I've only seen the Games for Windows podcast successfully do back before it ended months ago. Give it a listen.
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| Tuesday, January 20, 2009 |
| How I Got Into Games | |
Posted - 1/20/2009 12:41:13 AM | Every now and then it's nice to talk about game development; how to get into it, and what it's like to actually be a professional game developer after years of being a part of game development communities on the Internet. This post was inspired by a blog entry by the ever-fantastic Steve Gaynor. The entry is titled "Informative" and he discusses his approach to getting into level and game design from the perspective of someone who had no idea how to get into game development. It's a fantastic read and is a completely different approach to the way I got into game development.
One way to get into the industry is have the general knowledge of what game development consists of and keep this in mind as one progresses with his/her education. Maybe someone looked up a game school like Digipen or a trade school like Full Sail. I know a number of people that have gone this route and gotten good jobs in the game industry (one of whom is a close friend and colleague at Stardock). There are also a number of people who got into the industry in a sort of traditional training/educational manner. These are the people that maybe knew an widely-accepted path of learning a given artistic or programmatic trade through classes in high school and then continued the advancement of these schools through college. Both of these are very viable methods of learning the necessary skills to get a job in a very unique and competitive industry.
But that's not how it worked for me. And I have some of my personal history and some very unfortunate evidence of my past projects to share along the way.
I grew up with video games. Sure, I also had a fondness for basketball and, eventually, cross-country, but video games were always a consistent force throughout my life. I got a copy of Super Mario Bros. 3 from my grandparents for Christmas when I was around five or six. The problem that I remember back then is that I got this game and I didn't even have an NES. I wasn't sure what their angle was. I thought it was either a mean trick or my grandparents had no idea that a game cartridge wasn't a self-contained video game-playing entity. But I clutched that copy of SMB 3 in my hands for a week or two. At some point I accidentally dropped my copy of Super Mario Bros. 3 in a toilet. After that unfortunate event -- still not having an NES of my own to play -- I had an urgent need to visit my friend's house. He had an NES, see, and I had to ensure my holy grail hadn't been corrupted. Thankfully, it wasn't, and shortly thereafter I had an NES of my very own to play it with. It wasn't until I was eleven or twelve that I really ever started wondering how video games were made. But, that did happen, and it was, as is tradition for the small town of Kalkaska, Michigan, during an incredible blizzard that I started screwing around on a computer. Before I go further, I want to ensure we have the same picture of a winter as I do; these are recent pictures but you can't really tell the difference between back-then and now in this context:
 
So, there I was on a day where I clearly wasn't going to be visiting any of my friends, playing, most likely, a game of Warcraft 2 on the family computer that was used almost exclusively for word processing software. My immediate family wasn't a very technical bunch while I was growing up. Even this computer, the first one our family ever owned, was given to us by my grandfather (who worked as a computer analyst). At some point preceding this blizzard-filled afternoon, my cousin, who grew up in a very tech-heavy family, introduced me to QBasic and some basic Snake game that he downloaded off the Internet that was made with QBasic. So, on this day, I opened up QBasic like my cousin showed me and read through the in-program information and documents -- they weren't well-written, numerous, or particularly useful -- and began cranking away at a text game which integrated some text-based animations and my homemade Chiptune compositions. At some point I tried adding actual graphics to these games but, well, I was an eleven-year-old trying to figure out how to do basic computer graphics isolated of any knowledgeable help. I think I made a circle with one eye near the circle's origin and the other a few units to its right. It wasn't pretty.
A couple years later (and months after I stopped using QBasic for anything) and I was a fourteen-year-old with a far newer computer and an actual internet connection (a 28K dial-up modem). And it was at this point that I actually started wanting to learn how to make computer games using the same kinds of tools and information that the real "game people" used. I hopped on the Internet and, eventually, learned about C/C++ and how these languages had something to do with video games. I was working as a bag-boy at a local grocery store around this point and, with my first or second paycheck, gave my Mom the money to order a C++ programming book from Amazon.com (I reassured her that the site was safe and that she could use her credit card).
As soon as I got this book, I started reading and learning about the intricacies of the language. It was hard. I worked at deciphering what was an absolutely cryptic and confusing set of skills and information every single day after I got home from bagging groceries, cleaning bathrooms, and chasing after carts. Sometimes I had to read the book without immediate access to a computer to test new C++ functionality out or to try transcribing a sample program from the book into a free C++ compiler that I downloaded off the Internet. And I did this sort of thing nearly almost every day for a summer. And then school started back up, the book chapter on pointers was proving asininely complex, I joined a Cross Country team instead of a Basketball team (the running folks were way nicer and more relaxed), and forgot about my C++ learning for a while.
I didn't stop programming during that lapse in my C++ learning, though, which surprises me to this day. I ended up borrowing my mother's TI-86 graphic calculator for the math classes I was taking through my sophomore year of High School. And, one day during a class on Michigan History, I was playing around with my calculator and realized that it had a program editor installed. I went home that day and looked up information on the TI-86 and the kind of games that people were making for it. And through a series of nights working on a TI-86 BASIC program editor and tweaking the results in the middle of some of my high school classes I came up with a TI-86 game of my very own that the Internet has preserved for almost eight years: ARENA. The game won me a book from a site dedicated to TI-86 programming.
It wasn't until my last Cross Country meet that I had a mid-race revelation that ended up being kind of important; it was the one that reminded me that I stopped learning how to program and that I should pick my book back up again and start, once again, from the beginning. The one thing I did differently when I picked that book back up ended up becoming one of the most important lessons I like to relate to people who want to get into the game industry: join a community of people who share your interests. I joined GameDev.net, a community-focused site that was focused on its namesake: the development of video games. It was through this site, and others like it that have since ceased their operations, that I learned the most from and made a huge number of contacts and friends. I joined the site's IRC channel and talked to a bunch of other development veterans, which was helpful, but also to a group of people that were in the same situation I was in: learning on their own time and trying to make sense of all of the complexities of game programming. At some point, I got a group of people together (ignore the "Royal Rainbow" near my name; that's a result of antagonizing my fellow moderator last year about the lack of color to our tags) to make a game, had a bunch of people argue about what the "team" wanted to work on, and then all storm out of an AOL Instant Messenger group chat room. But I did meet some people that I worked closely with for a few months. One of the "games" that was born out the work done by myself and a fellow GameDev.net developer also, unfortunately, survived through the last eight years: ARENA: Evolution, the "sequel" to my TI-86 game.
And so my self-teaching went on. At some point I picked what I still consider to be the most game programming important book I ever bought (despite now realizing how many horrible practices it taught me): Tricks of the Windows Game Programming Gurus. I probably read this book cover-to-cover about three times trying to properly understand COM, DirectX (specifically, DirectDraw), and some basic tenets of game programming. And I worked with DirectDraw on some failed demos and little games for a few years; some screenshots of these awful projects can be found below. I didn't really grow to appreciate the concepts of color, scene composition, aesthetic design, and other such invaluable traits of a good game designer until at some point in my college career. It shows, yes, I'm well aware. I eventually moved into 3D game development with OpenGL with the help of Nehe's tutorials. These tutorials teach poor programming and development practices but were, at the time, a remarkably simple way of learning basic 3D programming. I ended up writing a basic series of game programming tutorials for NeHe but I had those taken down as I felt they gave some incorrect information and poor practices.
 
I contacted the author (André LaMothe) of Trick of the Windows Game Programming Gurus a couple years later, when I was around seventeen or eighteen, and eventually this action led to a book publishing deal for me. It was a very strange concept to get my head around but I finished that book and, surprisingly, didn't get beat up every day of High School for it; in fact, I actually made a bunch of new friends as a result of conversations about my book. I consider it be an absolute piece of trash both technically and stylistically (text and code) but, hey, a little selling-out never hurt anyone.
When I went to college at the University of Michigan I was certain that I wanted to be a game developer. I was eager to learn some proper programming information from the professors who spent their life developing applications -- maybe even games! -- using the kind of information that I've hacked together throughout the four-five years of learning I did on my own. It was tremendously exciting.
And then my first year ended and I didn't really enjoy programming anymore. Something about being taught the same programming principles that I forced into my brain on my own time became a dull, uninteresting endeavor when they were related to me by a college professor. I didn't see the relevance to video games in the examples that were discussed in various lectures and lab sessions. And when the video game angle was removed from the sort of technology and programming that I was so passionate about growing up I realized that I didn't care very much. I also had real concerns about how well I'd function in an office environment being that I was, throughout the entirety of my life, a very active, energetic, and oft-rambunctious person. I ended up dropping out out of the College of Engineering and switched to the school of Literature, Science, and the Arts. I received some strange looks during this process. People have to apply to transfer from LS&A to the College of Engineering but doing the opposite required only a signature from a College of Engineering advisor. So I did that. I switched my intended major from Computer Science to English.
I went through my second, third, and fourth years of college, at this point, with the intention of becoming a High School English teacher. I thought that I just wasn't cut out to be a programmer and, as such, didn't really have any marketable talents that would get me into the game industry. I really enjoyed a year of level design using DOOM 3's Radiant level editor and a bit of mod work within the Half-Life 2 Source Engine, but I considered those things hobby work. I also played with Torque Game Engine a little bit. Throughout this time I took a variety of classes about linguistics, literature, Roman/Greek history, and a number of creative writing courses which were all tremendously fun for me; I met a ton of cool people, learned new things, and realized how much I love writing. So throughout this period where I just enjoyed being a pretty unfocused college student who dabbled in a bunch of aspects of gaming and game modding I realized how much I enjoyed simply writing about games. So I did that. Often.
But, despite being a very connected person who still enjoyed talking to hobbyist game developers via IRC daily, I never once thought that I could have tried to get into the game industry like how Steve did.
Near Christmas my senior year of college I read about something that Microsoft was releasing to the hobbyist game development community that would allow independent game developers to make games for the PC and the Xbox 360 using the same code. So I downloaded the very first release of XNA Game Studio -- a beta that would end up being v1.0 of the development environment. I didn't know C# at the time so I was, in essence, trying to remember everything I knew about C/C++ (which was a bit rusty at that point) while also trying to apply those principles to C#. I ended up trying to replicate some of the graphics techniques I messed with when I was still in high school such as non-photorealistic rendering techniques and my favorite graphical feature of all time: particle engines (though, now, I find myself to enjoy programming new game mechanics and thinking about game design more than graphics).
  
I showed these images to one of the friends at Stardock that I had maintained contact with throughout my college career and, eventually, got an internship. It was a pretty simple endeavor, primarily because I interviewed and received an internship position withStardock back in 2004 near the end of my freshman year of college. I didn't have a car and as the time neared for me to actually start the job I also didn't have the money to purchase a car so, much to my disappointment, I couldn't take the job. But, three years later, I accepted a position as a game development intern at Stardock Entertainment working on a number of features for the recently-announced Elemental: War of Magic. My internship ended up transitioning into a full-time game developer position as I took my final class at the University of Michigan alongside working at Stardock from September 2007 until my graduation with an English degree in December 2007. And this is me at my desk playing with the iSight on my Macbook right as I was packing up to leave work this evening:
When I started this entry my goal was to discuss, concisely, how I got into game development and to give recommendations to anyone else who may be living in the middle of rural nowhere with a 28K dial-up modem. As I started writing, though, I realized how the beginning of my "game development career" began from apre-teen kid screwing around on QBasic on a 486 Packard Bell that was given to my family by my grandfather (who passed away last month). As simple an activity as that was, it was enough to get me to realize the kind of thing I wanted to do "when I grew up."
It's widely-believed that persistence and hard work are the two most necessary traits for any game developer. I absolutely agree with that. I'd like to add, though, the importance of communicating with other developers whether someone is just getting started or has been in the industry for years upon years. Much like when I was fourteen and using our family's new computer to talk to people about programming, I still find that sharing my development and gaming experiences with other like-minded people, even if I've never met them before, never fails to get me excited about the fact that I make video games. My work consists of making games that, in my opinion, are amongst a small group of definitively-PC games being made in the industry right now. And, when I get the time, I sit on my couch working on a MacBook to try and develop an iPhone game that will make good use of the platform's strengths while still being the kind of game that I love to make.
So, thanks Grandpa. You were the cause of me being, like, a super nerd.
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| Games of 2008: Wrap-Up | 
Posted - 1/16/2009 12:42:13 PM | Every year I realize I don't really like writing lists or articles which end up sounding more like game reviews than critical analyses. So, to close out my list of 2008's best games, I offer the best of the rest:
Valkyria Chronicles
Sega's Valkyria Chronicles uses its pseudo-World War II setting to the best of its abilities, presenting everything from the blitzkrieg of an "evil empire" to the concentration camps of a group of humans who are discriminated against for inciting a war thousands of years before the events of the game. The game attempts to encourage players to treat the units in the game as individuals each with their own positives and negatives and, as such, character development is handled through one of five character classes and upgrades to these classes affects every character of that class type. This behavior does diminish the goals of most strategy RPGs but, at the same time, the inventive combination of real-time character movement/action and turn-based unit management makes for a superb tactical experience.
Luminous Arc 2
Unlike Valkyria Chronicles which handles its strategy/RPG gameplay in a very new and innovative way for the genre, Luminous Arc 2 is an SRPG which makes no attempts to hide its Final Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Ogre-inspired gameplay mechanics. Unlike the sea of other games inspired by this very specific type of character development, Luminous Arc 2 offers an incredibly well-balanced difficulty curve over the course of the game. And through the use of Luminous Arc 2's "engagement" system, the game forces players to treat unnecessarily well-defined witches as a type of battlefield resource for the continued stat progression of the game's protagonist. Gameplay aside, the game has one of the best scripts I have ever seen from a Japanese RPG.
Boom Blox
Boom Blox is the kind of game everyone dreamed of when the Nintendo Wii remote was first announced. It's Jenga, it's throwing baseballs and bowling balls at complex structures to make them fall down, it's a party game, and it's a game where you toss heavy objects at a group of invading bear blox in order to safe a bunch of sheep blox. Yeah.
Audiosurf
It's a game where you race through tracks that are procedurally generated based on the music that you choose. So you race your music. You race your music.
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| Wednesday, January 14, 2009 |
| Games of 2008: Ninja Gaiden 2 | |
Posted - 1/14/2009 2:31:22 PM | It's easy to be disgusted by a game like Ninja Gaiden 2. Team Ninja's (now former) director, Tomonobu Itagaki, makes no pretense for a fair display of gender differences. The game makes no attempt to convey an intelligent and thought-provoking story through its occasional and concise cut scenes. And the game makes no attempt to further the integrity of video gaming as a medium. Within the first five minutes of the game a player is treated to pints of blood being splattered across the entirety of a given level and inhumanly large and buoyant breasts are barely stuffed behind a skimpy leather top attached to a CIA agent in an equally revealing miniskirt.
Unlike Grasshopper Manufacture's No More Heroes, no aspect of Ninja Gaiden 2 is designed to subvert and exploit the expectations of the medium or the desires of young teenage males. Ninja Gaiden 2 is what it is and, really, not much more. It is, through and through, an action-focused video game.
And as an action game, Ninja Gaiden 2 is the absolute best in its class for one primary reason: the game places the entirety of Ryu Hayabusa's behavior into the hands of the player. There are no quick-time events, there are no platforming segments where a player solely has to keep the joystick pressed forward to successfully progress, and at no point is there an AI-controlled ally character who exists to help the player along. The closest the game comes to taking away direct control from the player is when Ryu is "obliterating" an enemy foe who is in a state of near-death and operating in like a kamikaze fighter. During these segments a five-to-ten second animation players where Ryu will absolutely decimate an enemy's body, thus preventing this enemy from ever troubling the player again throughout a combat encounter. These segments, as automated as they are, serve as the only moments of respite in combat and, on harder difficulties, are used as a strategic period of invulnerability against, say, a group of enemies volleying rockets into the air through their rapid-fire launchers.
  
The endless combat encounters are the lifeblood of Ninja Gaiden 2 and are composed with a caliber of depth more like a fighting game than a third-person action romp -- no surprise given Team Ninja's work on the Dead or Alive games. Combat is fast and relentless, requiring a player to make snap decisions about whether to guard, counter, evade, attack, obliterate, switch weapons, use magic, or run away to a safer location (long-range rapid-fire rocket launching ninjas are frequent, especially on the hardest difficulty modes) in order to continue fighting. What's more, there is a great deal of complexity attached to the functionality of every single one of the game's nine melee weapons. As expected, each weapon has its own "move list" that is unlocked as a player's upgrades a given weapon as he/she progresses through the game. What's remarkable is how profoundly different combat becomes when switching from weapon to weapon. With the Dragon Blade (Ryu Hayabusa's initial weapon, a single sword) combat is fast and frantic with a variety of employable strategies from short to long range to an entire arsenal of in-air maneuvers. A set of boots/claws will make combat even more fast-paced as a player is required to engage solely in close-range and execute combos quickly, evading, and then targeting another opponent. And so on.
It's on the harder difficulties, the ones where a player is required to beat the game on the hardest-available difficulty before unlocking, that Ninja Gaiden 2 becomes an effort in tightly-controlled action. The button-mashing, lucky counters, and accidental evasions will no longer suffice on these unlocked difficulties. Nor, really, can a player simply choose his favorite weapon and eventually overcome all foes. On these difficulty levels, Ninja Gaiden 2 becomes the kind of success-through-repetition/mastery/memorization that Bizarre Creation's The Club was attempting to achieve: a racing game-like dedication to figuring out enemy patterns and the kinds of actions which don't work in certain enemy group configurations. And it's Ninja Gaiden 2's decision to make this type of gameplay strategy a requirement for the unlockable difficulty modes which allows it to work well.
Ninja Gaiden 2 wasn't released to the same kind of critical fanfare that its predecessor was which strikes me as unfortunate. It doesn't take any radical chances as a sequel but, rather, it simply fixes some of the game-ruining issues and adds in more of "what worked." The level design is streamlined to both prevent confusion over how to progress and to limit the number of times a player is forced to backtrack and explore, both of which were ill-fitting aspects of the original game which ruined its pacing. Ninja Gaiden 2 also focuses far more on humanoid enemies and uses the "fiends" sparingly and befitting in-game situations.
Most of all, Ninja Gaiden 2 embraces its status as a video game, and a linear one at that. It eschews the common trends of the medium in a year where "games as art" is a popular topic and grit and seriousness are the preferred tone. Instead, Ninja Gaiden 2 goes the route of the lone ninja of gaming's past killing thousands of other ninjas and mutants in the most absurd ways possible. And, sometimes, that's all a great action-focused game needs to be.
But, seriously, stop with absurd breasts and the inane physics calculations being applied to them.
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| The Point of No Return | 
Posted - 1/12/2009 11:09:53 AM | Around the time when I got my Nintendo DS along with Square-Enix's 3D remake of Final Fantasy III -- it's now cool to refer to Final Fantasy games without specifying the use of the Japanese numbering system, right? -- I experienced a gaming phenomenon more clearly than I ever had before. At that point I was already a couple dozen hours into the game and the finer aspects of its mechanics, character classes, and general progression of the game were all as well-known to me as they were ever likely to become. I approached the final dungeon with a feeling that I wasn't having fun anymore but I was close enough to the end of the game where stopping seemed absurd. After all it was the final dungeon and my characters seemed buff enough to handle whatever it contained. And they were.
They were buff enough for the first hour or two of that dungeon, anyway. After that I could sense a feeling of fatigue setting in amongst the entire party. Because what my characters were woefully unprepared for was the marathon of random battles, mid-dungeon bosses, and room-after-room in this dungeon that, all told, would take a player three-to-four hours to complete. And the time commitment wasn't a kind one. There isn't, to my knowledge, a single save point in the final portion of that dungeon. I ended up dying at the hands of one of the mid-dungeon bosses -- not only as a result of a lack of character preparedness for the long-slog, but as a result of sitting in the same couch for two or three successive hours dealing with random battle after random battle and eventually deciding: no.
A scenario like that may have been alright when I was growing up, unable to drive, and living in the middle of a rural nowhere. That kind of gameplay is embraced when it's an early Saturday morning in the middle of a Northern Michigan blizzard and the nearest friend is, at the least, eight-nine miles away. More importantly, though, is when a game like Final Fantasy III is one of a mere handful of games that a budding gamer has in his/her possession then that game will get play no matter how grievous its sins may be. When those young gamers get older and start getting more and more responsibilities and, in some cases, additional funds for acquiring a wider variety of games to occupy their time, the kinds of games which were once lauded for their difficulty and time commitment become the kinds of games that are actively avoided.
After that first attempt at beating the final dungeon in Final Fantasy III failed the game then enters a pile of games that I could play but didn't really feel like dealing with. It's a pile of games that gamers look at and worry more about the amount of time it may take to get to "the good stuff" or, more commonly, whether or not a gamer may have enough time to get from one save point to another.
The question about whether to play this game or that then becomes: will I enjoy my limited time with this? Sure, I could spend an hour each night just grinding and grinding to make my Final Fantasy III characters marathon runners instead of sprinters in order to beat that final dungeon the next time I had a four hour time interval of gaming that I wanted to devote to it... But is that really my best option for entertainment for a limited time span?
There is nothing fun about grinding in random battles to increase the levels of single-player characters. The reason that gamers grind is to ready themselves for some sort of reward. In Final Fantasy III that reward may be a new class/ability, a new locale, an advancement of the story, new equipment. That reward, coupled with a general sense of success at overcoming adversity, is the primary incentive for progress in any number of games. There is also a player's interest in "the unknown" -- the sense that if a player overcomes a given hump in a game that they may become privy to a new secret within the game world or some new game mechanic that will enrich the gameplay (which may be stagnating in the player's mind). I have not, in my years of gaming, found someone who was actually motivated by the presence of an enemy encounter isolated of any sense of reward.
The problem with a number of games, and this seems particularly true of RPGs, is that the closer a player gets to the end of a game, the less worthwhile those rewards become. By this point, the player already has his party customized the way he likes, the story already climaxed and is awaiting its resolution, and the player is generally safe in his assumption that there won't be any major changes to the core gameplay. These games also feel the need to make the final dungeon the longest and most difficult aspect of the game, even to the detriment of the pace and balancing of the game up to that point. And there is no time that a player wants to finish a game more than right before its ending. There may be gamers that take the final allowed moment of respite in a game progression to go back and finish every side-quest, explore every nook and cranny of the game's geography, and talk to every imaginable NPC... But these gamers shouldn't be treated as a standard case. The average gamer wants to beat a game, see its ending, and be done with it. And the average gamer doesn't want to have to deal with hours of random encounters to sufficiently build up the abilities of his characters just to finish the final leg of a forty-hour (or more) journey.
Can't we just make the final dungeon something fun? Is there a sect of gamers who considers additional length in a game that has ultimately come to its conclusion an enjoyable game design? This isn't a problem relegated solely to Japanese RPGs but, generally, they make the best examples for the phenomenon. The recent Legend of Zelda games, for instance, seem to start relying more on length and repetition in favor of concise and focused gameplay experiences; typically, this occurs around the fifty-to-sixty percent completion point of these games.
This is not an advocacy for a reduction in difficulty. It's an advocacy for meaningful difficulty. I think of a game like Team Ninja's Ninja Gaiden games, EA Blackbox's skate, Rockstar's Midnight Club: Los Angeles, or even a game as simple in design as Bizarre Creation's Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2. where game difficulty is tied directly to the skill of the player. The only barrier in a player's continued progression in these titles is that of the player's abilities. Neither of these games are easy; in fact, I'd probably call both of them two of the most difficult games I've played in the last year but when playing them I feel like I'm actively playing and enjoying the game while having my skills be constantly challenged. I don't feel like I'm playing a segment of the game and preparing myself for some unknown challenge later in the game. The progression of the gameplay is measured through increasingly challenging scenarios where I am actually a better player of the specific game than I was when I started.
Let's avoid ever creating game experiences like Final Fantasy III's final dungeon. There's simply no viable reason to force a player into overcoming some epic gauntlet of mundanity after he/she has already come so far in the course of a given game. The difficulty of a game shouldn't be measured by how long it takes a player to grind or how many mundane activities he/she has to engage in to actually have fun. Or, in the case of Final Fantasy III, difficulty shouldn't just be an otherwise-easy gameplay segment that is made difficult due to a lack of save points or simply an extraordinarily lengthy dungeon. A long game is nice; no one complains about a great game offering an abundance of content and gameplay. It's the games that out stay their welcome where gamers start putting the game down and never picking it back up.
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| iPhone Development Fun | |
Posted - 1/5/2009 11:13:37 AM | I've been plugging away on my iPhone project over my vacation and it's been pretty rad. which I'm actually developing using an iPod Touch but shortening it from iPhone/iPod Touch to just iPhone is so much easier. I do want to record just how absurd application deployment to an iPhone/iPod Touch is, though. Once an individual pays the $99 fee for a development license he/she is given access to the iPhone Development Portal. And in order to get a working xcode project from the iPhone Simulator to an actual device is as follows:- 1) Setup the team. For an individual license the only allowed team member is the person who bought the license. The first thing this person will need to do is generate a Certificate Signing Request; this is done through a system application. Once a request for a certificate from a "Certificate Authority" has been made, then a CSR file will be made on the desktop.
This CSR file needs to submitted to the Development Portal to allow a team leader to approve it. Once that is done, then the portal will allow team members/admins to download their certificates and install them to their machine. Each certificate is composed of a public key (which is available to the team leader) and a private key (which is available only for the team member).
- 2) The next step is to add a list of up to one hundred possible devices that will be used for testing. This is the most straightforward part of the process. Just add in the device name and its unique device ID.
- 3) Now an application identifier needs to be created that will serve as a unique identifier for that application and is composed of ten letters/numbers. This key is then followed by a bundle identifier that the developer can create; for instance, mine is ##########.com.trentpolack.kaboom.
- 4) Then it is necessary to create a provisioning profile which ties all of the aforementioned steps together. Mine is "Trent kaboom," and allows ##########.com.trentpolack.kaboom to be deployed to either mittens or Stardock's iPod Touch (which I was using before I bought my own) under the use of my developer license, Trent Polack. Once the form is filled out then a file has to be downloaded to the desktop and added as a provisioning profile to xcode's device organizer.
- 5) Moving to xcode, a property list file (Info.plist, typically) needs to be filled out since xcode seems to have issues automating its project name/product name/product bundle through the project settings alone. So various information from the previous steps needs to be manually entered here. The main information that needs to be given is the bundle identifier: com.trentpolack.{$PRODUCT_NAME:identifier}. It seems without that ':identifier' modifier deployment to a device will only work once until that installed application has been deleted; adding it, presumably, gives each deployed executable a unique ID that will allow it to overwrite a previous one.
- 6) And, finally, a provisioning profile is linked with a given target (executable) through the xcode project settings and serves as a means of signing that executable for use by an attached device. Deployment is impossible without a code-signing profile in place.
I think that about covers it. Maybe it's because I've been a Windows developer all my life (until a week and a half ago), but the number of steps that needed to be taken and then tweaks that had to be made over the course of getting my first executable properly deploying to my iPod Touch was just absurd. Deploying XNA-built applications to my Xbox 360 was a breeze compared to this. But:
And then there's my development desktop (check out all of those certificates):
And, finally, the logo for kaboom that I just whipped up:
Working in a completely different development environment has been an absolute blast, though. I'm looking to get my own Mac Mini sometime in the next month or two so I can continue working on this project (and others).
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| Games of 2008: Metal Gear Solid 4 | |
Posted - 1/4/2009 4:38:03 PM | Metal Gear Solid 4 is a strange game to discuss. As a long-time fan of the series it is both a superb gaming experience and an absolutely infuriating one. The game presents itself to players as being almost two separate entities: the one the player is engaged in and the one that Hideo Kojima wants the player to watch.
For a game like Metal Gear Solid 4, franchise history is of paramount importance to any discourse regarding the game. Metal Gear Solid is a franchise that got its North American start back in 1998. The Playstation game was released to pretty wide critical acclaim and commercial success (shipping "six million units worldwide. The game made good on its tag line of "Tactical Espionage Action" by merging its action and stealth gameplay better than any game that preceded it -- a feat that went unmatched until the release of Splinter Cell four years later. Metal Gear Solid was, above all else, a game with sublime pacing throughout its duration; the gameplay was the focus, the cut scenes were lengthy for the time, but rarely excessive. The game's sequel, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, was released two and a half year later and, despite critical and commercial success exceeding the original game, is considered a misstep in the series due to the change in protagonist, a pronounced increase in tangential storylines (especially the romance of two main characters), and more and longer cinematics.
When Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater was released in 2004, the gameplay, characters, overarching story, and level design were all better than they ever were before. And it was with Metal Gear Solid 3 that the franchise's penchant for unnecessarily lengthy storytelling through non-interactive cut scenes was most pronounced. The increased length of the cut scenes (along with an increased number of them) seemed to also go hand-in-hand with a poorly-crafted script that seemed to rely on a pure bulk of dialogue to present information and storylines. The franchise was always fond of its own verbosity, but each game in the series took it one step further.
And in 2008 Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots was released.
  
The core gameplay of a Metal Gear Solid game has always involved a conscious choice on the player's part: does he/she want to kill a lot of people or does he want to never kill a single enemy (or set off a single alarm)? Metal Gear Solid 4 features the finest implementation of these series axioms to date. The stealth mechanics haven't been drastically redesigned, but the iterative improvements in Metal Gear Solid 4 go a long way. Solid Snake's camouflage that was introduced in MGS 3 required players to spend a few painful seconds of menu navigation to choose the best pattern for his current environment, in Metal Gear Solid 4 Snake has an active camouflage suit that seamlessly blends with his current environment if the player remains motionless for a few seconds. This process will give Snake a base camouflage value that is at its lowest when he is running and highest/best when he is stationary and prone. It's a simple change to an old system, but the way it works now makes an already-fun/tactical mechanic from an old game less of a hassle.
My other favorite stealth-related introduction was the new "threat ring." If a player crouched to the ground and remained stationary for a few seconds, a ring would appear around Snake's mid-section that would indicate enemy positions/movement around him. If there was no enemy present in a given direction then that segment would be flat, if there was then the size of the hill/wave that was formed would depend on the distance of the enemy from Snake. The threat ring will also be colored based on an enemy's state of awareness. I think this is an absolutely brilliant interface mechanic for representing the kind of locational and audio information a player would have in the same in-game situation (or out-of-game with a good speaker setup).
While the stealth gameplay was relegated to some iterative changes on the existing framework, the combat and shooting mechanics seemed to have been almost entirely redesigned. Metal Gear Solid 4 allows over-the-shoulder aiming with weapons and a first-person perspective that allows the user to move while aiming. In the original Metal Gear Solid, the only method of shooting guns was by aiming from an isometric-esque viewpoint while using a laser attached to the gun to give the player an idea of the bullet direction. It wasn't until MGS2 that players were allowed to also shoot from a first-person perspective and, even then, movement was prohibited (the same is true of the non-Subsistence releases of MGS3). Most importantly, the gunplay of Metal Gear Solid 4 felt good. The weaponry all had proper heft, shooting from both the over-the-shoulder and the first-person perspective were both viable and enjoyable, and the controls were, ahem, solid. Also introduced was a weapon dealer that was accessible from anywhere and a fairly simplistic weapon customization system that allowed players to add scopes, grips, grenade launchers, laser sights, silencers and other basic features to the weaponry that supported them.
It's, actually, the new found strength of the gunplay in Metal Gear Solid 4 that ruins the balance between stealth and action. While the stealth aspects of Snake's repertoire received minor iterative improvements, it was still a bit archaic compared to the redesigned nature of the combat. There is no proper cover system which has a slight impact on the combat encounters but, primarily, prevents a stealth player from easily jumping from cover-to-cover amidst enemy patrols.
  
The gameplay of Metal Gear Solid 4 is, without a doubt in my mind, fantastic. It's actually a shame it had to arrive as a Metal Gear Solid game as the series reaches the peak of its own self-infatuation. The cinematics are so prolific and so unnecessarily lengthy that even I, as a long-time fan of the series, started getting a bit weary of them from time-to-time. This particular game had the lofty task of wrapping up over twenty years worth of storylines (the Metal Gear games and the Metal Gear Solid ones) but, in some ways, so many of those storylines never needed more attention given to them; namely, the romance of Raiden and Rose (two protagonists from Metal Gear Solid 2) and a seemingly-random romance between two characters in Metal Gear Solid 4. The end-game cinematics alone take up the kind of time you'd expect from a feature-length film. As long-winded as Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3 got at times, Metal Gear Solid 4 is still worse.
The casualty of the cut scenes is pacing. Throughout my young adulthood I played through the original Metal Gear Solid about five or six times. I may have watched all of the cinematics during two of those play-throughs. The gameplay still held up through almost the entire game with the cutscenes and story removed entirely. The same simply cannot be said for Guns of the Patriots. In my attempt to play through the game recently the number of cut scenes ruined whatever groove I got into so often that, eventually, I gave up shortly before the third act. I gave up around that specific point because after the end of the first two acts, the amount of gameplay decreases rapidly in favor of more cut scenes. Act four, for instance, is probably going to be one of my greatest memories as a gamer but that is due entirely due to how well the levels and cut scenes touch upon my nostalgia for the franchise. The amount and quality of the playable segments throughout that act is nowhere near that of the first two acts; players are no longer in the middle of a war between two factions but, rather, avoiding annoying little robots. Or big robots. Neither of which are enjoyable to face off against.
It is amazing how Metal Gear Solid 4 manages to wrap up those twenty years of plot lines, though. When I finished the game, it was impressive to see such a complete end to one of my beloved series. I could not think of a single plot line that I felt was unresolved (or resolved poorly). But what I enjoy about games is rarely the storylines as they are dictated to me. As the foremost interactive form of media in the world, a game has the ability to make players the story in their predetermined premise (like one of my other games of 2008). Cutscenes as rewards for completing a gameplay segment successfully or particularly well are one thing, but what Metal Gear Solid 4 does is make the gameplay a reward for finishing a cut scene.
Solid Snake's story comes to a close in Metal Gear Solid 4. It's been ten years since I was first introduced to the Metal Gear Solid series (I was too young to enjoy the Metal Gear games) and for my first time through the game, MGS4 did an adequate, and necessary, job of closing the narrative threads that got their start back way back when. In that decade, games have advanced in an uncountable number of ways. Metal Gear Solid 4's gameplay has managed to not only meet modern expectations, but in some ways it surpassed them. But with MGS4, Kojima Productions has alienated anyone not in their immediate fan base (and those like me who want to play through a game more than once) by not keeping the gameplay/narrative pacing tight and consistently relevant to player actions.
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| Games of 2008: Far Cry 2 | |
Posted - 1/2/2009 11:11:19 PM | Shortly after I started my first game of Far Cry 2, I was treated to an on-rails taxi ride where my driver pointed out some of the unique sites of Africa. There are groups of civilians wandering in hope of escape from their country, varied wildlife, the spreading of a flash fire spreading from a patch of dry grass to a nearby tree, and more than a few angry-looking mercenaries. Functionally, this segment did nothing for me that Half-Life's tram ride didn't do back in 1998. Though, the tour did allow me time to take in the harrowing beauty intrinsic to Far Cry 2. The game's microcosm of Africa is beautifully realized and serves the game as an entity unto itself; a living, breathing pseudo-ecosystem. More than that, Far Cry 2 provides the player with a robust toolset of destruction that makes each of the game's bountiful combat encounters play out different every time.
When the segment ends, my character blacks out as a result of what I soon discover to be a latent case of malaria finally manifesting itself at the worst imaginable time. Upon waking, I see that I'm recumbent in a shanty hotel room and there is an unfamiliar figure standing at the foot of my bed, reading my confidential mission documents aloud. He quickly makes himself known as The Jackal, the infamous arms dealer that I have been sent to assassinate. This first scene represents the sole objective of Far Cry 2's premise in its entirety: it introduces the player to The Jackal, gives some basic background on who he is, and what his relation to the player is. The scene ends when my character's malaria flares up again and he blacks out.
Next time I wake up it's to the sound of explosions and fire all around me as my hotel (and likely the rest of the village it's in) is being ravaged from a battle outside. I grab a nearby pistol and then learn the basic game maneuvers as I crawl through debris and jump over broken walls until I eventually make it outside the village and, once again, black out.
  
Far Cry 2 actually begins after another hour or so of pedestrian tutorial quests. My primary enemy in the country knows who I am and that my only mission is to kill him, I'm stuck in the middle of a violent civil conflict between two warring factions (each of which are filled with higher-ups willing to do whatever it takes to beat the other), and the weapons I grabbed early on in the tutorial are jamming up in the middle of a battle. My pistol basically disintegrated at one point near the end of the tutorial segment. What's worse is that my character is suffering the full extent of his malaria -- short of death, I suppose -- I get violent attacks that can only be held back by medicine given to me by members of an African Underground movement and I can only run about fifteen yards before I almost pass out.
It's not uncommon for a game to start a player off in an altered state; a number of games have a player start off exceptionally strong and then strip away all of the upgrades after an introductory segment. Some games start a player off weak and the player will slowly become more and more powerful. Far Cry 2 starts a player off with weak weapons that are prone to rapid degradation and a deadly incurable illness. The only way to move forward is to work closely with one of the two factions who are at war with one another and tearing about the African culture and people in the process.
What I have going for me are my friends. I rescued a woman named Michelle, a fellow freelance killer, who was being held captive by a group of mercenaries in a slaughterhouse and since then she has become a sidekick who will intervene in the heat of battle. She introduced me to another mercenary when I went to meet up with her in a nearby bar. Together, these two people will end up forming their own unique narratives with and for the player. One of them will serve as a means of subverting a number of the missions given to the player by one of the two factions by offering optional "sub-quests" that will both hurt one of the factions while making the eventual completion of the base mission easier. The other buddy is a player's parachute: when he/she is "rescue-ready" then he will come to the aid of a player who was killed in battle by offering a resuscitation and brief fire support. The game's buddy system forms part of Far Cry 2's story; the optional sub-quests flesh out the details between a given buddy and the player and form a narrative that is, in part, unique to a given player.
More importantly that the subversive sub-quests are the rescue buddies that will end up forming a sort of emergent narrative that will enhance a player's view of a combat encounter -- these are the stories that gamers will take away from Far Cry 2 and talk about with their friends. Stories about how their friend Michelle, Nasreen, Marty, Hakim, or some other character game in just when a player got an unexpected shotgun blast to the chest and died. And then that rescue buddy came in and brought the player out of his near-death state by coming to the scene with his AK-47 or Desert Eagle blazing and then dragging the player to safety and then announcing "Heal up and let's go; there are about three guys left out there."
  
Much like a Grand Theft Auto game, Far Cry 2 takes place in an open world while holding the player to a fairly strict progression system through the single-player campaign. The premise delivered through these narratives is best handled in somewhat linear manner, though, because these are the least interesting stories that are told within the game. Most of the missions (and all of the various side-quests) that a player can engage in are just an excuse to go to a specific location to battle a bunch of people.
Combat is where Far Cry 2 is at its very best. The game provides a toolkit of back-of-the-box seeming features that, surprisingly, actually add a lot to the way that a combat scenario plays out in-game. There's the naturally-spreading fire, weapon degradation, partially destructible environments composed of materials with realistic properties, non-scripted artificial intelligence, day, night, and weather cycles, and countless other systems all working simultaneously. The material properties allow for players to employ somewhat realistic strategies mid-battle; if an enemy is standing behind a wooden fence, then a player can just shoot through it and, hopefully, kill the enemy. If a pair of guards are standing next to a series of ammo canisters the player can throw a Molotov cocktail at the area and the ammo containers will explode and violently shoot a huge number of ammo rounds in its vicinity (killing whoever is near it). And if another pair of enemies are standing right atop a large patch of dry gas? Use a flamethrower to ignite the whole area in flames and watch the fire spread to a nearby gas canister which sets off a chain reaction of explosions through a town. The number of crazy situations that I've had spring from these gameplay systems in my time with the game are just too limitless to recount here.
As I was playing through a series of missions one day, I noticed something strange about the enemies that I was fighting. At this point I was about sixty or seventy percent through the game and my character had built up a bit of a reputation for himself in the game world and I had invested money in a Stealth Suit that would give my character an increased ability to hide when crouched around grass. Since I took a liking to conducting all of my dealings in chaos at night, this mission was occurring at around 3-4:00am in the game world, so the sun had yet to rise. I was able to clear most of this enemy encampment stealthily thanks to the sound suppressor on my MP5 submachine gun and was in the process of hunting down two or three more targets. I had no idea where they were but I was able to hear a few distinct voices so I was just tracking the sound of the spoken dialogue. And then I stopped to listen to what the enemies were actually saying; instead of the usual taunts and proud machismo the enemies were now scared. These few remaining souls were aware who I was and that they had no chance to make it out of the situation alive and they just wanted to hide and be left alone. As it turns out, reputation is an actual value that has corresponding effects in the game world. As a player goes through missions and eliminates various faction members and higher-up faction figures his reputation will increase. As the reputation increases, the entities that inhabit the game world will start reacting differently to the player's presence.
The most commonly-listed flaw with Far Cry 2 is the amount of time gamers have to spend traveling to-and-fro and how that travel is constantly interrupted by enemy checkpoints filled with guards that seem to respawn all-too-quickly (whenever a player leaves a "sector"). It's a valid enough concern as vehicular travel (and vehicular combat, to a lesser extent) is such a prominent focus of the game. The enemies do, ultimately, respawn far too quickly but this fact made checkpoints something I wanted to avoid. And, as such, it opened up an aspect of the game that I would never have discovered otherwise: the joy of intelligent navigation. Far Cry 2 does not have an automatic route navigator; if a player wants to find his place in the game world then he will need to use his in-world GPS device combined with the in-world map. It's a cumbersome endeavor but it functions as such for good reason: it's not something that someone should be doing in the heat of combat.
  
Looking at the map and plotting out a trip was a sort of mini-game unto itself. It's a process that should be done at the beginning of any mission and retained in the player's mind for as long as possible. Whenever I was given a mission to complete I wanted to avoid as many checkpoints as possible, so as soon as my mission briefing was done I would find a vehicle and then get out my map and plot my best course. Often, a "best course" would involve a brief trip to a bus station, pick up a car near the bus station, and then drive to the objective on a main road for as long as possible and then take a detour through a rough forest or valley path to avoid checkpoints. Sometimes just avoiding land entirely would be a good idea as the waterways in Far Cry 2 function a lot like highways. This wasn't even a process I was fond of early in the game but, really, playing Far Cry 2 is never about rushing into action and combat from the very beginning.
I'm not even touching on the game's subtle user interface or its clever narrative techniques for this piece. Far Cry 2 is an enormous game that is so much more than any of its individual components or features. It's an open-world first-person shooter that truly and successfully embodies the concept of emergent gameplay. The game's vision of Africa is never a mere backdrop for tried-and-true gunplay, it's an actual character in itself; the represented beauty and danger serve as gameplay mechanics for the player's exploitation at any point in the game.
To date, Far Cry 2 is the finest example of what video games can be.
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The entries in this journal have all been posted, along with many more, at mittens' personal site at www.polycat.net.
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