These last years I have been lamenting the fact that I’m getting too old for behaving like an uncouth youth. Slowly but inexorably I’ve cut down on my drinking, partying and general weird behaviour…but something inside me misses the good old days. I miss hitch-hiking to festivals to watch strange punk bands no one else cares about, meeting strange people and experiencing random everyday adventures. But lo and behold! Now it seems like I might get a chance to indulge myself in some good ol’ misbehaviour again: West Coast Riot is an upcoming festival in Gothenburg, and it features the best lineup I’ve seen so far in 2008!
Just look at the bands…
- NOFX
- Bad Religion
- Flogging Molly
- Lagwagon
- Moderat likvidation
- De lyckliga kompisarna
- No Fun At All
- Randy
- And so on…
I am aware that you might be culturally handicapped and unaware of the greatness of the latter four Swedish bands, but I trust that everyone has heard of NOFX, Bad Religion and Flogging Molly at least. Those three are enough to make me feel hot and bothered; the rest is a great bonus.
Feel like tagging along? The problem right now is that it’s been half a decade since I last knew people I could convince to come with me on events like this. I don’t fancy the idea of being the old bastard in a crowd of pretentious little 16-year-old punks, but trust me: even if I have to go alone, I am definitely attending this festival!
I think…
These last days I’ve seen quite a few articles on the ‘net mentioning MySpace’s recent “Data Availability” program which will make them share data with, among others, Yahoo and Twitter. This revelation is often mentioned alongside DataPortability, a framework for combining information from different social networking sites. I’m all for solutions like this; I love the thought of having data being accessible from everywhere (as long as it’s in a controlled manner). Not that I see much point in it, myself - I can easily add what’s needed manually to the few social networking sites I’m active on. But I love the idea.
One problem is that this is yet another attempt at creating an open standard that can be used by anyone and everyone. I’m sure that DataPortability thinks that it’s special and unique and brings something new into the disarrayed online world…but I’m also sure that OpenSocial feels the same way, just as FriendFeed and who knows how many others. Looking at DataPortability’s FAQ page it seems that they are aware of the problem of constantly re-inventing new standards; they want to use existing standards effectively instead. …But in a controlled manner. According to their recommendations. …Which sounds like they are trying to impose a standard, after all. One good thing about DataPortability is the fact that they won’t try to make a centralized storage point for all data - unlike FriendFeed, which sounds like utter bollocks.
Anyway, good luck to all of them, and I’m not stupid enough to look a gift horse in the mouth: if DataPortability (or some other standard) becomes a wide-spread way of sharing data I’ll definitely look into how I could use it in upcoming projects. For example…Spandex Force 2. I could imagine some cool uses such as importing personal information into the game, accessing photos that can be converted into an in-game avatar pic, or sharing pictures of impressive victories. Amongst other things.
I suspect that this could even be used for cross-game character data. It’s the old utopian dream that fanboys have yearned about for years and years: imagine that you’re playing an RPG and that you’re pretty fond of Mr. Fagball (as your character might be called). Then you want to play another RPG - or even a game of a completely different genre - and you could now have the option of using Mr. Fagball in that game as well! Yayness! Of course, it would probably work like utter crap if it was implemented badly, but I could imagine that static character traits could be shared even though game-specific data isn’t.
For example, if Mr. Fagball is a character in an RPG his STR stat might be at 16. Even if this would be possible to translate into strength in a strategy game, it might be completely ludicrous - the strategy game could become totally broken. However, if the RPG game stored information about Mr. Fagball’s pot-bellied appearance, that could (possibly) be of use in the strategy game as well. Like a cross-platform Mii. Except that this sharing wouldn’t have to stop at mere appearance; if data was gathered through social sites as well, personal information could be utilized by the game in order to make an uncannily scary experience.
“Give it up, Moop-Gleez! Your evil plans are brought to an end!”
“So, Mr. Fagball… You have come to destroy me? I think not - I know your weakness! You made out with Patrick’s sister last weekend, and if you don’t throw down your sword right now I’ll e-mail him and tell!”
“NOOOOO!”
I simply have to brag about the awesome character art that’s been pouring in lately for my adventure-puzzle-management game Wildhollow! Take a look at the cast so far:
Tiny, tiny samples of the characters in Wildhollow. Tiiiiny tiny tiny!
It’s going to be a whole lot of characters, and a whole lot of fun! I’d really like to write a bit about the story and the characters, but I’ll do my best to not spoil anything. And either way, things might always change before the end, so I’d better not say too much just yet.
One thing I can say though is that I’ve re-thought the beginning a bit. Originally I thought of giving the player loads and loads of things to do from the beginning, but that’s just…a bit overwhelming. Instead I’ll focus om the adventuring aspects first, and maybe some puzzles, before I bring in the management bits. Essentially, you’ll have to progress a little into the game before it really opens up. Not to worry, though - it won’t be like a dull tutorial. Just… Focusing on other aspects of the game, in the beginning.
When you start the game you have to solve a few easy quests and gather enough money for your first ranch upgrade before you can start buying animals. That’s when the game will begin properly; when you’re able to breed animals and create new species. But I have a suspicion that there’ll be quite some adventuring and puzzling even after that.
Enough ranting for now. I’ll just briefly mention that it’s a female dog to find background art that fits…and is affordable. I might have something going now - I’ll just have to wait and see. Stay tuned for Wildhollow news!
Yesterday I received a very kind e-mail thanking me for developing Spandex Force, heaping enough praise over the game to make me blush like a little girl.
This morning I blushed almost as much, as I got another mail from the same source, suggesting that The Crossdresser (one of the villains in Spandex Force) bears quite some similarity to me. I leave it up to you to decide:
The Crossdresser to the left. No, right.
Arguments for:
- Both have long hair and a beard.
- I have been known to wear a dress in order to disguise myself.
- The Crossdresser is completely insane; I think most people would say that we share that trait.
Arguments against:
- The Crossdresser’s wearing a wig in that picture.
- Uh…
- It’s not me, I promise!
Man! Outwitted by my own lists!
PopCap, developer and publisher of casual hit games such as Bejeweled, Peggle and Bookworm Adventures, have funded a study that shows that playing casual games relieves stress and improves your mood. Maybe I’m just a tad cynical, but my initial response to that is a raised eyebrow and a “no excrement” look on my face. I’m not really surprised that playing a cute casual game results in joy and less stress. Isn’t that pretty much the whole point?
And wait a second… This study was funded by PopCap? Hm… If I were a bit more cynical I would almost suspect that the study is intended to point out the obvious, and that they’re doing this purely for PR reasons. Especially since the games mentioned are - wait for it - Bejeweled 2, Peggle and Bookworm Adventures. But that couldn’t be the case, could it?
Also, I really don’t think there’s enough data present in the press release or in the slides accompanying it. It’s little things, like the following snippet:
In all cases, the changes in stress levels and mood were measured in comparison to a control group that experienced a Web-based activity similar in physical and mental nature to the game-playing groups.
Exactly what Web-based activity was this? And how can they assert that it’s similar in physical and mental nature? A similar mental nature would be something intended to stimulate positively, like…um…a game. Which would mean that they played a web game instead of a downloadable game? And how exactly are they confirming that the physical natures are the same? Playing a game is a much more involved experience for me than just, for example, browsing the net; even if they per definition both involve moving the mouse and sitting on my ass, the physical experiences are subtly different.
But seriously, the study was interesting and confirmed my intuitive belief that games help me relax. And there’s probably loads more information in the actual paper for those who wish to check up details about the study. That wouldn’t be me, though - I prefer to complain.
Either way, go casual games for making us all relaxed and happy! Now I feel like playing some Magic Farm.
I’ve been a lazy bum lately - my new puzzle/management/adventure game Wildhollow is progressing very slowly. This last week I have only written one dialogue, and added eyeblink and speaking animations to the dialogues. I’ve tried to defend myself with the fact that I’m still waiting for some art in order to test the dialogues properly…but the fact is that I still have a lot of work left on the puzzle and management parts of the game.
First of all, I need to decide where to apply puzzles. I’m thinking that the player has to capture wild animals in order to get new traits and fresh genetic material to crossbreed with the existing animals, but I haven’t decided on the puzzle mechanic for these captures. Also, I haven’t decided what other puzzles should be present. Puzzles when the player breeds animals? Gambling in towns? Tasks the player can perform for various people in order to earn money? I’m still undecided…
And this leads to the second big issue: how the game economics should work.
In Spandex Force I decided early on to have a number of resources: money, reputation and experience. It made sense to have many resources that have to be gathered, which enable different things in the game. Money allows you to upgrade your base, buy powers and get artifacts. Reputation decides your rank, affects the difficulty level of the minigames, and decides what artifacts you have access to. Experience decides your level and what powers you have access to. There are many other kind of resources and checks in the game (clues, power levels, etc) but these are the most important resources and checks. It wasn’t completely trivial to come up with this structure, though: the biggest task was to try to think of a scheme in which the player always has need for all of the resources.
In my first Spandex Force designs, money essentially became useless after a while. I partly solved that by raising the base upgrade costs in the later game, but even that would have made money completely irrelevant after the last upgrade. So, instead I went for a solution where you can only have a certain number of powers and artifacts at a given time. This has made people annoyed, but it was a carefully selected choice in order to make money useful throughout the entire game - there’s always a new artifact to try, or a new power to try out. (Well. At least for a long while.)
Now I’m facing similar problems with Wildhollow. I’ve cut down on the number of resources to one: money. Yes yes, I’m a capitalistic pig who can’t see beyond monetary power, but it was the only thing that would make sense. Granted, there are lots of other things to keep things interesting: items, animal food, animals themselves, etc. But money is the common thread throughout - every item and animal has a value.
But how can I make money useful throughout the game, except as a score-keeping mechanism? In order to make money relevant, there need to be things that have a cost. “Well duh,” the reader sighs. But this isn’t as easy as it sounds. What can I introduce into the game that the player wants and/or needs? Food for the animals, of course. Items that improve the animals. Upgrades to the ranch. But then what?
And, more of a problem, I’ve almost decided that the player should be able to sell his animals to make room for new and interesting breeds. But this will generate money - and I still have no real solution to the what-to-spend-money-on problem. It’s easy to fall back on the upgrade solution. You need to collect cash to upgrade your ranch. Then you can breed more expensive animals that you can sell in order to get more cash you can use to upgrade your ranch. …But after the last upgrade, this economic setup will crash and burn like a tinder house in hell. (Unless it’s Dante’s version of hell.)
I’ve been trying to think of ways to get around this:
- The tired old cliché: you’ve borrowed money in order to build your ranch in the first place. When you’ve paid off your debt you’ve finished a vital part of the game! Go you! This is actually surprisingly tempting, and would work very well. But it’s not a solution - it just delays the point of economic failure.
- Capturing animals costs money. You can capture new animals but this costs something. I don’t know why exactly - it could be bait for the animals, or one-shot items used to capture beasts… This is still vague and undefined.
- There’s no way to capture wild animals; you have to buy all your animals at the market. I don’t like this solution, but irritatingly enough it would solve a lot of things. This would mean that you could never get an animal for free, so, while you might make a profit on selling it later (after some grooming and taking care of), it wont be as big.
There are probably hundreds of other things I could do. As I’m writing this I’m starting to realize that point number three makes way too much sense for my own liking - I just might be forced to go for a combination of one and three. …With the possible addition of just capturing a couple of magical beasts in the wild…
Recently I wrote a little rant in which I complained about hidden object games. “They’re linear,” I grumbled, “and dull and static and they make no sense!” I went on to analyze the genre a little and came up with a hypothesis: I hate hidden object games for two reasons:
- They’re too dull and you end up spending too long on a single static screen.
- They’re too linear and don’t allow for experimentation and exploration.
Well, after playing Dream Chronicles 2 I have to revise my theory somewhat. I’d never played the first game, and I don’t think I will…but I’ll definitely keep an eye out for the third part whenever it arrives, ’cause DC2 was actually fun! *Gasp shock*
This is Dream Chronicles 1, but really, does it matter? It’s just here to give you a picture to look at, so you don’t get bored halfway.
Yes, the game is pretty much a hidden object game. Yes, the game features lots of static screens where you have to find the objects in order to proceed. But, and this is a big but, there’s a small amount of exploration involved and the storyline actually makes a little sense! The story isn’t groundbreaking in any way: your husband and daughter have been captured by the queen of the fairies, and it’s up to you to first escape the fairy prison, then find help in the mortal realm, and finally rescue your hubby plus daughter. Nothing new there, but there’s good pacing, and there are optional minigames that reveal even more of the story.
The biggest benefit of the storyline is that the whole fairy setting makes the puzzles and object searching somewhat more plausible, though. Fairies are notorious for being nasty critters who play mindgames and mess up people in various cruel and unusual ways. It makes perfect sense that, in order to battle a fairy queen, the player has to face a number of diabolical puzzles! I can’t say the same for Cate West and a bunch of other hidden object games I’ve played, so this definitely makes DC2 more bearable in comparison.
But the best thing about the game is probably that it doesn’t feel like a hidden object game. It’s not until you’ve passed a number of puzzles that you slowly get the sinking suspicion that you’re indeed playing something hidden-ish. “Heeey, wait a minute! I’m clicking around the screen looking for bits and pieces! Isn’t this…”
When I realized what I was doing I still kept going though, because there’s a major design choice that makes DC2 different from the other hidden object games: there is not a single timer in the entire game. Seriously, there is not a single static screen where you’re faced with an hourglass and a ridiculously large number of minutes you have in order to find a ridiculously large number of irrelevant objects. The game is completely un-timed which makes it tolerable even to me. And - thank Dog - there’s no penalty for clicking around wildly either.
Granted, those two facts make the game easier. But I would rather play an easy game that I’m actually interested in completing, than a 30-hour long game that makes me frustrated, annoyed and bored at every turn. Go, KatGames, go! Keep up the good work!
The regular readers of this blog is probably wondering what I’m doing right now.
“You’ve reached fame and fortune with Spandex Force. Have you taken the money and gone on a cruise or something? Have you bought a house in Monaco? Have you bought a space shuttle?”
Alas, while Spandex Force inded has sold decently I’m still not able to roll around naked in cash. But I have been finding ways to spend my hard-earned cash on art for Wildhollow, my upcoming adventure/management/puzzle game. More specifically, I’ve been trying to find art for the game!
The character art was very easy to decide upon: I loved the art for Spandex Force, so I took a few days to come up with an insane storyline and then sent a list of more-or-less strange characters to the secret artist located in a secret country, and asked her to come up with more-or-less strange designs for the characters in question. Oh, and by secret I mean not secret at all. But I’m not writing her name here, ’cause then she’ll be able to find this post when she googles her name, and she’ll see how I’m flaunting her excellent artwork downsized by a million per cent, saved as a lousy JPEG, essentially making it look like a smeared patch of mud instead of the brilliant character art I received.
Anyway, here’s the first completed art delivery for the game. The male hero:
Smeared patches of mud that once was great art.
See the expressions to the right? If you thought I was going to repeat the static dialogues from Spandex Force you’re incredibly wrong! This time there’ll be mouths flapping and our brave hero or heroine will show emotions. KarjaSoft is moving into 90s technology!
Aside from this I’m estimating a dozen backgrounds and another 20-something characters, plus a world map, plus item icons and puzzle elements. Dang, there’s going to be a lot of art!
Recently I complained about ridiculous spam I’ve received, but I just have to make a quick addition to that list. This is a title that just popped up in my inbox:
“Tired of being second best in bed?”
I’m trying my best not to laugh out loud at work; I’m not sure if the spammer really intended the humour, but I sure hope he did. I mean, come on. This is funny on so many levels, and it’s the perfect serve for a snappy response:
I’m never second best - I always come first!
Almost makes me want to click that darn link to see what he’s trying to sell.
And I know that it’s April 1 - I just can’t be arsed to make some inane attempt at a joke here. I’m going for the Grumpy Gamer approach: 100% April Fool’s Day joke free!
Spandex Force is out of the door, and it’s actually done reasonably well - I’ve more than recovered my expenses for the game, and I now have some dough to spend on my next project, Wildhollow. I still haven’t decided on that name; it’s hard to find a good name for the game when I don’t even have the game design completed yet! I’ve gone from a straight sim/management game to a puzzle/management game, to a management/adventure game…and now finally I’m considering a management/adventure/puzzle game.
Mind you, it’s not like I’m changing my mind every day. I kept the next to last design for over a month, and it’s just the latest week that I realized that puzzles probably will be needed for variety. I’ve skipped the simulation ideas since I want a simpler game; I want people to be able to click around and get it easily. The adventure parts are definitely here to stay, though, and I think a little management is good for both body and soul, so it’s remaining as well.
Now, what’s this about adventure parts? Here’s an ugly sketch of a rural fantasy town:
In the game you’ll be met with loads of screens like this. You’ll see towns, dwarven fortresses, dragon caves, and other locations, and in each location you can click on things to make various stuff happen. There will be items to pick up, people to interact with, stores and houses to enter, and lots of weird dialogue. One thing I noticed from making Spandex Force is that I like writing dialogue…and believe it or not, but Spandex Force’s story has received a lot of praise. So, it seems logical to me that I ought to expand on that a little. Spandex Force was linear, but this time around I’ve opted for a much more data-driven game structure which allows me to create dialogue trees and puzzles and many weird things….which is essentially what I mean by the adventure part of Wildhollow.
Making things data-driven as opposed to hard-coded is a relatively new thing for me. Optimally I should’ve gone for a scripting language, but I’ve chosen to have a bunch of XML files instead. Here’s an example of one of the locations mentioned above:
<location id="3" bg="301">
<hotspot x="428" y="200" image="600" item="Compass"/>
<hotspot x="208" y="308" image="665" location="4"/>
<hotspot x="428" y="700" image="664" location="2"/>
<hotspot x="528" y="400" image="664" dialogue="501" if="Compass" else="500"/>
</location>
Granted, it’s not much to look at, but it allows for a surprising amount of flexibility. What’s described in the snipped above is a location with ID 3 that has a background with ID 301. It has a number of hotspots that either lets you pick up the item named Compass, go to other locations, or trigger a dialogue. The if/else is used to make checks against certain items. I.e., before you have the compass clicking that hotspot will always trigger dialogue 501, but once you have it you’ll trigger 500 instead. This can be applied to locations as well: you can’t go though the Unnecessarily Dark Forest before you have a compass, for example. (’Cause otherwise you’d get eaten by grue. Grue hate magnetic needles, see. Nah, I’m just kidding, this isn’t part of the game.)
Of course, that doesn’t sum up everything you can do with these location descriptions - I’m adding attributes describing how the hotspot should look, what flags it should check against, and lots of other things. But I just wanted to give a general idea of how I’m structuring the game. Not that you’re any wiser now; guess you’ll just have to wait and see how it turns out!
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