A friend of mine recently bought the Japanese version of the ICO & Shadow of the Colossus HD Remix for me. I already had the western version. But the Japanese version has one great detail the western one has not: a beautiful, little behind-the-scenes booklet.

Good job, Sony. I’m sure that’s something the western audience wouldn’t have appreciated.

It’s a rather small booklet but it contains some amazing concept art that reveals some interesting details about how the game was made. Here are some of my favorites.

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There are multiple pictures like the one above. I think this one shows an early version of the first room in ICO – the sacrificial chamber you start out in. It has the throne for the final boss. It also has the movable floor that made it into the final game. Interestingly, in the final game the throne was moved into a separate room. What remained is the idea that you go full circle. The hero needs to turn around and return to the room he finished his adventure in to face the final challenge. It seems like that idea was there from a very early stage.

What I really like about that piece is that it’s drawn on millimeter-paper. Seems like a pretty unusual and hardcore way to do artwork in. Considering how the illustration contains profile-cutaways, it kinda makes sense. I also love the isometric perspective with selectively removed walls. It does a really wonderful job at conveying the space.

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Here is an interesting drawing of the capsule the hero in ICO starts out in. A remarkable attention to detail of you consider that the capsule is visible for only a few seconds in the game. I love the fact that it’s mechanically sound. The arm restrain folds away to the side only if the capsule is opened. Otherwise, the restrain will press against the capsule walls and won’t be able to swivel up.

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The two above images are probably my highlight of the booklet. The drawings describe in in painstaking detail the interaction between the hero and Yorda. Individual animation phases are described. There is a diagram showing the range of motion for the hero’s arm – apparently useful for hand-holding mechanics. There is a diagram showing how the call button works depending on how far the two characters are apart. It even shows what kind of hand movement the hero does when calling Yorda.

The millimeter-paper totally makes sense in this regard. It’s a good way to keep all the drawings in a comparable scale. I wonder how well all this pre-planning translated into actual gameplay. Was Fumito Ueda really able to design this all on paper or was this already informed by some preliminary playtesting? Did all of this just work or did they have to tweak the scales and proportions during implementation?

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Finally, something from Shadow of the Colossus. The drawing shows different stages of a boss from Shadow of the Colossus. This time the grid is not as fine. It looks like regular 5mm quadrille. It still clearly helps to keep the drawings to scale. The individual frames indicate opportunities to attack the monster as well as interaction with the environment. Which I guess is the real advantage of planning the battle ahead of time like this. Technically difficult events can be tested with no effort at all. I wonder if every boss battle in the game was pre-planned like this.

Overall, the booklet is not that large or comprehensive. But for a true Fumito Ueda enthusiast, the Japanese version certainly is a valuable and fascinating collector’s item.

So TRAUMA recently won the German Computer Games Award. I wanted to write a bit about it because there was quite a bit of drama associated with the award. In fact, there were 3 separate pieces of drama.

Drama 1 – Crysis Crisis

Minister of culture Bernd Neumann having a speech at the ceremony. © Deutscher Computerspielpreis 2012 / Fabian Matzerath

Perhaps the biggest drama was the fact that Crysis 2 was nominated. You see, computer games in Germany are highly controversial. There is a great deal of fear mongering going on from conservative politicians and the tabloid press regarding games and violence. The key word we developed here is “Killerspiele” which means “Killer Games” and refers to vaguely to violent games without actually bothering to define what it means and where to draw the line. But of course, that never stopped a conservative shitstorm. After all, we need to think of the children.

The irony is that Germany already has one of the most complicated and restrictive game rating systems in the world. The German Computer Games Award started as an alternative solution and it’s actually one I appreciate a lot. The idea is not to condemn violent games but to reward culturally valuable ones.

Of course the problem here is that the only internationally relevant development studio in Germany is Crytek. And their business in unapologetically hardcore, violent shooters. So on the one hand it’s exactly the thing the German Computer Games Award wasn’t supposed to reward. On the other hand, banning such an influential company as Crytek from participation kinda undermines the credibility of the award itself.

So even before the show last week there were quite some discussions when it was announced that Crysis 2 has been nominated. Some politicians condemned the choice and questioned the validity of the award. On the other hand, the industry and the award’s organization defended the choice of finalists which was the result of a diverse jury of independent experts.

Personally, I’m torn about this. On the one hand I’m tired of the persistent stigma of computer games in Germany. My games aren’t violent but what if I wanted to make some poignant piece about – say – rape or concentration camps? It would be very easy to slip into adult content territory there.

On the other hand, as an Indie, the Michael Bay-ish bullshit Crytek pukes out is exactly the kind of cancer that is eating our medium alive and I’m dedicated to provide alternatives. Having awards that reward such efforts seems like something that could really help to compete with the giants of the industry.

Perhaps the most positive outcome of this is that it seems it’s becoming harder and harder for politicians to harp on the tired “games need to be banned” cliche. This time around, there seemed to be even counter-arguments among the conservative party.

Drama 2 – Browser Games Battle

Jürgen Hilse from the jury and the German games rating board handing over the award to me and my GF. © Deutscher Computerspielpreis 2012 / Ulf Büschleb

But the identity crisis of the award was apparent not only in the main category. The category TRAUMA was nominated in – browser games – also showed signs of schizophrenia. The biggest contender was the game Drakensang Online by another German games industry giant Bigpoint. Bigpoint is pretty much the German Zynga – a browser-based money factory with questionable ethics at best. Drakensang is their newest browser-based Diablo clone. A massive, technically impressive production.

On the other hand it’s exactly as mindless and dumb as Diablo is. It’s about killing hordes of monsters by clicking on them. If Crysis is lacking cultural value, Drakensang is certainly not much better off. But of course, Bigpoint is incredibly influential. In fact, they probably financed a fair share of the award themselves. It feels weird to sit down at an award ceremony and find elaborate marketing material for your award contender in the goodie bag.

In any case, Drakensang won. But it’s kinda remarkable that so did TRAUMA. There was a separate special jury award for TRAUMA. The jury member, who handed me the prize emphasized that they really wanted to reward the artistic nature of the game. It was amazing of course. However, I can’t help to observe that it seemed a bit tacked-on. There wasn’t even a slot for it during the award ceremony. I smell that this is the result of some internal struggle and discussions. I certainly hope so. Because sadly, there wasn’t a monetary reward for it either. So the rich guys got all the money. All I can do now is to troll. I wonder if there was a profit at the bottom line for Bigpoint?

Drama 3 – Rondomedia Rip-Off

“Heey, it’s my gam… WTF!? That’s not my game!”

Finally, more of a personal drama for me. There was an exhibition associated with the award. Each game was playable on a station along with a short, printed description. Someone charged with the layout for the descriptions managed to put up the wrong cover for TRAUMA. The mistake is equally understandable and unfortunate. They printed the cover of a cheap knock-off I recently discovered on Amazon. Apparently, the company Rondomedia decided to cash in on my game. They made a Hidden Object game with the same title and a similar theme. If you look for TRAUMA on Amazon, that’s what you find. I guess that was their plan all along.

The German game industry immediately cannibalizing it’s own indie newcomers… with a smile. Way to go, Rondomedia.

I pointed this out to the award show’s organization and of course they apologized multiple times. The question of what I’m going to do about the knock-off remains.

So that’s a lot of drama for just one evening. Generally, I had a lot of fun. Sure, I haven’t gotten any money. But I haven’t lost anything either. Actually, I was enjoying having my game at the heart of such turbulent ceremony. I’m looking forward to see how the award develops in the future. There were some talks of re-thinking the categories. It might be a good idea.

Oh and by the way: if anybody has some sound legal advice on what to do with the TRAUMA knock-off, drop me a line! I’d hate the fuckers get away with this.

I just came back from Berlin and recovered from a hangover. Last Thursday, my game TRAUMA has won the “Deutscher Computerspielpreis 2012” – the German Computer Game Award 2012!

Yaaaaaaay!!!

TRAUMA was nominated in the category “Best Browser Game”. It didn’t win the main award in this category. However, it received a special jury award as a recognition of it’s unique approach.

The “special” status of TRAUMA does have disadvantages. There is no prize money associated with it. There was also no opportunity to give an oscar-style thank speech during the ceremony like the other winners had.

On the other hand, it’s the first award TRAUMA actually won. So we had a great time celebrating in Berlin. The award is actually highly controversial at the moment. Something I’ll write about later this week. Needless to say, I’m jubilant. And I hope this won’t be the last.

Recently, I discovered a really astonishing, old JRPG gem. It’s a game called Suikoden. It has been released on the Playstation 1 and it’s currently available on PSN as a PSone classic. On a side note: I really enjoy the PSone classic series. Especially the PSP/PS3 cross-play is convenient. But back to Suikoden:

It’s a very formulaic JRPG. It doesn’t even look that great. The character sprites are average. The tiles often look drab and washed-out. I found the setting especially unappealing. It’s a combination of uninspired western LOTR fantasy and dry, obscure asian mythology. It lacks the style and flamboyance of a Square Enix production.

But there is more here that meets the eye. The first few quests are formulaic but it soon becomes apparent that the story is constructed in a very well thought-out way. It’s just laced with graceful set-ups and pay-offs that keep the ball rolling. The missions always make sense within the overall story. The characters are stereotypical but their intentions are clear and consistent.

Unremarkable but solid. The regular battle screen is standard JRPG fare.

And then it gets really crazy. The plot revolves around the son of a general being accidentally accused of treason and turning into a the leader of a rebel army. And the game actually TOTALLY pulls this off. So eventually, you move into your own rebel hideout. You start recruiting dudes for your army. Almost every NPC in the game is a character you can recruit. There is a total of 108 (!!!!) individual characters. Think Final Fantasy where every NPC you talk to is a character you can collect in a Pokémon-esque fashion. And then add a touch of Harvest Moon for the way your rebel base grows as characters come in.

Actually, I always found myself thinking about how close this game feels to something like Mass Effect. And yet it’s light-years ahead of Bioware in some regard. Here are some observations.

• Depicting War – The story is very much centered around war. So is Mass Effect. Many games are. The unique thing about Suikoden is that it actually takes the time to develop mechanics do properly address this topic. Most games have a central game mechanic that focuses on small-scale combat. In RPGs usually a small team of heroes fights small groups of enemies. But those systems always seem to break down when they need to represent a different scale of combat. So in Mass Effect 3 when you are fighting the Reapers it becomes very difficult to rationalize why you still control just 3 guys even though the story vamps up the scale to depict a huge galactic war. You were supposed to be a person, who pulls the strings. But suddenly you turn into an insignificant gear in a huge engine that seems to be running just fine without you. The opposite happens when the game wants to depict duels. It becomes very difficult to design boss fight that work with the combat mechanics The mechanics weren’t made with boss fights in mind.

  

  Suikoden has a separate battle mechanic to show major battles.

  Suikoden has 3 different combat mechanics for different scales. There is a standard JRPG menu battle system for questing and various missions. There is a simple but effective grand battle system to depict major confrontation between armies. There is also a simple duel system for some boss fights. The latter two are basically dressed-up variations on Rock-paper-scissors. But they do a great job of communicating the idea.

• Clustering – With 108 characters, one would assume it’s easy to lose track of them all. After all, there is this legend that humans can only remember 7 items at once. And sure, there are some forgettable characters among them. But it’s not as chaotic as the sheer number would suggest. I was actually surprised how meaningful and memorable the characters were. I think one reason for this is that the game used multiple layers of clustering. Characters are not just random items you collect. Certain characters belong together. So for example, some characters have relationships and ties with each others. There are lovers, friends and families. You act out those relationships in the story. Some characters only join you if you bring another character they know with you.

  Another way of clustering is the Unity command. Some characters can join with each other during combat for especially devastating attacks. These attacks become very important when choosing which characters to bring with you. Which characters work together is often influenced by their relationships. Friends tend to be able to use Unity together but now always. It’s something you discover and act out yourself.

  Finally, the characters are actually visually clustered in the grand battles. In this system, the characters represent different orders. Characters that represent similar orders are clustered in triplets.

  

  During major battles, characters represent commands. Related characters are thematically clustered.

  So for example, a certain bow attack is represented by different 3 elf characters, who use bows. It’s not only a great way communicate the relationship between individuals and a massive battle. Just as the above examples, it also additionally helps grouping the various characters into clusters and helps keeping track of them.

  I always felt the best storytelling in Mass Effect, especially the 3rd one, were the little moments where characters interacted with each other – conversations you accidentally pick up in a hallway or in an elevator. But perhaps with the exception of Mass Effect 3, the crew still felt more like a loose collection of individuals. All the relationships were often aimed at Shepard, not at each other. There rarely was anything going on independently of the player. Suikoden demonstrates quite well how you can maintain an incredibly large and vivid cast if you just establish some simple relationships between them.

• Dog Fort – Personally, the game didn’t really start for me until I moved into the fortress. Initially, it’s a dungeon you need to clear from monsters. The various team members you recruit soon move in, set up their own rooms and establish facilities. Eventually, new areas are opened as the fortress grows. It’s incredibly satisfying. It taps into this childish joy of building a fort out of pillows or a tree house. It’s also a great tool to visualize the growth of your army. A modest cave dwelling soon turns into a mighty fortress.

  

  Your ugly rock soon turns into… ugly rock with a castle within.

  I was reminded that Mass Effect never really had anything like this. Some areas of the Normandy unlock gradually in Mass Effect 2. And there are some upgrades you can install on a list somewhere. But it’s never something you feel and experience. It’s never something that surprises you. It never keeps you guessing how far it will go. The Normandy doesn’t grow into something different.

• Squad – I had some flashbacks to strategy games like X-Com or Jagged Alliance when choosing squad members. You only have 5 slots. Some missions require you to take some members with you. So you constantly need to try out new combinations. It’s also pretty fun to do it anyway. The fact that there are so many characters is liberating. It’s clear that you won’t be able to try every one of them so it’s ok to just go with personal preferences. There is a front-row/back-row mechanic to help you trimming down the list of possible candidates. The above mentioned Unity command rewards experiments. Because of the grand battle mechanic, you don’t feel too bad about never using certain characters. There are other opportunities to make each one of the 108 team members feel useful. In contrast, I was reminded of how Mass Effect 1 rewarded you for playing the entire game with just 2 characters and having the rest just rot on the ship and do nothing.

• Leveling – Finally, there is a great game design detail I really appreciated. Leveling is tweaked in a very specific yet extreme way. It seems like characters level up incredibly fast when fighting much stronger monsters. But once they reach a certain level, the leveling plateaus. So when you bring in a new team member to the squad, they are able to catch up with the rest almost instantly. It takes just 2 or 3 battles, it’s THAT extreme. On the flip side, grinding levels doesn’t really work due to the plateau effect. So level bosses are really crisply balanced. I had multiple boss fights throughout the game where I literally won with my last character in my final round. I’d love to learn about the mathematics behind the system. It seems to be really well designed. Again, I remember the awkward solution in Mass Effect where characters would level up even if they were waiting on your ship.

In general, Suikoden is really an incredibly solid game with lots of bold, well designed solutions. I can thoroughly recommend it. I’m actually thinking of playing the second part was well. I heard that it’s even better. It’s not on PSone Classics. And apparently they didn’t print too many copies back in the days becase the prices on eBay are… discouraging. Yikes!

With my job contract wrapped up, I finally have some free time to catch up with some personal projects. One of them being working my way trough the pile of books and games that accumulated over the last two years or so. Just recently, I finished House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski.

Bricks may or may not have been shat.

House of Leaves is a book a lot of people are talking about. At least they were talking about it 3 years ago or so. I heard first about it when I began working on TRAUMA. I remember is specifically from one of the old Blogs of the Round Table posts. I started reading it when I finished my thesis project. I liked it a lot. But reading it required some effort so after a while, it turned into one of those books that would collect dust on my bedside table. And it’s not that I tried it. I had the book with me when I was in France in 2010. Never got to even open it. So naturally, I was quite relieved to be finally able to go back to it.

In case you are not familiar with it, it’s a very experimental book. It’s basically a horror mystery novel, not unlike Stephen King. It’s about a House, where supernatural things happen. The experimental part is its multi-layered narrative and its crazy layout.

The multi-layered narrative goes as follows. The story of the house is represented as a re-telling of a pseudo-documentary found-footage movie about the house. Specifically, it’s a book pretending to do an analysis and interpretation of the fictitious movie. It ends up re-telling the story of the movie, but also adds commentary. But that analysis is actually something a drug addict and small time criminal finds. Specifically, he finds notes of somebody, who tried to write the book. He becomes obsessed with gathering all the notes and compiling them into a finished book. But he also starts writing down comments and his own diaries and stories in-between. The two stories – the film book and the drug addict’s diary mix with each other. On top of that, there are notes from the editor of the whole thing. The multiple narrators start commenting on each other and it becomes a crazy ride.

And yes, the layout is crazy too. The different narrators each have their own font so you can tell who wrote what. At some point, the standard book layout breaks down and the text starts running all over the place. This often reflects what is happening in the story. In one instance, the protagonist needs to climb up a vertical shaft. For these pages, the text is set in a narrow column and needs to be read from bottom to top. Other times, the protagonist loses orientation. On those pages, you need to turn the book around because the text is written sideways or upside-down. But that’s just the most obvious instances. Some pages are almost blank. Others contain graphical elements.

Surprisingly manageable but still unsettling.

Reading it, what immediately jumps at you are the book’s extensive footnotes. The embedded movie book already has a fair share of references to other sources in the form of footnotes. The book is a story and its very own secondary literature at the same time. However, not all of the references are actually real. Some of them are fictitious articles, papers and books. Some of them are real. Following up those references often becomes this ARG-like experience. For even more fun, the drug addict adds his stories and comments in the form of footnotes – sometimes even commenting on the footnotes themselves. He even flat-out exposes some of the references as fake or adds his own red herrings.

I was glad to even find some small game references (Myst!). Indeed, the book could be seen an interesting blend of a novel and a game. Not only do the footnotes represent side-quests to peruse. The book itself also contains codes and cyphers. They don’t need to be solved to understand what is going on. But they add an active, exploratory part to the reading experience.

Also noteworthy is the idea of telling a story in the form of a fictitious critical analysis. It replaces the omniscient narrator with the voice of fictitious film/literary critics. The insight of each character’s thoughts and motivations is not the result of the narrators god-like status but the implied analysis and interpretation of other people. Funny enough, the result ends up feeling very similar to a “regular” story – it just adds flavor.

On the other hand, it’s not just flavor. There are some running themes that hold the different layers and the unusual style together. The most obvious being the theme of a labyrinth. The characters in the movie explore a labyrinth. The various footnotes, codes and embedded stories represent a labyrinth. The layout too often has a labyrinthine feel to it. It may be a crazy, experimental book. But it’s being held together by strong, unifying themes. Yo dawg, I heard u like labyrinths.

Which is also something one could criticize. Sure, the experimental nature is beautifully post-modern. It contains some amazingly smart observations and thoughts. But underneath it all, it’s a very simple, tired old story of a haunted house. The embedded secondary literature simulates the kind of high-brow discourse a real haunted house movie couldn’t even dream to illicit. In the end, you could just as well read a real deep book and it’s secondary literature instead.

But perhaps the trivial story underneath is somehow needed. As already mentioned, the book is certainly challenging. Without a simple, addictive page-turner core to guide you along, many readers would probably tire out and get stuck. In the end, I enjoyed it a lot. It’s just fun to discover. It’s chock full of ideas. It reminds you that books and other media can be different. For a game designer, certainly a recommended read.

One last thing: many of the references are actually different sources about expeditions and exploration. There was a spooky moment of finding quotes from the Shackleton expedition I just finished reading about. Did I mention that Danielewski also has a Polish background? And that there are a lot of German quotes in the book? *Cue X-Files Music* But anyhow, I was glad being able to steal some for the references for my own research. Thanks, Z!