Happion Labs GameDevBlog

Game Design 101: Player Time As The Gold Standard of Game Resources

Say you're making a turn based strategy game. Every turn a player can Attack or Defend. If they Attack, they do 2 points of damage. If they Defend, they do 1 point of damage but block 1. If we do the math, it seems like these two choices are basically equal - two evenly matched players will kill each other on the same turn no matter which strategy they take.

But you will probably find, in playtesting, that players prefer to attack than to defend. Why? Are they just bloodthirsty? 

No: it's that they want to win the fight as soon as possible, so they can get to the next part of your game, so they can finish your game, so they can move on to the next entertainment. You'll probably find that you have to overweight your 'defend' option to make it attractive, because players would usually rather lose a few resources than spend extra time 'savoring' the game by playing it 'optimally.'

Andrew Rollings called this a 'shadow cost' - the time the player takes to defend being an additional resource. I personally get a lot of mileage if I don't think of it as a shadow cost, and think of it as the real cost: your player is spending a real-world resource, time, in order to win virtual in-game resources, to extract the value out of your game. When you think of it that way, it's the in-game resources that are shadow costs.

This is different from the way things used to be. Back in the days of arcade machines when you put a quarter in and wanted to get as much entertainment as possible out, things were the opposite. Most players wanted to extend their time playing. We would start on the easiest level and bottom-feed, because that was the way to make our quarter last the longest. The quarter being another real-world resource that we wanted to savor.

But in today's highly cluttered attention economy, most players want to play a given game as little as possible - that is, they want to extract the maximum amount of value from it (see all the cool content, learn all the cool strategies, get to where their skill plateaus, get the high spot on the leaderboard, get the badges, whatever it is they value) for the minimum time investment. I know that sounds backwards! If you've made a game I like, shouldn't I want to prolong and savor my enjoyment? But I don't - I want the enjoyment rarified and compressed, all the great stuff in your game injected into me intravenously and instantly, so I can get on to the next game, TV show, job, book, quality family time, and enjoy that. 

With that in mind, those two seemingly equal game mechanics are not equal at all. One can end the combat in five turns; the other will take ten or more turns. It wastes my valuable time. Healing mechanics have the same problem - should I heal or finish off the enemy? Healing wastes time - I'll only do it if I have no other choice.

Here's the nonintuitive part: this means shorter games are a better fit for most of us time-and-attention starved people. Making a game arbitrarily more difficult, forcing your player to replay sections they've already beaten, game mechanics that encourage taking it slow*, and most kinds of grinding probably do not add value to your game. You might ask, "How can that be? Reviewers always complain that games are too short! RPGs love to shout in their marketing materials that they have fifty or a hundred hours of content!" And, well, I don't know: maybe it's that we're talking about two real-world resources there, gameplay per dollar, and because true gameplay value is so nebulous it's easier to talk about hours. But I am willing to bet that almost all of those reviewers, given a choice between ten hours of Portal and a hundred hours of a mediocre RPG would take Portal!

I've got lots more to say about this and will, soon...

* What about slow-motion or 'bullet' time? You might ask. Isn't that slowing the game down and therefore decreasing value / time? I think you'll find that most of the games that have a bullet-time mechanic take less real-world time to play if you use the mechanic than if you don't, because the bullet-time makes the game that much easier, you're repeating fewer sections.

What do y'all think of this ad copy?

Here's what I've come up with for the description of sixty second shooter Deluxe for the Playstation Store:

You only have sixty seconds to destroy as many targets as possible in this new-and-improved version of sixty second shooter, the only dual-stick shooter you can play in the time it takes to microwave a frozen burrito.

At Happion Laboratories, our scientists have worked tirelessly to bring you a dual-stick shooter that will stimulate production of the highest possible levels of adrenaline and dopamine in your central nervous system - for maximum euphoria and excitement. Warning, side-effects may include: dry eyes, dry mouth, increased heart rate, increased perspiration, and twitchy fingers.

Will you press your luck and fly to the deep levels where the truly treacherous enemies await? Will you shoot your enemies on sight or wait until you've racked up a higher multiplier? Will you use your missiles to build a large chain bonus - or to secure an area - or to save yourself at the last second? Will you detonate the bombs immediately or lure your foes to them first? Will you unlock the death blossom? Although the game is very short, its strategies are very deep.

“This game is a hidden gem. It's worth getting into.”

- Tomo Moriwaki, producer of Medal of Honor and creative director of Spider-Man 2

Created by Jamie Fristrom, the game developer behind the critically acclaimed and award-winning games Spider-Man 2 and Schizoid.

Well? What do you think? If you had a PSM device, would you buy it (I'm thinking ~$3 USD)? Why not?

Energy Hook City Feel

Work on Energy Hook has almost stopped completely what with sixty second shooter Deluxe and Guild Wars 2 launching and all, but not quite:

Paul put together a mood board for the cities-of-the-future yesterday.

Now, we're not going to hit that level of detail - our goal is to hit those shapes, colors and feelings but with the simplicity of the Futurama bits.

What do you think?

(In other news, we have an official launch date for Playstation Mobile: October 3rd. sixty second shooter Deluxe won't make launch, but it should be shortly thereafter. I'll let you know when I know.)

The Eternal Cycle of Platforms

There's been a lot of doom-and-gloom in the indie game developerosphere for a while now. A lot of us corporate developers jumped ship to make indie games because we saw how succesful others had been. For me it was Xbox Live Arcade - "Look at these games! They look like they take only a few person-years to make! And they're making bank! Let's do one!" - for most it was iOS. 

The early days of Xbox Live Arcade were heady. It seemed like even mediocre games were profitable on the platform. But it took a year and a half for us to finish Schizoid. The market seemed strong almost all the way up until we shipped - a couple titles came out before us that didn't sell much but we could rationalize it away. "That was a truly crappy game." "That was a sequel." We even turned down publisher money because with our back-of-the-envelope forecasts it seemed we'd make more going on our own.

And then we shipped, and our sales were not anywhere near where we expected. A lot of that was on us - we had a terrible conversion rate. Maybe the game wasn't as good as we thought, maybe the trial was terrible, but part of it was that XBLA was maturing as a platform. There were a lot more titles on there, and if someone was only 'meh' about your demo they would go download another one.

We weren't completely naive - we knew that the gold rush days of XBLA couldn't last forever. But we did think we would make it in time.

The iphone happened somewhere in there. We weren't in any position to get in on that - too busy with our stuff. 

The iphone has been the same story. A lot of developers who took a risk when it was an unknown quantity did scary well; there followed a gold rush where a lot of the fast developers also did well; and then things petered out. I have plenty of iOS developing friends who were in the same boat as us - by the time they shipped, it was hard to make a buck anymore.

What's easy to forget is that this has been going on since the beginning of videogame development time. The same thing happened with the Atari 2600. The early crappy games on the 2600 sold like hotcakes, and then one day ET comes along and takes up a landfill and the entire game industry imploded.

(Okay, I'm not that old, I wasn't in the industry yet. Close, though - I started making PC games around when the SNES came out.)

Back then it must have been quite a shock. What seemed like a guaranteed stream of revenue suddenly dried up. They had nothing to compare it to. They didn't have this history of consoles and platforms coming and going that we have now. Videogames as a whole looked like a fad whose time had run out.

Eventually, of course PC game sales and Nintendo reanimated the corpse and the game industry looked better than ever. It's an eternal cycle. New consoles, platforms, storefronts arrive. The products in those stores/ channels do really well at first, because they don't have much competition. Those early successes even help the products build mindshare, build their brand, so they can go on to have good sales in other, cluttered, channels. But then the stores get cluttered and it becomes hard to stand out. This doesn't mean the platform's completely useless anymore - it just means mediocre and unremarkable products aren't viable. A remarkable product with good marketing, or a product that already has a strong brand, will do fine. Like Fez or Minecraft on XBLA this year.

So when I say Xbox Live Arcade sales aren't what they were, or iOS sales aren't what they were, I am not pointing fingers or casting blame. Some do blame the platform creator. "They made titles less discoverable!" they often shout. But it is not the platform holder's fault. This is what platforms do.

So if your business strategy is "We're going to make a lot of games for Platform X" you are being naive. I suppose nobody would disagree with that right now. But in the gold rush days of a popular platform, it's easy to forget. You let yourself believe that sales on the platform are always going to stay strong even for the median titles.

Allow me to suggest two other strategies.

• Seek out new platforms and be on them. Spry Fox did this - they got on Kindle, in G+, on Android, the Chrome Web Store - and not all of these attempts were hugely succesful, but Triple Town on Kindle captured the lightning in a bottle. (But it's too late now to get on Kindle and expect gold rush success. Another platform that's become too cluttered.)
  Incidentally, a mistake I've repeated twice now, (when will I ever learn?) is to mistake new technology for a new storefront. 
  Me: "Ooh. This new technology (XNA / Chrome native client) looks really cool! I'm going to make one of the first professional games (Schizoid / sixty second shooter) for it!"
  Customer: "I don't care that your game uses new tech. To me, it's just another title in a cluttered store (XBLA / Chrome Web Store)."
• Take your time making a remarkable game and market it well - let's call it the Blizzard strategy - always works, in lean times and fat times. Though it's also a terribly risky strategy, liable to leave a smoking crater if your game isn't as remarkable as you thought it was. (We thought Schizoid was pretty remarkable, actually. And, hey, it was in the PAX 10 and nominated for a couple of XBLA awards.)

This brings me to a really interesting thing: Kickstarter.

You can think of Kickstarter as a platform / store / channel. There's products in there and people buy them. But it's much less cluttered than the traditional store, because once a product is in Kickstarter, it only gets to be there for a limited time, and then it's booted out to make room for the next product. Clutter is gradually increasing a little in Kickstarter because it's becoming more popular, but I don't believe it's the nonlinear growth you see in a standard digital store where products live there forever. Kickstarter could have some serious legs.

So, me, I'm not feeling the doom and gloom. Videogame development is and always has been hard - every now and then some group of developers are in the right place at the right time and catch a big wave, and then other developers are disappointed and frustrated to have missed it - but:

• There's always more waves / platforms / stores coming. (That's why I'm making a Playstation Mobile game right now!)
• You can still have a big success the old fashioned way: make a remarkable game and get the word out.

Or both. Did I mention sixty second shooter Deluxe is going to be the funnest dual-stick shooter evar?

Notes on sixty second shooter - programmer art

My attitude approaching sixty second shooter was 180 degrees from my previous modes of operations in a lot of ways. I killed a lot of sacred cows. 

One of the sacred cows? "I need a Real Artist(tm) to do the art." Dead.

So, yeah. I did and am still doing the art myself on sixty second shooter. And I'm a rank n00b when it comes to art. 

When I was a lad, that's what my heroes, the Richard Garriots and Jordan Mechners, did  - they did their own art. I was always a little sad that I missed that window, that I couldn't make a game all by myself, because by the time I entered the industry you needed real artists on your game and I'm not that. But Chris Delay and Jesse Schell's students showed me it could still be done even in these days, so I decided to bite the bullet and try it.

Also, since I wanted to keep load times to a minimum, I thought it would be great to make all of the art procedural, rather than load meshes and textures over the web. So various 3d primitives - almost all extruded polygons and spirals - became the bulk of the enemies. It's almost all procedural art. (I cheated with Deluxe and made a white circle in photoshop for bullet glows, but other than that...)

The little bird-like things that come after you was actually a mistake - I was trying to make something else, but there was a bug in my code - but I thought they looked pretty cool and scary, so I kept them.

And I'm really proud of the smoke in the background - I could watch it all day. Hopefully some day I'll write an article about how I did it. (But I'd want to put a WebGL sample in the article showing the smoke, and that'll take time, etcetera.)

But along with the in-game art there's also the layout of front ends and fonts and other graphic designy stuff. And again, I'm a rank n00b there. A book that's really helped - and I think you'll see the difference if you go from sixty second shooter on Chrome to sixty second shooter Deluxe is The Non-Designer's Design Book by Robin Williams. (Not that Robin Williams.) I was leery of the book at first, because flipping through the pages I thought "This design doesn't look that great" - but mostly that's because the book is filled with what-not-to-do examples.

So something I've started doing lately is the pinterest thing. Designers often have what they call a 'swap file', which is a folder filled with examples and clippings of cool design they like. So I'm using pinterest for that. Check out It's Atomic and Programmer Art for some of my inspiration.

With both the in-game art and the design I get tons of feedback - which is often, "Could use an artist," and when I get that kind of advice I say, "Well, that's not going to happen. Can you try and break down exactly what it is about the art that makes you say that?" - and then I fix what I can. I'm getting there!

So, the art is simple, but there's a clarity that comes from the simplicity. And it means this game more so than any one I've done before is my vision: it has this consistency and a unique style - a style I don't know if there's a name for, it's not really 'retro' or 'vector' or tapping into any particular nostalgic look. I just like mathy shapes and bright colors and glowy stuff. Do you know a name for it? Maybe we should just call it the 'programmer art' look. :P

Raise Your Happiness

I just found out today is World Suicide Prevention day. (Thanks to Meg Baker.)

And, since Happion Labs is a company about increasing happiness, I think this deserves a blog post.

Okay, it's weird that we're setting aside one day a year to not commit suicide - seems a little like the 'drug free zones' you might see around schools or what not, is it really going to change anything?  

But one day is better than none.

My wife and I have both lost people we love to suicide. I myself spent ten years writing and rewriting a novel about the experience (http://dionysusloggedout.com). In hindsight not the best way to process it. 

Short version - suicide of a loved one messes you up for a long time.

Of course, when you're about to commit suicide, you're in too dark a place to appreciate that what you're about to do is going to pass a lot of your pain onto your loved ones.

So let me try to say something positive:

You can control a lot of your unhappiness. Thirty years ago, psychologists were pretty clueless and had a tendency to perpetuate unhappiness rather than fix it. Today therapy is a lot better - they're practically like happiness consultants or trainers. I go to a therapist myself even though I'm rarely depressed!  Because I want to be as happy as I can be. But even books on happiness can help as much as therapy: How of Happiness by Sonja Lyubomirsky and Feeling Good by David Burns are two I particularly recommend. Oh, and you can check out this website: http://www.raisinghappiness.com/

This may sound weird, but I play a little happiness game. I take the CES-D every week, to track how I'm feeling. http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu. If my scores start slipping or life throws me curve balls I start doing more happiness activities.

Seriously. You can control a lot of your unhappiness.

Would You Rather Have Leaderboards or Individual Statistics?

Because Playstation Network isn't available yet for Playstation Mobile, I'm not sure what I should do about leaderboards and statistics for sixty second shooter Deluxe in the meantime. 

I can support the same leaderboards that sixty second shooter for Chrome uses: an advantage here is that PSM and Chrome players would be able to compete head-to-head. On the other hand, that would be weird, because they're really two different games at this point. And on the gripping hand, this doens't provide friends leaderboards. (I don't know about you, but I don't care how I do compared to the world champion, I just want to beat my friends.)

Or I can spend the time working on individual stats reporting: tracking your averages day-to-day and week-to-week and reporting on your progress. Because sixty second shooter is such a high variance game, this would be a useful tool to measure whether you're getting better - whether your practice is paying off. The problem here is you have no idea how you're doing in any semi-objective sense. I can imagine people saying, "Whoo! I got 25000 points! I've mastered this game! On to the next one!"

So I throw it to you - take the one-question survey:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Sixty-Second-Shooter/147543672027135?sk=app_127709503932081

A Note on Spelunky for XBLA

(Just a quick note. I started writing about procedural content but turns out I have a lot to say about it, so saving that for later.)

At first blush, Spelunky has the Damsel-In-Distress & Woman-As-Reward tropes. (Although it took me many repeated plays to figure out the heart you get for the damsel's kiss is actually a hit point. My seven year old figured it out right away.)

But if you go into the Options menu you'll find you can switch the Damsel to a bro or to a hound.

My daughters insist I go with the cute doggie, even though the guy is pretty hot.

Notes on *The Amazing Brok*: Limitations

"Make the player feel like a hero."

That's been one of my game design guidelines, by way of Mark Nau by way of someone at Atari cum Midway whose name I've forgotten. And it's always served me well, but it has its limitations.

Which brings me to the subject of this post: limitations. Taking away limitations and giving the player's avatar more powers is often a good way to make them feel more heroic. 

But every power you give the avatar, every limitation you take away, reduces the challenges you can put in front of the player. Take a Spider-Man game, for instance. Spider-Man can climb on walls. Any wall. This is canonical comic stuff here. You make a Spider-Man game, you can't take away his wall-crawling.

But then a whole set of environmental challenges is nixed. (One of the reasons rescuing people and carrying them to safety was a popular challenge in Spider-Man 2 was because you can't wall-crawl and carry someone at the same time: now you actually have to swing across the burning theater floor, etcetera.) 

And making the player feel like a hero has been kind of done to death. But it seems like there's a lot of fruit at the other end of the spectrum: can we make a game with one button? (Canabalt) What if we make a game where you can barely control your own muscles? (Qwop) 

Enter The Amazing Brok. You play a rock. A rock that can jump. And that's it. The game has two buttons: one button jumps; the other button activates the environment, switching directions of treadmills and activating springs and so forth. 

And with these draconian limitations on your character, suddenly this rich field of level design comes out. All sorts of potential puzzles and challenges. Check it out, it's inexpensive and it's on iOS and Android.

I make it sound like there's a continuum between 'be a hero' and 'have interesting challenges': but really, though the two principles exist in tension with each other it is possible to do both at the same time. Canabalt is a good example of that. In games where you've given the avatar a slew of badass powers you can experiment with taking them away in certain sections - Spider-Man carrying civilians, or the randomized powers section of Bioshock - and even in games where you play a fairly unheroic rock, any interesting challenge still makes you the player feel like a hero when you solve it.