Thoughts on some XBLIG games.

Ok, so over December, XBLIG (xbox live indie games) have had (/are having?) this "winter uprising" thing, which is basically all of the good XBLIG developers promoting themselves and eachother in order to rebel against the endless stream of bullshit massage apps and fart games.
And I downloaded a bunch of them. (and you should too, the ones in this post are all only 80 points. You'd be mad NOT to buy them!!!!!)
And I want to talk about them. I want to talk about them individually and together. So I will do that, in that order. And you can't stop me!

So the games I got from the promotion are, coincidentally, all shmups. First I got Hypership Out of Control. It's upward-scrolling, and its central conceit is that you are constantly accelerating and you have to dodge out of the way of obstacles. There are 10 waves, and on each wave your maximum speed increases, but there is a mode where there's no max speed and you just constantly accelerate until shit gets crazy. And it's awesome. It's a great idea, and they pull it off really well. There are well-placed rewards for going onto more dangerous routes, there are clever power ups and it's got a kickass soundtrack. It's great. It's really really great. It's got a great sense of humour and some self-aware silliness that is awesome.

Second is Decimation X3, which is a lot more space-invaders than it is shmup. And it's awesome. Wave after wave of space invader dudes come and attack you, and when you shoot them, they sometimes drop power ups. and in the power ups comes the awesomeness. Every power up stacks, so you end up with crazy spread and rapid fire and stuff going on. This gives you a similar sense of acceleration to what goes on in Hypership Out of Control (and even more similar to the third game I wanna talk about).
Your ship quickly becomes this ridiculously powerful thing, ripping through the dudes like nobody's business, but the enemies are also getting more powerful, and this is what I think makes this game especially good. Every wave, the enemies start shooting more. I couldn't tell you exactly how it works (obviously) but I think that every X seconds, a random alien shoots, and X gets smaller every wave. This means that you end up being totally showered in bullets, and it gets super bullet-helly, but this ALSO means that when you're down to the last dude of a wave, he is shitting out bullets at an almost constant rate, speeding left and right. It takes what made the last dude in space invaders hard (you have to shoot at where he is going to be by the time your bullet reaches him) and then adds the difficulty of a really intense bullet shower. You've got to concentrate on both things at once or you're totally stuck. And it's great.
Oh also another aspect of this I want to talk about is the visual feedback it gives you. Everything has awesome particle effects. When you kill a dude, he pops in a really satisfying way. When YOU die, you pop in a ridiculous explosion that fills the whole screen with particles. Every power up you collect, the power up's description pops up in the middle of the screen Sometimes you get a power up that showers down a whole row of power ups, like 20, maybe, all at once in a single horizontal line, so you have to line yourself up somewhere and just charge through them to collect as many as you can. And when you do that, the middle of the screen becomes this column of text full of all these different power ups. And it's really neat. Powerups in games, especially slightly goofy/retro games, need more of that kind of feedback. I've been playing AAAAA Reckless Disregard for Gravity recently, and something that game really gets right is feedback when you're doing something correctly. It makes a small "ding!" noise when you are close enough to an object to be collecting hugs, and it makes a longer more different jingle sound when you collect kisses, and every 10 kisses and 25 hugs, you get a voice telling you how many hugs/kisses you have. Also its points are based on fuckin HUGS and KISSES. Also when you hit a score plate it makes a smash sound and "score plate hit, +whatever" comes up in the middle of the screen, whewre you'd be looking anyway. It's a great game.

But I digress. Onto the third game, which I now realise is not actually part of the Winter Uprising thing. And is also by the same people that did Decimation X3. And also I don't have much more to say about it than what I said about the other two games. But: Score Rush. It is a twin-stick shooter, a la Geometry Wars. Left stick move, right stick shoot, trigger to drop a bomb. It is also very bullet-helly, with bosses that have super specific shooting patterns that you have to carefully navigate. (Also you have a really tiny hit-box, which is a really cool thing. Dodging a big lumbering ship between bullets is less fun than a tiny blob in the middle of your ship) It's got the same thing as decimation X3 as far as powerups, where certain enemies will either make your shots more powerful, or add another wingman on your tail. Eventually, you've got a huge spread of bullets ejecting out of you, and you've got like, 8 dudes following you and all shooting smaller spreads of bullets in the same direction. Again, it's got nutty particle effects that are super neat. It's got a great thing where, once you've maxed out your gun, any pickups you get that would improve your gun act as a mini-bomb that will take out some (but not all) of the bullets on screen, giving you some breathing room. It's fun! It's a lot of fun!

Ok. so you've got the backdrop. Now I want to get to the meat of this post. All 3 of these games have (local) multiplayer options. I played all 3 of these games with my flatmates. They all have the same problem. First: local multiplayer is great. All of the most fun times I've had with video games have been me and a few other dudes shooting the shit in the same room while shooting at shit on screen. I have issues with online multiplayer (which maybe I'll get into on a later blog post eventually but probably not) but local multiplayer is great. It's the best.

That said: these three games are all difficult. Real difficult. Like, I haven't finished any of them. They are all super hard, which is part of their appeal. But giving all the players individual lives brings some problems. I've played these games a bunch now, so I've got it down. I can get through to wave 7/8 of Hypership fairly easily, but the first time I played, I couldn't get through to wave 3. And my flatmates are the same. So about 60% of the time we spend playing these games, I'm the only one alive. (now to be fair, I think that HOOC has a "give away lives" button that I didn't notice until after the last time I played multiplayer, so it has this problem the least of the 3).
The fun of DX3 and SR is the power that you get once you're a ways into the game. The way you're tearing dudes apart in their hundreds where you had to aim carefully at the start. But the multiplayer messes this up. The powerups have to be split up between us, the acceleration is slower, the rush is slowed. I don't see why it couldn't have a 3-player leaderboard separate from the others, where we all get every power. It would be so fun to have three ridiculous ships dodging and weaving, destroying everything in their path. But as is, you've got to share out the powerups, it slows the ramp-up down, and the ramp-up is half the fun.

Again, I feel like I've gone into very stream-of-consciousness territory here, but I do have a point. Fun vs. Difficulty. When I play a game in single-player, the difficulty is a challenge to get past. I fucking love Super Meat Boy, because of the hurdles it gives you to jump. The difficulty makes that game an excellent single-player experience. In multiplayer, the fun isn't derived from difficulty, it's from playing with the other people, whether it be cooperative or competitive (or a fight for the highest score, as it is with these games). Once a person is out of the game, the fun takes a real hit. While it would obviously change the game experience a lot, and maybe it's just not what these particular developers want their games to be, I don't see why dying can't just give you a points penalty, or maybe just take away some of your powers. Maybe make it golf-style, where the winner's the person that lost the least lives. Or even shared lives! If everybody's sharing their lives, then everybody's playing the whole time that the game is going. Obviously it gives you trouble if one person is crap at the game, but all the more to smack talk about!

So, developers: I implore you. Keep as many players in your multiplayer games for as long as possible, please. The difference in skill between the players shouldn't be an obstacle to playing together.

Indie game dev blog part 2: The Basics

Hi!
So I've done some work on the indie game! I am going to post some stuff about what I've done so far, even though it's still very very bare-bonesy. Like, I haven't even programmed past basic platforming yet.
Still.

The game I've been working on is title-less at the moment, but it's about the elements. (The Fire Water Air Earth elements, not the Oxygen Helium whatever whatever elements.) Video games have NEVER involved the elements before!!!
But I do plan on being more clever about it. It's puzzle platforming. You get different powers based on which element you have equipped, and those powers interact with the environment in different ways. I don't really want to go into that too specifically yet, because I don't really know how it'll work too specifically yet.

I've got some CONCEPT ART, though!Regular dude, Earth dude, Air dude, Fire dude, Water dude. Probably I will change my mind about the fire dude again, he looks a little janky, but lizards that are associated with fire (salamander) don't have that many interesting features, or at least none that I have the skill to exaggerate for a tiny sprite. And chameleon eyes are cool. Also the donkey kong-ness of the earth monkey dude might be a little too stupid, I might change that. Fuck, I might change it all.
Anyway, the colours are relevant, and I've tried to give them different head shapes (except the fire dude, I now notice. dammit.) so that you can tell them apart in silhouette. In case I ever need to use silhouettes.

Oh, also: here is what the actual game looks like right now.
the coloured blobs are to change your element with, and the black blobs are the floor. the stairs on the right is to test how high the dude can jump. it's all very exciting. The dude drops water when he is the water element! and they make the blocks wet! but this was before I decided on the animal head design, it probably won't do that in the end probably.
But yeah, this is where I'm at, a week in. I'm gonna try to do some animations today, and some programming tomorrow.
I am still very excited about this whole thing! It's such fun!

Indie game dev blog part 1: The Rules

Ok, that last post was the product of sleep deprivation, a couple beers and like 4 coffees. I was a little bit out of it, but the sentiment is still accurate. I am going to try to make an indie game, and I am going to try to do it well. Just for my own sake, I'm gonna set myself some ground rules so I don't end up doing no work or doing a fuckload of work for nothing.
RULE 1: The game should be playable ASAP. I've tried to make games before but I tend to get lost in the design process long before I've made anything that you can play. I'll take the concept of a platformer RPG, and turn it into a randomly generated story with 100 characters and 1000 story elements and it just starts to get a little crazy. So following Derek Yu's (of Spelunky and Aquaria) ideas from Finishing a Game, and start the damn game and try to make it into something I can show other people quickly, so I don't get lost in feature creep.
RULE 2: I should work on it for at least a few hours a week. I'm at uni, I've got a social life, and I have an extremely active reading articles on the internet schedule. There's always an excuse not to do something you wanna do. So I'm gonna set aside a couple hours a week, at least, to do some work on the game. Coding, drawing, whatever. At least if I stick to a schedule then I'll more easily be able to tell what is within my own limits as a developer and what's realistically within my own limits as a dude who has shit to do.
RULE 3: I gotta try to do as much of it as possible by myself. I know people that are better programmers than me, better artists than me, and better writers than me, but what I want to do here is try to make something on my own. Again, part of this process is just to realise what my own limits are. If it becomes overwhelmingly difficult immediately, I know it's probably a lost cause and I should recruit some people that know what they're doing better, but I've gotta at least give it a go. The only thing that I already know immediately is that I'm gonna be useless in the sound/music department, but I got hell of musically inclined mates so that should be no bother.
RULE 4: I can't put any code into the game that I don't understand. There are a ton of tutorials and example projects out there for Game Maker. I've taken chunks of different people's tutorials and messed around with them a little and shoved them into a game before without really understanding them. But I don't wanna do that anymore. If I'm gonna get any better at programming, I've got to understand what the code is saying, so if I do take any coding ideas from other people (which I will probably have to, given how little I know about coding), I've just got to make sure that I understand what it means before I put it in the game. Ideally, I'll look at the code, learn what the individual parts mean, and rewrite it myself.

So yeah. Those are the rules that I thought of between my incoherent post yesterday and this hopefully more coherent post today. Probably I'll keep posting to this blog when fun new things develop with the development. I've got a bunch of cool ideas for games, and I'm really excited to actually get to work on them and show them off.

Oh also if you've got any other ideas for ground rules I should set myself, tell me in the comments! I am going into this basically blind, so any advice is good advice.

I am going to make an indie game

Clearly I haven't made much of an effort to keep up with this blog, but I don't really care because it was basically just an excuse to see if I could keep up with a blog. Which I could not. But maybe now I will be able to!

I plan on developing an indie game.
I love video games, and I think about video games all the time.
In the summer, I made a prototype of a platformer where everything was white noise. It wasn't excellent, and it wasn't that clever, but I did it and it wasn't hard.
Recently I watched a video on Giant Bomb with an interview with the guys developing Bastion, and when asked "what do you know now that you wish you could impart to other indie devs out there?" they said "that you can just start." and I can! and I will! I can do basic programming in game maker, and with some work, I can probably do some complicated programming in game maker!
I listened to a lecture by Jonathan Blow (of Braid fame) and it really got me thinking. I really think that I have at least a couple of games in me that can totally resonate with people. More than that, I really think that I could make those games.

I've got a few ideas on how to do this thing, on what rules I should set myself to make sure that I get this done. But that's another story for another blog post. This post is about setting my plans forth in the sacred internet tablets so that I can't take it back. on a blog that nobody reads.

but yeah. I'm gonna fucking do this shit. It's gonna be good.

Cooperation

People that follow me elsewhere on the internet (so, anybody reading this) already know of my obsession with extreme mouse torture simulator Transformice. Transformice is a multiplayer flash game wherein the players control mice that need to get to the cheese and then get to the mouse hole. One of the players gets magical abilities to create platforms to help the other mice towards the cheese. If you get the cheese first, a number in your profile will go up. If you get that number up high enough, you will be able to change a title that is displayed under your name. That is pretty much the only advantage to speed. Nevertheless, everybody tries to get to the exit first, most likely killing every other mouse in the process. (For more information check out the awesome Meet the mouse video by EvilDaedalus.)

In short, getting cheese is better than getting no cheese and getting cheese first is better than getting cheese in any other position. This system breeds some real cooperative/competitive action that is awesome to watch. People will fuck over everybody else to get to the cheese before them. People will rush towards the cheese, hoping that the level they're in won't be one that kills them for doing that. It's awesome, and it's really this weird system of cooperation married to competitiveness that keeps me going back to the game all the time.

So that's great. A game system where the point is to fuck eachother over and have fun. Awesome. Then take Burnout Paradise. It's a driving game where the single player is basically based around driving around a big open world, doing races and stunts and hitting into other cars. The single player is great fun, I just spend my time riding around and titting about in my big silly car. It's fantastic.

But recently I tried the multiplayer for the first time, and the multiplayer is goddamn nightmarish. Set in the same open world, you are now driving with a load of other people. You get set "challenges," some of which involve doing a stunt individually, some of which involve doing a specific stunt in a specific place, and some of which involve driving to a place and meeting all the other drivers there. This should be fun, right? You're basically doing the same stuff as single player, but you've got other people around you and you're given specific goals. Nope, it's not fun. It's nightmarish, like i just told you earlier in this paragraph. Pay attention. Jeez.

The game doesn't reward you for fucking over the other players, but it does acknowledge that you fuck over the other players. If you wreck another person's car, they are your "nemesis" and until they crash you back and settle the score, that relationship sticks. As far as I can tell, it means nothing. Apparently just this small incentive is enough for people to spend all their time on the game barging into other cars and wrecking their challenges. It's really weird.

I've been trying to think of a way to tie this post off with a nice bow, but I can't. Basically all I've concluded is that griefers exist, and in some games I'm fine with it and in some games I'm not. You get any group of people playing a game cooperatively, and you'll get assholes trying to ruin other people's fun. I guess all you can really do is make a game that embraces it, or make a game where kicking griefers off the game is easy.

Side note: another cooperative game that I recommend trying is Moonbase Alpha. My laptop can't really handle it, but it's still super fun. It's a NASA game where you are a astronaut. You have to hook up the solar panels to the life support machines before all your astronaut friends in the moonbase die. It's free, it's a grand old time, and you get to control a silly little robot with a funny arm.

Dwarf Fortress

For the past week or so, I've been playing extreme cat breeding sim Dwarf Fortress.

If you're a Serious Internet Person, you've probably at least heard of it. It's got some significant infamy for how nuts it is on so many levels. Let's examine some of these levels of nuts, shall we? (Yes.)

The game looks like a 5 year old got a hold of his dad's typewriter and just went nuts all over the Johnson report. It's an ASCII game, so everything is represented by text characters rather than images. It is impenetrable to the untrained eye. The only way to work out what letters are supposed to represent is through checking it and memorising it. Even then, the same letter can mean a bunch of different things, depending on its colour or its background or friggin anything. You think you're being attacked by elks? They're elephants, idiot. Jeez.

Admittedly, this is made a lot less terrible by the graphics mods that are available, but it's still a nightmare. A group of migrant dwarfs arrive, and you're supposed to be able to tell that is a fish dissector. First you're supposed to imagine that there are any contexts where a fucking fish dissector is useful (there aren't), then you're supposed to work out that the blob he's holding isn't an arrow or a tiny word or whatever. It's horrible. Fucking hours I must have spent pressing [k] and hovering over objects that are meaningless.

Speaking of meaningless, there's no goal. There are no explicit objectives. It's like The Sims, but the members your love hexagon of lesbian astronauts (which represent 'your fortress') is destroyed by the postman (which represents 'a skinless elk that vomits poison dust') because you didn't double-lock the door. You gotta make your own fun, which you do. You start naming your dwarfs after in-jokes that nobody else will get or see. You put the cages of the crundles that have been pissing you off for the whole game in the magma pit. The game doesn't reward you for doing shit like that. The game doesn't reward you for anything. You're making up what you want to do, and seeing whether or not the game will fuck you over before you can do it.

The only way that the game ends is by your dwarves dying. In the first game I played, a cave spider blocked the way to the farm so my dwarfs all either starved or were eaten by the spider. You work really hard to build up an impenetrable fortress where you can make statues of the dwarf you named after yourself all day, and inevitably it is not so impenetrable.

Even if it is impenetrable, you just get bored. I get some serious Paradise Syndrome playing this game. I'll make a beautiful fortress that's never gonna be destroyed. It's huge, everyone's happy and there's no way for anybody to invade it. So I cut a hole in the wall to let the goblins in. So I send the army into the caverns to piss off some demons. So I get deliberately sloppy with my mining safety, see if I can't flood the place with magma. Losing is fun. That's the Dwarf Fortress motto. It's in the help menu, it's all goddamn over the wiki, and it's true.

I love Dwarf Fortress. If you wanna play, go over to the site and download that shit right now. If you wanna know how to play before you start (which you do, it makes no sense without someone explaining the basics) check out capnduck's excellent youtube tutorials. If you want an in-depth look at how a typical game might go, check out the Boatmurdered Let's Play, which gets very hilarious very quickly. If you've got time to waste and you're ready to get lost in your own mistakes, check it out. It's like nothing else I've ever played.