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I want to talk about a topic that I think would be a great benefit to game design. This topic would be the concept of "Essence."

Before I define Essence, I'd like to propose a thought experiment. What are you sitting on right now? A chair maybe? Let's assume that this chair has 4 legs, a seat, and a back. It's guaranteed to be a chair, no questions asked. Now let's assume you're sitting on a couch. What is your couch made up of? Well it's got 4 legs usually, maybe 6 if you need support in the middle, or maybe 8. It's got a frame to support cushions; all couches have that. And then it has 2 or 3 cushions to sit on with possibly a matching number of cushions on the back to lean on. Now if we define a chair as something with 4 legs, a back, and a seat, then what do we define a couch as? It can have a varying number of cushions, legs, and places to sit, but we know a couch when we see one, right? So how can we definitively say that something is a couch? What if the couch has 4 legs and only seats one person. Is it now a chair? This concept of properties is one which philosophy calls "Essence". Properties essential to make an object what it is are the essence of that object, and properties that are non-essential are referred to as "Accident" properties.

So how does Essence relate to game design? Well, let's talk about a game; any game really. Let's say we have a game; Generic FPS 101. In this game, you shoot aliens and conquer worlds in the name of humanity. Pretty typical right? The game has a first person view, and a wide assortment of space guns to choose from. The point-of-view, alien-shooting, and world conquering are pretty essential to the game's identity. But what if Generic FPS 101 wasn't actually in first person view but was instead in third person view? What the game is, is entirely different from what the game should be. It no longer has the essence of being Generic FPS 101, and now has the essence of being Generic TPS 101.

This however, is an extreme change from the advertising. Normally, most games won't stray from what they advertise. An FPS will be an FPS, a fighting game will be a fighting game, a racer will be a racer etc. This problem comes into play more so in finite game mechanics rather than broad overarching mechanics. What if, in Generic FPS 101, your wide assortment of space guns gets narrowed down to only 1 or 2? What then? The game is obviously still the same game, it just seems to be missing something. One of these mechanics, which may be integral to making a game fun, might be unnecessary to make the game what it is.

Now if we switch the focus to fighting games, let's take a common character from Super Smash Bros., Link. He has a sword, bombs, arrows, and a boomerang. He's slow and heavily revolves around forcing your opponent to run into your giant sword swings. What of this is the essence of his design?

Since the first Super Smash Bros., that has been his design. He has a low potential for combos and a strong emphasis on zoning. When taking into account that he is slow, tanky, and his projectiles are strong, you can assume that any weaknesses he does have (a lot), can be attributed to his other attributes. So what attributes are his weaknesses?

Well, he has a large amount of ending and starting lag on nearly all of his moves. If he misses with an attack, there's a large window to punish him. To give an example, missing with Link's grab (the hookshot) can get him Warlock punched.

Now the real question is why am I talking about this? The reason is simple; every character has traits that are defined by it’s essence, giving it strengths and weaknesses. When nerfing and buffing these traits, you can lose a character's identity by removing weaknesses and adding strengths.

If Link suddenly became capable of moving fast, he loses his identity as a tank. If he is able to throw out low lag moves, he loses his identity as an imprecise zoning character and is now capable of pressuring his opponents with large, low lag moves. If he is capable of long combos, he is no longer the same zoning character he should be and is now capable of absurd damage output with little weakness.

So not to beat around the bush here; this article is partially inspired by the Smash mod, Project M. It’s a game that’s been designed and developed by Smash players. The unfortunate problem here is that the players of the game give odd mechanics to incorrect characters. There are many examples of flawed design in Project M, but I’m going to go through a couple of them.

In Project M:

Zelda’s Up B (Farore’s Wind) is completely lagless at the end making her capable of absurd movement. She is not a character that should be moving a lot. Her kit and Melee/Brawl playstyle is about forcing players into her strong attacks. The low lag move creates a play style that is centralized on movement rather than on precise space control.

Ganondorf has a low lag command grab. Ganondorf’s side special, a command grab, centralizes his gameplay around it. It allows him to tech chase, move quickly, and combo. Ganondorf is all about big powerful hitboxes. He kills you in 4 hits. That’s his style. The command grab is actually good for the kit, but quick combos are not. The command grab focuses his game on getting long tech chases rather than quick, huge damage.

Ike is a character similar to Ganondorf. In Brawl, he has big sweeping hitboxes that KO early with little combo potential. Ike in Project M has the capability to jump out of his side special. This means he can dash across the stage quickly and allows him combos on hits that shouldn’t necessarily connect to anything. Giving him speed and long-ish combos make him less focused around spacing his giant sword and more focused on watching when the opponent enters his dash range.

Most of the problems I emphasized are giving attributes to characters that shouldn’t have them. Oftentimes, it’s speed to a slow character, combos to high damage characters, or low lag to a high priority character.

This is a big problem with Project M; the idea of removing a character’s weaknesses to compensate for their strengths not being strong enough. What doesn’t seem to happen is the consideration for counterplay. A character’s strengths and weaknesses make up its identity. This identity creates desirable play and counterplay styles which encourages a healthy metagame to develop.

I’m going to switch to another game, League of Legends. Riot Games, whether you like them or not, is incredibly good at identifying the essence of a Champion(character) and nerfing their accidental strengths and buffing their essential weaknesses.

I can find countless articles from League of Legends designers talking about the core identity of a champion. “Core Identity” is simply another term for “Essence.” Whenever Riot changes a champion’s stats, they either try to buff the identity or nerf unnecessary strength.

Here are some examples:

Hecarim, the centaur/horse themed champion, who is based around running fast, has been fairly underwhelming recently. He was given a buff to his damage when he builds bonus movement speed.

Master Yi is a samurai-esque, speedy, high damage, sword swinging assassin. However, the common build on him was stacking up Ability Power, making him do more magic damage and be a sustaining mage. This is fairly un-swordsman-like, so he received a large change where it removed his capability to build up his magic damage, but also buffed up his sword swinging capabilities, and his assassin capabilities, so he could hit stuff with physical damage and run around nuking people.

These are just a few examples of good gameplay identites versus a few misplaced identities in Project M.

Removing weaknesses removes counterplay to that character. This makes a character largely unfun to play against and enforces a character as not having a solid identity, but just being good at everything. However, the main point to think about is when a character's weaknesses are large, the character needs large bonuses to compensate.

Simply put, in order to create a satisfying character, a designer needs to consider what traits are essential to them and design around them, making sure not to allow that character to stray too far into the accident.

Path constraint is good. Invisible walls suck.

I want to talk about a topic that I think would be a great benefit to game design. This topic would be the concept of "Essence."

Before I define Essence, I'd like to propose a thought experiment. What are you sitting on right now? A chair maybe? Let's assume that this chair has 4 legs, a seat, and a back. It's guaranteed to be a chair, no questions asked. Now let's assume you're sitting on a couch. What is your couch made up of? Well it's got 4 legs usually, maybe 6 if you need support in the middle, or maybe 8. It's got a frame to support cushions; all couches have that. And then it has 2 or 3 cushions to sit on with possibly a matching number of cushions on the back to lean on. Now if we define a chair as something with 4 legs, a back, and a seat, then what do we define a couch as? It can have a varying number of cushions, legs, and places to sit, but we know a couch when we see one, right? So how can we definitively say that something is a couch? What if the couch has 4 legs and only seats one person. Is it now a chair? This concept of properties is one which philosophy calls "Essence". Properties essential to make an object what it is are the essence of that object, and properties that are non-essential are referred to as "Accident" properties.

So how does Essence relate to game design? Well, to let's talk about a game; any game really. Let's say we have a game; Generic FPS 101. In this game, you shoot aliens and conquer worlds in the name of humanity. Pretty typical right? The game has a first person view, and a wide assortment of space guns to choose from. The point-of-view, alien-shooting, and world conquering are pretty essential to the game's identity. But what if Generic FPS 101 wasn't actually in first person view but was instead in third person view? What the game is, is entirely different from what the game should be. It no longer has the essence of being Generic FPS 101, and now has the essence of being Generic TPS 101.

This however, is an extreme change from the advertising. Normally, most games won't stray from what they advertise. An FPS will be an FPS, a fighting game will be a fighting game, a racer will be a racer etc. This problem comes into play more so in more finite game mechanics rather than broad overarching mechanics. What if, in Generic FPS 101, your wide assortment of space guns gets narrowed down to only 1 or 2? What then? The game is obviously still the same game, it just seems to be missing something. One of these mechanics, which may be integral to making a game fun, might be unnecessary to make the game what it is.

Now if we switch the focus to fighting games, let's take a common character from Super Smash Bros., Link. He has a sword, bombs, arrows, and a boomerang. He's slow and heavily revolves around forcing your opponent to run into your giant sword swings. What of this is the essence of his design?

Since the first Super Smash Bros., that has been his design. He has a low potential for combos and a strong emphasis on zoning. When taking into account that he is slow, tanky, and his projectiles are strong, you can assume that any weaknesses he does have (a lot), can be attributed to his other attributes. So what attributes are his weaknesses?

Well, he has a large amount of ending and starting lag on nearly all of his moves. If he misses with an attack, there's a large window to punish him. To give an example, missing with Link's grab (the hookshot) can get him Warlock punched.

Now the real question is why am I talking about this? The reason is simple; every character has traits that give it strengths and weaknesses. When nerfing and buffing these traits, you can lose a character's identity by removing weaknesses and adding strengths.

If Link suddenly became capable of moving fast, he loses his identity as a tank. If he is able to throw out low lag moves, he loses his identity as an imprecise zoning character and is now capable of pressuring his opponents with large, low lag moves. If he is capable of long combos, he is no longer the same zoning character he should be and is now capable of absurd damage output with little weakness.

Removing weakness removes counterplay to a character. When a character's weaknesses are large, the character needs large bonuses to compensate.

I was thinking recently about how certain games are astoundingly good at keeping a player immersed and some are terrible at it. Even some triple A titles designed with immersion in mind invest highly in graphics but are surprisingly non-immersive.

It took me a little while to think about, but I theorized something that I'd like to share: a pseudo-real or surreal art style in a game can evoke feelings of wonder in a player. The player naturally wants to explore the world to see what crazy stuff is waiting to be found.

Let me preface my thought by saying this: by no means are realistic games bad, nor should there never be realistic games, but game developers need to understand that better graphics does not always create a more immersive environment.

Now that I've said that, back to the original point: games don't need good graphics to be fun; they need consistent, stylized graphics. Back in the days of the N64 as a developer, you pushed your graphical power to the max trying to display as much as you could. You used your polygon budget on trying to display the most important things in the most detail. Now, we've got more graphical and processing power than we know what to do with and we try to utilize as much of it as we can. Now there's nothing wrong with that approach, but that fact is that a lot of high budget games with complex graphical structures can't evoke the same kind of player response that could be created with the opening cutscene in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

Let's look at that cutscene for a moment. It's all in-game graphics (the N64 couldn't run actual movies), so the moment you get into the game you already feel connected to the world and you feel like everything you saw in the scene was obtainable through exploration. Running cutscenes in graphics that aren't normal for the game breaks immersion more than you'd think. It's like if you played through Ocarina of Time and suddenly a Skyward Sword cutscene appeared. You'd think that's a little weird, wouldn't you? Or what if you played through Halo: Combat Evolved and a Halo 4 scene played. If the graphics in the cutscene are better or worse than those in the game, we lose immersion and we jump back to reality instead of being fully immersed.

A good example of this is Halo Wars. That game had some highly polished gameplay coupled with graphics good enough to make the RTS feel and play well. But what was really well done in the game were the cutscenes. These highly polished movies were nowhere close to in-game graphics. They were fairly high quality CGI movies, were incredibly good at telling the story, but failed to convey the feel of the game and the world you were exploring. The world being explored in the cutscene and the one you end up exploring are completely different even if there are similar goals in mind in both.

Compare Halo Wars to another title by the same studio, Age of Mythology. Both games, by the now defunct Ensemble Studios are RTS games which rely on following the hero around their respective worlds in an attempt to achieve their goals. Now while Halo Wars had full CGI movies coupled with it's normal graphics, Age of Mythology had normal in-game graphics used as cutscenes. In fact, you could even create your own scenes in the Map Editor. This actually makes the hero of that game, Arkantos, significantly more memorable and relatable than the high quality hero of Halo Wars, John Forge.

For reference, Arkantos looks like this:



and John Forge looks like this:



While Age of Mythology gameplay looks like this:



and Halo Wars gameplay looks like this:

Between the two games, the graphics are obviously superior in Halo Wars, as it is about 7 years ahead of the other. But looking at the screenshot of Age of Mythology, since I've shown a picture of Arkantos, you'd probably be able to pick out which one is him in the gameplay. But compare that to John Forge with in cutscenes, if that little icon over John Forge didn't exist, you would have no idea who he was. That's a problem. Arkantos looks exactly the same no matter how you look at him. John Forge, depending on if it's cutscene or in-game graphics, looks completely different. This inability to convey information properly causes the player to break immersion and lose focus on the game itself. The player, instead of thinking, "Where's Arkantos?" thinks, "Where's John Forge's icon?" and you look for that instead of actually seeking out John Forge.

I think something that really stuck with me between those two games is the desire to keep playing. When I was done with Halo Wars' campaign, I really didn't want to play much more of the game. But when I was done playing Age of Mythology's campaign, I kept playing the game for several years. And it wasn't really the gameplay that hurt either of them. The games both had polished RTS gameplay to them. Ensemble Studios was quite adept at creating that experience. The true problem with Halo Wars is that no solid connection between the player and the game gets truly established because the graphics aren't consistent.

This idea of stylization is by no means new, but it is worth noting to any game developer who really wants to focus a game on exploration. Exploration isn't always about making a bigger more realistic world. It's really about instilling the desire to explore by making the world different from the world we see on an everyday basis. In order to do that, we must lose the idea that better graphics make a better experience. More polygons doesn't always mean more immersion. Enhanced graphics should no longer be used as a crutch to substitute enhanced gameplay.

I'll finish this post by recommending a game. You may not have heard of it, but it's on Steam and is packaged with Mist. It's called Spelunx and the Caves of Mr. Seudo. This game is an old point and click adventure from the early 90's, which takes about 15 minutes in total to complete. The point of playing it is to understand how the strange graphics and odd sounds add the sensation of exploring.

I just finished playing through Injustice: Gods Among Us and spent a significant amount of time practicing the controls. I wanted to collect my thoughts on traditional fighting game control schemes and how they are implemented.

So what do I mean by "Traditional Fighting Game Control Scheme?" I mean the mapping of simple moves to complex button strings. As a competitive gamer for most of my life, I feel justified in saying this: complex controls suck. I beat the campaign not knowing how most of the moves were performed, which is probably how most players beat it. True fighting game players will undoubtedly have figured it out pretty quickly, but for me, a gamer who has logged countless hours in many tournament quality games, I found it incredibly difficult to figure out why moves were happening.

I've played tournament level Super Smash Bros. Melee for about 4 years now. I know about complex button inputs. Inputting a move requires absolute precision. Some techniques require absurd technical prowess that very few players can actually perform, let alone use proficiently. So why am I unhappy with the technicality in executing moves in a traditional fighting game? The answer to this I find to be this:

Players like pressing lots of buttons when button pressing is intuitive.

Well let me start by saying that part of the beauty of many games is their ability to integrate complex systems into simple button presses. Over time we've refined our controls to match gameplay in the most intuitive ways possible. When Super Smash Bros. was first released, a whole new way to control fighting games emerged. These intuitive controls removed a huge technical barrier from the fight and allowed for a wave of players, including myself, to play against each other and feel a much higher degree of control and satisfaction with their actions.

That's really what games should focus on right? How many good games don't have tight, well polished controls? Now obviously a superb control scheme without similar gameplay is worthless. We must consider that good gameplay with bad controls can make a good game bad, or at least less good. On the contrary, good gameplay with good controls leads to a great experience.

Here's a perfect example of what I'm talking about: Goldeneye 007 for the Nintendo 64. That game was amazing. The number of hours I sunk into the game is astounding. But realistically, the controls were awful. It's incredibly hard to aim, and the way they offset that is by adding in a ridiculous auto-aim system to make it stupidly easy to shoot everything. Fast forward a couple of years, and now we're looking at Halo: Combat Evolved. The vast improvements in the 4 years between the releases of these two games is quite astounding. The controls for Halo are incredibly tight and with each successive Halo game, Bungie and now 343 Industries, iterate on them to create the most polished controls (and game) possible. Now go to 2010 and Goldeneye gets a new game made for the Wii. The game itself was lackluster, but the controls were tight and fit in pretty well with most of the current FPS games of the time.

Basically, the point I'm trying to make is that the controls in Injustice: Gods Among Us were very clunky for me. And that's hardly the fault of the game itself. The game is conforming to an outdated control scheme that is used on most currently available fighting games.

So what is wrong with it? Well, my first problem with it is seemingly random button strings that allow moves to combo. The game tells you which button combinations are your basic combos per character. Well, let's try to figure out why that's bad. Why do basic combo moves have to be different per character? Why not standardize jab chains? Yes, I know that Light Light Light hits different spots per character and does different damage. That's precisely the point. Why isn't it standardized? If all of them do similar but different things, why isn't it the same three buttons for all characters? I mean, it can be different links depending on the character, but why is it that when I hit Light Light Light on Green Arrow, I can get a combo, but I have to hit three totally different buttons on Deathstroke to do something similar? I propose that these moves be simplified to all similar button combinations to allow for intuitive controls.

Anyways, so to continue this, let's talk about specials. Like most fighting games, each character has special moves that are unique moves to that character. These moves are awesome and fun to do, what isn't fun is that each move is set to seemingly random controls. When playing Super Smash Bros., there are 5 special moves with some used in the air and some with several variations once used. It seems similar in this game, but with the special moves spread out to different button combinations. I understand that some characters have more special moves than others, so they need more button combinations to satisfy this, but why are there specials spread out between quarter circles, half circles and others stick movements and 3 buttons. Why aren't all specials on the same buttons, but if more are needed, then there should be more special move button combinations used? Ideally I would suggest moving all specials to the same 5 to 7 button combinations to allow for a more intuitive button layout.

I think I've talked about random button combinations enough, so let's get back to the original point: lots of intuitive buttons are fun. So Super Smash Bros. Melee, is ridiculously technical. I mean, it's really, really technical. Some players hit around 300 APM(actions per minute). But the technicality of it seems normal within the guidelines of them game. When you compare this to what you see in traditional fighters, the technical barrier is entirely different. For example, wavedashing, the bane of the casual community in Super Smash Bros. Melee, is a simple physics exploit that is two things:

1. You slide on the ground when you air dodge into it.
2. You can air dodge on the first frame of your jump in whatever direction the control stick is pointing.

This simply allows a player to air dodge into the ground and slide without leaving the ground. Thus a wavedash. This is something that is simple, technical, and it makes sense. Wavedashing, for me, is incredibly fun. It is the first truly technical thing I learned in the game and I loved it. What makes it so much fun is because the technique is built out of actions that you know, already and you just combine them together. It's fun to do because it's intuitive. You already know how to air dodge, and you already know how to jump. You just need to combine them to get a desired effect. Now let's talk about something that is technical but not intuitive.

Bounce Canceling. I spent about an hour trying to perform this in the tutorial in Injustice. I'm not sure what it does, but apparently, it's just supposed to be really hard to perform. I cannot do it. It's not built on anything else I know how to do, or anything button combinations I've done before. But somehow, this technique exists and is useful... for something? I don't know, I can't perform it and it doesn't make sense to me. I'm sure I sound like a total scrub for saying that, but it's ridiculous. I've seen this complaint a lot too. It's not just me. That's why I feel justified in saying it should be simpler. It should be easier to perform and it should flow with the rest of the controls, something it doesn't do.

So what have I talked about here? It seems like a lot of words to say controls are too complex, right? Well, yes. I'm trying to convey the idea that fighting games are inaccessible because of the controls. I believe that Super Smash Bros. has a much better control scheme than traditional fighters. I'm sure I'm going to hear a huge counterargument to this whole post from a lot of people, which is the point. I want people talking about this. People need to know that players are upset with barriers between their brain and their game. I want developers to understand that complex controls should be discussed more before they are implemented. The should be streamlined so a player shouldn't have to think about controls. Players should be fighting opponents rather than the controller.

I know veterans of traditional fighting games will hate this idea. They'll probably say it's necessary to have this so it forces you to commit to a move, and it forces you to really think about what attacks you want to throw out. Blocking should be easy (holding back) while attacking should be hard. But this to me signifies outdated faulty game design. I despise fighting the controller as well as the player and I hope there are people that agree with me. I would love to play traditional fighters proficiently but I can't because there exists a technical barrier than I don't want to invest time in overcoming.

So I'm going to try an experiment later and post it on this blog. I'm going to try to remap the controls of the game to Super Smash Bros. style controls and see what people think of it. I want people to critique it and help me come up with an ideal to strive for when building a fighting game.

I understand there are challenges to this idea, and that's the point. I understand traditional fighters have analog controls with only 8 basic directions and smash has varied angles. So it should be a challenge and I hope it's something people will support me for. I'd like to see as many people as possible enjoying games that I would like to enjoy.

Anyway, thanks for reading this, and feel free to contact me on facebook and talk about it. And remember, I'm talking about this to improve game design, I don't want to ruin things people enjoy.

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Well I've just finished Bioshock Infinite and I'm onto another game now. But I'd like to discuss some of the intricacies of the game and figure out some of the pros and cons compared with it's predecessors (Bioshock and Bioshock 2).

Before I begin, I'd like to say that I absolutely loved Infinite. It was a wonderful display of good design and is a worthy successor to Bioshock. Bioshock 2 was terrible, so most of this review targets Infinite as a sequel to the original rather than to Bioshock 2.

If you haven't played Bioshock Infinite, read my last paragraph here and skip the design discussion. Go play it, because this may not make much sense otherwise.

Spoiler Alert

So what can I say about the Bioshock series? Well it's a story driven FPS with a huge emphasis on the plot twist at the end of the story. If you played Bioshock 2, you'll realize that the story was a steamy pile of poop. The Bioshock gameplay carried the game to be at least playable, but the lack of a strong story produced nothing short of well polished garbage. If you played the original Bioshock, there's no way to describe the story of than "mind-blowing." This game used a simple familiar phrase, "Would you kindly?" to commit the player to acts. Eventually the player discovers how they have been manipulated and becomes overwhelmed by their own ability to blindly follow the instructions. This feeling is nothing short of mind blowing. Now move to Infinite, where we have a story about a man trying to rescue a girl. As you progress through the story, you figure out that something strange is occuring, yet you have no idea why or how. You understand that you, as Booker DeWitt, must rescue this girl, Elizabeth, from the evil clutches of Comstock. As the story progresses, events get weirder and creepier, and you eventually somehow have caused a revolution, have killed Comstock, and discover through a dimensional tear that you are Comstock, or rather, he is you. The "moment of mind-blowing" wasn't nearly as mind-blowy as it was in Bioshock, but the same feeling was there. You discover everything you fought against for the whole game was really you fighting yourself. I really enjoyed how the game tied in the opening sequence to the ending sequence so well, and how there was a Rapture reference from the original Bioshock. So needless to say, it did evoke a similar emotion, but it wasn't nearly as strong, mostly because of confusion in the dimension shifting.

The next things I want to discuss are three themes of Bioshock that showed up in both games, but were used differently in each. In the original game, there was dark seriousness, light comedy, and excessive violence.

Before I address these, I want to talk about a big difference between the two games. The difference is the tone. In the original Bioshock, you find yourself wandering through an underwater hellhole. The entire place is falling apart, all the people have become discombobulated from overuse of plasmids and are killing each other over them. It is incredibly dark, but the one thing that it doesn't do particularly well is the use of awe inspiring scenery. The scenery is usually just very dark and gloomy looking. In Infinite, this formula changes. The scenery is awe inspiring. You get launched up to Columbia from the lighthouse, and from the air, you can see a huge expansive landscape. This evokes a sense of amazement and makes you want to go explore what you see. In Columbia, it's very bright and happy. The people seem to be in a perpetual state of happiness. In Rapture everyone was dead or splicing. So there's a notable difference in tone just by the fact that there are normal people walking around with you. Over time, Columbia gets darker and darker until you basically blow it out of the sky. You follow the downfall of Columbia instead of it having already fallen (Rapture).

This difference between dark and light makes it so the excessive violence theme, which meshes incredibly well with Bioshock's Rapture, is in bad taste in the sky island. When I first took my sky hook and ground someone's head off, I winced. I was very off put by the idea of it, and it actually deterred me from doing it again. I can probably count on my hands the number of times I actually used the sky hook "finishing blow." This leads to the other two themes. The dark comedy fits the original so much better than Infinite. The humor behind the liberty robots is almost non-existent. The vending machines, while very identifiable, aren't funny or really even amusing. I'd rather them not say much at all. The videos of vigors are really immersion-breaking. There are so many examples of this and all of them are really frustrating. This leads into the last point. The seriousness in both games is very starkly different. In Columbia, you follow an idyllic society and watch its fall from grace. In Rapture, you follow an idyllic society that has already lost its grace. Columbia seems to have a serious tone inherent of being a city with inhabitants that were just normal people. They went about normal activities, just in the sky. In Rapture, everyone is a gross monster-like creature trying to murder you. Rapture's seriousness comes from survival instinct rather than the realism you see in Columbia. I believe Bioshock Infinite could've been much better if it had focused purely on it's seriousness, and not introduced silly comical things or excessive violence.

Aside from these few things, Bioshock Infinite is incredibly well polished. I loved skyline combat. I loved each combat encounter. I loved the game pacing. I just really loved this game, and I would recommend it to anyone who hasn't played it yet (although I hope you didn't read this article before playing it). It was the most fun game I've played in years. I loved so much about the game, and I hope you enjoyed reading this.

I encourage discussion about this. Message me on facebook or post on my wall here.

So it's been a while since I posted my last GDC update. Since then I've done a huge overhaul to my website and moved all the content to a database. It's a ton of design work too. Regardless, I'm going ahead and posting all my thoughts on what happened at GDC.

This second half of day 2 kicked kicked off with Designing Without a Pitch - FTL Postmortem. This talk was really interesting. It discussed how the designers really didn't know what game they wanted to make, they just designed something that contributed to an overall feel of the game. In this." They really didn't know what they were going to make, just the feeling of being in space. The way they dealt with this process was through a couple of steps. The first step was to get a playable fast. You must get a playable product fast in order to iterate and decide what you need you game to be. The next step was to have a focus. A focus is not a goal. A goal is a plan for the end product. A goal means you know what your game is going to be. A focus means you can question whether or not something is in your game. A focus for FTL was "The Sims in Space." There is not mechanical depth to that idea, nothing other than that idea. This focus directs development to allow you to question if a mechanic, tone, or theme contributes to the overall design of the product. During this period of development, the production process was very agile, with things getting added and cut all the time. Unfortunately, once they showed it to the public, development became much less agile, with every decision alienating someone in the community. Everyone has their own opinion, and not everyone will like your design decisions. Another thing this talk discussed was catering to fans. When you cater to hardcore fans, you get feature creep. People ask for more and more features. This can make your product bloated and less clean. The last point made for FTL was the emphasis on using a code freeze. You must stop adding features before release.

The next talk on day 2 was Ahead of the Curve: The SpaceChem Postmortem. This talk was cool because it talked about making a really offbeat game. The speaker, Zach Barth was very eccentric. He talked about how SpaceChem was a game that was ridiculously difficult, but very fun. SpaceChem is a "design-based, puzzle game" as he described it. So it was difficult to pick up on what the game actually was about, but from what I gathered, it was about doing cool stuff with chemistry. Anyways, I came away with a few points. First, players like their creations to be their own, so make a goal with lots of solutions and give the players a way to share them. Players like to compete, share, and optimize solutions. Second, step by step learning is key - tutorials suck. We learn through trial and error, no need for tutorials to show us how to do stuff. This guy made a simple game on the side of whatever else of his other job. It was coincidentally a stroke of luck that his game succeeded.

After that was An Indie Expedition Through the Jungle of Free-to-play, In-App Purchase, Ad-Supported, and Analytics by Aaron Isaksen. This talk wasn't very interesting besides the point, "Indies hate paying in game." And then the talk discussed how indies can have in-game payment.

The last talk was the Indie Soapbox. There were a bunch of speakers and I'm just going to go through some cool points. The first speaker, discussed monetization and how many different models there are. Here are a couple listed with pros and cons. Freemium, or pay to win, breaks immersion and is disliked by many gamers. Monetizing trivial things is the next model. This is great for a popular game, it doesn't work well for smaller games. The next model is pay-per-play, or arcade style. Not used outside of arcades. Another model is tournament mode, or pay per tournament. This isn't used much either but could be used effectively. Yet another model is "Win rewards, pay if you suck." This seems mean, I don't know what to do with it.

The next speaker said No One Knows About Your Game. He talked about how you need to keep your social media usage frequently and constantly be hyping your game. He said you should go to a bunch of events and show off your product all the time. You should make contacts at the events and work with as many people as possible to get your product successful. A point he made was that you can't over-hype a game, you can only under-deliver.

The next speaker talked about a dynamic music game. A game where, instead the same 30 second loop of music which is quite tiring to the ear, we should create dynamic music which reacts to what the player is doing. I came up with an idea for music which makes it sound more human, which is to record many takes of the same music and use all of them.

I've forgotten a bunch of the speakers since the soapbox, but I've written notes on the ones I thought were important (the ones I already wrote on).

Day 2 was really good. I enjoyed a bunch of speakers, the same as day 1, and the next couple of days were really cool too. It at least inspired me to get my blog finished, and write about my gaming experiences.

So it's Thursday night now at GDC. One more day to go, so I figured I'd give a recap of what I saw in my talks on day 2. I may even get into day 3 if I don't burn out. As with my last couple of posts, I'll just go through the talks chronologically and tell you what thoughts I had about each.

So the first talk I went to was called Navigating Live Events: From Big Studio to Studio of One. The talk had some good points of getting your game known and how to deal with large events like GDC, PAX, and others. So to start this talk, Alexander Bruce and Greg Rice did a nice job of communicating what should be done at a large scale convention like this. Your game is a showcase, it should be available to the public eye. You should always be at your booth to answer questions and talk to your players. Be at the booth to address feedback constantly and talk to the fans. Another point addressed was the necessity of creating a network with other developers to help you work through the tough life of an indie. Another key idea is to talk with everyone and make sure the press knows your game. Folllow up with the press and make sure they know what events you're going to be at. There was content in the presentation about how to craft a demo, and how to tailor it to the audience of the convention. For example, GDC is much more developer friendly than say, PAX. All of these ideas are really great tips, and they seem self explanatory, but I think it's good that I hear them from someone else, so I don't go off and do something stupid while marketing my own indie product.

The next talk was called Designing for Mystery in Kentucky Route Zero. This talk was by Jake Elliot and Tamas Kemenczy about the differences between a mystery and a puzzle. I don't really have much to say on this. Sadly, I haven't played the game so I can't comment much on it. What I can do is outline a couple of points that were key to the presentation. So one of the big points in the talk was about the difference between a mystery and a puzzle. The differences are actually fairly wide. To start, a puzzle, what most players are familiar with, is being given information about a solution, and trying to find the rest of the information to achieve that solution. A mystery is something where tons of information is given, not all of it relevant, and you have to create a conclusion from all the data you have. KRZ focuses primarily on mysteries and uses crazy movie-like effects to make it feel like a really old movie.

After that game was Natural Selection. This talk, The Velveteen Marine - The Power of Belief in Natural Selection 2 was a very interesting look into the world of a dedicated community. So what is Natural Selection? It's a game that was initially a Half Life mod started by one guy, the speaker, Charlie Cleveland. It is a FPS/RPS hybrid style game that has plenty of running around and shooting stuff. The game came out in 2002, with little over a year development time. It was very popular within a certain community of players. Charlie decided that he wanted to make a sequel to this game, and started building his own engine. As time went by, the normal things that happened to indies happened: the game was overscoped and underfunded. This is where the magic happened for it. The developer decided if he believed in himself he could do it. And since he did, the community did too. Once the community backed him up, he asked for money, and they provided. Because they provided, he let art assets out into the community for them to play with. Because that happened, someone made a beautiful level, and so on and so on. The lesson from this talk was to be very open with the community. Make sure they have what you have. When you give the community support, they give back to you, the developer. I talked to Mr. Cleveland after the summit about some community management tips, and how to best deal with some of the things that happen with players. The first thing I asked was about content quality, and how to determine what to use. He said that even though the community delivers and actively participates, it doesn't mean that they always create quality products. He said they would really only consider about 1% of the community created content to be publishable. The next thing I asked was about how he gained the community that was on the original Natural Selection game. He said he created lots of iterations really fast, listened to player input, and responded to them ASAP. The last thing I asked him about was how he judged the quality of player criticism. He said that most of the time he didn't bother looking at the fix they suggested, but rather what the underlying cause behind the complaint was. The example he gave was about death timers. If they were too long, why were they too long? Was it because players died in an unfun way? Was it because of something beyond their control? These are the kinds of questions that should be asked whenever there is a complaint within the studio.

So after the community driven talk, I decided I didn't want to stay for the next summit. The presenter seemed boring, and I picked up my bag and left. Fortunately, because of that, I got to talk to Mr. Cleveland.

Once again, I am exhausted and passing out. So I'll save my blogging until later in the week when I'm much more energetic.

So I got back to my hotel room last night with very little time to mull over what I'd seen that day, but I took all of today to really internalize the indescribably huge amount of information that was thrown at my head. So obviously I talked about most of the summits I went to yesterday, but I stopped right writing right as they started to really hit home for me. I had so much to think about, and I really wanted to be fully awake for all the summits today, that I simply couldn't write anymore. So let's start where I left off: Free Indie Games: Curating the DIY Revolution.

This talk by Porpetine and Terry Cavanagh was incredibly strange. It wasn't bad, jut strange. So the talk primarily focused on what games meant to the creators. Game developers often times (and should) draw on real life experiences to create a game that is full of life. Many times these games have underlying meanings, maybe not to many people, but to a select few people who really strive to understand it. One game that was demonstrated was a simple color changing game with squares as the only graphics. The player (a square that could temporarily change color) would have to blend in with others in order to reach the end. If the player didn't blend in, the other squares would push, shove, and bully that player out of the level. Now this wouldn't seem like much to the average player; it's a neat concept, and nothing more. But apparently, according to the presenter, it had a deep meaning towards the developer's own sexuality, and how hard it was to fit in as a transgendered person. These are the kind of games that were presented. They all had deep rooted sentimental value to the creator. Sometimes it wasn't even always to the creator either, sometimes the games just had very strang meanings, and eerie settings where nothing really made sense unless you dug into it really deep. But one of the game styles that stood out was text adventure. The presenter pointed out that text adventures are easy to produce ways for unknown developers to tell a story of their life qnd experiences. And for 99% or people, that story may have been completely irrelevant and unnecessary, but there is a 1% of people out there who connect to that story and feel better knowing someone else has had their troubling life expereiences and gotten through it. Now there's plenty of room for design in my own realm of ideas. Right off the bat I can think of a game where all choices are much more logical than they are in most games. As a logical thinker, most of the time I get really frustrated when my two options in games are "Fight or Die," there really isn't a, "Let's stop and work this out option." Now I can't guarantee stabbing people is less fun than not, but I could say it would make me feel better about playing an RPG. So what I took away from this summit was to use my real life experiences to fuel my games, remove any and all constraints from design (text adventures), and really to just develop your own personal game, and maybe someone will really be able to feel what you do as you create your own game.

This next talk was by far my favorite. It was called Exploring Creativity and it was 3 different presentations in one. The first talk was by a man named Andy Hull. Mr. Hull worked as a wooden toy developer for a long time and realized that there is a huge design field still undeveloped because of the parallel that exists between physical toys and video games. Hull points out that so many games are based on classic wooden toys and that more inspiration can be drawn from them. He simply points out that there is more design space and more to be done within this field. This way of taking the wooden toy and translating it into a game is a wonderful practice because there is guaranteed fun with the wooden toy, so the chances of a finished game being fun is much higher than if you're basing it on nothing.

The next speaker, James Lantz, decided to talk about the idea of genre, something I have thought about a significant amount in the past. He mostly solidified some of my thoughts and theories about genre and how it worked. So first off, Lantz mentions that genre is a good thing. Genre, like basing off wooden toys, is guaranteed fun. You don't need to reinvent the wheel if things are already existing to do serve your exact purpose. But you can't create something that is just stealing from someone else, right? Kind of right. Plenty of ideas have been thought of before, but you shouldn't limit yourself to thinking purely of ideas that haven't been done before. You'll probably always be stealing ideas in one way or another. So He went on to talk about how to expand within the restrictions of genre. He proposes 4 ways: Isolate & Expand, Pull & Abstract, Pick & Destroy, and Smash & Combine. Each of these 4 methods was a way to innovate within each genre. Isolate & Expand focuses purely on one mechanic and blows it up to huge proportions. Pull & Abstract focuses on the essence of the genre and what the very base mechanic of it is. Pick & Destroy focuses on removing "necessary" mechanics. And Smash & Combine focuses on combining two genres together. I'd go into tons of examples, but I actually want to talk about the next talk. Needless to say, this was a very needed confirmation to my thought that I had already on the subject, plus a few new steps forward that I hadn't thought of.

This last talk of this session was absoultely spectacular. Even if Davey Wreden hadn't said anything useful at all, he was still a glorious speaker. But he did say useful things. He was very inspiring and atleast gave me a new game idea that I could implement in the future. So for his talk, he gave some general guidelines for being creative, and not forcing things. They were all very simple things, and so many of them were easy. I could talk for hours about how cool it was to see someone's creative design process in presentation form. But I'll leave it like this: Being creative is an art in itself. You can't just wake up one morning and be a creative person. You can decide to make a game for you, you can make it out of your own life, the life you want to live, or the life that you wish the world had. You can create ideas from anything and everything, you can think about an idea forever, but until you put it on paper, your idea is infinite. There's so much more to this talk, that I wish I could write more, but that is all I'm going to talk about.

After a wonderful set of presentations by these three guys, the indie guys decided to spice it up a bit with (drum roll)....... numbers and charts. Woooo. I surprisingly watched the entire presentation of Crowdfunding for Indies: Real Numbers and Trends. The presentation was pretty dry, and I came out of it thinking a couple of things. My first thought was that Kickstarter was the best thing to ever happen to indie games ever. My second thought was, 2012 was the year of Kickstarter games. So that was that, not too much else interesting. Use Kickstarter, fund your project.

The final talk of Day 1 was titled Obsessive-Compulsive Development: Retro/Grade Postmortem. It seemed interesting going into it. I really enjoy listening to postmortems and this was no exception. This one was much different than others though. This project had actually failed despite so many different things that had set it up. To start off, developer Matt Gilgenbach is OCD, not just your average anal-retentive kind of guy. He obessessed over many things. You'd think that would make him a good developer, but that's incorrect. Matt had a codebase of about 750, 000 lines of code. That's more than a lot of AAA titles. This code was, for lack of a better term, horrendously unnecessary. Retro/Grade is a music based action game. It has incredibly fancy graphics that you'd expect of a AAA game, but without the extra development you'd see on the actual game. Unfortunately, as the game got further and further into development, trivial things kept taking up more and more development time. So Mr. Gilgenbach graciously pointed out so many things that were nearly unnoticeable within the game that had taken up so much time that the actual game suffered for it. There was little content, and the sales were dramatically low. Anyways, the lesson I learned from this dramatic story of this OCD developer is that you shouldn't use a sledge hammer on a thumb tack. That is to say, I like building my own systems, but when that system is unnecessary for the solution, it shouldn't be eating up development time. However, on a brighter note, I recommend anyone that reads this to go out and buy Retro/Grade. Support an indie. Save gaming.

Anyways, I'll have another update with Day 2 later in the week. Once again, I've spent way too much time blogging about my experience, and not enough time experiencing. I hope anyone following this finds my writing readable, and not vomit inducing. I'm no writer, I'm just writing down my thoughts on this really cool event.

I've now spent one full day here at GDC. My feet are sore, my stomach is full, and my mind is blown. Let's go through each of these things and see what's been happening.

My feet hurt like none other. I've been walking all over the place to do stuff, as one should in San Francisco. I've been walking back and forth between GDC and my hotel, plus my friends' hotel which is much farther away. I've gone out to Fisherman's Wharf to do some touristing with my RIT friends. And overall I've been having a pretty good time. My feet hurt.

My stomach is full. FULL. This morning, I ate at the best Cafe in the area: Dottie's True Blue Cafe. I know of this place because I visited San Francisco when I was much younger, and my family and I ate here everyday. It is bar none, the best food in San Francisco. Anyways, I woke up around 8:00, went over there, had some delicious pancakes, and then set off to the convention. The pancakes held me over until around 3:00.

Now here's the part that is what is going to take up most of the post: What did I do in GDC? Well, I went to the most awe inspiring sessions that I attended last year. I went to the Indie Games Summit. I watched all the talks from this, which may very well have been a bad idea. I mean, sort of. Some of the talks were spectacular, while some were very lacking. Some were very informative and some were sparse with useful knowledge. I'm going to go through each one, bit by bit and explain what occured.

So to kick things off, was Taking the Leap from Student to Studio: The Story About Making FRACT by Richard Flanagan. So FRACT is a musical puzzle solving game, as far as I could tell. The presentation came across slightly sloppy, and assumed I knew exactly what he was referring to within the game. The point of showing FRACT was to show some common pitfalls and development habits that tend to envelop developers. One of the biggest points I took out of it was the point of iteration. Iteration is important but demoralizing. In order to create a good product, many times things may be scrapped over and over until a fun system is created. Fun isn't just created everytime it is imagined. Every mechanic needs iteration in order to be the best it can. Another thing I took away from the talk was how the scale is nearly always unrealistic within the timeframe that is proposed. The project will be over budget and it will have to be scaled down.

The next talk was Molyjam: How Twitter Jokes can Save Video Games presented by Anna Kipnis. This talk didn't really have a take away lesson for me. I just really enjoyed what Anna had to say. The talk was about Peter Molyneux on Twitter, and his tendency to tweet thought provoking, and surreal ideas. Well, as it would have it, someone decided to create a parody accout called Peter Molydeux which would tweet the weirdest surreal ideas that would seem to be in the realm of Molyneux's actual tweets. So Anna Kipnis sees these tweets and seems to think that some of them could be really creative game ideas. Well, she tweets her thought, and suddenly people start flooding behind it. And eventually a Game Jam forms based on these crazy, whacky, absolutely insane ideas. This Game Jam served to expand creativity in design to realms you, as a designer, would never even come close to thinking of.

After that talk was one by Northway Games. This was with Colin Northway and Thomas Shahan. The presentation was called The Art of Incredipede. This presentation proved to be the least interesting and thought provoking session today. It really seemed like the artist spoke about how awesome his art was, and the programmer talked about how awesome his code was. There really wasn't anything exciting about this talk and I really disliked it.

Next up was Shellrazer: Designing In-App Purchase Without Losing your Soul by Shane Neville. So Shane discussed his game, Shellrazer, which is free on iOS this week. And he talked about the appropriate way to design an in game purchase within it. So Shellrazer is zuped up sidescrolling shooter. As you progress through it, you collect coins to buy upgrades and levels. So how do you fit a "purchase" feature into the game? Well, according to him, there are 3 types of players: players with Skill, Time, and Money. Skilled players prefer to do everything themselves. They want control of shooting everything and they try to push their "micro" as hard as they can. Players with time prefer the method of using automation, and slowly grinding their way to the top, safely. And then there are players with money, who don't want a challenge in this and just want to blow stuff up. Shane proposes, that these people are more like those who have time, just without the time, so just give them an option to buy coins and power level to the top and breeze through the game. There should be no encouragement to do this. He says they have one notification in game that allows players to buy them, but besides that, players don't even know it exists. They aren't bothered by it, they aren't harassed about buying it, nor are they meant to feel guilty about not buying things. The option to buy should exist, but it shouldn't be a constant notification and it shouldn't be necessary to continue playing.

After lunch, the first summit was How we Created Mark of the Ninja Without Losing(Totally) our Minds by Jeff Agala and Jamie Cheng from Klei Entertainment. So Mark of the Ninja is a stealth puzzle platformer, and this talk was devoted to the removal of waste from the development process. So in Mark of the Ninja's development, a major roadblock occurered when the developers realized the game wasn't fun. It played like a hack and slash, and didn't really focus on being a stealthy ninja. Well tons of features allowed this to happen, and none of them were tested well enough to determine if they were fun. Fortunately, after turning the game into more of an action game, the developers decided to do some unit tests on the game. They stripped out a whole bunch of features, and began to toy around with the game without bloated gameplay from excessive fighting and bloodshed. Eventually, the developers cut out tons and tons of features that didn't contribute to the feeling being a ninja. This made the game play better and more inline with the stealthy, well-planned aspect of being a ninja. So the way they decided what wass waste, early on in the development cycle, was to test everything step by step and not to assume that just because a feature works, means it is what you want in your game. This waste detection system allows you, as a programmer, to do less work in the future and not get burned out nearly as quickly. Another point I took out of this summit was how useful people with broad skillsets are for indie development. Everyone needs to have a hand in other people's code to realize when your task affects someone else's. This was a really great talk in general. One of the huge pitfalls in indie development is burning out halfway through a project, and this summit did a great job of helping.

I'm going to sleep now. There are a bunch more talks I'd like to talk about, but I don't have the energy to do so. Stay tuned. I'll be posting about my favorite Indie Summit later in the week.

This is my first post on my newly constructed website and it's a pretty cool one. I'm on an airplane right now, heading to San Francisco for GDC 2013. I'm excited and nervous all at the same time. My excitement stems from all the cool stuff I saw last year at GDC 2012. The Indie Games Festival was really cool. Meeting developers of so many games and things that I didn't even know existed. Last year, I picked up a Summits and Tutorials pass and walked through the Level Design and Indie Development tracks. This year I've picked up an All Access pass, so I'll be checking out the main conference and see what goes on in there.

Now Where does my nervousness stem from? I'm not entirely sure, to be honest. It might be because I'm going out there by myself this time, whereas last time I was with my friends who had been to GDC before. But maybe it's because of an expectation that this convention will lead me into getting a job. However, I really don't want to worry about getting a job while enjoying the convention. The convention is something that really set my head straight last year when I went through a whole bunch of tutorials on indie development. They really helped clear my head of any doubts about being in the games industry. Maybe yet another reason is it'll feel like a waste of money if it wasn't as awesome as last year. Somehow I doubt that is the case though.

I mean, I'm nervous, so what, right? I guess to relieve that, I should set a goal for myself this time around. Last time I went was fun, but I didn't have a clear goal in mind. I went, looking to do what is recommended of anyone else in RIT's GDD program. The goal I've set for myself is to make contacts and be known and have fun. I know students are going here to chat up employers, and I understand that. I can't be "just another guy." I'm me, and I'm pretty damn awesome at it. I'm a good talker, and I'm a smart guy (at least according to the people around me). So what I'm going to do is this: I'm going to go into each area of the conference, several times over, talk to each person whose product looks interesting, and I'm going to make sure they know who the guy wearing a "Where's Waldo?" hat is.