GDC: A Critical Analysis of Wario Land 4 – User-Submitted Amendments

August 19th, 2014

Not long after I released Game Design Companion: A Critical Analysis of Wario Land 4 a handful of readers emailed in and gave suggestions for amendments. I’d like to share them here.

Quest Hawthorn had a theory that Aerodent’s biggest weakness is Large Lips because in Japanese “kiss” shares the same sound as a mouse squeaking.

Rowan Divey found a small mistake in Mario and Wario – A Character Comparison:

“You claim that the act of Mario taking away the golden princess statue is an example of Mario going against his do-gooder nature.

However, if you had read the manual for Super Mario Land 3: Wario Land, you would know that the statue had belonged to the mushroom kingdom before Captain Syrup had stolen it, and that Wario was planning on holding the statue for ransom when he had succeeded in obtaining it. Ergo, Mario’s action are not an act of spite, but an act of securing someone’s property before further crimes could be performed with it. This is even discounting the possibility that Mario was aware of Wario’s efforts or presence during that time.

However, it is still an embarrassment for Wario, as his greedy nature sees the inability to obtain any potential material reward as a failure, despite how many rewards he may already have obtained at the time.”

CM30 wanted me to add a bit more context to some sections in the Need to Know chapter:

“Okay, one more thing. On page 70, you talk about the flowers in Wildflower Fields and say:

‘wither up and be attacked for a few loose coins’.

This is technically right, but it’s also a bit misleading. The game actually gives you a different amount of money depending on how long you wait before breaking the flower bud, with the larger ‘bud’ giving the most money and the broken one (which occurs if you wait too long) giving you the least.

You might also want to mention that Robo Bird enemies are one of the very few monsters that actually respawn in this game, which adds another layer of challenge.”

Thanks for the submissions and thanks to everyone who continues to email and tweet in to let me know how the book is helping them better understand games. 🙂

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Maintaining the Status Quo (on Games Criticism)

August 10th, 2014

Every now and then I come across a great quote that articulates something that’s been sitting in one of the dark corners of my brain, patiently waiting for that light bulb moment of articulation. One of the great things about this game design discussion group that I’m part of (more details here) is that such quotes come regularly. Here is one on games criticism:

“I think a lot of the criticism field is about proving authority through displaying how well you fit in the group. You do this by outward displays of intellectualism, which is easiest to manufacture by taking the simple and rendering it complex enough to justify your college degree. Since today’s game design culture is such a loose world of ideas with very little in the way of concrete knowledge, currying status among the critical community doesn’t mean producing results that others can reproduce and use–it means harnessing intellectual fads and making everyone feel good (read: smart). “Let’s come up with language that is less ambiguous and more concrete so we can more directly describe how games work and how we can do game design better” is actually at odds with this status quo, and thus needs to be said. It’s tempting to see a statement so close to our values and say “well, isn’t that obvious?”–it’s not obvious, though no one will argue the other side of it because admitting that games criticism is primarily a status game would damage the status communication mechanism that is games criticism and provide no benefit to the vast majority of games critics who would prefer to continue their effective status-gaining strategies.

Regardless, there are often kernels of truth and useful information to be gleaned from the needless verbal profusion of games criticism.”

The speaker sums up a lot of the ideas I was forming back in 2007-2008 when I first started writing and interacting in this space. Not much has changed since then and not much will change going forward without a critical language to ground our conversations and communities. What are your thoughts?

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Introducing The Cave of Ātman

July 1st, 2014

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Play Here (in browser)

“The Cave of Ātman is a sequential strategy RPG puzzler inspired by games such as Fire Emblem (GBA) and Jeanne d’Arc (PSP). A band of brave warriors find themselves summoned to a mysterious cave following a short tremor. As they descend the cave’s many floors, they unearth a secret that rests deep inside their souls.”

– Game Description

Background

The Cave of Ātman is a game I developed with Chris Johnson and Hayden Davernport. I did the game design and graphic work, Chris did the programming and project management, and Hayden did the music and sound effects. I came up with the idea early last year after I finished working on Game Design Companion: A Critical Analysis of Wario Land 4. Chris put the framework together over Christmas after I pitched the idea to him, I’ve been working on it on and off since January, and Hayden joined in March after we completed work on Starseed Observatory.

Concept

The idea evolved out of a series of notes I’d written on Tactics Ogre: Let us Cling Together (PSP), Fire Emblem: Sacred Stones (GBA), and Jeanne d’Arc (PSP) shortly after I finished the final edit of Game Design Companion. Since I’d been playing these three SRPGs at roughly the same time, my observations kind of congealed together. Before I knew it the only way I could cover all three games without heavy repetition and overlap: a three-in-one game repair.

Long story short: I discovered that many of the RPG systems in SRPG games (leveling, equipment, and custom unit selection) deconstruct strategic gameplay, and that the only way to maintain pure strategic gameplay is to remove these elements completely. No matter whether the RPG systems are heavy (Tactics Ogre), medium (Jeanne d’Arc), or light (Fire Emblem), they still place a strain of the strategy. In this sense, there’s an inherent conflict between the two halves of this sub-genre.

Another point that I often returned to in my mini-case study of the genre was Jeanne d’Arc‘s excellent Burning Aura system. After attacking an enemy, an aura appears behind the enemy. Players can then move a unit into the aura tile to launch a critical attack. I love how this system adds new strategic wrinkles to the game whereby you manage the spacing of units with various attack ranges so as to combo up critical hits. The only issue I have with Burning Aura is that the auras fade away at the end of each phase cycle and so, with only a handful of units at your disposal, you can’t create very deep chains. I wondered what Jeanne d’Arc would look like if the auras stayed around a bit longer.

With these two ideas in mind and my repair job turning into a game of its own, I started planning my own SRPG. As I was thinking through the potential unit spacing, attack combinations, and suspension elements, I realised that I could distill this concept down further into a puzzle game, and thus The Cave of Ātman was born.

Lessons Learnt

It’s actually not like Jeanne d’Arc – The beauty of Jeanne d’Arc‘s Burning Auras is that enemy units can be attacked multiple times, and they usually have enough health that you need to attack them a few times. This anchors the spatial jig-saw around a central point. In The Cave of Ātman enemies die in one hit, assuming you’ve got enough aura, and therefore the puzzle challenges are centred around hot potatoes that move through the play space. The natural dispersion of enemies on the battlefield, where they might not always be in near reach, also makes it hard for the Jeanne‘s auras to be suspended across interactions (never mind the turn-based limitations). As I developed the rules for The Cave of Ātman, I realised that in order to turn the concept into a puzzle game, I had to shed some of Jeanne‘s identity and push the project into an alternative design space. The end result is more “inspired by” then “developed from”, but that’s cool.

The Particulars – When I write games analysis I always focus on the details and the power they have to influence a work on the whole. This is something that I found difficult to translate into game development. It’s easy to come up with ideas; the hard work is all in the implementation. Chris, who had the task of putting my ideas into code, would often ask for details on things I hadn’t originally considered.

Heavy Handed Tutorials – When I playtested The Cave of Ātman with a group of games analysis buddies, almost everyone said that the tutorial levels were so heavy-handed that players could complete them without even understanding what they were doing. Through their analysis, the group had unearthed a piece of me within the game. As a teacher (my job), I like to always be in control of my class and ensure that the students are getting enough feedback. I hold myself to the same teaching standards that I find in my favourite games and often compare my performance with those games. In this case, I hadn’t realised that my approach had been to the detriment of the learning design.

Planning Ahead – I had a clear understanding of the game I wanted to develop and the game we made turned out just as I envisioned it would. Having a clear understanding of the design space and also keeping everything limited (single turns, one enemy type, etc.) made it easier to work through some of the challenges that cropped up during development.

Conclusion

If you haven’t already, I encourage you to give The Cave of Ātman a go. Share it with your friends too. I’d love to hear your feedback. I don’t have any grand ambitions to get into game development or anything like that, this was just a hobby project, but I have put up a new page on the site which lists my background in working on games. With the Starseed Observatory and The Cave of Ātman finished, I can return my focus back onto writing, so expect some more of that soon. Big props to Hayden and my big brother Chris for their hard work and commitment on the project. 🙂

Press Coverage

Jay is Games – The Cave of Ātman Review

Indie Statik – The Puzzling Delicacy Of Slaughtering Smiling Skeletons In The Cave Of Atman

IndieGames.com – Browser Pick: The Cave of Atman

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