What is happening with Grand Final Rowing?

So, it has been weeks and months of tinkering and thinking and I’m confident to say that the game is much more enjoyable now that it ever was before.  Not only is the game more user friendly now, it is more fun and a lot more realistic!

Team selection screen

My earliest version of the game featured a timing mechanic.  The player would have to move the mouse from side to side collecting blocks that were falling down the screen, similar to Audio Surf.  This worked, but it required constant attention to the blocks and the player couldn’t watch what was actually happening in the race.  I wouldn’t even know what place I was in most of the time.

With this in mind, I changed the game to be more of a simulation.  The player would just call 10′s whenever they wanted, Power 10′s, 10′s to Relax, 10′s to Focus, etc… This helped make the game a lot more realistic, but it became just a way to watch digital rowing races…  It is not even fun to watch real races sometimes, let alone fake ones, so this idea was trashed.

So, I needed a gameplay mechanic that allows the user to affect the performance of the rowers, while also having the ability to see what is happening in the race.  What I have come up with is a Tetris mechanic, and I must say the game has become a lot more fun than I expected.

This image shows a 6 boat race being run by the computer.

With this mechanic the player must clear rows of blocks to add momentum to his boat.  One row cleared will add a little bit, two rows a bit more, etc… however, once you clear three or four rows of blocks, your boat also gets a power ten along with a huge increase in momentum.  The power ten will add a ton of speed to the boat and you can usually move your boat about 5 or 6 seats through an opponent. If you are not clearing rows though, you lose a little bit of momentum every stroke.

There is also a good risk/reward system in place with this mechanic.  If you play Tetris aggressively (ie: you slam the blocks down rather than just letting them fall on their own) you end up creating more new blocks over the course of the race.  The more blocks you make, the more tired your crew will become!  Realistic: the more aggressive  you take the race, the more energy you need.  When playing aggressively, you also have to pay constant attention to the Tetris board, but while playing conservatively, you can take a look around the course to see where everyone is.

Of course, if you suck at Tetris or you have bad luck, you also run the risk of filling up the whole Tetris board.  When this happens you lose all of your momentum and go well into the negative.  The Tetris board will then clear and you’ll have to try to build back up again.

A dual race, the user is controlling Northeastern (the boat on the left)

The game will be available to download by the end of April, so that way I can change the rankings of the teams to allow a more realistic simulation of this year’s crews.   The game will feature a race mode and a regatta mode, so you can play or simulate the Eastern Sprints or the IRAs.  A season mode is still in the works, but it may not be available until the end of the racing season.

Check out what the game looks like in motion…

NOTE: This game is still in an early stage of development.  Many things including lane lines, a better HUD, distance markers on the race course, bridges, etc. still need to be added but are in the works.

We’re all plain! 2

“We’re all plain! 2″ is the game that we made for the Global Game Jam 2010.   Going into the GGJ I wasn’t really expecting to be able to say that we made a solid product; I was expecting more of a small half-assed game prototype given the fact that we only had 48 hours.  I was pleasantly surprised by the skill level and enthusiasm from the other guys I worked with.

Now that we have had a little over a week of testing and small updates we can finally say that we have a finished game which you can find here:  We’re all plain! 2

Some of what I’ve learned from working on WAP2:

- Taking everyone’s input seriously is crucial.  Having everyone involved in the design process makes sure that they care when the time comes to actually making the game.  Through the first few hours of the 48 hours we went through many different ideas including games that involved the life of a rain drop, Don Quixote battling windmills, growing a forest using rain and sun, and zombie bulls chasing a bullfighter through Pamplona!  Speaking honestly and truthfully about what we liked and didn’t like about certain ideas helped us find an idea that we could rally around.  It obviously helped that everyone in our group had the ability to communicate their ideas effectively.

- Treat the player with respect, but also know that they are stupid.  After a week of testing since we made the game, it became clear that we didn’t layout the rules of the game clearly enough to the player; by the time the puzzles increased in difficulty the player was still clueless.  We feel we have rectified this problem now.  Before the changes players wouldn’t know how they had completed a level.  If I asked them to retry a difficult one that they beat, it was like they were seeing the level for the very first time.  The player should never luck their way into a victory.

- The aesthetics made the game feel more personal.  I made most of the levels using one of the earliest builds of the game that had just programmer art and no sound or music.  I tested the levels hundreds of times in this build before porting them into the final version.  The first time I played with sound and the beautiful 1984 meets George Jetson art style, the game had character.  The sound especially gave the game much more personality, and the sounds of the balls clashing felt more tactile and more personal.

Overall, I think we all enjoyed working on the project.  What’s great is that we all feel confident in the design and the potential of the mechanic for a casual game, and if enough people like playing it…. who knows? Maybe there could be potential for a sequel to We’re all Plain! 2

Global Game Jam

I had a lot of fun during the Global Game Jam this weekend.  My first chance to build a game with other people outside of the classroom went really well.  It was a great experience for me, and what I got is exactly what I thought I would.  Connections with other people who love to build games and a quality title that I could be proud of.  Hopefully we’ll have an embedded flash version up soon with some bug fixes and an improved tutorial, but for now you can download the game here.

Save Games

Saves are a part of most modern games; you can’t finish many of the longer ones without saving or passing a checkpoint, taking a break or dying, and then reloading from your previous point.  With a save game you can come back to the game hours or seconds later and everything is as you left it, your ammo, your health, the bad guys that are dead and alive…  You can recapture an exact second in gameplay.

The one thing that can’t be saved though is your state-of-mind and your experiences.  The way you felt or what you were thinking at the time you saved isn’t something that can be recaptured, and unfortunately, the player’s experience is what games are all about.  I’ve been wondering about this topic in design lately.  How can we make sure the player is brought back to their previous state-of-mind while also keeping their experiences upon reloading a saved game seconds or even days after saving?

Unfortunately we can’t.  There are far too many variables that go into creating one’s mood and experience and people are stimulated differently by many different things.  The challenge is to try to get the player back into their role-playing state of mind.

Many gamers introduce role-playing elements into their game, even if the game isn’t an RPG.  Fans communicate in their own minds as the avatar.  Someone playing Command & Conquer might pretend to be a general and discuss ideas with other army officials in their head before assaulting the enemy base; when playing Madden someone might have an imaginary pep-talk with the QB at half-time; Gordon Freeman never talks so when playing Half-Life the player almost has to have some sort of dialogue that he supplies to the game.  It is an amazing thing to be able to bring your own thoughts and imaginary scenarios to a game, and it is one of the aspects that creates the unique experiences for us even though we are all playing the exact same game.

But with checkpoints, how do I remember who I am or why I am doing what I’m doing or how do I feel? Am I feeling scared? Curious?  Courageous?  First person shooters greatly suffer from a system of “save, die, try again.”  The first time I pass a checkpoint I might be feeling very cautious, but on the seventh try I stop carrying about staying alive per se; I only care about getting to the next area.  In a game like Call Of Duty, where checkpoints often serve as jumping points for trial-and-error gameplay, how are we supposed to keep a sense of reality for the player when the player keeps dying and then appears back in the exact same scene only moments before his previous death with everything back to the way it was as if nothing had happened?  Most FPS games work this way unfortunately.  Even as Gordon Freeman in Half-Life I might have heroically helped escort a frightened scientist to safety, but then been killed right after.  Upon reloading a save, do I then try to save the scientist again?  After all, I already did that, right? That experience is ingrained in my head already and isn’t going anywhere.  If I save the scientist again the next time that initial experience will be less important, but nevertheless, I have still saved that scientist twice now… With checkpoints, my experiences remain, but the game no longer recognizes those experiences.

As I said, shooters suffer from this problem the most.  It might not seem like the biggest deal in the world, but that is only because the tried method of checkpoints in these games is the primary system that we use.  The only FPS games that come to mind that help alleviate the “save, die, try again” tactic  would have to be System Shock 2 and Bioshock.  The vita-chambers, although obviously fantasy, help the player keep their experiences and their state-of-mind even after dying.  I know a lot of players didn’t like the idea that their body could be magically remade after dying, but the vita-chambers allow the experiences to remain in your mind and in the game.  The enemies that you killed before dying are still dead, the ammo that you wasted is gone, the Big Daddy that you set on fire is still on fire.  It is not “save, die, try again”, it is actually just “die, try again”.  It is a great feature in these games that makes sure the player stays engaged and isn’t taken out of the game world.

Another method that I recall right now is that from Prince of Persia: Sands of Time.  In this game the story allowed the player to rewind time after dying.  So, the checkpoint that you created fit directly into the story!  Braid obviously used a similar method.  I’m sure there are some other examples that I can’t think of right now, but again, the main problem is with FPSs that use checkpoints.

Now, obviously, multiplayer FPSs are a whole other story.  Multiplayer is more about social interactions than user experiences anyways.  But, why is that my heart-rate can get jacked while playing Counter-Strike but stay low while playing other arena based multiplayer shooters?  Because death equals death in Counter-Strike, at least until the start of the next round; in Quake III death means I appear on the opposite side of the map.

Checkpoints and saves are needed in games if we want to finish them.  However, I wish developers could explore the concept of saves a bit more in games.  Maybe in another post I will try to explore some other options.

Weekend Review

I was quite pleased with what I was able to accomplish over the weekend in terms of designing with limitations, however I still think there is a lot of fat yet to be trimmed.  The game is a simulation that only requires one primary game screen and a main menu, won’t require saves yet still offers some replayabilty thanks to my friend Mr. Random(x), and only uses the mouse for controls.  I hope to throw a screenshot up soon since I feel like I have a very unique art style to go along with the game.  In fact, this art style is helping me streamline and the process even more since I only have two primary colors to work with.