Archive for October, 2009
Design Roundup #2
Posted by The Management in design on October 30, 2009
Things are really hectic here, so it’s a perfect time to take the easy way out by posting some more links!
- Dunbar, Altruistic Punishment, and Meta-Moderation – A really interesting article with some hard-data on social cooperation and how to encourage and maintain it at various scales.
- No More Wrong Turns – A great overview of the tools that any level designer should have in his/her toolbox.
- Imaginary Friends – MMOs might already serve as stand-ins for many real-world social interactions, but here’s why parasocial interactions can be very important for single player games (especially dating sims and titles with episodic content).
What a Twist!
Posted by The Management in writing on October 23, 2009
Fiction writers usually despise lists such as “The top 50 character archetypes!” The reason for this is that even the most meticulously pre-planned stories begin in the magical land of the imagination and continue to evolve until they’re completed. Appending these tales with stock concepts doesn’t really enhance them, and the end results often resemble poorly written soap operas.
In the spirit of poking a bit of fun at such things, here’s Aaron Diaz‘s 42 Essential 3rd Act Twists.
The "unreliable reader" and "stolen identity not worth it" are two of my favourites.
Also, for a more videogame-centric list of what keeps popping up in our medium, check out TVTropes’ videogame section.
9000 BC, Castle Defense Games and Touch Controls
Posted by The Management in design on October 10, 2009
A few days ago I bought 9000 BC on a lark. It looked colourful and vibrant, and I thought it was a great idea to style the game after cave paintings. It was also only $0.99, so I figured what the hell?
As it turns out, 9000 BC is yet another entry in a slew of iPhone “Castle Defense” titles. This subgenre of a subgenre is fairly simple in concept: the player’s avatar stands on one side of the screen while swarms of enemies make a bee-line for him/her/it from the other side. The avatar is immobile, but can launch various attacks at his foes, and every so often upgrades become available for purchase.
I do love the cave-painting art style.
9000 BC uses this exact same formula with a few little twists (such as being able to throw dead bodies into a volcano as sacrificial offerings), but ultimately it’s not a very fun game. The reason for this is its interface.
Castle Defense games require the player to constantly interact with mobile objects that appear on virtually all parts of the screen. With a touch-based system, this means that the screen is often obscured by the player’s own hand. What makes this even worse in 9000 BC (at least for right-handed individuals) is that the main form of attack requires the player to touch his avatar — who stands on the left side of the screen — and slide his finger in the direction of an enemy. This effectively covers most of the screen, and, combined with the inherent lack of precision when aiming, makes for a hectic and unsatisfying experience.
It doesn't actually get quite this crazy in the game.
Letting the player choose his side (or simply flipping to a vertical orientation so enemies come in from the top) would’ve helped, but it wouldn’t have solved the problem altogether. These types of games work fine as online Flash titles, but they’re not well suited to being directly ported to the iPhone.
Mouse-based controls offer pixel-perfect precision and hardly ever obscure anything due to small cursor sizes. Styluses aren’t quite as accurate, but they’re close, and only their thin shafts cover the screen. With pure touch-based interfaces, though, that fine level of precision is lost and the user’s hands often get in the way.
These are all fairly straight-forward points, but, curiously, they’re often ignored by iPhone developers. It’s still a young and evolving platform, though, so hopefully these types issues will become rarer in the future.
The Art of Zeno Clash
Posted by The Management in art on October 4, 2009
When it comes to in-game assets, Zeno Clash takes the opposite approach of what you’d expect from a small studio. The game is absolutely packed with art resources, and very few of them are re-used. It’s all pretty stylish, too.
Nice eyepatch.
In various interviews, its creators mentioned The Dark Crystal and the works of Hieronymus Bosch and John Blanche as inspirations, and it’s easy to see why. The Dark Crystal was packed with wondrous locations and anthropomorphic characters, Hieronymus Bosch was famous for his fantastically twisted paintings, and Johan Blanche had that Heavy Metal edge. The end result is a style that reminds me of various late-80s Belgian comic books I used to read as a kid; the palette is varied and colourful, but the world appears dangerous and cobbled together.
It all makes for some pretty pictures.
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About
Hi, my name’s Radek Koncewicz, and I'm the Creative Lead of Incubator Games, a small development studio I started with a few former coworkers.
I think a lot about videogames, and when I find the time, I post those thoughts here on this blog.
