More Portals!

Of course the perfect story to follow-up yesterday's review is:

Valve spokesman Doug Lombardi said the company would be pursuing the Portal phenomenon, and that it planned to add significantly more to the game that simply "a bunch of new puzzles."

yay!

Review (kinda) - Portal

As much as I enjoyed playing Portal, I really think I got a lot more out of it by watching my friends play. On three separate occasions, I tossed the controller at someone and told them to try it out. One of them, my boyfriend, is a game designer and hardcore gamer. It's his 360 I game on. Another, also male, is an occasional hardcore gamer, in that when he has time, he'll play the hell out of a game, but doesn't follow the industry in any way. He has a PS2, but no Xbox. The other one is female and loves playing games on the Wii, but had never tried a nextgen FPS game before.

I threw the controller at them, they asked me what to do and I said "Play." That's one of Portal's strengths, really. Anyone can pick it up and learn within a few minutes how to interact with the game world. The control scheme is very simple and when new things are introduced it's done very gradually, giving the player a chance to get used to it before it becomes vital for survival.

The puzzles were the same way, introducing new mechanics very slowly, one piece at a time until you had to start combining things together to solve them. Never once did I see anyone get frustrated with the difficulty of the game. In fact it was just the opposite, everyone said they had to force themselves to put it down so that they could be social, but being the awful influence I was, I told them to continue and no one hesitated. The puzzles are just challenging enough that you feel proud for finishing them. And because of your past experience with the other levels, you know that the answer has to be easy enough that if you just look hard enough you'll be able to figure it out.

Everybody loved the AI, of course. However, only the hardcore gamer didn't really listen to it as much at the start. The other two listened fairly intently to everything GlaDos said. In fact, the hardcore gamer was the only one who attempted to bring the cube through the force field in the "impossible" test. The others actually stated out loud "Hmmm...I can't take the cube through the field," because although it was never explicitly stated that the cube couldn't go through, GlaDos had said that any non-authorized objects will be vaporized by the field (including teeth). I asked my boyfriend about it afterwards and he says that it's probably because he's so used to the run and gun FPS style that he really didn't stop to listen to any implied directions.

Everyone's favourite line was, by far, "Speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out." It's just plain funny, really:)

When I was watching others, I also really got a chance to appreciate the excellent level design. When you finish a challenge, you're automatically facing the way you need to head next. It was also only by watching my friends that I started noticing the small hints and markers ALL over the place and paying attention to those really made it a lot easier to get through the game. Not to mention the extra runs that are available once you've finished the game, where you can play for fastest time, fewest portals and fewest steps. You really have to look at each level in a different light after that. Even the smallest changes they make to the advanced versions of the maps, it really makes you look back at the first run through, wondering how you could have been stumped and taken so long on it!

I think that Portal was the right game at the right time. A couple of years ago a game like this probably would have gone unnoticed, except for a cult following. But with the big push these days for accessibility to non-hardcore gamers, it really hit the sweet spot for being something that anyone can play and enjoy. Being bundled with the Orange Box sure helped since it's not likely something people would have taken a risk on by itself. Plus it comes at a time when most people have decided on Xbox vs. Playstation, with Xbox seeming to take the lead, the audience is sizeable and has moved past the early-adopter hardcore players to where most gamers have moved on to a next gen system.

Regardless, I'm happy to see this kind of success for a company that decided to take a risk. We need more of those!

pixel hunting

Sometimes it amazes me how the smallest changes can have such a huge impact on fun in a game. Sometimes it such a simple and minor change you have one of those "Now why didn't I think of that before?" moments.

For instance, one of the types of gameplay in the game I'm currently working on involves some serious pixel hunting, which can be out-and-out frustrating for a player. And given the size of our screens (average of 176x220 on most phones), with the HUD taking up about 20% of that, unless you're super close to an object, the relative size of something you're going to need to hunt for in a scene is going to be pretty small. Add that to the inexact controls of a cell phone and it can be a painful process.

The solution? Make cursor, instead of being a 1 pixel pinpoint into a 5x5 pixel zone. Simple and elegant. And sooooo much less frustrating, for both us and the player. The other alternative was to go through and increase the size of the sprite with transparent borders. It really makes a noticeable difference when playing through. But still, you think about it and go, well duuuuuuuh!

phenomenal cosmic power... in an itty bitty living space

I've just been reminded that I've been pretty quiet lately. We're about 2 weeks away from gold on my current project, so the hours I haven't been working I've been trying to de-stress from work. Which usually involves being fairly far away from my computer:)

Gotta love the constraints of developing for the mobile platform. My game was at 1200kB, it needs to be at 600kB. Ouch. By optimizing images and sounds, we've managed to squoosh it down to 809kB, which isn't bad. But it's still not good enough. It's those last few that are always the worst. We've had a brainstorming session after looking at how the sizes are broken down in the package. I'm fighting to keep a few things in and we've come up with some creative ways of dealing with a few of the problems.

The big issue is, and always has been, time. We could get it down to that, but the timeline is so tight, we're trying to do this optimization while still working out some major bugs in the game and giving it some polish. Adding in new things puts us behind. We wouldn't be in such a situation in the first place though if we'd had the time we needed to develop properly in the first place. Because we were given 5 weeks from script approval to beta, we just focused on throwing everything in to get it done, rather than doing things in a way that it'd be sleek and optimized from the start.

Going back and cleaning up something that could have been avoided from the start is frustrating. And stressful. I've had a constant headache the past week and haven't been sleeping well at all. I'm just looking forward to my 15 days of vacation in a tropical paradise at the end of this project. It's keeping me going:)

ol' school

This weekend, the boyfriend and I reinstalled Diablo 2. I do this once every couple of years, just because it's such an awesome game. I've always been a fan of roguelikes. In fact, my first PC gaming memory is sneaking a look into my dad's pack of floppies to see what games he had and I fell in love with Rogue. When I got my own computer, it was the first game I installed, moving on in later years to Nethack, which has been on every computer since then.

I think the reinstall was in part due to our disappointment with Hellgate (hmm...I still haven't written about that one yet apparently). I love a good hack-and-slash. Last night we powered through most of the first act, him as a Barbarian, me as a Druid. I've never played a Druid before. I still have all my old characters, I save them every time I uninstall the game. My top three were Sand, my Sorceress, Whoomp the Barbarian and Meth the Necromancer. The Druid so far is pretty neat. I'm focusing on Fire Elemental casting, Summoning Wolves and Summoning Vines. It's working out ok so far, I'm really enjoying it.

I was also really wanting to play it again after reading this awesome article on 20 mysterious games. Quite inspiring! I'd really love to use some of those techniques in my own games:)

The main thing I love about Diablo 2 is that it's co-op. A great way to spend an evening relaxing with a loved one:) Thankfully we have a stack of co-opable games on hand right now... although I am itching to finish of Portal;)

it's all about the boobies

*sigh* this post makes me sad. The notion that a woman can't be part of the industry, not in a central role at least. And if she is knowledgeable and powerful, she must have gotten there by sleeping her way to the top.

Or the idea that women aren't the target market for casual games, so every thing must have boobies in it to make it more enticing to those perverted men out there who only buy products because there's a hint of T'n'A in it.

I give women much more credit than that. I know that there are incredibly talented women out there working in the industry (even this MTV series about women in the industry defaulted mostly to women working as journalists or in PR in the industry, but who don't make games themselves). I know that geeks are known for their social ineptitude, but some of the attitudes I've seen have been fairly startling!

I've worked in several industry over the years and granted most of those (healthcare, mental health, PR, marketing) are predominantly female, but I've never encountered these kinds of attitudes before like I have in the gaming industry. The closest I suppose was while I was working in journalism, which is an old boys' club, but was already rapidly changing to at least a 50-50 split for newcomers. There were a few old-fashioned attitudes, but it mostly seemed about crushing any newbie egos than it was about women directly.

I also give men more credit than the gaming industry seems to. I don't think that you need to include suggestive or outright lewd content just to get men to buy your game. Sure, there'll always be a few out there who'll buy a game just because there's titties involved in some peripheral way, but I really think that it's a discredit to men to treat them like slobbering puppies who'll do anything for a little slip of nipple in an image.

This isn't to say that I'm against sex in games. I think that there should be more of it! After all, it's a huge part of life. I think that Mass Effect almost had it right (too bad there's no male-male action there, what a shame)and I think that The Sims has it perfect!

I'm just looking forward to the industry maturing and getting over their teenage-hormone-esque attitude. It's really like being in high school all over again. Maybe then we can all stop giggling and pointing (or freaking out) every time something remotely sexual is mentioned.

bragging rights

haha! My boyfriend (who is a level designer at another company here in town) just sent me this by email:

I just totally bragged about you. How you pointed out a game that we both wanted to play, I pay for it and that you had opened the box, ran off to the bedroom and finished most of Portal in one sitting. After a bit of silence one of them said "Wow she's a keeper" =)

At least he thinks it's cute that I ran off with his game:) What can I say, I've really been itching to try Portal! I also started in on Half-Life 2, which is one of those games I've been meaning to pick up but just never got around to.

However, I didn't get to finish Portal since I gave him back control of the Xbox. I got him hooked on Psychonauts, which is awesome for me. I really wanted to see the whole game all the way through but I completely suck at 3D platformers. So while I made it about half-way through myself, I've spent the weekend watching him play the second half of the game. He almost finished it last night but he got tired and frustrated with the insane platforming required on those last couple levels.

He probably would have finished it had I not usurped the console for part of the afternoon yesterday :P More on Psychonauts as a whole once I've seen the ending...

Review - Understanding comics

I can't recall quite where I had heard about Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, but when my downstairs neighbour mentioned in passing that she owned it, I said that it was on my "to-read" list. And so she loaned it to me (along with her entire Sandman collection, what can I say, she rawks)!

It's really a whole lot more deep than I had expected. I expected the basics, the explanation of panels and art styles. But it wen so much further than that. About how words and pictures were once the same thing and yet "civilized" people keep them very separate, feeling that only the basest people need to mix the two together.

The perception of time across space was also a very neat concept, that while intuitive, doesn't really seem to be in the fore-front of my mind while reading comics, it just happens. I love it when you have those "Well of course! Why didn't I think of that before!" kind of moments while studying other peoples' theories. It's true that when designing that kind of thing you must be conscious of it, but to me, the real beauty of it is that it happens without the realization of the readers. Full immersion and suspension of disbelief.

The other thing I really enjoyed from the book was the analysis of the differences between Western and Asiatic comic styles, the variance in the frequency of use of the different types of panels, to the way they are composed to the depiction of movement. It's really neat to see these things spelled out that you already sense are differnt between them (if you've read both types).

The book has really given me some food for thought about visuals and not only what those things represent in actual fact, but about the more abstract and iconic meanings they can embody. Certainly a book I'd recommend to any other game designers and anybody who enjoys graphic novels. It really gets you thinking about the role the reader/player has in interpreting the visions we put before them.

beeeeeeeerz

Today was a good day:) I declare it so!

After staying until about midnight last night and still not quite having a playable game (stupid bugs happening only in the release version and not in the debug version for no apparent reason) I came into work at around 9:30am. This is late for me. I'm usually in around 7:30am since I prefer leaving work early, it feel like I have more of a day left to accomplish my own stuff afterwards. Most people in Creations don't arrive until 10ish anyways.

In any case, given that we'd finally achieved beta status, our producer treated us to a lovely lunch (and beer) out. I really needed that long lunch. It was good to connect with the teammates, who although they sit right next to me, I mostly only talk to through MSN.

The afternoon was spent playing through the game with a fine-toothed comb. Many a bug was entered into Sharepoint and screenshots were mailed to teammates. I'm sure I was well-loved today, being the bearer of bad news. I can afford to be nit-picky now. If an image is off by one pixel I'm going to capture it and show it to you. This is my game and I want it to be as perfect as possible. I realize that if I don't do this kind of stuff, no one will. I have to point out each and every thing now. I can't settle for "good enough". I might come across as a hardass, but I know that it's what I need to do in order to get the game into a shape that I'll be happy with.

I checked out at 5:30pm since my old team and I were heading out for our standard payday 5 à 7 (happy hour to you non-Québecors) beers. 2 for 1! Stopping by home briefly to get changed before we head out to the club to finish off the night. Great way to start the weekend after a fairly stressful week. Great way to celebrate that we've passed the hump and it's all downhill from here :P I can't wait to put the polish on this project!

is t3h winn-ah!

It's Thursday after 9pm. My friends are out having beers, I'm still here in the office, trying to debug a very buggy build so that we can send it off to the VP tonight. It's not especially strenuous overtime, since a lot of it is sitting around waiting for other people to debug something else before I can be of use again. None-the-less, it can be fairly frustrating, making slow progress, one step forward, two steps back. Every time you successfully squash one bug you get past that point and discover another one.

But given the turn around time on this project, we've done pretty damned awesome, if I do say so myself. The last project I worked on has 13 weeks from script approval until beta. This one...5 weeks. With beta supposedly being Jan 3, like any work at all was going to be done over the xmas holidays! So I think the fact that by the end of tonight we'll have a playable product is pretty frickin' sweet. Starting next week there'll be some tweaking and bug fixes and finishing touches, but for the most part we've managed to put something pretty cool together.

It's all worth while when a few months after wards you get notice of something like this. Apparently my last game (CSI: Miami) won an award for best mobile strategy game! w00t! :) More than anything, it's just nice to know that people are out there enjoying my game. It's nice to know that these late nights mean something to somebody. I couldn't imagine finding the motivation to keep doing them otherwise!

Soul Calibur vs. Star Wars

I hadn't posted this before because I thought the screenshots were just fakes, but no, here's the trailer from CES. Turns out Yoda and Vader will be making an appearance in Soul Calibur IV. WTF? I loved playing the original Soul Calibur as Sophitia, I was unstoppable! I've really been looking forward to the next one in the series (but not Legends, cause it looked like it was gonna suck hard), but no... I dunno. Crossovers rarely work well. And throwing Star Wars into the Soul Calibur universe just seems... weird. I'm really not sure what to make of this. Am I excited or disgusted?

Different views of the gaming world

I recently watched two series of documentaries on video games, The Video Game Revolution by PBS and Gamer Revolution by CBC. Both covered the current hot topics, like violence, virtual communities and military recruitment. But the viewpoints were quite different.

For instance, I can't recall anyone mentioning sex in the PBS one in more than a passing mention. Yet the CBC one had a whole big section on it, talking about the sex RPGs out there in the States and how it's revolutionizing how people are exploring their sexuality.

The biggest most glaring difference, however, was their take on the same story about one gamer called Neverdie in an MMO called Entropia Universe. The PBS story covered how this man, a single father, mortgaged his home, risking his financial future, and implicitly that of his son's as well, to purchase virtual property in this game. Luckily, the go on, people are renting space in his new property and he's come out on top, an instant millionaire. Rags to riches, against all odds, risky undertakings. Seemed to imply to me that maybe his wife left him because he was being so wanton with the family money.

Well, CBC told that story and a bit more. They show a heart-breaking shot of the father and the kid sitting at the table eating, this little 4-year-old saying repeatedly "Why did mommy die? Why did mommy die?" Turns out there's more to the story. The husband adored his wife. They gamed in that virtual world together. He adored his gamer chick so much that he wrote a song about how awesome it was to have a gamer chick and that went on to become a hit song in their virtual universe. Everyone knew he was the artist and she was his muse. They were celebrities! Then one day she dies. And he talks about how hard it was for him to return to that world and break the news to their virtual, but oh so real, friends.

I found it really surprising that PBS skipped that part. They really stuck to the meat and potatoes of the gaming news. Sure they crammed a lot in and had some awesome industry interviews. But they seemed to miss out on the heart of the story. CBC really showed the Canadian-ness of their production, by not covering nearly as much, but going into each story much more in-depth and making the people much more real.

It's a gaming revolution right now, sure, both agree on that. But I agree with CBC, it's about more than just 1s and 0s, about more than hotshot industry insiders. It's about the people playing the games and living out the stories.

DeathSpank

ooo....this is interesting! Ron Gilbert, designer of Secret of Monkey Island, has a new game coming out with Canadian company Hothead Games, the guys working on the Penny Arcade game. The episodic action-adventure-RPG DeathSpank (love the name!) is supposed to be a cross between Diablo and Secret of Money Island. I can't wait to try it out!

Review: Overlord

So this isn't one of the games I mentioned in my previous post. In fact, I just picked it up this past weekend. I've had it sitting around for a couple of months now, but with crazy work hours and tons of other newer games, I just never got around to it.

The reason I picked it up was actually because of this interview. It's mostly about heavenly sword, but what piqued my interest is the who of the story, Rhianna Pratchett. As it turns out, she's Terry Pratchett's daughter. I love the Discworld series ever since I discovered them only a few years ago and devoured the entire library of books whole. And given that I'm currently doing writing in games, I was really interested in seeing how his progeny did in the realm of video games. And since I don't have a PS3 (yet), I went with her last game which was Overlord.

I'm playing the PC version, rather than the Xbox, which is really obvious in the simplified controls. It doesn't look as though they really optimized them for the PC, which is unfortunate. I sometimes find myself fumbling because of the camera or selecting the wrong group of minions.

I do love my minions though. When I play action RPGs I tend to select pet classes, like my favourite Necromancer, Sparky in Diablo 2 or the Engineer and Summoner classes in Hellgate London. Maybe that comes from being the oldest sibling and I just like being bossy, getting the other people to do my dirty. I dunno. Either way, it's lots of fun to have them run around collecting treasure defeating baddies and the like.

The writing is surprisingly sparse, I felt. I was expecting a lot more funniness from it, I guess. But given that your character is mute and your minions say the same things over and over and over again until you wish you could strangle them (though kicking them around can be somewhat satisfying), I guess I shouldn't have expect much. What there is in the way of story is of the silly-funny type. It makes me smile, but not laugh out loud.

The game itself is pretty fun. Not tons of fun and I'm loving every minute of it, but it's an ok way to pass the time. Not really a memorable game in the end. I guess maybe my hopes were a bit too high for it.

Happy New Year!

*cheer*

I'm still around, really I am! It's just that with the holidays (we all know how that is) and being sick (adverse reaction to my pre-trip vaccination, methinks) and it being crunch time (who the heck gives a Jan 3 beta date when you know everyone will be taking at least one week of vacation?) I really haven't had much time. In fact, I'm even working from home right now today, still recovering from yesterday. No, I didn't go out and have a wild time. All partying was cancelled in favour of getting better after a nasty illness, details of which are better off not being shared.

Regardless, last night resulted in great gaming, in fact, we finished (co-op) about two chapters in Eternal Sonata, which has finally started to pick up. I think that constantly splitting up the 9 or so playable characters (only 3 of which can be used at any time) has really added a different challenge to the game. We started out by really focusing on our 3 favourites, one melee, one healer one range. But when they started splitting up the characters into all these different groups, we had to constantly rethink our strategies. At one point we ended up being forced to play with several characters we hadn't been levelling at all and totally got our asses kicked. This finally gave us a feeling of being challenged again whereas before we felt as though we were just gliding right through it.

My favourite character by far is Salsa:) She is so me! And man can she do a ton of damage! I'm impressed. I'm also constantly impressed by the gorgeous locations too. We just finished going through Baroque for the second time and there's this one camera angle, just as you're about to switch locations, where the camera suddenly swings out from following you down the long roadway so that you can get a full view of the gorgeous castle in all its wintery glory.

I'm also really enjoying the historical bits throw in there. This is what a learning game should be, fun first. If it's educational first, then you end up losing whatever interest your audience may have otherwise had for your game. I remember reading a quote from one of the developers of Arden that that was the problem they had in the end, they forgot to make it fun.

I'll write more later (once crunch is over) about some of the other games I picked up over the holidays, including more Mass Effect, more Assassin's Creed, finishing Hellgate, Viva Pinata and NWN2: Mask of the Betrayer.

In the mean time, I'll probably only have time to post some news-y bits here. Oh and over here too, on the IGDA Montreal Blog.