The school of mandatory polish

Since I work in the industry I have mostly work on what is called casual games. Most of the dedicated video game audience see this kind of game as crap and for some title they’re obviously right. In fact it’s not the fault of casual game but of the investors thinking "let’s sell some poor game to an ignorant audience, and let’s call that casual game as an excuse". Sadly it sometimes works; or mostly it worked until mass market clients was upset by the scandalous quality of these games.

Anyway good casual game design is a school I’m proud to be part of, and mostly for one reason.

Many game I play this days are targeted for core or hardcore gamer and a lot of them share the same default : a big layercake of indigest features. Ok, I’m a core gamer and I should like that, but when layers of features rhyme with bad polish, artifiacialy stretched lifetime and hidden weak features; I’m sad.

I will not discuss again the way items was designed in Mass Effect and Dragon Age; but that's what I'm talking about, some basic and essential design features are regularly overlooked in this kind of games.

So now here is the reason I’m proud to be working on casual game, not because I’m a fan of the genre, but because in casual game design you can’t have too much feature; unless you want to dread your players.
This way you are forced to polish your small design feautre until they are flawless, delicious and delightful.

That's a shame but a lot of big games fail to polish their main features at the same level as some of the best casual games do; like the ones by Pop Caps (Plants vs. Zombies, Bejeweled, Peggle) or some successful iPhone games.

As a conclusion I would say that even few features and simple game design mechanics are enough to make an incredibly good game for core gamer. For example take a look at Diablo 2 few features or recently at Mass Effect 2 killed or simplified features.

So please; exchange more features against more polish in my next favorite hardcore titles !

Cut up your game in "time pieces"

Recently I played more games on my iPhone than on any other platforms. Realizing this frightening fact -I'm a gamer, please understand me- I started asking myself why I was relying this much on my iPhone games. I started to figure out when and why I was playing my iPhone games. And as you might have guessed my conclusion was mostly time related.

First I realized that I played iPhone game in places or at moments I almost never played before : waiting for someone in a public place, in my bed just before sleeping, during TV ads, walking to the subway station, before the movie in theater, etc.
Asking myself why I was playing in those situations was pretty obvious, I had small time to kill, very small time to kill. The kind of time my Nintendo DS or PSP can't kill for many reasons : I don't have any of them always in my pocket, they're too slow to boot, their games are not made to kill this kind of time, I don't carry a dozen of cartridges or UMD anywhere with me, I can't buy a new game anywhere and anywhen, etc.

Then I take a look at iPhone games charts and, as expected, the vast majority of successful game (sales are a special case) are designed to allow short play session : Angry Birds, Bejeweled, Tetris, Doodle Jump, Flight Control ...

So it's a whole new world for games, a world that started with flash games played at coffee time and now expending to every small moments we often lost doing nothing.
Well, aiming to "short play session game" while making an iPhone games seems to be one way to success. But what about "play session duration" for other platforms and products ?

I'm convinced that well crafted (game) experience is bound to a good management of the time consumer has to offer.
I mean that games should help player managing their leisure time by cutting the game down to many layers of timed gameplay loop. Why I think it is so important to me and many others ? Because when I start to play a game (or any entertainment) I like to know if it will fit in my schedule and when I could stop playing without being frustrated or lose my progression.
(Talking about entertainment, look at the success of TV shows, 45 minutes session instead of 1h30 for a movie. I bet that's one part of their success)

As an example I'll take a game I'm currently playing : Alpha Protocol. First because it's fresh in my mind and second because those layers I spoke of are easy to spot and understand in this game.

Alpha Protocol cut up time this way :

A Checkpoint takes less than five minutes to complete, a Mission a maximum average of an hour, an Objective is about 5 missions and so approximately 5 hours, and a Game Acts is nearly 3 objectives approaching a duration of nearly 15 hours. I voluntary extrapolate on some durations but it gives you a good view of how the game cut down its gameplay sessions.

The way Alpha Protocol is divided help player to manage her goals and schedule easily for each play session which is a great advantage. In fact the player knows she could start a 5 minutes play session or a lot more if she likes it or has more time.

Moreover this way of cutting up gameplay could help the game to reach numerous design objectives as a well balanced reward system, game pace, puzzle complexity, quest design, etc.

In summary I think that dividing a game with a "time knife" adapted to its target expectations and free time is something that should not be underestimated.

An unexciting E3

Reading this week Well Played column on Kotaku, I wondered why I wasn't excited at all by E3 this year ?

Here's what I know about E3 2010 :

• Sony and Microsoft are moving to motion controller, great, what a surprise. It's been one year since their first announcement. Sony has his Wiimote clone and Microsoft has a camera capturing the movements of maximum two players.
  If I summarize, the first is not much more than a Wiimote, so we could play Wii games in HD and the second prevents us to play with more than one friend at a time. You see something exciting their ? Playing in HD or with fewer people; I'd rather keep my Wii.
• Nintendo will reveal his 3DS but since I learned the 3D could just be an aesthetic feature, I lost my hopes. I was dreaming of 3D interaction with the stylus, something very cool as three dimensional touchscreen and allowing new gameplays.
• Also there will be a lot of new games at E3, but a lot of them are only sequels of sequels : Gears of War 3, BattleFront 3, Resistance 3, Killzone 3, Zelda XX... Not so exciting.

Well this was perhaps a quick and negative overview, but it make me wonder what E3 is all about now.

Of course it's perfect to do business, to shake hands and build huge booth too show your huge games. But an indie developer could have quite the same coverage with a little internet trailer or a developer diary video and no money spent.
Moreover E3 is the moment chosen for every big announcement, reducing the impact of everyone of them.

We could argue that its an occasion to gain visibility in front of general media, but I won't buy it. In fact video games are now a regular subject in magazines and newspaper, whatsoever in business, entertainment or crime pages. They don't really need this kind of event to be spoke of.

This remember me an initiative that was taken one or two years ago, when big editor use the money they didn't use for E3 to build their own mini-events. This way every editor had his shot with the media and made the noise they were waiting for. Perhaps it was a good move ?

To finish, some games announcement and even trailers has been revealed before E3, as Vanquish or Spider Man Shattered Dimensions are the first two examples that come to my mind. What is the meaning of E3 if new games aren't revealed during the show ?

So here is my question : at an era of fast and abundant information could E3 be has exciting has it was 10 or 15 years ago ? Is it still worth the costs ?

In fact, with Onlive or Gaikai new online services, the next big video game show could be online.
Everybody could play the new game demos and access the conferences live during their play sessions. It will be obviously cheaper and easier to set up. This will also allows attendees to avoid waiting queues before playing or watching the next big thing; and small developer to increase their visibility. I can't wait for it !

Sell your soul to offer your heart

Mass Effect, Fallout 3, Diablo, Fable and many more have shrunk down their RPG mechanics and content in order to reach more cutomers and to be more competitive. Others like Bioshock and Dawn of War II have at the contrary use RPG to give a bit more depth to their game.

Is the recent trend of simplified RPG mechanics a give up or a smart move for the genre ? Could it be use with other genre ?

Diablo was one of the first to use only a part of the RPG genre. It takes the most understandable RPG elements -character customization and progression- and melts them with a frenetic action game. Years later a lot of games followed this path.

The Mass Effect success was in part due to his TPS combat system. Using this feature allowed Mass Effect to appeal to a wider audience than the RPG players. In fact RPG as they're known are a scary genre for mass market consumers. Introducing a simple known and understandable gameplay as a TPS combat system give the game a chance to reach TPS customers and then to charm them with RPG mechanics.
Then Mass Effect 2 hit the market and despite its poor equipment system and its new TPS gameplay, it has improved strong RPG systems like dialogs and choices.

Fallout 3 was also mostly marketed as shooter; a bloody one. This politic scared RPG fans but excited the console FPS player base, resulting in 5 millions unit sold. Despite his marketing Fallout 3 is still a strong RPG at heart : character customization, numerous secondary quests, branched dialogs...


More recently there was also a common tendency to put RPG elements -mostly character customization and progression- to new genre.
For example there was Dawn of War II with a squad looking like a typical RPG group, or Bioshock with his character's powers and Dante Inferno with its light equipment system, even Call of Duty Modern Warfare multi-player offered the possibility to gain rank and unlock new classes.
That's a lot of RPG in our modern video-games !


Well, I asked in the first paragraph "Is the recent trend of smaller/simplified RPG a give up or a smart move for the genre ?". I definitely think it's a smart move.

RPG have always struggle to charm the mainstream consumers, in part because of the undeserved bad reputation of his pen and paper counterpart. And mostly due to its complexity.
Take the character creation phase, first thing you do in an RPG, you're asked to choose who and how you want to play whereas you didn't played the game for now !?
Imagine you create Super Mario with 0 in dexterity, Super Mario couldn't jump and the game would be like hell ! Some novice RPG players live that, most won't came back to the genre.

This way I think that simplified RPG or small RPG features in other genre are a good way to accustom players to our beloved RPG. In the meantime it will be easy to drag them into greater RPG experiences.


And I also asked "Could it be use with other genre ?" . Yes it should ! Take small and simplified parts of other genre and melt them together. Do it with caution,  prototype smoothly, iterate gently, something great could happen !

What about a bit of real time strategy in my racing game ? Or a bit of tactic in my FPS ? And a bit of music game in my platform game ? Etc ! As I share it with you earlier, Idea are new combinations, don't be shy and try.


So I'll conclude with  this article title, taking Fallout 3 as an example :
Sell your soul -make your RPG looks like a shooter to reach customer- to offer your heart -make the rest of the game as RPG as you can to reach your expectation-.

Making of a card game : the skeleton

First I must say that the first article about my card game was about a new version of it; a kind of second iteration. So don't be confuse when I'll start presenting you a quite different version of the pitch.

Yes it's awkward, anyway I think a lot about how to share with you my journey trough the making of these games and I'd start with a piece of my work which is not in an advanced enough state to be used as a material for my writing.

Enough explanation, let's talk about my first card game. Not a very good one but a finished one. It will be better as a source of examples. It contents many flaws I think, but that's not devaluating the lessons learned.

First the pitch : "Create a RPG pen and paper experience without a game master"

After brainstorming on this pitch I ended up with ideas and objectives.
- Give each player the possibility to build his character.
- Give each player a personal objective.
- Build a system which automatically narrates the players's journey.
- Force the players to play together in order to win solo.

Let's see the rules I found around these objectives.

• Give each player the possibility to build his character
  Each character will be build around three elements : Origin, Class and Destiny.
  Origin : give the player a special power and three characteristics : Charisma, Fight, Cunning.
  Class : give the player an other special power and three characteristics : Charisma, Fight, Cunning. Moreover class could influence some parts of the player journey.
  Destiny : give the player his personal objective; this card is hidden from the other players.
• Give each player a personal objective
  See Destiny above.
• Build a system which automatically narrates the player's journey
  Events will be drawn in order to build a new story each turn.
• Force the players to play together in order to win solo
  Each Event is a challenge requiring to match its three characteristics to be achieved :  Charisma, Fight, Cunning. Most Events can't be achieved solo, forcing players to cooperate.
  Events have consequences which could help or prevent each player to reach their objective. This way each player must carefully choose when to participate or not to an event.

You can already see one flaw in my rules; the strong likeness between Origin and Class. I'll discuss this later, as I said, I already have started a second version of this card game.

The game seems also very static and deterministic with not much place for treachery, strategy and tactics. That's why I choose to introduce Action cards. They give randomness, tactic and strategy to the game.

• Action cards give the player a special action and/or characteristics modifier. Action cards can be played at any moment and can be put on an other card in order to modify it. Action cards are removed when the card they modify are or at the end of turn.

Now we have the core rules of the game. Most of the other rules will come by testing it with friends or just by emulating a game in our mind.

But in order to be playable this game need content, in our case cards with characteristics, power, action, consequences... This will be our next subject, a tough one.

What did I learn writing the first set of rules of this game :

• See your ideas as objectives, then build rules that could match them.
• Don't blame yourself if your ideas are not 100% new, forced novelty could ruin the entire thing.
• Seek coherence, each rule must help the others to make sense.
• Run games in your mind, then search your rules for flaws and correct them.