Fail-Deadly… Succeeds?!

Much to my shock and awe, Fail-Deadly appears to have taken first place in Ludum Dare 18!

HOLY SHIT THIS IS AWESOME

I felt pretty good about this game, but even so my hope was just for it to place better than Conquistador (which finished Ludum Dare 17 at #34). I was optimistic about Fail-Deadly’s chances of making the top 20, but I never in my wildest dreams thought it could take first… especially not with awesome stuff like Metagun in the running!

I’m blown away, and frankly rather humbled. Sincere thanks to everyone who played my silly little game and found it worthy of your praise: you’ve all just made my year. <3

I Am, Perhaps, Too Ambitious

Although my free time these days is limited and unpredictable, I’ve still got a bunch of indie stuff in the works.

First is a planned update to my Ludum Dare 18 entry Fail-Deadly. I have a sizeable list of fixes, improvements, and a few new features on deck; I’ve just been waiting for the contest results (judging ends this weekend) before kicking that off. Fail-Deadly has picked up a lot of positive feedback from the Ludum Dare community so far and I’m really anxious to see how it places overall.

I’m also planning a tiny update for my previous game, TRI, to fix a couple of lingering accessibility issues. I’m really proud of this game — moreso than any of the other indie games I’ve released this year — but it’s still just a hair shy of the mark.

At a somewhat larger scale: I’m finally revisiting Conquistador and giving it a significant overhaul and expansion. I’ve been planning this for a while (I posted my Conquistador Design Philosophy more than three months ago) and am now, slowly, getting implementation underway. Conquistador was originally designed for Ludum Dare 17 and, like Fail-Deadly and TRI, was developed entirely in a single weekend. The updated design is of much broader scope and will probably take a few months to complete, so I’m hoping to post dev diaries from time to time between now and its completion.

Finally, I’ve been working on a new electronic music album. Like everything else it’s off to a slow start — one track complete, a couple others with rough starts — but today’s arrival of my copies of Reason 5 and Record 1.5 is something of a motivator.

Anyone else making yourself ambitiously busy in spite of your lack of free time?

Games, War, and Reality TV

The Hollywood Reporter is reporting that cable network G4 will begin airing in spring a reality show called “Bomb Patrol: Afghanistan”. It’s just what it sounds like:

The show will take viewers behind the scenes of a U.S. Navy Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) unit, starting with training sessions in the States and then during its deployment for several months in Afghanistan.

“There is simply no way to comprehend the incredible amount of pressure and split-second decisionmaking these individuals must undertake in the worst possible physical conditions without riding along with them as our cameras will do,” G4 president Neal Tiles said.

The reactions I’ve seen so far have been predominantly negative. For example, from Darren Franich writing for Entertainment Weekly’s PopWatch blog:

It’s foolish to judge anything this early (Bomb Patrol is set to air next spring), but it’s hard for me to picture how a show about soldiers engaged in a life-or-death activity — in the midst of a highly controversial conflict — will manage to not be incredible offensive to every single human being who has ever lived.

Rachel Maddow did a feature on the announcement tonight, arguing that often the draw of reality TV as a genre is when things go wrong: “You’re waiting — if not rooting — for the incidental disasters.” To the extent that that’s true, it seems to suggest that the underlying draw for “Bomb Patrol: Afghanistan”could be to see soldiers, um… fail. Catastrophically.

Even commenters on G4′s own forums, though not completely unified on the issue, do have some harsh words. Poster keebles124 said this:

This is a horrible idea…I play modern warfare but I dont think watching and hoping someone get blown up in reality is sane. Us as viewers of G4 expect to see faceplants and nads getting kicked, split or lit on fire, and we find that funny because those people are Arseholes…

But these guys are doing jobs none of us on here would do, (if you would then you would be there,so keep any stupid responses to yourself) and to find humor or pleasure in the possibility of a soldier’s death is sick and disturbing. We have to remember that every soldier that possibly dies on this show is one less soldier we have on our side.

This is an awkward situation. I’m trying to keep in mind what Mr. Franich said — “It’s foolish to judge anything this early…” — but I can’t help but wonder, aside from the obvious volatility of basing a reality show on such politically- and emotionally-charged current events, how this might play out for public perception of video games.

Stay with me.

While G4 isn’t strictly a network about video games, games are clearly their focus. Hit their front page right now: I see a wrap-up from Gamescom, previews for several upcoming games, a news feed in which every single entry is about a game, and so forth… and this is all above the fold. G4 is, to a certain extent, a product of — and a driver for — mainstream adoption of video games as a legitimate adult hobby. True, the network can be lowbrow (NSFW) and arguably tasteless at times. But it also represents a mainstream outlet for gaming news and content that — as far as the games themselves are concerned — doesn’t treat them like time-wasting child’s play.

But the association between video games and attitudes about violence is already one of our weak points as an industry. It’s the point on which our detractors (often politicians) most frequently — and most effectively — attack us. A vocal plurality sees gamers as people with little to no respect for the real-world implications of the violence in their entertainment. It doesn’t matter that that’s not true: it’s what our products are saying about gamers to non-gamers.

And in this case, it’s not even about gamer attitudes toward some indefinite, generalized idea of violence. It’s about gamer attitudes toward a very specific, ongoing, politically- and emotionally-charged situation of violence. Or more specifically, it’s about the perception of those attitudes by non-gamers.

What is a non-gamer to think of us, of gamers, when the cable television network about video games airs this show? Perhaps they’ll think we find war — even real, ongoing, right now war — just another form of entertainment. Perhaps it will look a hell of a lot like they’re right.

Leigh Alexander wrote a related bit recently, asking Who Cheers For War?:

The cousin of someone dear to me got all but one of his limbs blown off in Iraq. This is our most popular way to play together? And we are all okay with this?

It is, of course, driven in part by economics. Modern Warfare 2, widely touted as the “top-grossing entertainment product of all time,” is a performance that many publishers are eager to repeat. Thus here we are in 2010, and the battle-royale to watch this holiday is among first-person shooters. Historical war. Modern war. Future-war. Reports of “Halo-killers.” We all sit back and anticipate the fall-holiday first-person-shooter shootout shit-show. Hallelujah. [...]

What continues to concern me is that we don’t think about it and we don’t discuss it. We’re able to witness grenade-flung bodies, we’re able to crush enemies under the treads of our vehicles, we’re ourselves able to die in trenches. And get up again, and keep doing it. How far can we push things before video games like these stop being a way to interact with and process the human experience, and instead cross a line to where they’re trivializing it?

There’s something to our — gamers’ — dismissive attitude toward violence in our entertainment. Obviously it hasn’t turned us into a society of serial-killers. Obviously nearly all gamers are socially well-adjusted, responsible people. But equally obviously — from the other side — we simply don’t afford violence the respect it deserves. The respect that shows, that proves, that we do understand that bullets and bombs really kill people and shatter families and destroy communities and ruin lives, that they are doing it right now in Afghanistan, that we do care about this, and that we’re understanding and accepting of the fact that not everybody is okay with the argument, “It’s just a game”.

So I ask, at the risk of jumping to conclusions: is a reality show about an ongoing war, aired on a major gamer-centric TV network, really what gamer culture needs right now?

New Release: Fail-Deadly

I’ve just completed my entry for Ludum Dare 18, the theme for which is “Enemies As Weapons”. My entry is a simple RTS in which you play both sides against each other. It’s called Fail-Deadly.

I tried out some pixel art and chiptune stuff in this one, which probably owes mostly to the fact that I’ve been listening to Anamanaguchi like a goddamn addict for the past week, after enjoying his (brilliant) soundtrack on the (equally brilliant) Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game and thereby generally immersing myself in retro goodness.

Fun fact: this my first-ever indie game with blood.

So Ludum Dare: the judging hasn’t started yet, but Fail-Deadly lives here so once that gets underway that’s where the action will be. There’s comments and stuff there, too. Fail-Deadly also has its own fancy page here on Third Helix, because… yeah.

Let me know what y’all think.

TRI Update: 1.1

I’ve just uploaded version 1.1 of TRI with a bunch of fixes and improvements. I think I’m ready to call this the definitive version.

Play Online
Download for Windows (26.4 MB)
Download for Mac (30.6 MB)

Changelist:

- Advance to next level immediately without going through stage select
- Made several of the more difficult levels a bit easier
- Added a visual representation of the shot reload timer
- Added a climatic boss battle at the end of the game
- Extended and improved the soundtrack
- Added a ducking effect to the music when you are killed
- Improved collision handling during the player scale-down effect at level start
- Addressed occasional bullet collision failures
- Clamped award popups to the screen bounds
- Improved placement of some award popups
- Renamed and tuned some awards
- Improved some level subtitles
- Tweaked shell flow

With the latest game flow adjustments, updated soundtrack, and new boss battle, I think the game has improved a lot. Even if you already played version 1.0, you might want to give this one a tri.

New Release: TRI

Over the weekend I had a random idea for a game, so I made it.

I give you: TRI.

This is how I spend my holiday weekends. Well, this and watching the entire first season of Dollhouse while trying to shake a hangover I incurred for absolutely no good reason whatsoever. But we shall not speak of that.

Let me know what y’all think. I sort of just dove into this one headfirst without any real thought or design, but I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

Cortex: Sometimes, You Have To Move On

Cortex has been a really rocky project for me. The game isn’t really done, but I’ve decided — after much internal debate — to abandon it.

The game began its life as a physics experiment with manipulating lattice-like structures, sort of like the towers and bridges of World of Goo. I didn’t have any particular design in mind; I was just messing around with an aspect of Unity’s physics system that I hadn’t explored before. After a while, a game began to suggest itself, not so much from the physicality of the lattice, but from the structure of the network itself. Thus, the first Cortex prototype was born.

Initially, I thought the game would have a more traditional RTS aesthetic: that the neurons would be bases, the synapses would be waypoints, and the charges would be infantry, tanks, and planes with a simple rock-paper-scissors relationship. Separately, I’ve become interested in the psychology of gameplay and game design, and it was about this time that my reading on the subject led me into neurochemistry.

Neurochemistry is a really fascinating, complicated subject, and the more I read about it, the more I realize it’s one of those subjects that’s way out on the frontier of known science. I’m fascinated by all kinds of natural phenomena — and the chemistry of the human brain certainly fits that bill! — and lately I’ve also been thinking a lot about how to steer my game design work toward explaining natural processes through simulation. Gaming is an incredibly effective way to learn things, and it bothers me that we as an industry haven’t been harnessing that power to show our audiences amazing things that are actually real.

So I decided — perhaps pretentiously — to model Cortex on neurochemistry. The idea was nice, but in practice this turned out to be a great big failure.

The problem is that neurochemistry is really messy. Natural processes usually are, but what makes it more difficult here is that there are so many holes in the science. I mentioned before that this is a sort of “knowledge frontier”. You can’t read a thousand words on the subject without coming across a “scientists have not yet reached a consensus” or “it’s still entirely unknown”. Formulating a game design around such incomplete science means I have to take a lot of artistic license to fill in the gaps.

For a concrete example, consider the charge types: attack, grow, reinforce, and capture. My original intent was to represent each of these as a specific neurochemical: adrenalin, dopamine, etc. I spent an inordinate amount of energy trying to work out a sensible mapping between real-world functions and in-game functions. For example, dopamine is most well-known for being a “pleasure chemical”: when something feels good, that’s dopamine at work. What’s the analog for that in the game design world of Cortex, though?

Dealing with that question for one neurochemical wasn’t so bad, but trying to come up with a full spread — considering we really know so little about what these substances do and how they work — proved to be impossible. The only way I could create this mapping would be to take an uncomfortable amount of license with what these chemicals do, and at that point the game is really just lying to you.

For me, making a game about natural processes requires a certain degree of real-world accuracy. Certainly license must be taken — SimCity dances around a lot of the nitty-gritty details of city management, for example — but the cardinal rule is “never teach something that is demonstrably false”. At that end of the spectrum lies Spore, which (inadvertently, I imagine!) teaches that evolution occurs when an intelligent mind makes choices about when and how species will evolve. I didn’t want Cortex to go that route, so I backed off from explicit neurochemical mapping and instead chose to imply the point: we might surmise there is some undiscovered neurochemical whose function is similar to Cortex’s attack charge, and given the state of the science that’s not inconceivable (though I’ll admit it’s unlikely), so at least the game isn’t outright lying.

The issue of topical accuracy wasn’t the biggest problem that faced the game, though. After spending six months with this project, I’ve come to the conclusion that the core game design is irrevocably flawed. I had a lot of trouble getting past the first version, and while the second (and now final) version is a significant improvement in many ways, I still don’t find it fun. It’s not as simple as balance issues (which can be tuned) or adding a feature or two (not a big deal).

Let’s speak in traditional RTS terms for a moment, because Cortex is, fundamentally, a simple RTS. I don’t think that fielding infinite units — limited only by a production cooldown — leads to strategic gameplay. Instead, it promotes a stunted form of massing: you simply stream units toward your opponent as fast as possible, along the shortest possible route (which the game plots for you), and hope for a cooldown-boosting glucose pickup to break the inevitable stalemate. Furthermore, there’s no serious analog for base-building, which is a large part of what puts the “S” in “RTS”. The choices among unit types are limited, and the relationships between units are fundamentally uninteresting. Finally, there’s no real economy to speak of, literal or implied.

These are addressable problems, for sure, but they’re only addressable through a significant and fundamental redesign of the game. In short, to fix Cortex means to destroy it and create something entirely different in its place.

There is one critically important technique shared by every creative field, though they all have different names for it: the sketch, the treatment, the mockup, the prototype. Every creative field shares this concept because the signal-to-noise ratio of human creativity is pretty bad. Prototypes can be seen as a way to purge many bad ideas from your system, and thereby uncover the good ones.

The most important role of the prototype is failure, and the most important thing you must do when prototyping is recognize failure and immediately move on to the next idea. Cortex, in my estimation, is a failed prototype, but it’s one I stubbornly clung to for the better part of six months even though I knew it wasn’t working, and on some level, I knew it could never work.

How many legitimately good ideas might’ve emerged had I done what needed to be done when it needed to be done?

UPDATE: Wow, I feel like an ass. I posted this whole thing and totally neglected to call out all the people who supported my efforts on this game over the past six months!

I’ve never had as much response to one of my indie games as I did to Cortex, and the feedback I got from all you guys — through this blog and on Twitter and Facebook — was invaluable and hugely appreciated. It makes my geeky game developer heart sing.

The World’s Most Elaborate Magic Trick

Kieron Gillen at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, writing on Amiga classic Sensible Soccer:

Sensible Soccer is better animated than a modern football game, by using the impressively sturdy anti-aliasing of the human mind to fill in the gaps. When watching FIFA, there’s always going to be tiny problems which drag you out of the world where animation doesn’t quite match up. As you approach perfection, the errors scream. In Sensible, the reverse happened, with people claiming to have seen animation where there was none. It all happened so quickly, over-head kicks were pasted in our inner minds. Which reminds us that videogames are just the world’s most elaborate magic trick, and whatever works, works.

Sometimes, in my more curmudgeonly moments, I wonder where the magic in video games has gone. Perhaps Kieron has hit upon it: our industry has moved so far toward realism and high-fidelity that we’re leaving no room for the player’s imagination.

In other news… now I really want to track down a copy of Sensible Soccer.

Abusing History

The Texas State Board of Education is widely-known for being well right of center. Last night was their coup de grace:

AUSTIN, Texas — The Texas State Board of Education adopted a social studies and history curriculum Friday that amends or waters down the teaching of religious freedoms, America’s relationship with the U.N. and hundreds of other items. [...]

In one of the most significant curriculum changes, the board dilutes the rationale for the separation of church and state… conservatives strengthened requirements on teaching the Judeo-Christian influences of the nation’s Founding Fathers and required that the U.S. government be referred to as a “constitutional republic,” rather than “democratic.” [...]

They also rejected language to modernize the classification of historic periods to B.C.E. and C.E. from the traditional B.C. and A.D., and agreed to replace Thomas Jefferson as an example of an influential political philosopher in a world history class. They also required students to evaluate efforts by global organizations such as the United Nations to undermine U.S. sovereignty.

This is what happens when religion and politics mix: you get broad, overt steps toward an outright theocracy.

Religion as a social institution has always had two motivations: to explain the unknown, and to give meaning to the known. It’s important to remember, however, that when religion “explains” the unknown, it does so by quite literally making shit up. All throughout history, religious explanations for natural phenomena have been stories and myths, not empirical observations of fact. From Apollo pulling the sun across the sky with his chariot to God conjuring up reality in six days to Xenu blowing people up in volcanoes to capture and indoctrinate their thetans, religion has always invented fanciful explanations for that which was not yet empirically provable.

Why is this important? Last night’s meeting began with an opening prayer, offered by Republican board member Cynthia Dunbar, in which she said:

“I believe no one can read the history of our country without realizing that the Good Book and the spirit of the savior have from the beginning been our guiding geniuses. Whether we look to the first charter of Virginia, or the charter of New England … the same objective is present: a Christian land governed by Christian principles.”

Consider the state of science in the late 1700s. Charles Darwin hadn’t even been born yet, much less shaken up the scientific community with his ideas about evolution and natural selection. Practical applications of electricity were only just beginning to be felt out, and it would still be nearly a hundred years before Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. The “Big Bang” theory of the birth of the universe wouldn’t be developed until the 20th century. In the time of the United States’ founding there was much unexplained by science, so religion filled the void. In a sense, religion almost was science for many people, and Christianity was simply the way of life as a result.

But times change. In over 200 years, science has overtaken religion as the primary method by which we explain and understand the world around us. Just because our nation’s founders may have been predominantly Christian doesn’t mean that Christianity remains to this day an appropriate foundation for government and social policy. The separation of church and state is critical to protecting the considerable advances in human knowledge over the last two centuries.

And it’s not just about the religion-versus-reality debate, either. The overt partisanship on display here is stunning. The new curriculum now requires the U.S. government to be referred to as a “constitutional republic” rather than “democratic”. Why? Because there’s a “Democratic” party in this country, and they’re the opposition? How fucking childish is that?

There’s more:

The Dallas Morning news reports that the curriculum standards adopted Friday by a 9-5 vote along party lines on the elected board have “a definite political and philosophical bent in many areas.”

“For example, high school students will have to learn about leading conservative groups from the 1980s and 1990s in U.S. history – but not about liberal or minority rights groups that are identified as such. Board members also gave a thumbs down to requiring history teachers and textbooks to provide coverage on the late U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy while the late President Ronald Reagan was elevated to more prominent coverage in the curriculum. In addition, the requirements place Sen. Joseph McCarthy in a more positive light in U.S. history despite the view of most historians who condemn the late Republican senator’s tactics and his view that the U.S. government was infiltrated by Communists in the 1950s.”

The new curriculum also requires that students learn about the “unintended consequences” of programs like the Great Society and affirmative action, and it elevates to prominence conservative organizations like the Moral Majority and the Heritage Foundation.

There were other, even more embarrassing things that were proposed but (thankfully) ultimately didn’t pass. Things like renaming the slave trade to the “Atlantic triangular trade”. Because we wouldn’t want children to think about slavery as, you know, a thing that actually happened.

It’s not that teaching students about the conservative perspective and its effect on our nation’s history is a bad thing, in and of itself. In fact, a healthy debate about the ideological differences of the right and the left is an excellent exercise in critical thinking and, when properly informed, a bountiful resources for civics education. But this isn’t about balance: it’s about swinging the pendulum so far in the other direction that anything even resembling liberalism is unequivocally wiped out.

I’ve been a resident of Austin for just under a year, and in that time I’ve come to love this city dearly. The fact that this travesty of education policy took place quite literally right down the street makes me ashamed and angry. This decision is anti-intellectualism at its zenith, and when the next opportunity arises, I will be voting to kick these people off the board.

Conquistador’s Design Philosophy

I liked how Conquistador turned out for Ludum Dare, but as it was a 48-hour project it missed a lot of its potential. For the past few weeks I’ve been building out the game proper. Much of that work has been writing an event editor and bolstering the game’s fundamental systems. The most important thing for this game is event variety: specifically, I need to author a lot of unique events, lest the game become repetitive, so a sophisticated event editor was a critical investment. (It’s also kind of a neat thing, which I’ll be posting more about soon.)

The tech improvements are, at this point, pretty much done, so it’s time to move on to event authoring. Events are the heart and soul of Conquistador‘s design and will represent (and implement) the majority of the game’s higher-level mechanics, like claiming islands for the Crown or trading resources with native peoples.

In order that everything drive toward a consistent vision, I’ve written up a brief design philosophy for the game. This is a work-in-progress, and I’m extremely interested in your comments and reactions.

Philosophy

The game is about exploration (moving around the map), resource management (acquiring treasure and trading supplies), and risk versus reward (making discrete choices in CYOA-style event pop-ups).

Game mechanics are designed to be focused, minimalist, clear, and accessible. The game is self-documenting and intuitive to play without a detailed manual or tutorial.

The game will never waste your time. Starting a game is a one-button affair: there’s no need for an arduous “game setup” process. There are no laborious attempts at story or cutscenes to endure. The design deliberately avoids any incentive for farming, grinding, or scumming. Game sessions are intentionally short, generally well under half an hour.

The game employs permadeath as a means of promoting freedom and progress. A “completionist” mentality has the potential to destroy this game, as the world is theoretically infinite. Permadeath obviates this mentality entirely and allows you to focus on the immediate experience. Because sessions are short, deaths do not mean a great deal of lost time, and besides, death is educational.

There are no achievements, trophies, medals, or other secondary rewards. The game rejects Skinnerian game design and strives to be fun for its own sake.

You are the captain. The game will never subvert your authority for the sake of “story”. While the events around you are chaotic, you are always given a choice how to respond to those events.

Replayability is key, and accomplished by a combination of a randomized world, emergent situations (as a function of movement and storms, resource management, and event selection), and broad event variety.

There are many unique events in the game, far more than can ever be experienced on a single play. Additionally, a not-insignificant number of events have high rarity. The end goal is a game that continues to surprise on the 10th, 50th, and 100th plays, and beyond.

Events provide meaningful choices. No-brainers are a waste of your time.

Events are chosen randomly; however, each type of island (as well as storms and the open sea) has a general theme to which its events are fit. Thus you can begin to estimate potential risks and rewards at a location before even dropping anchor.

Both risks and rewards are of uncertain magnitude until the moment they are engaged. As a general rule: rewards are always led into by risks, but risks do not necessarily lead to rewards.

Within an event, risks are telegraphed and there is always an out. For example: before entering a dangerous cave, you’ll receive an action describing the cave as dangerous, and a choice whether to enter or go back. This means you always own your decisions. If you meet an untimely end, it will be obvious what you should have done differently.

Conversely: It is perfectly okay for random events to kill you without warning, provided you have used poor resource management. For example: you may run aground on a hidden reef and sustain some finite damage to the hull. This event occurs without warning, and if the hull is already in poor shape, you may shipwreck immediately. This may appear contradictory to the above; however, the idea is that the game communicates the cause of your sudden death appropriately so that, as above, it will be immediately obvious what you should have done differently.

Comments?

As I mentioned above, I’m extremely interested in your comments and reactions to this philosophy. It is a work-in-progress and certainly subject to revision and improvement.

What do you think?