stralor

[stralor]

#LoveIndies Week!

#LoveIndies week starts on Monday! It’s being organized by a couple of lovely folks from over at Failbetter Games (whose work I happen to be a huge fan of).

I’m participating in a few ways, as both developer and gamer.

As a dev, I’m:

Discounting Destination Ares. It will be 30% off on Itch and GameJolt, and 29% off on Steam (wtf, 29%?).

Running a competition for swag and keys. More about that below.

Hanging out in streams. If you’re gonna stream any of my work (doesn’t have to be DA), let me know! I’d love to stop in and kick it with you and your viewers, talk secrets, and spit strategy.

As a gamer, I’m:

Playing only indie games. Heh, who am I kidding? That’s always what I play.

Rating, Reviewing, and Recommending some of my favorite indie titles. I’ll be posting those periodically on my twitter.

What’s this about a... Competition

I’VE GOT STICKERS WITH YOUR NAME ON THEM

( and keys you can win to gift a friend <3 )

— How to participate —

Build a custom ship

Play the custom ship

Share your high score (screenshot the game over screen as proof, or, even better, share the VOD!)

Share the ship (screenshots OK, but posting the .ship file is awesome!)

Finally, let me know where to find all of it! I’m lots of places, but I’m easiest to reach on twitter.

— How to win —

Assuming enough entries, there’ll be (up to) three prizes — a couple stickers and a key each:

Highest Score (ties broken by fastest run in-game time)

Community Favorite Ship — I’ll post a poll Wednesday night, if we have enough entries

My Favorite Ship

I’ll be announcing the winner(s) on Thursday, July 19th!

Please note: this competition isn’t only open to players who own Destination Ares, but you do need access to it — go ahead and play on a friend’s computer!

See you on Monday!

[stralor]

Destination Ares has Released

Destination Ares has taken me three years of development, and today it leaves Early Access!

You can buy it on @itchio (or Steam, I suppose).

https://stralor.itch.io/destination-ares

store.steampowered.com/app/553470

Reblogs are <3

[stralor]

!!!! So excited

(also very scared)

[stralor]

I’m trying something new and giving Medium a shot.

This week’s blog post is in the link.

Feel free to let me know how awful or awesome this decision was <3

[stralor]

Design Spotlight: The Witness

I had the opportunity to play through The Witness some time back, and I was both impressed by the experience and occasionally frustrated by some decisions. Today, in true Design Spotlight tradition, let's focus on one aspect of the design that resonated with me.

Certainly, there are tons of pieces talking about The Witness's puzzles, narrative structure, or audio design, so, I'd like to pivot and talk about the game's spatial flow.

We're gonna babble light-heartedly about level design for a bit.

Well crafted level design often curves in on itself. New paths with open up and new perspectives in the same space are gained after some progression. Early Skyward Sword levels were strong in this regard. So was, famously, Dark Souls.

The trick: surprise the player without confusing them. Getting truly lost is rarely the point. Yet, being temporarily blinded to the larger context is great for inspiring wonder by opening new perspectives.

The Witness excels at this.

Turn a corner and you're in a new biome with a spectacular view. Follow a path, stumble onto new places to explore. Explore a place and find yourself spat out somewhere familiar, with a new shortcut unlocked.

The game starts with a somewhat linear play space and turns it into a well-connected web. And the layout should be web-like; the game features regular backtracking (and the tone is antithetical to fast travel).

(Fast travel sucks anyway... another topic for another time)

What's brilliant about it is how it mimics our unconscious spatial learning. When we enter a new space, whether virtually or IRL, a tunnel vision of orienteering occurs. We focus on the general feel and major landmarks as we build out our core understanding. This core understanding is rudimentary, even linear. It's also often accompanied with a sense of wonder.

It's once we've gained a familiarity with a space that we notice the finer, subtler details. Our awareness expands; we see new interconnections between areas, and, I suggest, we're more open to unexpected stimuli. The Witness's level design mimics this with its explicitly expanding spaces: initial areas are contained, understandable, and linear; later progress in the game opens up alternate routes, new methods of travel (the boat, underground tunnels), and expansive, winding spaces with hidden details, all while encouraging re-exploration of past zones. The game encourages our natural spatial learning, and progresses with it.

There's something "fun" here. Well, it certainly stuck with me, an admitted explorer type. The thing is, it doesn't often show more than the player is comfortable exploring at once. And the deeper aspects sprinkled everywhere are left for organic player discovery: there's a definite "WHOA" moment when the player discovers the hidden environmental "puzzles".

Other people have talked about how the game's puzzle progression usually does a good job of teaching the player. I'd argue the spatial design does an even better job of informing player expectations than the puzzles do. There's something to take away from that.

Thanks for reading, chums

[stralor]

Shitty Gamification

A few years ago, we heard a lot of talk about "gamification". It's pretty intuitive: real life is boring and frustrating -> games are engaging -> make products/ services/ etc. more like games.

Since then, gamification hasn't seen as much publicity.

However, you can see its influence in many industries: it's hiding behind improved customer loyalty programs, social media experiences, and even Unicorn-fucking-fraps.

This makes sense. Much of game development is user experience (UX) development. Games are (interactive) user experience variously in the forms of narratives, spreadsheets, art, and entertainment.

So, naturally, game designers tend to make pretty great UX designers.

What fascinates me, however, is how so many industries have missed the point or failed completely to jump on the bandwagon. What follows is a couple of US-centric examples.

Monopolistic Papercutting Dingleberries

Take, for instance, Albertsons/ Safeway and their million brands. At the moment they're running a "Monopoly"-branded sweepstakes. Basically: buy shit, get tickets, win shit.

Now, the choice of “Monopoly” is, of course, hilarious. The obvious reason I’m amused is because Albertsons was recently under some heat for having too much control over the market (aka, monopolistic powers). Also, Monopoly is a terrible game by contemporary design standards. No doubt, they picked it for brand recognition: it's perhaps the best known board game of the 20th century. But all of this is beside the point.

From a single consumer's POV in the trenches (checkout lanes), I can only imagine that they're losing participants and sales boosts year-over-year; churn is high and replacement rate is nonexistent. Surely the paltry $0.50 coupons aren't seeing redemption beyond dedicated couponers.

I'd love to see the numbers behind the Monopoly sweeps to prove me wrong.

It seems to me to have been designed by some idiotic suits in corporate marketing high-rises who know nothing about actual player engagement. They must have researched as far as an article about how larger prizes create greater sweepstakes player engagement and said, "Fuck it, making a game is easy."

What they've got is painfully menial (not unheard of in games...) while lacking sufficient, regular rewards (whoops, that's the trip; you've gotta do at least one or the other). It suffers from arcane rules like hidden, tiered rarities, and online second-chance sweeps. And it fails to account for human fallibility: even if an active player got that one rare piece they need, will they notice in the monotony of flipping through their collection?

I'm sure someone somewhere thought lower redemption rates were a good thing. In fact, they are not. If no one ever won the prizes on lotto and scratcher tickets, no one would play. Likewise, if no one claims your prizes, you’re not gaining customers who will come back to buy more of your crap.

To Albertsons: Might I point you to the gambling industry and the brilliance of slot machine design? Or perhaps you'll be interested in talking to the mobile F2P giants about Skinner boxes? If you're going to go full skeezy money-grab, you should actually study how to be a piece of shit and do it well.

Of course, maybe I'm wrong. That's certainly my opinion and observations as someone dedicated to honing my corner of the craft. Still, I'd be impressed if it weren't floundering this year.

Missed Connection

You know what other experience without a doubt needs a UX overhaul?

Airports and airlines.

Talk about missing the gamification bandwagon. From customer acquisition & retention, ticket purchases, obscene post-purchase legal agreements, TSA checkpoints, the in-flight experience, baggage claim, and customs, it's a shitshow.

I love to travel. I'm one of those rare people that even enjoys the monotonous moments.

I hate everything about having to take a flight.

Airlines feel like they're stuck in 1950s, despite the fact that flying was supposedly more pleasant back then. Cookie-cutter marketing, bland presentation, and peaks of stress in-between a general sense of arduousness:

It's got more rough spots than a sun-blasted hobo sleeping on granite.

No user reward cycle in the short loop

Everything feels like a punishment, without regard to user input or choice

Corporate interests > the service provided

Little to no user agency or engagement

Worse latency than Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars (heh, sorry Psyonix — that game was actually a gem... for local splitscreen)

And the only interesting aesthetics are: other travelers, clouds as-seen-through-tiny-ass-windows, advertisement posters selling more garbage, various hues of biege or gray decor, and the rare piece of architectural art

Need I continue?

Here's the point, folks

Gamification is here and it makes life pleasant. It's a tool, it's fucking effective, and it's here to stay.

Like any tool: it can be used for evil and it can be used like a dolphin with a pickaxe (poorly). None of that stops it from being effective or being wielded for perfectly good reasons by everyone else.

At least take the time to get a feel for its heft and balance.

Pat out.

[stralor]

A pitfall of games-as-a-service: updating the dev environment alongside the game's own patches can lead to serious consequences.

Story time.

Yesterday, I discovered Unity 5.6 has a UI bug that breaks a specific menu in DA.

Unfortunately, I discovered this while testing the newest build that I was hours from pushing to the public. Updating to 5.6 was one of the first things I did in this patch.

I almost didn't test that menu, since I hadn't made direct changes to it myself.

This means a bunch of the changes are tied directly to compatibility with 5.6. Some are fixes that I'd been eagerly awaiting, some are features that used new tools, some are simply casualties of chronology. Rollback to 5.5 would break half the patch. Roll-forward to beta didn't fix the issue.

So here I am, sitting on a patch that I can't release.

The current version of the game has a rage-inducing bug (the minigame clock blares a constant tone instead of beeping once a second). I'm troubleshooting how to fix that without sending along everything else that changed. I suspect it will involve a Unity rollback and a git repo fork.

In the meantime, I'm going to build some more tools. I have some ideas on how to streamline the home stretch as we approach full release. The ideas might take weeks to implement. However, I may have some unexpected weeks at my disposal.

File under "The Adventures of Solo Dev"

ttyl mfers

[stralor]

SIEGE

A couple weekends ago, I attended another university gaming convention. This time I was off to CSU Fullerton's inaugural "SIEGE" event.

Like last time at UCSD's Winter GameFest, I brought my A-game. Two stations, candy, the banner, info sheets, and one overly-caffeinated superdev. Bonus: I had buttons!

Unlike WGF, I spoke on a panel. It was a small, fairly intimate Q&A.

Sadly, the event as a whole was a bit sparse on traffic. Which happens when it's the first weekend of spring break, at the end of finals week... Combo that sparseness with the game demos room being down the hall from the main event and a gaping hole of unused floor in the middle of the room that made the space feel boring. The table outside with volunteers looked like guards. No doubt more people walked past than walked in.

Despite those issues, I felt good about the event.

The teams in the room did a good job keeping the energy high and the players flowing between stations. I managed to have one or both of my stations running the most of the time. Most players were receptive to the game, and a few truly enjoyed it (every fan is a win).

The university volunteers were awesome, friendly, and relaxed (a huge plus). Also, SIEGE was thankfully only one day, so it was a nice 16-hour day (with the drive) rather than a whole weekend. That felt like the right length. And the organizers awesomely came through and provided parking passes for the closest lot — this attention to detail for an exhibitor was clutch.

All in all, SIEGE was worthwhile. I'm glad to be back to work on the game, though; nothing in the world beats a long day of development and progress.

Speaking of development... Thanks for reading!

[stralor]

Teaching Too Much, From a New Angle

Destination Ares is an obtuse game. I’ve constantly battled how to teach players to play and how to give information about its hidden depths without overwhelming them. As is, it has too much exposition and too many mechanics in too small a frame.

I can't waste time adding even more text before players get to do anything.

So it's time to get creative.

As with roguelikes and other games with permadeath, Destination Ares is fundamentally about empirical experimentation. Try something new, fuck up, learn, repeat. The trick, of course, is getting players to A) initially parse what they're seeing and B) keep exploring and looping.

Enter the metagame

When they loop, we can tell more information. Teach when they lose. Make it clear why and how and where they messed up. Occasionally soften with humor. To this end, more than half of DA's initial achievements are actually "failure" achievements. Here are a few examples:

I've made these secret achievements; you'll see them only if they become relevant (and ohhh hoho they'll definitely be relevant).

You know what's nice about this method? They don't take time away from play. These are a way of side-loading learning; they'll pop up and reinforce what's already happening in the game. Furthermore, players can go back and see what "lessons" and "hints" they've unlocked.

This game is about exploring and playing your way, not being railroaded into meta-goals I've established. So, along with failure achievements, most of DA's other achievements are also going to be secret.

Down the line, I hope to expand on this ethos of teaching through the metagame. As much as is possible with a mechanically front-loaded game design, I want to introduce new concepts over play loops. Complicate efforts, show ways to influence key variables, and, most importantly, allow organic self-teaching.

Thanks for reading. Hit that follow button if you haven't already.

[stralor]

Design Spotlight: Tales of Maj’Eyal 4

Last time on Design Spotlight, I talked about some of the design choices that made Steamworld Heist really shine. This time, I'm going to hone in on Tales of Maj'Eyal 4 (aka ToME4).

Where Steamworld Heist was strong (feedback, animations, SFX, clear mechanics introduction), ToME4 is often weak. Yet, ToME4 is an impressive experience and strong in many ways that Steamworld Heist was not.

Let's talk about it.

ToME4 has incredible depth, responsiveness to past player actions (seemingly across campaigns), and sheer strength of content. There's certainly extreme replayability here. It's dense and tactically challenging, though. It's not for the faint of heart when it comes to learning sheets and sheets of abilities and statistics.

It isn't news that I like complex stats and mechanic interactions (my current project is a resource management sim, after all). Combat in ToME4 is often about combo-ing abilities in the right order against the right enemies as you get flooded, but it's also about knowing your core weaknesses. A design choice I found interesting (and, let's be honest, often frustrating to my desire for heroic power) is the trinity of Physical, Mental, and Spell attack types. It’s designed so that your best corner of the trinity will almost always be the same for both offense and defense... and you'll struggle against attacks of one or both of the other corners.

Play a melee tank, and you're asking for trouble with spells. Build up your defenses against those, and you'll have sacrificed resources that could have been put toward mind attacks. Play a ranged caster and you'll be vulnerable to any archer or sneaky melee character. Play a summoner... and, well, die to anything that gets past your helpers.

You can't underestimate any corner of the trinity. They can all disable and debuff you in unique and painful ways, and they can all straight up kill you once your defenses are down.

I'd often forget about Mental. Physical and Spell is just so prevalent in early and mid game that when a competent mind-attacker came along, I'd always have a fight for my life.

It's a simple thing, and certainly not even a main draw. If I've learned anything from my time in board game design, however, it's this: don't underestimate the tried-and-true core mechanics. So much of the game builds off this Physical-Mental-Spell dynamic, and it works.

As designers, we can see it as a form of the three-legged stool: Rock, Paper, Scissors.

Can you think of any other examples of RPS being used well in games?

Talk to you next time!

[stralor]

Way off-topic for this blog.

I’d just like to say: I agree with whoever this redditor is. The world is often bland and boring. A little color goes a long way.

Thank you for so regularly being wacky and weird, Tumblr. You’ve got at least this (late-20s) (white) (male) (indie game dev) dude rooting for you.

[stralor]

How to Expo, aka What I Learned at WGF

What a whirlwind of a weekend! I just spent three days standing by my little table in UCSD's Price Center as thousands of gamers ambled about and checked out my demos of Destination Ares.

Thanks to my friendly booth-neighbors, a steady supply of caffeine, and sheer willpower, I managed to survive the event. (I even had some friends and family swing by to help and hang out!)

Though I've shown the game publicly at IGDA-SD demo days before (and been an attendee at my share of cons and expos), this was in many ways a first for me. It was certainly the biggest event I've had an official table to demo at. I threw together a banner, some info sheets, 10 lbs of candy, and had two stations running the game all weekend.

What did I learn? A metric fuck-ton:

Do events like these in teams of at least two. I had to rely on other people watching my booth whenever I wanted to use the restroom or get food. There was no opportunity for naps or breaks or even proper meals

Candy is an effective attractor, especially for the cost and with an audience of primarily college students

Wireless mice are a bad move; I had to make sure they never got swiped, and at one point some batteries died

Laptops are ideal for space and portability, obviously. But they have an extra bonus: if you're using standalone monitors, mice, and keyboards (you should, if you can), you can watch the player's game from the laptop screen, behind the booth

Keep ports away from public access and set up guest user accounts with only what you need in them. I did this, and am glad I did; at least one guy wasn't shy about testing security vulnerabilities at multiple booths

Specific to my game: having one player building a ship while another was attempting a run created cool opportunities to talk about the depth of the game with the audience. Players seem to like seeing customization and users generating content

Static screensavers with info sheets, art, and various other game-related slides are great for when no one is playing on a station (which was awesomely rare!), but they have the disadvantage of needing you to close the game to turn on

Headphones were great for getting players isolated from the expo noise and engaged. Players that wore them tended to enjoy themselves more, even if they could already hear the speaker. The speaker is just about attraction (and, I suppose, hearing cues about where in the game the player is)

Like everything in life, turning up your personability to 11 makes it easier

The spontaneous inter-booth gift economy is the best thing ever. Candy, food, caffeine, hardware, swag, chairs, security, and helping hands were all exchanged constantly and made the experience smoother for everyone. The more neighbors I met and the more of that I did, the better I felt about the event

Next time bring sanitary wipes for the keyboards, mice, and headphones, rather than doing it at home. The players appreciate the care and attention to detail (if they ask), and you'll appreciate the peace of mind

Next time have some branded swag in addition to the cheaper attractors; I could have used something (even small) to remind players about the game when they checked their pockets at home after the event

Only a few players read any of the signs you post everywhere. They're good to establish presence and professionalism, but don't expect them to be engaging. I estimate <10% of players read anything about my recent update, my social media, or early access. I also had 0 sign-ups on my posted email list, even though the event spawned some direct sales. I hate email anyway, so part of me is kind of glad about that last one.

Relatedly, think about what your call to action is while players are at the booth. Mine was muddled for quite awhile: I was doing the IGDA's raffle stamp cards, pointing to my own raffle, asking to be followed on social media, soliciting feedback, building brand awareness, encouraging sales, and establishing industry connections. Some of that will happen organically from the people who want it.

As time went on, I chose to consciously focus on one thing: 'inspiring evangelists'. I'm at a stage where I need a community that is fervent about the game and the work I'm doing. After all, I can't handle all the outreach everywhere; I'm a poor solo dev. So, I honed my behaviors around various phases:

Attraction — cheer current players on, provide reasons to approach the booth (free candy, signs, screensavers, a big stupid shit-eating smile), encourage crowd formation, keep booth looking like there's constant activity and interest, and literally invite the shy people looking on to join in when space is available

Intro — elevator pitch game (AI of colony ship; keep crew alive; resource management colony simulator with a splash of minesweeper), set player expectations (”You're going to lose”) with good humor, reassure player that you'll help if they need it, let player choose to try the tutorial or jump right in

Early Game — interject key tips tied to fluff ("You're a computer, so you can slow time; hit spacebar to pause. Your crew is suffocating!"), get raffle card stamped before they were too engrossed, then pivot away to let the player explore (I found too much hand-holding here, even with people who needed it, was a big turn off. If I'd set player expectations well enough with a laugh and challenging grin, they were okay with getting their ass kicked)

Mid Game — be accessible for player questions, banter with anyone who is talkative

Late Game — assess player interest, transition uninterested players out, encourage interested players to dive deeper (try again, talk strategy, or build their own ship)

Departure — solicit feedback ("What could use improvement?"), then ask about what they liked, thank them, smile more than any other point, leave open the option of returning, let them go. Departure should be as short as possible (if a player has lots to say, great!), don't stress players out.

"But Pat, isn't all of this super exhausting?"

Yes.

That's why I call it "surviving." That's also why it was so damn fun.

I will add that I didn’t pressure players to quit after they’d been playing for awhile. Surely there are benefits to giving the player a taste and then leaving them hungry. However, my ethos was that I’d rather let a player get super invested and have an air of exclusivity around the booth than churn more players. Some people stayed for a couple hours!

Anyway, I have a huge list of bugs and feedback to get to after all that chaos of a weekend. See ya next time.

[stralor]

Design Spotlight: Steamworld Heist

Oh man, what a beautifully crafted game. I'd argue that providing feedback to the user is this game's strongest suit. It's amazing.

It's so good that the game could be shit (it's not) and it'd still be enjoyable to play. But, I've talked about various forms of feedback before (a few times), so I'll skip over that this time.

Instead, let's talk about a different strength of Steamworld Heist: the mechanics introduction curve.

Not Holding the Player's Hands

Core gameplay is introduced softly, letting the player understand the basics of what's going on. And occasionally a little tip will pop up when a new character ability is used. But that's the extent of the "telling" portion of teaching the player. The rest is "showing": they're not afraid to throw you in the pool and say, "Swim!"

Most of player learning is left to organic discovery. New mechanics are presented at the last possible moment; goop on the ground doesn't mean anything until the player interacts with it (in this case, shooting it), yet it's very clearly in the scene and relevant ever before its purpose is discovered. Moreover, it's clear what is happening once it's triggered.

A few examples:

Shields - Don't have health pop up when shot, so aren't destructible

Conditional cover - Only pops up when you're adjacent to it, yet very clearly makes a show of it and is highlighted in movement mode

Upgraded cover objects - Shows both thematic consistency and also is designed to appear "better" and more durable than that old stuff before you ever see its health bars

This is possible due to that fantastic feedback. There is art direction that foregrounds important/ interactable objects, responsive SFX, and VFX that clearly demonstrates what's going on.

The core mechanics of the game are also simple and exposed to the player. There's no large abstraction for the player to figure out: health and damage is literal and you can see what does what and how and when. This means new mechanics can be layered on without turning complication into confusion.

I suspect the turn-based nature of the game really lends a helping hand to this last-possible-moment form of discovery. There doesn't have to be a million things happening on the screen, competing for player attention; action is methodical, and chaotic only when the player made it so. You can take a split second to show 'conditional cover' opening up (and the player will see it!), since bullets and explosions and other unit movement isn't simultaneous; the cover is the only thing moving.

Lessons to Learn

Steamworld Heist shows us that there's a huge ceiling to how good a game can feel. Likewise, turn-based focus, exposed core mechanics, and organic discovery together show us that players' hands don't need to be held for them to get a full understanding.

How much of this can we take away to our own games?

Obviously the merits of turn-based focus aren't possible in, say, a realtime first-person shooter. 4Xs might require a large amount of abstraction. And tiny game dev outfits don't necessarily have the time, money, or manpower to punch out this level of polish and gamefeel.

The model is still relevant, though. Player focus is a (finite) resource we can tap to create clarity. Judicious use of feedback, timing, and simple presentation can make all the difference in any game.

I know I certainly could use the memo.

Thanks for stopping by and giving me a read. You can catch all these posts by following here and/or on twitter.

I'll see you again in a couple weeks.