Water it down and burn it

Wow, I'm posting a lot more often than normal! I guess you can thank my new job at Linden Lab for that. :) We'll see how long this keeps up...

As far as I can tell, there are two types of games that people play for a long time: games that water down content and stretch it out through RPG grinding or FarmVille-style appointment systems, and games where you create. Okay, I guess there's a third - games with evergreen content complexity, like Triple Town, but these are very rare and I don't know of any very successful online games based on that principle.

World of Warcraft is the obvious example for games with lots of content, and even when it's watered down there is still a ton of it and it's very expensive to develop. FarmVille is an example that combines a thin layer of grinding with a thin layer of creativity. Minecraft is an example that combines a layer of grinding (harvesting resources) with a much deeper system of creation.

In all of these examples there is a social element as well, which is essential (even in Minecraft, minimal as it is), but even non-games have it (chat clients, forums, social networking sites) so I won't dwell on it here. Just keep in mind that the longest-lasting games tend to be social in some way.

In games with a creative element, like FarmVille and Minecraft, the grinding gameplay serves to give structure and ease the player into the creative play. As the player begins to tire of the grinding gameplay, the creative part is there to take up the slack. But the initial gameplay structure is essential to provide that hook and that ramp into the later experience.

In games where the creation experience is separate from the gameplay experience, there will be some players who only do creation and many more who only do gameplay. In this case you could set it up so the creators are providing gameplay content to the players. However, without watering the content down (with grinding), it is likely that the players will burn through content much faster than creators can create it. And because playing is separate from creation, most players who burn through gameplay will not transition to creation - they'll just leave.

I've imagined making a game where you create platformer levels like in N or Super Meat Boy, and earn points when other people play these levels and rate them highly. I still think that would be a cool idea, but I'm realizing that it would not work very well as an ongoing community experience. I doubt that anyone would spend months playing Super Meat Boy, as good as it is, while millions of people play games like FarmVille or World of Warcraft for a very long time. There's just not enough gameplay in a platformer to keep people going on level design alone.

But you could imagine a game where people create watery RPG content for other people, and where the creation and gameplay aspects are connected enough that there is a steady flow of players becoming creators. If you connect the creation and gameplay in a sloppy way, the two could collapse into each other, with people exploiting creation to farm gameplay progression (creating easy dungeons with gold everywhere and no monsters, for example). There could also be problems with finding appropriate content for players at various levels. But it should be possible to tune everything so it works as a self-sustaining ecosystem of playing and creating and moving between the two.

What would that look like?

Why Avatar Is Important

I wrote this back in January, and somehow never got around to posting it until now. Well, here it is. Better late than never, right?

There was this other movie that everyone seems to be talking about. I saw that one, in IMAX 3D. I shamelessly add it to my list of favorite movies, along with The Matrix and Lilo & Stitch and other such gems of cinema. I may be excessively indie when it comes to games, but no one can accuse me of being a film snob.

Whatever people are saying about it, what I appreciated in that movie was that it clearly showed what people left behind when they took up agriculture and industrialization and the trend toward global corporate hegemony - I said "hegemony" haha! - that is, the fun. Not moral superiority, not environmental friendliness, not utopian peace and happiness, but a life that, despite the dangers, the high mortality rate, the lack of iPhones or toilet paper or whatever else you want to measure, a life that is richly fulfilling, challenging, rewarding, interesting, in a way that the human mind and body craves and thrives on - in a word, fun.

This pressure gradient between the two societies, the fun and the unfun, is what drove the progression of this story. And this movie drove this difference home in the way no other medium could - except for games, of course - and for that reason, it is important. That's it.

And lots of people feel it. They feel this gradient pushing them away from their own lives and into the imaginary fun of the movie, which is no place to be if you are in fact a real person. But this fun place is real, it's just out of sight, in the past, or in those pockets of the world where the fun has yet to be sucked out and converted into GDP.

But no one's talking about it like that, because the usual sides to pick, the usual ways to debate these kinds of things are so readily available. Yes, kind of sad. But it gives me hope. If you show people what they're missing, they will feel it, and they will desperately seek it out, even if they believe it to be imaginary.

So, hope for the world. I must remember my mission. This is why I chose games. Light the fire, make the spark. Don't crack the whip. Whips don't work very well on rockets anyway.

Game Idea Giveaway - Garden Chomp

...continued from The Game Idea Giveaway Thread

Request by freelanceflashgames:

• what sort of game idea you're looking for
  Something fairly simple and easy to code, yet fun. The game would probably feature achievements and upgrades, but it isn't required.
  

• what your goals are in making this game
  To make a good game that will be different from others and people will have fun playing.

The normal idea: Lava Land

The weird idea: Garden Chomp


In short, the idea is a simple arcade collection game where you try to balance your needs with those of the surrounding ecosystem. You are a little guy running around a garden, seen from above. There may be a few scattered rocks or plants as obstacles, but generally the playing area is unobstructed. Your goal is to survive as long as possible without getting eaten or starving to death.

You have an energy meter that constantly decreases. To increase your energy meter, you eat mushrooms. Just move around with the arrow keys or the mouse, and touch a mushroom to eat it. Like collecting gold in N, you have to eat these mushrooms often enough that your energy stays above zero. Otherwise, you die.

Where do mushrooms come from? To answer that question, we'll have to introduce you to your delightful companions in this little garden - the chompers. A chomper is basically a big mouth that can walk around - like Pac-Man with teeth and legs. Their entire function is to eat and produce manure. As luck would have it, chomper manure is the perfect fertilizer for mushrooms. As the chompers amble around the screen, they leave a trail of manure in their wake, which soon sprouts a delicious bouquet of mushrooms for your consumption.

To produce manure, chompers must eat. If they're especially hungry, they'll try and eat you. Don't let that happen - keep them well fed. Like an aphid, you produce honeydew, a sweet delicacy much enjoyed by the chompers. You can click the mouse or press the space bar to produce honeydew and toss it in the direction you are facing, preferably into a Chomper's perpetually open mouth. Producing honeydew subtracts from your energy meter though, so make sure you are eating plenty of mushrooms!

It's not that complicated. If you touch a mushroom, you eat it and increase your energy. If you touch a chomper, you get bitten and lose a large amount of energy. If you touch manure, you get kind of sticky and move slower for a while.

What?

• You eat mushrooms and make honeydew.
• Chompers eat honeydew and make manure.
• Manure gradually sprouts into mushrooms.

It's a nice little cycle. And the timing and conversion rates will take a lot of balancing in order to feel right.

Even though the game is about surviving as long as possible, it might be a good idea to break it into levels. The first level might have one chomper, lots of mushrooms, and few obstacles. The next level could have two chompers, and maybe the next level has two chompers and a bunch of obstacles arranged in a sort of maze. To beat a level, maybe you have to fill up your energy meter all the way, where each level might require a different amount of energy. Or you could just make it about surviving for a certain amount of time, though I could see that being annoying in a level-based game.

And there are plenty of things you could do with random goodies and powerups, changing how fast you move, making mushrooms grow faster, giving you temporary invincibility, or just giving you extra energy. Aiming the honeydew could be made easy or difficult. I'd probably go far something fairly easy, where the honeydew travels in a straight line until it hits an obstacle or goes off the screen. If a chomper is facing you with its mouth open then you can toss some honeydew straight in without worrying too much about aiming skill.

There could even be different varieties of chompers - some completely harmless, some that get hungry quickly and will chase after you, some that move fast, some that move slow. If you want, you even could do some weird things with Langton's Ant and patterns of manure. Maybe the player could push the manure around to change how the chompers walk. But I'd suggest starting with simple random movement and going from there.

Good luck! :)

Want an idea? Make a request on The Game Idea Giveaway Thread!

Google Is the Future of Games

It seems to me that the future of game development, in terms of minimizing the barrier to entry so anyone can easily make a game, would look a lot more like Google than like Photoshop. And it wouldn't look at all like Visual Studio. ;)

I can imagine a knowledge network of algorithms and components and behaviors, built up by people searching a space, as in Electric Sheep, and then organized and filtered by people participating in some kind of social network metagame.

If I am putting together an environment sketch and I'm looking for some procedural water ripples for a fountain, I'd be able to search for these procedural components as easily as I would for a web page. I'd be able to navigate through the space of algorithms at a finer level, too, like Biomorphs, to tweak an existing component without ever touching any code. And if I wanted to, I could modify the code directly.

Whatever social rewards I'd gather through my creation would automatically trickle down to those who created the components I used to make it. In this way, there would be an ecosystem of people creating, evolving, filtering, and combining this procedural material from which games are made and recycled back into.

I'm not saying it will happen, but something like that will have to happen before creating games becomes a mainstream activity. It's a tough problem, but I'd love to see it solved. How do you turn software engineering into an art form?

*image from one of my favorite flash animations, Pencilmation*

Planet Earth Is Awesome

And I mean that literally. It inspires awe. Have you had the chance to see any episodes of Planet Earth yet? Amazing. I really want to start watching those again.

The Earth is a beautiful place. I never realized how out of touch I was with the rest of life on this planet until this film brought it home to me. The sheer scale of this world, and what it means for all these millions and billions of species of plants and animals to exist. They're not just pictures in a book. Each one of them must do, and be, in a different way, every day.

There is life being lived beyond the human world and even if all humanity faces extinction, I am content that life continues to live, fragile but vigorous.

I should make a game about that. ;)

Exciting and Interesting Cool Things - Part 2

I've just started reading a book called The Spell of the Sensuous, by David Abram. So far, I've quite enjoyed it. Coincidentally, someone has gone through the trouble of typing up exactly the part of the book which I have read - the first chapter. So if you read that part, you'll have about as much reason as I do to be excited about nature games.

(...though you might have to read the Mountains and Waters Sutra too, which could be painful)

So, nature games? What am I talking about?

Well, not too long ago* I read this article online called Let there be life: Games go organic telling how "Developers are nursing creative gameplay out of Mother Nature's mulch" - in other words, getting game ideas from nature.

Besides being introduced to some cool titles like PixelJunk Eden, and the enticing projects going on at Cambrian Games, reading that article has made me wonder whether there might be a real trend here, with new games drawing on nature (or, the real real world) more and more. Because you know, while it's great to keep coming up with new ways to shoot aliens, there's a lot more variety to be found outside, if you look for it. Every species is playing its own game. Even aphids.

Plus it brings us back to our roots, as humans and members of ecological systems. On Lost Garden not too long ago* Daniel Cook wrote up a gameplay analysis of his life-inspired game idea Shade, based on playing a prototype submitted by a reader of his blog. What he found was that "Searching for the perfect mushroom is exciting", and "The dynamically changing world is exciting". He thought the game might be made even more fun by adding more varieties of mushrooms with different growing cycles, and creating "a dynamic ecosystem" by adding predators and seed carriers and more complex mushroom interactions.

This sentence in particular caught my eye: "The fact that the world was living and growing was immensely satisfying." Wow. Well, considering the fact that we, as humans, evolved, were created, to live as active participants of a world that visibly, loudly, lives and grows, what else could you expect? The way so many of us manage to shut out that living, growing world in favor of a world so dead we have to play games to give us that feeling again - well, that's the strange part. This trend, perhaps, of games that come from nature? That's the trend that makes sense.

As I wrote in a comment on that Shade gameplay analysis:
I'm also encouraged by the way these elements of fun that Danc has identified seem to reflect tastes that would be well-suited to people making their living through gathering and hunting food in the wild, as they have throughout the majority of humanity's evolutionary life. It just makes these games seem that much more wholesome. :)

Oh, and if you're wondering, the image above is from the artistically and biologically inspired new game Blueberry Garden. The game is still under development, but the author has released a trailer that looks very promising.

*too long ago

In other news, it seems that there is an intriguing new indie MMO under development, with a rather unusual, if somewhat pretentious, name - Love. I don't know much about the gameplay, but the art style is like a cross between the color script for The Incredibles and a digital speedpainting. I've always thought it would be cool to have a game with that art style. And well, there you go - a game with that art style.

The game's author, Eskil Steenberg, has a blog. It's a very interesting blog, very indie... I like it. I was inspired and encouraged by one post in particular, in which he says that All true renegades walk alone.

"In every situation you find yourself, there are limitations, disregarding how much power you accumulate. So being creative is really about finding the possibilities of what you have rather then the limitations of what you don't."

In fact I found it more directly inspiring even than the now-famous Last Lecture by Randy Pausch. Needless to say, I identify quite strongly with the sentiment expressed by Eskil Steenberg throughout his blog.

• While we're on the subject, I think I've fallen in Love with another game idea: Adopt an Invader. It's like Spore would be, if it were designed by Lost Garden, for the graphing calculator. Awesome.

I've also been looking into rapid prototyping again, since I've got so many games I want to make and so little time. I figure that if I can crank out a quick gameplay prototype for each of these ideas, at least half of them will reveal themselves to be horrible ideas that should never be played by anyone, let alone developed into full games. Then I can cross them off my list, without having gone through the trouble of actually finishing them.

But my secret fear is that all my ideas are so amazingly good, I'll have no choice but to make all them. ;)

Anyway, make sure you check out How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days, the definitive how-to article on rapid game prototyping from the four grad students who started the whole trend. Good stuff.

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