I haven’t been posting too regularly recently. Ever since the working schedule associated with my previous work fell away I’m having a hard time maintaining previous habits. One thing that distracted me a lot recently was my work on the website of my podcast: Club Teamwork.

teamworkcast.com – frontpage

I’ve been working on it at least since December. Just last Friday I released the last major update. Any further updates from now on will be little tweaks and complimentary functions. It was a very demanding project. On the other hand, it was also a very liberating one. I actually got back to a deliberate working schedule. I learned a lot web development techniques. I also shipped a product. Let me tell walk you through the website.

We already had a website previously. It was based on Wordpress. It was a blog where we could post articles and podcasts. While the website worked, I was always worried that some important elements were missing. My biggest worry was that in order to keep the website interesting for visitors, we had to generate content on a regular basis. Producing the podcast was time-consuming enough already. Requiring us to churn out articles on top of it was asking a lot. It made it very difficult to establish and maintain a certain level of quality. The website was made for the consumption of content. The only source of that content was the podcast crew. There were no other activities on the website. The website didn’t generate any content on it’s own. I’ve seen similar websites in my professional life. They usually fail once the shine wears off and the stream of content shrinks to a sorry trickle. To be fair, there was a forum and it survived and thrived. But it was never integrated very well.

So in my mind I kept honing a new concept for a website. One that would generate content with minimal extra input from the podcast crew. One that would actually cater to our audience with multiple, different activities. One that would have all the different functions of the website properly integrated. Last November I realized that I probably could pull it off.

The website is built on 3 different activities. Each activity is based on a question or request we would frequently get in comments and E-Mails from our audience.

“Where is the rest of your podcasts?”

Most of our podcasts are hosted on YouTube, which is a great heap of content. But it’s not a very well organized heap. Additionally, the podcast went through at least 2 major shifts. We went from an audio podcast to a video podcast on episode 19. We also changed YouTube channels and the name on episode 68. The cherry on top is that we actually took down some episodes due to copyright warnings. As a result it was almost impossible to browse our back catalog. Another question we often got was “Is this the most recent podcast?”. There was generally just no HOME of the podcast see what happened most recently.

teamworkcast.com – podcast timeline

So the first thing I wrote was a podcast database system. It’s a very simple, manual database of links to various videos and audio files. It’s not based on any RSS feeds or automated systems. This had the nice side effect of forcing us to actually go through our back catalogue and fix all of the issues people had when looking for older videos. It brought them all together in one big timeline.

While working on the database it occurred to me that it would be very easy to expand the system for multiple podcasts. We realized that we could easily turn this from a monolithic database for just one show into a more open community portal with multiple podcasts being featured in parallel.

Which just happen to address a different concern I had. Our podcast has been pretty popular. Over the years, we have been observing other Monster Hunter podcasts stepping up and also releasing some really good content. They never were able to achieve the kind of viewer numbers as we did. As illogical as it sounds, I always found it very depressing. One might think that overcoming competition is a goal worth aspiring. But I don’t believe this capitalist approach is a healthy one where thinking about a community. The success of our podcast very much depends on people being engaged in the topic we address. If multiple podcasts centered around the same topic can prosper, it’s a sign of a strong and active community. Multiple podcasts can increase the reach of a community. They can create cross-pollination. They represent fail-safes that can potentially keep the candle burning even if one shows needs to go on hiatus. Finally, they create opportunities for the individual podcasts to define their identities more sharply and address different audiences. That’s why we always promoted other podcasts on our own show. We were always a bit sad that the effects on the actual viewer numbers of those other shows weren’t as pronounced as we hoped. The new website would allow us to do this in an even more prominent way and on a regular basis.

teamworkcast.com – multiple podcasts

I think the keystone that really makes the podcast section work is the big carrousel on the frontpage. New episodes a featured with a big screenshot every time you enter a website. It unmistakably drives the idea home what the most recent episode is. It has the potential to make people interested in shows they haven’t tried yet.

“Can I hunt with you guys?”

Probably the most important and most unique feature of the website is the Hunting Party system. It’s a way for visitors to schedule gaming sessions in Monster Hunter with other people. Hunting Parties are all featured prominently all across the website. There is a comprehensive filter and search tool so the website can potentially handle a large volume of those happening at the same time. The system takes care of frequent stumbling blocks like time-zone conversion. Finally, the website also sends out E-Mails to keep participants of a Hunting Party up to date and remind them when the scheduled time has come.

teamworkcast.com – list of hunting parties

Monster Hunter is clearly a game that is based on playing with other people. We frequently received requests from our audience to organize gaming session. But we found that it was actually incredibly difficult to follow-up on those requests. Impromptu invites were impractical. Even if you just happened to have an hour of free time, by the time you see the invite, the person who posted it might have lost the patience and went away. Scheduling ahead was more promising. But there was a surprising amount of information that needed to be exchanged: time, timezones, game server, rank, goal, etc. Open systems like forums or Facebook required a lot of initiative and discipline to make it work. Even if you got a group together, maintaining multiple groups on a regular basis requied too much effort. If it was hard for us to play with our listeners, it was even harder for our listeners to play with each other.

So we saw that people would post requests. But important information was missing. By the time somebody responded and tried to clear up the confusion the initial scheduled time was over. When we scheduled a date, there were too many people on board and the chance to actually play with us was relatively slim. We needed a system that would help people schedule and maintain lots of those sessions on an ongoing basis and in a sustainable way. A system that would help with the menial task of keeping everybody informed about who is hunting where and with whom.

teamworkcast.com – hunting party screen

The current solution was clearly inspired by trueachievements.com and it works like a charm. After an exceptionally rough start I was using Hunting Parties successfully for the last two weeks. The number of scheduled parties is steadily increasing. I’m especially fond to see that the system was well received among older players. As a school student, you may have the patience to waste an hour to gather a team out of random players. As an adult with a job and a family, an hour after the kids have gone to bed is ALL you ever get. You want to make sure the time is well spend actually playing and not wasted by waiting for random players. That’s exactly what the system allows them to do.

“What is the best way to _____?”

Very early in the podcast we started answering questions. We realized very soon that people were asking a lot more question than we could ever answer. Monster Hunter is a game that has a lot of mysteries and secrets built in. Discovering them is part of the allure. A good Monster Hunter community should provide a way of maintaining that information flow. Podcasts and forums are a good start but they both have their limits. Forums are prone to offtopic derailments. If somebody asks a question there, there is a danger that the issue never gets a proper answer. When searching for a similar issue somebody else had in the past, you might have to wade through a long discussion until you get to the proper answer. We usually make sure to actually answer the questions on our podcasts but they aren’t searchable. We often found ourselves in a situation where people would ask for a question which we already answered. But we usually couldn’t even point them to the episode ourselves.

teamworkcast.com – Ask a Hunter

The current solution is basically a modern Q&A system found on websites like Quora, StackOverflow or Yahoo Answers. I studied the systems on those websites and extrapolated something that could be used for our website and implemented in a reasonable ammount of time.

Even with such a bare-bones implementation, the quality of answers we get from the community is pretty overwhelming. It’s the youngest part of the website and it probably had the best start of all of the features.

I do have some worries if the system will be able to prevail in the long term. Websites like GameFAQs do offer Q&A systems for quite some time now. The MiiVerse system of the Wii U might make Q&A system in general obsolete. Why even positing on website when you can crowdsource any issue without putting away the controller? On the other hand, one of the strengths of the website is that everything is integrated. So you while you check the date of your Hunting Party you also notice a new podcast is up and answer a question or two while that’s loading. So in any case, I’m very curious to see how this plays out.

Future Developments

While creating the website I had to cut down some features just to get anything done. Additionally, as people are using the website, we are getting feedback on what kinds of features to implement. Here are some ideas on my wishlist.

• Rating System An eBay-like rating system so people can rate the reliability of other hunters in the Hunting Party system. Should help motivating people to take the commitment to Hunting Parties more seriously.

• Follow-up Parties A lot of people asked for a way to do a follow-up session on a successful party. Ideally inviting the same people. That’s an obvious function I completely overlooked.

• Minecraft Server Integration We initially wanted to use Hunting Parties system for Minecraft as well. But we soon realized that Mosnter Hunter and Minecraft are just very different games. I do have some ideas how to help with the management of the Minecraft server I want to try out.

• Question Tagging The question system is a very rigid category system. I initially wanted to make a flexible tag system like on StackOverflow. But I had to tone it down due to the complexity of that kind of system and due to usability concerns. As the number of question increases we might loosen up the system a little.

• Question Quality Screening Something a lot of Q&A systems have are little interface tweaks that improve the quality of questions. For example, StackOverflow forces users to make a search on their question before allowing them to post. I didn’t think that was necessary for us yet. But as the system fills up with questions I’m getting some ideas for subtle interface changes to help people use the system more effectively.

• Unified Messaging I specifically avoided a message system just because users would expect a lot of functions and it didn’t seem justified for a website of this size. I preferred to solve everything via eMail. As the website grows, I’m warming up to the idea of at least an event feed.

• Social Features … and once we get into event feeds we can think about people following each other. Which then can turn into a small social network surrounding Monster Hunter.

If you have used the website and you have some ideas on how to proceed next, feel free to post it in the comments!

Summary

Overall, I’m incredibly excited with the result. It took a lot longer than I expected. But as mentioned previously, I learned a lot of web development techniques that should help me a great deal in future projects. There are also real, tangible benefits from the website. I have been using it myself in the previous weeks and they helped me a lot in actually playing the game. It’s always good to taste your own medicine and see it working. Finally shipping an actual product does wonder to for self-worth and motivation. It’s feels incredible seeing the website filling up with people and content. The feeedback is positive across the board. It really seems like it helped a lot pf people. So even though it was a challenging time, I came out of this project full of energy to tackle the next one. With that in mind, stay tuned!

I’m finally back from Poland and I finally received my copy of the Special Edition of TRAUMA – the physical copy of my very own game. I could not resist to make an unboxing video:

Needless to say, I’m pretty floored by the result. I designed every bit of the packaging and the bonus material myself. However, the actual experience of holding it in my hands is humbling and unreal. The print quality is superb. Especially the packaging and the polaroids turned out way better than expected. It’s feels substantial and incredibly sleek. A dream comes true.

Inside you will find a Steam key and a DVD version of the game. So you will get two copies of the game. There is a lush, detailed, full-color, 30-page making-of booklet with tons of background information and behind-the-scenes material. I designed and wrote everything myself. I really wanted this to be informative and not just some random marketing fluff.

There are also 3 polaroids with my favorite shots from the game. Of course, they are not actual polaroids but polaroid-sized cards. They are printed on glossy, heavy, high quality paper. Sadly, because of the size of the full-color booklet, there wasn’t any room to add any fancy clear-coat effects on the polaroids. Nevertheless, I experimented with some subtle textures and it blew me away how effective they were. It takes a closer look to realize that these aren’t actual polaroids. And even then, they are vivid and colorful like real photos. Each polaroid is signed by me and it has a number with the Google Maps coordinates of the corresponding locations. I really wanted Martin Straka, the musician and Anja Jazeschann to sign two of the Polaroids. But sadly, they weren’t available at the time and we couldn’t post-pone the printing any longer. Bummer.

Finally, there are two digital goodies on the DVD itself. There is an MP3 soundtrack and an over 1 GB gallery of photographs. I have included all the original photos I shot when creating the game. There is tons of photos that never made it into the game. You can also see all the photos before they were manipulated. I have included some every bit of behind-the-scenes material I could find on my hard drive.

Oh yeah, and of course the actual game is unique too. It’s the first version that features the new German voice track. We thought it was an obvious choice for the German retail release of the game. I actually got Anja to re-record all her lines in German so it’s still the same voice as in the original. And if you don’t like it, you can always switch back to English.

I should note that due to production errors, some DVDs may be missing the soundtrack. In any case, I will include the soundtrack in the Steam key. And otherwise, the guys from Headup Games said they will answer and help out anybody, who finds their copy of the game missing that feature.

The game is out in Germany and you can get in on the german Amazon. If you don’t live in Germany, I’m not sure what the best way to import it to other countries is. I’m not sure if amazon.de ships to abroad. I’m ordering stuff from amazon.co.uk using the same account on a regular basis so give it a try and let me know if it worked! Otherwise, enjoy! I know I am.

Toyko Junge is one of the most weirdest and most amazing mainstream games this year. Have a trailer.

You control various animals and struggle to survive in the streets of post-apocalyptic Toyko. The game offers an impressive number of animals to chose from. You can play as anything from chickens to Tigers and even Dinosaurs. The focus is on pets, farm and zoo animals.

If this premise wasn’t unique enough, the gameplay is pretty weird too. You control the animal from a very zoomed-out 3rd person perspective. The camera is fixed. The setup reminds of the PSX Metal Gear solid. The game actually takes a lot of features from MGS including the stealth mechanics – among them even a box to hide under. Those stealth mechanics are usually important for the herbivorous animals, who can’t attack very well and need to avoid contact with predators. Playing as a carnivore, the game reminds more of a brawler where you make your way through a sequence of passages and beat up enemies with some very basic, button-mashy combat moves.

But on top of that sits an RPG system and a challenge system. Your animal gets constantly hungry so you need to make it eat on a regular basis. You also need to mark your territory and procreate. You offspring inherit you RPG stats and the size of the litter represents the number of lives you have. Completing simple challenges such as “eat 3 flowers” will give you stat boosts and can unlock new animals. The goal is to see how far you can make it until you get eaten by a crocodile or poisoned by radiation. With each run taking half an hour, it feels very much like an action-based roguelike… with animals. And it is just as addictive as a true Roguelike can be.

And of course there is an insane story mode which – curiously – needs to be unlocked by playing the regular survival mode. The story seems to be taking clues from Yakuza films with clans of dogs competing against each other for the control of Tokyo. There is even a hint of social criticism found in the backstory of humanity’s last days.

Tokyo Jungle is honest in it’s quirkiness like old games used to be. It doesn’t hide the fact that it is silly or repetitive. But at the same time, it feels fresh and new because of gameplay and setting that avoid the oh so tired modern formulas. What I’m saying is take a look at Tokyo Jungle.

I wanted to start posting on a regular basis again. So here is an interesting game I found some time ago. It’s called Parameters and it is made by Nekogames, that Japanese Game Studio, that also did Cursor*10.

Talking about games, that look like spradsheets…

It’s supposed to be an RPG stripped down to bare numbers. Different percentage bars represent quests and enemies. You have to click multiple times on a bar to tackle the task at hand. When you fill the bar, the quest is over / enemy defeated. But attacking enemies will also reduce your Hit Points. Once you reach 0 hit points, you have to wait until you recover. Enemies recover as well. So the trick is to judge if your stats are high enough to defeat an enemy. Defeating enemies will give you keys which will enable you to open up previously locked quests / enemies. The

It occurred to me that it’s not exactly a stripped-down RPG. Parameters allows you to select from a huge amount of challenges with a very wide range of difficulties. That’s not what RPGs offer – certainly not Western ones. RPGs are usually much more “grindy” and more directed. They will usually provide you with a challenge just about right for your level. They won’t offer too many challenges to chose from anyway. Selecting the challenge, which is right for your current level is hardly ever a concern.

The game reminds very much of Hunter RPG by Daniel Benmergui. It also strips away a visual projection of the game world in favor of a more abstract interpretation. But as with Hunter RPG, the space never really goes away. Instead of a map of continents, rivers and seas, we navigate the colorful and chaotic map of quest percentage bars. It’s no accident that the bars are arranged in a chaotic and visually striking pattern. No doubt, it’s one of the reason for the game’s attractiveness. It’s also a part of the challenge – find the smallest percentage bar among the chaos. Where is Waldo?

Also, in spite of the game’s minimalism there is one particular effect that the game’s designers decided to indulge in. When quest and enemies will yield items, gold and various bonus points. Icons and numbers will pop out of the percentage bars and spread out in a tactile, bouncy manner. They need to be collected by a mouse cursor which will make them float over to their respective indicators on the UI. Not only is this effective information design. It’s also cute and entertaining – to some extent even addictive. This “juicyness” is clearly a significant driving force that keeps the player engaged. But it is also an example of the game being not what it appears at first glance – bare-bones minimalism.

My point is that spatial representation and physical interaction (”juicyness”) are to some extent the very source of a game’s engagement. No matter how far you manage to reduce the game to it’s “core”, you will never be able to strip away space and physics. To some extent they are the game more than the actual rules are.

However, as Parameters and Hunter RPG show, there can be many ways to evoke space and physicality. Both games show that questioning the dogma of direct visual representation of game worlds can open up those new possibilities and unhinge commonly accepted truths about game development – creative as well as economic ones.

Civilization is a game well-known for it’s addictiveness. It’s pretty much the game that coined the phrase “Just one more turn”. I don’t know how I came about to playing Civilization V recently, but 50 hours in, I’m hopelessly trapped. Every time I start a new game, I usually end up playing all through the night.

Interestingly, Civ V is somewhat of a iconoclast of the series. It many ways, it’s a radical departure from many of the established Civ formulas. Personally, I feel like it’s for the best in most cases. Here are some observations.

• Global Happiness – It’s easy to get distracted by gimmicks as the new hex grind. But the thing I found most difficult to get a hold on is the new happiness is handled. In previous Civs, happiness was a property of individual cities. When a city got too unhappy, you could just hire entertainers to plug that leak, at least until you got some happiness-producing buildings. In the new Civ V, happiness is a global resource. If you dip into negative happiness, ALL of your cities will grow less and produce less. It’s something I learned the hard way by losing my very first game because of it. I was using the same strategy as always – by expanding as rapidly as possible. I realized too late that in Civ V, global happiness is there to control the size of your empire. The many cities I had produced too much unhappiness for me to handle and stunted my growth. I soon ended up in a spearmen vs. tanks situation. That was a bummer. But it also got my attention. It’s a much simpler system and it does a good job at plugging that previous degenerative strategy. I had to come up win a new approach.

• Resources – Because of global happiness, there is one new system that is way more important now: the resources. Some of the tiles have special resources, which can be harvested by building city next to them and building a certain tile improvement on them. This was present in previous Civs. But they are much more prominent and important in Civ V. There are strategic resources like Horses, Iron or Plutonium. They define how many of a certain unit you can build. There are some economic resources like sheep, cows or bananas. They just boost your production and allow you to build some exclusive building in nearby cities. Most importantly, there are the luxury resources. They increase happiness. Especially in the beginning, the resources add a lot of variety to the city placement and tile improvement game. They make the map much more varied, alive and tangible. After my first loss, I started paying attention to the luxury ones. In an expanding empire, they become a crucial factor in territorial dispute and a core subject of diplomatic trade agreements.

• Diplomacy – speaking of which, the Diplomacy system received some rather puzzling cutbacks. You can no longer trade technology. You can no longer trade maps. Not really sure what the idea behind the changes is. Perhaps trading them allowed weak players catch up too quickly? Or perhaps it made a one-sided military approach too easy? In any case, it does make the diplomacy system feel even more stunted than it already was. Diplomacy in Civ never felt like talking to human beings. All the effort put into animated leaders end up being a massive a waste of time.

• City State – One of the cool new things are city-states. They are miniature civs consisting of just one city. They never expand. They don’t attack on their own. But they sometimes help the big civs. The deal with the city-states is that the big civs compete for their respect. You can pay them money. You can also solve some quests they give out occasionally. If you get their respect high enough, they will ally with you. Depending on the type of the city-state, they will give you culture, food or military units. Even more importantly, in the diplomatic ending, where the UN votes for a leader of the world, they end up participating in the vote. Needless to say, they are actually super-important. I initially underestimated how important they are. The only problem I have with them is that the quests they give up are often nigh impossible – like to exterminate another city-state. So more often than not, diplomacy with them just boils down to paying them off. Otherwise, the are a welcome influx of moving pieces in the diplomacy system.

• City Sieges – The way one attacks cities feels totally different now. In the old civs, you just sent an huge amount of random units mindlessly to a foreign city and blindly attacked a city. Eventually they killed the defenders and marched into the city. The reason why this doesn’t work so well anymore is partly due to the fact that units no longer stack. So you can have only one unit on a tile at a time and you just can’t physically have too many units at one place. Also, you can attack a given city just so many times each turn because units, who already attacked will block the way for others. So your armies are smaller and the units need to be moved and picked much more carefully. But also, cities aren’t really defended by garrisoned units anymore. They just have a huge health bar that regenerates very fast. Plus, they can attack nearby units. So moving into cities hinges on dealing a lot of damage quickly. You really need to set up a siege situation with a combination of artillery to get down the city’s health as quickly as possible and some close-range units to tank the damage and move in eventually. It is very different and it feels very much like one expects the siege of a city to play out.

• Cultural Trees – Culture finally has a meaning! Civ games have been tip-toeing around the portrayal of culture for quite some time. It was never as tangible and as in Civ V. Now, it’s basically experience points for your civ. When you level up, you can pick a skill from a number of tiny skill trees. Skill trees represent different values like Honor or Freedom. Engaging in one skill tree can lock out others. Filling out all the skills in one skill tree gets you additional bonuses. Filling out 6 skill trees enables you to go for the cultural victory. A very simple and elegant system. Some of the skills can really turn the tables – like your universities can begin producing happiness in addition to science for example. My only gripe is that the tiny skill trees are a bit fumbly and don’t really seem to have a purpose. I think just having a linear list of skills for each of the values would have been enough.

• Lack of Visibility – One thing I really dislike is how visually under-played a lot of the events in the game are. Wonders are still most prominent with full-screen still images, even though they are rather uncharacteristically rough compared to the overall polish of the rest of the game. Technological improvements just gets a lousy dialog box. At least each gets a witty quote. City improvements get nothing. I remember back in the days how you could look at how your city looks like. That option doesn’t exist anymore. Instead, city improvements appear as buildings on the actual overview map. But they are so tiny and inconspicuous that you can barely make them out. Growing the actual city is visually much more rewarding. Perhaps it’s for the best. But the thing that really let me down was the space ship. The original Civ had a seperate space ship window where you could see which parts of the space ship are already in place. All of this is gone. The space ship doesn’t even get the wonder or dialogue box treatment. It’s treated like a regular building. There is a tiny launch tower near the city where you build the Apollo Project. The space ship parts appear on that. You need to zoom in A LOT to see anything. It’s incredibly disappointing. Especially considering that it’s the finale of the game. This seems like the development team had more planned and ran out of time. Perhaps they should have invested less time in the silly animated portraits?

I have some more nit-picks. The AI is behaving very stupid in certain cases. There really should be an undo-function for cases when you click on the wrong thing. The order in which you need to deal with stuff is often uncomfortably rigid. But the game does look great and the interface is quite polished most of the time. Overall, it really seems they did a massive overhaul to the way the game works, without actually sacrificing what made it great in the first place. So at the moment the only function I’m REALLY missing is a real-life clock. Those all-nighters are taking a toll.