HelixFox Games

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.

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.

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.

While at Flash on the Beach last year, one thing that was gotten across quite a lot was the “KISS” principle, or “Keep it simple, stupid”. The basic idea behind this is that when designing something (this principle applies to a great deal, not just games), simplicity is one of the most (if not the most) important things to consider.

While reading a forum thread about Valve’s latest game Left 4 Dead, I noticed a lot of people were being armchair designers and suggesting “cool things” to add to the game that they thought would improve the overall experience. I’ll list a few of them here and why they wouldn’t work:

1. Having other groups of survivors holed up in various locations. You could barter with them and trade ammo for medkits or vice versa! Or you could just kill them and take their stuff! One of Left 4 Dead’s main strengths is its fast paced gameplay and the high level of tension it maintains throughout, giving you the feeling that you are never safe. Stopping to barter either means you break the pacing and tension while you shop around (by stopping zombie attacks while you interact with the survivors) or you are constantly being attacked while shopping, making the exchange annoying as hell. Either method wouldn’t work.
2. Have a huge open world city with a start area and a target area. You could take any route you want to get to the goal! Valve originally had something like this in mind but they found that players would often get lost as there was no clear way forward. As they explored the city, they would often end up at places they had already been or run into dead ends, getting frustrated. These problems go away as players learn the layout of the city, of course, but once players know the layout of the city they also know the best routes. Once players find a “best” route, even if it only shaves seconds of the overall travel time or is only marginally easier than other routes, they will always use this roure, to the total exclusion of others, turning it into the linear game it is now, except with huge amounts of wasted time and effort given to the areas that players will forget about. Valve applied the KISS principle and resigned the levels to be simpler and more linear.

I mentioned above that players find a “best” way to do things and stick to this no matter what. This is true in most situations (well, why would you do things worse?) and can especially be seen in online games like World of Warcraft. In WoW, you can compare two damage-dealing classes and if one does, say, 1100 damage per second and another does, say 1045 damage per second (5% less), everyone will consider the latter class to be vastly inferior than the former, despite the fact that a 5% damage difference is largely irrelevent in all but the most cutting edge of content (which only a small proportion of players will ever experience). This is foolish behaviour but it exhibits itself whenever some level of competitiveness is present in online games. However, it’s a matter of psychology rather than pure game design. I’m also digressing a lot.

So yeah, keeping it simple. When designing a game, you will inevitably think of cool things to add to the game that you (and your friends) think will make the game that much better. But will it? Be careful with every feature you add to the core gameplay and really ask yourself “is this worth it?” as good gameplay is a volatile mistress who can be upset by the slightest thing.

An example of this in one of my games, Helix Defense, I thought about adding boss character waves in, where instead of 10 ships attacking there would be a single really strong ship. I tried it briefly but something about it bugged me. I took it out in the end, mostly for reasons of turret balancing (the game is balanced around all turrets being roughly equal; having waves with a single strong enemy skews this by indirectly making turrets that attack a single target better and turrets that attack multiple targets weaker).

When I released the game there was only a single enemy type whose health and speed increased for every wave. All the turrets were roughly equal at killing these enemies, which I liked. The game was simple and easy to pick up while still maintaining a good level of variety, which I also liked. However, I now think there really should have been more variety with the enemies. One of the main things I noticed from people who played the game was that people almost always ended up using the chain turret exclusively (along with the slowing turret, which was always essential), even though it was only a little bit better than the other turrets. This goes back to the player behaviour thing I mentioned above.

The game was too simple, in the end. There was very little to differentiate the turrets (aside from the slowing turret, again) as their only job was to do damage to enemies. There should have been some other incentive to use every turret to encourage the use of all turrets. Perhaps having different kinds of enemies that are susceptible to different kinds of turrets would have solved this? It would take experimentation to see if this is the case or not.

These are the things I have to consider when designing Helix Defense 2 (hoping to come up with a better name for it).

(You may have noticed that it hasn’t been released yet, despite I said it might be done in january! Well, between work and family i’ve been quite busy. I’m still working on it, I promise!)

That’s enough rambling out of me for now. Tata.