Mark’s Glog

This week I got my new computer, together with Windows Vista. Even though this has little to do with game design I thought you all should at least know that from now on my reviews of games will be based on how they perform under Vista with a pretty fast machine and graphics card. Up to now I did not encounter games from our site that did not run under Vista so it seems compatibility is pretty good.

Also I did not encounter any problems with installing Vista and using the various pieces of software that I used to use. I actually was somewhat surprised how extremely easy everything went. After all the comments I heard about Vista before I expected some trouble but did not have any. Actually Vista looked a lot less different than I thought. And that is a good thing I think. The changes in Office 2007 were clearly larger than the changes in Vista itself.

The only disappointment was that even with my new NVidia  GeForce 8800 GT I could not run Microsoft Flight Simulator X on 1280×1024 with all the options set to really high values. It seems that for that you need a graphics card that has not yet been developed.

 I also got Pro Evolution Soccer 2008 for the Wii. (You readers should know by now that the Wii is my favorite console.) I loved the way you control the game. Rather different from previous soccer games, with more focus on strategy. I will write a review when I have played it some more but as it looks now I am really positive about it.

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There are many topics I can write about in the glog. So I would like you to indicate what you would like me to write more about. I can give more game design theory and tricks or I can write about different aspects of Game Maker itself or I can write more critical reviews or I can give more global news from the world of games. So please indicate in your replies what you want. But don’t ask me to review your game! I don’t promise I will do what you ask, nor that I will do it in the near future. But I will remember your suggestions.

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Today I spend a little time playing the game Techno-Drone written by Super-Drunk that can be found on the YoYo Games site here: http://www.yoyogames.com/games/show/29089. The game is a fast-paced action game with an interesting game play element. The drone with which you destroy the enemies also drags your home base toward the enemies. This leads to additional tension. While you clearly must destroy the enemies that very action can actually bring your base into a dangerous position. This requires decision making under time pressure, which is the main ingredient in all good fast-paced action games.

The game is fun to play for a while. However, there are some clear flaws in the game design that I want to discuss here. It would have been easy to remedy these flaws, which would have led to a better game. As many games make similar mistakes, I hope this analysis is also useful for other game designers. To understand the points I make below though, please play the game first.

 Control

The control of the game is very simple. You move the drone near to an enemy using the mouse and click the mouse to destroy enemies. This is great for a game. Easy controls make it easy for the beginner to master the game. However, easy controls can also lead to a feeling of limited control and can limit the number of decisions a player has to take. (And the challenge of most games comes from taking the right decisions.) When you get a bit further in the game all you do is move with your mouse around the center of the screen, clicking as fast as you can. All decision making seems to have gone. This could have been remedied by for example having a reloading time between clicks. Or by providing a second special weapon under the right mouse button. Also, by having different enemies that behave in rather different ways and with different strengths, you can force the player to think about what enemy to attack first, avoiding the random clicking. 

Visual Overload

The game has lots of visuals. The background is moving and changing, there are all sorts of visual effects, dead enemies hang around for a while and disappear with big visuals, etc. It all look very techy but in the end it hampers the game play. The further you get in the game the harder it becomes to see the enemies because they are hidden in a huge number of unimportant visual effects. It is important in your game that the visuals help the player. Great visuals can create a Wow effect but when they distract they will in the end lead to a negative feeling for the player. Design your visuals careful.

Limited Enemy Variation

There is rather limited variation in the game. All enemies basically behave the same and are destroyed in the same way. Although they look different they do not provided different challenges. It would have been nicer to have different types of enemies. Some can move fast but in straight lines, other slow but changing directions, others again moving in circles, or locking on to the base. Some might be big and others small. Some might be more dangerous than others. Some might shoot bullets. You could have mines that explode after a while, etc. You could even have enemies that cannot be destroyed but must simply be avoided, adding an additional game play element in which the control of the base is the goal. Clearly not all of these should appear from the start but they should be introduced gradually during the game.

Powerups

There are a few different powerups and these add a nice element to the game. Because they are powerful and important, picking them up with the base is important and, hence, require different game play. A few more would have helped. It would have been even nicer when they would not just appear randomly but a bit more when you actually need them. That increases the tension to get them in time.

Increase in Difficulty

 I think the main weakness of the game is the way in which the difficulty increases. In the beginning the game is very easy (which it should be) and then suddenly the number of enemies increases very much and the game becomes almost impossible to play. A careful timing of the increase in difficulty is crucial. You have to keep players in the flow. Also it is good to make difficulty come in waves. From time to time you need to give people the time to relax. The increase of difficulty should not only come from more enemies but it should come from having more difficult decisions to make. This can be achieved by providing the player with more choices and by creating more variety in challenges that require different strategies. E.g. suddenly all enemies could come from a particular direction or you get only a particular type of enemies.

The game has a nice gameplay idea and a great engine with nice (but overdone) graphics effects. Just a bit better level design would have considerably improved it. Remember, in the end the level design is one of the most crucial parts of your game that you should spend ample of time  on.

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On the GMC Forum the question was asked how to make sure that your game becomes a staff pick on the YoYo Games site. Of course the bottom line is that your game has to be good. But there is more you can do. Although I can of course never give you a guarantee, here are some tips that might help you.

Be Original

This does not mean that the game play has to be completely original. If you look at the current staff picks some of them are for example rather standard platform games. However, at least the characters and game name should be original. We will never make a game with e.g. Mario in the title a staff pick. And try to do some original level design.

The Game Must Be Finished

Only publish your game on the site when it is completely finished. This means that it should be bug-free, has all the levels in place, has built-in help, has a starting screen, etc. We normally look at a game for staff pick only once. If you update your game later we most likely won’t see the improvements. As long as the game is not ready, publish it in the Work in Progress part of the site to get comments.

We Must Find The Game

This is a tricky one. We will not be able to make a game a staff pick if we do not spot it. And we do not play all games that are added to the site. Here are the usual tips: Good screen shots, good description, appropriate tags, and get many people to play it and rate it (market your game outside YoYo Games). And here is a final one that may sound odd: don’t publish your game on Saturday. Saturday is the day most games are published, which means your game easily disappears down the list. Also the YoYo Games staff does not work in the weekend. You have a bigger chance that we spot you if you post during the week. 

We Must Enjoy Playing It

This is the most difficult. It requires some design talent to make a game enjoyable. The game does not have to be complicated or long for this. Look at a game like Sky Diver. It is a simple, short game, but it is simply fun because it is a bit weird. In the end a game is entertaining when things are in balance. Look at some of my other posts on game design for information about this, and I will continue providing such information here.

Other Small Things

Here are some other issues that are though not the most important. Make sure the game runs under Instant Play. Preferably make it run in a window. Make sure it is not too large and loads reasonably fast. 3D is not important. We don’t look at how clever you are, but at how nice the game is. I am amazed at the 3D games some people manage to make with Game Maker but in general the 2D games are more fun to play. And don’t ask us to make your game a staff pick. That is only going to do your game harm. We already get too many messages.

I hope this helps a bit. Happy designing.

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The last five days I participated in GDCSE’08, a conference on using game development in computer science education. It was partially sponsored by Microsoft and EA. (See https://www.msadgd08.net/.) A major reason for them to sponsor this meeting is that they are worried about the declining number of CS students (in the U.S. but I think this is also happening in other parts of the world) while the industry actually needs more computer science graduates.

There were many presentations about how to adapt the computer science curriculum to include more game development ingredients. This ranges from simply changing the first programming courses by having assigments related to games, to complete curricula explaining many of the fundamentals of computer science from a game development perspective. For example, you can teach about programming languages, algorithms, AI, networks, graphics, etc. all in the light of how they can be used in creating computer games.

Also there were talks by people from industry about the type of employees they look for. These talks made it clear that the industry wants specialists. If you want to become a game programmer better get a good university degree in computer science. If you want to work in design better get a good art degree. It was though also made clear that the industry needs in particular “technical” artists, that is, artists that also understand the technology behind it. A prime reason for this is that games have to move more towards automatic content creation. Creating all the assets by hand is simply becoming too time consuming and too expensive. Hence, we need to exploit more techniques like procedural animation and automatic terrain generation and this requires a rather different type of artist.

It was interesting to see how many universities were using Game Maker, either in an introductory course to get people interested or in a course that focussed more on game design than on game programming. I myself also gave an invited presentation about Game Maker, describing how the curriculum looks like at Utrecht University, how Game Maker is and can be used in education, and what are the planned future developments of Game Maker and YoYo Games. It was nice to notice that basically everybody in the 200 people audience already knew Game Maker and many had worked with it. I hope my talk will popularize Game Maker even further.

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I am sure that quite a few of you are working on games for the competition. Even though the judging is done by the YoYo Games staff we will take the opinion of the community into consideration. In particular we will take number of plays per day into account as the ranking can be manipulated too easily (even though this is against the rules of the competition and can result in being expelled from the competition). Here are some tips that might help you with getting the attention from the community.

First of all your game should obviously be good. If it is no fun to play people won’t like it and others won’t play it.

Provide good help inside your game. When a person does not understand the game play immediately he/she will stop playing and give a low rating. Don’t provide lenghty text help but some nice screens (see my earlier glog post on help screens). Don’t add separate help documents for people to read. As people play the game through Instant Play, they will not read them.

Avoid long download and loading times. Keep your games reasonable small in file size and don’t provide unnecessary data in the files (like the gmk; distribute those separately if you want).  Long loading times result in people not playing the game again, hence reducing the number of plays. In a future game I will give some hint on improving the load time.

Don’t post preliminary versions of the game as competition entries. (You can post them in the WIP section of the site.) A preliminary version will often have bugs and will not be as good as the final version. As a result your game will get poor ratings and will disappear down the list. Also your plays per day will become lower. (Note that we will not look at total plays but at the average number of plays per day.) If you considerably improve your game later, people most likely will not notice it!

Provide the best possible screenshots and provide as many different ones as possible. In particular, make sure the first one is a good depiction of the game play as this one is used in all lists. Don’t use the starting screen or menu for this but a picture of the actual game play. Note that you can use F9 during game play to create a screenshot. In the end, graphics is only one of the elements of a nice game (and not the most important one) but it is the most important one in getting people to play the game at all.

Provide a short but informative description of your game. A description like “This is a great game.” Is not going to get people to play it.

Choose an appealing title (but be careful that you do not violate copyright). Titles should sound nice. A good approach here is to use two words with the same starting letter. Like “Pyramid Panic”, or “Roman Races” or “Mummy Madness”.

Provide a large set of relevant keywords. In this way more people will find your games and it will be indicated more often as related games.

Advertise your game outside the YoYo Games community, e.g. on forums, your own website, etc. You can use the embed mechanism for this. If your game is really good you might want to suggest it on sites like http://jayisgames.com/ for a review.

Success in creating and marketing your games. Cause without some marketing your game will not be played so much.

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As you might have seen on the YoYo Games website, the second competition has started with as a theme Ancient Civilization. If you did not win the Winter Competition, here is your chance to show how good a game designer you are. And you can win some cash as well.

The theme allows for many different types of games. You can for example create an empire construction game to build up the roman empire. Or a maze game in the dungeons of a pyramid. Or an RTS game for greek armies. Or a fighting game with gladiators in the Roman Colloseum. Or a building game to create the biggest wonder of the ancient world. Let your imagination run wild.

 We listened to some of the comments that were made for the first competition. One of them was the time. We will give you more time to complete the game. The deadline for submission is April 27, so that is still 85 days. Our plan is to have such a competion four times a year and we aim to announce them three months in advance in the future.

Also we made a few small changes to the rules. So better read the new ones. In particular, people that submit games are not allowed to rank the submissions. Also, we will primarily look at the number of plays per day, rather than the rating when we take the communities opinion into account in the judging.

 You can find more information at the page:

http://www.yoyogames.com/gamemaker/competition02

Happy Creating.

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It has been rather quiet on this glog the past period. I have been extremely busy with the classes I teach at Utrecht University (on game design) and then there was Christmas with all the visits and a week vacation. And there was of course the huge amount of work of judging the winter competition games (but that also was a lot of fun). 

 And then I bought Super Mario Galaxy for my Wii, which was a big mistake. Not because it is a bad game. On the contrary. I think it is the best game I ever played. And that is the problem. It is almost impossible to stop playing it. I have now collected 100 stars. Only 20 left to go.

It is difficult to say why the game is so great. Is has the standard Mario story that you need to rescue the princess but that is not really a driving motivation to play the game. Also, you can already rescue the prrincess after collecting 60 stars but I (like most others I assume) come back playing the other levels after that. The global cuteness of the game is definitely an attractive factor. Everything is nice with bright colors, in some sense even the enemies.

The main attraction I guess is the many different levels (galaxies) with the many different types of challenges. There are so many original concepts (although some appeared in earlier Mario games). In particular the use of gravity in the game is exceptional. The use of the Wii controller is also very well done. The levels are not really difficult for an experienced player but they still offer enough challenges and surprises to keep you excited and wanting to explore further. I can definitely recommend this game to everybody. But be warned. It will eat up a lot of your time.

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The winter competition results are now available on the Competition page. Congratulations to the winners.

I had a lot of fun playing the many submitted games over the Christmas holiday. Many of them were of amazingly good quality. Judging was very difficult. There were many more games that deserved a prize but we could only award three.

But for those that did not win and for those who did not enter, there will be a new competition that will be announced very soon. So watch this blog and the YoYo Games site for details.

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Following a special request, let me give my opinion on cheatcodes. Many games have cheatcodes. It seems to have become almost standard and players tend to complain if a game has none. But actually this is a rather strange development. If you wonder whether you should add cheatcodes to your games you better first ask yourself some questions: Why does my game need cheatcodes? What is wrong with the game without them? What benefit would the player have when I add them? And why should I not simply turn them into game features?

 There are a number of reasons that people use for having cheatcodes; some good ones and some bad ones.

Add some fun. Cheatcodes can add some simple fun to the game, especially for people that have already played the game for a while. These can for example be cheatcodes to change the looks of certain objects, show some movie, add a little sidequest, etc. They do not really change the game play. Be careful though. An important aspect of games is that you want to get your players immersed in them. And for many games you want to achieve something called suspense of disbelief, a state in which a player is willing to temporarily accept the game world as real and important. Suspense of disbelief is fragile and surprises can easily destroy it. So a funny cheatcode can destroy it and reduce the motivation for playing the game.

Create a player community. By leaving hints that cheatcodes might exist you can create a player community of people that try to find these codes and distribute them. Player communities are important for games. Finding cheatcodes becomes a kind of game in itself. To achieve this you will need many cheatcodes but they should not have too much impact on the game.

Avoid stagnation in the game. For example, in some games there always is a cheatcode to go to the next level or get extra health or infinite ammunition. This is normally a very bad reason for having cheat codes. It is mainly done to make sure everybody can finish the game. But your game design should actually enable this. So often this is just a bad remedy against bad game design. Don’t use it! It will ruin your game. Once people find out (and they soon will and distribute it) people with use the cheat, even if they can actually play the game without it. This will reduce the difficulty of the challenges which are an important element of the game experience and, hence, this will reduce the fun in the game. It also normally destroys any useful highscore list.

Change the focus. As I indicated before a game has a particular type of focus. Also a game offers a particular type of challenges to the player. Some players might not like that. You can use cheat codes to change that focus. For example, The Sims is all about time management. You might not have realized that but it is the primary game play element. Your Sim has a limited amount of time in a day and you decide how he spends that time to balance his desires. Part of the time you need to spend on working to make sure you have enough money to decorate the house. Now some people like such a management game but others would much more prefer to build nice houses for their Sims and decorate them in beautiful ways. In such a case a cheat to have infinite money and access to all objects helps to make the game interesting to such players as well. In The Sims there still is enough interesting game play if you have all that money. So it does not really disturb the game play badly which makes this a reasonable cheat. The question though remains why you need a cheatcode for this. Why not simply add a game play mode in which the focus is different. You can then more carefully balance it by e.g. disallowing other aspects of the game instead, to make sure both playing modes have their own advantages.

Extend game play later. You can add a cheat code in a game that is impossible to find. Then, later, when the game is already available for a while, you can make the cheatcode known. If the cheatcode is interesting enough, it will result in people starting to replay the game. This will give you as a creator additional attention from the player and might in particularly become useful if you are going to publish your next game.

Often cheatcodes are just programmers jokes. Sometimes the game designers do not know the cheats exist. But the programmers do not realize how badly they can ruin the game play with the cheat codes. So cheatcodes should be considered as game features that the designer of the game should think about very carefully.

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