Mass Effect 2
… I actually completed Mass Effect 2 a few weeks ago, but following that I started up a new character and played through it again. Like Mass Effect it is very immersive and responds to how you play the character, and I felt that I needed to choose the other moral path offered by the game and see if it was just because I played the game as intended or if was indeed that good. It was, but knowing what parts where changed and what were not made some of it feel patched together.
So, Mass Effect 2 is a good game. A great game even, an improvement over an already solid first iteration. The classes and abilities have been more clearly defined, the equipment and item system have been trimmed down to something more suitable to the game and the seemingly auto-generated planetside segments have been removed in favor of a large number of solid sidequests with proper level design. The story and the presentation of it feels even tighter now than it did in Mass Effect, and the characters feel more rounded and likable.
Nothing is really horrible with the game (I did not mind the mining so much as others seem to, but then I did that while I was eating), but there is still ways to go with the battle system. It has improved since Mass Effect to be sure, and considering the multitude of ways you can play the game it does the 3rd-person cover-based shooting game fairly well. Doing everything seldom means doing anything particularly good, though, and the AI rarely do what you tell them, the cover system often means your character jumps in and out of cover without being told and being shot in the process and there is a sluggishness to the movement. Also, the game has the same rendering issues found in Mass Effect as well as a bunch of physics issues, getting stuck in terrain is not at all uncommon.
But you get the feeling Bioware was aware of this not being the core of the game and made the battles suitably lenient. The game is very well-designed and immensely enjoyable, and considering the game with the best cover-based combat I have seen was Gears of War maybe asking for an improvement in that area is risky.
A Jam and a Rant
Another iteration of Gotland Game Jam, this time I worked with artists Zenobia Homan and Jona Marklund to create the game Masquerade [download win32]
The theme of the jam was “the Play” and Masquerade is a top-down brawler where the participants are actors on a stage using costumes lying around to act out the roles of different kinds of warriors. In all honesty, this is design-wise not very different from simply picking up new weapons, but as we all wanted to make something complete innovation took a backseat to playability. It was a while since I last made a top-down brawler but what was really new for me was the basic AI of enemies with quickly changing abilities, luckily I did not need to worry about art so I had plenty of time to get it to a functional level. The end result is nothing spectacular, but a decent diversion if I may say so myself.
Some friends and acquaintances I have in the indie scene have told me that they usually do not go to these kinds of events to create games anymore, rather they just try to have a good time and meet people. I am starting to see why - not that I do not like making short games under pressure, but the tradeoffs you make are starting to become apparent. First of all, making a game in 40 hours can be a very demanding experience that you really have to prepare for and plan around, and fun as it is there are more enjoyable and productive things to spend your time on once you have done it a few times.
But also, there is some limit to what you can accomplish. I know a lot of people are championing rapid prototyping and I do not argue that it is a good way to create good games, I just do not think it is the only way. You can create great core mechanics in a short time, but for some ideas the greatness lies in the scope. The thing separating a great game from a poor one might be production values or long iteration times as well as a great core mechanic, and I think that by being short-sighted you can loose a lot of great ideas. Alec Holowka touched upon this awhile ago. I do not really buy into the whole “If a game idea is not fun after the first two hours of prototyping it needs to be scrapped” - mindset, it reminds me of the larger games industry, the impatient industry where books are written about the concept of the “elevator”-pitch.
In short, I think the amount of time we spend on being quick is staggering and it thus misses the point. Whether we are pitching a game to a publisher or trying to sell our own image as developers to the indie crowd I think the entire game development world could benefit from more wanting to create good games and less wanting everybody to know about them immediately.
… But then again, I guess there are a lot of people who are developing good games anonymously - we just do not see them.
Magicka Trailer
Arrowhead Game Studios‘ Magicka, the game that won the Swedish Game Awards grand prize in 2008, announced they had partnered with Paradox Interactive for publishing and released an impressive trailer a week back;
The writing in the trailer is a bit too campy for me, but the game itself is a real gem and it has received a lot of visual polish since it won SGA. Last I played it they had removed some of the more complex combinations available to make the game more accessible, a bit sad since there were a lot less emergent gameplay in that version. It was still a truly great co-op brawler that allowed for seamless switching of playing styles, though, and I am willing to bet Arrowhead will make the best of it in the end.
A deeper Final Fantasy VIII
Back in the day, Final Fantasy VIII was criticized for having somewhat disjoint and sappy storyline with characters that were not really likeable, a setting that strayed too far from it’s fantasy roots and one too many outrageous elements. Fans Diedra Rater and Rahul Choudhury have assembled a theory about why this was and presented an interpretation to what the story is really about.
Now, when it comes to games there is a huge volume of poor fanfiction masquerading as literary analysis so it is always refreshing to see something that feels insightful and challenges your way of seeing things. Now, the stories in Final Fantasy games have always seemed very shallow to me but there has always been a depth to the presentation, a history leading from mythological events to the events in the game - seeing someones theories about depth in the meaning of the story as well really makes the game richer.
Well worth a read if you played the game.
Blast from the Past
Logan Westbrook wrote some nice things about the Darkness on the Escapist, it’s been almost three years since it was released so it is nice to see other people still thinking about it. I personally liked the game but the story parts got kind of ruined for me since the important scenes in question were horribly broken the first time I saw them, but we worked a lot on the game over a long period of time so I am somewhat relieved to hear the hard work paid off.
Also, the results for Assemblee have been revealed! Congratulations Ivan! Our own project Backworld ended up sharing a 6th place (with Tiny Crawl, one of my personal favorites), which is not half bad considering there were 73 entries in the competition.
Global Game Jam
The Global Game Jam was this weekend, and after failing to set up a local event me and a few friends decided to go to the Nordic Game Jam, reportedly the largest GGJ site. Besides hanging out with friends, acquaintances from the indie scene and making a few new connections, we (Juha, Martin, Tobias and I) created a short game called “Fake“.
We were in development up until the final minutes so there is no proper tutorial; consider this an introduction. Your role is that of an art forger working for the mysterious mafioso “Don Key”. Funds being sparse, you are limited to cut and paste existing images in order to reproduce the paintings.
Start out by selecting a painting, then selecting a theme for your photos on the right. You can re-select the theme later by clicking the button on the top-right but it will reset your work. Click any of the images on the right to select a source, then use the left mouse button to cut out a pattern and use it on the forgery. The left menu bar can be used to select or move the active layer, you can also use the right mouse button to delete a layer. When not cutting a picture, you can move the active layer with the left mouse button, rotate it with the right or press both mouse buttons to scale it. The button on the top left will swap the preview mode of the real painting, how it is shown will have no bearing on the final result, though. When you are done, press the button second from the right at the top to submit the painting for approval by Don Key.
I was really out of my element when hacking this together and too much time went into hacking GUI elements that a proper tool would’ve provided for me. This being the case, the final version does not only miss a proper tutorial but also some basic UI elements and it comes with a lot of bugs. That being said, the game was fairly fun for what it was, the idea feels solid and we managed to make a game out of the development itself by taking pictures of jam attendees and using them in the final version - always fun to do at events like this. All in all, we had a great time at least.
Sadly, we had to leave halfway through the finals and I have not seen very many of the other games from NGJ yet. I would like to give a shout out to Shoot Stop Lollipop and Shadow Ninja… Monkey though, as they both had genuinely interesting gameplay mechanics.
TIGSource Assemblee rundown
I have finally managed to play all of the other 72 entries in the TIGSource Assemblee competition … Well, I managed to play the ones that started on my machine. Some really good games in there, and some real diversity in the innovations provided. While a lot of the games have already garnered attention outside of TIGSource, I would like to mention two of the games I personally liked a lot.
Tiny Crawl by Sparky is a very simple flash-based dungeon crawler. Deceptively simple, actually, as I didn’t even think about sinking an hour into it. A great diversion.
Mr. Kitty’s Quest by pgil is an action-heavy zelda-like game with mouse aiming. A solid experience enjoyable from start to end.
Backworld
The deadline for the second part of Assemblee has passed, me and a buddy from work submitted a game we call Backworld. Early reactions have been positive, but as always the competition is stiff - I have yet to play any of the other games but I am looking forward to doing it sometime in the next few days.
Backworld is a puzzle-platformer featuring a rabbit, with the twist that the world always consists of two layers. Each layer has a separate set of physics and the player can use the mouse to paint on the screen to decide what layer should be used at what position in order to progress. I do not really have the patience for things like animation so the competition rules - that we were only allowed to use content from part one - did not really bother me personally at all. The timeframe more so, it felt like even though the original idea was interesting and fun to work with a few months more of experimentation, polish and weeding out the levels that just didn’t work would have made a huge difference. Of course it is always hard to produce something in a limited time, when you encounter something that works okay but not as well as you’d hoped you have to make the tough decision of either throwing it away and risk having a game without content or polishing it up and risk having a game of varying or all-out mediochre quality. In Backworld we mostly opted for the “keep and polish” solution in order to see how people reacted to different kinds of challenges, time will tell if this was a good idea.
And who knows, we might even keep working on it and make something better.
IGF 2010 Finalists
… Have been announced. Very few playable versions among the finalists, sadly, so it’s hard to make any guesses at this point. Again it’s nice to see Limbo pop up, and the fact that it was nominated for a technical excellence award makes me anxious to see what it’s really about. It’s also nice to see Heroes of Newerth get some recognition as a game of it’s own, hopefully this will silence some of the zealots claiming it to be a bad DotA ripoff.
Less obvious than last
Again, it feels good to be a rebel. But I digress. Games to honor, and all that.
Spelunky, for a lot of reasons. My main point would be the balance between what’s expected and what’s randomized, and how the randomized parts feels interesting every time. You always know what you’re after, but you have no idea of what you’ll have to encounter to get there. For years the commercial gaming industry have been pursuing different multiplayer modes as means to prolong the lifetime of a game, Yu’s take on procedural content might just provide an alternative to that.
 Persona 4, for sticking to its guns. Looking too deep into academia and (ironically) into reviewers’ opinions, it is easy to discern certain things that should guarantee a game being bad. There are many things about Persona 4 that I dislike, but they certainly helped make the things I did like about it feel like an achievement to get to - design by tedium might not be a wholly bad thing.
Uncharted 2 for the exact opposite reason. Making a game that does just about everything right from a technical and academically sound point of view does not make it enjoyable, apparently.
A decennium has come to an end, and for the first time of the three new decennia I have seen I feel like the Uggla song is an appropriate way of entering it. On the other hand, it might just be because I had not heard it at any of the other shifts. The future will tell.