Play This Thing

Off to GDC

costik — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 02:01:22 +0000

I'm leaving for GDC Monday evening. I'll probably be blogging from there, and I have some games in the hopper to post, but it's possible we won't get to our five for the week, for which I trust you'll forgive me.

I'll be speaking Tuesday afternoon, on a panel on pre-production at the Serious Games Summit, with Lynn Sullivan, Rebecca Stoeckle, and Sonny Kirkley. Just a short presentation from me, the title of which is "Prototype More, Suck Less," which I'll post here after I get back.

Decepticolor

costik — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 01:56:48 +0000

Decepticolor is a remarkably polished little game, for a 48-hour game jam effort. It's a puzzle game, supposedly for two players (one using WASD and the other the arrow keys), but in fact it can readily be played by a single player manipulating both, although it's sometimes hard to remember which of the squares under your control is controlled by which set of keys this way.

Each player controls a square that contains a simple pattern of 16-bit colors. Somewhere in the game are are two "target" squares. You must move your squares to the target squares in such a way that when they overlie the target squares, the pattern of colors matches.

The keys "flip" your squares -- left or right moves you one square distance and flips the pattern across the vertical axis, while up or down flips across the horizontal axis. In addition, if on player flips his square, or part of his square, atop the other player's square, the underlying square assumes the overlying pattern. Thus, on many of the higher levels, you need to figure out how to strategically flip squares atop part of each other in order to build the target pattern. (In the screenshot above, the target squares are all blue, so the two manueverable squares need to be manipulated to transform each other to an all-blue state.)

The result is quite an interesting set of spatial and logic challenges. Only twelve levels, but then that's pretty good for 48 hours.

Semblante

costik — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 20:41:03 +0000

Semblante is a Global Game Jam entry from a team at the Catholic University of Paraná. As is typical with GGJ games, it's more of a prototype than a complete experience; just a single level.

What's notable about it is the atmospherics; darkness, an eerie soundscape, shadow enemies gliding in the depths. Periodically, there are overhead lights, and when you pass through the light, you glow for a time and can defeat enemies until the glow fades. Jumping atop them helps you not at all. Consequently, navigating the level is a combination of platforming and using the strategically placed lights to advantage.

Also, you can scream with the X key, but I don't believe this has a game effect.

Ostensibly, your character is named Jung, and you are exploring the recesses of your own mind.

You can see how a fuller treatment might be emotionally effective -- and certainly, the complexities of the human mind and its fears is a motif that lends itself to introducing additional gameplay elements over time.

S.H.M.U.P.

costik — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 01:41:55 +0000

Despite the generic name, S.H.M.U.P. is not a generic shmup. A finalist at the Chinese IGF, it is indeed a horizontally-scrolling shmup, but with some unusual characteristics.

Killing enemies gives you points you can use to upgrade, a common trope, but upgrades persist the next time you play under the same username, even if you've died. Indeed, it's designed so that you will almost certainly lose the first time you play, but that over time (a few hours of gameplay, at any rate) you will build up enough to be able to persist and triumph even through the higher, and more difficult, levels.

Control is entirely with the mouse; your cluster of ships follow the mouse pointer around. Right-click launches missiles, of which you have a limited supply. There's a boss at the end of each level, but these are not all that impressive.

Behind you are a cluster of squares that you can think of as akin either to the cities of Space Invaders or the points you must protect in a tower-defense game. Ships you fail to kill as they scroll by reduce them, and you can lose either by losing them all or losing all your ships.

However, at higher levels, enemies self-organize into impressive opposing formations -- sometimes taking advantage of combined arms, with defensive ships protecting high-fire but more vulnerable ones, sometimes organizing into megaships, in the fashion of amoebas forming into the cells of a multicellular monstrosity.

Gameplay is not, however, particularly challenging from a traditional shmup perspective; at worst, you simply die a lot, build up points to buy upgrades, and eventually triumph even with a fairly minimal twitch-action skill set. There would seem to be a bit of a casual game influence in this.

High scores can be posted to your Twitter feed, something I haven't seen before.

In general, it is neither the most visually beautiful shmup, in a genre known for its weird psychedelic beauty, nor the most challenging game of its type, but there are some interesting design ideas here.

The Indie Fund - Money For Indies

the99th — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 22:52:27 +0000

In a nomenclature reminiscent of George Costanza´s fake charity, "The Human Fund (Money For People)", comes something genuinely good and authentic, the Indie Fund. The creators of some of the most commercially successful, independent games to rake in six-digit unit sales and six-to-seven-digit revenues on console-downloadable platforms (with PC sales often making up a large minority) have banded together and pooled funding in an ostensibly for-profit venture capital fund for independent games. Like a traditional publisher, they will give people cash to spend while developing games, and will benefit from a share of the net revenues on said games, but unlike a publisher they´ll refrain from owning the resulting intellectual property and from holding veto power over creative decisions.

There are probably more details to it and I should look forward to the GDC talk that Carmel is giving. This is something I´ve wanted to do since the start but, you know, didn´t have the cash-o-la.

I do want to note that the successes of all the individuals boarding this fund comes from for-sale games which have a distinct design M.O. than free to play games, and some expertise in the latter may be useful. (On second look I´m reminded that the CEO of Flashbang Studios is involved, so the balance in the force may be there after all). I´m interested to see what kind of standardized submission process they provide, because I can tell you the deluge of "here´s my great idea!" emails you get when publicly stating that you want to invest in game projects can be quite formidable.

Towlr

costik — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 01:44:43 +0000

Towlr is a puzzle. Towlr is an art movement. Towlr is an aesthetic with its own manifesto. Sort of. Towlr is frustrating. In Towlr, the cake is not a lie.

Towlr has a + sign in the screen. It has no meaning.

Towlr provides no rules, no tutorial, not even a minimalist statement of goals. You must deduce the goal.

Towlr tells you when you have failed, in a most annoying fashion.

Towlr displays only simple, geometric shapes such as you might see in an Atari 2600 game.

Towlr rewards success with cake.

In Towlr, the appropriate response when you succeed is "Doh!".

Towlr looks simple; but actually, there is a highly refined sensibility at work here, one that could only and can only derive from games. It's a sort of minimalism that rejects almost everything we know, or believe we know, about games. There is no hand-holding, no increment in skill, only a puzzle, with no hints and no support. The purpose of Towlr is to figure out how to play, and once you have, you are done.

And just as stark as its gameplay are its visuals and soundscape.

The first Towlr was created by PoV for a Ludum Dare competition, but a bunch have been created since. They are all available at the Towlr site. Some are web-playable, others are downloads, and the downloads vary in what platforms they support. But you should check them out, if only to experience a remarkably different aesthetic of the game.

Sixteen Thirty Something (v. 2)

costik — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 02:00:48 +0000

Sixteen Thirty Something is a design by Martin Wallace (who also designed Steam) dating to 1995. This version is a redesign by Danny Stevens, and has been released as a free "print and play" game with Wallace's permission.

Although the game has something of the color of the period, it is not, as you might expect, a Thirty Years' War game. Instead, it's a strategy game in which players, theoretically representing large merchant houses, have influence in the various countries which they use to attempt to earn victory points. Wars occur, but are highly abstracted.

At the start of the game, each player receives a number of secret "victory point markers" printed with the names of different countries. At the end of each turn, a player earns victory points for each of these countries, if he has influence there, with the point award being the smaller of the country's current "status" (a measure of prestige and power) and the player's influence in the country. There are multiple markers for each country, so that, say, two players could both be earning for Denmark, or one player earning doubly there. Players calculate their own VP totals, with only the totals revealed each turn, so it may be possible to infer, as the game goes on, what powers each player has VP with, but it is never overtly revealed, at least until game end. This, coupled with card hands, is the main source of uncertainty in the game.

"Influence" is in the form of cards, which players place in front of themselves, with a set of rules governing when new cards can be played, drawn, and so on. The main player conflict is in the form of "lobbying the crown," whereby a player attempts to get a nation to initiate a war with another nation; players vote their influence, with players able to play new influence cards in the process. The victor of a war gains status (and thereby may confer more victory points to players with that country's marker), and the loser loses military power.

The original version of the game had two main flaws; first, random allocation of cards and VP markers made it perhaps too luck-dependent, and second, there's an obvious positive feedback loop in terms of power status that tends to mean that, by midgame, some players are clearly in the lead and others pretty much out of the game, which is not a desirable effect.

Stevens's version redresses the problems and produces a considerably tighter can, at the cost of some additional complexity. Hand limits tighten over time, which makes for tenser play, and a system whereby a player's influence can be in decline (and the player unable to increase it) is added; this provides a negative feedback loop that redresses the positive one. In addition, a system is added to reallocate some cards among players each turn, which helps with the randomness issues.

On the whole, it's quite a good game with some novel mechanics, and worth the effort to assemble a copy to play. Stevens's version is, unfortunately, not particularly attractive from a graphic design perspective, though a fan contributed alternative game board helps. (It's designed for v1, though -- you'll still need the tracks from Stevens's game board).

Pay with FaceBook and Why Pigs Fly

costik — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 17:54:48 +0000

Will social games go the same way as the casual downloadable market?

Some of the characteristics of the social game market are very similar to those of casual games. There is little marketing and promotion in either market, because social games rely on the viral nature of social networks to spread the word; cloning is already a problem. The audience demographics are similar. Both are typically played in short sessions.

The major difference (so far?) is that there's no equivalent of the portal in the value chain. Social game operators retain a full 100% of the revenues they generate (less a few percentage points for using Paypal or a credit card gateway) -- by contrast to the mere 20% that casual downloadable game companies get from the portals. Coupled with minimal marketing costs, this is a sweet, sweet deal, and it's no surprise the market has engendered such enthusiasm.

FaceBook Needs Revenue

The 100 pound gorilla in the room that no one talks about, however, is whether (or more likely, when and how) the social networks themselves will demand a piece of the action. Mostly, Facebook, MySpace and the others appear to be happy, so far, to have third parties provide services to their users that increase the value of the service to those users -- social games attract and retain users for the network as a whole.

Yet all of the mass-audience social networks have huge valuations that their current level of revenues do not remotely justify. For example, the valuation of FaceBook is currently just under $10 billion. If you accept a p/e (price/earnings) ratio of 20 as typical for a company in the long turn, this implies that FaceBook is expected eventually to earn annualized profits of around $500m. Last year, FaceBook had total revenues of about $400m, of which $150m was from a probably unrepeatable ad deal with Microsoft. FaceBook claims to have reached profitability in 2009, but presumably just barely -- in other words, profits were unquestionably a small fraction of that $400m.

Meanwhile, the major social game providers are all profitable, apparently at a high level, and themselves supporting valuations in the hundreds of millions.

In other words, if FaceBook is to be sustainable at anything like its current valuation, it needs to ramp up revenues quickly -- and the obvious source to tap is all that game revenue.

Enter "Pay with FaceBook"

As it happens, FaceBook has been clear about where it expects its next big addition to revenues to come from; it's from Pay with FaceBook. Pay with FaceBook is a payments system, whereby users buy FaceBook Credits and can then spend them on any service on FaceBook that integrates with the system. Interestingly, there seems to be some confusion, among analysts at least, as to whether this is expected to ultimately be a PayPal killer, or merely a FaceBook-specific virtual currency -- and in truth, the system could go either way. But it's notable that one of the options for purchasing FaceBook Credits is -- tada, PayPal. If FaceBook were planning on competing head-to-head with PayPal, they presumably wouldn't be doing this.

FaceBook executives have gone so far as to say that they expect Pay with FaceBook to double the company's revenues over the course of the coming year, and this is not, in fact, impossible.

But what does it mean for social game providers? Well, of course it means that they can now offer another payments system to their customers, one that a high proportion of their customers, being FaceBook users by nature, are likely to adopt. And another payments system, especially a widespread and easy to use one, will by nature increase revenues.

BUT: Pay with FaceBook charges 30% of revenues to sellers of virtual goods -- and virtual goods are what social games sell.

Payments System or Retailer's Cut?

Now, you can view this in either of two ways: If you view Pay with FaceBook as a payments system, this is extortionate. PayPal and every credit card gateway charges a single-digit percentage for handling transactions, almost always under 5%, typically with an additional per-transaction charge of 25 cents or less. In other words, viewed as a payments sytem, Pay with FaceBook is the single most expensive system available anywhere on the planet (with the sole exception of mobile payments, which are even more onerous, and which is why mobile payments have not taken off).

Viewed as a cost for accessing a distribution channel, however, 30% is pretty reasonable. It's what XBLA, WiiWare, and the iPhone app store take. It's a far better deal than the casual downloadable market offers, where portals and intermediaries like Oberon/i-Play want 80% of the consumer dollar -- and a far, far better deal than developers get in the conventional digital game market, where they typically receive a skinflint 15% of wholesale revenues, entirely recoupable against development advances.

And it is, at the moment, only one, optional, additional payments system; social games can still take credit cards and use PayPal and so on, and aren't even required to integrate with Pay with FaceBook.

And how long will that last?

The Network Owns You

Social network games live and die by the social network. The virality of those networks, the ability to grow big audiences quickly, is the single vital reason social network games are successful -- it's surely not the excellence and intensity of their gameplay. If you are a social network game provider, of course you will integrate with FaceBook credits; the last thing you want to do is piss off FaceBook. If they want you to adopt Pay with FaceBook, of course you do so. Because game developers are not fools, and they know that if FaceBook wants to, it can utterly cripple them. FaceBook is under no obligation to allow third parties access to their network.

In other words, social network games are ultimately in precisely the same position, vis-a-vis the social networks, as casual downloadables are relative to the portals. The social networks are in the whip hand. They are the main providers of value. The social network game providers are like intestinal bacteria; they may help their host, but their survival is entirely at the host's whim.

The Precedent

An important precedent is being set here. FaceBook is dialing itself in for a piece of the social gaming pie. It's a small piece, at present. As social network game revenues continue to soar -- and, as usual, the analysts are predicting beellions and beellions of dollars any day now -- why should FaceBook (and the others) not take a bigger chunk. Why shouldn't the "Pay with FaceBook" option become mandatory? Why shouldn't that 30% become 40%? 50%? Even 80%?

We've seen this before, in the casual downloadable market; initially, the portals took a mere 50% of the consumer dollar. But they realized who was in the driver's seat, and that 50% grew and grew, and the result is the steaming pile of poo that is the casual downloadable market today.

Now, possibly FaceBook and the others will look at the lessons of the casual downloadable market, and realize that to sustain social games they need to sustain a viable business ecosystem, in which developers can continue to profit and in which incentives for innovation are maintained. Possibly, they will say, "Yes, we could grab 80% of all that tasty revenue, but it's a bad move, long term." Possibly, the social networks are corporately wise, morally upright, good and kind. Possibly they'll say "never mind the valuation we need to support, we must do The Right Thing."

Also possibly, pigs will fly.

Genetic engineers are working on the problem today. Honest.

Restraining Order

costik — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 01:29:57 +0000

Sidescroller. You are a repulsive drooling green guy, chasing a woman. Cops chase you; space-bar to kill 'em, up-arrow to jump. If they get you, there's a brief interlude telling you you're restrained and jailed for one year, then back to the pursuit.

When you "get" the girl, you're on to the next level. Tougher cops. The woman's baby is now a girl. Difficulty ramps up by level, you're still obsessively chasing the couple. Songs about love and incest. A definite story (with, apparently, multiple endings, although I only played to one). Weird sound effects, difficulty getting to the bullet-hell level (though this is no shmup). Disturbing. Smoothly executed. Hard to play (though the designer claims there's dynamic difficulty adjustment).

This is actually, in its own odd way, quite a polished game. Quite funny, with an uneasy edge to it, like -- wait, that's not actually funny.

Worth a play, yes.

Game Cloning

costik — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 18:44:05 +0000

One of the banes of the casual game and social game markets is cloning; that is, whenever a successful game appears, developers quickly produce games with essentially identical gameplay patterns. Surprisingly, there is far less of a first-mover advantage for the innovator than you might expect, particularly for small game providers cloned by larger and established companies, who can leverage their existing customer relations to grab share of the new game style.

Cloning, of course, means that a gameplay innovator profits far less than he or she might otherwise by launching an original game; and thus diminution of the value of innovation reinforces all game markets' tendency to become repetitive and boring over time.

The prevalence of cloning in social and casual games is particularly interesting, because cloning was also problem in the 19th century tabletop game market -- but is not a particular problem in the conventional videogame market, the mass-market tabletop market today, the hobby games market, or the mobile games market.

What's the reason for this difference?

It is, ultimately, a consequence of the nature of marketing in the different industries. In the casual game market, publishers and developers spend virtually nothing on marketing and promotion, and simply rely on the firehose of traffic that the portals supply. Similarly, in the social game market, very little is spent on marketing and promotion, with developers relying on the virality of social network user communications to attract players. And also similarly, in the 19th century, advertising and promotion was in its infancy, and publishers relied mostly on establishing as many points of sale as possible and hoping that word of mouth would generate sales.

By contrast, the conventional videogame market spends hugely on marketing and promotion; the mss market game market depends on "old faithful" brands and also spends in the millions promoting newly launched games; mobile games also depends on "old faithful" brands like Tetris, and on games that piggyback on the marketing spend for properties licensed from other media; and the hobby games market depends partly on franchises (the tendency of RPG and TCG players to purchase more product for games they like) and partly on author recognition (boardgamers follow designers whose work they like).

In other words, in markets where cloning does not happen, or rarely happens, it is because an innovator can, through marketing, promotion, and establishing a brand synonymous with a style of gameplay, gain a major first-mover advantage. In markets where cloning does happen, marketing and promotion, and the consequence ability to build brand identity, is weak.

Of course, this "weakness" is also in a sense an advantage; in these markets, game providers' profitability is unquestionably enhanced by the fact that they do not have to spend substantially on marketing and promotion. But the downside is that it is hard to establish brand value, which weakens game providers in negotiations with other members of the value chain, and also makes it harder for them to erect barriers to competition and build sustainable and protectible businesses.

Thus, the reliance of the casual downloadable market on portal distribution has proven to be something of a Faustian bargain; it allowed the market to grow rapidly, but it left the portals in effective control of the market, which they used to squeeze the publishers' and developers' margins, and left publishers and developers with little in the way of a sustainable competitive advantage.

Will social games go the same way? I'll post on that another day.