A Sequel by Another Name [Gamer by Design]

I was out playing Super Contra on an arcade machine last week, and a non-gamer friend commented on how cool is it was that this game was side-scrolling, unlike that “other Contra” game he’d played on the Playstation, which just “didn’t feel like a Contra game.” After some investigation, I realized that he was talking about Neo Contra. I’ve written a few columns about the difference between video games and movies, and this conversation brought me back to that line of thinking…”What is a sequel in a movie, and what is it in a game? How do they differ?” In my mind, a movie sequel is theme and subject driven. For example, in the second Back to the Future, Marty goes to a totally different time zone, with some new tricks (flying cars and hover boards). In the fourth Star Wars, the much maligned Episode 1, we visit characters from the previous trilogy in a different time, but the through-line is the common fiction and character lineage. Those are both good ideas for a sequel (well yeah, maybe if the Star Wars ones had been executed well). They delve further into the subject matter of those worlds. For a video game, I think part of the issue is that video games always tend to follow movie models. And the issue with that, is that games have special needs that are unique to games, and nonexistent in movies. In the years before games, movies, TV, and radio were the main media of technological form. So it made sense in the early years of games to take a little of what movies do, a little of what software does, mix them in a bowl, and out comes a video game. However, I think time has shown that...

2D vs. 3D Games – We Don’t Need No Stinking 3rd Plane [Gamer by Design]...

If you follow the history of console video games, it has generally followed this (very) rough progression: Low resolution 2D games of the Atari and Commodore era Rich, colorful 2D experiences with Nintendo, Sega Genesis, etc. Early 3D with the N64 3D for ever and ever from then on, with increasing graphical detail But, we can add to the long list of disruptive changes made by iPhones and similar devices the title of “2D revamped.” We’ve seen iphone hits like Cut the Rope and Angry Birds make more money than some 3D console games that cost many times more to make. Most console shooters, like Call of Duty, cost above the 30 million mark to produce, and that game is the exception; most don’t recoup their budgets. We could go into a whole conversation about the market’s shift from console games to mobile devices, but that’s a whole ‘nother ball of wax. Today, let’s talk about some of the great aspects of 2D games, and why they persist and even thrive nowadays. Unmatched for jumping and platforming The best way to approach this is to consider some remakes of 2D games that were made 3D. For example, Bionic Commando. This game came out at about the same time as a visual refresh of the original Ninendo game. When the smoke cleared, people really liked the refresh in 2D, but were disappointed by the new shiny 3D version. Think about it. You have a game that’s based on grappling and swinging, then try to add 3D? By adding that 3rd dimension, there is the added complexity of aiming in the right direction to grapple. The second disadvantage of 3D here is visibility and obstruction. Even in a 3rd person 3D game (where you see the...

Behold, Ye Video Game Designer’s Rules of Grocery Store Parking [Gamer By Design]...

We’ve all heard about how video games are infiltrating everyday life. Infiltrating it to an almost annoyingly offensive level. After reading a few trade magazines with such articles, I started thinking about parts of life that already have video game style rules. Consider the deep, intricate rules that you don’t even notice anymore..for example, how to decide which way to go when you’re walking straight at someone on the sidewalk. You kind of make eye contact, you tend to indicate slightly which way you’re going, etc. The same set of inherent rules are common in most of the things we do in everyday life; who goes first at an intersection, whether you should fold clothes one by one, or sort first then fold, etc. That is what makes video game design a pretty natural thing to understand. The best designs are made of sets of rules. So after years of thinking that way, I came up with a set of rules to one thing that we all encounter, at least those of us who drive to get groceries: Where to park in a grocery store parking lot to avoid door dents. But mostly, I’m writing this to show how something that seems like common sense actually has some pretty specific rules. As video game designers, this is how we approach things like character AI behavior. We make rules out of systems that seem totally organic. And I guess, as you can see below, we tend to do this all the time, even with the most mundane things. So here we go, the rules to parking at the grocery store, in order to avoid dents! I’m a VIP Rule If you have a nice car, never ever park across two spots. This one sounds like...

Book Week: Psy Comm, and interview with the Author [Gamer by Design] [Book Week II]...

My regular readers know, I write about video game design, business, and sometimes the mobile app scene. For Book Week, I decided to read something equally nerdy. That would be the graphic novel Psy-Comm. I have the privilege of knowing the author, Tony Salvaggio. As you’ll see below, he is one of those mad scientist personalities. He is a member of two bands, an author, a video game artist, and if there is any time left, I’m sure he eats and sleeps like the rest of us. So its been one of my blogging goals to score an interview. As for Psy-Comm, this thing is a 188 page graphic novel. But it moves really fast. I think I read the whole thing in about 1.5 hours. Part of that is the quick plot movement, but part of it is that it’s drawn in a very cinematic style. The frames are large and action oriented, with some pages only having about one sentence of text. The experience is more like watching a movie sometimes. Here’s my quick summary, without spoilers. The Psy-Comms are a group of psychic troopers, who each have really unique powers. I’d say it’s like the Matrix meets Harry Potter meets X-Men. But there is an interesting socio-political commentary, in which war is entertainment, and the media is woven into the whole battlefield environment. Somehow, with all this grand fare, the book also has a really tight interpersonal story that deals with young people coping with the loss of their loved ones in wartime. I’m honestly very surprised this isn’t a movie.  I’d see it. To be honest, I’m not a big graphic novel fan, but this one grabbed me. So here we go, the interview with author Tony Salvaggio: Matt: Psy-Comm could...

iPhone 5: The Game Designer’s Perspective [Gamer by Design]

After all the talk about the iPhone 5 in this big week of Apple announcements, I thought it would be interesting to put my thoughts on paper. After all, I’ve been talking about it with my fellow game developers for about a week now. If you follow my blog posts, you know that I am an indie developer who spent the last year making Zig Zag Zombie, a puzzle game on Android, Mac, and iPhone. But like most mobile games, at this point, we have to really pay a lot of attention to the iPhone market, because it’s still where people download our game the most. That being said, the schedule and nature of hardware releases by Apple has a pretty profound effect on game designers. So I’ll talk about the basic points here. Changing resolutions and dimensions so often is un-Apple If you see in my previous posts about Apple products, you’ll know that I’ve given a pretty unbiased lover/hater account of Apple’s decisions to keep a limited amount of devices and prevent third party devices from using their OS. Well, in the last year, I’ve felt that some of the device releases have fragmented the line-up. One of the things designers love the most about making games for Apple devices is that  you can test on a limited amount of screen resolutions, yet reach a huge amount of people. So basically, the cost/time to test a game per devise vs. the potential sales on the marketplace are great. For Zig Zag Zombie, we made high resolution art (for an iPhone 4 retina display), and we were able to adjust the game slightly so it displayed well on iPhone4 screens, iPhone 3gs screens (because they are half the resolution but the same proportions),...

How iPhones have made all of our lives Better(worse) [Gamer by Design]

If you read my column on the reg, then you know I spend about half my waking hours designing iPhone games. Oh and I also use an iPhone for my PHONE. So basically there is almost always an iPhone in my hand. This is a sad state of affairs, considering the fact that I’m not an Apple fanboy. All kidding aside, I give the iPhone its due; it made GPS maps actually usable on a handheld for the first time, it created the App store and improved the whole industry of making games for phones. We could go on, but let’s complain, that’s more fun. So here it goes, the reasons why iPhones make my life worse. Texting While Driving I think texting while driving is super duper dangerous, and I’d advise you to never ever do it. But remember when I had my T9, old school texting phone? The one with 9 numeric keys? You could text with that thing with one hand like it was your job. And because it had tactile, physical keys, you could do it without looking. So though you shouldn’t text while driving, you could text and walk, while looking at where you were going. With iPhones, you have to look AND use both hands to text. So with the advance in tech, you lose some of the very mobile functionality of the more simple phones. Oh and we all have to look like chipmunks with a nut when we text now. And that’s just not sexy. People talking on that stupid white headphone Mic That’s really nice of Apple to include a headphone with a mic with all iPhones, but we need to issue a PSA: You’re not really  supposed to use it that way. It’s supposed to be...

Thine Commandments of Kickstarter for an Indie Video Game [Gamer by Design][Best of FaN]...

For my favorite post of the year for Fierce and Nerdy, I chose to re-publish my Kickstarter how-to. It was by far my most popular post, probably because there are not a lot of straightforward, honest articles of how to succeed in doing a Kickstarter for a video game (I know, because I searched for it before we did the campaign). By now is a success on the app store, and we’re thinking about the next thing. Time Flies! So I’m republishing it because it’s useful, unlike most of the things I write, which are usually half rant and half awkward jokes. Enjoy!  -Matt My little outfit, Part Time Evil, recently decided to do a Kickstarter to fund our indie game . Not the “I need money to live off for a year to make this thing” type of Kickstarter. Everyone on this project is employed in the day, so we raised enough for contractor pay, software, account to publish on iTunes, and all the other things that can really add up. So my point is, the project has zero budget. But as we all know, there’s no such thing as zero budget. That being said this article is something I’m writing so other designers can read it and get a leg up on doing a Kickstarter for a game. We were fortunate enough to succeed in getting the funding, which is not super common on Kickstarter. But it could have been easier, and we could have raised more money if we’d been on top of the following: Let’s just jump right in. What’s a Kickstarter This is a good topic to start with, because you may not know either.  Kickstarter is the worlds largest funding platform for projects. So there are things like crazy...

A Cup of Coffee Vs. An iPhone App: The New Pricing Model of Console Games [Game By Design]...

I always make the joke that people are so price-sensitive on iPhone games, that they think 2.99 is UBER expensive for a game, yet they buy cups of coffee for 6 dollars. Since I first started making that joke, we developers have been empowered with much better ways to make money, like in-app purchases. And in-app purchases have taken off. In fact, at the time of writing this, they comprise more money on the app store than actual game purchases! The app store has gotten to the point where volume sales, free to play, and ads have allowed developers to make money while the consumer doesn’t feel cheated. So how is all this innovation going to affect your old pal, the console game, otherwise known as “the stalwart of the 60 dollar price point.” Play-through time on games is always a focus at a game studio during the production process. Obviously it varies between genres, but for something like a First Person Shooter, the standard acceptable length is around 10 hours (at least in the last few years). For something mission-based, where areas of the game are reused over and over, like Borderlands, Grand Theft Auto, or Red Dead Redemption, it can be 30 hours to beat the game, and that’s not counting all the little bonus missions that they usually include. From an industry standpoint, it really comes down to art. There are a limited amount of locales the artists can create during the production time, so that’s why FPS games can tend to be shorter; the player generally runs through scenes quickly and doesn’t revisit the same locations. I like games of all shapes and sizes, but I really like short games. This is a personal preference thing. Even when I have...

Why the Video Game Awards are NOT the Oscars [Gamer by Design]

So what we’re gonna talk about today is, the eternal question of “Why don’t game awards carry the weight of the Oscars?” I’m gonna delve mostly into the content of the games, rather than the peripheral questions like the history of the Oscars, the budget of each show, etc. First of all, let’s get all the nit-picking out of the way. This is a column and not a 30 page dissertation. So in fairness to you, let’s assume these things: What are the Oscars: The Oscars aren’t perfect, and what we define as a “good” movie award show also differs from person to person. Some people think they’re too commercialized, some think the opposite. So let’s assume the most neutral point of view: The Oscars reward their industry as a whole in various categories, and their top awards are for commercialized movies that have what the industry considers great artistic achievement. Which game Awards Most game awards honor the same group of games, and I personally like the Developers Choice Awards the best, but we are gonna examine the Video Game Awards because they are by far the most widely-known. This year’s Game of the Year Game of the year this year, as listed by Spike: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Batman: Arkham City The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword Portal 2 Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception What do we see here?  All blockbusters, in the biggest most blockbusting sense of the word. I’ve worked on blockbusters from time to time, and most of my friends do (if you read my column, you saw my earlier interview of Red Dead designer Danny Bulla). So before we get into the details, how about this next part… I love the Fast and the Furious Yes I just...

Dev Blog (or How to Make a Game) Part 1: Misconceptions [Gamer By Design]...

This here is gonna be one of my most spontaneous blog articles. I’ve been thinking about doing a how-to of games, but didn’t know where to start. Then today I got inspired by a lot of facebook traffic about marketing-driven games vs indie games and the creative process. This traffic was all spurned by a really well written article by Josh here that I felt went great as a companion to my first article in the series “Why you should love/hate Apple.” The indirect benefits/drawbacks of the Apple model had me thinking that a great place to start is the “common misconceptions” of what happens when you make a game. Stuff that’s not obvious from the outside. A lot of time it is also the dirty work. The un-fun stuff. So You’re Gonna Make a WHOLE game? You film dudes are gonna here something familiar. “Everyone’s a director.”  That’s the film saying, right?  Well in games, everyone is a designer. Here are all the people who think they are better designers than the best designers: Programmers Pimple faced 17 year olds That kid fresh out of school in his first design job The dude bagging groceries at the store Dogs Cats Single-Celled Organisms Aliens that are spying on us and pirating our games from another galaxy So that’s everyone right?  If you’re gonna be a designer, you have to really learn to accept that. The misconception is that designers make game ideas, characters and stories. Well some of that is true. We do that stuff. The misconception is that outsiders, even people in the game industry who haven’t designed an entire game, think that’s all we do. If that were the case, then yes, it would be all kitties and happiness and GREAT GAME...

Why you should be an Apple Fan/Hater: Part 1, the Walled Garden [Gamer by Design]...

In the nerd and tech communities, we pretty much argue every day about why Apple is horrible or perfect. The one thing we all agree upon is that, just like politics, Apple is polarizing. Let’s gab about the very high level concepts of the debate. Walled Garden A few of the practices of Apple are referred to as the “walled garden.” I like the term ’cause the Secret Garden is one of my favorite musicals (Mandy Patinkin, he’s like butter!). But I digress. What the term means is that a lot of the elements are controlled tightly. For example, to publish an app on an iPhone, you must go through the Apple app approval process. On the contrary, Android has several app stores, and some of them have no strict approval process at all. In short: No apps (unless you have a hacked phone) run on iPhones unless Apple approves them. Hater: You are a tech guy and think that the “walled garden,” un-customizable vault of the app store hinders the ability of developers and individuals to write programs, install custom programs, and use the device for other purposes like teathering to laptops (giving a laptop internet through the phones connection) and shopping on other app stores. Also, if you have your music and other content on an Apple device, it can be hard to move it somewhere else, so you kind of become stuck. This is especially true of less tech savvy peeps. Most of these people have chosen Android for that reason. Android allows your phone to be your phone. If you are a rookie, you can follow the rules and keep it in somewhat factory condition. If you are super tech in nature, you can hack the crap out of it...

Immersion: The rule of Opposites [Gamer By Design]

The word “immersion” is thrown about every single day at video game companies and schools. In the industry, it basically means the idea of making a player feel as if they’re part of the experience (or simulation). In layman’s terms, it means they forget that they’re playing a game and “become” the character. They forget they are sitting in a living room. This is similar to watching a good film or play; you are entertained enough to be transported to another place. So here, in the mini-rant of the month, I’m gonna talk about two very broken techniques of immersion and why they don’t work. Number One, The Mute Lead I’ve worked on a few games in which it was decided that we would have a mute lead. The intent: This is intended to avoid forcing the voice upon the character you control, thus allowing you to be immersed as the character. The result: The result of this is that it’s jarring. Humans are accustomed to interactions, and to have the star of the show not talking makes them seem passive and strange. We’ll talk about the famous Holodeck from Star Trek fame below, but here’s the point. Unless you are actually walking around, touching things, and talking to people, you aren’t gonna somehow identify with that character because he doesn’t talk. This underestimates humans and all the complexities of their ability to communicate. It underestimates our emotional sensitivity to the ideas of identity and character. On the other hand, if you create a really interesting, well-wrought character as the lead, the player may identify with them because they share personality traits, because they want to be heroic or brash like that person, or because they think they’re funny. See what I mean? People...

Film is Dead [Gamer by Design] for Book Week

If you read my column on the regular, you probably know that it’s a video game industry look at games. So with that being said, it was an interesting challenge to keep it game related during book week. So I decided to talk about a topic that, in this day and age of kindles and nooks and iPads, I think about a lot. And that topic is the idea that [whatever new hot technology] is killing [whatever established art]. When movies came out, everyone said theatre is dead. Now with video games making billions of dollars, people theorize that they will kill film or that they will merge to form a sort of interactive film. My opinion on that stuff is: no. In order to find some decent research on it, I polled a number of friends who work in relevant fields. I’ll use first names only to prevent them from being spammed, but they are: Pedro, guitarist Marta, actress John, Theatre director and educator Deborah, Theatre director and author What Can’t be faked? There’s this weird question I think about sometimes. It’s more of a hypothetical, as I don’t really believe it. But interesting, nonetheless. Why do people still play guitar? Since we have the ability to emulate the sounds, at least for studio work, why not just fake it. Even though we can’t copy the exact nuances of a musician, we will be able to within 5 years, right? I was quickly corrected by Pedro: “the premise of the sound being faked in five years is actually ridiculous. It’s like saying human emotion will be perfectly faked in five years.” I made the connection (since I have a theatre background I needed to find an analogy in my field), that faking a...

Why You Should Never Make a First Person Shooter [Gamer by Design]

First of all, what is a First Person Shooter? It is a game in first person (as in, you are the camera, like in a movie where you see a shot of someone running through the forest from their POV), and it involves them shooting. So you have a camera POV and usually a gun is in that view somewhere. Oh and one more thing: Because the core audience of FPS games are young boys who grow up to make more games for their childhood selves, the top sellers are almost always about aliens and/or space marines. Some day we will look back nostalgically at the alien/space marine era of subject matter in the way film people look back at the day when you went to the theatre to see a train coming at the screen. But we’re not at that day yet. You may see a flying car first. That being said, at our current level of technology, FPS’s are a very fun, proven game type that we’ve gotten really good at making. That is tempting to a lot of game designers to want to join the fray. But I’m about to rant a little bit about why you may not want to do that, if you want to succeed. So here we go…Take my mostly unresearched stats with a grain of salt. Your 1.0 can’t compete with their 3.1 A lot of us game developers have worked at studios that had goals of competing with Halo and beating it. Here’s why this is a bad idea: 1.  Game schedules are notoriously unrealistic, even if you had a crap load of money. The only way you can compete with the polish, the fun, and the scope of a Call of Duty or Halo,...

Then S%#t Goes Boom! Movies vs Video Games [Designing Gamer]

A lot of F and N readers are from film and literary nerdship, so here comes a little helping of cross-cultural columnizing. Games and Movies have shared a sort of awfully awkward sisterhood since the early eighties. We could talk about their first public spat when the ET movie became a classic and…the ET game famously infamously found its way into a landfill somewhere in the desert, because so many units of it were un-bought, returned, and generally avoided. Games and movies made a lukewarm truce when James Bond’s Goldeneye became a hit, and hence the poster child for why to make a movie-based game, “we really should make a game for Comic Book Movie 19, remember Goldeneye? It was good.” Or we could talk about all those Uwe Boll Movies… But we aren’t doing that today. Today we’re gonna over-simplify a really complicated thing. The question that most film people ask me:  What’s the difference between making a movie and making a game? You know I hate when people ask that. How do games get greenlit? The super duper simplified version. Just like the pictures, there are lots of types of games that all have different money paths. There’s a term in the industry called a AAA (“Triple A”, like the roadside towing thing) game. I’ve seen game designers debate this over hot pockets in the studio kitchen for hours on end, so let’s keep it simple; it’s the game version of a blockbuster. It’s a big budget game. Things go boom. Pretty vistas. Lots of other things that costs millions of dollars. These type of games are usually rained down from biz/marketing of a publisher. I said usually. (Please game friends, don’t email me about Valve.)  Publishers are the gods of this...

Inside Secrets of Video Game Designer, Danny Bulla [Gamer by Design]

Designing Gamer Interview Series: Life of a Game Designer Today I sat down with designer Danny Bulla. Danny Bulla cut his teeth at Full Sail University’s Game Design and Development program. Upon graduation, he teleported to the deep heart of Texas to work at Midway Austin on titles like Blacksite: Area 51. He then warp-zoned over to Rockstar San Diego to make a little game called Red Dead Redemption. After a couple years, he respawned at the legendary Bungie Studios in Seattle, WA. He and I worked together way back in the day and we became close friends. That happens a lot with game developers. In the midst of typically crazy hours at work, you see those people more than your spouse, your momma, the inside of your eyelids, etc.  Naturally,  I tried to pull those strings to get him to tell me some secrets of his current employer, the world-famous Bungie, creators of Halo. I know you’ve heard of that game, my non-gamer readers.  Keep reading to find out if we got the dirt. You were at Midway, you worked on Red Dead Redemption at Rockstar, and now you’re at Bungie. Are you at the point in your career where you feel like you’re pursuing a genre? No I really don’t think that’s true. I think to further yourself as a designer, you have to pursue genres you’ve never worked on. I think I still have time to learn a lot before I make that kind of decision. The cool thing is that new genres keep coming out now. It gives people like you and me more options. So in that vein, a lot of people in the audience may want to know what we do. A lot of people think we go in to...

Two Buttons OR Redefining the Casual Gamer [Designing Gamer]

The number one thing people tell me when they find out I design video games: “There are too many buttons now. I liked Mario Better. I liked the two buttons on Nintendo.” Two buttons, huh? Yeah, the Super Mario Brothers games of the 1980s were played on a controller that (besides the control pad) had two primary buttons. If you’ve said “I liked two buttons,” are you banished to the non-gamer front of the school bus while the cool Xbox players sit in the back?  Actually, not at all. You are driving the current rebirth of the game industry. In the old days, it was really easy to define who was a hardcore gamer, and who was a casual player (or non gamer). Let’s talk about how, in 2011, these lines are hard to define. Pretty little well-defined boxes Marketing people play a big part in defining things. Marketing people love terms and little clean boxes in which to place products. I imagine them as little kids that neatly kept their gravy from mixing with their cranberry sauce on Thanksgiving. Lest they throw that fancy plate at grandma. They describe games with phrases like, “this is a casual game that is socially networked.” If you said Two Buttons, marketing people at game companies call you a non-gamer, or a casual player. It’s not that simple. But they hate gravy-flavored cranberry sauce. Traditional definitions say that a casual gamer is someone who plays games that are quick in playtime, easy to pick up and play. Hardcore gamers play console games, or games that have a high learning curve and a high investment of time. It gets messy Here’s how modern games make things so messy. Traditionally, a casual gamer plays phone games or web games....