Thank God I Make Crap (And So Can You)

Today marked the end of 38 Studios and the second end of Big Huge Games, whom 38 Studios bought a couple years ago when they were going under. It's been a tumultuous week for Curt Schilling's company, with the news that they couldn't pay back their $75million loan from the state of Rhode Island, and now every employee getting pink slips. Sometimes business management is so bad it's inexcusable.

Cough

Which brings me to why I'm here. I mean, I'm in the same boat right? I run a company that makes games. Am I going to completely fuck over the hundreds of people I work with too?

The answer is NO and here's why. First, I work with about four people. We're small, close knit, and we're doing this out of love for the game we're making, not out of a desire to enter a market we know nothing about. Second, when we started out, we'd already made games and we found other people who'd made games to help us and determine the creative direction of the project, not just writers and comic book artists (protip). Finally, I'm not that guy. I keep my budgets at small as possible for a reason. I haven't had that many people play my games, Children of Liberty's Kickstarter wasn't anything to brag about, and its current alpha funding isn't doing so hot either (though it's on sale, 50% off for #becauseWeCan week). For this reason I keep my expectations on Earth.

Furthermore, when I started out, I didn't dive into the deep end of the pool without knowing how to swim. The MMO market is dangerous, and has been since 38 was founded. At any given point, there are about three subscription-based MMO's that make money: World of Warcraft, EVE Online, and a "MMO of the Month" (Age of Conan, Rift, Star Wars: Old Republic, take your pick). I started out with really small games, ones that hardly anyone has played. But you know what? I am fine with that. I am also fine with the fact that I have 4 or 5 gigs worth of unused prototypes. Like I was telling a friend of mine, I consider it my sketchbook. The only way to get good at any kind of artform is to keep making the art. 38 launched one game, which was already in development at Big Huge. Schilling bit off more than he could chew and the taxpayers of Rhode Island are going to have to eat the rest of it.

Don't let this discourage you from going into game development, even if you have no previous experience. Just don't have newbie ambition. If you're starting a company, you don't need to make an MMO. You can be as indie as you want, have a small team, and still make awesome games. The tools are available, even if you're poor. Or, if you're rich and want to get into game development, why not help fund some indie studios that can show you the ropes of development in return?

David Perry Challenge #002 - Dr. Mario

Dr. Mario is a puzzle game created by Nintendo in 1990. The game has you lining up pills of 3 different shades to clear viruses on the puzzle board. It's a very simple premise that ramps up the difficulty as the game goes on. Few puzzle games manage to create a perfectly straight difficulty curve as the game goes on. Dr. Mario does.

The primary resource in the game is the pills which Mario throws onto the board. Each pill has two halves, and each half is black, gray, or white. On the NES the colors are Red, Blue, and Yellow, probably one of the earliest examples of colorblind-friendly gameplay. This means each pill can be one or two colors, with six total variations. The game avoids falling into the tropes of Tetris or Match-3 by adjusting how the game is scored. Instead of awarding the player for just making matches with pills, players are only rewarded for making matches of four or greater that include the viruses scattered throughout the board, each of which is also black, gray, or white and the size of half a pill. When all viruses on the board have been cleared, the levels progress, and four more viruses are added to the board. While this does double the number of viruses on the board from the first level to the second, after that it actually becomes a smaller percentage increase per level (50%, 25%, 12.5%, etc.). This may seem like diminishing returns on the difficulty, but it gives the game value for your time spent playing and the board does start filling up pretty quickly. It allows the game to be elongated while never feeling like the player's time is just being milked.

The original Dr. Mario on NES is an early example of colorblind friendly gameplay.

To mix things up, there are also three speeds at which you can play the game (Slow, Medium, and Fast), two different songs to listen to while playing, and you can start at any level, from 0-12. However, starting at a higher level will not give you a higher score by default, so the challenge becomes a matter of survival instead of high score. Starting at a higher level is a great way to train for marathon sessions of the game, to help you get used to the higher pressure of a board that is nearly completely filled with viruses.

What makes Dr. Mario so much fun is its simplicity. All of its systems are on the surface, clear as day to the player. There is no back-end trickery, no subtle balance adjustments if you're doing too well (or too poorly), and no random powerups that throw the game for a loop. It's an old enough game too that your high score isn't even saved (on the Game Boy at least), so it's up to you to want to improve, not an online leaderboard laughing at your pathetic attempts to reach the Top 10.

In case you thought I only emulated it, here's proof of having the real thing!

There have in fact been many Dr. Mario games released, the most recent of which being Dr. Mario Express on the DSi. Yet, none of the future Dr. Mario titles have messed with the formula. Why fix what ain't broke? There have been some minor tweaks, though. For example, in the original Dr. Mario you would only see the next pill before it came onto the board. In the DSi and Wii versions, you see the next three. Dr. Mario on the Wii also had online play, a welcome (and rare) addition for any Nintendo game.

Dr. Mario on Wii features competitive online play for the first time in Dr. Mario's history.

Nowadays, with the introduction of microtransactions and online-gated gameplay (i.e. blocking out the player from enjoying the game if they are not connected to the internet for purposes of preventing piracy), I fear that a lot of the magic of Dr. Mario could be easily lost. Imagine if you dropped a dollar on the game and all of a sudden your next ten pills were “wild cards” that would make matches no matter where they went. Where would the challenge be in that? What about the fun? What I love so much about Dr. Mario is that it reminds me of a time when games were games, when developers weren't afraid to teach you all there is to know about a game in the first 30 seconds and that little bit created an infinite amount of replayability. If developers nowadays care about the gameplay, and not just about milking their players for all their money, they should take a serious look at Dr. Mario and revel in its simplicity. They should take note of how the formula for the gameplay hasn't changed in over twenty years, and yet it and its followups are amazing. That is truly saying something, and Dr. Mario is a truly great game.

David Perry Challenge #001 - Mirror's Edge

Today I bring you the first of the 100 game challenge, Mirror's Edge from Digital Illusions Creative Entertainment and published by EA in 2009. Video footage comes first and my 1-page writeup follows. This will be the format I follow every week.

Week 1: Mirror's Edge (DICE/EA, 2009)

Mirror's Edge is a first-person free runner designed with the intent to create a high stakes experience in an adrenaline-pumping setting. The use of high-contrast colorization - which itself contrasts many of the releases of the current generation's use of brown, dull materials – creates easily navigable pathways with the use of red-shaded objects to guide the player's eye. Combined with the design choice to have bullets unable to hit you when you are going over a certain speed, Mirror's Edge is tediously calculated simulation of a game. It's smoke and mirrors, a highly glossy prototype, but nothing more.

This is not to say that it's a bad prototype. Quite the contrary, Mirror's Edge successfully posits the thesis that a game which takes place from a First-Person view can be used for more than just shooting guns. The parkour mechanics go beyond the basics of running and jumping to include two different kinds of shimmies, wall-runs, 180 degree kick spins, zip-lining, and vertical climbing. The visuals are incredibly striking, with the outdoor having a strong emphasis on blues and indoors favoring greens. In order to finish the RGB trifecta, Reds are used sparingly in order to guide the player toward what they need to grab onto or run at next. It's a simple technique that eliminates some confusion in an otherwise highly detailed and sometimes confusing world.

However, the game is not without its faults. While the parkour mechanics are solid for the most part, a lot of it feels like a pixel-hunt. It is easy to gloss over your goal half the time or miss a jump because your “Death Dot” cursor happened to be off from where you were supposed to have it. While a “Death Dot” in many games can be a blessing of precision-based shooting, here it only serves to hamper the experience. The purpose of free running is just that - to be free in your running – and yet more than once I found myself unable to get through a section the way I wanted to. Even though it looked like a wall would be ideal for wall-running, or the gap between platforms easily jumped over, the section was specifically designed for you to shimmy across the ledge on the side. It is moments like this that force the realization that the player is being led; that any sense of agency they have in the game world is an illusion, and the whole game has been laid out to be played in a specific manner. Do it any other way and you will not only die but will have to replay the current section countless times before you are allowed to continue.

While Mirror's Edge makes itself out to be an open world, it only leads the player down a linear path. It's possible that this “illusion of freedom” motif mirrors, as it were, the game's totalitarian narrative. Any freedom one is led to believe they have is actually a carefully constructed ride, with ups and downs, glimpses of choice, and much like the game's high contrast aesthetics, shimmers of greatness. The game's challenge come from finding the path through levels laid out by the designers, not by creating your own as the game would have you hope would happen. The skill comes in the form of precisely timing and aiming your jumps (a slow-motion mechanic is included to assist in this endeavor and disarming enemies, though it almost seems as if it too was at one point included in the ride and was changed to a button-press at the last minute). While you can take enemies guns and shoot them, the game in no way encourages this behavior. Gunplay is a sloppy, slow, throwaway mechanic. Being that this is from the studio that brought us Battlefield, we know damn well that they are capable of forging solid first-person shooter mechanics. The gunplay is all part of the simulation. The player is given the illusion they can use guns, but that use comes at the cost of usability. In the end, it is a better choice to just throw the guns away. Even the bullets flying at you are all part of the ride and are themselves an illusory threat. There are a few tense moments to be found here, but once you realize just how shallow the rabbit hole actually is, the tension wears off quick.

There are some good ideas in Mirror's Edge, but they are all at odds with each other. The mechanics are shoehorned into an expressionistic use of narrative-as-gameplay, yet the gameplay itself can do nothing to alleviate the feeling that the roller-coaster is too well constructed. We are still safe.

Game Challenge - An Introduction

I have started a new channel on Youtube called "Don't Start" to hold all the videos for the David Perry Challenge. I have also posted the first video, outlining my goals for the challenge.



As it stands, I will playing games on the following systems:

• PC: 20 games
• XBox 360: 20 games
• PS2: 20 games
• NES: 10 games
• SNES: 10 games
• Gameboy: 10 games
• HP Touchpad: 10 games

I already have the list of games I want to play set, though I will not be revealing this list beforehand in case of any of it has to change for whatever reason.

Now, the tricky part. I am poor. Quite poor. Sentence fragment. In fact, I straight up can not afford to do this challenge, and I want to do it right. As I work in the game industry, I have not ever nor will I ever pirate games (Abandonware is another matter altogether, and I love Abandonia.com). I am wondering, since this is basically a combination of a thesis and a bit of a creative endeavor with the Youtube channel, if a Kickstarter would be a smart way to go to help me do this challenge right (I would need probably close to $1500, more if I expand the channel to include other kinds of videos). My other alternative would be to source games from the community and my friends, to see if anyone would be willing to let me have some of their old cartridges. However, I do have games in the list that are a download-only affair (like the ones for the Touchpad) so those will still eat into my available funds. Thankfully I have two years to get this all done, so hopefully by that point Children of Liberty will have sold a few more copies (won't you please help a starving indie out?).

I'd like to do some other stuff with this channel too. Podcasts, Let's Plays, News, maybe even bring in some other content creators so I still have time to work on Children of Liberty. Additional content depends on if other people want to contribute videos and if my development time permits me to be doing anything else. If this starts interfering with my development time I will have to put the challenge on hold, but with my current goals I should be able to do it.

Please make sure to Subscribe to the new channel as the first of my 100 games will be up some time next week(ish), and one a week from that point on!

David Perry's Game Design Challenge

Over the last several days, I have found myself utterly bored by my current game collection. Nothing has really sparked with me, I've had no desire to load up anything too in-depth or too frantic, so I find myself playing The Binding of Isaac over and over and over again, to the point where I have added another 20 hours of playtime to it and have only beaten it one more time (ugh). It's time for a change.

Enter David Perry from Gaikai, who has challenged students to play the Top 100 games on their platform of choice as listed as Gamerankings.com. For me, this would be the PC, however if I can manage it I would also like to throw in some NES/SNES, Gameboy, XBox 360, and PS2, so howabout the Top 20 games from each? I most likely have experience with a good 50% of this list anyway, but that's good because I don't have the money to buy all of these games. However, I have the money to buy a few, and my goal is not to play one a day but one a week. I will then make a video a week (yes, a VIDEO dammit, my own, more intellectual version of a Let's Play) detailing what makes each game fun, what design/graphical tricks are used, and what design patterns stand out to create the core experience of the game.

Over the weekend I'll be loading up on full games/demos for PC, as well as trolling around ebay for some classics for my NES/SNES hybrid machine, my old, dusty Gameboy Pocket, my underused PS2, and my 360 aka "The Netflix Machine."

Long story short, Mr. Perry, I may not be a student but I accept your challenge anyway!