Last month, I found out last-minute about an IGDA Los Angeles meeting. The guest speaker was Mark Cerny. No way I was gonna miss out on that! I’ve been super inspired by the stuff I’ve read about him, like working on some of my dream projects (I wanted to work on Sonic 2 when I was 8 years old 🙂 ). I left work on time and ended up getting lost on the UCLA campus, but I managed to catch the tail end of the presentation.

My coworker was smarter than me and actually saw the whole talk. His synopsis described what I missed — like Mark talking about the arcade business back in the 80’s. Arcade programming was tough because each game ran on new hardware so programmers never got the opportunity to master the hardware. With consoles, the benefit was that they had a lot of time to learn all of the inner working, tricks, reusing engines, and whatnot. Something like that, ha.

When I jumped in, he was getting to some points. Game budgets are commonly exceeding $20 million. He made fun of no game development team being complete without a “combat designer”. The leap from vertices to pixels has taken its toll on the industry during this generation. But there is hope.

There’s hope in taking the time to actually learn the craft. There’s hope in learning what is and isn’t important. There’s hope in breaking out of budget climbing.

UN-learning

Mark stressed importance of UN-learning. Learning is easy, unlearning is hard. He focused this unlearning around many of the conventions of games inherited from the Arcade Era.

Arcade based games have frequent death and great difficulty at the end. He then did a quick overview of 30 years of arcade style games.

• Dragon’s Lair had simple gameplay but required players to memorize each sequence to complete the game.
• Space Ace was designed to be hard as hell for people that mastered Dragon’s Lair.
• Robotron was mentioned because difficulty was the appeal of the game.
• Mario 3 was a great example of an arcade game because even though it was a console game, it worked great as Play Choice arcade release.

After that, he talked a little about the Crash Bandicoot games he worked on. The first Crash Bandicoot was hard as shit. In it, you had limited number of lives and although you could restart from the same level, you had to progress to and complete a bonus stage just to save your game. With Crash 2 they had more consumer awareness, they tested it more for difficulty. The players performance in the game is tracked and the game helps when possible.

Dynamic Difficulty

He then talked a bit about dynamic difficulty in games, sometimes you notice and sometimes you don’t. The first example was Sly Cooper, in which the Sucker Punch “solved” jump problems. The solution was that if you missed a jump a certain amount of times as cartoon hook would grab you and put you where you need to go. Maybe not the ideal solution, but it fit the vibe of the game’s world.

Next he mentioned Ratchet & Clank, where reviewers had a problem because the difficulty adjustment was too obvious. When you die too much in Ratchet & Clank, boxes that would normally drop money start dropping health. Last he mentioned Uncharted but just that many people didn’t realize that Uncharted had dynamic difficulty systems, he didn’t go into anything specific.

End of Death

We are fighting our arcade heritage. If you aren’t dying, you aren’t playing. Is Farmville a game? Even though you can’t die?

I think this was an important point. Many games I love for the challenge, like a Mario game for instance, but many other games I enjoy more for the experience, like NiGHTS.  Mark asked the crowd to raise their hands if they thought Farmville was a game. There were some vocal Farmville haters expressing that they didn’t think these kinda games were games at all. Is it because you can’t die? No clear challenge or goal?

I don’t think they are good games, but it’s kinda hard to deny that they share much of the same basis of the games we all love.

Can a game be enjoyable without rewards and punishment? I’ve been playing Earthbound recently, and I’m into it solely for the story and scenario. I feel like I could skip out on much of the “game” of it and have a great time. I’m willing to experiment with these ideas.

Today’s Vocabulary

At the end, Mark talked about today’s gaming vocab, we have “co-op”, “social game”, “3rd-person-shooter”, “deathmatch”, etc. But we need new words for new social paradigms. His example of this was Demon’s Souls. It’s a single player action RPG… but it has many forms of social interactions. But not necessarily directly. For instance, you can leave messages for other players and your spirit shows up in other players games. So what do you call that?

Q&A

I believe during Q&A he states that he thought 80-90% of games could work with socialization and monetization. I agree with this, and this seemed to be his point of “un-learning”. Developers need to stop thinking of “social-games” as leaderboards and Farmville.

When asked something about independent development without a publisher he said that it’s possible to scrape together enough cash to make a console game but even if you manage to do that, you’d need a publisher for marketing. With a console game having about $10 million marketing. On the subject of the iPhone market he said something like “There’s someone successful out there. Odds are that’s not you.”

That’s it!

One of the most interesting things he said was pointing out that gaming has sort of come full circle. People are scared and violent towards the trends of monetization of social gaming. But it’s the same concept that the industry was founded on — arcade machines eating players quarters to cover development costs.

I think it’s best to embrace it if you can, think about it differently and find a way to make it work for you.

Some Links:

• IGDA Los Angeles Twitter – Check this for meetings, they never update their site.
• Sega-16 Interview with Mark Cerny
• Cerny Games

I started playing through Earthbound to see what it was about. There was a great little article on the original that never made it stateside in issue 5 of GameSpite Quarterly, the NES 25th anniversary issue. Just another reminder that I needed to play through this game! The only time I played it was back in 1998 on a SNES emulator, which barely ran on my 200Mhz Pentium 1 computer. Today, I’m running a much more developed version of that same Snes9x emulator, with a much better dual core processor and USB controller. No reason not to keep playing!

The first time I played, I only made it through the intro and a little farther after that. This time, I discovered why. Once the game opened up to the first town, it became a puzzle to determine what to do next. Back then, it was too frustrating with the choppy framerate of my slow computer. Now, I took the time to figure out what the game is about.

The gameplay of Earthbound is pretty much your typical Japanese RPG — think Dragon Warrior or Pokémon. You wander around locations and encounter random battles when you bump into enemies, similar to Chrono Trigger. You can obtain an advantage if you encounter the enemy from behind — and you start the battle at a disadvantage if they get you from behind. The battles are of simple menu driven variety. No cluttered menus and overly complex sub-systems.

What separates the game from everything I’ve mentioned is definitely the scenarios and dialogue. The scenarios are pretty random and wacky from what I’ve seen — from fighting thugs at their arcade hideout to fighting police. The dialogue is always on the side of humor and satire. It’s just goofy and funny! Makes me smile simply by reading it, wondering what was going on in the Nintendo translators’ heads in 1995. They did a great job! In addition to the writing, the game starts off with allowing you to answer questions from the NPCs early on. This will usually affect how they respond. But sometimes your answer affects your progress through the scenario. For instance, you may have to answer with the alternate response for something to happen. I got stuck at a part like that.

The music is great as well. I was like “right on” when they played a little reggae track when you enter a house. Great attention to detail with the tunes, it seems like they even sampled songs for many of them.

What I love about the game is that even though it’s so simple, it’s apparent that a lot of love went into it. I love that it’s not afraid to poke fun at it being a game. I even feel like if you took a lot of the gameplay out of it — like removing the battle system — it’d still be an enjoyable experience because of the definite world it creates for itself. Playing, I feel like I just gotta see what happens next.

Till next time…

-Bryson

When asked whether there would have been a loading screen when switching times in Sonic CD if he had programmed it, Yuji Naka replied with this…

“Technical skill depends on being in the moment and getting some kind of inspiration to overcome your current problem, and there’s no guarantee it will happen every time. ” – Yuji Naka’s New Bird by Gamasutra

Yuji Naka’s known as an amazing programmer , being lead programmer on Sega classics such as Phantasy Star, Sonic the Hedgehog, and NiGHTS: Into Dreams. Many of his games have pushed the hardware in ways that many didn’t think was possible.

I identify with the words because there’s been many times where I’ve gotten through a mess and realized that I was capable of a lot more than I initially imagined. There are always those “Why didn’t I think of that earlier?” moments where you reach a sudden realization which pushes you further ahead. These moments have come to me at the most random times so I try to step out of my problems for a while and have a look from another perspective.

Take a break, breathe and take a little walk. Clear your mind. Then jump back in, haha!

Sega 16 has a great biography of Yuji Naka.

“Behold! A Massive Overhaul!” – Bryson, the Mighty

Tonight I finished an update to our blog theme. The new theme follows Sokay.net’s color scheme and design more closely — it’s bothered me that they looked similar but different. I like the direction it’s going and I’ll continue to revise the design sporadically.

Indiecade’s this weekend! Although Chris and I didn’t get our entries accepted, it was disappointing that they didn’t even bother to give feedback on our games — they basically said “we got too many entries. if you’re lucky, you’ll get feedback”. I’m suspicious as to whether they even played all of the games submitted. When Chris submitted Children at Play to Indie Fund, he was given a prompt and usefull feedback from Jonathan Blow. And he didn’t even have to pay an entry fee, haha.

With the Donut Game, I’ve passed the Fight Game’s engine to David. He’s working on updating the Fight Game’s animation with his most recent updates. I’ve spent some time working on the UI and some effects for that section of the game.

(this is a work in progress, yo)

To help me ease my mind, I’ve been working on this pixel portrait between running around in circles. I’ve been getting some assistance from the Pixelation community, check out my Work in Progress thread.

That’s it for today!

Peace!

-Bryson

It’s easy to find documentaries or interviews with Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, The Departed) talking about film with absolute honesty and passion. I just watched an episode of American Masters about Elia Kazan (A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront, East of Eden). The show was hosted by Scorsese and I was reminded of how much I love listening to him, but it almost hurts sometimes.

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Artwork from the Car Segment of the game.

Work continues to progress on the Donut game. I’ve spent a great deal of the summer focusing on the Car Segment, which serves as an interactive intro. During this segment of the game, you play as the officer driving to the scene of the Great Donut Fire. You must drive through traffic, hopefully avoiding collisions with cars and civilians. The outcome of this section will be dependent on how you handle it — reckless driving will result in a ‘negative’ outcome where you don’t get to where you’re driving to.

With the Car Segment mostly wrapped up, I’ve moved on to focusing on the Fight Segment of the game, which acts as a mini-challenge within the game. David’s animating the characters for this part, the gameplay will be similar to Punch-Out!. I’m working on getting a skeleton of the game engine in place so that he can test his animation without requiring me to drop additional code in. Since this sections gameplay is so tied to the actual animation and timing, it’s important that he’s able to quickly iterate and test while animating.

The game is starting to emerge from the rubble and smoke. With every pass at detail and polish, it becomes clearer to see what the end result will be. While I chose to have the game mechanics relatively simple, I wanted to use them to play out a scenario and communicate ideas and themes from the world. This communication plays a larger role than it did in Thugjacker, where it was a bit more subtle, and is more integrated into the world than LUV Tank where it was much more blatant and abstract.

Most of the game artwork is done and in place at this point, but there’s a lot of animation that needs to be done. I’m doing planning for the game endings now, which will play a large role in the game. The way the game plays out will determine your ending — Way of the Samurai serves as my inspiration for this aspect. I’ve been thumbnailing these endings, working them out on paper while I develop the game.

Until next time…

Peace!

-Bryson

The title of the talk was ‘Writing Games: Tall Tales of Triumph and Terror’ and it was held last Thursday at the Writers’ Guild of America, West headquarters in Los Angeles. It went alright, with some discussion of what it’s like to be a game writer, the new and growing position of game writers within the WGA (which allows game writers to join according to lower standards than film or television writers), and lots of nods to Uncharted 2 and Half-Life.

Everything pretty much went as I expected, but I found it very unfortunate that we did not see a discussion of the art or craft of game writing. We only really heard about the differences in work environment and technicalities. For example, it was generally agreed that game development involves far less clearly defined roles than filmmaking, so a writer can expect to play some role in game design and should expect the game designer to play a role in writing. A script writer should also expect his usual 125 page script to shoot up to around 800 pages for a game, since games are longer and a player may only experience a fraction of a game’s writing in a single play through. We did not, however, hear about anyone’s ideas on game writing, how a game is structured, approach, how they use the game to convey meaning or feelings. At one point it was mentioned that while in film it is said that a writer should ‘show’ and not ‘tell,’ in games a writer should ‘do’ and not ‘tell,’ but that was the extent of artistic discussion.

I stood up for the Q and A at the end and asked about the difference between games with mute protagonists and those with talkative protagonists, citing Half-Life and Uncharted and asking how each writer felt about the different approaches to game writing. This, I thought, was a question they could bite into. Surely one of these guys struggled at one time or another with the contradiction of a game’s protagonist being both a unique character and being played by the player, or at the very least, thought it was interesting, thought something could be done with that. Right? One of the writers reiterated that Uncharted 2 and Half-Life were both great games and simply said sometimes you go the one direction with a mute, and other times you go with the yapper. Nobody else had anything to say. So that was my shot. Oh well.

Anyway, I had a good time, especially talking to some of the writers over cokes. I even met a flash developer by the name of Tamar Curry. Seemed like a cool dude.

This is my second IGDA meeting and I recommend checking them out, especially if you want to meet some local LA game developers. Students and indie devs show up in addition to folks from some of the larger companies, so it’s a good bunch.

-Christopher J. Rock

• First-Person Shooter. Check.
• Post Apocalyptic World. Check.
• RPG Elements. Check.

I had held off from getting an Xbox until Halo 3 came out. There was all the drama with the Red Ring of Death and there were lots of rumors of a new motherboard with less problems, coincidentally around the time of Halo 3’s release. After playing through Halo 3 I ended up getting a Wii and Super Mario Galaxy — mostly using my Xbox for XBLA games ( Braid, Rez, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Banjo Kazooie, etc.) Last Fall I decided to get caught up with Xbox retail games, and borrowed a bunch from Ricky.

Bioshock

Bioshock was high on my list. It was mega-hyped, looked pretty cool, and one of the prettiest games out at the time. There were a lot of demo videos leading up to its release, demonstrating the variety of ways you could interact with the enemies and environment to get through situations. Using electricity to deactivate machines, using fire to make enemies run for water, making the Big Daddies fight on your side, and the like. It looked exciting and I had to see what the game was about since it was one of the best examples of our game technology.

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Thugjacker Half at Agame.com

Over the weekend I noticed a sudden surge in traffic and I noticed most of it was coming from Agame.com. Turned out they had just stolen it and added it to their frontpage on Thursday and a lotta people were playing it. It’s nice to know people are still playing it after 5 years! haha. My favorite part is still reading all of the insightful comments like “cool ima pimp nigga“and “DONT STEAL HIS BIKE“. Mostly spam here, but the Newgrounds comments are still gold to me.

Thugjacker’s been our most popular game, by far. A great deal of it has to do with it being our first game, with Ricky and I spending so much time with it. The gameplay has a stickiness that keeps people coming back — I think it’s just fun to mess around and beat guys up. These days, it’s easy to be lost on Flash portals so it’s usually hit or miss if people notice the game or not. Thugjacker usually does well but LUV Tank usually gets lost. LUV Tank only really took off on Addictinggames.com for some reason, but it’s usually the game that the not-so-hardcore gamers tell me they like the most.

Yesterday I was working on the Donut game with David. We had started talking about Thugjacker and I showed him a lot of the stuff we cut out of Thugjacker Half — David wasn’t working with us on Thugjacker. There were cinemas scenes that I didn’t have time to finish and implement. A lot of the real story. It’ll all find it’s way into the game eventually. This Donut game will give another side of the story.

Bryson’s been pressuring me to post about Children at Play for a long time, and I kept telling him “I’m too busy working on the game!” But enough a’ that crap. I uploaded the video preview to YouTube and I’ll have a playable demo up here very soon.

I started work on Children at Play at the start of last winter and its eaten a lot of my time since then. I consider it a small step, but an important one, in the right direction. I’ll save any in depth discussion for when I’ve got the demo up. For now I’ll post some text I’ve put together for various submissions and whatnot.
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