Last week I mentioned something about a physics rant. Guess what time it is?

Forgot to mention the other checked item - my personal site has been revamped!
It's at http://www.yarsoft.com .

I normally do one big-blog post on Fishbeat a week so as to not clutter the site. My personal page is where I'll be writing in more detail about the various prototypes I'm developing, review games, and share other things I've worked on like cartoons, and it has a piratey theme, so check it out!
Or not, if you want to be a jerk.

Let’s start with a checklist update!

Two checks and another post (this one)! Actually a week behind on the blog I believe, but not due to slacking! We here at Fishbeat have been toiling away extra-hours for a recent milestone. I was actually going to make this post a semi-rant about the various shortcomings of physics systems I’ve worked with, but now I’m finding myself having more to say about crunch times, so I guess that’s the topic for today.

On most projects that I’ve worked that have had deadlines, there are three scenarios that occur as that deadline approaches. First is that you’re on-track to hit the deadline, and it goes pretty smoothly. This is usually the case for projects that are very small in scope. These also tend to not be super-interesting because if a project’s time has been calculated that precisely, then there was probably a good reference for the task (i.e. it’s been done before).

The second scenario is that the deadline gets pushed back. This happens when people with fairly good knowledge of how long tasks take them, come to the conclusion that no amount of crunching can meet the deadline acceptably. This is a last-resort scenario because pushing deadlines back is never a good thing. You’re delaying money at best, at worst you’re pissing off your funding source (baaaaad).

The last scenario is the crunch. This happens when a task is not yet complete but the devs are confident that if they go above and beyond their normal working schedule/time that it will get finished. It’s kind of like staying up all night to finish a school paper – you know it will get done, but you’re going to feel really tired and probably get sick afterwards.

Everyone is aware of the negative aspects of crunch time. Your social life goes away, it doesn’t tend to pay any better, and it is taxing physically and mentally. It always feels forced, even though it never is (there is usually just a lot at stake). But there are some good aspects too. It’s almost cleansing in a way.

Over a long enough period, people tend to develop little time-wasting activities. Whether it is excessive email checking, or browsing websites too often, or even some little casual game, it all has the same effect. It’s pretty negligible in small doses but the cumulative effect of these time-wasters will have an impact on productivity. The crunch wipes all these time-wasters away- and the effects actually last beyond the deadline. Having stayed away from these activities for a few days makes it easy not to pick up again. The memory of the last crunch stays fresh for quite awhile, and the desire to not go through that again is very motivating for working harder in general. Sadly, while these effects do last awhile, they're not permanent.

Similarly, having so little time near the end of a deadline makes one re-evaluate how they are spending it in general. Faced with the reality that tasks for work must get done, and that they take a certain fixed amount of time reveals what procrastination actually eats: real leisure time.

Crunching can be good for the project in general too. Features or code that have been getting put off, or defined vaguely gets resolved. People are forced to either face the reality that the problem is too big to solve, or nail down a concrete solution. Either way, the difficult choices get made and the difficult tasks get done.

That being said, crunching does have its limits. People will get burned out if it goes on too long, (most people need a day of recovery after heavy crunching in any case), and eventually the tasks that can be solved or culled run out. What is left are “crunch-resistant” tasks- ones that require days of planning, strategy, and thought. They can’t be brute forced, and trying either leads to bad results or just more burn-out.

I’ll end things with some tips for crunching. I’ve gotten pretty good at keeping my sanity and feeling well during even pretty intense crunch times, and it only takes a few considerations:

1. Minimize the amount of time being tired – This one is kind of a ‘duh’ tip, but it leads to the next two. People work slower, have a harder time solving problems, introduce more bugs, fatigue more/get sick, and are far more irritable when tired. All of those things are very counter-productive to hitting a deadline.
2. Play to your strengths – If you’re an early-bird type of person, then crunch by getting up extra early in the morning and starting work then. If you’re the type of person who needs a bit more sleep, but can also work for much longer periods of time without tiring, then opt for the more classic late-night crunch. Don’t work against your sleeping habits – you’ll just make yourself more tired.
3. Listen to your body – People are generally aware when a few days of crunching are coming up. If one of those evenings is approaching and you’re feeling tired – take a nap! If you feel tired now, you’re only going to feel more tired later when the crunch goes into full-swing, and that will have a negative impact on work. A nap fixes that – it only takes an hour or two, but the feelings of being awake and refreshed last much longer.

So if you find yourself one-day in the midst of a crunch, I hope these tips come in handy. And of course – hang in there!

Last year was the first time I (or any of my development team for that matter) had taken the trip down to GDC. It was the most amazing week of my life, completely reinvigorated our game development spirit, and put us firmly in the mindset of being indie devs. It also put our heads in the clouds.

Coming back this year, many things stayed the same. Food was amazing as usual, the hobos were still annoying as hell, and my desire to be a kick-ass gamedev was kick-started once more (even greater than last year). But I also got brought back to earth.

This time around there was no award, and while some people may have heard of the game I helped create last year, I was pretty much an unknown. At the same time, other people on the team were speakers and other indies that got noticed last year were giving talks, are well respected, and friends with what seems like everyone. And it's my own fault I'm in this spot.

I had a chance to turn the opportunity we were given last year into something special, and while that opportunity hasn’t been completely wasted (Fishbeat was founded after all), I did get full of myself and lazy. The excuse that I was too busy helping to start the studio and get our title going doesn't really hold up; everybody else last year at IGF has had obscenely busy schedules too. They just powered through and worked even more. Whereas I stayed within the bubble of my team, others were becoming active parts of the various game dev communities. I can think of time almost every day that I have slacked off, where I could have been working on a side-project or something worthwhile game-wise.

So that changes now, with the power of checklists! (I tend to complete things on checklists)

I've been paying attention to everything that has occurred at GDC this year, and compiled a list of what I need to do to gain awesome JAWESOME:

That last one isn't really game-dev related but damn that'd be cool.

Alright, time to get to work!

Oh, on another cool note I did discover what the name for my job at Fishbeat is while at GDC: Technical Artist.

In a recent TED talk, Malcom Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, makes the point that there is no perfect spaghetti sauce, there are only perfect spaghetti sauces; in any given space, be it music, video games, pasta sauce, etc, different groups of people will gravitate towards different variations on the platonic form of the object that makes up that space. In order to maybe get a better grasp of what I'm saying, you should go ahead and watch Malcom Gladwell on variation in personal preferences.

I have long been on a journey to design "the perfect video game". I have always recognized the limitation that although I cannot design the perfect video game, I can probably design my perfect video game. In the above video, Gladwell discusses variation and human preference, and what he says is that in general, people will cluster around three "perfect" ideals within a given space. In the case of spaghetti sauce, which he discusses, he says that some people like their sauce plain, some like it spicy, and some like it extra chunky.

So just as with spaghetti sauce, people will cluster around different kinds of video games. According to Gladwell, for any particular cluster, somewhere between a fourth and a third of people will cluster around one ideal sauce (or game), so there are between three and four ideal kinds of video games. In reality there are many more genres than this, but most gamers don't confine themselves to a single genre, and I submit that games across many different genres can still be of the same kind.

This is my prediction: gamers cluster around three kinds of games: games that are primarily narratological, games that are primarily ludological, and games that are primarily social. Now before I get any farther, I need to define some terms. What does it mean, narratological? Today I was reading an article called The Primacy of the Imagination by Richard Dare, and in it he discusses what he calls the "extroverted" mode of game playing, "where the player's emphasis is focused more on the kinetic experience of playing and winning". The second is the "introverted" mode, "where the game acts as a catalyst or facilitator for the gamers own feelings or imagination". I think he is almost right. According to wikipedia, narratology is the idea that games fundamentally take the form of a narrative, and ludology is the idea that games fundamentally take the form of their structure, rules, and interface.

I wish to use these terms in a slightly different way, but in a way which I think captures the idea. By Narratology, I mean the aspects of the game which are concerned with the story, the imagery, the themes, or more concisely, the fantasy. By ludology, I mean the rules and structure, or more concisely, the game mechanics. I do not think that the social aspects of gaming fit into either of these broad categories.

Going back to Gladwell and variability, I can't prove that gamers like games that are either social, narratological, or ludological, but I'm going to list a bunch of games here, and which classification I feel they belong to. My argument (for the moment) is the fact that most games can be very nicely placed into one of these three categories. All games have narratological and ludological aspects, but there is a tension between them, and one aspect usually wins. The tension lies in the fact that interactivity necessarily distorts the narrative, and in the balance between game-playing and story telling.

Examples of ludological games: Pac-Man, Pong, Tetris, Mario, Galaga, Dance Dance Revolution, Beatmania, Guitar Hero, Rez, Ikaruga, Bejeweled

Examples of narratological games: Final Fantasy X, Grand Theft Auto, Metal Gear Solid, Shen Mue, Bioshock, Assassin's Creed, Earthbound

Examples of social games: Counterstrike, Diablo 2, World of Warcraft, Halo

All three of these lists could be extended at great length. But just based on what I have here, some interesting observations; the social games are extremely balanced between their ludological and narratological aspects. Or more accurately, they allow players to choose their modality when playing the game. A ludological approach to Diablo 2 would be a focus on the mechanics of collecting loot and finding the optimal allocation of stats. A narratological approach would focus on the five act story. A ludological approach to Counterstrike would focus on kinetic proficiency of the player to make kills and react to combat situations. A narratological approach would revel in the fantasy of running around shooting killing people and being some kind of badass special ops gunslinger.

In my personal experience, however, the people who play these kinds of games are engaged less by the mechanics and narrative of these games than by the avenues for social interaction that they present. That doesn't mean that there aren't ludological or narratological gamers who play social games, or that there is no overlap (there's a lot), but simply that this is my proposal for considering variation in people's game preferences.

I have a friend who plays games almost entirely for the fantasy they convey. The games that engage him are the ones that feed his suspension of disbelief. With a few exceptions, he doesn't really play the games that I play, and I don't really play the games that he plays. I was thinking about the different ways that games engage us and what I look for versus what he looks for, and I came up with this dichotomy of mechanics vs. fantasy.

Before I go, I want to mention Portal, which is not a social game, and which, in my opinion, is perfectly balanced between ludo- and narratological modalities. Perhaps this is the key to its runaway success.

Making a game is all about building an experience. An important consideration for an experience builder is the magnitude of the experience that he is building. What is the sensory impact of the experience? What is the psychological impact? Games are primarily a visual medium, but when they don't engage the other senses, they have a low impact. For casual games, this is perhaps appropriate, but all of the good casual games I have played engage the senses richly. Ironically, in my experience, so-called "blockbuster" games are frequently less multisensory than casual ones; I speculate that this is because the people who make them, on a high level, are treating them like films.

So often, the things we consider to be secondary to the production process, things which we understand to be important, but not our primary concern, are the elements of the game that engage diverse senses. In particular, the sensation of touch is under-represented. When I talk about tactile engagement, it is most likely that you think of force feedback, but I submit that this is only a small facet of the way that games can interface with touch. What is more critical is crafting a visual metaphor for tactile engagement, articulated through simulation of physical impact.

When I press a button, there needs to be an immediate and one to one reaction in the virtual environment. In the real world, there exists this kind of relationship. To engage this sense, we need to present a simulation that communicates with the brain in familiar metaphors. By this I mean images that the brain can relate to the physical world, and interpret in a familiar way.

I've found that the more I read about evolutionary psychology, the more I am able to make sense of the world around me. Today, I want to talk about how I think an understanding of evolutionary psychology is applicable to video game design. I'm going to start with a very obvious example, World of Warcraft, and try to come to some conclusions about how games like World of Warcraft engage the unconscious, caveman part of the brain.

MMORPGs interface with the caveman brain by giving us "stuff"; we love to acquire things, and MMOs present us with a nearly limitless arena for doing this. They encourage everyone's inner packrat. We all have a latent desire to save things "in case we need them". It's an instinct which suits us when times of abundance and scarcity occur at unpredictable distributions.

Moreover, WoW constantly reminds us of our progress in acquiring stuff. What makes it so especially clever is the way that they layer different progress metrics. It's possible to have 25 quests going at once, and every time you make progress in one of them, a little reminder flashes on the screen. The constant feeling of progress, and the close proximity of each reward, feeds the caveman brain. Just a little bit further, we think, just a little bit further. Then I'll level up. Then I'll get this item.

The higher brain does not participate in this transaction; by speaking directly to the subconscious, animal desires, the MMORPG idiom creates a universe which is compulsive (or compelling, if you prefer). It's interesting that the former is considered detrimental, but the latter, a compliment

But all of this is self-evident. The observation that I actually want to bring to you today is this: it's not merely the existence of progress that is compelling. It is the display of progress. There is a certain visceral satisfaction that comes from watching my actions move a progress bar. It's like a refined version of acquisition. Imagine if you could watch your bank acount fill up. Imagine if you could see your muscles getting larger, your waistline getting slimmer, your brain getting smarter.

Progress in games stimulates that fantasy. It's the ultimate acquisition. Because when you have money, that's an expendable commodity. But your intelligence, your strength, these are things that feel intrinsic to you. An inexhaustible commodity, and you get to watch it tick up in real time as it corresponds to your actions. In my last post, I talked about the effectiveness of highly reactive game experience. But to take the highly reactive, and to mix it with this sense of progress, this is the next step.

An excellent example of this is the semi-recent XBox 360 title, Crackdown. When you lock your gun on an enemy and fire, the enemy's health bar becomes a progress bar, which scrolls down in real time to completion. I do not know if this was intentional, but it produces an extremely pleasing effect.

WoW's progress bars are a little more time delayed, but they work even better because there are many of them, each running on a different timer. The kinds of psychologists who sit around conditioning dogs to salivate actually have a name for this; they call it a reward system. It's a term that comes from Skinnerian conditioning, but it's completely applicable to games, especially MMORPGS.

Many people try to copy the "WoW formula", believing they will also somehow achieve WoW's success. There are many reasons why WoW copycats are doomed to fail. But even though the number of games that have been influenced by WoW already is innumerable, I have yet to see any of them copy the part that is compelling. If you want to copy part of WoW, don't copy the style, or the gameplay mechanics, or the simple innovations like putting an exclamation mark over a character's head. Copy the reward schedule, the timing of the rewards that are given to players as they complete different progress bars, and remember to show it to them in a way that is pleasing and intuitive to understand.

Postscript, a quick note on the implications of what I am saying:
Many people complain that games are addictive, that video game addiction ruins lives. I do not think this is the case. We live in a continuous world, with a truly infinite number of things that can tap into this psycho-evolutionary drive. It is precisely the ability of games to do this in the first place that makes them fun. People who allow the addictive qualities of video games to damage them are simply (unfortunately for them) particularly receptive to certain kinds of stimuli. The mechanism by which evolution works guarantees this kind of variation. Would you play a game that had no addictive qualities at all?

Each of the IGF finalists got a booth in the convention hall, and it is definitely in one’s best interests to run it. There were usually two of us at the booth, and I stayed there a majority of my time at GDC. This worked out very well.

First, a warning: If you ever find yourself running a booth, get as comfortable of footwear as possible and sit often. Even then, your feet are probably going to hate you at the end of the day.

Running a booth is a great idea, especially if you are an introvert (like me). It basically placed me in a situation where I had to get people to approach the booth and convince them to play Synaesthete. Even after just a few hours, I found I was much more comfortable talking with total strangers and ‘important people’. And it’s certainly never a bad idea to improve one’s social abilities, especially in the software industry.

This leads me to the most rewarding part about running a booth – You meet a lot of really cool people. We got visits from an entire range of developers, from the up-and-coming students, to our fellow peers at IGF, to the developers we idolized when we were kids. We talked a lot about Synaesthete, our aspirations and game development in general (it’s quite an experience, talking shop with these veteran programmers you had previously only read about.)

Running a booth also nets you visits from two other important sources. The first is the media, which any indie developer should be going all out for. Not only is it extremely easy to get exposure for a game here, there are a lot of reporters at GDC. A game will likely get more media attention here than it will the rest of the year.

The last, most important visitors were the potential employers and publishers. If you make it to IGF, this means at the very least you are a competent developer and have a game people think is pretty darn cool. Turns out employers and publishers want both. So instead of running around attempting to give people your resume, everyone is now coming to you. As a student, this is sort of like entering a magical bizzaro land where all your wildest dreams come true.

Interestingly, our team barely handed out barely any resumes while nearly running out of business cards. And with a booth this makes sense. People don’t need a sheet to see your credentials when they have a product you made right in front of them. It is something that is much more tangible and enticing than a list of old work.

I've been wanting to write down my perspectives on game design for a long time. A lot of things made sense to me only recently, and until recently, I did not have a good place in which to say it. I've been meditating deeply on game design, and I feel like I've finally seen enough to be able to write down something meaningful.

The first time I ever had any inkling of what might make a game fun was about three years ago, when someone in my freshman class made a game that made extensive use of particle systems. In fact, two teams of the four in my section used particles, and two did not. From this simple occurrence, I made several observations: 1) the games with particle systems were a lot more engaging and fun. 2) They were only fun after the particle systems were integrated. One person said to me something to the effect of "I noticed people actually started to play my game once I put in the particles." About that same time, Geometry Wars and Luminez both came out, and I noticed that they were both incredibly fun, and featured particles as a center piece. Luminez also caught my attention with the way it made use of music.

The next time I really started to meditate deeply on the structure and method of game design, we were already several months into the development of Synaesthete. As we extensively focus-tested every new mechanic, it was a real learning ground for me regarding how different elements of a game interact and how to make the project fun. It's really difficult to put the insights I learned into words, but mostly they center around the question of how much is too much?, especially regarding what you can pull off in music games and how to do it effectively.

It really started to click for me this year at GDC. I went to a panel where Jon Mak talked about a game as being purely a series of inputs and outputs, and how the secret to using this knowledge is to make everything in the game reactive to the player. He illustrated this using Everyday Shooter, and also a small prototype. Simple gameplay logic, in a reactive environment, is extremely engrossing. Identical gameplay logic, without the environment, is extremely bland. This immediately framed the way I think about game design. In particular, this tied in with my observations about particles, which really were just a specific implemenation of this high reactivity.

Right before this I had been reading a lot about Tetsuya Mizuguchi, and his thoughts on game design. What struck me the most about his game design philosophy is that rather than play other people's games, he simply looks through life to try to find inspiration. I had always used a much more limited approach, to look through memories of things I enjoyed in games and then try to pull them apart and combine them in a new way. What Mizuguchi's words made me realize was that the whole world is full of inspiration for game concepts.

Mizuguchi's games are unusual because he does not look to the space of games to find his ideas. He also talked a lot about call and response, and how many things in life can be expressed in terms of this simple mechanic. The ubiquity of the call-response mechanic makes it a very natural and enjoyable experience in a video game.

My boss at Hourglass is also full of game design wisdom, all of which is eminently practical. He describes himself, not as a game designer, but as an entertainer. The number one realization he has given me is that the purpose of a game is to entertain, and if it achieves that purpose, then it is successful.

Making a fun game is ultimately an exercise in making a digital experience which conforms to the expectations of the player. When expectations are met, play feels natural. What I think makes a game great is to tailor an experience to player expectations, but to do so in ways that produce new expectations. What is the logical extension of an already familiar concept? Or the intersection of several concepts? These are the questions we need to ask ourselves when designing a game.

I'm sure that everyone has their own idea of how to design a game, but this is the method that I employ. It is not a very fast method, but I have always been pleased with the results. What I do is I try to imagine, in my head, what would be the gameplay experience that I want most in the whole world. The key words in this meditation are "experience" and "want most". First, I wish to design, not just a game, but an experience. If we think of the game as an experience, then we can regard the emotions that the player feels, and the thoughts that are inspired within her as consequences of the gameplay experience.

I think about this question for months at a time, slowly revising my concept, trying to gain an understanding of what would make the game concept the game I truly want it to be.

To recap: Games must be highly reactive, games must entertain, games must conform to expectations, but not perfectly. The game that you want to play is the game that will be the strongest expression of yourself. When you enjoy a game to a large degree, the things you are enjoying are the reflections of the highly desirable game idea that you don't even realize you have in mind. The way that I produce game ideas is to try to grasp that concept. It changes constantly, reflecting my evolving tastes, and so to capture it and write it down must be a constant process.

Welcome to the site everyone!

I’m Andy, one of the devs and also character designer here at Fishbeat. I thought I’d start my blog off with the catalyst for this studio: GDC. It’s been roughly a week since the Game Developer’s Conference, and thankfully I’ve been able to relax a bit and collect my thoughts. This ended up being a lot of firsts for me; my first big conference, first big award, first time staying in a city, first time really partying, etc. I’ll be sharing my experiences with the various aspects of the trip over the next few posts:

San Fransisco:
Holy cow, the food here is good. There are restaurants everywhere, and pretty much all of them are fantastic. Even the little hole-in-the-wall places are gems of deliciousness. You get free lunches at GDC but I only took advantage of that one or two days of the week; there are seriously more excellent restaurants than I had time to try. There were multiple occasions when I was eating at one place while looking at two or three others I wanted to try at some point.

The city itself is nice, although I wouldn’t want to be driving in it (that goes for most cities though). Also, the number and aggressiveness of homeless people there were a bit higher than I was used to. I live in the suburbs though, so I chalk that up to not being used to cities.

The Hotel:
The whole team stayed in a tiny little two-bed room, with shoddy internet access and basically no workspace. This was a smart choice – It ended up costing us less, and as we learned: When at GDC, you should only be in your hotel during the few precious hours you can spare for sleep.

GDC:
The convention is very well run. There are a ton of people there but things tended to move along fairly quick. Most everyone was friendly, and likely worked in the games industry so there was plenty to talk about. There was some cool swag to be had (my favorite thing was Eidos’ card holders), and tons of crazy awesome booths. There were a lot of good talks being held for developers too, but as an IGF entrant I didn’t end up seeing a whole lot of the convention- it was far more rewarding to run our own booth.

There was a heavy media presence here too. I know not everyone was thrilled about that, but as an indie developer I loved it. I hope GDC at least keeps the IGF portions of the convention open to the public, because the amount of exposure we got during the week was fantastic.

IGF:
We had a very humbling experience early on in the convention. Our team participated in a panel where we, along with many other IGF entrants, delivered post-mortems. What we discovered was that everyone shared similar development methodologies, testing techniques, and resources. Not only that, but the other teams were at least as skilled and dedicated as we were. This was when we realized the playing field was so even, the competition would basically come down to luck.

I have nothing but respect and admiration for everyone else in the competition. All the other indie developers we met were really cool, have a lot of great ideas, and I can’t wait to see what they come up with next (let alone the play the games they’re making now!)