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

Air-Fix models for the 40+ kidults?

Posted on January 8, 2012

When i was a kid we would spend ages glueing together model stuff like this:

Airfix and humbrol FTW!

The problem is, even if you are a 40+ kidult like me who wouldn’t feel silly ordering a model tank to build, the market does not seem to cater to me any more. Lets be honest, those model tanks we built as kids were actually pretty crap. I recall them being stupidly intricate and tricky and lifelike, but in fact they were small, very simple, easy to make, and always looked a bit crap.

of course, if you have money to burn you can buy these:

But they weight 70 KG…

But where is the middle ground? Show me a decent sized, hard to build (but satisfying to build) model tank and I’ll easily waste a weekend fending cats away from the glue as I stick a model together :D

Bite Sized Hardcore

Posted on January 4, 2012

The press and publishers often try to split gamers into two groups, the hardcore and the casual. Here are rough descriptions:

Hardcore gamers play serious games, deep games, and they play a LOT. They have a lot of time, and they get invested into games. They play mods, they read strategy guides, they are probably 14 year old boys. They like zombies and killing stuff. They play games like Skyrim, Call of Duty, Men of War, Starcraft. Their favorite color is dark brown, stained with the blood of orcs.

Casual gamers play fun cute games. They play simple games, and only in short chunks. They cannot cope with 2 mouse buttons, or reading instructions. They hate violence. They are all 40+ soccer moms and they like kittens and cooking. They play games like farmville and peggle, and match-3 games. Their favorite color is the fluffy white of a pony’s mane, draped across a basket of flowers.

But of course this is bullshit.

I am *time poor* when it comes to games, but I love deep hardcore serious strategy stuff, with orcs and blood, and ok, maybe the odd kitten, but it’s a kitten with razor sharp claws who battles his enemies and earns steam achievements.

What I think game designers may have missed, is that the 14 year old hardcore starcraft players of yore, are now 30+ with kids. maybe even 40+ like me. They understand and love serious hardcore games but are time poor. Right now I genuinely play more battlefield 3 than anno because anno takes longer to load for me.

What they want, perhaps… is bite sized hardcore? I present to you, the first draft of

THE BITE SIZED HARDCORE MANIFESTO.

What we demand is…

1) No pandering to casual gaming stereotypes. No gratuitous kittens or ‘cute’ cuddly characters.

2) No time wasting. No splash screens, intros, or FMV. We have 30 minutes tonight for gaming. Ensure all 30 minutes have us interacting with the game.

3) No Grind. We have day jobs. leave the grind to the kids in the F2P MMOs where it belongs. Give me decent, varying content, without filler. And don’t reward grind either, with bonus achievements for time played, or 1,000 low level rats clubbed.

4) No nickel+diming. We have proper jobs and disposable income. If the game is good, we will buy outright. Don’t keep breakign immersion to try and sell us $0.05 worth of magic pixie dust.

5) No oversimplification. We can cope with 2 mouse buttons, maybe even 3, and a wheel. We can cope with right clicking, tech trees, customisable units and mods.

6) No mandatory training levels or tutorials that cover the obvious. This is my 245th first person shooter. I can guess that WSAD moves, the mouse looks, and the mouse shoots. At the very least, let me skip tutorial stuff I don’t need.

7) Don’t patronize us. We shouldn’t get an achievement for hitting the jump key, or told we are awesome soldiers for hitting a tin can. Leave that crap for kids in kindergarten.

8) Be original. We have gamed before. We have fought in many a crate-strewn corridoor, and killed many a rat and returned their hides to someone who is too lazy to do it themselves. We have heard many tales of lost kingdoms and evil wizards. Surprise us. Please.
What needs adding?

Tutorial

Posted on January 2, 2012

I’m doing the tutorial for Gratuitous Tank Battles over the next few days. In format, it is similar to the one in Gratuitous Space Battles. I have thought quite a lot about tutorials, and the best approaches to them when i make my games. My starting points come from ym own experiences with game tutorials which are thus:

  1. I hate tutorials that are slow. I learn FAST. If your game has a tutorial that will take more than ten minutes, then I’m likely going to skip it and not bother, and then try to wing it. Sorry, but I have little free time…
  2. I hate tutorials that rely on spoken voice. I can read. I can read faster than you can speak, even if you are some sort of entertaining rap-singer with extreme vocal dexterity. Plus, the accent and acting will often make me snigger or groan. Text please. (also some people game with the sound off, especially in a room with family members).
  3. I dislike tutorials that attempt to be too cute or funny. Save it for the games characters, or the manual, anything but the bit where I am purely after information, not flavour or atmosphere.

With these thoughts in mind, my tutorial is split into different parts of the game, and triggers when you hit them. Its basically text windows with the odd interactive prompt to click a button, and flashing rectangles that highlight which parts of the UI are being referred to. In a sudden outbreak of common sense, there is now a ‘reset tutorial’ button on the options screen, which resets it all and shows it again if you missed something.

There is a lot more to the tutorial than actual modal pop-up windows though. I also think that an effective part of a games tutorial is distributed elsewhere, for example:

  1. the website, and it’s forums
  2. The manual
  3. Videos showing how certain stuff works, linked from the website.
  4. Tooltips on everything

I think this works well, because it means you don’t burden veteran GSB and RTS players with forcing them (like FPS games do) to look left and right and click all the buttons before you let them play. Real gaming newcomers can read the manual, and every tooltip and tutorial window, but I’m hopefully not applying the brakes too much for gamers in a hurry who want to plonk down an army of mechs RIGHT NOW and watch things go bang.

Thats’ the plan anyway. I’m looking forward to the manual. Should be fun to do. Most game manuals suck. Hopefully this one will not.

Gratuitous Influences

Posted on December 30, 2011

I’ve uploaded a new video blog thign about the influences on GTB, with me rambling about Dr Who and Blackadder. Here it is:

 

Obviously it’s on youtube. if you have a second, and you thought it was worth watching, please up-vote it on the youtube site. better still, share it on facebook or twitter. That kind of thing is really helpful, and it doesn’t take much effort to do it. I really appreciate it. Also, does anyone have any good ideas for sites to submit/notify about this sort of thing? I’ll post it to the GTB moddb page, and also nervously submit it to reddit, but I’m not sure where else it should live.

It takes a silly amount of time and effort to make a video, in comparison to a normal blog post. i want to get into the habit of promoting GTB through video though, because it looks so much better in motion.

I started early work on the tutorial today. yay!

Edit: here is the reddit submission:

Me nervously talking about the influences behind my humble indie game (Gratuitous Tank Battles)
byu/cliffski inIndieGaming

A game devs thoughts on skyrim NPCs

Posted on December 27, 2011

I bought skyrim, partly because I did enjoy oblivion, partly because skyrim got great reviews and any decent game dev should know what people are buying and enjoying.

So far, It’s pretty good, but I’m not bowled over. I don’t see it as any major (or even minor) change or improvement from Oblivion. Maybe I haven’t played it enough yet? There are a number of minor things that make me smile, more than disappoint, such as all of the guards sounding like schwarzenegger, and all the women assuming I want to sleep with them. That’s my normal expression, I swear!

More seriously, the game does not seem to have moved on at all, in the field of interaction with NPC’s, which is a big surprise. It’s 2011 now (nearly 2012), so we still need almost static NPC’s that act pretty much like ‘gossip+quest+lifestory vending machines’.
Coding a much more adaptive and context sensitive system shouldn’t be hard. I find it very unlikely that there is a major problem from either a game design or code POV, in having every NPC store some data abut their attitude to you, plus a list of recent events, plus reaction to your appearance.

Almost all games have NPC’s that are staggeringly stupid. You can sneak up to them at midnight, having never met them, with your sword drawn, wearing a black cloak and holding a two handed sword, and as long as you press ‘E’, they will say something like
“My name is zarg, I’ve been farming here all my life, things aren’t so bad really.”
WTF?
We *can* do better than this. On an indie game, with a tiny budget and one coder, we can do better, so why a game with the budget of skyrim cannot, is beyond me. Unless….

It’s voice acting isn’t it? Lets be honest. We cannot afford to have 500 different lines fo dialog for that character, because the assumption is that all games need to be ‘fully voiced’. This is CRIPPLING to AI. I bet the
AI coders on skyrim grind their teeth like maniacs, knowing that the simplest and cheapest text adventures can have twenty times more immersive character interaction that the trillion dollar AAA hit game skyrim.

Is it *really* so vital to have voice acting for all NPC’s? I find most acting in movies to be tragic, let alone acting in games. I would be much happier if ‘lesser’ NPCs had just text, (maybe some simlish mumbling?) but they actually said something relevant and believable.

Immersion is NOT just graphics and sounds. If it was, who would buy books? Sometimes dialog really matters, and in an epic RPG it is vital. Skyrim has (like most games) prioritised screenshots & trailer clips over actual immersion, at least when it comes to AI.

You probably all thing I’m wrong, the game scored massively highly and sold by the crateload. What do you think? Is it just me that wants to smack the NPC’s and say “I only just met you, you f**king robot!”.