Thank You For Playing

I have decided to discuss common game play mechanics found throughout games. For the most part, I will be speaking in generalities. I will also be discussing commercial as well as Indie games. The purpose of this post is to discuss familiar gameplay mechanics that most games share and to perhaps avoid some of these cliche mistakes in the future.

This most may sound like a bit of a rant, but it stems from a series of recurring themes and gameplay devices that I have noticed in my years of gaming. These things apply to most not all games.

• Collecting Stuff
• Difficulty
• Points
• Boss Fights
• Save Points
• Unlocking Characters in fighting games
• Ninjas, Pirates, Robots, Zombies

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Often the charm of an indie game comes from its simplicity. Not having access to huge teams, and running with the occasional necessity of tapering your vision to your abilities can accent the unique gameplay and style of an indie game. An artist is often the most creative when he is forced to act within strict limits. This is one of the things I love about indie games. I assume it is a fun challenge for our favorite indie developers to try and find ways to use their limited resources to transcend audience expectations.

Unfortunately, too often games fall short due to what I expect is an opposing attitude:  the game doesn’t have to look good or work perfectly, after all it’s just an indie game. Lazy developers sometimes think their audience won’t be bothered by minor flaws because the game was free. But overlooking these things makes a huge difference to gamers like me. Many simple games could’ve been a lot better by (believe it or not) making them even simpler.

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Besides completing the professed function of this post, I’d like to discuss a few things here that I’ve noticed about the video game blog circle. First of all it’s a circle. Well, more of a ball of yarn, but if you have a really big ball of very fine yarn and you observe a cross-section of the ball then it will appear to look very much like a circle. The name isn’t so important though, what I actually mean to observe is that they really like to link to each other and chat it up in the comment sections.

How do we get in on this action? We’ve got street cred. We were Chalktoid. Does one of us have to marry one of your daughters or something? Is there some initiation ritual? Will there be hazing? I’m not sure if I’m comfortable getting paddled in front of the other bloggers.

Or (and this brings me to my next point) do I link to all of your blogs so that you notice ours in the list of sites that link to you then, when you arrive, have quality content of our own worth discussing? Diabolical!

My second observation is that bloggers rarely post wordy responses to the other articles to which they are linking. I guess that’s what the comment section is for, but I dunno, I like the whole hegemonic “I have a URL, hear me roar” approach to discussion. It reminds me of academic discourse. I call the comments “peer review.” I also call my townhouse “Oxford” and wear tweed jackets as I sit around.

Wandering musings aside, I have a few pieces to discuss at great length. Sharp observers will note that all but one of these articles was linked by Level Up within the past two days. This is what prompted my “ball of yarn” diatribe, you see, because I actually found them independently while snaking around the community. It’s a small ball after all.

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Bruno will be writing the formal review, but I could not help myself. The following will be my opinions. (Contains Spoilers)

Super Smash Brothers Brawl is mostly just that. It is difficult to imagine any serious battles of extreme skill taking place in these exuberantly shiny stages with their bullshit level designs. Honestly, I think one of the developers enlisted his 5 year-old child to assist in the structuring. Items aside, which are dumb enough on their own to cause immense aggravation, the scrolling levels keep me too occupied with not getting swallowed up to focus on button mashing.

Single player mode is the most aggravating of all. The adventure mode consists of fighting randomly shaped creatures while running through a maze of irritating obstacles. The mode is incredibly large; only completed 30% of it after a few hours. The adventure mode can be done with a partner, but with the camera fixed on player 1, efficient cooperation is difficult.

Back to the bull, I cannot even remember how many times my character lost a life due to completely absurd additions to levels. In one level I was eaten by a dragon that appeared out of nowhere on the map. That’s right, a dragon. I was like, “What the hell, I just got eaten by a dragon.” On other stages I was forced to die because of super fast screen scrolling that caught me unawares and inexperienced in the layout.

—Final Destination, the only stage we will ever need, or so we thought, seems less good in this version than before. Perhaps smaller was Bruno’s comment—perhaps indeed. It’s also uglier, in my opinion.

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Before you begin designing a game, there is something you must decide. Do you want the game to be enjoyable (I want to avoid the word “Fun” for controversial reasons, but that is more or less what I mean) to the player? Or would you rather the joy emerge with the satisfaction of beating the game? –It is most likely possible for the two cases to exist together, but for my purposes lets suppose they can’t. Let us also suppose you want to make the enjoyable game.

While the latter is often challenging and tedious, depending significantly on the players ability to perform in a precise manner at a precise time, ie. jumping tasks, an enjoyable game is one that can be played by a relatively unskilled player. An easy game on its own will not be enjoyable though; it will take a bit of personality to keep it entertaining.

Character

A humorous or exciting character is a great way to add flavor to an otherwise mediocre adventure. All one really needs is a well thought out personality and an interesting back-story to support it. Anyone who has played Star Ocean: Till the End of Time will surely remember the magnificent Cliff Fitter. His indiscriminate tough guy comments never cease to amuse the player. A combination of humor and badass, two qualities which on their own are remarkable enough, but Cliff makes the pair work amazingly well.

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This may seem that it is aimed at the complete opposite end of the spectrum: those who are expert enough developers to write their own guides to coding. And it is. I wish I could come up with an exhaustive list of great ways to recognize a good tutorial, but I recently took on a pretty weighty endeavor and the very lack of good resources is what triggered my desire to express myself.

The weighty endeavor I speak of? I decided a couple days ago to try and learn as much of the C++ language as I could from online tutorials. I haven’t given up completely, but it seems that I’ll need a face-to-face tutor to help me put it all together. I’ll allow that coding isn’t easy, and that having a teacher (or friend in my case) is perhaps paramount in being able to learn a language in any effective manner. However, the sort of problems I ran into with online tutorials were so inexcusable and so rampant that I can hardly imagine how the writers could conceive of passing their material off to beginners. Most of these tutorials claimed they would be very useful to those with no coding experience at all. Hogwash.

I did learn a little C++ in the process, and with that I am able to go back and criticize some errors in these guides. And where I became unable to continue, my criticism is simply that. Here is my list of awful mistakes in C++ “beginner” tutorials:

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All music links in this post, unless otherwise noted, link to VGMusic.com, a large database of midis for classic games.

I have a very simple theory: that the success of most, if not every, popular 8-bit game was heavily dependent on the quality of its music. That is to say, dependent almost exclusively on the music. Mediocre games became great and good ones became legendary. I will support this theory, but also apply it to the development of independent games today.

I won’t drag this out with too many details, since my original theory isn’t so much the point as its application to the current indie industry (dare I say… indiestry?). Instead, I’ll appeal to your own personal experiences and ask you to participate in a small experiment. Play any of the following games with the sound off, then simply crank it up. Be amazed as the entertainment value increases a hundredfold.

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