Tilt Left, Tilt Right

The 14th of March saw the release of Ridiculous Fishing, and despite looking forward to its release and counting down the days I got completely distracted by cricket. (England vs New Zealand in Wellington, a total win win for an English ex-pat who's lived in NZ for 5 years. And literally a win win, as rain stopped play and it was a draw.)

Anyway, come Monday 18th, and just a few days after the release I got an email of my former colleague, PikPok art director and superior game design mind Peter Freer, telling me how much he loved Ridiculous Fishing and had completed it.

Comp-What!

Naturally, I scurried home at the end of the day and set it downloading on my iPad. I then proceeded to play it for an hour, despite being pretty hungry when I arrived home.

Two nights later I was up late submitting an app to Apple and couldn't sleep when we wrapped up the process around about 1am, so I played some more Ridiculous Fishing. Two hours later I thought it might be best to get some sleep. 

The next night I completed the game, well, sort of.

I'm being deliberately vague because I don't want to spoil it for anyone.

The controls for the game are pretty simple - you tap to cast your line which then your hook descends through the water in a one screen wide gully. You tilt your device left and right to move the  hook left and right dodging fish, for as soon as it touches a fish it starts going up again, and you again can tilt left and right to hook as many fish as possible before the hook gets to the surface, whereupon all the fish launch into the air and you have to shoot them.

The further down you can get your hook without colliding with a fish the more fish you can have the chance to hook on the way up. There's also quite a variety of fish in the game, and the deeper you go the more different fish you will see and catch. To complete the game you also need to get the hook all the way to the sea floor. So, whichever way you look at it, depth matters.

I'm not particularly keen on tilt controls, so for me to like a tilt controlled game so much takes some doing. For one, tilt controls can be extremely frustrating and making them feel good is not a trivial thing. The most common type is the form seen in Doodle Jump, where tilting in one direction sends the protagonist arcing off in that direction, and the more you tilt the faster they go. Return the device to vertical and the protagonist returns to moving in a straight line.

Doodle Jump is an old game, by iOS standards, but it's still an excellent example of making such controls feel good. The most important thing to get right is the inertia on the player's character, which defines how quickly you can make it change direction, either switching the direction of travel from left to right or right to left. PikPok's Bird Strike suffers from too much inertia in the turn, which seriously hampers the feel of the game. As I was the senior designer at Sidhe (PikPok's parent entity at the time) I have to accept some responsibility for this, as I didn't spot the problem at all, although I don't understand why PikPok doesn't fix it in an update.

But Ridiculous Fishing doesn't work like that, instead each angle of tilt corresponds to an exact x coordinate on the screen. Holding the device vertical sends the hook along the centre of the screen, and any tilt to the left or right aligns to an exact path, not a drift in that direction, as shown in the diagram below.

Temple Run uses these controls too, but it's hard to appreciate on the narrow channel you run along. Again, inertia plays a part, the hook doesn't move instantly from one x co-ordinate to another, but the speed of manoeuvre that's possible is incredible, allowing me to thread the hook through the slenderest of gaps more easily than I could possibly imagine normal inertia controls. 

So, even if you, like me, don't usually like tilt controls, I strongly recommend you play Ridiculous Fishing.

Badges Come Full Circle

Over a hundred years ago Robert Baden-Powell launched the Scouting Movement. It's a fine institution, and I say that as someone who has never been part of it. Part of it is the rather neat factor of awarding Merit Badges for doing various things, like camping, canoeing, carpentry and game design. 

Yep, they've just introduced a game design merit badge. 

Boy Scouts - now enjoying the great outdoors activity of game design...

I don't know if the Scouts invented badges but they certainly popularised the concept. Now badges are everywhere, most notably in video games and a wide variety of gamified systems - some good, some best ignored.

Funny how things come full circle.

Abilitease

Of all the terms in video game design there is none I like more than "abilitease". This is a portmanteau of "ability" and "tease" and normally refers to the design trick of giving the player lots of powers at the beginning of the game and then taking them away a short way into the game. The player then has to earn back these powers to once again become awesome.

In the right circumstances this gives the game a cracking beginning, like the start of a James Bond film, which hooks the player in the delicate first few minutes when you must impress them most. But, of course, you need to be able to give the player new cool things as they progress through the game. So you take the toys off the player and then drip feed them back to them. As the player knows what they're missing, from their experience at the beginning, they also know what they're working towards.

Assassin's Creed did this and there was some chuntering about the significant downgrading of Altaïr's abilities after being awesome at the beginning, but I certainly think it's worth doing if it gives you a genuinely spectacular opening to the game.

Social games do it in a different way: They give you a whole load of whatever their hard currency is (the currency that you have to spend hard cash get in any significant quantity) which allows you to build things rapidly and progress in leaps and bounds and get yourself a nice stake in the game. Then you run out of this precious currency and your progress slows down. However, even if you don't buy some more hard currency there's still a good chance that you're sufficiently invested in the game to keep grinding along.

However, over the past couple of weeks I've been playing Supercell's lovingly crafted Hay Day. It's a farming game, and I've had a soft spot for farming games ever since I was introduced to Harvest Moon on the Game Boy Color. However, FarmVille never grabbed me and I was wondering if I'd just had enough of virtual crop growing, now that I have my own real life lemon tree to worry about. Nope, said Hay Day, you're still a digital dirt addict.

Naturally I've been playing it with the intention of not spending a single penny of my hard earned cash on the game, despite the extreme temptation. Around about Level 15 things were starting to take quite a long time to complete and I was starting to feel my progress becoming a little too slow. That's when a little errand boy turned up in the game and offered to go out and find things I needed to complete certain tasks. Brilliant, that was just what I needed. So I sent him off, and he found stuff and even though he needed to rest for over an hour after each errand he massively accelerated my progress.

Then, all of a sudden and without warning, I had to pay to use him. And his rates are steep, costing 15 diamonds a day. I can accrue diamonds without paying hard cash for them, but I probably earn about three a day, at most. 

So far I have managed to trudge on without the errand boy, even though he still stands on the road outside my farm, reminding me of the power he once gave me, and still could if I was prepared to get my credit card out. This, of course, is an example of abilitease and it's the finest example I know of because it very nearly made me do the thing that Supercell need me to do - pay. Expect to see a lot more abilitease, liberally sprinkled throughout the full length of your play experience of a game.

Game Masters!

Earlier in the year I was in Melbourne, Australia, and there was an animation festival on at ACMI, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, which led me to go along there. What baffled me was that this place wasn't already on my itinerary. It's an amazing place, a feast for the senses, with interactive exhibits galore, including one that takes images of you from multiple camera angles like the Matrix and another that turns the shadow puppets you form into digital monsters, in real time.

However, coming soon at the time was an exhibition charting the history of video games. It was coming soon, but not soon enough and I left the country before it arrived. But as luck, and I daresay  proximity, would have it, the Game Masters exhibition has come to Wellington, to reside in Te Papa, New Zealand's national museum.

Shortly before Christmas I got the chance to go to the opening night, where we got to drink for an hour before being unleashed on a whole welter of games, covering pretty much every year of my own lifetime. Right at the beginning of the exhibition there are classic arcade games, like Tempest, which I'd never actually played in the arcade before,  and the Angry Birds of its day, the infinitely merchandised Pac-Man.

And, frankly, it was this section that held most of my attention. I also realised something I hadn't really appreciated - when I think of old arcade machines I think of conversions or rip-offs on home platforms. Some of these were excellent, but none of them ran as quickly as their counterparts in the arcade, and boy do they run quickly in their original format. Seriously, if you get chance to play a classic old arcade machine you will find a game that was designed within the limits of the hardware, something that is incredibly responsive to your inputs, which it has to be because the rest of the game is pretty hard.

To amplify the sense of satisfaction the controls on these machines are part of the game. Paddles might have been common back in the day, especially at Atari from whence Tempest came, but the feel  of this paddle is utterly unlike anything I used on a Binatone or VCS. Its weight is perfect, it's resistance to movement is low but there's just enough to make you feel in control.

But it was Missile Command that impressed me most. It doesn't use a puny small radius trackball, it has a big fat one, probably exactly the same as the first ever trackball invented for the Canadian military, which used a five pin bowling ball - until recently I thought they used a full sized ten pin bowling ball, which was a stupid thought in hindsight. Again, the weight is great, allowing for precise controls as the game gets harder and harder at just the right rate. Of course, I still lost all my cities to nuclear strikes fairly quickly, but I really enjoyed trying to defend them.

And I got all the way through this post without mentioning that Shatter is on display there. Oh, last second fail.

Baby Snakes!

Long before mobile phones were automatically expected to double as gaming devices, even long before I started making games for mobile phones (which was 2001, in case you were wondering) there was one embedded mobile phone game that ruled supreme - Snake.

Baby Snakes! Back it on Kickstarter!

A couple of years ago I was at GDC Europe, and between attending talks, giving a talk and falling asleep while waiting for my boss, I met a guy called Eric Prince. Eric was working on an RPG at the time but he told me about a game of his called Baby Snakes, which was a massive re-imagining of Snake.

Then I was on Kickstarter, and what should I see there amongst the projects but Baby Snakes.

I've actually played a version of this game and will definitely be making a donation so I can get my mitts on the latest, most fancy razzle dazzle version. You should too.

Pixel Jam 2012 - Coming Soon

Wellington, New Zealand, is best known throughout the world for its movie magic - no doubt all eyes will be on the southern hemisphere when the first Hobbit film opens here later in the year. However, it also has a thriving game development community, with an enviable list of games produced here, including the following great ways to spend your pocket money:

The joyously presented Wooords...

Major Mayhem - the best value for money game in the world...

The genre redefining Monster Flip...

And that doesn’t include the stupendous little games that come out of Victoria University every year.

But for a long time this little capital had no game jam, nowhere for game makers to come together for a weekend to see what they could create over just a couple of days. That all changed last year when Pixel Jam appeared on the long dark lonely nights of winter to warm the cockles of those with a yearning to make games in but 48 hours. 

And it’s back again this year! On September 7th, 8th and 9th Pixel Jam will open its doors to those that desire less sleep and more coffee in their weekend, plus interaction! If you're in Wellington you should grab the nearest programmer and enter now.

I can’t attest for the quality of the games, we’ll just have to wait and see, but I can tell you that the judging will be at least 1/3 extremely fair and thoughtful, as I’m one of the three judges.

The Game Design of Fencing

Being a game designer I get to do or watch anything that is related to games. Therefore, watching the Olympic Games turned into an impromptu and, thankfully, short hobby over the past few weeks. I say ‘thankfully’ because it managed to take up so much, admittedly joyous, time. 

Naturally, I had to analyse what I was watching too, and the different approaches that different sports take to snags in their game design is very interesting. 

Like many sports, fencing is a gamified version of a once useful everyday skill. There are three disciplines in the sport – foil, epee and sabre. Of these epee is the most lawless (it literally has the fewest rules) and is the simplest to follow, as a viewer. 

Sword fighting - once twas for real, now tis for fun...

Points are scored by pushing the tip of the blade, which contains a small button, into your opponent with enough force to depress the button. Every portion of your opponent is a target, hands, feet, head, legs, arms, body and groin. Most importantly, you can score double points, which means that when both fencers hit each other at the same time (within 300 milliseconds of each other) they both score a point. This is not the case with foil and sabre, where they have right of way rules that determine which of the two fencers should get the sole point. 

On the surface this lack of rules feels like it should lead to impressively manic fencing, a weapon to which the anarchists of the sport are drawn. In fact the opposite is true – attacking means extending out of a safely guarded stance and exposing extremities to attack. The defender only has to strike at nearly the same time (300 milliseconds is big window of opportunity for a fencer) for a double point. The defender is also striking from a stable platform, where they only have to extend their arm to put the attacker in danger, acting like a rock for the aggressor to dash themself upon. The attacker, on the other hand is in motion, having to place the tip of the blade, which is quite whippy, while in motion. 

Hard to imagine why they wear masks...

To win a match you only need to be one point up, so acquiring that one point lead becomes a major focus. Equally, you must be pathologically fearful of not dropping to one point down. “Don’t get hit” is probably the mantra of most epeeists. Far from wild aggressive abandon, epeeists have become standoffish and quite passive. 

This fear of being hit lead to contestants backing off from each other and waiting for the other to crack and attack. All bouts are timed, so the tactic was to get one point and then wait for the time to run out. If you want to see how shameful and miserable this could get then take a look at this video. 

Imagine the pain of the crowd. Imagine how much you wouldn’t want to waste TV time on showing it. 

So, ironically for few rules epee, this has necessitated the addition of rules to try to remedy the situation. Many rules that enter into games are introduced for this kind of reason, and choosing good solutions is one of the trickiest parts of game design. 

In response to epeeists not fighting there is now a non-combativity rule which actions when: 

1. criterion of time: approximately one minute of fencing without a hit 
2. absence of blade contact or excessive distance (greater than the distance of a step-forward-lunge) during at least 15 seconds 

The penalty for non-combativity is an immediate end to the current three minute session and immediate advancement to the next three minute session, with no break in between. 

This is reasonable rule and seems to have the desired effect on the contestants, providing a psychological shock that snaps them out of their dallying stupor. If nothing else, it puts the current session of the bout out of its misery. Epee matches also seem to start slowly and finish with more aplomb, so this kind of event is more likely in the first session, thus hurrying the whole bout onto the latter, more exciting stages. 

There's a double - both fencers score a point...

But it’s still very possible for two fencers who can score at the same time to finish the match with the same score. Then what? It’s time for a sudden death minute. In this situation a fencer is chosen at random to have priority. Any fencer who gets a single point during the minute wins. If neither gets a single point then the fencer who has priority wins. 

In one of the women’s epee semi-finals this happened, and you might have caught some of the controversy around it. Shin A-Lam and Britta Heidemann were tied at the end of their semi-final and went into a sudden death minute. Shin got the priority and then did her best not to get hit. This involved backing off, backing off and backing off. 

Heidemann attacked several times but it was a double each time. With the double not counting as a scoring event the fencers were never returned to the middle of the piste. This meant that by the end of the minute Shin was pinned down at the back of the piste, if she’d put a foot out she’d have conceded a point and lost. 

Shin looks to be a long way over to the side of the piste, but a point is only conceded for stepping out the back,  not the side...

Through various events involving the countdown clock Heidemann was given the opportunity to attack several times in the closing couple of seconds of the match. Double after double was struck, none of which counted, then Heidemann finally broke through. She was probably out of time, although technically, if she was, then the machine wouldn’t have registered her point. 

Fundamentally, I believe that a match should be won by someone scoring a point, not through some kind of digital coin toss, which is exactly what the priority system amounts to. 

Shin didn't really take the loss all that well. Don't worry though, she picked up a silver in the team event...

So how should this problem be fixed? Well, one potential answer lies in the fact that Shin was pinned down at the back of her own area, desperately trying not to step back out of the piste and concede a point. The depth of the piste is a fixed distance, but what if it wasn’t? 

If you’ve ever watched Gladiator you’ll appreciate the value of a constricting play space. In the fight against the silver masked, and undefeated, Tigris, tigers are released from pits. The purpose of these is not to maul Maximus, where is the sport in that, but to force him towards his opponent. I don’t suggest that tigers should be used, although that would be awesome, but the length of the piste could be reduced, forcing conflict. 

Tigris - you'd think the armour was enough to back up the name...

It would also be possible to change the scoring system. After all, the sudden death minute changes the scoring of epee to the degree of removing the double point anyway. Why not still allow double points but give the fencer who is not in their own half more points than the fencer who has retreated. This would no longer be a sudden death minute, just a normal minute, with the winner being the one with the highest score at the end. 

The greatest irony of the Shin Vs Heidemann situation however is the fact that the priority system is intended to be spectator friendly, bringing matches to a conclusion within a specific window of time. Yet Korea quite rightly protested Shin’s loss and this appeal took over an hour to process, an hour in which the poor woman wasn’t allowed to leave the piste. 

In the time it took for the appeal to return a verdict the fencers could have ploughed on under normal rules until one got a point over the other. So should that be the system – fence until a definite conclusion is reached, like tie-breaks in tennis? No, with time pressure lifted, the current non-combativity rule would have no effect, because it punishes both fencers. So it could end up being the case that both try to out psyche each other, much like the non-fencing fencing match in the video. 

So there has to be some kind of outside pressure, and I certainly think a territory based, uneven point scoring system in double point situations would be the easiest to test and trial. It would certainly be much superior, on a mechanical, dynamic and aesthetic level, to the coin toss of the priority system. If that doesn’t work then we call in the tigers.