Two sides of the same coin. Inside and outside.

I went to a games convention on the weekend. There was a section with Indie developers, so I decided to go and hand a link to my portfolio around and see if anyone was interested in hiring me ('cause right now I work at a factory, far from what I'd really like to be doing). What I saw there was really disappointing, however. While the games they showed off were pretty, I saw only a couple of inventive things there, and nothing particularly inspiring.

There was a game with a penguin that slid on an undulating surface. There was no variety and the game was not interesting for longer than the time it took for me to fail. There was a stealth game that the developers had obviously put more in presentation and graphics than the gameplay, which had some annoying unfairnesses, such as the cops turning infinitely fast with no warning.

As games to get a little bit of money in to start working on better games, they were ok. Like iphone games. Short, cheap, unmemorable. But I got the impression that it was this sort of game they were aiming for, and no higher.

Something I've noticed of the better games out there (not on my own) is that there's two parts to all of them. There's the side for the casual (or casual-ish, I'm not using the normal meaning of casual gamer here) and the side for the hardcore. A casual player of, say, Bayonetta, will button-mash their way through, even on hard mode, and then go on to the next game. The hardcore will learn all the various useful moves, unlock everything, and maybe even write a strategy guide for GameFAQs if there isn't already one. The casual player of Super Metroid will play through the entire game, maybe even trying for 100%. The hardcore player will try to use glitches, or at least highly challenging tricks, to see how much of the game they can skip, or maybe try a 100% speedrun or something. Even so-called "casual games" can have rediculous levels of hardcore-ness to them when someone gets obsessed with them. It's the same for competative games. Games that don't have room for both casual and hardcore players tend to die more easily. The hardcore player of BlazBlue will be scrutinizing the frame counts of every move, whereas the casual player may not ever even use cancels, and only bursts randomly. Casual players become hardcore players. If you don't have the casual, the hardcore group will be very small. If you don't have the hardcore side, people will get bored after a time and move on.

I think it's often best to design a game so that both styles of play are valid. Actually, I went back and added the word "often" to that last sentence just now. Most people are not as discerning between well and poorly designed games as I am, and are quite happy with, say, minesweeper (by the way, that game is badly designed. Even very late game, you still have to make completely random choices that could end your game prematurely). But even if some people don't notice your game is well made, a few people could, and that could boost how many people enjoy your game, thus telling others about it, thus getting more sales and reputation, making it more likely that people will buy your next one.

This is why I was disheartened at the developers at the convention. They seemed like they just made games, without thinking about them, and a lack of any hardcore appeal was one of the negative outcomes.

(I learnt some of this stuff from David Sirlin's website. Now there's a guy who thinks about games!)

I forgot to title this post. New site!

So, some people (Ha, I lie. *One* person. I don't have that many players yet.) have expressed dissatisfaction at my continued use of divShare. Well, stuff divshare! I am now the proud owner of a website! A small, free, thing that uses a template, but a site nonetheless! There are no waiting periods for downloads! Yay!

Unless, of course, I run out of bandwidth, but that's 100 gigs per month. Plenty, plenty.

I am now plunging head-first into the weird world of making web pages. It's not pretty. I wouldn't want to live there. But I must admit, I find it interesting.

Here 'tis!

Zelda Master Quest 3heart-shieldless challenge!

I recently started playing Metroid Prime again. I had a quick look on GameFAQs to see what sorts of tricks and secrets I could find, and I spotted a "Minimum Percent Walkthrough". It seems that, far from trying to get 100% items, there are people trying to get as small a percent as possible. Currently? 23%. If you know the game, you know that's very impressive. It uses all kinds of cheats and tricks to skip large portions of the game. After a quick look around, I discovered this was common for Metroid games. For example; Super Metroid's version of the guide is down to 15% (unless you don't mind using glitches, then it's 14%).

I also came across, on the TIG Source Forums, a procedurally generated Super Metroid like game, still in development, called Gentrieve. It got me thinking how it would be possible to do a minimum percent run through a game that changes every playthrough. In Gentrieve, probably to combat this, every room that you need an item to progress through is specifically designed so that you must have the item and there is no other way. This actually seems a bit sad, but completely understandable. With less rigidly designed levels, you risk a level being made that the player can use to accidentally skip parts of the game, which you don't want. However, levels made like this make you feel more railroaded, and it feels more gamey, like the place was made for you (which, of course, it was, but it always is. The idea is to make it not seem that way).

I have always loved the Metal Gear series (yet to play Solid 4, sadly). My favourite so far is 3. It is like the designers made a sandbox game that just happened to have a storyline. You can just mess around so much. Some of the videos of clever tricks and funny setups on Youtube are amazing. What they have done is create the game so that the player has a large scope for experimenting and arseing around, which is a game trait normally reserved for open world games.

What I love to see in games is scope for players to play the way they want. Linear games are fine, but freedom within the limitations is a factor that can elevate a game from good to great (in my view anyway). It's about creativity.

(To a certain extent, this also applies to competitive games, but it's a different kind of creativity, I think. Although, it's probably even more important there.)