A Game Called 'id'

A Simple Game Idea

On my way home from work tonight, I had an idea for a game, a game that I am calling 'id'.

At the start of the game you are assigned an arbitrary shape placed inside an arbitrarily shaped container. You can change your shape but only to a limited extent (the shape is somewhat elastic and resists attempts at reshaping, a little bit like playdough). You cannot change the shape of the container, but it will arbitrarily change shape sometimes, and if the new shape of the container forces the player's shape to be out of bounds, the out of bounds portions of the player's shape are lost, incurring a move penalty. You win the game by getting your shape to match the shape of the container and you are ranked on leaderboards based on how long it takes and how many moves you used.

The game has two difficulty settings: 'Reality' and 'Fantasy'. In Fantasy mode, you can also alter the shape of the container to match your shape and the player's shape can never be out of bounds. Fantasy mode also has no leaderboard or scoring - every player can win.

Endings, Expectations & Choices: The Mass Effect 3 ending and Analogue: A Hate Story

When I was a kid, I went through a period of consuming choose your own adventure books in mass quantities. It was the merging of books and games, my two loves, so I kept telling myself that, as the amalgamation of the two, they were even better. But they weren’t better. I never identified with my character in those books the way I identified with Bilbo in ‘The Hobbit’ or Hazel in ‘Watership Down’. And they were definitely not as exciting as stomping mushrooms in Super Mario Bros or hitting things with Simon’s whip in Castlevania. Obviously the gameplay was lacking because there isn’t much you can do with “turn to page 67” (even adding a die roll and combat system, like some of the more advanced versions did, didn’t do much to increase the sense of risk and accomplishment inherent in games like Super Mario Bros and Castlevania), but why was the story not as immersive? The theory I think a lot of us who make games operate from is that offering player choices creates a sense of investment in their character and in the story that supersedes that of a novel or film; however, in my experience, that is seldom the case.

Guild Wars 2 June BWE

Last weekend was the second Beta Weekend Event for Guild Wars 2, so I spent most of the weekend playing it.

I already had a Charr thief I'd made for the last beta event, but I made a couple of other characters, a Norn engineer and a Human necromancer. I ended up mostly playing the engineer because I really enjoyed the class and the Norn starting area. The thing I've found so far is that each class allows for a fairly wide range of playstyles while each still keeps their own unique flavor. The engineer uses pistols, rifles and shields, and has a wide range of utility skills from turrets (some for healing and some for damage/control) to grenades to elixirs (providing buffs to the player and/or nearby players). I highly recommend playing quite a bit with different skill/weapon combinations because it really changes how the class plays.

I did some crafting - leatherworking and huntsman on my engineer. Leatherworking is pretty much what you would expect, crafting various forms of medium armor and inscriptions to buff said armor, while huntsman is mostly for ranged weapons. The crafting system is interesting - once you choose your crafting professions (you can have two) you gain some basic recipes. You skill up by crafting things and you learn new recipes through either (rarely) purchasing them from vendors or through discoveries. On the crafting interface there is a tab for recipes and another tab for the discoveries, where you select 3 or 4 components to craft something and 'discover' a new recipe. It's fairly obvious what items you need to craft for a discovery. For example, for a new pistol discovery I put an inscription and the pistol components together, which created an upgraded version of the pistol recipe I already knew. My only issue with it is that my huntsman skill progressed much more quickly than my leatherworking, because I had trouble getting enough leather to craft the things I needed to improve my skill. So while my huntsman crafting skill advanced ahead of my gear level, my leatherworking lagged pretty far behind. Still, overall I found the crafting system fairly enjoyable. It is grindy but not tediously so (at least for me).

I might post some more thoughts later, but for now, have some screenshots.

Podcasts

Anyone have any suggestions for good gaming or game dev podcasts? Looking for some aural inspiration to listen to while I do other things.

I'll make sure to post a follow-up on what I find.

Thanks!

Diablo III: Not Quite Awesome

So, like most of you, I've been playing a lot of Diablo III. I've mostly been playing my Witch Doctor (level 52 and in Hell Act 1 now), mostly solo though some grouping as well. Some of the fights have been an interesting challenge and Hell is noticeably more challenging than Nightmare (Normal was a joke). Crafting and the Auction House have both been somewhat disappointing so far - crafting is generally more costly than justify its rewards and the Auction House has a disturbing habit of being up and down all the time as they sort out various issues with it (it's also rather lacking in search functionality and limits users to 10 listings which is a bit disappointing though I understand it).

Blizzard posted a dev blog this morning (Game Design Update) describing some of the issues they're seeing with balance and play-feel as well as roughly outlining some of their intended solutions. It's well worth a read if you're interested in Blizz's perspective about the course of Diablo III, and of course I have a few thoughts about it.

A Beta By Any Other Name...

A Beta By Any Other Name...

TERA, Diablo III and Guild Wars 2

A couple of weeks ago, like many other people, I participated in the betas for TERA and Diablo III. While I wasn't particularly thrilled by either, they both had some interesting elements.

TERA

I'll admit, I only spent an hour or two on the TERA beta - back issues and a lack of compelling interest in the game got in the way. Overall, it seemed fairly polished, although everything was every bit as crowded as you expect an open beta to be. When I looked at the demo at E3 last year, I was impressed by the combat mechanics, and I still think they are an interesting innovation. However, combat does not an MMO make, so I was more curious about the world and the quests... unfortunately the writing is very uninspiring (Gary Gannon of GamebreakerTV dubbed it "TERA-ble", a pun almost as bad as the writing), at least in the prologue and starting area, and the pretty animations that impressed me at E3 got lost in the overall business of every location (open beta overpopulation). I'm sure if I'd played for longer I could have gotten away from that, but again, pretty animations are nice but not enough to keep me playing. The character designs are pretty but I'm getting a little tired of overly sexualized female characters in these games and it would have been nice to be able to make a badass female warrior who actually looks badass. One thing they did that I thought was interesting was start you out at level 20 for the prologue (you're reset to level 1 once you complete the prologue) so you get a little taste of some of the abilities you'll gain later on.

Beat Fez, Now What?

I beat FEZ today. I mean, I finished the game two days ago, but today I really completed it. As in, all achievements unlocked, 209.4% completion, saw the 'all cubes collected' ending. The game sunk its claws into my completionist side and wouldn't let me go until I was done; it also reminded me that I really do like platformers, especially the part that involves searching for and collecting every last little piece.

I find it interesting that one of the puzzles ended up being solved by collaboration. It's a little frustrating that there's no real answer (yet, anyway) as to what it means or if it's just an easter egg, and I'm not sure if I approve of a puzzle that seems to have only been solvable through brute force. It's definitely not the kind of game design I aspire to, anyway - as interesting as it is to see how people worked together to resolve it, I'd prefer for solutions to be something that one can logic through on one's own (and it kind of goes back to what I said in my earlier entry about not requiring mind reading skills of your users).

My initial irritation with the Tetris/code input puzzles (link contains spoilers) faded after I realized a couple of things: a) the thumbstick is strangely more reliable than the d-pad for directional input for them and b) the code isn't actually all that complicated when you stop and think about it. My main remaining frustration with them is that certain ones it's quite difficult to get the right angle to view them correctly (I'm talking about ones that require you to be in NG+).

The entire fabulous game soundtrack is on Youtube, I highly recommend checking it out so I'm helping you out by embedding the playlist:



I'm not sure what to do next now. I'm having some back issues that make sitting at my computer difficult so PC games are probably out, but I have a cold so staying in and playing games the next day or two sounds like a brilliant plan.

These are the options I am considering:

1. Replay Mass Effect
2. Finish Dead Space
3. Finish Red Dead Redemption
4. Play some other Xbox game
5. Watch movies/shows

Thoughts?

FEZ, What Are You Doing to Me?

I got into a couple betas this week (including Diablo III) and I was going to tell you about that (it's still coming but later) but I got sidetracked by a little thing called FEZ.

Before I tell you my thoughts on FEZ, I feel I should first tell you that I have a Rule for myself when it comes to what games I play. I came up with this rule at some point after I'd been doing QA work for a year or so. It's a simple rule: "Don't play anything that feels like Work."

Mostly this means anything that isn't fun, but also anything that's buggy enough to seriously impinge on my enjoyment (SWTOR fell, in part, to this aspect of my Rule). Now, fun is a subjective evaluation, and there are plenty of games that I do not consider fun that many otherwise sensible people enjoy. Puzzle games, for instance. I very rarely find puzzle games fun, or any game whose gameplay is predicated on solving a puzzle that is clearly the warped product of some twisted mind who likes to fiendishly torment the poor saps who were foolish enough to purchase their game. I can't stand Braid, for example. (I know I've lost a lot of you at this point.) Or Machinarium or many of the classics of the point and click adventure game genre, because they're all essentially puzzle games. Or as I like to call them "Read the Mind of the Demented Designer" games. If I ever make a puzzle game, I will a) have someone else design the puzzles because I am clearly not demented enough and b) have a murderous alternative to puzzle solving (especially any Damn Jumping Puzzle™), probably some sort of cruel demi-god who demands a blood sacrifice and then does the puzzle for you. (And there will be no penalty or bad ending for the player who takes the blood sacrifice route. This is because I vastly prefer Shooting Things to Reading Minds.) The exception to this are the really stylish and hilarious Monkey Island games as well as Grim Fandango - they get a pass on account of being really, really well written and hilarious. Otherwise, it's a big N-O to demented puzzles for me.

From all the buzz about FEZ, I suspected that it fell into this category, but also that I should still try and play it (like I tried to play Braid and many other games). And it turns out that for some reason I bought a bunch of Microsoft points a while back and then never used them. So I bought FEZ, figuring I'd eventually check it out but not really expecting to play it.

I was partially right.

It actually fails my Rule on both counts. It is one of those Fiendishly Twisted puzzle games and it is also incredibly buggy. So far it's only crashed on me once and otherwise the bugs have been limited to horrible framerate issues and the occasional extremely long load time (>5 minutes once or twice). According to raptr, I'm 10 hours and 4 achievements into the game and it pains me not to pick up the controller RIGHT NOW and play it instead of writing this (also laundry and various other chores that need to be done today).

Why is it sucking me in so much?

Well, for one thing, I think it's a gamer's game. It references so many classic console and puzzle games of the past that are much beloved by many of us (including me) that I find myself looking for/hoping for more references. Mario, Tetris, Castlevania, to name a few. The music (many have commented on how incredible the music is already), the art style, are all reminiscent of those days of yore that many of us (especially if you've been playing since the NES days) remember fondly.

Some of the puzzles are the kind I hate, that basically I have no chance of ever figuring out on my own on account of not being a Mind Reader, but quite a few are interesting and fun. More than once I've come across something and thought to myself "If I put this in my game, it would do this" and lo and behold, that's what it does. Sometimes I'm playing with the world just to play with it and the goal (mind you, I'm still not even sure what the goal is - I think some old man in a village told me but I seem to have forgotten in a haze of wonderment) falls to the wayside.

However, late last night in my voyage I found something disturbing. A number of the puzzles require that one decipher a sequence of characters and then execute a sequence of button presses in specific locations. I eventually cheated and looked up one of these and even knowing exactly what I was supposed to do, it took me a good twenty minutes to execute it. Admittedly, it was late and I was tired and I kept getting confused about which sequence of button presses I was supposed to be executing, but I really, really cannot stress enough how much I hate these kinds of puzzles. They're the same sort of combination of "memorize a sequence" and "execute perfectly" that makes me hate, hate, hate jumping puzzles.

So I'm going to cheat and look them all up. It doesn't do anything for me to sit there staring at a sequence of symbols and write them down and decode them and then have to execute a series of button presses. Obviously I can't get out of the button presses (no cruel demi-god to do them for me in this game) but at least I can bypass the rest.

I'm not even sure why I'm still playing; this should be the Last Straw in breaking my Rule. But I am, and I wouldn't be surprised if I "finished it" whatever that means.

Followup to That Wistful Feeling

A few weeks ago I posted this discussing my feelings about the Mass Effect 3 ending.

But Virtual Shackles sums it up much better (and more humorously):

That Wistful Feeling (Mass Effect)

Note: While I do discuss my feelings about the end of the Mass Effect trilogy, this post contains no spoilers. I make no such voucher for any comments that may or may not be left.

When I walked out of the last Lord of the Rings movie, I had a feeling that I seldom got from a movie but frequently got from books - that utterly satisfied and yet nostalgic feeling of ending.