Patreon Newsletter - December 2015 (Patreon)

Hello! Welcome to your Patreon newsletter for December. As always, thanks so much for your support this month!

Post Script

Let's start by talking about this month's episodes.

5 Bits of Good Game Design from 2015

One piece of design that didn't make the cut for this episode was Axiom Verge's randomised secrets. The location of the hidden areas in this game - the weird, glitched out dungeons that contain special power-ups - are randomly distributed to players.

Why? To capture that thrill of stumbling upon a secret area or hunting down hidden places, which normally cannot exist in a world of Twitter and GameFAQs. By making sure you couldn't actually share the locations of the secrets online, this was a smart way to bring the feeling of retro games to the modern day.

Some commenters mentioned that They Bleed Pixels has a similar choose-your-own-checkpoints system to Ori and the Blind Forest. I checked it out and yep, it does - however, Ori lets you choose between dropping checkpoints and doing special attacks, which I think adds an interesting layer of strategy to the whole thing.

How Her Story Works

I knew this one was going to get a divisive reaction. Almost all of the negative comments on Game Maker's Toolkit have come from the inclusion of games like Gone Home and Life is Strange. So devoting an entire episode to a “not-game” was never going to go amazingly well.

But that wasn't going to stop me. I think it deserves to be called a game, I loved playing it, and I think it has really important lessons for interactive narratives, and balancing player freedom and developer hand-holding.

I think the problem there, by the way, is the word “game”, which obviously has connotations of rules and fail states. It is, unquestionably, hard to see how Dear Esther is a “game”. Ultimately, though, these games need to exist. Whether you like them or not, they provide some players with stories, settings, and experiences not found in more traditional genres.

But seeing as we're stuck with the word “game”, I think we're just going to have to decouple the meaning from the word. Like how you don't lodge a complaint when you go in the Car Phone Warehouse (or, say, RadioShack for my US readers) and see that they don't sell car phones. Or radios. Definitions shift, get over it!

Anyway. This was a tough edit as I decided to throw in a few effects like the game's database snapping together and the VCR pause effect. That last one was surprisingly tough to get looking good, and required lots of layers, effects, and sounds.

Here's a YouTube video to show how I put it together in Adobe Premiere.

Sneak Peek

I was supposed to be giving myself a Christmas break from Game Maker's Toolkit (not that I needed it - just seemed like a nice idea). Well, in the last few days I've already started working on the next episode. Whoops!

I want this one to be a bit of a surprise. I'll tease it and say it's a look at what we can learn from one of the most famous computer games of all time. I can't wait to get it out there. Should be very useful for devs and interesting for gamers.

As for January's second episode… no idea! Got dozens of things I want to talk about though so we'll see what takes my fancy.

Mark's Month

In December I finished up Rise of the Tomb Raider. I stand by my criticism that it has really shallow climbing mechanics (though, some slightly cooler stuff - like arrows you can shoot into the wall and then stand on - appear later in the game). But, taken for what it is - i.e. Ms. Uncharted - it is a lot of fun.

Especially the optional challenge tombs, which are great little puzzles. One, which has you clambering about on a giant creaking model of the solar system or something, came close to classic Tomb Raider thrills. It really made me want a game about climbing and puzzle solving in the Rise engine. Wouldn't that be a pip?

I also played Project X Zone. This is a crazy mash-up of Sega, Capcom, and Namco games like Valkyria Chronicles, Street Fighter, and .hack. Some I recognise, many I do not! But it's always fun to see, say, the dude from Dynamite Deka (which became Die Hard Arcade in the West) beating on zombies and robots with a mop and a grandfather clock.

But man, what a grind! How to kill your strategy RPG in three easy steps: 1) make the game staggeringly easy so the player is practically guaranteed to win. 2) make all the units work almost exactly the same so no tactics can be used. 3) make the combat as repetitive as humanly possible until the player thinks they're trapped on a production line in a never-ending factory of death.

Still, I'll probably get the sequel when it lands next year. It's got the guys from Shenmue and Yakuza! How can I resist?!

Reading List

Each month I'll share some videos and articles I've enjoyed. This time…

I also finished Undertale this month. It's a funny, knockabout, and impossibly charming RPG (with a killer soundtrack), but its big feature is that you can can choose to talk enemies - every enemy, even boss characters - out of fighting.

This leads to different endings, and has some interesting things to say on video game morality, pacifism, and even watching Let's Plays on YouTube.

Some found all this effective, like Richard Cobbett in Uncovering the heart of Undertale. Others, like Jed Pessgrove in Undertale Review - Progressively Pointless, were less impressed.

“The flaccid stakes in Undertale highlight the lack of a significant message in the killing/mercy dichotomy”

If you want a good primer on how all this stuff works (and you don't mind spoilers), check out Good Game Design - Undertale: The “Real Morality” Principle from snomaN Gaming.

Anyway. Enough Undertale.

Now, I liked both games, but Jeremy Parish makes a good argument for why Axiom Verge is - surprisingly - less of a Metroid clone than Ori and the Blind Forest.

What to know what the hell happened to Steam on Christmas Day? Tom Scott has a good breakdown in this video.

The placebo effect works in video games. From a Rock Paper Shotgun interview with League of Legends developer Riot Games:

“There was a time when we nerfed a particular Champion and saw the win rate of the Champion plummet a few percentage points. However, we found out after that the nerf didn’t get implemented into the patch. The simple fact that the patch notes described a nerf to the champion had a weird psychological effect on the play patterns of players and resulted in a drop in win rates.”

This is a good analysis of the story in Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. I liked that game a lot. It hasn't aged well (I revisited it very briefly for the Uncharted episode), but this video makes me want to go back properly.

The Just Cause 3 menu is cool. Rico is resting against a car, and when you press start he gets in and you suddenly have control. Very snazzy - but it also leads to some funny outcomes when the systems of the game get involved.

This looks like a good bookmark for developers - how to make your game colourblind friendly. 

Two movie things. This video about the tricks used to hide the cuts in the brilliant Birdman is worth a watch. And of all the 2015 movie compilations, this one is the one to see. Finding all those matching shots must have taken all year!