GameTruth

So Seth and I attended the New York Comic Con this past weekend (more on the NYCC here) with our friend Joe and we saw a ton of games.  Prototype, Mad World, Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, Ghostbusters, The Conduit, Deadly Creatures, GTA: Chinatown Wars, Sonic and the Black Knight, DC Online and others.  Out of these there are several I will own (Chronicles of Riddick and Ghostbuster for sure) but there was not a game I saw that I didn’t immediately notice something I would consider to be a flaw or detractor from the game.   Prototype looked like Spiderman mixed with Assassin’s Creed therefore done before, DC Online looks exactly like City of Heroes also done before, Mad World got boring during a 10 minute demo and The Conduit had flaky controls to say the least.  The thing is I did enjoy demoing these games and many of them will do quite well.

So that brings me to the question that is the title of this post: do I have impossible standards?  It seems the more I get into game design and the more serious I take them the more I seem to sneer as imperfections.  Now I have played and loved terrible games before (Turok: Rage Wars and Rebel Assault II come to mind) but now that I plan to make my living creating games I can’t seem to cut them any slack.  Do other people have this problem?  Is this even an issue?  Should I check my gaming elitism at the door and give these games more than a 10 minute demo?

-Mark

Periodically over at Game Career Guide they have a guest come in and create a game design challenge.  About a month ago I entered into one of the challenges and I was an honorable mention.  The info on the challenge I entered is below:

The Challenge
Design a one-button first-person shooter game.

Assignment Details
This design challenge comes from Brandon Sheffield of Game Developer magazine and Gamasutra.com, and his assignment details are extremely minimal.

Design a one-button FPS game. Describe

* the game idea
* the game mechanic
* the platform
* the target audience
* why your game will be addictively fun.

That’s it.

Succinct ideas will be highly favored! Can you describe all this in only a few sentences? Remember, the businessmen and women in the game industry don’t want to read a hundred-page design document. Get to the point.

Sheffield will weigh in on the results. (Hint: Search out his name to find out what kinds of themes and styles he might be into.)

So with my success in this challenge I may very well be entering into some more.

-Mark

I know that the text above is not really a question, hell its not even a sentence. However, I wanted to talk about my experience with Super Mario Galaxies (SMG). I am currently about half way through the game so I am no expert but at this point I am comfortable commenting about it.

Let me describe the gameplay of SMG. Mario flies to a nicely themed galaxy in hopes of making it out alive and with a star. By nicely themed I mean that the power-ups, environment, enemies, music, etc all fits together nicely. When he lands in the galaxy he has to complete puzzles of all kinds on a planet so that he can move to the next one. These puzzles include platforming, killing enemies, throwing switches, etc. Mario’s main attack is a spin attack which stuns enemies and then Mario kicks them to finish them off. There are also power-ups throughout each galaxy that include items that increase the total health Mario has, exta lives (I love that green mushroom), stars for invincibility, and others (like the bee mushroom that lets you fly). Also Mario can get coins to refill his health.

Now at the end of galaxy there is a boss fight that usually consists of a large boss themed after the galaxy and to defeat him Mario must use some gimmick to stun the boss and then attack the bosses weak point.

Does any of that sound familiar to anyone else? In any of the 3D Legend of Zelda games the gameplay in the dungeons is as follows:

Link goes to a nicely themed dungeon with the purpose of coming out alive and with some item he needs. When he arrives at the dungeon he has to complete puzzles in rooms of the dungeon to unlock other rooms, get a boss key, get a compass, and get a map. These puzzles include switch puzzles, platform puzzles, killing enemies, etc. Link has a spin attack plus a slew of other moves to defeat enemies. He can also find heart containers to give him more health, new equipment and spells, fairies for extra lives, and potions to refill his health and magic. At the end of each dungeon is a large nicely themed boss that can be killed using a gimmick usually learned in the dungeon. Link must use this to stun the boss and then attack his weak point (usually a blinking area or something like the eye or brain or jaw or whatever).

Now I am even confusing myself about these games. There are even closer similarities, like the sound effect that comes with unlocking some secret in SMG, it sounds just like the sound Zelda has. Also things like floating in a bubble and using fans to get through a platforming puzzle in SMG. Slap a green suit on him, pop the bubble and give Mario a leaf and he could be Link in the Wind Temple of Wind Waker.

So what is the point of even bringing this up right? Who gives a shit if they have almost the same gameplay? Well the point I am getting at is about using the weaknesses of a games design so that they become strengths. Portal did a really good job with this as well and I have a draft of a longer game design question for it in the works. SMG seems boring, you fly some place, you solve easy puzzles, you defeat an easy boss, you get a star, you fly home and repeat like 300 times. However, this modular game design (by modular I mean that there does not need to be continuity between the galaxies, the player can choose their own path of which ones to play so they take these modular pieces and weld them together for their experience) gave the designer a lot of advantages.

This modular type gameplay gave the designers a lot of freedom in what they could do without breaking immersion. Sure, why can’t a junk heap galaxy with the boss being a spinning top be next to a galaxy that has an ooze spewing spider as a boss. They are separate galaxies. Also by separating the galaxies the designers split up the experience making each level of a galaxy short in duration which lowered frustrations for the player and let the player feel like they were accomplishing a lot during play. This also gave the designer the ability to reuse puzzles but with enough galaxies in between that the player did not get bored. However, under this immaculate design and theming is the dungeon crawl dynamics of Zelda, a proven fun gameplay dynamic with enough new twists that few people even realize they are playing a dungeon crawler.

I am currently really enjoying SMG, I recommend it to any Wii owner. It has its faults but that is a discussion for another time.

-Mark

This is the first question to be written in the Game Design Questions category. In this category we will focus on features of games as well as submit some design problems.  If you would like to submit a design question or problem on the right toolbar under Pages is a Submit button.

This question is pretty simple. I remember back on my Nintendo 64 playing the original Turok (great game). This was one of the only games that my mom would sit in the room and watch my brothers or I play. She said that the music was good and the environments were interesting to look at.  She was not a huge fan of the blood, of course being 14 at the time, I was.

Turok had an interesting feature to deal with the blood, something I will call a gore filter. On the pause/start menu of the game you could change the setting of the blood from the bad guys. It was defaulted to red, the other options being green blood and no blood. The reason I bring this up is that Turok came out in 1997.  Now a tiny bit over a decade later I am surprised that we do not see games still utilizing a feature like this.

Probably the game that could best use a gore filter (in recent memory) is Gears of War. In Gears of War upon chainsawing someone in the torso blood splatters all over the screen.  Would adding a gore filter to violent games like Gears of War possibly give some leeway in ratings or maybe placate parents better?  Is there some kind of sliding scale that could be used to tone down violence in games as well as gore?  Would implementing a feature like that be worth it?

It is something to think about as the industry progresses, the addtion of filters could lead to a larger base of users and be a good way to separate a game from the pack.

-Mark