Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Category: game design

Size Doesn’t matter

Posted on August 17, 2010

I’m not the only indie developer writing on this topic today, check out the links at the bottom of this post.

There is a bit of a trend, as I see it, an unwelcome one, for the subject of game ‘length’ to be the dominant topic in the reviews of new games. I don’t think this a good direction for the industry to move in.
As an ‘older’ gamer, I recall a time when the whole idea of game length was silly. How long is pacman? how long is space invaders? As long as you have time for, clearly. Now you may argue (and some do) that the only reason that early games worked this way was the artificial constraints caused by a lack of processing power and file storage. These days we can have games with hand-crafted, bump mapped worlds made in incredible detail, and this is clearly better and more immersive and thus games should be measured in this way.
Now I’m not vaguely going to suggest that more-detailed, more immersive worlds are not a good thing. They clearly are. What I’m against is the weighing up of a games value (both artistically and in monetary terms) by sheer length and content.

Firstly, it would be insane to judge movies or books the same way. Andrew Marrs ‘The History of Modern Britain’ weighs in at 602 pages for £8.99, whereas Malcom Gladwells ‘tipping point’ is an all-too short disappointing gameplay experience at just 259 pages for £7.99, representing far worse gameplay for your gaming cash.

Sounds totally bonkers doesn’t it?

Is Halo a better game than World of Goo? Personally, I probably enjoyed WoG better, but I haven’t finished either game, so I have no idea which is longest. Clearly, game length didn’t vaguely factor in for me. And That doesn’t put me in some minority either. A huge chunk of gamers never finish games. I’ve been gaming since pong and only ever ‘finished’ 3 games in my entire life. I got bored with Half Life (yes really) and Half Life 2, and Bioshock, and almost any game you care to mention. When I read about how some l33t haxxor ‘finished’ a game in 8 hours, I find it laughable. Imagine bragging about ‘finishing’ war and peace in 2 days. The idea is to enjoy the experience, not race to the end as fast as you can.

Even worse than paying for games where the effort is spread out over 100 hours, when i know I’ll get bored at 20, is games where, in a desperate bid to make the game sound ‘longer’, the designers introduce tedious sections where you plod back and forth between the same points to get their moneys-worth from the scenery. It’s obvious, it’s tedious, and it’s embarrassing. Please stop.

I don’t judge food purely by quantity. Anyone can produce a ton of bland rice for a trivial cost. We tend not to judge things purely by quantity, and when we do, we can at least admit we are being shallow. So lets stop doing it with games. Tell me if a game is good, tell me if a game is dull, but some meaningless statistic about how many levels, or how big the installer is, or how long it took you to ‘finish’ it is meaningless to me. Size doesn’t matter.

Other blog posts:

http://24caretgames.com/2010/08/16/does-game-length-matter/
http://2dboy.com/2010/08/12/too-short/
http://blog.wolfire.com
http://brokenrul.es/blog
http://gamesfromwithin.com/size-matters
http://macguffingames.com/2010/if-size-doesnt-matter-where-do-you-get-the-virtual-goods
http://mile222.com/2010/08/a-haiku-about-game-length/
http://nygamedev.blogspot.com/2010/08/coming-up-short.html
http://retroaffect.com
http://the-witness.net/news
http://www.copenhagengamecollective.org/2010/08/17/size-does-matter/
http://www.firehosegames.com/2010/08/how-much-is-enough/
http://www.hobbygamedev.com/
http://spyparty.com/2010/08/16/size-doesnt-matter-day/

Campaign Battle Frontiers

Posted on August 9, 2010

My latest playtesting has convinced me to change the way ai attacks happen in the upcoming GSB campaign. Previously, there was a complex system involving local threat levels, which changed over time based on the strength of your fleet combined with the number of enemy-controlled systems linked to your world by hyperspace warp tunnel thingies.
And that works fine, and its cool, and mostly staying.

But what was happening was that you would conquer a system, push forwards and conquer the next system, and there was still a threat ‘behind the lines’ to recently conquered worlds. That was fine too, but I also coded a little ‘unlikely but possible sneak attack’ system whereby any of your worlds could get attacked at any time. If you didn’t have a big fleet sat there, this would be unopposed, you would lose the system, and maybe now have a gap in your supply lines.

Frankly, in game terms, this is a pain in the exhaust-port. It’s frustrating and annoying to lose a system behind the lines, and it’s wasteful to keep a fleet in every system just in case. The good old ‘pushing-back the frontier’ system is better.

I’ll keep the gradually lowering threat level thing, but ditch the sneak attacks. Once you have conquered a world, and parked a big-ass fleet there for a few turns, you can mvoe on and not fear losing it. It is, after all, a big map to conquer.

On an unrelated note, can whoever codes the cursor stuff at ATI get their shit together please? Multiple monitor setups in windows 7 are basically chaos with an ATI card. Random cursor corruption when swapping monitors, and an invisible cursor if it goes into text carat mode and back again on the secondary montior… These are not new bugs, from what I read, so why are you tweaking drivers to get an extra 1 FPS on starcraft when you should be fixing basic windows functionality? Bah!

Strategy game specs are going mad

Posted on August 8, 2010

I just saw the recommended system reqs for Civilisation V.

  • Operating System: Windows® Vista SP2/ Windows® 7
  • Processor: 1.8 GHz Quad Core CPU
  • Memory: 4 GB RAM
  • Video: 512 MB ATI 4800 series or better, 512 MB nVidia 9800 series or better

    • What?

    WHAT?

    512MB video cards and quad core, for a turn-based strategy game? The min specs…

  • Operating System: Windows® XP SP3/ Windows® Vista SP2/ Windows® 7
  • Processor: Dual Core CPU
  • Memory: 2GB RAM
  • Video: 256 MB ATI HD2600 XT or better, 256 MB nVidia 7900 GS or better, or Core i3 or better integrated graphics

    • That’s still crazy. We are talking MINIMUM specs here, for a geeky turn-based game. GSB has high specs (for me) because of the real-time battle playback shinyness, but I’d still think they are lower than this.

    I like games like CIV, but ultimately these games are not about the graphics. I just cannot imagine where the processing power is going. This trend to make the campaign maps of strategy game run at 10 FPS just boggles my mind.  What about all the strategy geeks with old PCs or laptops and no interest in buying new ones? Don’t people want their money?

    Someone with the min spec above, tell me how GSB runs for you. Please tell me it runs fine or I’ll look a right dork :D

    I don’t need a 2nd job, or heroin

    Posted on August 2, 2010

    There seems to have been a huge growth in two areas of game design in the last 5 years.

    1) 2nd Job games.

    Most people call them ‘MMOs’ , but the basic gameplay seems to be this: You start out at the bottom. You go to someone who stands there all day doing nothing who tells you to go kill 5 spiders. When you do that, he gives you a miniscule promotion, and then tells you to kill 10 spiders. Repeat until dead.

    This sounds like some of the early office jobs I did, only rather than the spider-dude paying me at the end of each month, with an MMO, I pay for the priviledge of doing this job. No thanks.

    2) Heroin

    I’m lucky. I don’t get really addicted to farmville games, or flash MMOs. I know people VERY addicted to world of Warcraft or EVE. People who run online games who I know have tales of people spending $300+ a month on in-game items. Why? Because they are addicted.

    Peoples’ brains are different. A BIG chunk of people have whatever neurotransmitter or collection of neurons it takes to get them totally hooked on games which keep you in a  tight feedback/reward/effort loop, ad finitum. A lot of big companies are tuned into this and boy do they exploit it. Keep them playing…Keep them playing… Spread out the gameplay, because the players time is considered worthless to them. Quantity, not Quality…

    And we are only at the very early days of this. People have already shown adverts to people while they lie in MRI scanners to fine tune the ads to the way peoples emotions trigger. This will come for games, if it isn’t already being studied.

    Luckily, I seem to be immune to 2) and I already have a job, so 1) doesn’t appeal to me. There are still fun games out there that I enjoy, but they are becoming an endangered species. Company of Heroes is now Company of Heroes online, because they want micro-transactions and the addictive push-button-get-banana gameplay that earns zynga so much money…

    I see *why* gaming is going this way, I just feel left out and a bit saddened by it.

    Campaign Repair update

    Posted on July 30, 2010

    When I started designing the campaign, I put in code for repairs to ships, where you could repair individual pieces of damage. An attack on a ship might damage a module, doing 25% damage to it. You could repair just that specific piece of damage, if you so chose.

    The idea was that rather than just clicking ‘repair this ship, 1,240 CR’ you could spend less, if funds were tight, and just repair critical modules. I wrote a ton of code to generate slightly silly technobabble descriptions of each piece of damage. All of this is in the campaign and working.

    In practice, when testing the campaign I find myself invariably repairing the whole ship, or if funds are tight, just leaving it to the next turn when funds are available. The fancy repair interface is a bit overdone and over-engineered. However, I see no good reason to remove it entirely, it’s kinda fun, and allows micro-managing for those who want to, so it’s staying in.

    Something that did change today is the cost of repairs halved. Previously it was the same as construction. If a module cost 400CR and took 25% damage, it cost 100CR to fix. Now it’s 50CR. Why the change?

    Well in practice, repairs are reasonably rare. It takes time for ships to retreat, especially cruisers, and in battle, by the time you realise your fleet is screwed, the chances of all of them managing to turn 180 degrees and warp out are quite low. You often lose half the fleet during the retreat, unless you make an instant judgement at the first sign of the enenmy, and call an instant withdrawal. Combined with this, there is is the issue of repair yards. Not every system has them, so the damaged ships need to make a few warp jumps back to the nearest connected repair yard, before they get fixed up. By the time you do this, you might as well build new ships.

    So….. Repairs will be cheaper than new build. I think it balances out better this way, and it makes sense in gameplay terms anyway. The real frustration should be logistics, and having retreated and thus given up territory, rather than resenting the cost of repairs. I’m aiming for a ‘company of heroes’ style mechanic, where its sensible to retreat and fight another day, if outgunned.