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Airy Canary, Developing an Indie iPhone Game, Part I

The story behind the development of Airy Canary…an indie iPhone game…

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/airy-nary-part-1.mp3

Or listen to it here…

Guest Post: Backtracking and Non-Essential Areas

For a very long time, backtracking has been seen as a cheap way to lengthen games. If you are out of time, money, or story, you have a twitching desire to send the player back to places they have already visited to find something you couldn’t get to or do the first time around(Retro did this with missile expansions in the Metroid Prime series).

This type of backtracking really crushes the freedom the player is supposed to have – if he/she wants to explore, he/she will. Forcing theplayer to do things not essential to the main path down the middle of the game will make the experience less enjoyable. However forceful backtracking can be a good thing if used correctly.

The weak kind of backtracking ruins games. In Metroid Prime: Corruption, near the end, you come to a door that requires six or so missile expansions to open. You have to go to old areas you have already visited and devour them for missile expansions and doors that were locked the first time you walked by them.

You even have to defeat some enemies and puzzles you beat the first time. This is terrible design. The weak explanation as to why you need to backtrack (you need six missiles to open this door, the five you have won’t cut it) ruins the player’s suspension of disbelief.

Not only is the suspension of disbelief hurt, but so is the eagerness of the player. When forcing a backtracking segment, no new challenges are thrown at the player! The learning curve and pacing that has carried the player throughout the game is suddenly cut and halted until you find these missile expansions.

In addition to that, frustration consumes the player, who has no clear objective and path to the objective, an important rule in game design. This point in Metroid Prime: Corruption is where I stopped playing for months.

The truth is: if the player wanted to explore, he/she would have! If you allow the player to either charge through the level or check every nook and cranny, the players who just want to advance

the story do so, and those who want to explore the world do so.

And not everyone feels the same way throughout the game! By leaving the option open for the player to choose, everyone has a lot more fun.

When I played Fallout 3, there were times where I scoured areas for little things to do, and there were times I put the blinders up and went straight forward, depending on how I felt (self-adjusted pacing). The game allowed me to do what I wanted to do, what would be the most fun for me during that playing session.

Games like Fallout 3 and Mass Effect 2 take the opposite approach of Metroid Prime: Corruption(although, Corruption didn’t have THAT many extra places to explore). By exploring the worlds ofMass Effect 2 or meeting all the deranged survivors of Fallout 3, the player can nearly DOUBLE his/her playtime! That is a whole lot of extra content.

But another important detail – Fallout 3and Mass Effect 2 didn’t really need to force you to backtrack anyways to see all there was to see: the worlds were so interesting that I actually WANTED to see what there was to do.

And honestly, if these two games forced me to explore and find hidden collectables in far reach corners of levels, I wouldn’t have wanted to explore! At that point, it is not really exploration – the best kind of exploration in games doesn’t force you to do so (but I’ll save that for another article).

It’s like the things I say in these parentheses: you don’t actually have to read them – they are just asides! But you read them anyways (at least I hope you are, or my point will be severely weakened). If I, however, told you before the article started that I was going to test you afterwards on what was written in the parentheses, the reading would have become a task!The same goes for extra, non-essential areas in videogames.

By not forcing you to talk to the wounded alien leaning against the wall, the designers are actually forcing you to talk to him.

There are more benefits to adding extra content to a game, too. Even though it costs more money, you are making each gamer’s experience that much greater when they find or do something that none of their friends even heard of before.

The player gets a grand sense of accomplishment upon discovering something new that he/she knows (or at least believes) very few people have discovered. All gamers have this strange belief that they are somehow better than any other gamer (we gamers are of an egotistical breed).
Extra content also personalizes the experience of the player. When the game is complete, the player has something he/she can look back on, something different than what any other player experienced. This story is his/her story, and I believe part of Fallout 3’s glory lies in the stories people told after playing the game.

Before I got to play it, I heard accounts of people stealing carrots and facing a wave of enemies, running into a shop, only to have the monster come in after you, only things that players experienced by exploring and experimenting, using their imagination. And these individual experiences motivated the players to explore even more (and it motivated me to play the game, along with many others)!
It is true that cutting non-essential areas and events build up the cost of the game, but think about what it adds to the experience by KEEPING IT NON-ESSENTIAL!

And when the player is done with the game, he/she will know that lots of content went undiscovered, leading to a HUGE replay value. In some of the best video games, the player asks what if questions (What if I had shot the sheriff? What if I went down that other hallway?) – that is a sign of good replay value and a good game, if the player is already having the desire to replay the game after the first level.

Plus you add all the role-playing elements to games likeFallout 3 and Mass Effect 2, and you have a GINORMOUS game, which you could play in many ways, with different goals, with different focuses on the characters and your stats.

So if you want to force exploration on the player to make him/her explore all of the world you created, DON’T! You will make it more special to the players who actually want to explore the world you created (and if it is as good as you believe, they will; forceful exploration is a band aid over faults of a dull story, world, characters, etc.).

You should only use backtracking if it is necessary in giving the player a strong set of emotions or a new, truly unique challenge. Lets say you go through a thriving village on the way to a mountain. On the mountain, you cause a landslide, blocking the river that used to run to the village you went through. If the designer forces you to go back through the village, seeing  the thirsty young children, the fishers out of work, the bakers whose bakeries ran on the power of a waterwheel will make you feel (in this case, guilt, or maybe even regret).
Forcing the player to retrace his steps can be a good thing if the challenge has changed in someway, too. Maybe the street of the woman you just robbed is now crawling with FBI, or you now have a tool that completely flips the whole dynamic of the level on its head.

Simply, something needs to have changed since the last time you were there, something major. Otherwise, it is just a waste of time, and will be regarded as such. Backtracking used correctly can wow the gamer, making him/her see the level (in terms of gameplay or world) in a way he/she didn’t see the first time.

There is a huge difference between games that have too little content, and too much content. Games that force you to go back through levels, looking for things or separate areas you missed the first, are weak, and their designers are lazy.

Games that allow you to go through non-essential areas at your discretion are strong in this aspect, and their designers (and producers) should be hailed for understanding the necessity for spending extra money to make extra content that they don’t really need. If Metroid Prime: Corruption did not force you to go back through areas you already went through, it would have been a better game.

By including a block in the game, it forced the players who were not intrigued enough with the world and story to spend some more time in the same areas, while giving the players who actually cared, the completionists and those who had been sucked into the world of Metroid, the green light to even more content. Logical?

Dylan Woodbury lives with his family in Southern California. He runs http://dtwgames.com, a game design website that posts intriguing new articles every week, both beginner’s tutorials and theoretical ideas. He also has an interest in writing, and is planning his first novel. His primary goal is to change the world through video games.

Why You Should Develop Games For Brazil

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/gdco-ual.mp3

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Free Friday: Royalty-Free Music For Your Game

GianMarco Leone has been nice enough to create free music that game developers can use in their game…enjoy 🙂

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/creepy-ambience.mp3

Or listen to it here…

Vanessa and Her Nightmare, Best Game Design Winner at IndiePub Contest

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/gdco-bad-pilcrow.mp3

Or listen to it here…

[wp_youtube]twOBUIhi55k[/wp_youtube]

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Guest Post: What We Want From the Next Decade

Can you believe in 10 years we have gone from games like The Sims and Deus Ex to games like Mass Effect 2 and Red Dead: Redemption? And while pretty much every site/show/blog is pitching in their two cents of the top 10 games/(game-related-topic)s of the year or next year, I wanted to do something else.

Because while every single one of these lists is absolutely perspective-based, I think there are certain things everyone who cares about games as a medium wants to see in the future. So, here are a few things I would like to see tackled in the next ten years (and I believe it can happen).

Explore new characters. I am tired of playing as the tough, smart-aleck, straight, lady-killer, white, adult male. I want to experience some new stories, some new characters with new dilemmas and backgrounds. How about someone who isn’t so tough and confident? Making the main character Black, Latin-American, Chinese, or Indian allows for a different story. I was hoping they would unmask Master Chief as a Japanese man, but that never panned out.

And we need more variety in gender, too. Almost every hero in games is male, and most of the ones who aren’t are hyper-sexualized, rather dull, cliché characters. And using characters of different sexual orientation can be a good way to teach people about the issue and equality. Hopefully someone is listening right now, because it is really sad that this pattern has been going on for as long as it has.

Not be afraid to tackle real-world problems. This is beyond just naming the enemy after a terrorist group. The Twilight Zone episode, “Monsters are Due on Maple Street”, tackled the Red Scare (extreme fear of communism in the US) just years after the period, and I think if a designer has something he/she wants to say about an event or just the times, and it is meaningful in a game format, it should be there.

Does that mean we should make a game to cover every major even in recent history like 9/11? No. But if a video game can take something like 9/11 and enlighten the player in some way, it should be done (but maturely). (By the way, I am not supporting a 9/11 game – I don’t think there is any reason to make a game on the topic – nothing much I have to say on the tragedy – kind of black and white)

More artistically mature production choices. Just because a game sold well doesn’t mean it needs a sequel, especially not so soon after the previous game (Call of Duty, I am especially talking to you).

A sequel should only be made if the story and/or gameplay can be expanded on, not just to give more of the same old crap, even if it means missing out on a lot of profit. I can think of many of the best books and films that never even got a sequel, and that is a sign of artistic restraint (I would kill whoever announced Citizen Kane 2).

I also want developers to branch out a little more and innovate. All of the low risk/high reward wii games, annual (identical) sports games, guitar hero games, and mindless shooter games are weighing us down, and I am getting sick of seeing them. Do something new, something that will leave a mark on the industry, or do nothing at all. I want to see something new somewhere in any game I play. Is that too much to ask for?

And just a note, we have been making a lot of progress in terms of scheduling releases, but we can still improve. Instead of all the games coming out around the holidays, the games come out at both the beginning and end of the year. It would be nice if good games came out all year round (there is a wide open, uncrowded spot for those three/four months).

Half Life 3.

Haha, just kidding (sort of).

People to focus less on glitter, more on games.

This is especially true since we have no idea what this next decade will bring. With the Wii on its way out, the Move and Kinect just coming onto the scene, and the 3DS ahead of us (and who knows what else), we as an audience need to focus less on the wow factor and more on the fun.

Virtual reality doesn’t matter unless it enhances the gaming experience and allows games to tackle new ground with new possibilities. I would honestly not care about any new systems boasting the new technology if I knew the games were going to be all the better for it.

So, to developers, make systems that make it easy for designers to make amazing experiences for the player, because that is what grows our industry and pushes games further on their evolutionary path. The future technology is not what excites me, it is the future games and stories they can tell and the way they make us think and act.

Maturity.

If we want to be able to tell stories that cross into our real world, we need to show some maturity. That means not being racist or sexist or demeaning to any group (it is depressing that I have to even mention this), and I am speaking both to developers and to gamers.

I’ve started to hate playing online games, where there are always a few mocking others for race and sexual orientation, or have anti-Semitic images and unmentionable body parts for their profile picture.

These are the people that give gaming the bad name, which is insane, since I have always thought gamers were supposed to be a little more open and accepting than that (what do I know). But the crazy thing is that video games themselves have been known to have sexist, racist, and other demeaning material (even the big games). I would kinda like to move past that, if you don’t mind.

Dylan Woodbury lives with his family in Southern California. He runs http://dtwgames.com, a game design website that posts intriguing new articles every week, both beginner’s tutorials and theoretical ideas. He also has an interest in writing, and is planning his first novel. His primary goal is to change the world through video games.

The Fun and Challenges of Building a Successful Tank MMO

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/gdco-wargaming.mp3

Or listen to it here…

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