It’s not news if you read this blog, but yeah, cool, zee article went up as a feature on Gamasutra. Cool!

UPDATE: Looks like it went up on Kotaku as well. Fun thread there. Highlights:

Thanks everyone for the kind words about the article and thanks so much for the discussion. I’m actually working on a book on this same topic so many of these observations are things which I am keen to hear more people’s opinion on. Specifically, I’d love to hear what people think are the best-feeling games of all time. I’m also really interested in the way people describe feel. If you have any particular way you describe the feel of a game or compare one game’s feel to another, I’d love to hear about that. Things like responsive, sloppy and so on are great. Also, what do you consider to be two ends of the same extreme? For example, is ‘sloppy’ the opposite of ‘responsive?’ *shameless plug* More of my in-progress thinking on the subject at my blog (www.steveswink.com.) */shameless plug*

@ J.Kyle: Out of curiosity, what games have been ‘just right’ for you feel-wise? I haven’t played Half Life for a long time, but I did enjoy the feel of it quite a bit. I’ll have to revisit and try to experience what you were feeling. I think that most if not all games use a certain slipperyness because it’s preferable to stickiness. Most of the time, it’s preferable to press against something and have yourself slide past it than it is to get hung up. Also, I think Half Life was the first game to really nail jumping in an FPS, what with the ‘jump and tuck’ control scheme. It had a surprisingly powerful sense of physicality for a game in which you couldn’t see your avatar at all.

@DCARTIST: Yeah, totally, and driving a car is one of my favorite analogies. It’s the closest thing to game feel that people who don’t play video games have experienced. Your concept of intent and outcome is also something I’ve come across- controlling something with a controller is something of a megaphone for your thumbs in that regard. You get a lot more bang for buck in terms of motion input vs. reaction output, which is one of the things that makes controlling something in a game so compelling (I think.)

@SXP151: I think you make some interesting points, for sure. The sort of meta-point you’re making, at least from my perspective, seems to be the question of skill. What is the difference between something that’s worth mastering and something that isn’t, between difficult controls with good feel and just plain bad feel? I think we can more or less agree that with enough time, about any controls can be mastered. That doesn’t mean that all games have good feel, though. So I guess the question is: it is both easy to learn and difficult to master? Does it have a high skill ceiling and a lot of layers of mastery/expressiveness while still being fun and rewarding from the first moment you pick it up? And, digging deeper, what is it about games that have this property? How does it get designed/created? I don’t know that I have a great answer to these questions yet. Interested in what folks think .

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It’s, like, precisely everything I always say about playtesting! To my students: see, I’m not completely full of crap! To Ron: <3. It’s neat to see someone smart come independently to the same conclusions!

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This is neat!

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Whee!

L-System test 1

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Well, it was released yesterday. Enjoy!

Splume 1.1

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An email got me to thinkin…

There isn’t much good deconstruction of games out there. That is, someone who really knows how to make games trying to break down a game in a way that’s useful for themselves and for those looking to make better games. I’m pretty green on the subject, but I’m always interested when I come across a new way of looking at games that might be useful. What are your angles of attack for deconstruction? Some stuff I’ve seen that I think has merit:

Granularity (heard it first from Will W. – not really sure where it came from originally) Breaking the game down by various recurring time periods (heard this idea or a variation called loops as well.) What does the player do, what are they thinking about, and what are their goals at various increments – every 1 second, every 5 seconds, 10, 30, minute, 5 minutes, 20 minutes, hour, and so on. One example is from an FPS like Half-Life (via Matthew’s original IGDA talk:)

Fire the rocket launcher
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Predictive aim the rocket launcher at helicopter
|—|

Take cover between shots as helicopter circles
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Destroy the helicopter to cross the bridge
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Find control room
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Deactivate air defensives so friendly transport can land
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Escape the compound
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The Valve folks actually mentioned having a process like this in their Game Developer postmortem…they said they’d played through the game over and over again to make sure that the player would never go more than a minute without finding some puzzle, enemy, or item. Anyhow, I’ve found this useful for taking a game that’s mostly completed and looking for the area that could most benefit from extra love. If a game sucks at the lowest granule (bad feel, usability issues etc…) that’s really easy to see, and so is suckage at the largest granule (poorly written story, long-term balance issues.) But in the middle there are some great opportunities to pull stuff out and examine it, find out what’s going right and wrong and maybe change it for the better.

Reward Schedules. This is a sort of interesting idea, and one that gets applied a LOT when designing MMOs and other mass-market games. I feel a bit weird about it, like dirty or something, but it can’t be denied that when you understand the way that people respond to a given stimulus you can manipulate their perceptions and actions. Gamasutra article that goes into various reward schedules, if you haven’t read it: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20010427/hopson_01.htm. I’ve found this useful for examining why people do what they do at particular moments in a game, especially with respect to when they stop playing entirely.

Flow Breakers. Frustration or boredom, yeah? I think it’s super interesting to look at a game with an eye for flow. The only way you can measure flow is by noticing when it’s broken. By definition, if you’re thinking to yourself, about yourself, or about anything, you’re not in the flow state. To examine a game for flow you have to let yourself zone out and try to write down instances when you start thinking things about yourself and how you’re doing, snapping back into self consciousness. In as much as the goal of lots of games is to get you into the flow state and keep you there, this can be an interesting prism through which to examine a game. I’ve found this useful as an experiential sanity check. As in, it’s a catchall for anything that’s detrimental to the experience. It could be the feel of the controller, bad level design, a weird art asset, a physics or motion glitch, or anything else that just seems a bit off. Anything which detracts from the overall experience of playing the game tends to snap you out of flow. Lots of stuff that isn’t a “show stopper” bug shows up under this kind of scrutiny. I haven’t tried it on a real project, but it seems like it might be interesting to rate bugs in severity not only by whether they break the game, but by whether they break flow experience (the flow.)

Emotional/Visceral Reaction. Genres are a pet peeve of mine. Like, Soldat is more closely related to Counterstrike or Tribes than it is to Worms. I feel the same way about playing Soldat as I do about playing Counterstrike. I have the same kinds of memories. They occupy a similar space to me experientially. But no one would ever classify them in the same genre. Why is that? It seems like there’s a huge opportunity here to look at the types of experiences a game gives you and try to relate them not only to other games but to other stuff in general. I think this is why I’m so struck by the idea of starting a design with an emotion or a experience – it seems like the only way a game can actually come full circle from idea to reality. In the end, that’s what we’re building, no? Experience?

If anyone reads this, I’m interested: how do you deconstruct a game? Does it help you make better games? How?

Catmilk.

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For the goal, as my Amy would say .

So, yeah, we made a game in two weeks for the Unity Top Dog Competition. Obviously, there’s a lot that could still be done with the game, and a lot in there that’s placeholder or incomplete. I guess what we did get completed was in line with the criteria set down for the competition, though, because about twenty minutes ago they announced the winner and it were we! Bacon, whiiiiiirrrr, bacon!

I was quite shocked, actually, and I’m pretty sure there’s a really great picture of my face as I was saying ‘really?!?’ when they announced the winner. RC Laser Warrior is just amazing, as are the other games we were competing with, Gravball, Tennis Stars, and Ducateers. To my eye, everything looks more polished and more well done. But, wow, we’ve never really won anything before. Really makes the last two weeks of crazy work seem worthwhile.

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And now the critical: we made what we considered a safe concept. We’d like to do a bunch of different art for each level, retheming the gameplay and art for each one. Also, more sounds and music, more gameplay variants, and a few other interesting things. A Breakquest-style exploration of a simple, well-known concept. All told, though, I’m glad that it’s a short project and that we’re moving on. What we made is cool and how fast we made it is cooler, but it’s just not all that exciting design-wise. I can’t wait to make something a bit more mind-melting. Stay tuned .

A la tapa!

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God, my voice is so nerdy.

More editorializing on the panel here.

Good rants, good people, good fun!

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Scary and inspirational. We’re all going to leave little tombstones by the side of the trail at some point; Randy’s leaving Machu Pichu. It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. More on that later.

Randy Pausch’s “Final Lecture”

Regardless how old I am, if I can look back and make a checklist like that…

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Whew! Lately I’ve been putting every ounce of my thought energy into my book about Game Feel (and much of my physical energy – just got back from a bunch of interesting book-relevant interviews in LA, SJ.) This, obviously, leaves little time for the blog. But, hey, writing is writing, and if what I’ve written for the book thusfar is any indication I write better when I’m more relaxed. Blog-like style suits me much better, n’est-pas?

So as a bit of a brainstorming/creativity/productivity tool, I’m going to start brainstorming some of the things I’ve been mulling book-wise to the blog here. This should provide some nice clarification, perhaps a bit of book-usable writing, and a chance to get some feedback on ideas as they’re developing.

Spew du jour:
• Are casual games “without feel?”
• Casual games focus on having the lowest possible barrier to entry. They accomplish this by using the most widely spread interface conventions possible, mostly pointing at things and clicking on them. Browsing the Web, essentially.
• How does skill relate to casual games and game feel?
• Not about skillful translation of intent into motion
• About other things, more generalized things such as word puzzles, logic puzzles, or image puzzles
• As a casual designer you can’t assume the player has pre-existing knowledge or skills of manipulation past basic point and click skills
• But you can assume that everyone has an image processing center that will be pleasurable to utilize by doing things like sorting objects, recognizing patterns and so on. Same with words; everyone who’s online can probably read, and letters are simple, recognizable and fun to organize or rearrange. Often casual games will appeal to many of these faculties simultaneously.
• Skill grows over time, both in a single game and as a more abstract generality
• There is a general skill to manipulation of a digital avatar which is applicable to all games in which motion translation is employed
• Just as knowing how to use a mouse is applicable to all websites
• Game ‘genres’ have kind of evolved this way: if a game takes a particular kind of skill that is similar to another game, those two often get lumped together
• Assumed knowledge in the player is a game design tool: if your interface is close enough to lots of other FPS games, you can assume that players will ‘get it’ very quickly and this gives you some reassuring certainty in an otherwise highly uncertain enterprise
• This is why lots of games are so similar to one another
• This is also why it’s so damn hard to make a game that’s completely ‘original’ and employs few conventions from other games that the designer can assume the player will understand to some degree.
• But hey, we got along ok when there was no precedent, when every game you made would potentially constitute a ‘new genre.’

Casual games are very interesting to ponder in relationship to game feel because they contain no proactive motion. Here is a whole class of games that more or less ignores the core of game feel. That is, purely input-driven motion and the potential for frustration, challenge, and the soaring elation of mastery that comes with it. Often, there is no control layer, no “twitch” skill that must be mastered as part of the gameplay in a casual game. To play takes roughly the same amount of skillful manipulation as buying a pair of shoes from an online retailer. Point to what you want and left-click. The challenge in casual games tends to be more cerebral, as in word puzzles, logic puzzles, or image puzzles, with as low a barrier to entry as possible.

The thing is, a lifelong gamer can pick up and enjoy a casual game. The interface is no barrier, and the challenge can still be engaging or meditative.

Casual players do not consider themselves gamers, and might even be offended by the suggestion.

One mantra of casual game design is ‘only the mouse.’ Even right clicking is viewed as too complex for the average casual player.

Does this mean that casual players are inept? That they’re all morons? Perhaps unsurprisingly, the answer is no. We can’t swipe categorically at these folks because they’re not stupid. They simply lack the experience of years of skillful manipulation those of us who grew up with games take for granted. But they’re still intelligent people, people who want to solve crossword puzzles or play Sudoku. This speaks to the nature of skill and challenge in video games: there are limitless kinds of challenges, some of which are about mastering a motion translation, some which aren’t. By and large, casual games are about sorting things by colors and shapes, recognizing patterns in letters or numbers, logical deduction, or a combination of the three.

The processing power of the computer is used mostly for keeping score and for reactive effects such as showers of particles and blasts of colors that reward the slightest action. Perhaps this is why most game designers regard the casual player with disdain, because they see this constant stream of reward as mollycoddling and can’t comprehend the notion that a person would not have devoted countless hours of their life to mastering Ninja Gaiden.

Casual games are also about Flow. Flow in the Csikszentmihayli sense, as in “The Flow State.”

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Not exactly my best prose, I realize, but I’m brainstormin’ here. Thoughts are welcomed/appreciated.

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