Category: Uncategorized

It’s time to get your vote on, because area/code’s Sharkrunners has been nominated for a Webby Award in the Games category!

Sharkrunners is a real-time, browser-based game developed for Discovery Channel’s Shark Week. Players take on the roles of daring shark researchers, and take their crews out on the open seas to risk life and life in the pursuit of great white sharks. In their browsers, players set their courses across the water, and are alerted via text message when their crew has spotted a shark. It’s cross-media in a very area/code way, and the game has a tension to it that makes the time-sensitive experience of tracking and observing sharks surprisingly potent.

I worked on Sharkrunners last summer while interning at area/code, composing a lot of the in-game copy, as well as QA-testing the title. The area/code crew deserves a lot of props for the work they did on this game. Show them some love by casting your vote.

As if that wasn’t cool enough on its own, The Escapist was also nominated for a Webby, in the “Games-Related” category. Congrats go out to all the nominees (but especially the ones I work/have worked for).

I’ve been publishing non-digital games over at The Escapist since July of last year, and I thought it might be time to address the republication rights of those games.

My contract with The Escapist is not tailored to games, but rather is the same general contract offered to other freelance writers on the site. Because of this, The Escapist publishes my work under a 90-day, exclusive first-publication agreement, after which point the republication rights revert to me, the author/designer.

In other words, my Escapist games can be formally re-published as proper games, provided the actual publication occurs outside of the 90-day exclusivity period. Game publishers interested in working with any of my titles should feel free to contact me at my whole name with no spaces ÄT gmail DØT com.

Not all the features are conducive to proper publication, but games like Petrol Panic and 9am class definitely have that “star” potential.

I’m a bit behind on blogging these days, for a variety of good reasons. Most of them excuses.

Last month over at the Escapist I published Petrol Panic, a board game that I consider one of my best works to date. It took two full months of testing, balancing, and hair-pulling to get right. I’m still not convinced it’s perfect, but I’m utterly satisfied with the end product as is.

Interestingly, Petrol Panic taught me the importance of economic theory in game design, particularly in game balancing. A few design problems I encountered were solved with the help of a friendly economics major, who was able to approach certain number issues methodically, rather than chaotically. I tip my hat to him.

I return to the United States two weeks from tomorrow. I’ve been living in France for the past six months, so I expect some degree of reverse culture-shock, as well as a bit of sadness. In April I’ll be moving out to San Francisco. More on that when I know more about that.

Just as a heads-up for anyone trying to get in contact with me: I’ll be away this week from the 18th of February to the 22nd. Oddly enough, I won’t be at the Game Developers Conference, despite it being the exact same days.

For those curious, I’ll be in Vienna Austria, pretty much out of reach. I’ll be back in contact on Saturday, the 23rd. Looking forward to hearing about all the GDC wackiness that will ensue in my absence.

The soundtrack may be abysmal, and the graphics incredibly outdated, but Nintendo’s F-Zero X on the N64 is still, in my mind, one of the greatest single-player racing experiences on any console. The reason? It’s just simple mathematics.

Like a lot of racing games, the Grand Prix mode of F-Zero X determines ranking with a point system. At the end of every race, each racer is awarded with a number of points depending on what place they finished. First place is awarded 100 points, second-place 93, all the way down to thirtieth place, which is awarded a meager 15 points.

Over the six tracks in each Grand Prix cup, the points earned from each race are tallied, and this is how overall ranking is determined. In of itself, the point system is simplistic, but effective. A player doesn’t necessarily have to rank first place in every race to claim first place overall. In fact, a player can have one or two lousy races and still manage to earn a medal, provided the other racers also performed inconsistently.

Of course, relying on computerized racers to mess up isn’t the best way to win, and this is where F-Zero X stands out. Building upon the damage meter from the first F-Zero game on Super NES, F-Zero X introduced a battle system, where players could perform side-swipes or spin attacks mid-race to knock opponents off the track, or total their vehicles entirely.

And the number of points awarded to a racer who is eliminated from a race? Zero.

You see, F-Zero X wasn’t just about racing; it was also about offing the competition. When gunning for first-place overall, sometimes the best strategy is to eliminate the current leader, causing his score to plummet. Second-place racer closing in on your lead? Wipe him out in the next race, and secure your point advantage over your opponents.

F-Zero X didn’t just make this style of gameplay possible; it made it easy. Arrows indicated the vehicle in third, second and first place, as well as marking your “rival,” the racer directly ahead of or behind you in overall ranking. The thirty vehicles populating each course are also each uniquely designed, and easily identifiable. Even while racing through a cork-screw track at break-neck speeds, spotting the Wild Goose or Deep Claw was never difficult. Racing alongside to attack, however, and doing so without pitching yourself off the course, was certainly never easy, either.

The Gamecube sequel to this title, F-Zero GX, should have built upon this offensive form of gameplay. Unfortunately, the track designs were needlessly busy and overcomplicated, making it all too easy for players to fall to their deaths if they weren’t careful. With this subtle change in game design, it became too difficult to target and eliminate opponents, let alone stay alive and still finish in the top three.

It may just be that F-Zero X is one of those once-in-a-lifetime games, with just the right gameplay elements intermingled to produce a near-perfect experience. With the portable versions of the series building upon the SNES-style gameplay, and nary a hint of a Wii version on the horizon, we might never see another F-Zero game as polygonally-perfect as F-Zero X.

Oh well, at least it’s on the Virtual Console for us to replay into oblivion.

This month’s Escapist game is called Petrol Panic, and it’s not finished.

The trouble is, designing board games is a difficult process, and designing good ones is even harder. For this month’s game to work, a number of variables, constants, and formulas need to be balanced. How much should gas cost? How much money do players start with? How big is the game board? There’s a right formula to be found; I just need some help finding it.

It’s my hope that readers, designers, and good samaritans will join in the discussion, and help me figure out the finer points of gameplay. A big reason for my attempting this method of design is the potential to create a board game built from user-contributed content. It’s a lofty goal, though, and I might not have the clout to pull it off. Still, I’m definitely open to even the smallest suggestions.

As long as you’re checking out Petrol Panic, you may as well take a gander at Fictionless, last month’s Escapist game. Petrol Panic is actually an attempt to make a fiction-full version of this game. Clearly, that’s easier said than done.

At least, that’s how we should perceive them. The comparison to films is tired and no longer relevant. Portal signals a break from long-and-laborious gameplay. Now, the solid gameplay experience should be likened to a well-composed music album.

This isn’t just a new perspective for consumers and critics; developers should reconsider how they approach the process of game design. Games should become, in a word, digestable. Short, succinct, sweet.

Everyday Shooter is perhaps the most literal interpretation of this new perspective. Because it’s based around the game-as-album concept, it’s short, with its length dictated by the music. However, like an album, the game is replayable, and players are able — and willing — to re-live the experience again and again.

Of course, unlike a music album, the experience changes each time, as the game’s intrinsic interactivity — and elementary chaos theory — dictate that no two playthroughs will ever be the same. It’s this guarantee that should draw players in, and justifies short length over epic storytelling.

In short, playing a good game is tantamount to listening to a good album. And good albums don’t last 30 hours. They usually don’t even max out the space on a CD. They don’t have to.

I’ve felt that there’s a strong connection between music and video games for some time, which might be what draws me so strongly to game design. I’ll never be a musician (despite those ever-present yearnings), but creating a game that plays like an album seems like a good compromise. So I’m going to start reviewing my favorite albums on this site. I’m no John Cusack in High Fidelity, but there is something compelling about a well-structured album, and I think games can tap into that. I think they’ve already begun to.

Industry veteran Brenda Brathwaite has taken a keen interest in Facebook, and its role as a nascent platform for game development. Because of the social network built into the site, and the ability for any app to tap into that network, Facebook is most definitely not familiar territory in terms of game design, something which only a few developers have realized as of yet.

As I see it, games on Facebook exist in three distinct categories, which I’m calling “flat”, “shallow”, and “deep”. These terms describe the degree to which each game takes advantage of the Facebook social network, and do not reflect the quality of each game.

Flat games exist on Facebook, but they might as well exist anywhere else. They’re almost always single-player, and do not involve the available social network through the gameplay. (I want to stress “through the gameplay,” as many of these apps do take advantage of the network to create leaderboards and share high-scores, but this does not affect how the core game operates). Examples are popular apps like Jetman, Tower Bloxx, and the copious arcade compilation apps that let users play classics like Snake and Tetris. Sometimes, these apps are simply Flash applications ported to Facebook.

Shallow games do utilize the social network in gameplay, but usually to a fairly limited degree. Examples of this include Texas Hold-Em Poker, and the ever-so-excellent Scrabulous application, both of which use your friend list to organize potential opponents. Scrabulous was the first app I encountered that made smart use of Facebook, turning Scrabble into a divine play-by-mail-esque experience. Still, the gameplay is largely unaffected by the network.

Finally, deep games take more direct advantage of Facebook’s features, building core mechanics around social networks, and using additional methods to incorporate the whole of Facebook into the gameplay. The best example of this is the Werewolves/Vampires/Zombies application(s) which took the gameplay onto Facebook’s walls and PMs, as players lured unsuspecting friends in order to increase their power. A more recent addition to the deep end is area/code‘s Parking Wars, which has users leaving cars on the streets of their friends in a strange parking-oriented version of “chicken.” Both games re-imagined the social network as something else (be it food or free parking), and built gameplay around this fiction.

Both games also offer incentives for inviting more friends to play, which contributes to their fast-growing popularity. Brenda goes more in-depth on the dark-side of Facebook propagation, but I would certainly be interested in exploring non-invasive means of designing deep Facebook games. Expect at least one more post on this topic.

It’s called Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood. Yeah, I know, but check out the art style:

Sonic’s never looked hotter. Image via Jeux France. Name via GayGamer.

Create a functional digital prototype of a board game concept. Departing from the graphic-focused code of the previous two objectives, this objective will focus on text display and variables, in order to test and tweak possible mechanics of an upcoming board game.