GameDevBlog

Notes on Bejeweled Blitz

I'm not the biggest fan of plain old ordinary Bejeweled, but if you take Bejeweled and:

- shorten the session length to 1 minute

- add friends leaderboards

- add a somewhat random incidence of score multipliers

then you've found my digital crack.

Friends' leaderboards are obviously compelling - but what about those other two things?  Are they obvious?

First - session length.  If you like a game, wouldn't a longer session be better?  Nope.  All other things being equal, a shorter session length is better than a longer one.  If you like the game, you can always play it again, and the lower your time commitment, the more likely you're going to re-up.  So go ahead, take your game, make it shorter, see what happens.  You'll probably find that you have balance issues - those 'guns vs. butter' decisions you were making early on thrown out of whack.  But that can be fixed, and the tighter game loop is probably worth it.

So why did it need random multiplier gems?  I've heard hardcore guys say it takes the skill out of the game, if a n00b can rack up a 150000 point score just from a lucky draw - and people who invest more time are more likely to get the big payouts, so don't multiplier gems wreck the game?  Nope.  I'm more or less quoting Richard Garfield here:  "Everyone says they want their games to be less random, but nobody really does."  Paraphrasing, rookies want to be able to win occasionally, otherwise they won't play, and the skilled players will have nobody to play against.  (Also, a lot of players who think they're skilled aren't as good as they think - a highly variant game lets those players feel like a badass when a less variant game like chess might throw their actual lack of skill into stark relief.)

And there's another thing going on with the multiplier gems and that's a slot-machine schedule of reinforcement.  For a tiny investment (one minute of your time) you might get that big payout.  Behaviors that are reinforced intermittently are resistant to being extinguished - check that out, I did learn something with my psych major.

When I find myself drawn back to Blitz, I feel about like those wirehead laboratory rats of legend, the ones who would continually pull the lever to get the electrical stimulus until they starved.  It makes one ask if maybe Blitz is a bit unethical - are we being manipulated by PopCap?  All I can say is that since guys who work at Popcap are continually at the top of my leaderboards, at least they're drinking the kool aid too.

And the fact that the PopCap guys are always at the top shows that there is still skill involved, despite the variance.  It's hard to put that skill into words - the ability to see the matches is paramount, and that seems to be something you can only learn by practice.  There are also strategies, to be sure, but most of the strategies seem to be less important than just being able to make a lot of fast matches.

Is GameFly Really Worth It?

I tend to have GameFly games out for a while.  I wondered to myself - is this really worth it?  If I just bought used games, would I not only spend about the same amount of money but also get to keep the games?

Turns out GameFly lets you look at your rental history.  So I did.  Turns out, for games I actually finish, I tend to have them out 4-5 weeks.  So that's a cost of $16-$20 or so in Gamefly time.  These are games that are still fairly recent releases, that I could buy for around $35.  

Factor in that some games I discover I hate and return immediately, and the savings goes up considerably.

And although sometimes I like to have the games for my collection, the truth is I almost never, never, ever go back and play those games again.  So there is just about zero value to me to keep the games.  

So.  Yes.  GameFly really is worth it.  And no, they didn't pay me to write this.

Risk Vs. Risk

Although I have no spare minutes these days I am going to dash off this thought quickly:

Your project usually has one big fat risk, right, which is - will we finish all this crap on time and be able to ship something and keep our agreement with our publisher and get our milestone payments and keep our company in business and hopefully turn a profit for our publisher and ourselves?

And then there usually some other big risks, like:  Will we be able to get network play working?  Will this game mechanic or mode actually be fun?

The agile manifesto would say that you should deal with that first big risk by getting your project to release quality early and often.  Make something you could ship - then decide if you want to add stuff to it.

But with things like 'network play' and 'fun' - if you push towards something barely shippable (hey, it passes all of TCR and doesn't crash!) - and then decide, "Yeah, it really needs network play" - you may be somewhat screwed.  Network play is something usually worth doing first, because it brings with it a host of engineering decisions that have ramifications everywhere.  It's really hard to take a single-player game and add network play;  it's much easier to take a network game and make a single-player mode.  (Other things like 'save anywhere' have similar ramifications.)  I think there may have been more than one retail game that came out in the past couple of years that were originally intended to have network play, used somewhat agile development methodologies, where the team then realized that network play would be very expensive to retrofit in.

What's the right answer?  I don't think there's a rule-of-thumb for this.  In fact, I think this is a place where rules of thumb break down.  The agile "Get it to shippable as soon as possible" may not work;  likewise, "always mitigate risks" or "get multiplayer done first" might be wrong if your game is pretty darn fun single player.

Quick Follow Up On IGDA Leadership Forum

Ok, I'm a bad guy, I said I'd write more about the forum and didn't.  I'll just quickly lay down what were highlights for me and you can dig them up yourself - the talks I saw that I dug the most were the ones by:

- Chris Hecker (as I mentioned)

- David Edery

- Kane Minkus

- Scott Crabtree

- Chris Satchell

Because I just can't seem to find a spare minute to blog anymore.

Chris Hecker's talk

Chris Hecker's talk may have been the highlight of the Leadership Forum.  (http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=26077)  Both entertaining and thought provoking, and in some ways I have to admit he's right - if we want games to be the top art form of the next century, the way movies were for the last, then we have a long way to go.

That said:  do we want that?  I also attended Scott Crabtree's talk on happiness in the workplace, where he, quoting someone else, said something along the lines of "don't compare yourselves to others, because you'll be both bitter and vain - bitter because you're worse than some and vain because you're better than others."  We could get swollen heads because we've overtaken amusement park rides in our artness and at the same time lament that we're not movies.  Best not to think such thoughts if we want to be happy.

But I suppose artists aren't known for happiness.  If we do want to kick film's ass, Chris isn't the only one who has said what makes games special is the interactivity, and so interactivity is where our art must lie.  Wait a minute - what makes movies special, and is that where their art lies?  What if movies didn't exist, and Casablanca was made instead as a play...?  It would still be great art, wouldn't it?  I'll admit Citizen Kane had to be a movie (I never did appreciate Citizen Kane) but Casablanca?  Thought experiment: what if you make a game (or a theme park ride) that has a linear narrative that is as meaningful and important and resonant as Casablanca...?

I'll talk more about other conference stuff later.

I would pay Intuit $50 a year to *not* make me upgrade

Last week at the office we were talking about how annoying Quicken has gotten lately - the number of clicks per transaction has doubled or tripled, and it has stopped feeling "Quick".  Maybe they've fixed that in the 2010 edition, maybe not, I'm too scared to find out.  Joel Spolsky's article is dead-on.  http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000017.html  Just replace "Office" with "Quicken".

In other news, the IGDA Leadership Forum this year is even better than last year's.  A full report will be forthcoming.

Sofia's a frickin' genius

Not only is she reading *One Fish, Two Fish* to me at bedtime, she started to learn to "program" today with Kodu Gamelab.

Ok, I was giving her step-by-step instructions, I don't think she could have done anything with it on her own.

Cathy's not impressed.  "She is almost five, you know."

Neat, neat program, though - as a primer to programming it's awesome.  And we could practically have written Schizoid with it - color-coded enemy bashing is built in.  A bargain at $5.

Why has sneakernet returned?

For us, it seems to be the cryptic security and permissions crap involved in sharing files.  We somehow couldn't find any of our memory sticks today and we resorted to attempting to share files.  It never works the first try anymore.  "You don't have permission..." if you're a public user, because the permissions have somehow been set incorrectly...or you need to log on as the owner of the box.  Or whatever.

Windows has taken us back to the dark ages.  Next thing our source control will stop working.

Are we being mocked?

Probably, but I'm getting at least one.

And really, it's not the space lobsters that have to work cooperatively, it's you.

IGDA Leadership Forum Almost Upon Us

When I was first promoted to management, back at Mindcraft Software, I thought to myself, "Finally!  Now we can start doing this project right."

Nevermind that I was 26 and didn't know the first thing about management, having never managed anything ever...I'd never taken a seminar, never even read a single book on the subject.  All I managed to do was piss other people on the team off before the company fortunately went bankrupt, saving me from the embarrassment of not having shipped anything when I was supposed to.

If only the IGDA Leadership Forum was available then.  I don't know if I could have talked my boss into sending me, but it's a lot cheaper than DICE ($350 if you're an IGDA member and you get the early rate, available until September 9th) and it's a great opportunity both to attend lectures on beginning and advanced topics in managing game development and to--perhaps more importantly?--just talk to other managers about how they handle things.  Something I've found over the last two years is we tend to have a lot of the same problems...maybe not all families are unhappy differently after all...

Mindcraft would still have gone bankrupt but my career might have turned out differently.  It was many years before someone trusted me with management responsibilities again.

And - if you're a project manager or an executive - send your leads.  Particularly if they're green.  If I had a dime for every time I saw somone promoted to management with no training who then had to be fired or demoted back to rank-and-file, I'd have a couple bucks by now.

I realize it's tough in a recession year, but the cost is paltry compared to the salaries you're paying these people, and the benefits...

Hell, if you don't send them to the Leadership Forum, at least send them to something.  Get them some trianing of some kind.

Here's the info:  http://www.igda.org/leadership/