Only a short update today. I was interviewed by the awesome German video podcast Mehrspieler. about my game TRAUMA.
It was a very pleasant interview and it includes lots of juicy background bits on the game. They also talk a little about the Global Game Jam event at Cologne Game Lab. Unfortunately, it’s in German. But for my German readers certainly something to check out. Mehrspieler is a podcast with an extraordinary production quality. So be sure to watch the other episodes as well!
Encouraged so many times by Krystian, I’m once again trying to establish a “once a week” post of mine. So this is the second part of a (more or less) flavour + ideas + game design describing developer diary, which I am writing on my upcoming Android game “Silent Totems”.
Currently I see it more fit to write down the “softer” game design intentions. But if you expect technical details, wait for the post mortem / making of (i will probably also write one for Princess Nuriko).
This time the dev diary is about two of our gameplay mechanics.
Strange encounters of a third kind?
WARNING: Spoiler(s) ahead. Basically all my dev diary texts contain some spoilers (and will in the future). So if you want to get the full “i don’t even know one bit of the game” puzzling experience, don’t read this developer diary 
Or forget about it ASAP.
Continue reading “Tuesday Developer Diary – Silent Totems #2″
The Monster Hunter Podcast takes a bit longer this time. So now I’m on a spot to come up with something. But I actually have something great.
Recently we have been reviewing some of the GDC Vault content for CGL. The GDC Vault is a website where GDC attendees can watch videos of the GDC sessions they missed. Sadly, it is only availible for GDC attendees. But this year they actually have a great selection of videos availible for free as well!. You can see them here.
The most interesting items are the Classic Game Postmortems. Some old-school game developers talk about some the development of some of the most influential titles.
How indeed?!
There are videos on titles like Doom, Elite, Bejewled, Another World, Maniac Mansion, Pac-Man, Prince of Persia, Populous, Pitfall and more. I haven’t watched them all but so far I have been enjoying the Another World a great deal. An it’s not only because I have been playing the game lately. This is the first time I hear any details on how the game came to be. There are some great technical details in there. I love how Eric Chahi started out with a creative vision and then came up with this crazy technology to make it happen. I’m glad he is back.
But the other videos are great as well and I recommend checking them out. Sadly, there is no good way to download and save them. Who knows how long that stuff stays there. Also, there is even more great content once you log in, but there is no way to save that either. And each GDC Vault membership expires after 12 months. I see what they did there…
So no update yesterday. I blame the Majewski Afternoon Time-Barrier Principle. Let me explain. You may – perhaps even without knowing – be familiar with the Novikov self-consistency principle. It’s a theoretical model of how time travel could be possible without creating paradoxes. According to this principle, all time travels have already happened. So if you go back in time and try to change anything, something unexpected will happen to prevent you from making the change. As if the universe defends it’s own consistency. A good example of said principle in action is shown in the movie 12 Monkeys.
The Majewski Afternoon Time-Barrier Principle states that for every day you have at your disposal to work on a creative project, you physically won’t be able to begin before 5PM. The universe will prevent you will all it’s might to stop you. Perhaps you will have to do some overdue groceries, clean the flat or you will oversleep or even receive a really distracting Amazon shipment. The Majewski Afternoon Time-Barrier Principle is the reason why I always have been working at night. But that workaround stops working so well when you get a dayjob.
Back to serious. I have been setting up the payment system for the TRAUMA website. It is finally coming together. A small problem caused some headaches. Last weekend I have been trying to generate a direct payment by tapping into the instant payment button HTML form using PHP. This is a bit out of the ordinary. Usually, one would use the PayPal PHP SDK. But I don’t have the nerve to dive into it. It seems to be made for people who like to toy around with shopping baskets. I just want a plain direct payment with perhaps a bit of control.
I finally figured out that it’s basically not possible. The workaround everybody uses is to generate an HTML form with PHP and send it with Java Script. Duh! Not very elegant either. But it will have to do for now. I will post a detailed walktrough when I’m finished.
During further tests, I stumbled across an intriguing idea. You see, every time I test my system, I have to make an actual payment of 1 EUR. This is how my account looks like.
And you thought waiting for code to compile was nasty?
On the one hand, it makes bugs super-annoying because you actually have to pay for them with real money. The process is also a pain to debug as the code you write isn’t executed by yourself. So you can’t really trace out error messages and whatnot. On the other hand, I have never written so clean code in PHP. In 9 tries from 0 to first payment went trough flawlessly – that’s certainly a personal best. Perhaps I should adapt this system for other areas as well.
Of course, I’m making the payments to myself. So I will get some of that money back. But not all of it. Especially at this low ammounts, PayPal keeps a hefty percentage. It’s really quite sad. I would have loved to experiment with Micropayments.
So all in all, I’m on track. Will continue working on the payment system and release it for other Indies to adapt. Most of it should be done next weekend.
Not many people seem to have written about it. Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker has an interesting feature where you recruit new soldiers using Wi-Fi access points. Here is a video.
Peace Walker contains an X-Com-like base management part. You need to recruit new soldiers and assign them to different teams. This gives you access to new, better weapons.
Soldiers are usually recruited by basically kidnapping them during missions. But the soldiers recruited this way often have very low skills. An alternative way of recruiting unlocks at some point. The game scans the Wi-Fi access points in your environment and generates soldiers from them. You can recruit the soldiers by doing a hand-to-hand combat training mission against them. I have been using this feature a couple of times, here are some observations.
Forcing players to take out the PSP – You will “use up” the access points at home quickly and will soon be doing recruiting sessions on the go. Because there is a mission associated with recruiting, you will be forced to play the game on the go. On the one hand, this is inconvenient. A passive “street pass” option would seem less troublesome. On the other hand, players will be encouraged to play the game on the go. This has the potential to make the PSP system and the game itself more visible. Other people might ask the players what they are doing and learn about the game this way.
Lack of Transparency – The way the function works right now, you just select the menu options and the recruiting mission magically appears. The fact that the soldiers are generated from Wi-Fi access points is not addressed at all. It’s not clear where the soldiers are coming from. This lack of transparency reduces the function to an arbitrary, anonymous soldier generator. Increasing transparency could encourage players to experiment more. Maybe the Wi-Fi at Starbucks generates a kick-ass medic. I’d like to know so I can share this with my friends.
Disparate Wi-Fi Functions – Actually, you can do a lot in Peace Walker using Wi-Fi. You don’t only recruit solders but you can also trade solders and equipment, play co-op missions and play versus matches. Each of those functions is hidden in a different, separate menu. The next level of this system would be to pull all those functions together in one menu. Walking through the city and collecting soldiers, I should be able to accidentally meet a Peace Walker players and play with them or exchange gear.
Easing Players Into Online Functions – There is an interesting feedback loop that encourages players to use more online functions. Once you start recruiting soldiers, you actually get quite a lot of them. You will soon max out your teams and you will be forced to weed out some of your staff. It feels like you are wasting recourses if you just fire them. So you are automatically interested in reaching out to friends to see if they can find any use for your obsolete staff members.
These are just a couple of observations. I heard that the usefulness of the system and the resulting experience varies depending on the Wi-Fi density of where you live. If you played the game, feel free to add on your own observations. I’d love to hear them.
Again, not a very long post today. I recently got a wheel stand for my racing wheel. It is made in Poland and it’s called Wheel Stand Pro. Here is a video of it in action.
Let’s rewind. Back when Gran Turismo 4 got out I thought it would be interesting to try a more serious approach to this game. I have been playing Gran Turismo 3 for a long time, even though I never reached 100% in it. I liked the game a lot. So I got a Driving Force Pro wheel from Logitech. It was an upper mid-range wheel with force feedback and made specifically with Gran Turismo 4 in mind.
I liked it a lot. There was only one problem. It was a bit cumbersome to set up. There were a lot of wires and that whole thing had to be mounted on a surface. I had to play it at my desk. Luckily, my apartment was set up in such a way, that I could re-position my TV so I could see it from my desk. It wasn’t a very comfortable setup, though. The TV was very low and far away. The chair I was sitting in had wheels and it tended to roll away. Not like in a car at all.
But it was nothing compared to the problem I faced after I moved to my current flat. Now my desk is a different room. In the living room, there is no table I could attach the wheel to. I tried using small tables to play it on the couch. It kinda worked but it was even less comfortable and the tables were not even stable enough for more outrageous driving maneuvers.
All these small issues led to a rather depressing result. I ended up not using the wheel as much as I hoped. I also ended up playing GT4 even less that GT3.
So now with GT5 it was time to take it to the next level. I looked for a lot of solutions. There are tons of racing seats out there but I don’t have the room for an entire seat in my flat. They are also quite expensive. So I was looking for some kind of stand or table I could mount the wheel on. I decided to go with the Wheel Stand Pro. It looked good in the videos and was at the upper limit of what I was willing to pay (100 EUR). It was also from Poland, that’s alway a bonus in my book. On the other hand, the wheel is being held by just one bar in this one so I was worried about stability issues.
It arrived recently and I’m glad to report that my worries were unfounded. It’s an incredibly sturdy product. It’s made of thick, rock solid metal tubes. There are rubber pads everywhere to ensure that the stand doesn’t slide around on the floor. It would be difficult anyway since that thing is heavy. But that doesn’t mean it’s ugly. The tubes are either powder-coated or polished. There are two stylish, minimalistic logos placed on unconscious places. The entire look and feel of the stand reminds a lot of some well-done, professional weight training equipment.
The two biggest advantages of the stand are that it is fully adjustable and foldable. You can adjust the height and angle of the bar the wheel sits on simply by twisting two fasteners. You can operate the fasteners by hand and you don’t need any tools at all. You can also use the same fasteners to simply fold the whole thing together with the wheel and the pedals still attached to it. You can stow away that construction more easily. And you can set it up again in just seconds. They even provided plastic straps to fasten the cables to the stand.
The thing I was most worried about was that the stand would tilt sideways when I made turns. Even though the wheel is held by only one bar, this is not happening at all. The frame construction is too sturdy and tight to allow that. There is some play when you push the wheel forwards or backwards. This is probably due to the fact that the bar is attached to the rest of the stand on a pivot. It’s perhaps most noticeable when using the shift stick. So it’s perhaps not 100% rock-solid but it’s good enough so you stop caring and start whipping the wheel around like a pro.
The effect of using the stand is profound. I own this wheel for a couple of years now. It’s the first time I had such a pleasurable experience using it. Of course I have been using real racing seats on trade shows already. But they were in a crowded place and made for playing some boring demos. The setup really starts to shine once you attempt longer sessions. I got really comfortable with the way GT5 feels now. Even my girlfriend agrees that it’s getting very close to sitting in a real car. Of course, the G-Forces and vibrations are still missing. But at least the hands and feet are in a familiar position.
I don’t want to turn this into a sales pitch. All in all, I’m rally glad I got this. I regret I haven’t done it earlier. If you are looking for an excellemnt wheel stand, I can wholeheartedly recommend this one.
Just a quick update today. Some time ago I did this short piece on the interface design in the movie Sunshine. Now this interesting bit appeared on the web. Some background information on some of the interface effects in TRON.
I especially like the first part where they re-created a functional text-based interface simply by using an ACTUAL Unix terminal. It didn’t necessarily make the movie more believable to me. But it makes sense. The typical audience for TRON may be actually so computer-savvy, that it is reasonable to uphold some exceptional standards for the technical authenticity in the depiction of computer technology.
Because of this podcast thing I have been doing I was pretty much forced to make an exception to my backlog embargo and get a new game. It’s Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker. As expected, I got immediately hooked. It’s the Metal Gear game I have been waiting for. And I can tell exactly why.
From the Metal Gear series, I played Twin Snakes (Remake of MGS), MGS2 and MGS3. I was trying hard to understand why the game was so appealing to so many. The closest I got was in MGS2. I really enjoyed the post-modernistic bits of the story in there. But gameplay-wise, I always felt disappointed. It’s not that I didn’t like it. It’s just that it seemed to me like I wasn’t playing it right. Like I was cheating myself through the entire game by systematically exploiting AI glitches rather than really sneaking.
More specifically, I didn’t like how the game went down the drain once I made just a tiny mistake. Enemies would immediately swarm me. I would either die and had to re-do longer portions. Or I would maw them down and hope that I would eventually get to a spot where the AI can’t find me. I screwed up either way but the game never gave me the satisfaction of quick restart. In both cases, the time required to get back into “sneaking mode” was painfully long. The guards often died in the firefights whenever I screwed up and I would get trough many challenges this way. It felt like I was brute-forcing the game. To add insult to injury, the overhead camera and the weird, unintuitive short-sightedness enemies would ensure I would screw up often. Finally, I would also always end up with this huge inventory of different gizmos, gadgets and weapons I would never use anyway. And so I would feel even worse that I wasn’t using them. I was always worrying that maybe this is the reason why I was having such a hard time.
I saw my friend Yu-Chung play MGS3 once. It pretty much confirmed my suspicion. Somehow he always managed to get out the right tool for every situation to get past every guard unnoticed. Also, he looked cool in the process. I never looked cool in that game.
But now Peace Walker came in and in a world dominated by Monster Hunter it brought one thing: mission-based gameplay. This changed everything.
So for example, I still have tons of items and gizmos. But now I only bring a few on every mission. So I always need to devise a strategy in advance. The game acknowledges that I will be only using a sub-set of my equipment at any given time.
Accordingly, the mission-bases structure segments the entire game into tasty, short chunks. So I will be sneaking through a jungle in one mission to encounter a boss at the end. The next mission just that boss fight where I may need to focus on firepower rather than low profile. I can chose different equipment for each mission.
More importantly, splitting the game into missions makes failure much more manageable. Sure, the game still goes downhill when I screw up. But if I’m not satisfied with the way I solved a mission I can easily repeat it – even after I brute-forced it once. This may be one of the biggest strengths of a mission-based structure. It is much more conducive for repetition, practice and exploration.
And finally having a mission-based structure also allows adding some interesting meta-elements in-between. Peace Walker was basically turned into the X-Com of the Metal Gear series. In-between missions there is some very cool base management. There is staff to assign to different jobs and new equipment to research. The outcome of the individual missions ties into the base management. I can recruit new members for my team or capture vehicles during the mission. The base management creates this addictive cycle of low-hanging fruit Daniel Cook talked about in his Advance Wars DS analysis. There is always something awesome you just need to take care of in Peace Walker.
Unrelated to all this, I still enjoy the story a lot. I really got into the audio logs. There are HOURS of completely optional, recoded conversations between Snake and the other characters. They talk about so many interesting topics. I’m feeling like I’m learning a lot about middle America. It’s almost like a podcast, but every now and then you can stop and actually interact with the word they are describing. Sure, a lot of the game is mostly fiction. But many things they talk about are grounded in reality. I would almost call it a serous game. But I think it’s even more powerful because it’s not explicitly made for education. Certainly a great way of designing games I’m eager to explore myself.
Have you played Peace Walker? If so, what did you think?
Because of the nice comments i received on my last post on Princess Nuriko, i thought i should post a link to my developer diary on my next Android mobile game: Silent Totems.
Silent Totems is a little project i’m doing with Yann van der Cruyssen. Whose great library of music and game soundtracks you definitely should give a try!
I intend to release a demo/beta/early-feedback version of Silent Totems this month (april) and would love to hear from anybody in comments or via email who is interested into trying it out.
On this episode of the Monster Hunter Podcast: Secret Monkey Day. We celebrate the 1st April by trying some of the newer downloadable quests in Monster Hunter Portable 3rd. Those monsters look so weird…
Get the mp3 of the episode here.
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Enjoy!
