What I've been up to (includes some shameless self-promotion)

So, I've been out of town -- but not away from games -- for a few days. I can't talk about a lot of the work I'm doing while it's in progress, but I figure I'll post some of these kind of "What I've been up to" posts every once in a while.

• Ninja Blade is shipping soon! Here's a preview video done by the folks at G4TV: http://g4tv.com/xplay/previews/36987/X-Play-Preview-Ninja-Blade.html. I did some design, production, and user experience consulting on this title on behalf of Microsoft Global Publishing Partners. Mostly I focused on core combat and initial experience (the first 2 hours of game play). Takeuchi-San is a genius and FROM Software was a great developer/publisher partner. I hope to work on more of their titles in the future. 
  
• I met with other panelists on the "Funology" talk we're giving at South by Southwest in a couple of weeks: http://sxsw.com/interactive/talks/schedule?action=show&id=IAP0900867. Interesting group of folks -- come by and check it out if you're at the conference on Fri March 13 (5PM).
• I also spent some time networking with various game and film industry folks. As much as I could never see *living* in L.A., there is a lot of energy and it is infectious. I came back refreshed, energized, and ready to push forward on several projects. 
• I'm becoming a HUGE fan of VirginAmerica as an airline to fly on. In addition to great fares and a cool club-like feel to the plane, they also provide a console in each seat that allows users to watch movies, tv, listen to music, and game. I'll talk more about the gaming in a separate post.
  

The Space Game: A Casual Collective Joint

I've been experimenting more with Twitter lately as a way to keep up with interesting folks in the game and social computing world.

One of the people I've been following posted a link to The Space Game which is hosted on the Casual Collective website. It's a Tower Defense variant that is pretty fun to play and addictive. 

The game is pretty polished with lots of content. There are several help pages and semi-interactive tutorials. Moreover, the first few basic missions are pretty non-threatening and allow players (like me) who don't like playing boring tutorials or reading lots of help text to learn by playing.

Game play is very much like an RTS: The player needs to manage resource gathering and allocation. There are few "building" types and upgrades, so the game isn't overly complex to learn.

That said, there is some room for improvement when it comes to core game play UI and the structure of the initial experience:

• There is an initial discoverability issue with the main build menu. Specifically, if you have something selected you no longer get to see the build menu. This is especially problematic early on when you are just learning the game and can't figure out how to retrieve this menu (you need to click on an empty space on the screen to do so).
• Feedback on "noff nuff resources" (don't have enough to purchase an item) and invalid placement is confusing. For the first few minutes I couldn't figure out why sometimes I could build objects and sometimes I had to wait. The lack of confirm/noff-nuff resources sound FX and the non-standard use of color to indicate valid/invalid placement of buildings added to the confusion.
• The rock-paper-scissors was not that easy to understand. This could have been helped a bit by having specific "good vs." information on both "buy" and "upgrade" buttons (the help text currently has vague text about size and speed of ships) and by having mouseover help text for the various enemies (e.g., "use missiles against this foe".)
• I didn't understand the role of "electricity" as a resource until after playing several games. This speaks mostly to the "learn as you play" structure of the game. There really wasn't much need to introduce electricity in the first couple of games, but by the third game it would have been nice to have the scenario "trick" me into managing the electricity resource in ways that made me pay attention to it and learn it while playing. 

That said, the game was fun to play on my laptop using the mouse touchpad, which is nice.

The other interesting thing about The Space Game is the fact that it lives on a casual games portal called Casual Collective. I haven't checked out some of their other games, but it looks like a promising website:

• It encourages you, but does not require you, to register. You can play mostly full versions of the game -- but miss out on awards, credits, MP, save progress unless you choose to register. It lets me get hooked before I need to commit instead of scaring me away before I even get started, which is great!
• The games, themselves, seem interesting. I look forward to trying some of the other titles.

On the negative side:

• Although the registration pipeline *seemed* simple and pain-free (just fill out nickname, email, and provide a password) I somehow failed to get an account. There was no confirmation screen and no mention that I should check my email for a validation key. I'm not sure what happened other than I don't seem to actually be registered. Sadness.
• Social/Community features on the site tend to be buried in tabs as opposed to surfaced at all times. There are leaderboards, forums, and real time presence is being tracked. These data should be surfaced in useful places to let users know that this is a social place.
• There doesn't seem to be any integration with existing social networks (e.g., no Facebook application).

I'll give it another chance when I can figure out how to register... I'm curious about how it holds up as a platform vs. some of the other more popular digital distribution platforms.

Afro Samurai, Skate 2, Hardwood Backgammon, Sonic Chronicles

So, I spent some time gaming this evening. That is, gaming in addition to the usual dose of Facebook Scramble and Turn Play Backgammon. 

First, I had to dive back into Sonic Chronicles, the DS game from Bioware. As I mentioned in a previous post, the initial experience was rather tedious and frustrating. Having played Bioware games for years, I figured I should still give it a chance as pretty much every one of their games has had a kind of grim first hour or two of game play.

Turns out that it got a lot more fun. That said, I'm not sure it's something I'll spend much more time playing for a variety of reasons:

• The IP isn't compelling enough. I'm just not a Sonic fan.
• I've played similar RPGs that have more interesting combat and character selection and advancement. I do like a 4 person party (with lots of characters to acquire and choose from). I do like turn based combat. I just don't find the character advancement, available skills and equipment upgrades, and combat options to be as well done and polished as similar other games I've played recently. 
• I really don't like the exploration mode: I want to explore the world as I would a platformer, not a pixel hunter. Yet because my movement input is a stylus, I am drawing all over the screen to try and get my characters to move where I want them.  Even more frustrating is the fact that my hand covers most of the screen when I'm using the stylus, blocking my view.
• That said, I do like the idea of using the stylus during combat -- both for QTE minigames and for target selection. However, there needs to be a clear visual and auditory cue when the player is about to be presented with a QTE. More importantly, the QTE minigames are not well calibrated, especially for the beginner.  The QTE need to ramp up in difficulty from simple to more complex. The QTE UI elements could probably be a little more intuitive (it took forever to figure out some of the "timing" elements -- and I failed many, many times without realizing why).
• I find myself skipping all the reading parts. I just don't see Sonic as much of a reader or talker and can't for the life of me begin to care about what all the characters have to say to each other. Maybe if I was more into the IP I would read more? I'm not sure. I read the heck out of Mass Effect ... It's not that I don't like reading dialog, but maybe I just don't expect to have that much reading in what I consider to be a platformer universe.

I also managed to play a few 360 demos.

I've played Hardwood Backgammon before, but decided to try it again given my new interest in playing Backgammon on Facebook. The Hardwood version isn't very exciting, but it mostly gets the job done and is certainly easier to use than the Facebook version. Of course, it does NOT allow asynchronous play (none of the XBLA turn based games do as far as I know), which is a shame. Taking my turn in various Facebook games has certainly been a key reason I log in so often -- and I have to believe I'd do the same if XBLA supported play-by-email options.

The highlight of the night was Afro Samurai. I loved the art direction and integration of comic book design into cutscenes. I think it really takes what the Penny Arcade folks did to the next level. Having great VO by Samuel L. Jackson doesn't hurt, either. Outside of combat the game feels very well written and polished.

As far as combat goes, I'm going to have to spend a bit more time breaking it down (the demo was quite short -- but sweet). Basic attacks and combos didn't feel quite right. I'm not sure whether it was my character poses/animations, the enemy hit reacts, the rumble, the camera, or "all of the above". There were some cool finishing animations and slo-mo attacks, but the nuts and bolts of combat vs. multiple enemies felt a bit off.

I was unable to figure out exactly how combos fed into my power meter. Truth be told, I was given a lot of functionality right off the bat -- and I'm assuming that the actual game layers these components on a little more slowly so the player can absorb them more deeply. Still, I'd like to know how I power up the "over" attack mode which functions a bit like Ninety Nine Nights orb spark (you dash quickly in different directions doing massive damage to anyone standing nearby).

Criticisims aside (and there are others, including: inability to switch options in the pause menu; inability to set the horizontal camera control to inverted even from the main game shell), the demo was tight. I'm not familiar with the actual source material (graphic novels or animated series) but I definitely felt like I was dropped into a world that I thought was cool and that I wanted to explore. Even though I have some concerns about combat, the demo left me wanting more.

Enough to buy the game? Not sure. I'm definitely bumping it up my Gamefly Q -- but we'll see. If I work on another action/brawler title, I'll definitely have to study it and Conan (which is also on my desk).

Finally, Skate 2. Not a genre of game I usually play for no reason other than none of the skateboarding games ever made me feel cool. The only extreme sport game I ever liked was Aggressive Inline. It had a pretty low bar in terms of accessibility, hot female skaters, and really cool environments. Basically, it was fun to skate and explore.

Skate 2 is another example of a game that is completely geared towards its (hard)core market. It was completely inaccessible to me. After 15 minutes of game play, I could barely stand up on the skateboard. Career mode left me stuck and unable to continue about 10 minutes in. The Freeplay mode started with a "bang" that meant every 12-15 seconds my character died and I had to restart. Whoops.

Although it hardly seems worth mentioning, I actually did bother to try to customize my skater. Stupidly, in retrospect, I chose a female skater. I should have known something was up when I got a dialog box asking me to confirm that I was sure I wanted to change the gender of my skater from male to female -- the default female characters were fuh-uh-ugly. Whoah. Freakishly ugly. Not just out of shape (though some of them were) but not even average in appearance. Hair, eyes, facial structure, you name it. The clothes were mostly unflattering.

Seems to me that character creation and customization is a pretty known and solved science:

• Start with attractive and popular defaults. At least have 2-3 presets that have "buy in" from some sort of art director.
• Add a "random" character generator button. Let players jam the button a bunch of times to get a sense of the possibilities and either accept one as is, or take one he/she mostly likes and tweak the rest.
• Yeah, it's cool to let me know that there are lots of unlockables in the game. Still, try to organize options such that it's easy to scroll through the currently available options instead of having to stream through pages of locked content.

In some ways I wonder whether the demo might have been better with the following:

• True freeskate mode. One map available as SP or as online play (can join/host). Default attractive skaters as playable characters (but allow players to customize from a small set of content).
• 4-5 self-paced tutorial modules. These could be executed as quests in the freeskate mode. Break down a few of the basic skills and let players practice them at their own pace -- not when under the stress of some arbitrary time constraint.

It's too bad (in my mind) that skate games are so hardcore. In my mind I still have the fantasy of relaxing while listening to music and skating around and exploring a cool world. Possibly coordinating stunts with friends like we did when we played co-op Crackdown. 

Maybe I can still hope for an Aggressive Online MMO. That would be cool.

Bejeweled Blitz Sound Off. Why is BB harder to play without SFX?

I'm sure other folks have addressed the issue more thoroughly, but I've definitely noticed that I obtain much higher scores "sound FX on" than "mute" whilst playing Bejeweled Blitz.

Part of it must be that I'm getting additional information that I can somehow process in parallel to the visual stimuli I'm already paying attention to. I can tell a chain reaction is continuing while I scan for the next match; I know I need to speed up as the clock is about to run out.

But I also think that part of it has to do with the rythm and flow of the game. Successes are much more visceral and exciting when combined with the solid reinforcing crashing sound; matches made "to the beat" form chains that lead to greater points.

It's hard to believe that such a quick and simple matching game has captivated me... And though I am improving over time, I still feel like it has a lot more to teach me in terms of game design and gamer goals/expectations.

On a side note, it's interesting to consider the use of sound FX on websites. If I had been asked 5 years ago, I would have hastily concluded that sound FX on websites = bad. But I'm not sure this is a universal truth anymore.

Obviously some websites are dedicated to streaming media and require sound to be useful.

Well designed sound feedback could help give user interfaces a more solid "feel" when subtle (and well designed) cues are combined with mouseover and click events. We see this in games all the time.

The basic problem is that the bad apples spoil it for the well-intentioned sound designers. I need to mostly surf with the sound turned off because I hate annoying SFX, VO, and music. I wonder if there's a browser-based solution that defaults to "no sound please" but lets you permit specific sites to broadcast sound if they've earned your trust. It's kind of like the headset for Xbox Live. Great idea when I'm in a party with friends. Never going to use it otherwise.

And, on a completely unrelated note, I'll post some more on Sonic Chronicles in the next day or so. I forced myself to play some more -- with mixed results.

Just tell me why can't this be love? (by love, I mean a great demo)

After watching a really terrible movie on the 360, I decided to cruise some of the recent demos that I have downloaded. Some of them were trial versions of XBLA titles and others were demos of upcoming console releases.

I spent a few minutes in each and will have to return to some of them for deeper analysis. But the overwhelming sense I got from the demos was "meh". None of them sucked me in from moment one. None of them filtered me into an experience that left me wanting more. And certainly none of them made me want to purchase full retail versions.

The demos I tried were:

• On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness (ep. 2)
• Resident Evil 5
• Tom Clancy's HAWX
• Three on Three NHL Arcade

So, 2 sequels and 2 new IP (well, reasonably new IP). 2 XBLA trial versions and 2 retail demos. A variety of different genres.

Were there any unifying flaws of these try-before-you-buy experiences? Not really.

In some ways, it was unlikely that I would really get into the first 2 titles. I've played previous versions of the games and just can't get into the core mechanics. 

• RE5 is great in terms of mood and suspense, but like Condemned, I just can't get into the claustrophobic game play. In some ways, I'm still not sure how I managed to enjoy Dead Space so much (given it's another plodding/claustrophic action horror game), but I never did finish it so maybe the setting and zero-grav game play could only carry it so far.
  
• Precipice is just too UI and word-driven. I love the use of comic strips to tell story (which has been used to great effect in other games like Max Payne) but I feel like I'm constantly waiting for another UI element to load or to quit out of a dialog tree that goes on forever. I never even got to explore the core combat systems. Given that I didn't get very far in the original Steam download, maybe the game is mostly about dialog trees and reading -- which isn't really my kind of game. I also found the world hard to navigate, the UI difficult to parse, and the penalty for clicking the wrong item is severe (you play the waiting game for the next screen to load).

HAWX started out with a bold (but not obvious) premise: To get players flying around in co-op mode with other folks. I'm always skeptical of this kind of experience (I hate playing with strangers for all the usual reasons) and generally skip demos that are MP only. But, ever since I had a blast playing through the Army of Two demo with a stranger, I've been more open to this kind of experience.

The basic flaw with the HAWX demo was that it had no real quick start mode that dumped you into a sandbox "fly around" mode. Instead you needed to worry about decisions like "Starting" a game vs. "Joining" a game (and all sorts of other options). Once the game started you were presented with boring tutorials that were easy to fail or skip by accident which left you stuck, having to guess what the designers meant for you to do to trigger the next sequence.

Unfortunately the co-op experience wasn't a great teaching experience, either. Unlike in a "walking around" game where you are in constant contact with other players and can observe and mimic their behavior in order to figure out what's going on, in a flight combat game usually other players are merely blips on the radar screen. 

There were other critical failings as well: Knowing that 50% of users will probably want to invert their camera/yaw, there should be an easy way to adjust this. The feature is buried under an options submenu that has jargonistic working with no useful help text. Moreover, there is no UI feedback to let you know whether your change registered or not, so I exited out twice without actually changing the option as intended.

But, when it comes right down to it, there is one main reason why I probably won't play HAWX again. Flying the plane is not fun. It feels slow, sluggish, and weightless -- all at the same time. Yeah, there's some rumble when I launch a missile, but I don't really feel like I'm flying a top of the line jet fighter. I realize that it's hard to simulate the kind of speed that these jets are capable of in a way that makes for fun game play. But, still, there are things that could be done to make the plane feel more powerful and deadly. At the very least, using the afterburners should rock my world and make me feel like I've got several g's of force pushing back against me.

Three on Three never really had a chance, unfortunately. I'm too big a fan of NHL Hitz (with 2002 being my favorite version). For a simple arcade game, they managed to make the default controls pretty darn awkward. I think that they violated the basic conventions of most other hockey games which made it hard for me to tell what was going on for the first few minutes (I'd switch players instead of speed burst, for instance).

The awkward controls made the game feel random, the weak team AI made the game feel like an episode of "chase the puck around", and the fact that somehow I managed to "win" even though the score was 0-0 at the end of the game still confuses me.

Sometimes I do wonder about the state of the traditional and console game industry. I know that there will always be awesome games out there (and I've been playing a bunch recently), but when I want to have a guaranteed relaxing and fun time, more and more I'm just firing up Facebook and playing some Scramble, Bejeweled Blitz, or my newest interest: Backgammon (by Turnplay).