xeophin's blog
[The following text is part of my upcoming master's thesis on the use of game mechanics in therapy games for children. This is just a rough first draft, and I gladly welcome all critique and suggestions – be it on a content level or regarding my use of language.
After having analysed some of the most-played Facebook games in previous instalments of this series (Candy Crush Saga, FarmVille 2, Puzzle Bobble Clones, Diamond Dash and Pet Rescue Saga), this final chapter looks at what is so "social" about these "social games" – if at all.]
It is a common assumption that games that are part of the Facebook platform are inherently more "social" than other games, since that platform offers the possibility to developers to tap into the social graph.
[The following text is part of my upcoming master's thesis on the use of game mechanics in therapy games for children. As part of my master's thesis I am analysing already existing games that are commonly known to be addictive. A lot of those games are Facebook games.]
Pet Rescue Saga by King is probably one of the best examples of how certain game mechanics are not unique to a game, but can be adapted to other games. Pet Rescue Saga is basically a mixture between Diamond Dash and Candy Crush Saga, yet works surprisingly well.
[The following text is part of my upcoming master's thesis on the use of game mechanics in therapy games for children. This is just a rough first draft, and I gladly welcome all critique and suggestions – be it on a content level or regarding my use of language. As part of my master's thesis I am analysing already existing games that are commonly known to be addictive. A lot of those games are Facebook games.]
Most Puzzle Bobble clones play quite similarly, with their graphics being their most distinguishing feature. The outliers are Bubble Island, which adds the element of time pressure into the mix, and Woobies, which comes from another era of online games, and lacks most of the additional game mechanics the Facebook games use. This core mechanic can be expanded upon, allowing the Facebook game studios to find ways to monetize the game. The game is easy to pick up and is equally well playable with any input device, be it a mouse or a track pad, making it an obvious candidate for a casual game. It is deceptively simple to play: aim, shoot, aim, shoot, with hardly anything that takes the player out of the flow.
[The following text is part of my upcoming master's thesis on the use of game mechanics in therapy games for children. This is just a rough first draft, and I gladly welcome all critique and suggestions – be it on a content level or regarding my use of language. As part of my master's thesis I am analysing already existing games that are commonly known to be addictive. A lot of those games are Facebook games.]
Diamond Dash by Wooga superficially looks like a matching tile game similar to Candy Crush Saga or Bejeweled, but works slightly different. Diamond Dash lacks some of the refined features of its competitors. When compared to Candy Crush Saga, Diamond Dash seems a bit rough around the edges, both art-wise as well as in the use of game mechanics. While Candy Crush Saga tries to cater to as many player types as possible, Diamond Dash mostly attracts agile, quickly reacting players that like to compete with their friends. Still, the classic Facebook game mechanics are implemented, mainly that one one hand, Facebook games usually provide strong motivations to do certain things but on the other hand directly prevent players to actually do those things – unless, of course, the players pay or bug their friends about it.
[The following text is part of my upcoming master's thesis on the use of game mechanics in therapy games for children.]
FarmVille by Zynga is probably one of the best known Facebook games to date, both because of players that cannot seem to quit the game and their Facebook friends that are annoyed by the game's ceaseless stream of pleas for help, designed to suck in even more players. FarmVille 2 has several tightly interwoven game mechanics that manage to keep the player glued to the game. The most important among them are the tight feedback loops, where finishing one task has an immediate effect on the next task at hand; a constant stream of quests that provide temporary "winning" conditions in an otherwise endless game; the possibility of self-expression through decoration, even if severely limited and finally the integration of Facebook friends that "ask for help", cleverly exploiting social norms that result in players returning to the game again and again.
[The following text is part of my upcoming master's thesis on the use of game mechanics in therapy games for children. This is just a rough first draft, and I gladly welcome all critique and suggestions – be it on a content level or regarding my use of language.]
Candy Crush Saga by King.com is a classic casual game (as most Facebook games are), that caters to different player types at once: the puzzler, the explorer as well as the competitive player. Candy Crush Saga is a Bejeweled clone, a simple matching tile game. Candy Crush Saga combines various basic game mechanics and feedback methods in order to attract a diverse set of player types. The basic game allows players to recognise patterns and create order (a common theme with many casual games, which is quite rewarding in itself), the level map caters to the explorer type, while the constant feedback of how well the player's peers did eggs on competitive players. By catering to all those different player types alike, the producers of the game manage to capture an audience as large as possible, something a therapy game would likely have to achieve as well.
Over at The Astronauts, someone figured something out. Sometimes, games work even when you're not shooting things.
Listed below, there are five well known action-adventure games. Think about your favorite, most memorable moments from the single player part of each, then click on the + spoiler button and see if I have managed to guess any of these moments.
What do all these moments have in common?
They are game-free. They are gameplay-less.
That’s right. You heard me.
If we understand gameplay as something that a challenge is a crucial part of, then none of these moments features any gameplay. You just walk, or swim, or ride a horse, but that’s it. You cannot die. You don’t make choices that have any long term consequences. No skill is involved.
There is no gameplay.
In other words, certain things worth remembering from certain video games are not what these video games are all about.
What this guy now figures is that you have to remove gameplay from games to get those moments.
But I don't think so. It has nothing to do with gameplay. But a lot with pacing.
A lot of games just keep stomping on, throwing new enemies to battle at the player even before he finished the old ones off, in order to make the game "gripping". The makers fear that if there is just the slightest lull, the players will become bored and stop playing. But will they?
In most other narrative media it is well known that ceaseless screaming action is very tiring and impossible to watch.
This requires Photoshop Extended, since the 3D tools are only available in the Extended Version of Photoshop. It also has (at least in my current version, CS5) some serious shortcomings, i.e. forget about layers. Kiss them goodbye. Also, performance-wise, this is not something that works without waiting between every second brush stroke.
- Lay down the base of the texture in a new file, using the final size of the texture. Create most of the stuff you want, leaving out the edges.
- Select all the layers that should be part of the texture and choose 3D > New Tiled Painting. You will see your texture repeated 9 times, in a seemingly smaller resolution.
- You can now paint on your texture, crossing the texture's edges, and your paint strokes will be seamlessly replicated on all 9 copies. This is rather processor intensive, so expect lag …
- In order to change the layer you're painting on, go to the 3D panel, choose Materials (third button from the left in the top row), and choose in the File drop down besides Diffuse
Open Texture. The original file will open, allowing you a) to paint directly and without lag onto the image and b) to choose the layer you would like to paint on back in the 3D mode. Choose the layer, close the.psbfile (with saving), and any further paint strokes will happen on the previously chosen layer. - In order to save your texture, do the same as before (3D panel > Materials > Diffuse: Open Texture) and
Save as ….
Clearly, the process is not exactly simple or straightforward.
You occasionally want to assign more than one material to a mesh in blender. You might need different textures on the same mesh, and don't want to break up the mesh into different objects.
Not much of a problem. Go into Edit mode, select the faces that need a different material, then go to the Material tab in the Properties. Notice that you get an additional set of buttons right below the list of materials: Assign, Select and Deselect whenever Edit mode is activated. With those buttons, you can add a material to a selection of faces (Assign) and select or deselect those faces based on their material.
Materials applied in this way will be picked up by Unity3D without a problem.
Yet another trouvaille thanks to Robert Yang:
Valve's Elan Ruskin's GDC talk about AI-driven dynamic dialogue, used, for example, in Left4Dead.
Instead of opting for dialogue trees, that, as I well know, get out of hand very quickly, they go for lines of dialogue that are getting triggered upon environment variables. When certain conditions are met, the story continues, things happen.
The presentations goes into much detail on how the actual system works, how the actual lines are picked, how the data is stored and retrieved as well as how artists/writers are working with the system. I must admit, I only skimmed the lengthy PDF, but it definitely looks worth checking out.
Eventually, I might implement it in ID: Me, You (and everybody else), and probably do a test version in an earlier game (master thesis, maybe? Implement context-relevant barks to cheer on the players?).
It took five years. Only five years, that is, for people to change their expectations of how displays are supposed to work.
Case in point: at the Scientifica, our booth had several slideshows running on iMacs – obviously without any keyboards or mice around to interact with. So far, so normal. But then, something funny happened.
People would stand in front of those iMacs and then … touch the screen. Five years after the first iPhone has been introduced, and people are now expecting displays to be touch-sensitive. It wouldn't matter how old they were: children did it, but seniors, too.
Now you would think that people would realise soon enough that this was just an iMac, with no touch screen abilities.But because the slideshow was still running, they kept on pushing things on the screen, repeatedly, for surprisingly long periods of time. Why would they do that?
I assume that not all of those visitors are necessarily familiar with a tablet or smartphone device. In Switzerland, another touch device is even more ubiquitous: the ticket vending machines at the train stations. The touch screen of those devices is notoriously unreliable, often requiring several attempts until the input gets registered. What follows is that most people are actually used to non-responsive touch devices, and they know what they have to do in that case: try again.
Which leads to this observation I made at our booth: People would approach an iMac with the slideshow running. They would touch the screen. Nothing happened. They would wait a moment, then try again, touching the screen again.
That's gonna be a short post, because all you need to know is over on Robert's1 blog:
Say you're making a Unity game that takes place in a large landscape dotted with windmills, and some of these windmills have tunnels that lead underground. But in Unity, the terrain collider is generated from heightmap data: it's essentially one giant bumpy plane. You can't punch holes in it.
Can we hack it to achieve the same result? Yep. Here's one way, there are two parts to it:
- Hiding a piece of terrain geometry with a "depth mask" shader.
- Disabling the collider so the player (or whatever) can pass through the hole, but collides with terrain other times.
If you need more detail,
please head over to Robert's blog, where everything is explained. Just had to get that out there, because it seems like something other people might find useful.
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Who's talk at GDC Europe I did miss because I chickened out and didn't go … meh. ↩
If you follow my Twitter account, then you should already know that I regularly post stuff from Muddy Colors.
This is no exception, even more so because it will be relevant to my current work. Two posts by Dan dos Santos about basic image composition, the first one about value structure, the second one about temperature structure.
Those two posts struck a chord with me, since they clearly explain what I already plan to do in the therapy game I'm working on.
When it comes to games, adding depth to the composition is seemingly less of a problem, since the movement already provides you with that information. However, discerning objects you can interact with from the ones that act purely as set pieces is another question.1 The higher the player's velocity within the 3D space, the faster he has to parse the environment for clues – especially when the players are not able to influence their own velocity, which is the case in rail shooters. As it happens, I'm exactly making one of those, thus the need for an environment that can be parsed instantly.
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As well known by the red barrel problem. ↩
Even though gamification has become a buzzwords of sorts, not always in the best ways, I always like a well executed idea to gamify something.
Which is why I like the Zombies, Run! app so much. It helps you run. Because, after all, you have a horde of zombies on your heels:
You tie your shoes, put on your headphones, take your first steps outside. You’ve barely covered 100 yards when you hear them. They must be close. You can hear every guttural breath, every rattling groan - they’re everywhere. Zombies. There’s only one thing you can do: Run!
Executed as an iOS or Android app and delivered over your headphones, it storifies your run, turning the experience of just running into an adventure, into something meaningful.
Something for my list of things to try out. [found thanks to ᔥHymnos]
One to file under Today I learned: The concept of Observation Post Trees, deployed in the first world war. Those trees were completely artificial, and, ever more interestingly, would replace actual trees with a almost indistinguishable double:
To develop the O.P. Tree, Royal Engineers representatives selected, measured, and photographed the original tree, in situ, extensively. The ideal tree was dead; often it was bomb blasted. The photographs and sketches were brought back to the workshop, where artists constructed an artificial tree of hollow steel cylinders, but containing an internal scaffolding for reinforcement, to allow a sniper or observer to ascend within the structure. Then, under the cover of night, the team cut down the authentic tree and dug a hole in the place of its roots, in which they placed the O.P. Tree. When the sun rose over the field, what looked like a tree was a tree no longer; rather, it was an exquisitely crafted hunting blind, maximizing personal concealment and observational capacity simultaneously.
As the BLDGBLOG notes:
But there's something almost comedically paranoid about the idea that, upon waking up tomorrow morning, a tree—or rock or, for that matter, a whole hillside—has been surreptitiously replaced by an artificial surrogate, an exactly designed stand-in or double, in a ruse about which you otherwise remain unaware.
