HelixFox | Games by Kyle Rodgers

The latest week-long production for my monthly week game challenge thingy thing:

What are you waiting for?

Over at the SA Forums, I’m taking part in a monthly week-long game design experiment. What this means is once a month I’ll be making a game and will only have a week to do so from start to finish. Usually there will be some sort of theme or design constraint to encourage experimental game design.

For each game I’ll also write up a post-mortem about what I was going for, what went right/wrong and how to improve upon that in the future. The idea is to experiment with game design ideas to see what works and what doesn’t, improving my overall ability to design games and come up with actual good ideas. Plus there’s always the possibility of coming up with a surprise hit or at least a very good idea worth developing further. I’ll also pump out 12 games a year and even if they all suck it’s better than nothing.

The first game is called “Get Out” and is thematically inspired by this thread.

Play it here.

Post-mortem:
Besides the obvious inclusion of the frog and other emoticons from SA, there wasn’t really any overall theme or design constraint when making the game. More than anything it was just an excuse to get out of the rut I’ve been in lately where I haven’t actually released anything for a very long time (over two years now, in fact). So I decided to make a dead simple side-scrolling shooter variant.

The biggest issue I ran into during development was, unsurprisingly, the deadline. I had a lot of ideas of extra things to put into the game but ultimately they had to be cut. A health bar for the frog, power ups, extra graphical effects, better music integration and other things were cut to meet the one week deadline.

Unfortunately, this sometimes had a knock-on effect of making other parts of the game less effective. For example, enemies have a random amount of health and so take a few hits to kill. There was going to be a sound and graphical effect when hit, but they were cut. The result is the game feels a bit frustrating when attacking the enemies as there’s no indication when they are hit and no way to tell how close they are to dying. In retrospect, the enemies should have only taken one hit to kill.

Another problem was the title screen “click your mouse a lot” when in actual fact the optimal way of playing the game is to hold the mouse down. I really didn’t think about this when I put it in, but I should have as it is actually a bit misleading.

I think the game suffers a bit from the frog’s invincibility. There’s no way to lose, even if you sit there and do nothing. The gameplay might have been improved by letting the frog die when hit by enemies, adding in an extra gameplay objective of having to avoid any enemies that you miss.

The ending of the game is the least polished and it kind of shows. An extra screen saying “Game Over. You scored ” or something like that with some buttons to return to the title screen or play again would have been quite good, I think.

Ultimately the game suffered because I didn’t have enough time to add in all the necessary features, which is largely because I didn’t manage my time properly in the early days, resulting in less time in the later days. Time management is going to the main thing I’ll focus on improving next month.

This is a bit late, but I thought I’d throw my opinion about the iPad.

There’s been a lot of discussion about Apple’s iPad since it’s official announcement on wednesday and a lot of this discussion has centred on the issue of Apple not including any third party plugins with its version of the Safari browser, specifically Flash.

There have been a whole range of arguments about this issue, ranging in severity from “No Flash on the iPad makes it a completely useless device” to “Apple are saints – Flash is a blight upon the Internet and must be destroyed.” I subscribe to neither of these theories, but lie somewhere inbetween.

I actually don’t really care that much anyway as I have an iPhone, which fulfils much of what I would use an iPad if I had one. That said, it looks like a cool device and, while having Flash on it would definitely be nice, I can see a compelling reason for its omission – one that I haven’t really seen talked about at all – its control systems.

The argument over Flash on the iPad seems to revolve around Flash as if it was a single feature checkbox where it is either absent completely or the full Flash experience you get on a full operating system. I don’t think that’s necessarily true.

The iPad essentially has the exact same user interface as the iPhone – a touch screen and very few external buttons that have rigid roles within the OS and can’t be leveraged by any apps running. So essentially the touch screen is the only way the user can interact with web content (I know there’s the accelerometer too; I’ll mention that in a bit). There is, however, a big problem with this when it comes to using Flash content: basically all existing Flash content is designed with a keyboard and mouse in mind.

There are essentially four broad input methods for Flash currently:

1: Keyboard input
2: Mouse movement
3: Mouse clicks
4: Mouse’s scroll wheel (usually not used anyway)

Think about it.

Every single Flash application that uses keyboard inputs would be completely unusable on the iPad without some sort of virtual keyboard (and the iPhone app attempts at having virtual controllers to play games hasn’t worked very well, in my opinion). It’s my understanding that there will be a hardware keyboard available for the iPad, but that seems an inelegant solution that you can’t count on users to own anyway.

Every single Flash application that relies on mouse movements separate from clicking would be pretty unusable on the iPad. Imagine a menu bar that contains a number of headings – you move the mouse over these headings to make a submenu appear. On the iPad there’s no mouse cursor that you can move to open up the submenus. You could press the heading to make the submenu appear but you would click the heading at the same time. There isn’t really an elegant solution I can think of that can let the iPad use mouse movement input in the same way that a regular computer can. A menu bar is a very simple example, but there are loads of games that make heavy use of mouse movements in more complex ways. How would they work on the iPad?

Mouse clicks are fine, obviously, as a mouse click roughly corresponds with a finger press. The scroll wheel is right out, however.

Adobe has made a bit of a fuss about the millions of web pages using Flash that won’t be the same on the iPad, but I have to wonder how many of those pages would still be broken even if Flash was supported.

Of course, there’s a very good point to be made that Flash apps can simply be redesigned to work on the iPad and traditional operating systems, but that would require every existing Flash application that wouldn’t work properly to be redesigned, which is a foolish hope, yet would be required for everything to work smoothly. Additionally, making apps work universally would also dumb them down significantly for the desktop-using audience, ignoring interface features currently used that make things a lot easier. Anyone who has played Bethesda’s Oblivion for the PC can attest that its interface suffered greatly with it being designed to be the same on both the PC and the Xbox 360, when the PC can handle much more complexity.

You could design apps to have different interfaces if shown on a computer vs an iPad, but what a pain in that ass that would be to develop – essentially doubling the development time.

What I’m trying to say is that I love Flash and think it’s great, but I don’t think it necessarily has a place on every device.

Eleven months ago I made a post about starting a secret project. I’m still working on it but it wouldn’t be totally accurate to say it’s eleven months in the making (I’ve moved twice in the past year and all progress on the game is basically in my spare time, which I don’t have a lot of), but I’m still working on it!

The last couple of months have been particularly fruitful for game progress. In fact, I reckon probably more than half of the game has been coded in that time and the basic engine is pretty much complete right now! All that’s left to do is art assets (which I’m having to do myself as I don’t know an artist and don’t really have to budget to hire a pro), coding tweaks and bug fixes (I guess there’s a bunch of those), a couple of extra features, optimisation, level design…

Okay so that’s quite a bit still, but here are some screenshots of what I’ve got at the moment:

Duck Alliance! A very Lemmings-inspired game that has you helping a bunch of ducks to navigate through a level to reach an exit.

The title screen. Has buttons to play the game and to open the level editor. The level editor may not actually be present in the final game and is just there for my benefit at the moment

This is the level select screen and as far as aesthetics go is a looong way off completion. Right now each level has a button for it but I’m considering having a map screen with each level being a location on the map. The red buttons in the corner are just for level creation uses at the moment.
If you played Lemmings, the level names might give some clues as to what your ducks will be doing…

This is the main game screen and, again, is pretty unfinished. The UI at the bottom is atrocious and the actual game graphics could use some tweaking.
This level has two ducks who need to get to the level’s exit (the blue square – yeah, that’s a placeholder). This is done by telling the ducks to dig through the ground to get to the lower area using the commands along the bottom.

Hooray! (Note: the duck is the red square – another placeholder asset)

The duck in this screen is flapping through the air, which lets the duck fly briefly, letting him cross gaps or jump over obstacles.
In Duck Alliance, the ducks don’t all spawn from a set start position and, in general, there are only a few ducks. This allows levels to be constructed where all the ducks start in completely different areas and have to take a separate route to the exit.

This duck is building a set of stairs. There’s a handy number above his head showing how many bricks he has left.

This duck has a balloon that will let him float to safety. You can always see which ducks have balloons by looking above their heads – the ducks are vain creatures and show off their fancy balloons whenever possible.

There’s a lot of work left to do but it’s going well. I’m hoping to get some sort of demo up soon and get some user feedback

There are lots of puzzle games around on the Internet, providing challenging tasks, riddles and other objectives for us to bash our heads against. It can be frustrating trying to figure out how to solve these puzzles, but it’s made worthwhile by the feeling of elation we get when we work out what to do and how to complete the puzzle and therefore the game.

Puzzles are very popular in games because of the simple fact that learning is fun. A puzzle presents you with a problem and you have to learn how to overcome this problem in order to succeed, which causes your mind to reward you with feelings of pleasure. This response is an innate feature of the human mind, evolved throughout the ages to make us as smart as we are today. In fact, all games revolve around some form of learning and the fun in playing them is usually derived from overcoming challenges in the game, taking advantage of our evolutionary instinct to learn in order to better survive in the world.

This even extends to other forms of play and can easily be seen in children: hide and seek is practice for hunting, war games are practice for protecting your tribe from outside threats, looking after dolls is practice for looking after a real child – all of these games that children play correspond with something that our ancestors will have had to do a lot in their adult lives. It makes sense: by practicing these skills as a child they will be better at them as adults and so much more likely to survive in a prehistoric world – evolution at work. Games don’t necessarily have to have a direct analog in the real world, but their enjoyment is due to the thought processes behind learning and mastering skills.

This is why fine tuning of difficulty is important for games. If a game is too easy the players will master it too quickly and grow bored with the game. If a game is too hard the players will get frustrated and eventually give up. Hitting the sweet spot in the middle where a game is difficult but doable goes a long way to improve the longevity of a game. One way of adjusting the difficulty in a game is to introduce customisations that the player can make that affects the way they play the game – effectively making it easier if they customise well. This acts as a sort of metagame within the game, giving the player more to learn.

I played a game the other day called Learn to Fly by maxgames.com. The main gameplay is quite simple: you have to adjust the angle of your penguin as it flies off a ledge in order to achieve the maximum distance. However, at the end of each day you earn money which can be used to buy a variety of upgrades which let your penguin achieve a greater distance. This introduces a new challenge into the regular gameplay: Which upgrades provide the most benefit? Should you save up to buy a glider or spend what you have right now on air resistance? It adds an additional puzzle element to the main game and adds that little bit of extra depth.

These sorts of “puzzles” within non-puzzle games are actually very common once you realise they’re there. Any game with some RPG-esque character customisation automatically challenges the player to customise themselves in an optimal way. One big example is World of Warcraft, which has a variety of ways for characters to customise themselves: equipment, talents, temporary buffs, etc. All of these features interact with each other to determine what statistics a character has (e.g. how much damage they do or how much health they have) and in a highly competitive game like WoW, optimising your character as much as possible is a big deal. Many players have written their own spreadsheets to calculate what statistics they need to focus on, what abilities to use, what talents to take in order to maximise damage. The “puzzle” of making your character the best he or she can be in WoW is taken very seriously by many players and makes up a huge part of the game’s depth and therefore its appeal.

Going back to what I said earlier about difficulty, it’s important that when implementing customisations like these within your game that it isn’t necessary to customise your character to the optimal level to complete the game. It should be possible to complete the game with any customisations the player wants (obviously you can require some customisations – you don’t necessarily want players to ignore it completely), but they should make it easier in order to reward the player for customising their character well.

Some more examples of these sorts of customisations off the top of my head: Choosing between an uzi or a shotgun (one is better at long range, the other is better at short range – you have to decide which one is more important), allocating stats to damage or health in an RPG (doing lots of damage is desirable, but you need enough health to stay alive), choosing which character to play if each one has a unique power (can depend on the level you’ll be playing on; one character might be better suited for it).

For my devil game that I’ve mentioned previously on this blog I’ve been thinking about a system where you get a number of points for successfully completing a level, with these points being spent to acquire new powers or upgrade existing ones to make the rest of the game easier. I’m hoping that this will add depth to the game and make it more fun! The aim will be to balance the powers so that they are all roughly equivalent, so the player can choose whichever ones they want to customise themselves with and still be able to do well in the game.

As I mentioned last month, I am taking part in the fourth game development contest on the SA Forums. I haven’t posted a new entry since then so it’s about time I posted what I’ve come up with so far!

The Game: Clicky

The theme of the game needs to be ‘Dealing with the devil’ and the most obvious way to incorporate this into the game is through the plot, which is what I’m going to do.

You will play as Eric A. Goon. A lonely nerd who spends his days complaining on the World of Snorecraft forums about how overpowered Doom Knights are and how machineering sucks. His secret wish is to obtain a lady friend, but he is far too reclusive and fat to have any hope of this. Cue the Devil’s appearance. He offers Eric the his heart’s desire for female company in exchance for a small favour… Eric must help the Devil steal souls from people in his town and use these souls to rain down destruction to annihilate the entire population!

The basic gameplay has you looking at a city from a top-down perspective with people wandering around. You have to harvest souls from the people when they are vulnerable (happens occasionally) and these souls act as a form of currency used to invoke various demonic powers which you use to kill the population. The aim will be to kill the entire area as quickly as possible.

Originally you were going to play as the Devil himself and the deals made would be with the people in each level to get their soul. You were going to have a cash fund to use to buy the people material items to bargain for their soul, but that sort of system is far too complex for such a short development schedule. It would also have been too “minigamey” within the context of the greater game, making the regular gameplay much too complicated – simplicity is the key here, I think.

So I changed it to people becoming randomly vulnerable (when they glow red), with you able to click them during this time to get their soul. Once you have a person’s soul, they won’t become vulnerable again (they only have one soul, duh), but if you miss your chance then you would never be able to get that person’s soul.

I ended up changing this as well as I figured it kind of sucks if you miss your chance with the people as you then have to really focus on clicking every person you can, taking the focus away from using the devil powers. I changed it so people will become vulnerable again after 30 seconds if you miss them. As it stands now it’s a fairly “Plants vs Zombies”-esque method similar to picking up Sun in that game – a fairly constant stream of currency that you have to devote a minor amount of attention to to obtain (so you can’t simply ignore obtaining it). I kind of like this way as it encourages the player to get as many souls as they can, but you’re not screwed if you miss some.

The main objective is to kill everyone and the devil powers are how you’ll go about doing this. Right now the game has Imps, Minions and Hounds implemented, which are all Summon type powers. They work by you dragging them onto the game area, where they then run around trying to catch everyone and kill them. Eventually there will be other powers such as outright killing people in a certain area, scorching the ground (killing everyone who steps over it), spreading disease (killing anyone infected and also spreading itself around). The aim is that the various powers will synergise well with each other combinations needed for maximum success (e.g. using imps to herd people into a corner, letting you get more of them with a single death power).

I have until the end of this month to finish this off and there’s still lots to do, so I’d better get cracking!

While writing my previous post about where Flash games are going, I started to think about graphics and how they apply to peoples’ perceptions of games.

We look at modern games on consoles and ooh and aah about how pretty they look. We then plonk down a nice amount of cash (usually £40-50 here) to buy these games, play them for their 6-10 hours of gameplay, then shelve them until we want to replay them (perhaps never). This is an exaggeration, sure, as most games will potentially offer more than 6-10 hours of gameplay these days through multiplayer or additional features or, my favourite, achievements.

Then there are other games that don’t have these cutting edge graphics but offer more than 10 hours of gameplay and more replayability for the future.

Surely in terms of how much your time is worth the latter game should be worth more than the cutting edge game previously mentioned? This would make sense as you get more actual enjoyment out of it. It seems to be that this isn’t the case, however.

Let’s compare two games: Mirror’s Edge and Peggle. How much would you pay for these games? When first released Mirror’s Edge retailed for the typical £40 for a 360 game, but you can find it now for around £20. Peggle is on Steam for £6.99 or you can buy it with Peggle: Nights for £9.99. Does this sound about right? That’s about what I would expect to pay for it.

It’s the strangest thing. I’ve spent much more time on Peggle than I have on Mirror’s Edge. In fact I never even finished Mirror’s Edge. Yet I feel as though the latter is “worth” more than the former.

Perhaps good graphics and other tangible features (something we can easily quantify, such as number of levels) are what we actually look to when we decide how much a game is worth. It would make sense as good gameplay is a fairly intangible thing: something that is hard to define as a concept, never mind judging whether something is “good gameplay”. Graphics on the other hand are right there in front of you saying “Hey! Look at me! I’m pretty! I’m worth £40″.

There’s also the fact that graphics and such are the only thing you can judge a game by before you actually play it. It could be that we look to the graphics of a game to determine whether we can justify the price tag when making the initial investment for a game. With this you would expect the idea of judging a game’s worth to go away once someone actually plays the game, but it still seems to linger (for example, I’ve seen people complaining about Left 4 Dead’s price tag despite admitting that they’ve gotten more gameplay out of it than other similarly prices products that they don’t complain about).

Extrapolating from all of this it seems that the higher a game’s price is, the higher the graphical standard is expected to be. But similarly, lower priced games would be forgiven for poorer graphics. Free games can be forgiven entirely, assuming the graphics don’t get in the way of the actual gameplay (e.g. if the interface design is hideous).

There’s a game you may have heard of called Dwarf Fortress. Dwarf Fortress is well known for how ridiculously in depth it is in the way that it works and this gives it almost endless amounts of gameplay where the fun derives from discovering just what is possible in the game. But the graphics of Dwarf Fortress are a bit lacking…

Another game is Space Station 13, which has a different setting but is very similar, with incredible details and in depth gameplay. It also has very poor graphics.

How much would you pay for these games? Not a lot, right? They’re both free. Yet, many people sink lots of time into them, perhaps much more than they do into full priced retail games.

Obviously this rule does not hold true for every game. There are some games where the gameplay is good enough that people can forgive poorer graphics and still pay full price (Grand Theft Auto 1 springs to mind). There are other games that have beautiful graphics but don’t sell that well because they are obviously shit.

Flash games are almost always free and you very rarely see someone complaining about bad graphics (except, as previously mentioned, when the bad graphics detract from the gameplay). But what if Flash games suddenly cost money? Even something small like £1-5? I bet you would see people start to complain that it isn’t worth it unless the developers step up their game with the overall presentation of their games.