What’s up with me lately!
Posted: February 12, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized 35 Comments »So then, anyone following me on twitter will have been witness to a few freak-outs of late. The truth is things aren’t that great. Lately it’s been kind of a perfect storm of screwy hormones, stress, mood swings and actually having good selection of reasons to be depressed all at once.
Ultimately a lot of “what’s the point” thinking has led me to some decisions. One is swift*stitch becoming free (see below) and;
Leaper★, and a commissioned game (that I can’t talk about yet) may be my last games as a full time indie.
I just can’t afford to keep going like this, I haven’t been able to afford the past three years really. Sales have paid for food but I’ve just racked up debt when it comes to everything else. It has gotten to the point where I try to spend time working on short projects as an attempt to make enough money to pay for the stuff I really care about making, but it doesn’t work and it’s making my games worse as a result.
I want to make my dream games. I enjoy all the jamming, the short projects and all the other interesting gamedev stuff that builds my skills and is just plain fun to do. I also enjoy knowing I can afford food, not crying myself to sleep and the thought of not owing friends ridiculous amounts of money sounds kind of neat. If I can’t work on the things I really want to work on, then all of this ‘full time indie’ stuff is just a waste of time. I’d be better off just getting a regular job and making stuff I care about in my spare time.
I have enough money left to eat for a month, maybe two. I’m going to work on Leaper and this commissioned game. These are things I want to do. I’m going to do them how I want and fuck the money. – this is my attitude normally, but there is always the hope that money will come. I’m sure it would if I stuck with it long enough, but I can’t afford that, so fuck the hope of getting paid.
Either Leaper will sell enough to cover all the money I owe or it won’t. I’m not going to hold my breath either way because I *do not* need the stress. If it sells enough I’ll stick to this indie thing, if it doesn’t I won’t. I’ll at least have made a game that I care about as more than a ‘project’.
(If anyone is wondering, the commissioned game has already had the payment decided and most of that is going on software to make it, it’s not going to anywhere-near save me from my money troubles but it is also a game I want to make).
So that’s where I’m at right now, I also have the following updates:
Swift*Stitch:
Swift*Stitch has done more than well really, having been in a couple of bundles and having had the nice ‘pay-when-you-want’ sale in January 2012. however… outside of sales, nobody is buying it. and even with the sales the game has not paid off any of the debt I hoped it would, and it’s not really covering the costs of living while I develop other games. It has paid for food and bills, some software and even got me the opportunity to work with the awesome guys at nicalis for the iOS version.
My relationship with the game is thus; the game has paid for itself (more or less), I think it is kind of neat. But I also hate it because it’s not the kind of game I want to spend my time working on, especially if it can’t pay for me to work on the games I really do care about. It is a fun little arcade thing, with a couple of interesting design and mechanic things happening. I don’t think the world is significantly better for me having made it.
That hate has only getting worse, I’ve been wanting and wanting it to sell, but nobody has been buying it. I can’t be relying on something I hate to feed me, and pay rent and bills. So now you can download it or play it in the browser for free.
Now that I’m not expecting anything from the game, I don’t hate it anywhere near as much. I still kind of wish I’d spent my time working on something else, but I am proud of what I did accomplish and hope some more people can enjoy it now.
The iOS version is still a paid-upgrade for $1.99 (you get the first few levels free) and I expect that will stay for quite a while because despite my feelings towards the game, the guys at nicalis put in a lot of work for that version and they deserve to get some money for it. if you like the PC version please do consider buying it for iOS too so you can carry it with you 🙂
Android is still a possibility, and if it happens it will likely be with nicalis again, because frankly, they are pretty cool guys 🙂
Rose&Time:
I recently spent a couple of days fixing up Rose&Time’s graphics, I also fixed a bug and released a Linux version too. you can check it out here.
I considered making Rose&Time free also, however I don’t hate the game so much. whilst I was hoping for cash when I was making it, the game is all about a bunch of themes I care about (emotionally and mechanically) and I still think it’s worth the money. In fact lately I’ve been loving the game more and more, I think I made something a little special just by accident on this one ^__^;
Lottie’s Dungeon:
So if I do quit making games full time, what happens to Lottie’s Dungeon? honestly I don’t know. This is one of the games I really want to finish and most everything I’ve done since taking a break from it has been in the hopes it would pay for Lottie. maybe I’ll work on it after Leaper, maybe I wont. I want to but don’t need the stress of worrying about something I care about so much. I have to put it out of my mind for the time being, I’m sorry.
SURPRISE!
Posted: January 25, 2013 Filed under: General Stuffs 2 Comments »(This blog post was originally a talk I gave at the winter world of love event, then it spent two years in my blog’s ‘draft posts’ bit, I found it tonight and tidied it up since it’s still something I get super excited to talk about 🙂 )
(warning: links in this blog may be spoilers, including THAT spoiler from FF7)
Surprising an audience is something games can/could be super good at, but I think when we are making games we don’t think about surprises enough. I’m not saying it’s something we should all focus on but it’s pretty interesting and I think we should keep it in mind from time to time 😉
What is surprise?
First things first, we need to know what we are talking about when we say ‘surprise’. People often don’t realise it, but surprise is an EMOTION!
When we are talk about making something in a game surprising, we are talking about making something that results in this emotional response.
The second most important thing about surprise, is it only lasts for a very short period of time, otherwise it’s something rather different that we call ‘shock’.
Off-topic but don’t-want-to-delete paragraph! – I’m not really going to go into shock here, not because I think surprise is better or more important (IMO shock can be even more valuable), but because there are no shortage of games trying to shock anyway, and it’s much harder to shock right than surprise right. I’m pretty sure it’s not hard for you to think of a few games that are trying to be shocking, and whilst there are some where the game is better for it, I feel they are in the minority. (also just a minor thing, I think sex shocks can be good, IMO the sexuality displayed in mighty jill off is probably shocking to some, but it’s valuable to the game, Jill would do anything for her queen, wheras you would never see some GTA protaganist climbing a tower of death for a hooker.)
anyway, that’s enough about shock, just remember that it’s easy to do wrong, tricky to do right. 🙂
So, where was I… oh surprises don’t last long, BUT, the memory of them can last a very long time, sometimes even for a lifetime.
They are wonderful because they takes us to new places emotionally, places we never even expected to go. At the very least, this is good for keeping things fresh. In games we often find ourself in the position where players will get bored after a while, but with surprises we can take what the player is expecting and subvert it. This changes the way the player relates to the game. From their perspective, the game has actually changed, and they are now less certain what the game will present them next, it has more possibilites!
It’s important to note that I’m not saying you should take a boring game and put in surprises here and there to keep the player glued to it, that’s actually EVIL. (and yeah, I’m going off topic again here, but whatever) your priority should always be providing a valuable experience for the player. If your aim is only to hold the players attention, then you don’t really care about your player and you should do something else with your life. Ultimately you are creating something that will take up people’s time, and time is a limited resource for humans, so make sure if you are taking it you give something valuable back. (so just don’t be an asshole k? thx)
Surprises are not about random drops (though you can surprise people with random drops), they’re not about some unknown reward (though sometimes they can be), what THEY ARE about, is making people feel something.
THE SCIENCE OF SURPRISE!
Let’s get academic, or at least pretend to (since academic types are way smarter than me). The University of Southern California had some clever people to look into surprise and they then had some clever things to say about it.
First of all, they demonstrated their exceptional coolness by deciding that 1 unit of surprise should be called a ‘wow’. They then proceeded to measure people’s wows per second when exposed to various input data… none of that is really too relevent to us but they were very clever about it so I trust them when they say things that do apply, such as:
For a definition of surprise, we need 2 things, There must be uncertainty (this is extra important to us because we actually have a strong influence over this) and we must realise people react to the same situations differently (less important to us, but do keep it in mind)
in other words, so long as a person isn’t omnipotent you can surprise them, and when exposed to even the exact same stimulus different people will react with varying levels of surprise.
The USC boffins then go on to say “an event is surprising when the distance between posterior and prior distributions of beliefs over all models is large”. And if you translate that into English: Surprise is a big change in what you expect.
For example, I can show you a black screen. The longer the screen is black, the more you expect it to remain that way. When the screen turns white, it’s something you don’t expect and you are surprised! OK… you aren’t surprised much, it’s not a great difference in what you were expecting. but if the black screen instead sprouted limbs and started doing the macarena… the odds are that would be an example of a greater change in your expectations and therefore a greater surprise to you.
Here, I made a graph for you:
At the start, the person has little or no expectation of X occouring, then at some point X does occour, their expectations change rapidly and they are surprised. Then following the occourance of X, whilst it is not occouring the person expects it less.
I’m aware we seem to have moved away from games, but we have just gone over the most important sciency bit that is most relevent to us. You see the axis on that graph, with ‘expectation’ and ‘time’?
We can influence both of these things.
So my point, (yes we have finally reached it!) is that:
Engineering surprise is achieved by engineering people’s expectations.
But what if people are expecting the surprise? This is what we in the human-feelings business call ‘anticipation‘. I’d argue that anticipation is also a type of surprise, just with different timing. since you are expecting something that doesn’t happen, each moment it doesn’t happen is a change in expectations, a tiny surprise. But since it’s many tiny surprises drawn out over a period of time, it can have as much of an effect on players as a sudden surprise.
When people are anticipating stuff you can give them what they are expecting to relieve them… or make out like it was never going to happen (the killer wasn’t really behind the curtain, nothing to be afraid of I guess…) and/or then throw it at them a second later anyway (the killer was actually behind the door! *stab stab stab*). This way you get all the cool stuff of building wows gradually with anticipation, and also dropping a bucketload of wows on people at once.
Playing with expectation and time is what it’s all about really, for both surprise and anticipation 🙂
Point made, The following paragraphs are disorganised! \:D/
Even the great so-called ‘masters’ of surprise, the ninja, are WEAK in comparison to our power. A ninja must adapt to it’s surroundings, play to whatever their victim’s expectations are, and make their move at just the right time. For us game developers however, we don’t have to adapt to the surroundings, we own the surroundings. we don’t have to play to our victim’s player’s expectations, we create their world, their expectations are built from the experiences we have already given them.
Therefore game developers are better than ninjas. >__>
You know who the *real* masters of surprise are? Magicians! A good magician is in complete control of their audience’s expectations (just as we can be). Every word, smile and flourish leads the audience a certain way, sometimes the magician gives the audience what they expect, sometimes they don’t. To a magician, the audience’s expectation is like a toy, or better yet, a tool. Magicians use this tool to engineer that sense of wonder the best magicians are known for.
We can do better!
Magicians are still limited by reality, I can pull a rabbit out of a hat in a virtual space, I can do it with a million rabbits in under a second. Our virtual world exists not in reality, not even in the computer, but in the mind of our audience. Magicians have to conceal the reality of their tricks, whereas we are kind of the opposite, we create a reality for our tricks. In this way our tricks can exist in any world we can make the player believe they are happening in. The conventions don’t exist until you make them, and you can break them later, just to make the player feel.
That’s not to say every player is a blank slate of expectations when coming into your game the first time, the reality is quite the opposite. But you can work this to your advantage too. There are many conventions players take for granted and you can easily have fun subverting these. Things like walls being solid (you can walk through that bit!), always jumping the same height (jumping in sunlight makes you go twice as high!), conversation won’t advance till you press the button (make NPCs act concerned about the player spacing out after a while!) and so-on and so-forth.
And let’s not pretend you don’t have any impact on expectations of players before they start the game! The name of your game, trailer, screenshots, description and so-on all paint a picture in the mind of people who are going to play, you can use this to your advantage by planting ideas and expectations that the game then subverts. Remember all those metal gear solid 2 previews with snake looking cool and doing snake stuff? then people got the game and half of the players didn’t see snake for hours! Kojima probably had a grin a mile wide from all the “wtf!?” he caused there.
Expert level expectation-engineering: make an entirely different game and send that out to reviewers, use it for screenshots and all other stuff! or give different players different games all together, tell no-one!
And you can do it too both in your game and elsewhere; you can influence players’ expectations and surprise them where it suits you most!
( Slight disclaimer/warning: getting people to expect one thing and doing another is a deception. It’s pretty easy to argue it’s OK for our purposes and all, but it’s still important to know when you lie, and make a judgement call on whether your conscience can handle it 🙂 )
TL;DR:
- Surprise is an emotion
- It’s over quickly (otherwise it’s shock, not surprise)
- Big changes in expectations make for big surprises
- We get to decide what is expected
- That starts before anyone even starts playing our game
Extra stuff to note:
- Presenting things consistently will lead the player to expect them
- Surprises don’t have to be big, you can use them as small accents wherever you like.
- “The game isn’t over” is always a cool surprise, give people more than they expect 🙂
- surprise is measured in units of “wow”, that is crazy awesome!
End of post! thanks for reading! 😀
I’ve kind of run off a bit with this blog, and missed some points so here is the original notes for the talk (.txt), the second draft (.odt), and the presentation slides (.odp)
(I promise I tried to present this post well, but I kept getting super excited because this is so interesting, it’s hard to stay on track and explain clearly when you’re in love with a subject, double-thanks for reading it anyway!)
Developers: Let’s do digital distribution right.
Posted: December 21, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized 26 Comments »The odds are that very, very few of us are going to deliver our games through steam. That doesn’t mean we can’t be super slick when distributing our games, but it’s something we consistently fuck up. So here’s how I propose we operate when distributing games to best serve the awesome people who take a chance on us and buy them.
First of all, none of this shit:
Expiring links are the BANE of digital distribution. What if I want to download later? What if I want to get the updated version of the game? What if I want to gift the game to someone, but their birthday happens after the link expires?
If you are having BMTMicro/FastSpring deliver your files, those links will expire (BMT also has a habit of becoming blocked if the person doesn’t download the files when they get their link). I don’t know about other services so much, but it seems to be a standard.
Expiring links are only worthwhile to businesses who want to treat their customers like shit, that isn’t us. so here’s what you do;
Have a download page on your own site with all the download links:
Just one address for everyone is fine, but if you really want some key-based download pages feel free to work that out so long as those keys don’t expire. Put your updates here and people can always return for the latest version of a game.
If you are using BMTMicro/FastSpring, you probably have to upload a file to their servers (that will expire). But you can also specify what goes into the email customers are sent, so GIVE THEM A LINK TO GET THE GAME FROM YOUR SITE.
Providing a link that never expires is kind of what makes steam such a reliable service. For all the issues I have with steam, they deliver a fucking excellent process for buying games and getting them.
In my browser, I have a folder of bookmarks with game downloads. I can just click it and see a list of games I’ve bought. I get a sense of pride every time I open it, these are things I own, these are things I supported. Give your customers a chance at this pride, it’s the same enjoyment folks get from adding games to their steam library.
Right now my folder of games is pretty small. Not enough developers are providing bookmarkable downloads. If we want to exist outside of steam we need to get rid of this expiring link bullshit, and make it easier for customers to browse and get games they have bought from us.
LET’S DO THIS! \:D/
Leaper★ prequel comic: Resisting the Nechrim
Posted: December 13, 2012 Filed under: Art, Leaper 4 Comments »
Spent today putting together this little comic, it shows the events right before the game begins, and shows off a little of the world 🙂
until I figure out a better way to present it, here are the links to the pages:
That’s all for now, sorry if you were expecting another snarky/ranty blog post 😛
Can Art be Games?
Posted: November 30, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized 102 Comments »The Musée de Louvre is a place in Paris. Every year over 8 million people visit the place, often to view art. Now, that’s not as many people as are currently subscribing to World of Warcraft or anything, but it’s still a lot. And people are beginning to wonder if art is beginning to have a similar cultural importance that games enjoy.
So, do pictures like Whistler’s Mother or that one with the dreary-farmer-couple have a place alongside classics like Final Fantasy 7 or thatgamecompany’s latest masterpiece ‘Journey’?
To tell the truth, I’m not very well versed in art, having spent most of my life dedicated to more serious pursuits such as skateboarding, playing computer games and hanging out on twitter. I had always assumed that ‘art’ was something for a different generation. So to get a better understanding I ordered an art from the internet, to give it a go.
What I got was a framed ‘print‘ of a painting (what that means is that it’s not actually the source painting, but a copy of it. Much like how the games you play rarely contain their source code). I’m told that there are many types of art, but this is by far the most popular.
“I had always assumed that ‘art’ was something for a different generation. So to get a better understanding I ordered an art from the internet, to give it a go.”
Unfortunately I had trouble soon after I unpacked the thing. The default display was kind of nice, a picture of a pretty landscape with children playing under a tree… but that was all there was to it! The screen was entirely frozen, unresponsive to touches and I couldn’t find any switches to turn the thing on. I thought perhaps the battery had run out but couldn’t find any cables to charge it with.
Clearly not a good start, I had wanted to get a good idea of art on my own, but ultimately I had to give in and call over my friend Emily for help.
Now reader, if you want to see your friend at their most frustrated, all you have to do is ask them to help you use art. “You just have to hang it on the wall, that’s all!” Emily tried to explain, but this was totally outside my range of experience. “But how do I interact with it?” I asked, “You don’t interact, you just look at it!”
Now I do like my friend Emily, but how was I supposed to know that? What came naturally to Emily was a chore for me, the art didn’t even come with any instructions or tutorial. It seems art is easy for people like Emily who grew up with it, but I fear regular folk like you and me will forever be out of touch.
Having situated the art on a wall in the living room, I asked Emily if there was a special way to look at it to make the art work. “No, you just look at it.” she explained, clearly as frustrated with the experience as I, “Like a TV?” I asked. The look on Emily’s face then became that look you get when you’re at risk of losing a friend, so I quickly said “Oh never-mind, I think I’ve got it figured out.” and stared at the lifeless picture, pretending it gave me a similar sense of emotion I got from actually exploring the beautiful landscapes that developers craft for their games.
After Emily left I checked on the internet and it turns out she was right, you really do just look at it, that’s all!
“pretending it gave me a similar sense of emotion I got from actually exploring the beautiful landscapes that developers craft for their games”
Where was the engagement-building interaction of games? Where was the sense of teamwork and community you get from multiplayer games? Where was the emotional investment you can only get from stories and characters that actually involve you, a real person?
I had no sense of accomplishment from looking at the art (hanging the thing on the wall didn’t even unlock an achievement!), and ultimately I didn’t feel like I had improved as a person. I mean, I see pretty pictures all the time so why would one more affect me the same way an engrossing game does?
I think if we inspect art, it certainly has its uses. I won’t deny that my wall looks more interesting now that I put an art on it… but does art compare to games? No.
Perhaps I’ll reconsider if some art comes along that could make me cry (like the part of Final Fantasy X-2 on the thunder plains where Yuna sung with a ghost murdered 1000 years ago, or Kingdom Hearts II when Roxas has to face his end and becomes forgotten by everyone he held dear). Ultimately though, I don’t think art could ever have the emotional impact that games do.
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This article thanks pretty much entirely to this.