Glitch: A Beautiful Something

Posted on October 11, 2011 by Ian

My name is Cheesefish, and against all logic it is one of the more mundane names I have come across. I am wearing a sari and I have a fox on my head. My hobby: squeezing chickens. My mission: to become the finest chef the world of Glitch has ever seen.

Glitch is a browser-based, entirely combat-free, massively multiplayer online game. And for the last few days, it has been something of an obsession. It is Maple Story, if Maple Story cut the combat (and the Korean-ness) and focussed solely on exploration and crafting mechanics. And it’s the exploration that makes it. As a 2D scrolling flash game, there are none of World of Warcraft or Guild Wars’ sweeping vistas here, but it makes up for it in variety. One moment you may be exploring a lush and utterly normal forest, but one stop on the ever-present intercontinental subway drops you off in a land of pastel where the hills have eyes.

Stranger places still await the intrepid explorer. Keita Takahashi, creator of Katamari Damacy, has had his hands on this game and it certainly shows. (The other more recognisable members of the team are, bizarrely, the founders of Flickr.) There have clearly been some… unique minds behind the design of this game, which become most apparent when acquiring raw materials from the environment.

Need meat? You get it by nibbling on pigs, but only after petting them. Milk? From butterflies of course, but they must be massaged first. Grain can be obtained by squeezing chickens, but eggs? Oh, right. Egg plants.

From the odd interactions with fauna to the bizarre contraptions you can use, the ever-humorous quest descriptions and the pet rock that does your learning for you, there’s a strange sense of humour at work here and it works very well indeed.

Glitch is also an example of one of my most hated things – an Energy-based game that has no end. But here, it doesn’t feel malicious like the game-killing ‘games’ of Zynga and Playfish. Energy is plentiful and refills completely every few hours, and even with my character’s mediocre cooking skills, she can easily whip up enough odd food and drinks to keep her energy and mood full. Skills are learned over minutes, hours or days of real time, but again unlike FarmVille and its kin, they’re not just a mechanism to drag you back to the game. There doesn’t feel like an urgency to get them learned, and besides, you can manage them from the website or the iOS app without having to touch the game itself.

So what the heck is Glitch? It doesn’t seem much like a game, as there’s no way to win and no reason to compete against anyone. It’s a world to explore, to create and add to, and apparently, to hold farmers’ markets in.

It resembles nothing quite so much as a twenty-first century upgrade of the MUSH, the shared environments from the early ’90s. If it allows anything like a MUSH’s ability for players to create and expand the world, it will be a wonder. But creating with text is easy; doing so with graphics much more complex, and I can’t imagine the company behind Glitch giving up creative control so readily.

But even without that, even without an idea of what it is and what it’s going to be, it’s certainly a beautiful something.

Cheating in the Age of Micropayments

Posted on August 15, 2011 by Ian

So, the other day I cheated at a videogame for what is probably the first time in years. Not for unfair advantage over other players, but merely because it was one of those games with no end, and before consigning it to the dustbin of history, I wanted to see what the best weapons were like.

It was a pretty simple hack — an in-game replacement of the contents of a certain memory address, the same thing I had no shame whatsoever in applying via a Game Genie nearly two decades ago. And, just as hoped, I eked out a few more hours of fun from the game with my new-found power to lay waste to civilisation.

The best weapons in this game can only be purchased with the game’s “premium” currency, which I simply awarded myself 9999 of with barely a second thought. But in this world of in-app purchases and micropayments, the company who makes the game want me to have paid for that amount of in-game cash. Out of interest, I calculated how much money I would have paid to acquire it through legitimate channels.

£840.

Now, although there’s no way I’ve obtained £840 worth of value from my cheating, it raises an odd ethical dilemma that’s relatively new to gaming. Have I just cheated to gain myself another couple of hours’ enjoyment? Or have I just cheated someone out of the better part of a thousand pounds?

I’d be happy to pay a reasonable amount — £10, say — for the amount of enjoyment I’ve had from the game. But the “freemium” business model of many modern, social games makes that surprisingly difficult. Instead, I must get 99% of my fun for free, then pay extortionate amounts of real money for the last 1%. But, having cheated, I have no option at all to pay what I think is fair apart from simply buying my £10 worth of the game’s currency, even though it would barely register against the huge value I have unfairly awarded myself.

Not Exactly Canon

Posted on July 30, 2011 by Ian

Joseph: “What’s if I was a real superhero?”
Ian: “Then you’d be out fighting crime, not sitting in your pyjamas playing videogames. Sitting in your pyjamas playing videogames is what students do.”
Joseph: “It’s what Batman does!”

On Game Design: Time to Quit

Posted on May 25, 2011 by Ian

Not long after my post about the game DJ Rivals, I finished the main part of the game and hit a metaphorical wall. There was no more story; I’d bought every item in the store and mastered the game’s hardest moves. The game tries to offer replay value via progressively harder missions based on those earlier in the game, and via battles against human players of comparable level. The latter offers nothing to play for apart from in-game money, which I already had in abundance, while the former offers only the elusive carrot of 100% completion, which dangled too far distant for me to want it much.

So I stopped playing — which is probably fair enough. I’d played it, enjoyed it, finished it and stopped. But it got me thinking about the number of games I’ve played that don’t end.

Zynga’s Farmville is perhaps the most well-known example I could give. At the beginning, the game is about designing a nice farm, planting the most efficient crops, coming back to harvest them and planting some more. This is fun. Then it’s just something you do. Then it’s annoying. Then you start contemplating spending real money on in-game items to automate the process. At this point it’s clear that planting and harvesting crops is not the game — the game is having a bigger and better farm than your friends. And the only way to achieve this, assuming you weren’t lucky enough to start first, is to be more devoted to the game or spend more real money than your friends do. (It shouldn’t surprise you that these are both things that make money for Zynga.)

A case of escalation of commitment (or commitment bias) can kick in, whereby the player has invested enough effort in the game that even though they are no longer enjoying it, they can’t bear to quit. And this only gets worse over time, because unlike most non-social games, Farmville and its kin don’t have an ‘end’. There’s no story to finish, and because the makers of the game can easily add more, higher-level items to acquire or quests to fulfill, there is no 100% completion to aim for. You quit, or you play forever.

I am no better than the rest as regards being sucked into these games. Tactics in Battle Stations only extend as far as clicking a button and upgrading your airship within one of a few effective builds, yet my character made it to level 85 before I quit, realising that the rate at which new shiny equipment was added to the game outstripped the rate at which I could acquire it. Starfleet Commander is a good strategy game in its own right, but after having reached the end of the tech tree, I found nothing worthwhile to aim for. The same flaw has turned me off Backyard Monsters at level 36, too.

Moreover, all of these games suffer from a time delay mechanic that increasingly is enough to put me off a game (Dungeon Overlord, for example) all by itself. Now, part of the aim of all these games (from the creators’ perspective) is to get users returning regularly to play — and view ads. To achieve this, every game I have mentioned — and countless thousands of others — have in-game activities that take time of the order of hours or days. This, I think, is my main problem with them.

In the vast majority of traditional computer and console games, there is a concept of a gaming “session”. The player sits down to play the game, plays continuously, and stops when he or she is done. But the majority of the new breed of social games aren’t like that.

They begin with a rush of activity, much like other games. You put the first few buildings down in your base, plant the first few crops, start and finish researching technologies within a few minutes. At some point, you choose to stop. But the game hangs its carrots just out of reach. “Sure,” it says, “you can stop. But your building is only half an hour from being finished. And once it’s finished, you’ll be able to do this and this, and build this, which only takes a few hours…”

In the early stages, it grabs you back when you might prefer not to be playing. Later on, by contrast, it switches around to perhaps the more annoying mode. More advanced things tend to take longer to build, research, grow, or whatever — possibly many days. So you’ll sit down for your gaming session, you’ll do your five minutes of formulaic clicking, harvesting your crops, planting new ones, then… then you stop. You can’t do any more; you have to wait two days before you can play again. In two days, you spend five more minutes clicking the same things, then stop again.

Once upon a time, I enjoyed these Facebook games, and I thought I still did. But yesterday, I logged in to do my five minutes of clicking, and realised all of a sudden that it was exactly the same five minutes of clicking I had done the day before and the day before that. I was grinding towards a non-existent goal, performing mindless tasks in search of a sense of completion that I knew would never come.

I thought, “why am I doing this?”, and it dawned on me that I didn’t have an answer to that.

I love playing games, and presumably always will. But I think I, and possibly others, need to get better at judging the enjoyability of games in this casual, social age. Certain kinds of game and certain games companies are now remarkably good at exploiting sunk cost and commitment bias, and in order to only play games that we enjoy, we should evaluate the game better, and decide earlier when it may be time to quit.

On Game Design: DJ Rivals

Posted on May 6, 2011 by Ian

There’s a formula common to many of today’s popular “casual” games. If you’ve played a bunch of Facebook games recently, you’ll probably recognise it. It goes a bit like this:

You have a pool called something like “Stamina” or “Action Points”, which refills slowly in real-time. Once you’re out of Stamina, you have to wait for it to refill over minutes or hours. Stamina allows you to complete various actions, quests etc., each of which consume varying amounts of Stamina, and reward you with some combination of money and experience points. Money buys you equipment that lets you do better quests. XP gains you levels, which also let you do better quests. This process continues until…

…nothing.

I’ve played a few of these — the formula is very good at getting you hooked, getting you invested in the game. It feels like you’re losing a lot of work when you discover that it’s just a level treadmill with no real game, and decide to quit. Which is why, naturally, you can pay real money for in-game advancement. By paying the developer, you can avoid the tedious questing and levelling — except that what you’re circumventing is the game itself, so at best what you’re doing is paying real money to fool your friends into thinking that you sink more time into a game than you really do.

I swore off these games a year or so back, as every single example I’d tried was as I’ve described, a game devoid of gameplay. I may have ranted about this at length.

It would be remiss of me, then, to fail to point out that I am playing such a game again, in the form of DJ Rivals (Apple App Store, Android Market). Its difference to others I’ve tried is that it includes elements from other, more game-like things, which add to the experience immensely.

What’s weird is that those other things are Beatmania and Foursquare.

At worst, these “Stamina-based” games are a simple button-click to perform a quest; here there is a basic attempt at turn-based combat, where each attack requires you to play a 10 second clip of rhythm game. Better moves use more complex rhythms, and the hardest moves are on a level that Tap Tap Revenge would consider medium, and IIDX would consider easy. Not especially challenging then, but fun — orders of magnitude more fun than simply clicking a button.

PvP battles are implemented as poorly as in any of these games — they’re identical to PvE battles. But DJ Rivals also introduces a location-based element to play, where players compete to become “House DJ” (Mayor, in Foursquare terms) of real-life locations that are detected by the game’s use of your phone’s GPS. Although fighting over real-world bars and restaurants is fun, a high location-to-player ratio — and the ability to set your location manually — mean that it’s easy to become House DJ of places far from any other players and thus reap the rewards without any risk.

I should point out a couple of negatives, too. Levelling up unlocks more powerful attacks and equipment, but the power curve is not smooth and gradual. It suffers from the same issue as did Terranigma‘s last boss — at a certain level it is all but impossible, but one level-up makes it trivially easy. At level 10 in DJ rivals I could do around 600 damage a turn to my enemies’ 800, and I had to return to a previous “Chapter” to find some lower-level enemies to beat. Once I hit level 11, I could immediately buy a move that did around 2000 damage, killing everything — including the next sub-boss — in a single hit.

Also annoying is that it doesn’t tell you that you can only set your character’s name after finishing Chapter 1 — I had to delve into the forums to figure that out.

But on the whole, DJ Rivals is a good and enjoyable game. The “freemium” model that all similar games thrive on is present, but so far I have felt no need to pay real money to speed up my progression, as that progression is itself fun.

I’ve no idea who originally thought that Beatmania and Foursquare was a good combination, but I’m thankful to them for demonstrating that “Stamina-based” games can actually be games and not just money-seeking level treadmills.

Sea Battle: Design

Posted on November 25, 2010 by Ian

Sea Battle is a casual 2D real-time strategy game with a pixellated ‘retro’ feel, based on the multi-component vehicles of RTS games such as Warzone 2100. It was written as an experiment in building games using the Processing language.

Sea Battle was prototyped and launched in 2010.

Design Process:

Results

The Finished Game
Source Code (GPL)

Game Idea Spam Time!

Posted on October 21, 2010 by Ian

One of the games I remember liking from what I was shocked to discover was 11 years ago was Warzone 2100. It’s actually one of the rare examples of an Abandonware game that’s been taken and updated on by a loyal community — over a decade since it was first released, they’re working on version 3.0. (You can download it from here, completely free.)

The reason I’m mentioning it today is for its vehicle construction mechanic. Rather than simply building a Light Tank or a Heavy Tank and so on, each vehicle came in a number of bits — body, tracks, turret, and so on. You researched each item individually, then you could build vehicles with whatever bits you’d researched.

For some reason this idea has been weighing heavily on my brain over the last few days, so I’ve sketched out some ideas for a game that I’m half tempted to write.

It would be sort of like a naval version of Warzone, only 2D with a limited playing field, and probably rather simplistic graphics (especially if I’m building it on my own, since I can’t draw for toffee). There aren’t any buildings apart from a single base for each player which builds your ships, and you lose if your base is destroyed. In order to defend it, you build ships from blueprints you have researched.

Each ship is composed of four bits:

Hull — affects how much armour (health) the ship has. More armour, roughly speaking, makes a ship heavier and also take longer to build.
Engine — engines provide thrust, which along with the hull’s weight, affects its speed.
Radar — affects the range of the ship’s weapons.
Weapon — deals damage to other ships. Weapons have a power (damage per shot) and a fire rate.

Ships can shoot at other ships (submarines are a possibility too) and if they get close enough, the enemy base. They can be moved around the playing field, and will automatically fire on any enemy ship within range.

Here’s the rest of my thought processes (and doodles) in Awful Handwriting form:

My big question is, if I were to make this — and have the patience to finish making it, which is a rare thing indeed — for what platform should I be making it?

For the Desktop is the easiest option. I could code it comfortably with tools I’m used to. But it’d be yet another crappy downloadable game that no-one would keep around.
For Phones would give it a more interesting market, though the UI would need some work on anything less than an iPad or Galaxy Tab. Also, CBA developing for Apple stuff.
For the Web is probably the best way to get people playing. But it’s probably not doable in HTML5+JavaScript, I can’t afford Adobe Flash, and I can’t write a Java applet because it’s not 1995.

Does anyone out there in internetland have any thoughts on which format they’d like to see a game like this in? (And while you’re there, do please wade in with any other suggestions, rants, reasons why the whole idea is flawed, etc…)!

Politics, meet Videogames. Everybody Loses.

Posted on August 24, 2010 by Ian

On Sunday, Britain’s Defence Secretary Liam Fox called for the upcoming Medal of Honor game to be banned by retailers (BBC). Apparently he finds it “hard to believe any citizen of our country would wish to buy such a thoroughly un-British game”, which shows quite a remarkable lack of understanding of the people he is supposed to represent. And since when has there been an expectation that American games should be “British” anyway?

Apparently it is “shocking that someone would think it acceptable to recreate the acts of the Taliban against British soldiers”. Well, in real life, maybe. But this is a game, and an 18-rated one at that, so it is played by adults that are fully capable of distinguishing between fiction and reality.

And yes, you can play as the Taliban. It’s called multiplayer. Would Mr Fox prefer that the multiplayer was Americans shooting Americans? Because that’s just as morally dubious, and also kind of dumb. No, one team plays the good guys, one team plays the bad guys. That’s the way these things work. I don’t recall politicians losing their shit about Counterstrike because zomg half the players are being terrorists! How many games have there been where you can play as a Nazi soldier in multiplayer?

I wonder if the Defence Secretary ever got the chance to play Cops and Robbers as a kid, because, you know it’s no different. One team plays the good guys, one team plays the bad guys, that’s how it works. Cops and Robbers doesn’t glorify violent crime, just as Medal of Honor doesn’t glorify the Afghan insurgency.

So Mr Fox, it would be appreciated if you could please go back to getting our real soldiers some MRAPs and some more helicopters and guns that work, and leave the rest of us to enjoy our videogames. Thank you!

Game Recommendations Please!

Posted on June 28, 2010 by Ian

A job for bored lazywebbers:

What with Saudi Arabia recently having declared software piracy to be a criminal offence punished by imprisonment, there are certain kinds of DS cartridges that I would be unwilling to take into the country! I will however be taking my DS, my 2nd gen iPod Touch, and my HTC Magic (running Android).

Are there any games for those platforms that offer a shedload of play time per £ — ideally RPGs, strategy games, or the combination thereof?

I have already played to death: TWEWY, Fire Emblem, Advance Wars and Heroes of Mana on the DS, Plants vs Zombies and Angry Birds on the iTouch, and every damn tower defence game on Android.

And no, I still don’t have enough spare cash to buy a PSP!

All suggestions appreciated! :D

tl;dr: Internet, please recommend time-sink games.

Only Dreaming

Tag Archives: Games