Tagged: videogames

a troubled bloodline

A generous video caster and a fortuitous turn have placed a copy of Rogue Legacy in my hands and, in a little over a day, I’ve made it to the last boss. And I’m still conflicted about the whole thing.

See, I like customization. And, by all means, Rogue Legacy offers this. A huge tree of unlockable boosts applies to all your characters, while equipment and runes allow you to vary your loadout from one to the next. Neat! Where I have trouble is in how the game globally increases the cost of these options as you buy them. Whether you put one point into each of 25 categories or 25 points into one, the same cost modifier is applied to every future purchase. What this means is that I, having gone the former route of the generalist, have a very long and uninteresting grind in front of me. Although the potential of meaningful character-to-character choice is there, I simply can’t afford to buy all of the customization options I would like. Does this lead to greater feelings of consequence and player impact? Maybe. But in a game where you’re running through dozens or even hundreds of different attempts, it more than that leaves me feeling stuck and frustrated.

To address the question I asked in my blog post of a week ago, I’ve found that it’s not that the challenge has run out, just that the difficulty of the more challenging parts has been artificially inflated. I suppose this is true of any game with HP and damage statistics, but with RL in particular I’ve been irked by familiar enemies doing five times as much damage just because I’ve encountered them in a later area. Sure, they might be differently named and palette-swapped, but their modes of engagement are familiar. It’s really just an irritation when overlooking a haunted portrait (an obstacle familiar from the earliest stages of the game) suddenly removes a third of your health. Maybe I built my bloodline badly (actually, this is almost a certainty; generalism is an awful approach), but I’m left feeling cheated either way. Dark Souls doesn’t mess around with its difficulty. Yes, later-game enemies do more damage, but they’re entirely distinct: hollows are hollows and skeletons are skeletons. And, even though late-game enemies do indeed do more damage, that which the early-game enemies do is never negligible. You’re always forced to be careful and are rewarded for your practice and gradual skills development.

I’m not being entirely objective here. The rose-colored lenses I view Dark Souls through are tough to cast off. But where Dark Souls’ difficulty thrilled me until my avatar became too powerful, Rogue Legacy has stuck me in a place of impotence and demanded that I grind to improve my stats and options. It might just be an issue of timing; maybe DS simply lined up with the curve of my skill development where RL didn’t, but it’s frustrating all the same. But then I ask myself: would I rather have a game that’s a little more challenging than I’m comfortable with, or one that’s a little too easy? And I am conflicted again. Would that I might know my own mind.

pedigree

Having heard quite a bit about Rogue Legacy since its release last Thursday, I downloaded the demo yesterday and promptly lost two hours to it. Returning to it again that evening and then once more today, I’ve effectively conquered everything the demo has to offer. The game represents a tight synthesis of elements that have worked well in past platforming and adventure titles. For me it’s a fresh trip through fields of nostalgia, calling to mind:

  • Castlevania: Dealing with tricky enemy/platforming combinations while exploring a sprawling castle environment would be enough to suggest this, but the player’s reliance on melee attacks and a limited number of secondary weapons is what seals it. I’ll grant, though, that this influence is a particularly obvious one; several of Castlevania’s signature items are faithfully recreated in Rogue Legacy.
  • Spelunky: Permadeath around every procedurally-generated corner. Having a good run? Hold onto it as tightly as you can because once it’s lost you’ll never get it back.
  • Mega Man X: The feeling of speed and mobility you can achieve with the right combination of upgrades takes me all the way back to the X series, with its air dashes and wall jumps and such. Additionally, there’s an element of bullet dodging in Rogue Legacy that reminds me of some of X’s trickier boss fights.
  • Dark Souls: Entering in to a hostile world ill-equipped to deal with its numerous threats forces a certain caution, initially, then demands a gradual building of confidence and skill until you can finally topple obstacles that at one point seemed utterly insurmountable.

But despite all these warm fuzzy feelings, I’m conflicted about one thing. Difficulty scaling. Repeated playthroughs progressively increase the player’s baseline strength and capabilities, and by the end of my demo play I was able to reliably clear out all available areas. Surely the full version has harder areas to explore, but what stops these from becoming trivialized at some point, too? Where Spelunky starts you from a zero point each time, tying your success or failure primarily to your skill, a system of progressive and persistent growth means that, with enough time, some threats will become utterly meaningless. As soon as there’s no question of being able to get through an area, doing so becomes a chore rather than an engaging challenge. And that’s where things might fall apart for me.

That being said, Rogue Legacy continues to burn its image into my head. I can’t spare the $15 for it right now, but there’s a pretty good chance I’ll be able to give you a complete assessment at some point down the road. It just scratches too many itches to be ignored. Even if the challenge does run out, would it not be worth it for the time that it lasted?

app sass

So: Tetris Blitz. Whoa. Take a proven formula and a timeless original, then extract critical mechanics and substitute a wide array of pay-per-use flashy special powers. It’s strange they can still call it Tetris. The new “tap-to-place” mechanic is perhaps the most striking; the removal of the old dexterity and timing elements was initially pretty jarring, but upon further reflection I think it’s a pretty good compromise for touch-driven play. Tetris for a new generation? Maybe. Where it kills me is in its “everyone can win” structure– everyone can win, provided they’re willing to replenish a quickly-depleted store of in-game currency with real money. I appreciate the drive to keep old properties fresh and relevant in this ever-changing world of games, but seriously. Tetris nailed it, and I’ve yet to come across a successor that has done anything other than defile its corpse.

Single-device simultaneous multiplayer. On the suggestions of Michael Brough, I downloaded a few that would play on my device:
Circulets gave me some trouble, as fingers too quickly swiped off the screen would leave a dragged circle sitting right on the edge, rather than deposited for points as intended. If circles had just a little more momentum, I think it would be greatly improved. More than simultaneous players might also be neat.
Bam Fu has a really nice visual style, within which I particularly appreciated how cumulative round victories were counted on the fingers of each player’s in-game hand. When playing with more than two players, though, I found that tapping more than once to set targets to your colour was not an altogether intuitive action. You’ve got to think what the present colour is and then figure out the number of taps it will take to rotate it through the sequence and end on yours. Frantic, yes, but not in a fun way.
Bloop nailed it. Rather than tapping to make things your colour, you’re simply tapping on everything that already is your colour. This is much easier to parse, and more purely taps into the tangled-fingers rush that provides most of the thrill of these games. There are no distractions: simply do whatever you can to hit your blocks. And, best of all, keeping it basic frees up the players to start exploring game interactions beyond just what’s on the screen.

Dead Ahead got an early lead by having a clever title. It’s yet another variation on the “endless runner” genre, but I’ve really been enjoying its difficulty curve. The achievements tied to progress scale really well, and I’ve never felt choked by not buying in-game currency as I have in so many similar games. I have to make meaningful choices when it comes to my upgrade purchases, and as a result, I’m never overwhelmed by parallel loadout options. Where this game gets a bit strange is in its vehicles. The moped you start with, unupgraded, is a bit sluggish. Zombies have a pretty easy time catching up to you. So you upgrade it or you buy a new vehicle. Now you are irreversibly faster. By purchasing these higher-level rides, you are effectively increasing the difficulty, with no way to revert this. As a result, I’ve only upgraded once. I just can’t see the reason, otherwise; any faster and it seems like it would become a game of chance rather than of skilful dodging and careful ammo management. Odd. But enjoyable.

—

A small reflection on my recent gaming habits: I’ve been finding that iOS games, in their relative bite-sizedness, appeal much more strongly than larger games to my recent thirst-for-discovery and haste in dismissing the familiar. I can jump in, grok the mechanics, and jump out without feeling like I’ve run anything to death. Or, when things come together well, I can stay immersed for as little or as long as I please.

I’d like to view this, though, not as an increased ideation towards casual gaming, but as a gradually refining preference for simple elegance. I’m appreciating more and more the value of a game that draws you in quickly, engages you meaningfully, and leaves hungry for the next play. Maybe there’s some sinister social psychology entrenched in that model, but more prominently I think there’s an important lesson there in engaging all sorts of gamers, not just the self-professed hardcore.

after the honeymoon

Whoosh. Back from the cabin and still spinning a little bit. An excellent weekend with a perfect balance of games old and new, short and long, fiddly and flowing. But something surprising came up that I’m still chewing on.

Of the table games we played, three were new to me:  Castles of Burgundy, Mutant Chronicles: Siege of the Citadel, and Glory to Rome. Each is certainly a respectable and enjoyable game in its own right, but for some reason, each was a struggle for me. I found myself quickly irritated by one aspect or another of each of them and tended towards swift dismissal of their worth. My focus was squarely upon their shortcomings and I’m not sure that I would say that I “liked” any of them. Where did that come from? What happened to the berv of old, diving into a new game with multiple back-to-back plays and spun into excitement by the ongoing process of discovery? Each is not categorically different from all the games we’ve played in the past and, strangely, I had no such issues with those games. What’s going on in my head?

To take a stab at introspecting on all this, I think that my present framework for experiencing games is overmuch a critical one. “What is this? How is it different from other games I’ve played? How is it the same? What’s compelling or intriguing?” And, shouting down all these other questions: “What aspects don’t I like about it?” Perhaps I’m unconsciously assembling a mental compendium of design notes, setting myself up with a “How would I do this better?” And maybe there’s nothing wrong with that. But I don’t think it’s healthy to engage with games (supposedly the medium I’m devoting my life to) if enjoyment simply isn’t a possibility. I’m thinking critically, which might be good for my design proficiency, but I need to return to thinking exploratively; to take everything in and appreciate my mental synthesis of the experience as a whole rather than valuing it only for what I can learn from it.

I’ve been noticing this problem with video games, too. The only thing that tends to bring me back to a game these days is that sort of ill-founded completionist drive that leads me to resent the game it’s focused on. I blow through freeware games, often in less than a minute, and I haven’t sunk my teeth into anything in quite a long while.

Hrmm. I need to enjoy games again.

continued yawhging

As of this writing, I have played The Yawhg exactly four times. Why so few for a game I’ve so enthusiastically advocated?

The Yawhg is a game that tells a story. Your story. From blissful ignorance of the Yawhg’s coming, through the ever-increasing sense of dread, then onward to times beyond, it inscribes an arc dictated by your actions and echoing out past the confines of the explicit exposition. With this resonance hanging heavily in the air, it just wouldn’t feel right to swish it all aside and have another run. To do so would be to lessen the gravity of each iteration and with it, the impact it leaves on its players.

Emphasis on the plural “players”: I am adamant that it must be played with others. To take the game’s ups and downs alone is to lose out completely on the shared experience that they promote: mutual celebration when a player finds their fortune, collective horror when things take a dark turn, and an overall sense of collective fate and responsibility. To play on one’s own reduces the experience; it makes it more of a challenge to be overcome and less of a story to be shared.

And oh! How incredibly different and wonderful are the ways in which these sharings unfold. In each of my four games, I’ve played with an entirely different group of people. And each, beyond the differences in the internal narratives of the game, was an overwhelmingly distinct experience:

  1. Well after nightfall, lit only by candles; intimate, serious, and personal. Every passage read aloud. Resonant.
  2. Analytical and explorative; both of us sought primarily to understand the game’s systems. Much brisker; led to a story seen more from a distance than within.
  3. Extremely social; every decision was put to the group: “what would my character do?”, with much discussion and speculation arising. The clangour of the room hit a fever pitch whenever things when badly.
  4. Invested and enthusiastic. A game-ending bug broke both of our hearts, but we resolved to try again and paid meticulous attention to each event as it unfolded.

I’m grateful that The Yawhg is as accessible as it is; fully half of the people I’ve played with had very little prior experience with digital games, yet took to it eagerly and came away having thoroughly enjoyed themselves. It’s one thing for a game to appeal to those who already identify as “gamers” of one sort or another; it’s another entirely to entice those on the periphery, those who appreciate narratives and imagination but might resist sitting down at a computer to play a game. The Yawhg, in achieving this, has highlighted the potential of games to bring people together; to connect them rather than pit them against one another or isolate them with categories of achievement. And how brilliantly it works across each of these completely different situations! There is a language to games that, when well spun, can speak to each of us regardless of our histories.

I’m curious to more deeply explore the mechanics of The Yawhg, to crack open the event files and see all the paths at once, but for now I think I’ll hold off. There are too many possibilities still unexplored, too many stories yet to share, yet to build, with those around me. I want to ride this strange and sickly wind a little longer.

these games I play

It had been a little while since I had last sat down and played any game for more than a couple of minutes, but this week’s Humble Bundle broke that streak. It was Proteus that really sold me, though I had enjoyed a couple free weekends with Awesomenauts and was curious about the gameplay of Hotline Miami despite the graphic violence, so I figured it a worthwhile purchase. And so, reserving Proteus for a special day, I put a couple of hours into the other two. And I’m not sure how I feel about having done so.

Awesomenauts has a familiar structure: two small teams of diverse heroes push across a symmetrical map with the eventual objective of destroying the other team’s base. It’s Dota, it’s League of Legends, it’s another multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA), to use the generic term. What leads me to play this game more than those ones is the fact that the interactions of the player are run through an entirely different sort of interface. Rather than the top-down RTS-style that is the genre standard, Awesomenauts plays out as a side-scrolling platformer. This, like the first-person-shooter based MOBA Super Monday Night Combat, makes a far more attractive experience for me. They’re each a perspective I have greater comfort with and, perhaps because of their partial reinvention, each takes the liberty of juggling some of the genre conventions. I appreciate the shorter rounds, the limited (but still varied enough to be interesting) hero selection, and the streamlined item/ability purchases. They’re easier to get into, easier to get out of, and a bad game only costs you 10-15 minutes. Huge improvements, in my opinion.

So I played Awesomenauts for about an hour. It’s pretty to look at, and the characters are satisfying in all the different ways they run and jump and shoot and change the game up, but after those 4-5 games, I didn’t really feel any more content or excited than I did when I had started. I felt that in each of the games I played, I was just running the pattern that my character dictated. Pretty trivial, really: advance, retreat, or use one of three powers. There’s not a lot of strategic depth; instances of cooperation seem limited to the incidental, and the whole thing just feels like I’m stepping through a program. Maybe a bigger game like Dota would better succeed in this area, but in my experience that comes at the cost of a tremendous learning curve and very unforgiving play. Either way, I’m finding that I come away from MOBAs depleted and occasionally irritated. I just don’t think they can provide the sorts of experiences I’m looking for.

I moved on to Hotline Miami, which I had long been curious about but avoided purchasing because I didn’t like the explicit violence and the fact that the gameplay was predicated entirely upon it. But here it was in my hands, with a tidal wave of recommendations behind it based on its tightness of play, quick and visceral feedback, and brilliant sense of style. And it was exactly what I’d thought it would be. Very clean design; quick, satisfying iterations on established mechanics, and a growing sense of tension and dread the further one gets into it. All in all, quite well put together. Yet I am troubled. Similar to how The Binding of Isaac grew to make me quite uncomfortable in playing it, I felt that Hotline Miami crossed a certain line. Rather than exploring the central topic of violence, Hotline Miami relies on it as an end in itself. The only interactions you have available to you are to shoot, beat, or eviscerate the inhabitants of the game’s central levels. The gameplay is completely sustained by this and I recognize that, in wishing it otherwise, I’m dreaming of a completely different game. And so, of course, I’ll find one. But it’s worth considering what it means to willingly engage in these sorts of simulated violent actions.

I can’t deny that Hotline Miami is engaging, challenging, and viscerally stimulating. I’m loathe to say “fun,” however, because every moment I spent with the game was tinged with a certain disgust: “Why am I doing this? Why would I, as a player, willingly put myself through this which I find objectionable?” It highlights for me the darker side of games, that which compels people to continue playing in spite of themselves, that compels them to push past the point where they were having fun and into the realm of chasing the next drop of dopamine. Perhaps there’s some message at the end of it all, a clever remark about how you, like your character, never questioned your instructions, always dutifully carrying them out in the most direct way possible. But that, for me, is not enough to justify the patterns of graphic violence laid again and again over my brain in playing the game. Hours of firsthand experience are not undone by a critical epithet.

So I return to my own work.

<Boy, what expectations I’ve set for myself here…>

rose-t(a)inted

It’s been far too long, so tonight I’m headed to a friend’s for some SNES and N64-era multiplayer gaming. Split screens, absurdly shaped controllers, and Nintendo fanboyism abounding. I have a soft spot in my heart for all these things; they each played their role in making me the game enthusiast I am today. So why is such a group reminiscence so occasional an event?

Well, I’m not sure nostalgia is enough. Many times I’ve gone back to the games I treasured when I was younger. Games like Ogre Battle 64, Diddy Kong Racing, Yoshi’s Story. And once I’ve peeled back the heavy layers of fond remembrance, I find that they’re not really all that good. Sure, there are some good bits: some neat mechanics, some memorable storylines, but overall they don’t really stand out (and certainly don’t warrant another playthrough today). The truth is, they were the games I had. I played the hell out of them because they were there for me to do so. And the more time I put into them the more I convinced myself that it was all worth it. And, at the time, it might have been. But now I’ve a world of game experiences at my fingertips and comparatively less time in which to explore them. So I tend to consider any purchase for a while before I commit and even then I don’t play most games for very long at all. More often I pop in, have a look around, and then set them aside. It’s not enough, anymore, to just have a game. I have to have the right one. Maybe this is why I’ve been spending more and more time on development?

I’d be remiss if I didn’t say that some older games have stood the test of time and are exceptional in their technologically-bounded simplicity. There are gems, to be sure, monuments in gaming history, and these are what I tend to play when such an opportunity like tonight arises. But, all the same, I don’t want to play them every day. Maybe not even every week. I want to take those experiences and all the warm tinglies I associate with them and build them forward into new expressions. To provide games that know their roots and grow forward from them; further advancements in interactivity and emotion and engagement.

Boy, I really tend to set myself up, don’t I?

one dimensional

I’ve been utterly taken by the simplicity of Slayin (free to play online/download there; enhanced version $1 on the iTunes store). In its scope, gameplay, and literal definition, it is almost entirely one-dimensional. And this is what makes it great.

<I want to say at this point that “the game unfolds…” but don’t know what the one-dimensional analogue would be. “Extends”?>

bervquest

The player is constrained to a single axis of a scene viewed from the side; moving left and right represents the majority of your gameplay input. As the starting character, a knight, your facing is critical: from one side you are a relentless dealer of death, but from the other you are only meat to be devoured. Other than this directional movement, the only other option available to you is a short jump. You go up, you come right back down. There are no platforms, no skybound powerups. Any escape from that one-dimensional axis is short-lived. And so you move and you face and you dodge wave after wave of enemy, each calling for a slightly different approach. Bosses provide more complex patterns but your options remain the same. Take what little you have and handle everything they throw at you.

Unlocking the second character removes the jump button and the direction of guaranteed slaughter in favour of a spellcasting button that turns you briefly into an invincible and damage-dealing tornado. In the moments between bouts of tempestuous fury, you are made intensely vulnerable. Until your next whirl is ready, you can be harmed from any angle. Gameplay shifts dramatically, an entirely different nuance of timing and position is added to the still-single dimension of movement. Familiar enemies call for entirely new approaches. Forget everything you learned in knight school; you’re a wizard now.

Further deepening the experience are the intermittent merchants, offering slight alterations and improvements to the characters’ abilities. Extend your killing reach or add an additional effect; nothing will let you escape your plane, only survive a few levels longer. The third unlocked character, the knave, has a strange relationship with this merchant: with blades on both sides he collects money only to spend it on objects that increase the future money he will earn. Is this singular pursuit a clever microcosm of the game’s own singular focus?

It’s the thorough exploration of a simple mechanic that makes Slayin shine: a single set of constraints is imposed, then pushed against in every direction in an attempt to squeeze out all the hidden possibilities of the gamespace. It succeeds brilliantly. It is at once accessible, challenging, and rewarding on a number of levels. Would that more games knew their mechanics so well and explored them so thoroughly. Elegance is often born of simplicity and, in this, Slayin is the eleganst.

eleganst1 (l-gnst), adj.
1. Most elegant.

eleganst2 (l-gnst), n.
1. One who is the most elegant

walk before you run

The beginning of a new week! A fresh surge of willful energy and all the time one could want in which to explore it. I recall piecing together my game plan as I drifted off to sleep last night: “Should I start by drafting the entirety of the mechanics? Jump right in to Ren’Py? Or learn it all from the ground up?” The morning saw me, necessarily, taking the last of those options.

You see:
I’ve got a pretty good idea of how everything in Collegia will fit together. Some of the interactions will need refinement, but all the major pieces are conceptually in place. Were this a board game, I could grab my scissors and cardstock and whip you up a simple prototype in under an hour. But it’s not! It’s a digital game constructed in an engine I don’t know with a language I’ve never used! So, to reuse a favourite analogy of mine, I need to learn how to use these particular scissors and what exactly you can do with this strange new cardstock. So today brought a simple start:

  • Formatting! Python is markedly different from JavaScript in its use of whitespace as a meaningful parsing element, instead of just a personal organizational preference. It took me a little while to adapt, but I am very much a convert. Not only does it do the job, it standardizes everything! It makes learning from examples much easier.
  • Storing and accessing variables! The crux, really, of what will make Collegia a management game and not, as the engine would encourage, an interactive novel. <Ha! I just thought up a new genre term. Collegia will be a Lore Game. Need to remember that.> Having a basic knowledge of how variables and arguments are passed and called in code has helped me a lot here, but as so much of what makes it work is contextual, I’ve been taking thorough notes about how exactly Python prefers this to be done. Knowledge++ ! <wait, no. That doesn’t work in Python>
  • Making the experience feel distinct from its engine! You know that launcher that precedes so many Unity games? “Choose your resolution, your graphics quality,etc.”? I don’t like it very much. It’s a preassembled bit that, although it allows some easy customization tweaks, is ultimately shaped in the image of the engine, rather than built to optimally present the game waiting behind it. Starting in Ren’Py with this in mind is helping me to make decisions based around presentation as I go along. It just won’t do to have the default text boxes along the bottom of the screen, centered option buttons, and a thoroughly practical font. Bring on the theming! (but only so far, of course, as it serves the game…)

So it’s only really three things today. Not terribly much when I look back on it, but an important start. This evening I want to play with screen elements. Slide-out trays and optional overlays and all these little leaves that fold in on themselves ad infinitum. Well, we’ll see. That might be too much of a jog for a little old hobbler like myself. But I think I just might feel a second wind coming on.