Groupthink

As we learn a game, we construct a mental model of how it works. Sometimes our model turns out to be inaccurate, and we have to modify it to take into account new information. A game should not refrain from presenting evidence that will disprove false models of it.

In a multiplayer game, some of the responsibility for disproving our models belongs to our opponents. If I believe that Rock is a superior choice and always pick it, you can select Paper to confront me with the falsity of this belief. But our opponents will have inaccuracies in their own models as well; Frank Lantz describes the process of finding and exploiting inaccuracies in your opponent's understanding of a game while they're simultaneously trying to exploit your own as maneuvering in donkeyspace.

Situations can arise, especially with board games where there are typically small local groups of players, where all players share some of the same false beliefs and thus are never confronted with their falsity - "groupthink". We all believe that X is the most efficient, so we all always pick X, so we never learn we're wrong - unless perhaps someone from a different group joins us and shows us how X can be beaten.

Now, this isn't necessarily a problem. If a group of players settles into something that's interesting to them, it doesn't matter if they're playing poorly on an absolute scale. But if groups falsely conclude that a game is unbalanced or uninteresting and give up on it before they really understand it, if groupthink is reducing what they get out of the game, then that's something for the designer to be concerned about.

A groupthink problem has come up in a game I'm working on. It's a two-player local ipad game, like Glitch Tank, so there are the same risks as with board games for groups of isolated players. Some people are getting it fine, others aren't - they settle on a style of play that mostly involves trying to prevent their opponent doing anything, while only accumulating points very slowly themselves. This is an unstable equilibrium; if one player focused more on scoring they could get ahead, but as long as both players are doing the same groupthink prevails. It's also a less fun way to play it. One tester has reported that the rounds last a bit too long - and he's right, I agree with him, with the way he's playing it does take too long. The game ends when one player reaches a target score, so if you're accumulating points more slowly than usual the game takes longer. But tuning the target score to make those games an appropriate length would make it far too short for my preferred style of play.

Not sure what I'll do. It might be solved by the measures I'm taking to try to communicate the scoring mechanics more clearly, or it might not; once someone believes they know something it's quite hard to change their mind. I've considered different ending conditions (time limit, number of balls collected), but nothing else really seems satisfactory. Possibly I'll just relax and ignore it, and try not to mind if some people decide they don't like the game based on false assumptions about it - I should be getting used to that by now.

Mixtape

So this is something we're doing now: game mixtapes.

porpmix
science-phantasm
cool mix

I'm not convinced the analogy quite works; games - even very small ones - tend to be bigger and more self-complete than songs are. Ideally I'd like to pull out a bunch of individual sections from different games and string them together to make something much more closely approximating a mixtape - a track from Soul Brother, a room from Cave Story, one level of Brogue.. this isn't so easy to do with existing games.

I've dug into the idea of albums of games in the past, with Idiolect (which I never finished) and Kompendium. Specifically designing games to be joined together as an album; more distinct than individual levels of a single game, but more coherent than a series of separate games. L mentioned the idea of an album of games from different authors earlier today. I think this kind of approach is more likely to yield something that makes sense as a whole. But a big part of the mixtape idea is just to introduce people to stuff they might find interesting, akin to the Pickford Bros' "games we like" initiative; they don't necessarily have to fit together.

Anyway, here's a mixtape.

---

side 1:
Kenta Cho - a7xpg
Linley Henzell - Excellent Bifurcation
Chris Morris - Linerogue
Christoffer Hedborg - Cathode Rays

side 2:
Jonathan Whiting - Niña Nueve
Jonas Kyratzes - Alphaland
Robert Yang, Mohini Dutta, Ben Norskov - Souvenir
Stephen Lavelle - The Rose Garden

hidden costs of independent game development

Sometimes I can make a game in a month, then sell it to make $1000 or so. Maybe that's not great by most people's standards, but if I could do that every month I'd be pretty happy, that's enough to live on.

But most of the time it doesn't work out so well. Making games quickly requires quite an intense level of effort that isn't really sustainable long-term. Sometimes I get sick, and while that might not prevent me working, it limits my potential. Sometimes things break; computer hardware isn't very stable under immersion in liquids or high-speed collisions, and repairs or replacements can be pretty costly. And sometimes I'm an utter fool and write over a month's work that I haven't backed up.

Crap.

Running some disc recovery software now and hoping it can rescue things.

And other times, I can spend months prototyping various ideas that sound cool in my head but don't actually work. Some simply don't work at all, but others seem quite close to working, if I can just think of the right way to bring their pieces together. Trying out new ideas takes a lot of time and gives a lot of failures. I can see why some prefer to stick to variations on an established formula; trying out new things takes a lot longer and tends to be less favourably received.

When I make a game in a month and it works I feel pretty amazing. I feel like I could do that every month no trouble. But I can't, because there are all these hidden costs that I don't perceive at that point in time. Those months are a few among many. Just counting the development time of a game from when I started working on that particular game until when it was released misses a lot: the risks of accidents happening that didn't happen to occur in that time, the time spent on failed games that mapped out the way to that one, the time spent fixing bugs and trying to convince anyone to review the game afterwards, the subsequent period of exhaustion from overwork. It's not enough for a game's sales to just cover the time spent making it.

I'm very lucky to be able to continue making games for now. Lucky to have had a game on Steam and the Indie Royale bundle, that actually made enough to pay off my student loan and live on for a bit. Extremely lucky that my wife has a job at the moment that pays enough to support us both. I feel kind of bad that I sometimes complain about not having much income from games when there are others in genuine need. But if there comes a time where I need to choose between trying to support myself entirely from making games or going out and getting a real job this is something that I'll need to remember: I can't consistently make games as quickly as I think I can, I have to take into account these hidden costs.

zaga, score, expressivity, personality

Came across some brief discussion of Zaga-33 in the comments of this auro post while browsing google searches trying to figure out what had triggered a bunch of sales (I know, pretty sad). Padi and Keith make the point that there's limited scope for really expressive skillful play; we discussed this in the roguelike radio podcast as well.

I do agree with this; although there is room for skill in the game, there is a ceiling which can be reached. You can get to a point where you've fully mastered the game: you can complete it 95% of the time, get the maximum score, get the secret ending, whatever. It takes some time to get to that point, most people won't, but once you're there there's little reason to play again. It's not a game you can spend your whole life getting better at. And that's okay, it doesn't need to be, but let's think about why.

SCORE

The scoring is something they mention as limiting Zaga-33's scope for virtuosity. And I think this is an error, in fact I believe the opposite. When a game (or anything) does a few things differently to usual, we tend to latch onto those differences as an explanation for anything about it; I think that's what's happening here.

Score is a measurement we take of a game system, ostensibly to evaluate how well a player performed. We tend to design scoring in parallel with the rest of the game, but it's a one-way interaction, strictly an output. It doesn't affect the system, it's not a resource to manage or whatever, it can't add any systemic depth to the game. It can reveal depth that was already present but not apparent, but it has to be there in the first place. So the fact that the score ceiling is accessible - well, that's an effect of the skill ceiling being accessible, not a cause.

Super Crate Box awards points for collecting randomly located crates which randomly change your weapon. Some of the weapons are terrible, or only situationally good, so improving your score can put you in a risky position. The developers joked about changing the game to award score for kills rather than crates, apparently this was somehow a common suggestion from players? That's a very uninteresting way to play; once you have a good weapon you can sit in a corner and safely rack up any number of kills, getting an arbitrarily high score without risk. However, there's nothing to stop you playing in either way regardless of how it's scored! Even if the game counted number of kills you could still perform the exact same actions as if it was counting crates and presumably enjoy the game just as much; the scoring simply provides a guide towards an interesting way to play.

In a multiplayer game we typically take a binary measurement: win/lose (although sometimes we allow draws or care about position e.g. in the context of a tournament). This is often appropriate in a single-player game, especially if there are other limitations on replayability (e.g. fixed story and content), but in a game that's meant to be played repeatedly, it's more satisfying to take a higher-resolution measurement of performance to provide goals and a sense of progression. Because your opposition is a fixed algorithm, there's a certain level of performance required to reliably achieve a binary "win" measurement, after which there feels like little reason to keep playing and before which there can feel like little progress. Again, there's nothing to stop someone playing a game repeatedly regardless of scoring, it just provides guidance towards an interesting way to play.

(Note that multiplayer games sometimes have a score value which is measured and compared to determine the winner; this is conceptually quite different to how single-player scores operate because ultimately all that matters are the relative values, scores are not comparable between separate plays of the game.)

When measuring a score, we typically throw away a lot of information about the game (we could encode all information about its state and history in a single number but this would be highly atypical). So there's a question of how much we want to throw away, what resolution to measure at. Zaga-33 has a fairly coarse score: one point per level, and one for each item when you complete it. Does this coarseness limit the game's expressivity? I don't think so; it actually increases it. See, the more precisely a score measures your performance, the more precisely it specifies what counts as a good performance. This reduces choice by dictating how you're expected to play. A score that throws away a lot of information allows players to more freely choose what that information is. This doesn't mean that it doesn't matter what you do: skillful play will get you further by conserving resources, resulting in a better score overall. But it means your actions are dictated less by details of the score and more by complex evaluations of the entire game state. It takes more skill to evaluate and manage resources when their relationship to score is more ambiguous. As I discussed in my last post about it, not having 'experience' awarded for killing enemies enables a choice about how to approach enemies - whether to engage them or to sneak past; not having a score bonus for killing does the same. The fact that the game doesn't specifically call out skillful moves and reward them is irrelevant; efficiency is its own reward and ends up reflected in the final score. I feel its scoring is close to the optimal resolution for the game - fine enough to measure variations in skill but coarse enough to leave some choices open. So if Zaga-33 ultimately lacks expressivity, I'd say it's despite the scoring, not because of it.

Other roguelikes I've played (mainly Nethack, Rogue, ADOM) have these complex score systems measuring all kinds of things - gold collected, monsters killed, tripe eaten. I tend to ignore them and just pay attention to how far I get; basically I'm modding them to use the same score system as Zaga-33. And I think I'm not the only one, I don't think many players care about these scores unless they're an expert looking for an additional challenge - a "high score" play as an additional optional constraint akin to "ironman", "pacifist", "vegetarian", "atheist".

An advantage of coarse scoring in a game with heavy randomisation is that it covers up some of the variance. If killing enemies is rewarded, someone who draws a powerful weapon will score higher than someone with powerful armour, even if the two items are perfectly balanced in terms of efficiency. That's not an insoluble problem, but it's nice to be able to skip over it entirely.

One other thing - when a game is played repeatedly, we get a sequence of scores. How we interpret that sequence also affects what we count as a good performance. In Zaga-33, how you play differs greatly depending on whether you aim to maximise your maximum score or your average score (although skill at one easily translates to the other, because it entails a good understanding of the underlying system).

EXPRESSION

So what is it that ultimately determines a game's scope for expression? I think it's quite simple: how many options you have. If there aren't many, there's not much room for different players to make different choices. Comparing Zaga-33 to a similar game like Nethack, its choices are a lot more limited: there are fewer of them altogether, there are fewer alternative options when you make a choice, and they have fewer consequences and interactions. The movement, 4-way versus 8-way, is I think not very significant, but the large number of items, skills, and spells Nethack sports give room for very distinct approaches to situations. Equipment and character progression present decisions with long-term effects.

If there are a large number of options they need to be presented in a way that can be dealt with intuitively. Just selecting from a long list is pretty horrible and overwhelming. Here are some ways I can think of to give lots of alternatives in a reasonable structure:
- Geometrically. Picking from a list of 14 options is hard, but moving a rook on a chessboard is pretty easy to visualise. Picking from a list of infinity options is really hard, but turning and moving in a direction is really easy to visualise.
- Sequentially. A small number of options each turn multiply out to a wider palette of choices - e.g. 4 directions to move in is not many, but after a few turns they give thousands of possible paths.
- Combinatorially. Building a deck of cards, selecting subsets of sets. Race for the Galaxy does this well with the mechanic of spending cards from your hand as payment: you're choosing between dozens or hundreds of alternatives each time, with significant consequences for later moves, but it never feels overwhelming.
- Chronologically. In a real-time game, you constantly make continuous-valued choices about when to act and how long to spend. Tests of speed and reflexes are not so interesting to me on their own, but as a component of a system they can give an extreme variety of possible inputs.

PERSONALITY

I've been somewhat ambiguous with what I actually mean by "expressivity" here - expressing what exactly? This was intentional: I don't think it particularly matters. A system with room for expressing a particular thing probably has room to express other things too. The default assumption has been "expressing skill at the game", as the posts I'm not-responding to were about, but we could equally much talk about expressing personal character and creativity. In any game that you can spend a lifetime getting better at, skillful play does tend to express a lot about the player's personality. There isn't a single optimal path that everyone is channeled into - if there is, then once it's found the game is essentially solved and therefore not worth spending a lifetime on. There's a close correlation between skill and expression; beginners may make different mistakes but in general they play much more similarly than expert players (although the capacity to recognise the depths of nuance that distinguish experts may be inaccessible to non-experts). In any game played at a tournament level, there are clear differences of personality between professional players in terms of how they approach and play the game.

action games, ziggurat

Thinking about Ziggurat, because I'm making an game of a vaguely similar type (action, highscore, endless hordes of enemies) and they got so many things incredibly right.

It's hard to get difficulty right in an action game. Competitive multiplayer is kind of self-balancing in some ways, your opponent sets the difficulty, but for a single-player game the designer has to set the difficulty in advance, and it's desirable to suit a wide range of different skill levels (althought not necessarily in the same mode). It's hard to get an absolute reading of how challenging things are, because your skills continuously improve as you test.

It's important to design for people less skilled than yourself if you want anyone else to play; you'll usually be the best at your own game at first. Ziggurat uses the age-old method of starting slow and ramping up gradually - in fact, it would be too gradual to be interesting once you've played a few times if not for the alien ship. (I'll get to the alien ship.)

It's also important to design for people more skilled than yourself, to make sure a game has depth and remains interesting at high levels of play. Even if nobody else ever surpasses your skills, you have your own future self to worry about - they'll be better at the game than you are now. It's unsatisfying for a game to have a skill ceiling that can be reached, after which you can simply play indefinitely until collapsed from exhaustion. It's easy enough to make something actually impossible, but that's also unsatisfying; it's uninteresting to lose only because the game threw a situation at you where you have no chance at all. Instead you must push ever closer to the limit of what's humanly possible without crossing it.

I'm thinking about endless games here. The above problems are lessened if there's an end; you can have a maximum required skill level without leaving someone stuck in an interminable game until they get bored and quit, and you can explicitly test whether that skill level is achievable. (This too is why turn-based games should rarely be endless; if at every step there's an option to keep going you'd have time to find it, and if not then you have the unsatisfying ending of reaching an impossible situation.)

So, the alien ship. It flies overhead sometime near the start of the game, and stays as long as you keep shooting it. While it's on-screen things are harder. Essentially it's a difficulty option elegantly incorporated into the single game mode: if you want things harder shoot the ship, otherwise let it pass. It's also a hint at hidden depths to the game: can you destroy the ship if you shoot it enough? Does anything special happen if you do? I haven't managed yet, and from skimming comment threads I couldn't find any indication that anybody else has, so it remains a mystery to me.

Ziggurat's score is just how many enemies you've killed. (It could measure time instead and it'd play the same, but counting kills instead of time works thematically: it's a game about vengeance, about taking down as many of them with you as you can before your inevitable demise.) I noticed some common complaints in the comments on the game, a bunch of people object to not getting score bonuses for combos, for killing lots of enemies in one explosion. But no, you shouldn't, Ziggurat gets it right. You already want to make big explosions because they're more efficient, they let you clear the screen of enemies faster. You already want to make big explosions because they go boom and the screen shakes and it's totally sweet. Awarding extra points for it would be superfluous, it wouldn't significantly change the way you play, there's no need for further incentives for something you want to do already. Those kinds of bonuses are interesting when they warp the way you play, encouraging you to take risks you wouldn't otherwise - and that's where the concept of scoring extra points for killing many enemies at once probably comes from, from a game where that was a riskier way to play, but now it's added blindly to too many games. And mechanics like that get perceived by players as a sign of added value, like they're saying "the more rules a game has the better". Sheer madness.

And yeah, the suggestion of combos has come up in the game I'm making too, and is equally inappropriate. I'm using the same scoring system of "1 point per kill" - I do like to avoid rewarding killing enemies if possible (as in Zaga-33), for the same reason as above: eliminating threats is already a beneficial activity and need not be further encouraged; but in this game some interesting play comes out of it, there can be enemies that only pose a threat if attacked, and whether to engage with them is an interesting choice; part of my version of the 'alien ship' difficulty option.

Another common complaint I saw on Ziggurat is that there's only one level (and one weapon). This is so bizarrely wrong. A small amount of good replayable content is worth much more than dozens of levels each worth playing at most once. And in Ziggurat's 'one' level there's actually a lot of content in the progression: new enemy types are introduced, difficulty rises, events happen, the background changes, the nature of the game shifts. This progression is hinted at right from the start - the sun is setting, slowly but fast enough to be perceptible, signalling that there's going to be changes to come. For me, the goal of "survive until sunset to see what happens" was a much more powerful draw to keep playing than a myriad of levels or a high score table.

It's just frustrating to see these things that I value about the game (and am trying to emulate) being perceived as negatives; its clean and pure design, the way difficulty levels and other elements are elegantly incorporated into a single level/mode. I'm not sure how common these viewpoints are in this case, a bunch of people do like Ziggurat, no idea how successful it's been. But these comments are indicative of quite common perceptions about what's valuable in a game: rule complexity is valued over depth and elegance (it tends to be mistaken for depth), quantity of content is valued over careful design and curation, graphics are valued over gameplay, and things that are the same as what people are used to are valued over anything else at all. Not everyone thinks this way, but it seems like a majority.

meaning through repetition

Having odd feelings after releasing Vesper.5. A bunch of people are intrigued by the concept, and have started playing it, which is great. I really look forward to when they find certain things. But I worry a little: I don't want to disappoint anyone. The game is very slight - intentionally so, it's a pure expression of a single idea - and I'm just a bit uncomfortable with the idea that someone might expect more from it than is there...

...which is paradoxical, because the very concept is about making more out of it than is really there. Imbuing it with meaning that isn't intrinsically present. Turning a mundane action into something transcendent through repetition, ritual. Mystery.

It's a very simple exploration game, quickly made. Without the one-move-per-day limit there wouldn't be very much to it; the concept is everything. With an ordinary game I don't worry about disappointing anyone; there's only a small commitment required to get a rough idea of what's in there. But this one demands such an investment. I don't know if this is really a problem. Ultimately I think what you get out of it will depend mostly on what you put in, what meaning you create for it yourself. But it makes me uncomfortable. Which is interesting!

The game demands patience, commitment, making choices with unknown consequences. There's a kind of symmetry between player and designer; these same concepts reflect back on me. Making the game I couldn't know what it would be like to play it as intended, moving into the unknown one step each day; I had to commit to a design only imagining what this might be like. And now I still have to wait patiently for others to play through to find out, experiencing it vicariously. But from seeing initial reactions I have more of a glimpse than before, and there are some things I'm tempted to change. Questioning the reasons behind my decisions.

For now I'm resisting the urge to fiddle. I don't know for certain whether the changes I could make would be improvements. But even if they were, there's a cost to making an update; it diminishes the reality of a game. When working on something it's in a state of constant flux, anything is subject to change. But once it's released and played it becomes a solid thing, a world. Allowing that world to become mutable fundamentally alters its nature, makes it less real. Changing it in response to player actions alters the meaning of those actions.

I've committed to my move, released the game in an inevitably imperfect state, and any mistakes I've made we will have to live with.

edit: Minutes after posting that, in response to Pippin Barr's lovely post, I updated the game - for a minor improvement in presentation (hiding the flashing ESC after the first day), not to change anything in the world.

VESPER.5

Made for a Super Friendship Club Pageant with the theme "ritual": thread.


windows download
mac download

In this game, you may take one step each day, and then you must wait for the next day. If you wish to complete the game, you will have to make it a part of your life for at least 100 days. Make a ritual out of it. How will you incorporate it into your daily schedule? Will you tie it to an existing activity? Will you treat it as a ritual or merely a routine? Will you add to the ritual, embellishing it in your own way, making it yours? Meditate, say a prayer, think back over what has happened while you have been playing? Will you approach it alone or share it with another?

Is it worthwhile? You'll have to answer that for yourself.

It's a pilgrimage. It's very simple, but it does have choice in it; even the smallest decisions have their consequences amplified when you can only move daily.