Some things are impossible.
That shouldn't be controversial, but our culture is filled with messages that go against it. Nothing is impossible, you can do whatever your dream, don't give up, just try harder, believe that you can, have faith. Our fiction/mythology is full of people overcoming difficult odds - and impossible is just a harder kind of difficult, even more admirable to inevitably overcome.
And like, that's sometimes a good attitude to have, we've accomplished a bunch of stuff by being persistent and obstinate. "Try harder" can be pretty good advice. But sometimes things that look impossible really are. And if you're attempting something impossible, giving up isn't defeatism - it's the rational thing to do.
(IMPORTANT NOTE: even when something is technically possible, "try harder" can still be bad advice. We know about burnout and depression from working too hard, we know working "crunch time" damages people. Plus it's generally awful to tell someone to work harder from a position of privilege when they're facing obstacles you don't even know OKAY.)
Impossibility is beautiful, because it's so much bigger than possibility. Finding a solution to a problem is a small thing, you can just show it to me. But to claim that there is no solution, that no solution will ever exist, no solution can ever exist, that no amount of ingenuity and effort will solve it - that's enormous.
OKAY what does a genuine impossibility look like?
Guess I'll point you to some classics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Bridges_of_K%C3%B6nigsberg, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_root_of_2, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squaring_the_circle, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angle_trisection, you probably know about these already whatever. In general this is something that mathematics does, proving things impossible. And then because humans are bad at accepting impossibilities we still get amateur mathematicians (less charitably, "cranks") trying to square circles and trisect angles because hey the establishment thinks it's impossible but maybe if I just try really hard I'll find something they missed, never mind that it would take a lot less time to verify the proof.
Importantly, these claims are definite but conditional; they say "this is impossible with the methods of Euclidean geometry" or whatever but with different tools you can do the thing. You can't write this as a fraction but sure you can write it some other way, maybe you can build another bridge or a teleporter idk. That doesn't diminish their beauty - like there are infinitely many constructions you can do in geometry and to be able with just a finite amount of work to show none of them square a circle is pretty rad. But yeah it's a thing, the only way we get to be 100% confident that something is true is by tying it down with enough qualifiers. Mathematics is fairly special because we do have those qualifiers, most places we don't and so we can't unambiguously prove impossibilities. Science operates by inventing mathematical models and experimenting to test them against reality - we can prove impossibilities in the model but never be certain whether the world follows the same rules. So while actual definite impossibility exists and is beautiful, it is something alien, we mostly live in an ambiguous world of uncertainty. (Which is not to say things aren't impossible, just we don't get to know for sure.)
Okay this is a blog about games right.
Now games are often power fantasies. Everything in them was placed for us to play with: here's a ledge, you can jump to it / a door, you can open it. Everything you see is possible, it's there for you. If there's a door that's just scenery and can't be opened, that's a failure of the game - and players complain like anything. The "perfect" game is imagined as a wide open space in which anything is possible, that never tells players what they can't do.
Which is fine i guess. But games also have the scope to let things be impossible. They're self-contained systems with fixed rules we can know; so we can prove impossibilities. And I said that's beautiful so okay let's, how?
(Note that the process of creating complex software can obscure what the rules actually are, we can end up with unintended rules - bugs, glitches, exploits. So as @flantz often points out, players end up doing actual science in experimenting to discover the laws of the toy universe, rather than the mathematics of knowing the rules and deducing their implications. In a videogame, the actual rules are what's written on the software, not what the designer or the player had in their head. Board games though, the rules run in the player's minds so they literally are exactly what you think, it's pure mathematics.)
(Lots of videogames do let things be impossible FOR NOW. The metroid thing of areas being inaccessible until you've acquired a new ability. Decent compromise I guess.)
With puzzles, what I usually see people do first is just push buttons, try to solve them without having to think. A good puzzle takes a long time to solve that way but is quickly solved once you think of the right idea, to make you give up and switch your brain on. But if it takes too long to think of the idea you'll just start going through a list of all possibilities, which isn't interesting either.
Now what if it's actually impossible? It can't be solved by button-mashing, you're wasting your time. If the state-space is finite then it can be solved (proven impossible) by exhaustive search, but very slowly - if infinite it can't. A good impossible puzzle would require a long time to be confident it can't be solved by trial and error while being quickly proven impossible once you think of the right idea.
Okay I don't really like puzzles in general and this kind of thinking might lead to things I like more? Looking at a puzzle and not knowing whether it's even solvable, and thus which approach to take, kind of a delicious uncertainty. Trying all possible moves to rule them out is super boring though just as much as trying them all to find the right ones, so that really has to be avoided. But the classic "prove or find a counterexample" topology exam questions are the best so.
Vertex Dispenser was my attempt to put an idea from mathematics into a game somehow more interesting than just make a puzzle like everyone else does. It's this dense knot of ideas, the space you move through in an action game is also the territory you command in a strategy game is also the graph you colour in a puzzle game which feeds resource management for abilities in the action game / the negative space protects the positive and everything's connected. Too weird. Anyway I ended up putting in a bunch of conventional puzzle levels too, I wanted the last one of those to be impossible but was convinced not to. What I did instead was have the level be a collection of ten separate puzzles which you have to solve half of, the rest being impossible - so you have to recognise which ones are possible and solve them while not wasting time on the others.
Maybe that wasn't a good example but here's this idea of recognition. Actually formally proving something is a specialised skill most people lack (it's not scary but it's not instinctive), I'd love to see a game that teaches this but I don't know if you can do it in an interesting way without just being maths, also to verify proofs in software tends to require input in a way that's way less intuitive than what mathematicians usually do so yeah it'll be hard to make a good game out of that (someone do it please). But just requiring recognising impossible situations without proof is still pretty interesting, usually how this works is you find some invariant feature that the allowed moves can't change (parity's a common one), recognition doesn't have the beauty of absolute certainty because a modified trial-and-error approach will still work if you're right most of the time but hey compromise.
Corrypt was getting into this kind of area too - it starts solvable but you can enter unsolvable states and then you have to recognise them and undo, preferably without wasting time on
Tuesday, 24 June 2014
Wednesday, 11 June 2014
868-HACK prog costs
Hello I felt like writing something about tuning the costs of the 868-HACK abilities. This is maybe quite boring and nerdy and also it's like lots of words but you don't have to read it ok.
You can see some of the process by comparing the 7-day version 86856527 to the released version (yes it's only on iOS right now I'll do something about that soon) but there's lots of missing bits in between.
Okay the central activity in a roguelike is choosing between different resources to lose - a typical choice is whether to engage in melee (spending hp, risking death) or use an item/magic to avoid it. Classical roguelikes lack many choices about which resources to acquire, you just take what you find and figure out how to use it, but 868-HACK also has the "data siphon" tool giving frequent acquisition choices. I put two currencies (credits and energy) so there'd be a choice of which of those to acquire, but you're also trading those off against abilities and points. (In the original concept energy was for using abilities and credits were for spending between rounds to gain abilities, but it was cleaner to collapse that into siphoning and so the choice just became which abilities to spend them on.)
So okay there were a whole bunch of abilities (the game calls them progs, I'll call them progs now too since it's shorter though a little pompous) and they needed prices, and this is kind of too big a problem. The possibility space is just too large to think about: each prog has a 2d currency cost and also you can change what they do and what they are, how many there are, how they interact. Also working with small numbers rules out cheap statistical effects like "+5% damage"; every small change makes a big difference. Balance is hard. But there's no right answer, probably lots will do fine they'll just be different games.
I started by trying to distinguish the two currencies with a conversion prog (.EXCH) going one way but not the other (credits to energy). Initially gave you 3 for 4, a slightly unfavourable exchange rate, because I thought it should cost something to use to make you think about whether it was worth it. (Could have had a second one in the other direction at a different ratio - 2 for 3? - but also such a direct resource conversion isn't interesting to have very much of, just a little is good.) Eventually it became clear that it was usually a bad choice and it wouldn't hurt to push it up to 4 for 4. I realised there's still a cost to it - the siphon spent and the risk taken acquiring the ability in the first place, and the constraint of having to do it in blocks of 4 (consider: a 100/100 exchange would never be useful, even though it's the same ratio).
This imbalance between the two currencies helped guide later decisions. Because you have the possibility to turn credits into energy you can more likely avoid running out of energy - energy is more reliable, you can sink it into using a prog over and over again, so this determines the types of progs that should use it. If something's main utility is using it several times to set up a combo or get control of a bad situation (.PUSH, .PULL, .STEP) then it should cost energy; if it is interesting to use sparingly with precision after some setup (.DEBUG, .D_BOM, .CRASH) then it costs credits. (Of course you might like to use some of these latter progs with reckless abandon, but they're still valuable when you can't, so.) There ended up being slightly more progs costing credits than energy, which aligns with the idea that energy progs are each used more often (and means there's sometimes pressure to actually find something to spend that energy on).
Having a limited number of enemy types with specific counters was part of the initial concept. I expected to have multiple subtypes within those - several varieties of virus all affected by .ANTI_V or whatever - but keeping it focused with just one of each turned out really well. Started with a counter to each type all at the same price - .ANTI_V, .KIL_D (now D_BOM), .DEBUG, .DCRPT (now .SHOW) all at $$$, and these didn't change drastically. They're in the same currency to force a choice between them: you can't deal with every type at once.
The general pattern that started to come through was: credits for damage, energy for movement/evasion. Not everything fits that pattern but keeping it in mind made many other decisions easier - e.g. .WARP both attacks something and moves something so it costs an even mix, .REDUC and .DELAY are similar in that both make enemy spawns easier to deal with, but .REDUC's cost is weighted towards credits because it prevents enemies outright (pre-destroying them) while .DELAY just holds them at bay in a weakened state. Even though the currencies have different values, I treated it as meaningful for pairs like this to have mirrored costs ($$% and $%%) because it helped simplify the decision of where to put them (other such pairs are .WAIT/.UNDO, .ROW/.COL).
Originally .ROW and .COL only did 1 damage and cost $$% and $%%, and were quite a bit more tactically interesting to use than they are now but so efficient they completely overshadowed the other attack progs (especially since they don't depend on enemy type). I couldn't find a completely satisfactory fix; there wasn't room to weaken the effect and putting up the cost by 1 was enough to leave them pretty underpowered. What I ended up doing seems balanced (which is counterintuitive - an effect is too strong at cost 3 but double the effect is fine at 4? non-linearity, having the effect twice in one go is nowhere near as valuable as having it twice at carefully selected moments) but isn't as fun to play with - but balance makes the game better overall; conservation of fun. .COL costing mainly energy clashes a little with the principle of damage mostly costing credits so to compensate I pushed up the alert cost to 5 (vs .ROW's 4): breaking a pattern merits a higher cost.
.RESET explicitly converts energy to hp, but its efficiency varies situationally: it restores you to 3 so ideally you'd use it when on 1 to maximise the effect, but sometimes you must do it on 2 when you can't avoid being hit twice next turn, or when you only need 1 because you'll restore 1 on leaving the level. Usually (ideally) it gives 1 hp for each 2 energy. Several other progs can be thought of as converting currencies to hp - at different ratios under certain conditions, so how much 1 hp is worth is pretty variable. If there's an enemy one space away from you diagonally so you can't move without being hit, then .WAIT gives 1 hp for just 1 energy (by preventing subtraction rather than by adding). With .PUSH you can very often get a bit more than 1 hp for 2 energy (avoid a hit from a nearby enemy while inconveniencing other enemies). Occasionally you need to use $$$ for 1 hp (with .ANTI-V /.DEBUG/.D_BOM) but usually these can get you quite a lot more. So I think .RESET's 1 hp = 2 energy is kind of a bad deal, but it has reliability in its favour; to emphasise this I put the alert cost really low making it safe and accessible for beginners.
Some thought went into the order in which progs unlock. The initial set has no mixed costs; they're slightly more complex to use (they clash with everything, can't be used if either currency is exhausted), and it seemed like it might make the unlocks feel a bit more special by setting up a pattern then breaking it. Also all the attacks that are independent of enemy type have mixed cost (to compensate for them being more reliable), so this meant the initial set forces you to pay special attention to enemy types which might help with learning their behaviours. When you unlock a new prog you start the next game with it, giving an opportunity to try it out straight away - which meant .SCORE had to be in the initial set because starting with it would give a huge score advantage (some of the others are a bit of a concern too but that's the worst). A side-effect of that though is it's maybe easier to score before you've unlocked everything because .SCORE shows up more reliably, this is hopefully somewhat compensated for by not having .SIPH+. In general the game gets harder as you unlock more stuff; there are some stronger abilities but you're less likely to find something that combines well. I tried to keep the balance of credits/energy fairly even at each stage of unlocking, also tried to leave gaps and then fill them later so someone might have time to wonder what something might be before unlocking it, or when something obvious was coming; no idea if this worked at all.
(For reference, initial set is .WAIT, .SHOW, .PUSH, .STEP, .ANTI-V, .DEBUG, .D_BOM, .RESET, .EXCH, .SCORE and unlock order is .WARP, .POLY, .ROW, .DELAY, .UNDO, .ATK+, .PULL, .CRASH, .COL, .CALM, .REDUC, .HACK, .SIPH+)
NOW I WILL SUM UP SOME IDEAS WITH BULLETPOINTS
You can see some of the process by comparing the 7-day version 86856527 to the released version (yes it's only on iOS right now I'll do something about that soon) but there's lots of missing bits in between.
Okay the central activity in a roguelike is choosing between different resources to lose - a typical choice is whether to engage in melee (spending hp, risking death) or use an item/magic to avoid it. Classical roguelikes lack many choices about which resources to acquire, you just take what you find and figure out how to use it, but 868-HACK also has the "data siphon" tool giving frequent acquisition choices. I put two currencies (credits and energy) so there'd be a choice of which of those to acquire, but you're also trading those off against abilities and points. (In the original concept energy was for using abilities and credits were for spending between rounds to gain abilities, but it was cleaner to collapse that into siphoning and so the choice just became which abilities to spend them on.)
So okay there were a whole bunch of abilities (the game calls them progs, I'll call them progs now too since it's shorter though a little pompous) and they needed prices, and this is kind of too big a problem. The possibility space is just too large to think about: each prog has a 2d currency cost and also you can change what they do and what they are, how many there are, how they interact. Also working with small numbers rules out cheap statistical effects like "+5% damage"; every small change makes a big difference. Balance is hard. But there's no right answer, probably lots will do fine they'll just be different games.
I started by trying to distinguish the two currencies with a conversion prog (.EXCH) going one way but not the other (credits to energy). Initially gave you 3 for 4, a slightly unfavourable exchange rate, because I thought it should cost something to use to make you think about whether it was worth it. (Could have had a second one in the other direction at a different ratio - 2 for 3? - but also such a direct resource conversion isn't interesting to have very much of, just a little is good.) Eventually it became clear that it was usually a bad choice and it wouldn't hurt to push it up to 4 for 4. I realised there's still a cost to it - the siphon spent and the risk taken acquiring the ability in the first place, and the constraint of having to do it in blocks of 4 (consider: a 100/100 exchange would never be useful, even though it's the same ratio).
This imbalance between the two currencies helped guide later decisions. Because you have the possibility to turn credits into energy you can more likely avoid running out of energy - energy is more reliable, you can sink it into using a prog over and over again, so this determines the types of progs that should use it. If something's main utility is using it several times to set up a combo or get control of a bad situation (.PUSH, .PULL, .STEP) then it should cost energy; if it is interesting to use sparingly with precision after some setup (.DEBUG, .D_BOM, .CRASH) then it costs credits. (Of course you might like to use some of these latter progs with reckless abandon, but they're still valuable when you can't, so.) There ended up being slightly more progs costing credits than energy, which aligns with the idea that energy progs are each used more often (and means there's sometimes pressure to actually find something to spend that energy on).
Having a limited number of enemy types with specific counters was part of the initial concept. I expected to have multiple subtypes within those - several varieties of virus all affected by .ANTI_V or whatever - but keeping it focused with just one of each turned out really well. Started with a counter to each type all at the same price - .ANTI_V, .KIL_D (now D_BOM), .DEBUG, .DCRPT (now .SHOW) all at $$$, and these didn't change drastically. They're in the same currency to force a choice between them: you can't deal with every type at once.
The general pattern that started to come through was: credits for damage, energy for movement/evasion. Not everything fits that pattern but keeping it in mind made many other decisions easier - e.g. .WARP both attacks something and moves something so it costs an even mix, .REDUC and .DELAY are similar in that both make enemy spawns easier to deal with, but .REDUC's cost is weighted towards credits because it prevents enemies outright (pre-destroying them) while .DELAY just holds them at bay in a weakened state. Even though the currencies have different values, I treated it as meaningful for pairs like this to have mirrored costs ($$% and $%%) because it helped simplify the decision of where to put them (other such pairs are .WAIT/.UNDO, .ROW/.COL).
Originally .ROW and .COL only did 1 damage and cost $$% and $%%, and were quite a bit more tactically interesting to use than they are now but so efficient they completely overshadowed the other attack progs (especially since they don't depend on enemy type). I couldn't find a completely satisfactory fix; there wasn't room to weaken the effect and putting up the cost by 1 was enough to leave them pretty underpowered. What I ended up doing seems balanced (which is counterintuitive - an effect is too strong at cost 3 but double the effect is fine at 4? non-linearity, having the effect twice in one go is nowhere near as valuable as having it twice at carefully selected moments) but isn't as fun to play with - but balance makes the game better overall; conservation of fun. .COL costing mainly energy clashes a little with the principle of damage mostly costing credits so to compensate I pushed up the alert cost to 5 (vs .ROW's 4): breaking a pattern merits a higher cost.
.RESET explicitly converts energy to hp, but its efficiency varies situationally: it restores you to 3 so ideally you'd use it when on 1 to maximise the effect, but sometimes you must do it on 2 when you can't avoid being hit twice next turn, or when you only need 1 because you'll restore 1 on leaving the level. Usually (ideally) it gives 1 hp for each 2 energy. Several other progs can be thought of as converting currencies to hp - at different ratios under certain conditions, so how much 1 hp is worth is pretty variable. If there's an enemy one space away from you diagonally so you can't move without being hit, then .WAIT gives 1 hp for just 1 energy (by preventing subtraction rather than by adding). With .PUSH you can very often get a bit more than 1 hp for 2 energy (avoid a hit from a nearby enemy while inconveniencing other enemies). Occasionally you need to use $$$ for 1 hp (with .ANTI-V /.DEBUG/.D_BOM) but usually these can get you quite a lot more. So I think .RESET's 1 hp = 2 energy is kind of a bad deal, but it has reliability in its favour; to emphasise this I put the alert cost really low making it safe and accessible for beginners.
Some thought went into the order in which progs unlock. The initial set has no mixed costs; they're slightly more complex to use (they clash with everything, can't be used if either currency is exhausted), and it seemed like it might make the unlocks feel a bit more special by setting up a pattern then breaking it. Also all the attacks that are independent of enemy type have mixed cost (to compensate for them being more reliable), so this meant the initial set forces you to pay special attention to enemy types which might help with learning their behaviours. When you unlock a new prog you start the next game with it, giving an opportunity to try it out straight away - which meant .SCORE had to be in the initial set because starting with it would give a huge score advantage (some of the others are a bit of a concern too but that's the worst). A side-effect of that though is it's maybe easier to score before you've unlocked everything because .SCORE shows up more reliably, this is hopefully somewhat compensated for by not having .SIPH+. In general the game gets harder as you unlock more stuff; there are some stronger abilities but you're less likely to find something that combines well. I tried to keep the balance of credits/energy fairly even at each stage of unlocking, also tried to leave gaps and then fill them later so someone might have time to wonder what something might be before unlocking it, or when something obvious was coming; no idea if this worked at all.
(For reference, initial set is .WAIT, .SHOW, .PUSH, .STEP, .ANTI-V, .DEBUG, .D_BOM, .RESET, .EXCH, .SCORE and unlock order is .WARP, .POLY, .ROW, .DELAY, .UNDO, .ATK+, .PULL, .CRASH, .COL, .CALM, .REDUC, .HACK, .SIPH+)
NOW I WILL SUM UP SOME IDEAS WITH BULLETPOINTS
- Start by fixing some initial values to base things off (which could change later if needed).
- Invent principles of symmetry to guide the rest. Symmetry is good because it cuts out a whole bunch of possibilities and also it might have some aesthetic value maybe?
- Tools to convert between different resources are maybe interesting, but better if they vary situationally rather than just having a set exchange rate, and better the weirder the resources themselves are.
- Be aware of non-linearity; don't assume the meaning of numbers scales in an intuitive way. It might be more than twice as hard to pay 6 as 3, doubling an effect shouldn't necessarily double its cost, etc.
- Be aware of different types of cost - unreliability, difficulty of acquisition, opportunity costs - as well as the explicit numeric resources.
- Breaking a pattern merits a higher cost.
- The whole is more important than its component parts. Be comfortable making a component worse if it's better for the whole.
- there's no perfect
- What is balance anyway idk
Friday, 25 April 2014
why am i making games for ios
NO REALLY WHY?
Someone asked me this yesterday because I was complaining along the way to finishing Helix.
Writing this more for myself to figure out if it still makes sense.
I got into this when I was working on Kompendium; someone suggested the games might work better on a mobile device. I was pretty skeptical at first, partially because I'd never owned a phone or anything and so it would mean buying expensive stuff I couldn't really afford, partially because the games were very much designed around the constraint of each player using just the arrow keys and I didn't know how that would translate to a different control scheme. But I decided to go for it, bought an iPad, the first game I ported over was Glitch Tank which turned out to work amazingly well, better than on a keyboard. So I released that one on its own while I kept working on the others, it didn't sell enough to cover the cost of the device, justifying some of my skepticism - but I was really happy with how it turned out, falsifying the rest.
The other games didn't transfer over anywhere near so well, they felt pretty bad. So I got interested in the problem of how to use a touchscreen well. Touchscreens are really interesting to design for, they have this immediacy to them - you're directly touching the videogame. They're malleable, you can divide up the space however you like, invent new button configurations and change them on the fly, adjust to accommodate different numbers of players. They constrain you in that all controls take up screen space, but I feel that's the right kind of constraint, forcing elegance and good design. Their obvious weakness is a lack of tactile feedback, but just wait. (This is where Helix came from - since it was really hard to do movement controls for two players well I decided to solve it for just one player first. Which is still pretty hard, hardly any games get it right. I've done it to my satisfaction now, but it might not be to everyone's; it seems like everybody has a slightly different expectation of how a touchscreen will work.)
I've ended up really enjoying working on the iPad, it just fits really well with how I make things, it feels like the right size for my games - compact but rich. It's really convenient to have games on a portable device, handy for being able to show people what I've been working on, and perfect for multiplayer, being able to play games together when out places. I don't like working with telephones at all though, they're far too cramped, supporting a different resolution is a bunch of work (more with this low-res pixel stuff I've been doing than if you just do scalable vector graphics, and even more now they've brought out widescreen ones as well), BUT HEY IT'S A BIGGER MARKET so.
Also it kind of feels to me like games at the scale I've been making it's easier to sell on mobile. I'm pretty sure the most reliable source of income from videogames is big PC games with lots of graphics and lots of fiddly bits and inelegant content to justify a substantial pricetag, but if you're making small focused things and want to get paid at all I think mobile's the best bet at the moment? That's just my impression though, it's a subject on which I could easily be quite wrong.
I really don't like that putting games on iOS means people can't play them without some expensive gadget. It excludes people, and it doesn't feel true to myself - I've been disappointed many times by games being exclusive to some console I couldn't afford. I shouldn't do this I'd rather not do this. It makes me quite unhappy that Glitch Tank and O are confined to proprietary Apple products but it's a real pain to do anything about it. Obviously it'd be nice to cover Android devices too but those are even more of a nuisance to develop for: way more different resolutions, whole bunch of extra technical nonsense to fight through (probably not that much worse than iOS but it's separate & one only has so much time in a life), plus it tends to pay a lot less than iOS and until 868-HACK I really wasn't making much. (I actually did get Glitch Tank running on Android, with some ugly hacks, but it's not getting a good framerate and I'm not quite motivated enough to dig into that mess to figure out why.) Obviously games that don't require a touchscreen I can release on PC, I do this, I've been delayed with 868-HACK because I got into a bit of a mess trying to track down some obscure crashes on a few people's computers that I can't reproduce on my own - something that is a bit less of a concern on iOS, having fixed target hardware is pretty nice (although Apple tends to break stuff with every update; I had a bunch of complaints when iOS7 broke something, though it was fortunately non-critical and only required one line added to a config file to fix. More of a concern is that Vertex Dispenser is crashing on startup on the latest MacOS, no idea why, haven't had time to dig into it, it can't really be my priority right now, but it's hanging over me. Wish I could just release games and be done with them, but each one is an additional maintenance cost at random intervals forever, and each platform it's on adds a multiplier on top of that.).
Really a lot of the reason I've stuck with iOS for a while is the multiplayer games. This is what got me into this in the first place, it's something I got really excited about for a while, it's so perfect for them but there are very few and they don't do well. I think a lot of people just don't realise that they're carrying around multiplayer consoles everywhere they go? Culture. Anyway I was hoping if I stuck with the platform for a while and made some singleplayer games maybe I could get some attention to reflect back on the multiplayer ones - because they can't so much go elsewhere. This has worked a little I guess, but of course they're not new, I'm thinking about making a new one or maybe doing a sequel to Glitch Tank, but it's hard for me to work on these at the moment because I got so excited and then demoralised.
Anyway at some point Apple will drive me away and I guess I'll go back to only making PC games again, yay.
Someone asked me this yesterday because I was complaining along the way to finishing Helix.
Writing this more for myself to figure out if it still makes sense.
I got into this when I was working on Kompendium; someone suggested the games might work better on a mobile device. I was pretty skeptical at first, partially because I'd never owned a phone or anything and so it would mean buying expensive stuff I couldn't really afford, partially because the games were very much designed around the constraint of each player using just the arrow keys and I didn't know how that would translate to a different control scheme. But I decided to go for it, bought an iPad, the first game I ported over was Glitch Tank which turned out to work amazingly well, better than on a keyboard. So I released that one on its own while I kept working on the others, it didn't sell enough to cover the cost of the device, justifying some of my skepticism - but I was really happy with how it turned out, falsifying the rest.
The other games didn't transfer over anywhere near so well, they felt pretty bad. So I got interested in the problem of how to use a touchscreen well. Touchscreens are really interesting to design for, they have this immediacy to them - you're directly touching the videogame. They're malleable, you can divide up the space however you like, invent new button configurations and change them on the fly, adjust to accommodate different numbers of players. They constrain you in that all controls take up screen space, but I feel that's the right kind of constraint, forcing elegance and good design. Their obvious weakness is a lack of tactile feedback, but just wait. (This is where Helix came from - since it was really hard to do movement controls for two players well I decided to solve it for just one player first. Which is still pretty hard, hardly any games get it right. I've done it to my satisfaction now, but it might not be to everyone's; it seems like everybody has a slightly different expectation of how a touchscreen will work.)
I've ended up really enjoying working on the iPad, it just fits really well with how I make things, it feels like the right size for my games - compact but rich. It's really convenient to have games on a portable device, handy for being able to show people what I've been working on, and perfect for multiplayer, being able to play games together when out places. I don't like working with telephones at all though, they're far too cramped, supporting a different resolution is a bunch of work (more with this low-res pixel stuff I've been doing than if you just do scalable vector graphics, and even more now they've brought out widescreen ones as well), BUT HEY IT'S A BIGGER MARKET so.
Also it kind of feels to me like games at the scale I've been making it's easier to sell on mobile. I'm pretty sure the most reliable source of income from videogames is big PC games with lots of graphics and lots of fiddly bits and inelegant content to justify a substantial pricetag, but if you're making small focused things and want to get paid at all I think mobile's the best bet at the moment? That's just my impression though, it's a subject on which I could easily be quite wrong.
I really don't like that putting games on iOS means people can't play them without some expensive gadget. It excludes people, and it doesn't feel true to myself - I've been disappointed many times by games being exclusive to some console I couldn't afford. I shouldn't do this I'd rather not do this. It makes me quite unhappy that Glitch Tank and O are confined to proprietary Apple products but it's a real pain to do anything about it. Obviously it'd be nice to cover Android devices too but those are even more of a nuisance to develop for: way more different resolutions, whole bunch of extra technical nonsense to fight through (probably not that much worse than iOS but it's separate & one only has so much time in a life), plus it tends to pay a lot less than iOS and until 868-HACK I really wasn't making much. (I actually did get Glitch Tank running on Android, with some ugly hacks, but it's not getting a good framerate and I'm not quite motivated enough to dig into that mess to figure out why.) Obviously games that don't require a touchscreen I can release on PC, I do this, I've been delayed with 868-HACK because I got into a bit of a mess trying to track down some obscure crashes on a few people's computers that I can't reproduce on my own - something that is a bit less of a concern on iOS, having fixed target hardware is pretty nice (although Apple tends to break stuff with every update; I had a bunch of complaints when iOS7 broke something, though it was fortunately non-critical and only required one line added to a config file to fix. More of a concern is that Vertex Dispenser is crashing on startup on the latest MacOS, no idea why, haven't had time to dig into it, it can't really be my priority right now, but it's hanging over me. Wish I could just release games and be done with them, but each one is an additional maintenance cost at random intervals forever, and each platform it's on adds a multiplier on top of that.).
Really a lot of the reason I've stuck with iOS for a while is the multiplayer games. This is what got me into this in the first place, it's something I got really excited about for a while, it's so perfect for them but there are very few and they don't do well. I think a lot of people just don't realise that they're carrying around multiplayer consoles everywhere they go? Culture. Anyway I was hoping if I stuck with the platform for a while and made some singleplayer games maybe I could get some attention to reflect back on the multiplayer ones - because they can't so much go elsewhere. This has worked a little I guess, but of course they're not new, I'm thinking about making a new one or maybe doing a sequel to Glitch Tank, but it's hard for me to work on these at the moment because I got so excited and then demoralised.
Anyway at some point Apple will drive me away and I guess I'll go back to only making PC games again, yay.
Monday, 17 February 2014
CYBERGALLOP
netrunner demake
made for retro remakes "cassette 50" jam
windows download
mac download
(mac version is only running in windowed mode right now because i haven't figured out all the new hoops i have to jump through since apple most recently coerced me to submit to their updates. and maybe i won't bother.)
clearly it doesn't capture all - or even many - of netrunner's dynamics, but there's something there.
Friday, 17 January 2014
868-hack update
Okay, 868-HACK has been updated on iOS. The update clears the high score tables and starts fresh. The old scores can still be viewed through gamecenter under "legacy". If you don't update, any new scores you get will remain separate. If you're in the middle of a streak, updating will reset that so scores can't be carried over that way (sorry!). Your local score list is also cleared, so if you want to keep that record take a screenshot before updating.
Since release I've been learning more about the game and tweaking the balance. Most of the changes are smallish, but they add up and make a difference to how easy it is to score. Many of the things I've learnt have come from observing the game in the wild; I couldn't have known to account for them before release.
At some point during development .STEP allowed stepping off the edge of the level to wrap around to the opposite side: this felt very cool as a glitch in an abstract digital space, but was far too useful for skipping levels (because it makes the corners adjacent) so it didn't stay. So at release I felt like .STEP was slightly underpowered because it was weaker than it had been; it was more expensive than .WAIT / .PUSH / .PULL as a parity flip and it was less useful for grabbing lots of points on the last level and getting out safely than before. I WAS WRONG. It's still extremely effective, you just need to make sure to save up enough energy. I've nerfed it a little: it now spawns 4 enemies instead of 3 on acquisition, and it can no longer be used to instantly siphon (since while that was a neat interaction it's a more interesting problem to find a safe space to siphon while stepping through a level full of enemies). This means it's now harder to get a high score because you're more likely to have to deal with the enemies you alert, and it's harder to get a streak because you're less likely to be able to skip the hardest levels.
I wrote before about the question of whether .SCORE was overpowered. I don't believe that it technically was because I was able to get scores as high without it as with it. But many others did believe that it was and that belief was shaping the way they played in a way they were unhappy with - it doesn't always matter if a belief is true if it has genuine effects anyway. This belief reinforced itself: players convinced that it was the only way to get high scores would only try to get high scores when they had it, so the high score list filled up with .SCORE-based scores, convincing anyone else looking at it that this was the way to get high scores. James Lantz describes the process of constantly restarting the first level to get a good run - this is mostly a problem with .SCORE because it is clear from the first level whether you'll be able to get many points out of it, whereas other ways of scoring big aren't obvious until later. Meanwhile I would almost never pick up .SCORE myself because it just wasn't worth the risk. Also I noticed that many of the high scores weren't quite as high as they could have been because they'd forget to dump their remaining energy into .SCORE on the last level when it was safe - which is admittedly a boring requirement. I'm attempting to fix these concerns in a way that remains balanced by making .SCORE grant one less point with each use, while spawning one less enemy on acquisition. This means it's harder to get high scores with it (you'll need to take even more risks or rely on other methods of scoring as well), every use of it is an interesting gamble (you can't use it safely at the end because it's worth 0 by then), it less encourages restarting lots to get a good run (because it has less variance), and it's more viable during streaks (because it's less dangerous to pick up).
SPOILERS: There is a secret level. It's expensive and risky to get there but sometimes it can be exploited for an advantage. There was a design error which is now fixed, in which it was possible to recursively access it and maybe push that advantage too far. It remains a possible way to get extra points, but not so many as before.
SEMI-SPOILERS: During streaks difficulty modifiers get applied to provide an extra challenge and hopefully end the streak eventually. I didn't want streaks to continue indefinitely because then the optimal way to play would be to get one point per game for a thousand games rather than taking any risks, so I increased the chances of failure as you go.
(It seems like bad form to just present an impossible run, but with a finite discrete game you can't just keep increasing the difficulty without it ending up impossible. The best I can hope for here is that when you eventually lose it'll be because of a risk you took that you could have done differently: this feels less unsatisfactory even though in the limit it's still outside of your control.)
When I made the game I was enamoured with the idea that a streak might last a very long time, that there could be some elite hacker known only by a mysterious pseudonym somehow *STILL RUNNING* against all odds. And this happened exactly as imagined, nobodyweknow has an amazing streak, 1228 points in 47 games at time of writing. But there's a side-effect to this that I hadn't anticipated: it's putting other players off even trying for streaks, leaving them just grinding at the (less interesting) single-game scoreboard. Additionally, nobodyweknow has said that at the level he's playing at some of the runs seem pointless because they're not offering enough challenge - the difficulty modifiers, originally conceived just as a way to kill off streaks, have become a core part of what makes the game varied and interesting. So I've significantly ramped up the difficulty increase to hopefully end streaks quicker and more consistently challenge experts. This has a more dramatic effect on scoring than the single-game changes because of how much the points can add up across a streak.
All of these combine to make scoring more difficult, but in ways that are somewhat ambiguous - I can't just recalculate old scores to fit the new scale. There may only have been one score that exploited the old secret level (my own) but I can't be sure, and certainly there were many that exploited the old .STEP and .SCORE. Probably all the old scores would be beaten eventually even though it's harder - just by someone eventually being more skilled and having a luckier run - but until then they'd be hanging around in the lists and I worry this would seem unfair to new players. Also it matters because you can examine what progs a score was obtained using, so this would be providing misleading information to anyone hoping to learn from it (similarly, you can examine what modifiers were applied to games in a streak). So all up I think it is best not to have the old scores hanging around. I hope this is okay with everyone!
Since release I've been learning more about the game and tweaking the balance. Most of the changes are smallish, but they add up and make a difference to how easy it is to score. Many of the things I've learnt have come from observing the game in the wild; I couldn't have known to account for them before release.
At some point during development .STEP allowed stepping off the edge of the level to wrap around to the opposite side: this felt very cool as a glitch in an abstract digital space, but was far too useful for skipping levels (because it makes the corners adjacent) so it didn't stay. So at release I felt like .STEP was slightly underpowered because it was weaker than it had been; it was more expensive than .WAIT / .PUSH / .PULL as a parity flip and it was less useful for grabbing lots of points on the last level and getting out safely than before. I WAS WRONG. It's still extremely effective, you just need to make sure to save up enough energy. I've nerfed it a little: it now spawns 4 enemies instead of 3 on acquisition, and it can no longer be used to instantly siphon (since while that was a neat interaction it's a more interesting problem to find a safe space to siphon while stepping through a level full of enemies). This means it's now harder to get a high score because you're more likely to have to deal with the enemies you alert, and it's harder to get a streak because you're less likely to be able to skip the hardest levels.
I wrote before about the question of whether .SCORE was overpowered. I don't believe that it technically was because I was able to get scores as high without it as with it. But many others did believe that it was and that belief was shaping the way they played in a way they were unhappy with - it doesn't always matter if a belief is true if it has genuine effects anyway. This belief reinforced itself: players convinced that it was the only way to get high scores would only try to get high scores when they had it, so the high score list filled up with .SCORE-based scores, convincing anyone else looking at it that this was the way to get high scores. James Lantz describes the process of constantly restarting the first level to get a good run - this is mostly a problem with .SCORE because it is clear from the first level whether you'll be able to get many points out of it, whereas other ways of scoring big aren't obvious until later. Meanwhile I would almost never pick up .SCORE myself because it just wasn't worth the risk. Also I noticed that many of the high scores weren't quite as high as they could have been because they'd forget to dump their remaining energy into .SCORE on the last level when it was safe - which is admittedly a boring requirement. I'm attempting to fix these concerns in a way that remains balanced by making .SCORE grant one less point with each use, while spawning one less enemy on acquisition. This means it's harder to get high scores with it (you'll need to take even more risks or rely on other methods of scoring as well), every use of it is an interesting gamble (you can't use it safely at the end because it's worth 0 by then), it less encourages restarting lots to get a good run (because it has less variance), and it's more viable during streaks (because it's less dangerous to pick up).
SPOILERS: There is a secret level. It's expensive and risky to get there but sometimes it can be exploited for an advantage. There was a design error which is now fixed, in which it was possible to recursively access it and maybe push that advantage too far. It remains a possible way to get extra points, but not so many as before.
SEMI-SPOILERS: During streaks difficulty modifiers get applied to provide an extra challenge and hopefully end the streak eventually. I didn't want streaks to continue indefinitely because then the optimal way to play would be to get one point per game for a thousand games rather than taking any risks, so I increased the chances of failure as you go.
(It seems like bad form to just present an impossible run, but with a finite discrete game you can't just keep increasing the difficulty without it ending up impossible. The best I can hope for here is that when you eventually lose it'll be because of a risk you took that you could have done differently: this feels less unsatisfactory even though in the limit it's still outside of your control.)
When I made the game I was enamoured with the idea that a streak might last a very long time, that there could be some elite hacker known only by a mysterious pseudonym somehow *STILL RUNNING* against all odds. And this happened exactly as imagined, nobodyweknow has an amazing streak, 1228 points in 47 games at time of writing. But there's a side-effect to this that I hadn't anticipated: it's putting other players off even trying for streaks, leaving them just grinding at the (less interesting) single-game scoreboard. Additionally, nobodyweknow has said that at the level he's playing at some of the runs seem pointless because they're not offering enough challenge - the difficulty modifiers, originally conceived just as a way to kill off streaks, have become a core part of what makes the game varied and interesting. So I've significantly ramped up the difficulty increase to hopefully end streaks quicker and more consistently challenge experts. This has a more dramatic effect on scoring than the single-game changes because of how much the points can add up across a streak.
All of these combine to make scoring more difficult, but in ways that are somewhat ambiguous - I can't just recalculate old scores to fit the new scale. There may only have been one score that exploited the old secret level (my own) but I can't be sure, and certainly there were many that exploited the old .STEP and .SCORE. Probably all the old scores would be beaten eventually even though it's harder - just by someone eventually being more skilled and having a luckier run - but until then they'd be hanging around in the lists and I worry this would seem unfair to new players. Also it matters because you can examine what progs a score was obtained using, so this would be providing misleading information to anyone hoping to learn from it (similarly, you can examine what modifiers were applied to games in a streak). So all up I think it is best not to have the old scores hanging around. I hope this is okay with everyone!
Wednesday, 18 December 2013
where i am at with 868-hack
When I released 868-HACK on iOS I said I'd release it on PC soon. That was like four months ago and it hasn't happened yet. In particular I may have claimed it would be released this year and now it's mid-December and it's not done and there's no way I'm going to get it out in between visiting people over Christmas, and it's probably a terrible time to release something anyway given that everything else is on sale.
And now some people are putting it in lists of their top games of the year! Which is really great, but makes me feel a little awkward because it is not a game that everybody has access to this year, maybe I am losing money by not offering it for sale to everyone at this moment when attention is being drawn to it, maybe someone is sad because they hear about it but cannot play it. (Here are some of these nice list-writing people: Kris Graft, Leigh Alexander, Brendan Keogh.) The year thing is kind of arbitrary but still it happens.
SO WHAT HAPPENED
I guess I don't owe you an explanation or anything but since I have said things that were not true I would like to give some justification.
A few different factors are combined to cause this happening!
- When I spend lots of time working on one thing I get too many ideas for other things and want to try them out instead. So I really wanted to do that instead of spending even more time on 868-HACK. Distractions!
- Also I'd promised someone a game for a Kickstarter reward a while ago and not delivered, I'd tried to make it a few times but the ideas were not working out, and I'd finally figured out what to do for that so I needed to spend time on that.
- One of the things I have to do for the PC version is fix a crash that affects a few people and which I do not understand and can't replicate. I've spent a while trying to track it down but mostly I get frustrated and give up, do something that feels more productive. I will find it eventually. (A couple of my free games that have used the same API have the same problem but those are free so it kind of doesn't matter.)
- There have been a bunch of things to fix in the iOS version, and those have been higher priorities since that's OUT.
- I had been working too hard and stressing too much and really needed a break.
This last element is the main one. For the last couple of years I've been working really hard and there's been this constant worry about whether I'd be able to keep going, just making me feel tense all the time, draining. I didn't know what to do, I'd tried the "spend years polishing something" approach and that was bad for me and didn't work out, I'd tried being ridiculously prolific and out-performing almost everyone else and that got more positive responses but paid even less. I'd made - to my taste - some of the best games, felt like I was doing something worthwhile, I'd gotten some recognition for them, but it wasn't enough.
So then when 868-HACK came out and was so well-received and made enough money that it looks like I'll probably be able to keep going, I relaxed. (So far it's sold 6000 copies. I know lots of people will scoff at that, sales figures from Actually Successful games contain more digits than that, but since it was just me it's enough.) My tension fell away, I stopped feeling like I had to spend every waking hour making things or self-promoting, I took some time out to not be stressed, read some books, play some games that weren't my own ones I was working on (MOSTLY DOTA), have a social life. IT'S BEEN REALLY GOOD FOR ME.
OK so I'm feeling better about things now, I'm working on another update for the iOS version (some bugs fixed, some balance tweaks), I'm prototyping some new things which are exciting and new, and hey sometime in the new year there will be a PC version of this and also some other new games and hopefully I will keep doing game-making art things. Really sorry to everyone who's still waiting to play this game on the computer they have, I will get there but I haven't yet and it is better this way really.
And now some people are putting it in lists of their top games of the year! Which is really great, but makes me feel a little awkward because it is not a game that everybody has access to this year, maybe I am losing money by not offering it for sale to everyone at this moment when attention is being drawn to it, maybe someone is sad because they hear about it but cannot play it. (Here are some of these nice list-writing people: Kris Graft, Leigh Alexander, Brendan Keogh.) The year thing is kind of arbitrary but still it happens.
SO WHAT HAPPENED
I guess I don't owe you an explanation or anything but since I have said things that were not true I would like to give some justification.
A few different factors are combined to cause this happening!
- When I spend lots of time working on one thing I get too many ideas for other things and want to try them out instead. So I really wanted to do that instead of spending even more time on 868-HACK. Distractions!
- Also I'd promised someone a game for a Kickstarter reward a while ago and not delivered, I'd tried to make it a few times but the ideas were not working out, and I'd finally figured out what to do for that so I needed to spend time on that.
- One of the things I have to do for the PC version is fix a crash that affects a few people and which I do not understand and can't replicate. I've spent a while trying to track it down but mostly I get frustrated and give up, do something that feels more productive. I will find it eventually. (A couple of my free games that have used the same API have the same problem but those are free so it kind of doesn't matter.)
- There have been a bunch of things to fix in the iOS version, and those have been higher priorities since that's OUT.
- I had been working too hard and stressing too much and really needed a break.
This last element is the main one. For the last couple of years I've been working really hard and there's been this constant worry about whether I'd be able to keep going, just making me feel tense all the time, draining. I didn't know what to do, I'd tried the "spend years polishing something" approach and that was bad for me and didn't work out, I'd tried being ridiculously prolific and out-performing almost everyone else and that got more positive responses but paid even less. I'd made - to my taste - some of the best games, felt like I was doing something worthwhile, I'd gotten some recognition for them, but it wasn't enough.
So then when 868-HACK came out and was so well-received and made enough money that it looks like I'll probably be able to keep going, I relaxed. (So far it's sold 6000 copies. I know lots of people will scoff at that, sales figures from Actually Successful games contain more digits than that, but since it was just me it's enough.) My tension fell away, I stopped feeling like I had to spend every waking hour making things or self-promoting, I took some time out to not be stressed, read some books, play some games that weren't my own ones I was working on (MOSTLY DOTA), have a social life. IT'S BEEN REALLY GOOD FOR ME.
OK so I'm feeling better about things now, I'm working on another update for the iOS version (some bugs fixed, some balance tweaks), I'm prototyping some new things which are exciting and new, and hey sometime in the new year there will be a PC version of this and also some other new games and hopefully I will keep doing game-making art things. Really sorry to everyone who's still waiting to play this game on the computer they have, I will get there but I haven't yet and it is better this way really.
Wednesday, 20 November 2013
i spy variation
Dreamt this game last night. Have only tested it 2-player but it seems like it might work?
Start by playing I Spy as usual. One player is the spy, they pick an object they can see and say "I spy with my little eye, something beginning with C" (or, you know, substitute the first letter in the object's name).
Any other player may guess what the object is. If they guess correctly they get a point and start the next round as the spy. But if they guess wrong, the spy gets a point and the round continues.
Any other player may become the spy and raise the stakes by repeating the description with a new detail - e.g. "I spy with my little eye, something beginning with C that is red" - describing an object they can see (which may turn out to be the same as the original spy's object, or may be different). Guesses are now worth one more point. You can raise the stakes as many times as you like, but each time you must add a new detail while repeating all previous details.
Play as many rounds as you want to I guess?
Clarifications:
- There's only one spy at a time; when someone raises the stakes they are now the spy and the previous spy is back to being a regular player.
- I guess there's no reason why you should have to start with a letter? Any detail will do.
- If there's a bunch of similar objects, like a shelf of books, should you have to pick a specific object? That's probably better I think?
Start by playing I Spy as usual. One player is the spy, they pick an object they can see and say "I spy with my little eye, something beginning with C" (or, you know, substitute the first letter in the object's name).
Any other player may guess what the object is. If they guess correctly they get a point and start the next round as the spy. But if they guess wrong, the spy gets a point and the round continues.
Any other player may become the spy and raise the stakes by repeating the description with a new detail - e.g. "I spy with my little eye, something beginning with C that is red" - describing an object they can see (which may turn out to be the same as the original spy's object, or may be different). Guesses are now worth one more point. You can raise the stakes as many times as you like, but each time you must add a new detail while repeating all previous details.
Play as many rounds as you want to I guess?
Clarifications:
- There's only one spy at a time; when someone raises the stakes they are now the spy and the previous spy is back to being a regular player.
- I guess there's no reason why you should have to start with a letter? Any detail will do.
- If there's a bunch of similar objects, like a shelf of books, should you have to pick a specific object? That's probably better I think?
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