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!)