So I’m playing Final Fantasy: Crisis Core right now. As with every Final Fantasy game, I somehow feel obliged to check out the endgame content. Final Fantasy games tend to have a big dramatic storyline but also tons of optional side-missions. Square even started to hide very, very, very difficult bonus bosses in the games as special challenges for hardcore players.

Crysis Core is no different in this regard. Actually, the structure of the game is actually even improved. All the side-quests are so-called “missions”. They can be accessed at any point at save spots. They all consist of tiny dungeons. You can finish each mission in a few minutes. It’s perfect for portable play. But it’s also a very elegant way to distinguish side-quests from the main storyline.

Your Mission is, should you accept…

Yet, as I completed the first 50% of all availible missions, there is something that starts bugging me. The battle system seems to have a bi-polar tendency. You either smash any enemy or you die instantly. There is no in-between. The game starts at the smashing side of things. So as already mentioned, the beginning of the game is very confusing. There are no challenges to overcome, no decisions to make. You just kill everything that stands in your way. And it stays pretty much this way for most of the story.

It starts out similarly in the side missions. But after a while, you suddenly start dying a LOT. The game tries to judge the difficulty of each mission compared to your level but I found that the system just breaks down at some point.

But then it’s Final Fantasy, so it provides you with some crazy overpowered spells and abilities. If you find them, you can keep on blasting away the enemies just like before. The trick becomes to find one of those and keep on exploiting it until the enemies become too powerful even for that. And then you move on to find the next even more overpowered skill.

So at first I was using the skill “Darkness” a lot – it does heavy damage to everything around you for the cost of a small amount of HP. One or two shots killed everything for a long time. But now it doesn’t anymore. So I’m moving on to “Power Punch” or something. That does damage to just one enemy but so much that I one-shot kill even bosses. I imagine once that doesn’t work anymore, there is yet another skill.

That bi-polar effect is something I encountered in other Final Fantasy games as well, especially the newer ones. But it seems to be very extreme in Crisis Core. It may have to do with the fact that you control just one character. So mistakes are much less forgiving. Also, I feel like the game was designed for portable play, so they went for extremely condensed battle gameplay. I don’t think they did themselves a favor there.

That doesn’t mean that the game is bad. I like some of the choices they made and there is certainly a game design lesson or two in there. So I’m not ready to throw the towel yet. At least not as long “Power Punch” is working.

So this weekend I added a couple of new features to TRAUMA (not online yet). First of all, a lot of beta testers asked for some way to view the Polaroid collectibles once they collected them. I was actually thinking of the same thing already but wasn’t so sure about it. The beta convinced me. So now when you click on already collected Polaroids on the top of the screen, you will actually travel to the Polaroid in question.

Click on the icons for already collected Polaroids to jump to them. A simple way to make the collectibles more useful.

This solves a lot of problems at once. First of all, you can view your collectibles. Also, you can review the audio commentary associated with the Polaroids in case you missed them. It also makes the collectibles more useful – you can use them to actually navigate through the world.

Technically, this was a little more difficult than it might seem. Some of the Polaroids are in places that are only accessible after performing some action. So when you jump to one of those, the game needs to realize that and quietly perform the actions in the background. I actually had a lot of the systems required for this stuff in place and implementing this functionality was a really helpful opportunity to tie up some loose ends together.

But since I was working on the Polaroids anyway, I decided to add another functionality – the Photographic Sense.

A message box informing about the new Photographic Sense. It helps players in search of the collectibles.

The thing is that more often than not, finding the Polaroids is really just up to pure luck. Some of them are impossibly well hidden. I disliked how the game didn’t offer any kind of clues. That’s something I criticized with on games. So I decided to add a feature that let’s you know how far away you are from a Polaroid you haven’t found yet. You can activate it simply by hovering above the icon for that polaroid. A text fades in telling you how far away it is. Even with this help, some of the Polaroids are still very tough to find.

Also, I decided to make this an unlockable feature. I already realized that a lot of the beta testers over-focused on the Polaroids. This is a weird, uncertain game and the Polaroids seem like a simple thing to focus on. Introducing such a helper early on would put the Polaroids even more in the foreground than they already are. So I decided to make this feature unlock once a player finds all endings in that level. Additionally, this would add a missing acknowledgment that the player found all the endings.

But then that meant that I needed a message box to communicate to players that a feature has unlocked. And message boxes are really a problem in general. I went for a message that disappears after a given time or after the user clicks.

I was surprised about how many difficult features I implemented this time around. The to-do list gets slimmer and slimmer. It’s pretty much all about bugfixing from now on! I will look into ways to get a week off to crunch trough. I can smell the release already.

This piece right here made my day. It’s an interview with Jonathan Blow, the developer of Braid. He is talking about his new game, The Witness. The interview is going well until suddenly this:

Yeah, it’s the mechanics of the game– Sorry, I’m choking on this croissant. It’s very dry.

It baffles me how the PC Gamer staff managed to actually transcribe this bit from the audio recording and put in into the text of the interview. Is this the death of journalism everybody is talking about?

On a more serious note, Jonathan has (again) a very similar position I had when I began with TRAUMA. Just like with TRAUMA, his new game has the goal to introduce new ideas to the genre of adventure games. His observations echo a lot of the ones I had when I started work on TRAUMA. The point where we differ is that he seems to be quite dismissive of the game design in adventure games. Instead of debunking some of his fallacies myself, I recommend this excellent response from Emily Short, an experienced Interactive Fiction writer/designer.

The idea Blow repeats here is a standard meme. On the big scale of Cluelessness about the Thing He Is Critiquing, this rates only about 5 picoEberts. And that’s our problem to solve. There will always be a serious barrier to sharing and marketing IF as long as the standard perception is that it’s about fighting the parser.

Emily admits that there are problems that adventure games and specifically Interactive Fiction still have to work out. On the other hand she points out that there has been a tremendous amount of development and experimentation. I agree with her that it is a good idea to do some research on that before attempting to revolutionize the genre.

By the way if you follow some of the links in her response you can get in an awesome rabbit-hole on the discussion of how text adventures have evolved already and could evolve in the future.

The first time I heard of Blow’s game I was very surprised. This is very different from the game I would have expected him to make. I often found myself independently making the same observations as Blow but completely diverging on the conclusions I would draw from them. I am very curious to see how this game turns out. I’m looking forward to compare TRAUMA with The Witness.

Space Geekout Time! A probe flew past a frigging comet and snapped a few pix.

7km x 5km of dirty ice. That’s what I call an iceberg!

The probe in question is called Stardust and it was launched 12 years ago. It had the mission to collect dust from another comet. It succeeded and with it’s mission over, it managed to visit it’s second comet now. But that new comet isn’t just any comet. Oh no. It’s Tempel 1! It is remarkable because it was visited by another probe some time ago: Deep Impact. And if Deep Impact sounds menacing it’s because that probed was sent out to kick some comet butt. It had a heavy projectile on-board that was fired at Tempel 1. You know, for science and stuff. Back then (2005) Deep Impact managed to snap a couple of shots from the resulting explosion.

Ka-Blaaaam!

Now 6 years later, Stardust can provide us with some additional data on how Tempel 1 was affected by the Deep Impact experiment and how it changed in general. The changes are indeed intriguing. Comets are basically made of ice. That’s why they leave a trail behind when they get too close to the sun. They slowly evaporate and the vapor gets blown away. Tempel 1 is too far away from the sun to show anything dramatic from afar. But comparing the photos from both spacecraft, you can clearly see some changes.

The same area photographed by Deep Impact 6 years ago (above) and by Stardust recently. You can see how surface features have just evaporated away.

The surface in general is super-interesting. It is much smoother than asteroids, has much less craters and weird plateau-like structures. I would love to see a probe that explores one of the comets in detail over a longer period of time. Oh wait! That’s what actually happens in 3 years! Remeber Lutetia? The probe that snapped that picture (Rosetta) is actually on it’s way to visit a comet and stay with it for a longer period. So there are plenty of really awesome comet pix coming up in the future.

At this rate, it’s almost a wonder when I actually manage to get something done for TRAUMA. But there is some progress after all and I will eventually get there. First of all, I was able to apply some spelling / wording suggestions from Julia Zaadstra (a friend of mine) and Igor Hardy. The quality of the subtitles has improved greatly and I greatly appreciate both of them helping me that much.

But that’s not all. I have been also working with TRAUMA’s musician, Martin Straka to finalize the sound in the game. Martin has provided me with the final tweaks for the volume levels. On his suggestion, I also implemented a system to cross-fade different background music tracks into each other. The game sound pretty much finished now.

Finally, I have implemented one feature that was requested by a lot of beta testers. The game can be played in full-screen now. This is something I picked up from my friend Yu-Chung Chen. He discovered that Flash actually has some pretty cool hardware-based full-screen features. The problem I couldn’t pull a real full-screen mode until now was because I am using the flash-based 3D engine Papervision3D. Because this engine software-based, it rapidly loses performance with increased resolution. By upscaling the game using Hardware, I can keep the game running at the same resolution. Of course, upscaling doesn’t look that great. But it is a solution if the game looks too small on a screen with high pixel density.

Implementing the full-screen function meant I had to add a full-screen button as well. This caused a small interface design dilemma. It made sense to put it into the control panel at the bottom. But on that panel, there was already a button to show “sound settings”. Pressing that button would make sliders appear on the right next to it. So I couldn’t add the full-screen button on the right of the “sound settings” button. But then, I couldn’t put it on the left either. It would put the full-screen button between the main volume slider and the “sound settings” button. The two clearly belong together.

The full-screen button slides to the right when the user presses the “sound settings” button.

My solution was to put the full-screen button on the right anyway and make it slide all the way to the right if the user presses the “sound settings” button. I’m not perfectly happy with this solution but it will do for now.

I’m slowly eating my way through the to-do list. It feels quite liberating to get all those problems out of the way, that were nagging on me. I might even take a few days off to power trough and finally get it done.