HelixFox Games

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

What are you waiting for?

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.

Another game development contest on the SomethingAwful forums!

The theme is ‘Dealing With The Devil’ which should present some interesting possibilities. I’ve got the month of June to come up with something finished so expect a result before July!

My initial idea is some sort of game where you have a top-down view of a city with people walking around, living their lives. You are the devil. Using a gradually increasing cash fund you must deal with the people to buy their souls from them. With souls you can activate certain powers to cause chaos and destruction across the city, which earns you points. The more points you get, the better!

Once we get to June I’ll start updating with my progress.

Flash games, Indie games and casual gaming in general are all doing very well at the moment, Flash games in particular being in a very good place for developers. The tools required to develop in AS3 are readily available (there are very good paid tools available [Flash IDE, FDT, Flex Builder] and it’s possible to create AS3 apps without actually paying anything [FlashDevelop + Flex SDK]). These tools are also sufficiently designed that it is relatively easy to create a game without being held back too much by the technology (that is, you don’t have to fuss around as much trying to figure out how to get everything working).

The latter point is most interesting to me, with the best point of comparison right now is with twenty or so years ago when the games industry was in its infancy. The whole industry was being fuelled by bedroom developers making games in their free time and as a hobby because they just liked making games. These days we have a similar situation with many flash games being developed by people in their free time as a hobby for similar reasons. The main point of interest for both of these cases is that a single person could quite easily make a game by themselves, without needing a full team to take advantage of all the capabilities of the technology. Obviously with traditional videogames the technology did advance and bedroom developers largely vanished in favour of development teams, but will this happen with Flash?

As technology evolves the possibilities evolve with it, but the effort required to make use of these possibilities increases accordingly. A single person could code a text adventure game on, say, a ZX Spectrum fairly easily, but when the Mega Drive/Genesis and SNES consoles were released, the games that were developed had bigger teams behind them, usually split up into an art team and a programming team.

The Playstation era saw us enter the world of 3D in commercial games, which is probably the largest single leap in technology games have seen in their lifetime, and also the largest leap in requirements to make a game. 3D models are much more difficult to create than 2D sprites and dealing with performance issues is much more ambiguous (2D sprites were mostly limited by colours, 3D models are limited by animation complexity, number of polygons, etc). All of this meant that you needed specialists who knew how to model 3D objects on your team when developing 3D games.

These days it’s not unusual for big budget console games to have teams of hundreds of people working on them, with the possibility of even more people being involved due to outsourcing to external companies. Grand Theft Auto 4 had an overall development cost of $100 million, which really highlights just how far past the age of the bedroom developer we are.

Taking all of this into consideration it’s interesting to look at the state of Flash games recently, which somewhat mirror the situation twenty years ago with developers making games as a hobby, and try to predict how things will change as Flash and Actionscript become more and more advanced (or even replaced by better or more accessible technologies). This is already happening with 3D being implemented into the Flash API and other libraries like Papervision and Box2D offering advanced systems to be implemented in games. 3D especially adds a lot of work to the game development process, as explained previously with the effort needed to create 3D models.

If things were to happen like they did before then we would see more and more Flash game collaborations where people combine skills to make a better game than they could make on their own. The overall quality of games will raise so much than a single person can’t make a good enough game anymore; the public would demand better graphics, better gameplay and more features than it is feasible for one person to implement. The number of people required to make a decent game will rise and rise as demands and the technological capabilities of peoples’ computers also rise.

But… will that happen? I don’t think so, and we have to look at a number of factors to understand why.

The first point of interest is an idea that the mainstream games industry has been running with for decades. The idea that consumers want MORE features with BETTER graphics that are more REALISTIC or otherwise impressive. There is a kind of technological arms race going on with companies boasting about the number of polygons in their characters, the minor details in their characters’ facial expressions, the number of individual blades of grass that are rendered…

There’s a simple fact that Flash games are much more casual than traditional hardcore games and are usually free and played for less than an hour at a time, mostly supported by advertisements. The fact that they are free is the key point here as it means the player’s only investment in playing them is their time (as opposed to a hefty £40/$60 when buying a new game), which means players are much more likely to actually try a game and are significantly less likely to be put off by poor graphics and low production values (the old idea of “You get what you pay for”).

The same holds true for other casual games, such as most of the iPhone’s game library. They do cost money, but usually only a fraction (£0.79/$0.99 for many, a little more for others) of what it costs for a full console game.

So, with a lower investment for consumers, there is less pressure needed to convince them to play your game. Which means less reason to pile on the graphics and increase production time and costs. We are more able to focus on making a great game.

Flash games in general have been playing catchup to console and PC games, mostly because of technological limitations of working within the browser. Because of this, the types of games that you see made in Flash tend to be very reminiscent of many retro games that were around fifteen years ago when similar technological restrictions were in place in the games consoles of that era. You see lots of 2D platformers, racing games, puzzle games, etc. One thing that you can notice, though, is that the Flash equivalents of these games are usually a lot more sophisticated than the retro games of yesteryear. Mostly because of theft.

It’s not really theft, though, but people making games will almost always look to existing examples for ideas and for examples of what not to do. For example, if you were developing a 2D platformer game now, you could look at Sonic 3 or Super Mario Brothers 3 to see what they did. You can look at those games and see what worked and what didn’t work and you can incorporate the best parts into your game and leave out the bad parts, perhaps coming up with an extra idea or two of your own to add to the mix. Later, someone will play your game, take your ideas and make them their own and the cycle continues.

This is a process that has always been going on in the games industry and you can actually see it happening if you look back at certain games. Raph Koster in his excellent book A Theory of Fun for Game Design suggests that for old shoot ‘em up games, Space Invaders came first, with Galaxian coming later, adding a couple of extra features (such as more aggressive enemies). Later came Centipede which let you move around more and later still came Galaga which added bonus levels and power ups. The general idea of what he says is that games would copy the general format of games that came before them and build upon that, adding new features and improving the overall experience. This process is what spawns genres and, if anything, has become much more blatant in recent years (What are the major differences between most first-person shooter games of this generation? Hardly anything, mechanically).

An amusing example of what is probably the latest big genre to be created is the Tower Defense, which is an apt example as it has been a big deal in the Flash games community (I’ve even made one!). I used to be into the custom scenario making community of Age of Empires 2 when that game was big and there were a few (very crude) TD scenarios released for that. Later, I got into the custom map community for Warcraft 3 and that is really where TDs started to become big. There are a lot of TD variants released for WC3 and most of them were pretty popular. So popular, in fact, that one of them (Element TD) was remade in Flash and, I believe, the first Flash TD to be very popular. Then Desktop Tower Defense was released and achieved an insane amount of publicity, allowing the creator, Paul Preece, to go on to form the Casual Collective (interestingly, it seems the flash version of Element TD was made by the other founding member, Dave, which I just discovered).

Nowadays you can see TD games everywhere and it is basically a genre in its own right now. I even have one on my phone (geoDefense)

This point has become a bit long-winded but what I’m trying to get across is that as Flash game developers we have a huge library of games that came before us that we can look to for ideas and mistakes that we can learn from.

So, back to the original point. Where are Flash Games going? Where will we be in five years? Ten? Twenty?

It’s likely we’ll see a variety of things happen. Some will find success releasing free games and reaping advertising rewards. Some will have their games sponsored. Some will manage to sell their games. Some will simply enjoy games and make them without thinking of making a profit.

It’s one of the benefits of having such an open platform with Flash in that there are no restrictions in what we can do. What happens with flash games is up to the developers themselves and the only limit is how daring we will be.