Blog - Technical Difficulties
Sunday, April 18, 2010Haven't posted here in a while because I was still deciding what to do about my blog here, as it is one affected by Blogger's decision to cease FTP support.
I thought I already would not be able to post, but it turns out they extended the deadline. However, I have been having trouble posting anything, but will try to persevere and get this notice out, at the very least...
Hopefully I can get these issues sorted soon so I can keep this blog going. posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 11:02 AM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - GDC 2010
Monday, March 8, 2010This morning I'm flying out to San Fransisco for this year's GDC!
Hope to see some of you there...
Labels: GDC
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 12:27 AM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Ada Lovelace Day 2010
Friday, February 26, 2010Ada Lovelace day is coming up on March 24th!
If you feel so inspired, please join in the pledge to write a blog post about a woman in science or technology on that day.
I was proud to participate last year (see the Ada Lovelace Day tag to hunt down the two blog posts that resulted from last year).
I really encourage others to follow.
I haven't yet thought of who I'll write about this year (not for the lack of awesome game dev women I know, though!) ...so I figured I'd at least chip in with helping get the word out.
And if it helps, Rhoulette of the FragDolls recently posted a great list of Game Industry Women to Know, if you need a good place to start...
Labels: Ada Lovelace Day
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 10:47 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - The Fans
Wednesday, February 24, 2010After the announcement of the game I'm working on, tonight I was greeted with something great: got passed a link with fans of the first game reacting to the news of the sequel coming out.
The kids are so excited. It's very inspiring. Perfect motivation for making it through the final grind of shipping a game!
Honestly, like most game developers, I make games because I love to make them and can't see myself doing anything else with my life. But having a big base of fans excited for the release of a title I'm working on is altogether new to me, and not something I had really given any thought to before. That's not entirely true, I suppose. I knew the IP was very popular, and that has been encouragement for me to push to make this game the best I can, yes. I knew this game would be highly anticipated by a lot of kids, some of whom are fanatically devoted to the world and characters. But at the same time, that same push was always more about the pride I always take in my work. I'm something of a perfectionist. Not to mention I'm still new to the industry and trying to build up my cred by doing great work on notable titles.
Meanwhile, comparatively, when you are a student pretty much nobody is that excited to see what you end up making. Your only fans are your friends, and even they aren't usually that excited by anything you're doing unless you end up making something really cool -- and then that's only after the fact.
Before that point? People may be interested to know what you're working on, but rarely is anyone what I could call "excited" by it unless you're doing something truly groundbreaking.
So reading all these comments from fans posting how excited they are to see what we've made -- well, I feel all warm and gooey inside now. A huge number of kids are waiting to see our game, and that feels wonderful.
Something to think about fondly as I go back to all the more frustrating parts of shipping a game... to see it through, and make it the best I can. For me AND for them. posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 9:46 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Baby's First Titles...
Friday, February 19, 2010I admittedly haven't been posting here too frequently. I've been... busy.
Well, guess what?
The game I've been working on for months now was just announced.
So, that's what's been eating up my time. :)
Oh, and while I'm at it I suppose I should point out that before that game, I worked on Imagine Gymnast, out later in March.
Never was quite sure when that got announced, hence why I hadn't posted anything about it until now. Which is a shame, since I'm particularly proud of my work on that one. But hey, better late than never, right?
So there you have it, my first titles as a professional game designer. Aww... posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 12:21 AM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Hooray! I'm a Resource!
Thursday, February 11, 2010Wow, this blog got listed in a list of 100+ Resources for Video Game Professionals.
I'm honored to be placed on the list next to so many great sites, particularly since I am myself only fairly recently a video game professional and still rather inexperienced. I have read many of the sites on that list in my journey to get where I am now, and so It's incredibly cool to be named among them in a list like this. posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 10:05 AM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Global Game Jam 2010: The Aftermath...
Sunday, January 31, 2010Wow, that was a trip. Global Game Jam was awesome.
Liked it last year, but this one was definitely more fun than last time -- not doing code is much less stressful. ;) But more than that, I'm super proud of the game my team developed!
Check it out:
The Sun Always Lies
Not that the Global Game Jam is meant to be competitive, but the Albany location decided to have people vote on the best game anyway, and had awards to give out.
...And "The Sun Always Lies" won 3 awards!
Yay! I'm honored!
Labels: awards, global game jam, The Sun Always Lies
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 7:16 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Global Game Jam 2010
I'm once again participating in the global game jam.
That's why I'm awake at 2:45 am, on my computer... ;)
I'm extremely excited about how the game my team is developing is coming along. Will post a link here when it's over!
Labels: global game jam
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 2:45 AM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - More Fun With Structures: Video Game Mashups
Monday, January 25, 2010While I'm already still in the swing of talking about DJ Hero...
That game has gotten me all the more interested in the idea of mashups (which I was already interested in, being a electronic music-y geek).
It's gotten me thinking about the video game equivalent to the musical trend... What would a video game mashup be like?
You could first consider that a lot of games are pitched with the "It's like a cross between Game A and Game B!" technique -- Age of Empires, for example, was pitched as "Warcraft meets Civilization." But while it's true that a mashup is a combination of two different songs mixed together, it's a much more literal crossing -- a song could be pitched that's LIKE a mix of Song A and Song B, but unless it literally is a mix of those two recordings, it's not a mashup.
So a game mashup would actually have to not just be similar to two games -- it has to actually be built out of something tangible from each of the two games.
A few games spring to mind as possible video game mashups already--
JoustPong is a game I've heard of (homebrew game for Atari 2600, and I think versions exist online as well in Java) that is basically Pong, only instead of paddles, each player controls one of the bird-riders from Joust. That certainly fits the mold of what I'm describing -- the art is literally ripped from both Pong and Joust... and mechanics as well (instead of simply moving your paddle up and down... you flap your bird's wings to travel up to hit the ball!) to make a game that uses very recognizable and tangible elements from each game to make a new experience.
I've also mentioned ROM CHECK FAIL before in previous entries, and that's another game you could call a video game mashup -- it mixes together more than just two games, but, again, both art assets and mechanics are borrowed and mashed together to form some really crazy stuff that's different than any one of the games by itself.
And both of those examples, as I can only assume, use the art assets from the games they draw from without permission -- which I feel is important to it's status as the video game equivalent of a mashup. The mashup phenomenon seems in part driven by anti-RIAA sentiments and some mashup artists have come under legal fire for their unlicensed use of samples, while others have somehow avoided the heat. Either way-- I feel that the frequent use of unlicensed samples is an important part of the phenomenon of mashups, and so find it interesting to see that tradition manifest in the video game equivalent with use of art assets as well as sound effects/music.
But-- one thing that struck me after I thought all of the above is that the only part of anything that I've said so far which is strictly relevant to video games is the mashing-up of game mechanics-- for example, the fact that JoustPong combines the flapping movement mechanic of Joust with the rules of Pong.
And that's fine-- I'm glad to see interactivity making it's way into video game mashup-ness, but couldn't it be pushed further? All of the mashing-up as it were was all done by the designers, not the players, after all...
So, I'm considering now the possibility of a game that lets players mashup the game(s) themselves! Just as a mashup artist may decide which element of what song to mix in when... the player might decide which element of what game to employ at one time... maybe just as a creative choice, but the choice could also be a strategic one as well!
What if the game in question was like ROM CHECK FAIL only the PLAYER got to decide when to change into one of the game avatars, and which one to change into -- not the game.
Enemy goombas approaching? Mario can step on their heads! But the ship from Defender can hover and ground level and shoot them in the face! ...and with those Asteroids coming down from the skies, being a space ship might be the better bet. Then again, if you could only reach that Power Pill in time, Pac Man could just eat everything on the screen... but can you take that risk? posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 8:24 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Reflections on DJ Hero -- Music Games aren't Dying, They Just Forgot Who They Are
Friday, January 22, 2010I have read about how sales are down on the music-game-with-plastic-instruments game genre as a whole. That they haven't been meeting sales expectations. I've heard cries that the genre is waning. Dying out. DJ Hero is one of those titles that just wasn't meeting sales expectations (despite Activision now boasting that it's generated more sales than any other new IP this year, ironically... although it seems that was in terms of revenue, not copies sold.)
Playing DJ Hero, though, I get the feeling that the problem isn't that the genre isn't dying-- the genre has just forgotten who it is. Or, more accurately, it forgot what made it hot in the first place.
I've mentioned many times here before that I'm a huge fan of Harmonix's first game, Frequency which is also a DJ game in a sense but in far more abstract terms. But Frequency and it's sequel were never the successes that their later game Guitar Hero was... Guitar Hero was the game that REALLY kick started the recent craze in music games, despite the fact that they've been around for quite a while now. And comparing the two games, it's not hard to see why. I think people at Harmonix would be the first to admit all the things that Frequency does that make it no where near the commercial and popular success that their later games have been. And I say this saying that I actually like Frequency BETTER than I like Guitar Hero -- that doesn't stop me from viewing it's flaws critically and admitting that it's not nearly as accessible of a game.
Playing DJ Hero, and the few times I've been able to play Activision's contributions to the Guitar Hero franchise as well, makes me wonder if the developers of the game really took the time to look back into the past and see the paradigm shifts that happened at Harmonix to take them from Frequency to their smash hit Guitar Hero (and it's continued legacy in Rock Band).
I say this because playing DJ Hero gives me the feeling that it's falling into all the same traps as Frequency. And as the Guitar Hero series progressed post-Harmonix, they just got harder and harder... and I stopped finding them less fun as a result.
Two things really made the initial Guitar Hero blast off in a rocket of success:
First, it was super-accessible. The music itself was, for one thing -- rock music is more generally popular and accessible than the stuff in Frequency, and they had enough flavors of it to more or less satisfy everyone. But also there's the interface -- the interface of Frequency/Amplitude is a big scary octagon of doom which intimidates the hell out of people who have never experienced the game before. A friend of mine watched me play Frequency for 20 minutes straight and said "I still have NO idea what's going on." But Guitar Hero? Pretty straightforward.
Second, it made you feel like a rock star. You could pick up the controller and after you get the hang of it after a couple songs, you're really rocking out. It's easy to get all stupid getting into character with friends and trying to look your most badass while shredding...
Frequency, although it got you into a real groove sometimes... and sometimes you'd pull off something impossibly hard in the game and feel a bit like a legend... was in the end too abstract to really make you feel like a rock star in any capacity.
So-- DJ Hero. When I played it, I initially jumped into playing it on medium. I guess I knew that it was going to be a different experience and would probably be lost jumping straight into expert mode... but cocky enough about my skills at other rhythm games to swallow my pride and try easy mode.
So, starting on medium difficulty-- I was immediately overwhelmed. On MEDIUM.
Oh sure, I got the hang of it eventually, and beat the whole game on medium... but initially it left me very flustered. I've now gotten used to where the controls on the mixer are located, but first starting, I'd be watching the screen and groping-- nay, flailing, trying to find them while keeping my focus on the screen.
Feel like a rock star DJ I certainly did NOT.
Even now, having beaten all of the hardest songs in the game on medium... I still don't think there's too many songs easy enough that I could properly show-boat and act like a cocky pro DJ if friends were over to play it as a party game. ...on medium.
I eventually decided though that it was unfair that I was judging the game in this way by medium difficulty mode, and went back to try the others. I take some of it back now. For example, beginner mode can't help but be too easy for anyone but the person who has never played a single rhythm game in their life before, and are hopelessly uncoordinated. So, accessibility as far as difficulty goes? I'll give it to them after all.
And having played through some songs on all difficulty levels now I'll admit that there actually is a really decent curve of difficulty between all the different difficulty modes. I can't think of a better way than they did it. But... it still doesn't feel quite right to me. But as I can't admittedly think of a way it could be better -- sure, you win this round, DJ Hero.
I've since, btw, jumped into playing Expert mode now, and at first I thought it was actually pretty cool -- terrifyingly difficult, but it's interesting that it's far more accurate to real turntablism than the rest of the game, and the challenge of actually having to scratch in the right directions is kind of fun.
(...But those damn peak spikes! WTF ARE THOSE?! They are just annoying as hell, impossible to juggle on top of everything else and are entirely unlike anything a DJ does ever!! Again, W-T-F?! ...there, got it out of my system... sorry)
However, all that said, there's still a problem -- the interface. At first it seems simple -- 3 note track. Not bad! But as the game goes on, it adds more and more things that happen to that track-- the crossfader that splits the track, the different kinds of scratch portions, the sample-playing sections, the dial-tuning bits and the peaks...
If you hadn't played or seen the tutorials, you'd have NO IDEA what's going on!
Guitar Hero you could easily play without a tutorial, but I can't imagine anyone playing most of the songs in DJ Hero without having seen the tutorials, especially the higher the difficulty modes. Really hurts the game as far as being pick-up-and-play at a party -- which is what made Guitar Hero explode in popularity.
And, furthermore, the problem with all those things that clutter up the track is that all that all of those things are entirely different actions you have to perform!
Here, let's go back and look at something...
Frequency had quite a few actions possible:
-hit beats
-switch tracks
-deploy powerups
-scratch/play samples (when available)
-play with the axe (when available)
Guitar Hero?
-hit notes, sometimes chords
-strum (basically always done at the same time as the hitting of notes, so it's almost only really one action, and not two)
-deploy star power.
5 vs 3.
And... which one of those two was the more accessible, hugely selling game again?
DJ Hero's list...
-hit beats, sometimes 'chords' of them at the same time
-crossfading to the left or the right with the crossfader
-scratching, sometimes freestyle, sometimes in more specific discrete directions
-tuning the audio with the effects dial knob
-deploying 'euphoria' (read: star power) with a button on the mixer for that
-spinning back the platter to rewind the track (when available)
-hitting peak spikes with the crossfader
7. Woah.
(Isn't the limit to how many things a person can even juggle in their head... 7 things? HMM...)
Note also that the game often has you doing some completely ridiculous juggling of things that are on completely different controls!
Sometimes I swear it seems like there's more things available for you to do at a time than is physically possible with only two hands.
Again, feeling like a rock star, I did not. I just felt incompetent.
Admittedly, the difficulty level you're on does determine how many of those features you'll see or have to use (thank god). So, put Grandma on beginner mode and all she'll have to do is hit one button and freestyle scratch -- not bad. Easy mode, best as I could tell (didn't play too many songs on it) adds all three buttons. So in some ways it still does beat Frequency's list, if you're playing on a low enough difficulty mode.
But I can't see myself ever 5-starring more than the first 4 tracks on expert mode. Thanks for making me feel like a loser, game.
And since even on medium, I find most songs too difficult to show-boat so I can feel like a rock star... the game just doesn't make as good of a party game as even Guitar Hero, let alone the new "band" games out these days...
At least DJ Hero provides a 2 player mode -- a nice attempt. But I don't think it's enough to make it work as a party game, and so it'll never be the success that Guitar Hero was.
But after all that criticism of DJ Hero -- the game certainly isn't awful. If I had worked on it, I'd be pretty damn proud. The game design may not be as polished as it should be -- but the game as a whole certainly is! Some of the mashups are really awesome, and there's not too many song/levels I straight up dislike -- the overall quality of the tunes available are pretty good. I totally love the spinback-rewind powerup -- time rewinding in a Guitar Hero style game is really interesting and actually leads to at least some strategy (something the rhythm game genre generally sorely lacks). The game has certainly kept me playing it, and nothing BUT it (due to the fact I AM in crunch right now so not really much free time for gaming...) for a week now. So kudos, Activision.
But yes-- that said, I can't lie to you either-- the game's got some real issues too.
But hey, nobody's perfect. I can tell you a million things wrong with my games...
Labels: design, DJ games, Frequency, game design, music
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 10:30 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - The Similarities Between a DJ and a Game Designer
Wednesday, January 20, 2010After making my weekly design challenge game Warm-Up DJ a year ago, I had thought it would be fitting to discuss some of the interesting crossovers between the art of DJing and the art of game design.
This essay got a bit lost in the mix though and so I'm only wrapping it up just now.
Thought it was a fitting addition for my DJs and Games theme week...
So here you are -- How DJs are like Game Designers (and vice versa):
In both disciplines, one creates an experience, largely a "fun" one, for the participants. Specific decisions are made which are used to try and establish the right mood and pacing.
In both cases, the goal is immersion. A game designer keeps players immersed in a game and a DJ keeps players immersed in dancing.
If people don't get immersed in a game, they won't tell their friends about it, and the game won't get played.
For a DJ, immersion is just as critical. Some rare exceptions aside, people just won't dance unless there's already people dancing. Dancing by yourself is strange and embarrassing, but if everyone is doing it and you can hide inside the crowd, and have fun.
So, just like how a game needs a good hook, a DJ needs to find the hooks that get his audience to join the dance floor. In this case, it's finding just the right song to get that first group excited to dance. Here, however, is one of the differences: they say a game should be fun within the first 5 minutes, but when it comes to dancing, people don't want to dance within the first 5 minutes of arriving at the club. The DJ must wait for her moment to strike, but when that time comes, she needs a hook just the same.
Just as there are forces that break immersion in a game, giving players excuses to break away from the game at times the designer may not desire, there are similar forces at play for a DJ to overcome. For example, people will often decide to stop dancing "as soon as this song is over."
The good DJ has then in his toolbox various techniques for manipulating the dancer to continue beyond this point. Artful mixing can blur the lines between songs to the point where the transition may go unnoticed, and if someone didn't realize the song changed, then they missed their excuse to leave.
Similarly, immersion can be built with other techniques relevant to the game designer.
Consider player goals, or, in this case, dancer goals. Are they just there to have fun? There's many layers to the fun-factor of dancing, and one of those layers is in dancing's sex appeal. Many of the people who enter a club are only there because they're looking for a mate. In such cases, emotional immersion matters, and just as a game designer can build tension, one form that a DJ can craft is sexual tension. It's no accident a lot of dance music have suggestive if not blatantly sexual lyrics.
On the most basic level, a classic DJ technique is to attract women to the dance floor first, because men generally only dance to find women. Once the gender mix has been established, it's easy to stir into a hormonal froth with some well selected music.
This leads to player-created stories...
A big source of fun in games as well as dance.
After a night of dancing, you generally have a story or two to tell your friends, or share if you were with them at the club. Just like how you can tell people of your zanier exploits in GTA4, flipping cars and what have you, you can tell people of the fun you had at the club last night, and that hottie you danced with, etc.
Finally, just as the game designer can use the tools of game design to create game experiences that are not the typical game fare of "fun" (for example, in many art games or serious games, which attempt to use mechanics to communicate or persuade beyond merely entertaining) --the DJ can and often does select music to make people stop dancing, and even stop having fun. Sometimes it is for pacing -- to get people off the dance floor temporarily to give them a rest before you hook them back in later as opposed to dancing them until they're so exhausted they're done for the night. It is especially true when the club needs to close and you have to get people out of there -- nothing works better than playing some truly irritating music. Or, for the more subtle, simply winding slowly back down in mood and tempo of the songs you select can signal people to wrap it up and head home.
As a DJ I have done both of these many times. You can be as blatant as you want with the the most truly awful samplings of your collection, or go for a gradually, subtly increasing threshold of irritation so that your crowd doesn't even consciously realize why they want to leave -- they just do. A combination of the the above methods works especially well.
Alternatively, you could eschew that whole technique entirely, and end with a bang so climactic people know their night is over, and leave with a rush of feeling.
Further, if game design is a process of iteration, DJing could also be seen as an iterative process: you play a song, see the results on the 'players', try a different song, observe the reaction to this new song, etc.
Now, some have said designing games is like a game in it's own right. Well, consider this entry all the more support for my entry yesterday, then. If DJing is like game design which is like a game -- DJing is like a game.
It should be a game.
...But DJ Hero, sadly, is not that game.
Labels: DJ games
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 8:30 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - DJ Games part 2 (Bonus Content!)
Tuesday, January 19, 2010Since that previous entry was already getting too lengthy, I decided to add this little addition in a new post instead. I feel it is necessary, because it's amusing and geeky:
While trying to formulate the thoughts that went into writing that prior entry, I explained it to one of my game developer friends using the pirates vs. ninjas debate that forever rages on the internet.
Turntablism is the pirate, and DJing (as I define it) is the ninja.
Turntablism, much like a pirate, is flashy, cool, and cocky-- Pirates were the rock stars of their day, and true turntablists are simply stunning.
So, it's easy to see why DJ Hero and your average person are drawn in to the allure of turntablism...
...but true DJing is like a ninja -- you don't even notice it's there until it's already done it's terrible work on you. It is clever and subtle and cunning in the way the pirate/turntablism could never be...
And that's the problem. People vote for the pirate, because they can see the pirate.
But DJing is so good that people don't even know it's there...
It's like good game design in that way -- you notice bad game design like you notice a hangnail... but if a game designer has done her job right-- you're too immersed to even know just what she's done. But I have a lot more to say on that later... ;)
Labels: DJ games
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 8:46 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - DJ games
I just got DJ Hero this weekend, and feel like I can finally write all the stuff I've wanted to write about it since the moment I first heard it was going to exist... behold as I begin the week of DJ-game related writings!
Fun fact: I used to be a DJ professionally. Not long-- just as a brief stint over a summer or two back when I was in high school.
However, I got really into it. And given as I'm also very much into games (also professionally) seems like these DJ games like DJ Hero and Scratch: The Ultimate DJ would be a winning combination, right?
Well, no. Frankly, I'm a little disappointed. Don't get me wrong-- they sounded decently fun, and I had to buy DJ Hero. But I'm be slightly disappointed all the same:
First of all, I've been burned by DJ games before.
Some of them are just electronic or hip-hop music themed rhythm action games simply claiming the player is a DJ to try to provide some kind of motivation or backstory, despite the fact that the mechanics have almost nothing to do with anything resembling DJing.
A few flash "DJ games" I found just now as I started to write this... weren't "games" at all-- just simulations of DJ equipment: Mixers, turntables etc.
No goal or challenge- just toys to play with. Okay, fine.
Add actual gameplay to that and you have a small but varied collection of games based around scratching and mixing -- of which the two titles above are no doubt the most ambitious works of this style to date.
Here's the thing:
Almost all the DJing games I know of involve record scratching.
I guess that's the image people have in their head of DJs. I don't blame them-- scratching is freakin' cool, when done well.
Games are often about selling a fantasy to the player, and this DJ fantasy seems to be common. I totally hear all of you that it sounds like it'd be really fun to have a turntable controller and just go nuts with the "wikiwikiwiki" kinda scratching fun in a video game.
Hell, through my electronic hobby experimentation fun, I turned an old Sony Discman I bought for $2 at a Goodwill into a sort of scratchable CD player-- I'll be the first to admit that my main inspiration for doing so was that scratching a CD like a vinyl record sounded like a ton of fun. I also play with virtual turntables in my music making, occasionally even linking them via MIDI to the pitch-wheel of my keytar so I can 'scratch' while playing live.
The problem is that scratching is turntablism, not DJing.
Many DJs engage in turntablism, sure. But in the sense that in games we should be concerned with the verbs --what the player DOES in the game--
I find it interesting that many people mentally equate the verb of turntablism with DJing -- a verb in it's own right.
Which brings me to another fun fact: I was a professional DJ and I've never even USED turntables for either mixing or scratching.
All the magic happened for me with two CD players and a mixer.
There are many DJs out there who do not use turntables.
Then there's the phenomenon of remixing to cause further confusion.
Not to mention star DJ/musicians too -- you may have never been personally there for, say, a night Fatboy Slim DJed a set-- but you no doubt have heard some of his music in movies and television commercials and many other places.
Sure, a lot of DJs will create remixes, mashups, or entirely new electronic music compositions, and/or anything in between. And since remixes and mashups, (or hell, even just creating grooves through backbeat techniques) can all be created on he fly by a very skilled DJ-- the lines can get a little blurry...
But, er, if you want to argue semantics-- none of those are at all required in DJing either. They're related fields, or tools in a handbag of DJ tricks, rather than the actual verb of DJing itself (which is, extremely simply put, just playing a set of pre-recorded music for a crowd.)
So okay, cool: scratching != DJing and ReMixing != DJing.
Who cares?
Didn't I already say scratching was fun? And ReMixing could be (and in some cases already has been) made into a pretty cool game too.
Frequency, for example, includes both-- and it's one of my favorite games!
So why do I care?
My beef is that I think nobody realizes what they're missing out on by ignoring the most fundamental level of what a DJ does.
Sure, scratching and remixing are the flashiest, edgiest parts of the whole DJ culture. But that's just the surface-level gloss-- which admittedly video games as a medium tend to get obsessed with in general (graphics race, anyone?)
I was just a DJ at the most basic level, without any of that. In fact, when I tell people I used to DJ, I usually add to it by saying I was "the lame kind" of DJ-- the type that does wedding receptions, birthday parties, etc.
In that role all I did was entertain a crowd, often through (but not completely limited to!) playing popular music.
Again-- no turntables, so I couldn't do anything fancy like scratch or back-beat.
And that kind of crowd isn't the type for mashups or remixes-- Hell, I mostly played oldies!
But I loved it. It was incredibly fun.
See-- the reason I'm sad that all DJ games turn into the more obvious points of scratching or remixing... is because I've seen how much of a game DJing in its purest form actually is.
Being a DJ is playing a fantastic strategy game--
First, you can observe the game system (people at a dance club).
You have a really unique form of input: a case of records, and a couple turntables/CD players to play them on. (Music selection as a form of UI!)
If the old chestnut about a game being a series of interesting decisions needs to be brought up... well, you've got a whole case of records to choose from. How will you decide what to play?
Contrary to what you may believe-- if a DJ is worth anything, he's not just throwing on records willy-nilly, or playing what he wants to hear at the time.
There's a reason he's getting paid for what he does: he's in a friggin' chess game, observing every pawn on the dance floor, noting their every move, and his mind is racing, already several moves (read: songs) ahead. Keep in mind a professional DJ has a goal-- to entertain people through dancing. To aid in this quest, he has a visible score: the number of people on the dance floor. So, essentially a DJ's goal becomes a quest to lure everyone onto the dance floor. But how to reach this fabled high score?
How to DJ Right was my strategy guide, and I regularly poured over its suggested tactics:
-Get the women dancing first, as men largely dance only to try to pick up women. Focus early energies on attracting women to the floor.
-The importance of proper pacing -- warm up slowly (when people first arrive at a club they usually want a few drinks before they'll dance-- the floor needs to build up slow, over time) and building up to feverish climaxes.
-Knowing when and how to boot people off the floor rather than gain them-- again, using only music.
-Etc.
And before you think this game is too stuffy and intellectual of a game (I did compare it to chess just then...), then let me assure you it also involves skill and even brief moments of twitch play-- sure, there are stretches of time where only your mind is racing, trying to strategize what songs to play next-- but when it comes to actually finally mixing the tracks together, that takes some definite player skill.
Beat-matching is notoriously difficult to learn... and you'd be surprised at how much the timing of your crossover into the next song impacts what the crowd does.
It can be the difference between night and day.
Fun classic DJ trick, just to show you there's a lot more going on in a DJs head than you perhaps realized:
People often think to themselves "Oh I'll leave after this song." either because they're tired or they just happen to like that song, or what have you.
This is the reason DJs have a ton of tricks up their sleeves to blend between songs and blur the lines-- if you can't tell when exactly a song ended, you have already missed your window and started dancing in another song-- maybe you'll say to yourself "well, after THIS onen, then..." ...crossfading, beatmatching, even skillfully done mashup DJing can be used to take control of the system without the dancers even knowing they're being manipulated. All thanks to a honed sense of timing and a masterful control of he DJ's hardware (the cross-fader, the play and pause buttons, etc.)
I've always wanted to design a game that represents DJing in this light.
One of my designer friends suggested that feedback wouldn't be immediate enough to work as a video game.
Oh, really? You'd be surprised.
Perfectly time the mix in to just the right song, and the crowd goes nuts. And that's an understatement-- the best way I can describe it is "It's like you just gave everyone in the room a simultaneous orgasm".
Seriously. I've never experienced anything else like it-- I've been a comedian/actor and made an audience explode into laughter and applause... the few times I've nailed the right track as a DJ beat those experiences, hands down.
But play the wrong song and you can have your floor clear out nearly instantly, with a lot of grumbling, maybe some booing.
So sure, you can have your turntablist scratching play with your turntable controller peripherals-- but I just feel disappointed because it's like my old friend is being neglected or sold out. There's so much more depth to DJing-- and a depth that is very similar already to a game system, no less!-- that DJ games all seem to be missing out on.
That's why I'm disappointed all the more that DJ Hero is starting to be seen as a flop. Now that I've played it, I'll admit that on top of my initial hesitations indicated by the whole rest of this entry-- the game has some real design issues. But I WANT it to succeed-- because I want to see my dream of a DJ game come true someday, and one major flop could be the nail in the coffin for the genre before it even gets a chance to ever really exist in the first place.
Labels: DJ games
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 8:41 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Endings in Games
Sunday, November 29, 2009Reading another book on screenwriting today, the book mentioned an old Hollywood axiom:
"Movies are about their last twenty minutes."
It's interesting to compare this statement to games.
Are games about their last twenty minutes?
(Note: I will use the 'twenty minutes' a bit more metaphorically for the rest of this article, since games are not nearly as uniform in length as film...)
Given how it often seems like game developers take many of their cues from film (those of Hollywood itself, commonly) it's odd that I don't feel this statement as ringing quite as true for games. So what is it with games and endings then-- is it something about the video game medium itself that makes them fundamentally different in this area? Or is this a case of developers neglecting lessons from our media cousin out of ignorance or stubbornness? I suppose the two aren't mutually exclusive and it's a bit of both and on a case by case basis.
On the one end of the spectrum, I recently read an article where someone was venting their frustration at having to beat all of the puzzles in Braid to unlock its ending. It's a valid point-- that is a game with one of the most astounding endings I've experienced in a game, yet it is fairly frustratingly difficult to complete a few of the puzzles. Some of them aren't even brain-teasers-- a few require real physical skill like timing button presses. What is the player to do if they just completely lack the coordination for such a puzzle? Either they have to find a way to cheat past it, or give up and miss out on the brilliant ending.
On a much broader scale-- I've read that most players won't make it to the ending of most games. This is, of course, completely unlike films-- you can't help but encounter the end of a film unless it bored you so much you walked out or fell asleep. DVDs even make cheating and skipping to the end an always instantly accessible option (and easy for anyone who's ever used a DVD player before-- i.e. much more accessible than video game cheats). The closest thing I can think of in film is more cerebral or deliberately disjointed movies which require intellectual skill of sort to comprehend them-- but even then you're at least experiencing the ending even if you don't 'get it'.
But games are often far longer than films and generally require you to actually beat areas with some kind of skill (intellectual, twitch, etc.) to unlock more of the content/story/etc. If you hit a wall-- you don't get to the end. You won't get those supposedly great last 20 minutes. Hell, forget a great ending-- you don't get any kind of closure at all. And human beings crave closure...
Then you've also got your largely multiplayer fragfests or competition games like when friends get together to blast each other in Halo or play Super Smash Bros. On the one hand, you could say those NEVER end... how can the last 20 minutes possibly be great if there is no end at all? On the other end-- each match could be seen as it's own little mini-story and those usually do build to some kind of climax as things get down to the wire of the last few seconds/lives.
But finally, consider the game Indigo Prophesy.
If you read the postmortem for the game, the developers lamented their mistake at focusing too little on the ending-- since, again, they figured not as many players make it all the way to the end. So, when players DID make it to the end, and cried out "What the hell is this?!" the developers realized their folly.
In fact, a game with a bad ending is worse than a film with a bad ending, because the game makes you WORK for that terrible ending. If a film ends up as a dud, all you've lost is a couple hours and the price of your ticket. When a game's ending flops? That could be after weeks of grinding, or blood, sweat, and tears of trying to beat that last damn final boss or level. In other words-- it was possibly frustrating even BEFORE you saw the bad ending. Not to mention that to that frustration you add the lost cost paid for the game, which if it was a new $60 game can hurt a lot worse than a wasted movie ticket.
So, this seems to be a problem. Indigo Prophesy's ending proved that endings may be just important in games as they are in film (maybe it's not the best game example, as it is a very cinema-inspired title... but meh, you get the point.) However, make a brilliant ending like Braid and maybe only half your audience will actually make it all the way there to see it-- and that's the best part of the game, if you're following that axiom. Players are missing your best content. So what's a developer to do?
There is, of course, the overall "dumbing-down" of games to make them appeal to a broader audience, and that is part of it. Only the hardcore were insane enough to play through the challenges to see the endings of games, which frustrated everyone else who didn't have the skills to achieve the closure they seek in their media experiences. But at the same time, this dumbing-down is somewhat despised by gamers-- although, admittedly the ones complaining are only the hardcore minority who never had this problem. But they do have something of a point-- if it's too easy to get all the content, you lose any
sense of accomplishment.
Of course, as the article venting about Braid pointed out-- that notion only appeals to players who seek fiero, which isn't everyone-- especially as games branch out to larger audiences. It's an issue of balance between players who are achievers and those who are explorers-- either way you're disappointing one of those two sides.
So, is there a way to find a happy medium for both achievers and explorers?
Maybe returning to something similar to the old favorite-- difficulty modes?
Have, say, an explorer mode and an achiever mode: Achiever mode has you play to unlock content, and explorer mode makes it easy to skip ahead, ala the New Super Mario Bros for the Wii (presumably-- haven't yet got to play it!)
I'm thinking if you have players decide in advance their play styles it won't sully the achiever's sense of accomplishment if achiever mode has no way of 'cheating' to get ahead like explorer mode. And just completing achiever mode could, of course, have an xbox-live achievement attached to it, as further enticement for achiever players.
Thinking about it, an interesting case study would be Jason Rohrer's game Passage, which has a brilliant, brilliant ending that the players can't help but get to, like a film-- you basically get there even if you do nothing other than start the game and then just sit there. It's so easy to get to the 'end' that the game goes further and actually makes any attempt at achievement you made feel very intentionally frustrating, depressing and empty -- and that, in this game, serves to make your ending even more powerful and charged with meaning.
So, in a sense-- Passage DOES appeal to both explorers and achievers-- if you try to achieve as an achiever, your ending can resonate stronger in failing to achieve a state of fiero than if you did not even try to 'win' a high score, and explorers are free to explore the entire gambit of meaning from achieving to not even trying at all (I did!)
Can most other games pull that particular trick off? Probably not-- but it's an observation I felt was worth noting nonetheless.
Labels: design, endings, writing
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 11:16 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - More Fun With Structures: Poetry Forms
Sunday, November 15, 2009Again, since I like thinking about adapting structures from other things and using it as a strange new template to possibly map a game onto...
There was a time where my best friend and writing long-time writing partner were working on a film that was a collection of vignettes... each based on a different poetry form. The premise of the film was thus: we'd take various forms of poetry and use their structures, only use filmic language rather than written language when applying the structure.
For example, where a poetry form dictates you'd repeat a word, we'd repeat a shot.
That sort of thing.
I'm wondering now what it'd be like to do the same premise with games?
Supposing it would even be possible...
It's a difficult challenge since it's much harder to 'structure' a game since the player can do whatever she wants.
But, I suppose you'd first have to, much like what we were doing with our film, decide what poetic elements would translate to game elements. What is the equivalent of a word -- a mechanic? An enemy? What about the repetition of rhyme-- what is the gameplay equivalent of that? Are stanzas the levels of the game?
I think it'd be an interesting challenge to explore sometime. ...you know, when I'm not crunching on a big project at work. posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 11:21 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Status Update: Still Hangin' In There...
Saturday, November 14, 2009Thanks to crunching on my first project at 1P it seems I've forgotten about my blog here for quite a while and let it wither. Was only reminded of it when an indie dev I met at a local IGDA meeting asked if I had a website.
I do, and it's long overdue for a status update of some sort, so... er, thanks Mike!
Fortunately my project is in it's last stretch so I'll have more time to post stuff here. In truth I actually have started several entries during the past few months, but wanted to let them settle fully in my mind before I released them out to the world. Now that I should (I hope) have some time to take a breath I can flesh them out a bit more. posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 5:31 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Garfield Minus Garfield and Games -- New Experiences Through Removing Elements From Classic Games
Tuesday, July 28, 2009Was just reading through the website Garfield Minus Garfield again. If unfamiliar, the premise is this: a guy takes old Garfield comics, and erases any reference to the title character, Garfield the cat.
What happens is pretty spectacular-- the context of the comics is changed entirely and the comics begin to chronicle the rather depressing life of a lonely and rather insane-sounding Jon (the character who normally is Garfield's human owner).
He now talks to himself, and appears to cry or scream for no reason. His comments normally directed towards Garfield where he expresses, say, his excitement to go fold some socks, now is just idle musings and makes his life seem even more empty and meaningless than it already did.
So I'm thinking now about doing that same idea with classic games, rather than comics.
Now, I guess I shouldn't be too intrigued by this idea, as one of my first class projects as a game design student (actually, my first game design project ever, I think) was to modify a pre-existing board game by adding or subtracting one rule, and see how that changed the game.
Games, as dynamic systems, I suppose naturally lend themselves well to experimentation with what happens when you remove some kind of critical element.
When designing a game the designers are somewhat encouraged to test the limits of what needs to be in their system and does not. Everything must be there for a reason.
Yet, Garfield is there for a reason in the Garfield comics-- yet there's something really awesome that happens when he's removed.
I suppose I've seen a few things that border on this concept already in the realm of video games.
Rom Check Fail plays with the idea of replacing critical game elements from classic games with elements from a different game. Granted, it's a replacement, rather than a removal, of a critical element-- but that's still pretty close.
Of course, a lot of times, when removing game elements what results fails to be a game anymore. In board game terms, what the hell would Battleship be if you removed the battleships themselves? Or the ability to fire? Are either one still a game?
That example above provides some pretty terrible results, but this is not always the case... an extreme example of removing game elements to create an interesting new piece with a new context would be Cory Archangel's Super Mario Clouds-- a hack of Super Mario Bros. where everything but the sky was removed.
The resulting piece of art is no longer a game, or even interactive-- you just watch 8-bit clouds peacefully roll slowly on by, as though you're looking out of a surreal alternate reality window. But even though the result is no longer a game, it's a decidedly cool piece of art, at least in my opinion.
So, I'm currently having fun exploring how various games would work without their title character and their according mechanics. It's difficult to try to make the results still playable, let alone as interesting as Garfield Minus Garfield comics are. (Ironically, Garfield Minus Garfield comics are usually more interesting than the real original Garfield comics...)
Part of the problem is the nature of the avatar-- most title characters are the avatar, and with that removed, the result is typically no longer interactive. If you removed Pac Man from Pac Man, well, you'd just watch ghosts run around a maze. I suppose that's about as interesting as Super Mario Clouds, but seems a bit disappointing.
But take, say, Sinistar, a game who's title 'character' is not the player character, but the villain of sorts.
The level ending conditions of, y'know, destroying the Sinistar get a bit thrown out of whack if you removed the Sinistar itself from the game, obviously. But other than that, the game seems like it could at least function with out him, just as a kind of rather uninspired space shmup sort of game. So, sure, it works still as a game... but the only meaning provided by removing the title character is pointing out how much better the game is with him in it. :)
And on the other extreme-- remove the Halo from Halo and, well... you'd have a slightly different storyline, but the gameplay would probably be mostly unaffected. Again, the element of removal doesn't provide an interesting new context like the Garfield Minus Garflield scenario.
So I'm trying to think of more examples that would turn one game completely upside down in a truly interesting way by removing something important, just like how Garfield Minus Garfield makes for a more interesting comic than the original by removing the main character.
Labels: design, garfield minus garfield
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 12:39 AM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Watching my Story Develop
Tuesday, July 21, 2009I got to see the very first storyboards created based on my scripts for the game I'm working on. As it's my first professional game writing experience, It's really something to see it come alive like that.
It's funny... I had a screenwriting professor once who encouraged his students to direct their own films they had written, because he felt that was the only way to maintain one's original vision. I suppose he had been burned one too many times by having his story handled sloppily by directors, perhaps?
But I disagree. I like handing off my writing and seeing what people make of it.
First of all, I'm rather humble and don't want to assume I'd be able to capture my own vision any better than another director would.
But I also think there's something to the idea of seeing what other people do with it-- the directions they choose, some of which might be something I wouldn't have considered. You don't get so attached that you get tunnel vision. You can sit back and watch your baby grow up without having to be so lost in the details of working on it every step of the way... merely course correcting when she stumbles, guiding her into what you want her to be. Present a guiding hand, without dragging her along-- you let her wander and discover what she finds along with her, as the rest of the team adds their own creative touches.
I'm pleased to work in such a team-focused business as the game industry where I can experience this.
Labels: writing
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 9:57 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - On "Fairywings"-- my frustrating and depressing 'art game'
Thursday, July 16, 2009Inspired by Ian Schreiber's latest class/post in his online Game Design Concepts course, I'm thinking about my 'art game', which I'm realizing never made it on this website in any form. As I talk about the game now, I'll answer why that is.
The game was created for a class at SCAD where we were encouraged to create expressive games - games that communicated some kind of idea or meaning through their mechanics primarily (as the class's intention was to teach what mechanics would convey particular dynamics, which could then accordingly create particular aesthetics. Or so the designer hopes, anyway.)
I had realized a while back that I had something of an artist's wound-- a topic an artist keeps returning to in their work over and over again, usually due to it being a frustrating, unsolvable puzzle from their life that haunts them. In my case, it was a relationship that I pursued for far longer than I should have. One which never quite worked out and mocked me by manifesting its themes over and over again in future relationships as well. I had realized this aspect of my life had made it into much of my drawings, paintings, music (especially the lyrics, but also the melodic portions as well) and film and play scripts I had written... but never a game.
As a game designer, I thought this was interesting, and decided to look into finally tackling it as a game.
In order to simulate my frustrations with this relationship, my design goal was to make a game that was really boring or outright unpleasant to play, but kept tempting you to keep playing it anyway.
I figured that challenge wasn't as difficult as it first seems. WoW accidentally pulls it off with grinding. Sometimes gambling ends up that way as well.
So, it seemed like designing a game that did this intentionally, and especially about such a personal emotional well, would make a good art game.
My first instincts were to make it a chase game -- after all what kind of game mechanics more instantly scream unrequited love than a chase?
Up to that point, the most serious effort I had put into expressing this part of my life was an allegorical short film I had written for one of my screenwriting classes. The film was named Fairywings. To cut a long story short, it expressed my frustrations about this relationship as a sort of twisted, dark fairytale, where a man falls in love with and pursues a fairy he finds, and not surprisingly this doesn't work out well for him and she flies away, never to be found again. I felt like this allegory could work in a game as well as a story and used it (with some tweaks like making it about a boy rather than an adult man).
I even named the game after the film's highly symbolic title.
My initial design was a non-digital prototype where you were a young boy, and after you discovering a pretty fairy out your window you could chase it forever, but never quiiite catch it.
It sucked.
I realized it was basically the same thing as Heroin Hero from the Guitar Hero episode of South Park. Just chasing the fairy didn't get across any of the issues of why this was personally frustrating, or why I was compelled to keep chasing this 'fairy'.
I needed to go deeper. (Luckily little time was spent on that failed prototype)
So I went back to the drawing board completely ('exploding' my game as became the running joke for my design process amongst the other game designers SCAD) and ended up making for the next prototype a more complex little economic system to express the frustrations.
In the new system you were still a little boy interacting with a fairy, but now you would go visit her in a clearing in the forest whenever you could. You'd bring her bread so that she could slowly, over time, leave a trail through the mysterious woods to the secret fairy lands hidden deep within, where you could live and play with her forever.
But you're a poor little kid so you have to do chores to earn an allowance to buy bread from the store, and you can't neglect your dog or he'd follow you and discover the fairy and chase her away. So, as much as you want to see the fairy to advance your progress in the game, you've got other stuff you have to do first: mow the lawn, buy the bread, play with the dog, walk to the special clearing in forest where she meets with you, etc.
The idea was that your day was never long enough to do all of those things. Some days you just simply couldn't see the fairy, making an entire day wasted on tedium building up to the anticipated days where you could finally run to the forest and see her again and get one step closer to, er, well, 'scoring'.
Worse still, as you play you begin to realize that over time she grows apart from you, and shows up at the clearing to meet with you less and less until eventually, she's never there anymore at all.
And the idea was that this would happen in such away that it was impossible to complete the breadcrumb trail before she's gone forever, leaving you with a half-completed trail leading nowhere. An empty promise that never got realized.
But this would be dragged out over a much larger period of time than the player would want to waste his time on.
I first, due to unexpected technical limitations of my personal computer having suddenly died, prototyped the game non-digitally as a board game.
The results were spectacular when I finally managed to get at least one playtest session done. ("Hey, want to play my painfully unfun board game?" is a hard sell, and makes it difficult to get playtesters...)
The girl playtesting it complained the entire time-- it was apparent I had nailed the intentionally-unpleasant side of the game. But that's easy.
What I was super pleased about was when the professor called out that it was time to pack up and turn in the games for review, my playtester refused to quit the game, believing that if she just had one more turn, maybe she could win.
I assured her that would not (could not!) happen, even told her I had spent weeks of development time ensuring the game was unbeatable, but she was determined and kept going. It happened to be that very turn where she activated my final failsafe I installed to prevent players from being able to win the game: a card that cuts the progress you made to that point in half after you've accidentally 'offended the fairy' by stepping in a fairy ring. It was this moment of desperation where she gave up hope and quit, which is to be expected.
Still-- I had successfully made a game with the reward of the end of the game hung so tantalizingly close that the player couldn't stop playing it even though she did nothing but express her hatred of it and how unpleasant it was to play from the moment she started playing the game. She wanted to continue suffering through because she felt so close to achieving... something.
I consider that my greatest accomplishment of game design, right there.
I then proceeded to start the video game version.
After all that development time over the rest of the quarter, it became interestingly apparent that the board game was more successful than the digital version.
The issue was the board itself. In order to represent the breadcrumb trail I had a sort of bookkeeping board where you put little pretzel-bits onto squares on a race-to-the-end sort of board. Yes, that's right, it was basically a race-to-the-end game, with a very intentionally irritating economic system in place in order to advance further down the board, and narrative hooks to provide the inspiration to get there.
In the video game version I instead did a procedurally generated never-ending mysterious woods... the path the breadcrumb trail changed every time, storing each 'room' of the forest it went through in an array. Get off the trail and you immediately find yourself in a never-ending loop of randomly generated rooms that never lead anywhere and eventually mysteriously spit you back out at the forest entrance no matter how far you had gotten lost.
The thing was, I discovered that the board game's solution worked better because you could SEE how close you were to the goal, and that made all the difference.
In the video game version (at least as it exists so far), you couldn't really track how close you were to achieving the end goal, so it was too easy to be cynical about your progress. Since there was literally no end in sight, it was easy to give up hope too soon. You could easily assume that, since this game is what it is, that there is no end in sight and there's no reason to continue (which is all true.)
But in the board game version, there's a space for the end, the victory condition, and it was right there on the board. It stared you in the face, clearly marked as the end. You know it's real, as you can clearly see it's there. More importantly, you could clearly see you were only, say, 5 spaces away from it. You just feel "Oh man, I'm so close... just get lucky a couple more turns and I could finally win and be done with this stupid game." All it would take is a lucky serious of events to get you to move just a few spaces ahead and win.
But of course, the game was designed to never let you get there. The dynamics even mapped well to the real events they portrayed: A lot of progress in the beginning with those flutterings of the early stages of a relationship, and then things begin to slow to a crawl like you've hit a sudden invisible wall.
Yet you could see how close you were, so you want to keep playing.
So, I've neglected ever mentioning this game here until now because, well, first of all, I clearly had a lot to say about it, and it's taken far longer than I would have liked to write the above. I'll be pleased if anyone actually reads all this. It's also difficult to express such personal demons to strangers like I am now (It's easy to see I wrote this entry in a very guarded, conservative way).
It was difficult when designing the game too-- I feel I hide behind my allegory too much there.
But also the game is at a strange unfinished stage.
I'm trying to decide what to do with it, having hit the realization of how the board game succeeds where the video game version of it fails.
It doesn't seem difficult to conceive of a way to provide some sort of feedback in the video game version that serves the same purpose as the non-digital progress board... but that would take time to implement (especially for me who will be the first to admit that writing code is not my strong suit).
Now that I'm an actual professional game developer, that kind of programming time doesn't sound appealing activity to fill up my precious spare time. (I've got plenty of games to PLAY to catch up on!)
On the other hand, the non-digital prototype worked fairly well in at least what few playtests it got-- should I just instead continue working on developing that from a quick and dirty prototype to a complete and polished board game? The idea immediately appeals to me given my fond memory of how successful the prototype was, until I think about how few people would play and experience it as compared to a simple video game online. How would I even release such a project? My only reference for such an intentionally dark, non-digital art game is my mentor's projects like Train, which aren't really being 'released' at all, technically. I'm suspecting such an approach wouldn't be nearly so successful for me.
So for now, it's in sort of a limbo. But I'm glad I've taken this time to at least explain this and my process of designing it. It gets my ideas (and demons) out.
Labels: art games, expression, expressive games, fairywings, playtesting, prototypes
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 3:27 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - My New Job Writing for Games
Thursday, July 9, 2009Now that I'm tasked with the job of writing the story for an actual title, writing for games seems all the more an interesting thing.
Unlike with most other kinds of writing I've done (screenwriting and playwriting), in games the story comes second to the gameplay, and this causes a really interesting set of constraints on the writer. I can't just write whatever I feel like, whatever my artistic soul most wants to explore.... I'm bound to writing something that would benefit the game, and fall within its own constraints.
Many essential story elements were already created by others on the project long before I showed up... setting, characters, and key gameplay events were already laid down. I have to work those already established components and work them into a awesome cohesive story, rather than create them as I weave them together.
But just like in game development in general, those constraints are a good thing. They've given me a launch-pad to jump from, rather than just an intimidating blank slate.
The thing that strikes me most oddly about this project though is that the story I was asked to write is one that on my own I would never have attempted in a million years. The student projects I wrote for were either entirely my babies, or at least of a genre/topic I was already interested in. Now, though, I'm writing for a target market I have never been a part of, nor ever will be.
It's not a story I would have ever thought I'd like to tell, or thought I'd be able to be inspired by or relate to in any way.
But I am. I find I'm delving into this world just as passionately, perhaps even more so, than any other story I've developed. I didn't come up with these characters, but I've gotten to know them and fall in love with them as I try to find and fix their own internal conflicts, struggles and flaws. And I think that's wonderful, and fascinating that that has happened. I hope to continue experiencing this on future projects.
Labels: writing
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 11:47 PM 0 Comments Links to this post