I picked it up with low expectations, and came away 60 hours later thoroughly impressed. Players willing to look beyond the problems can still find a satisfying experience inside – not to say they should because it has a lot of problems, but it shouldn’t be completely dismissed either. It’s a good candidate for a deconstruction because the unpolished mechanics strewn throughout the game are representative of amazing ideas that remain unexplored by other open world games.

The Saboteur

Developer: Pandemic Studios
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Genre: Open World / Stealth Action
Metacritic: 72
Price: $59.99 on release, $19.99 at the time of writing

The bulk of Saboteur’s gameplay consists of destroying targets that weaken the Nazi presence in the city such as observation towers, armored vehicles, and artillery encampments. The sheer number of targets around the city is unprecedented – looking at a map of them at the beginning is nothing short of intimidating. Some players might be turned off by the breadth of things to do, but it reinforces the setting by making the French Resistance feel smaller than any sort of dialog could.

Story missions are strewn throughout the game and do everything you’d expect in an open world game. They’ll take place in one-off, linear levels, but most of the time they’re just about navigating from point A to point B on the world map, occasionally blowing something up along the way. There’s nothing particularly bad about this system, but nothing great either.

The defining characteristic of Saboteur is its stealth gameplay. Players are tasked with sneaking into bases and planting bombs over and over again. It’s a big system, so let’s break it down:

The game’s map is divided into three types of areas: “normal zones,” “suspicion zones,” and “restricted zones.” In normal zones, Sean can walk around right in front of Nazi officers without them minding. These are the areas where the people of Paris are out on the streets. In suspicion zones (indicated by yellow on the map), enemies will slowly become suspicious when they see Sean. In restricted zones (indicated by red on the map), enemies will almost instantly trigger an alert when they see Sean.

Alerts follow the GTA system of escaping the highlighted area on the minimap. The area’s size doubles with each alert level. After alert level three (of five), “fight back” points appear on the map that act as a sort of last-stand where NPCs assist the player at an intersection to fend off Nazis from all sides. After eliminating enough enemies, the alert phase ends. There are also hiding spots throughout the city that can be used to end the lower alert levels, such as brothels and bathrooms.

The player’s suspicion level is indicated by a yellow ring around the player’s weapon on the UI. It drops at a constant rate, but increases at different rates depending on the player’s actions. Climbing a building or walking into a Nazi is always suspicious, and driving over one will instantly trigger an alert. Running while in a suspicion zone will cause the meter to increase much faster than walking. Enemies that see the player doing suspicious things are outlined in yellow so the player knows where suspicion increase is coming from.

The player can also use stealth kills on Nazis to steal their uniforms, allowing free exploration of suspicion zones. Climbing and running, however, are still suspicious, and the player can’t get too close to enemies for an extended period of time. Disguises disappear whenever an alert is triggered, and they aren’t an inventory item.

Lots of critics complained that the stealth system felt too “gamey.” I’m not entirely sure I understand the concept of a game being too much of a game, but to be fair, let’s look Metal Gear Solid and Splinter Cell, widely accepted as the best modern stealth-action franchises, to get an idea of what a “good” stealth system looks like.

When enemies spot the player in Metal Gear Solid, they audibly say something like “HUH? WHAT WAS THAT?” and begin walking in the player’s direction. Various factors affect how fast the player is spotted, such as light versus dark hiding places or crawling versus standing. Making noise is bad too – unless the player uses a silenced weapon, enemies will hear gunshots. After a couple seconds of being visible, the famous exclamation point appears above the enemies’ heads and they begin shooting, triggering an “alert” phase where all enemies in the area will start moving in the player’s direction. If players just run through a room full of guards, they’re almost certain to be seen. There also aren’t any safe areas – guards will always attack them when they see them. Players are equally rewarded for stealth kills and shooting wildly, but most players choose to play it as a stealth game because most of the mechanics are designed for stealth.

Splinter Cell has similar light/dark and noise mechanics, but rewards stealth over action. It’s possible (and often encouraged) to proceed through large sections of the game without killing anyone.

In both games, players must run away, hide, and wait a certain period of time after being spotted. During this waiting period (often called the “suspicion period”), the game’s enemies will actively search the level until they either find the player (retriggering the alert phase) or the timer on the waiting period runs out. After that, they go back about their business as usual.

Whereas it can be frustrating to sit in the same place waiting for an alert to end in Metal Gear Solid and Splinter Cell, Saboteur empowers players by making them responsible for ending an alert rather than being the mercy of the AI’s pathfinding. This doesn’t mean that the systems in Splinter Cell or Metal Gear Solid are poorly designed: they serve to encourage players to use stealth. If I know I’m going to have to sit still for sixty seconds every time an enemy sees me, I’m going to make damn sure I don’t get seen. You simply cannot offer a good run-n-gun experience when half the buttons on your control scheme are reserved for stealth-related actions, so it makes sense to encourage players to use stealth most of the time.

This is a problem for The Saboteur. The game is forgiving enough that it allows players to play it like a shooter rather than a stealth game. Regardless of the difficulty level, you can shoot your way through almost any situation if you don’t want to use stealth, and it’s always the easier option. The run-away-reset system isn’t bad on its own, and it’s been proven to work in an open-world environment, but the game offers nothing to reward you for using stealth beyond a handful of achievements. Players are going to go for goals whenever they see them, and if the easiest way is to shoot their way to a target, that’s the route they’ll take most of the time.

When played as a run-n-gun, the reset system has the opposite of its intended effect: players now must take a break from their shooting to run away from the action and reset the alert meter so they can deal with a manageable number of enemies in the area. It becomes a game of inching forward and resetting rather than a game of continuous progress.

Maybe this is what the critics who cried “gamey” really meant. The stealth system would likely come across as being overly arbitrary when players breeze through Saboteur like an action game. Maybe we inherently expect a penalty for being discovered when we’re sneaking around through some basic understanding of “stealth” beyond traditional game mechanics. Saboteur’s systems aren’t all that different from the games that critics love, but they were perceived as being poorly implemented. That means the problem lies with balancing in the other mechanics that present the stealth system, such as player health and firepower.

If the majority of your game’s design is geared towards stealth, it should almost always encourage players to choose stealth as their first option for any given situation.

Some people love the run-n-gun gameplay popularized in GTA and Mercenaries, so it’s likely Pandemic (or EA) management that wanted the studio to stay somewhat true to its roots. I see this as a missed opportunity for Pandemic to separate itself from the competition – if the bigger part of the game required players to use stealth and plant bombs, it might have ended up appealing to the Splinter Cell or Metal Gear Solid audience. As it was implemented, it fell into the crowded GTA wannabe genre and went unnoticed in the holiday-release window.

It might sound like I’m talking about Assassin’s Creed now. The games have a lot of similarities – most notably in their climbing / parkour systems – but they feel very different. Assassin’s Creed is much more structured. I recently played through Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, an absolutely fantastic game by all accounts, and the story missions blow Saboteur out of the water in terms of production value, plot, and gameplay variety. The bulk of Saboteur’s gameplay, however, lies in its freeplay missions (or sidequests / collect-a-thon compulsions). Whereas Assassin’s Creed has you running after flags and feathers on rooftops, Saboteur has you blowing shit up. I found the latter to be more satisfying. To top it off, there are more sabotage targets in Saboteur than there are flags in the first three Assassin’s Creed games combined (which you should know is a lot of targets if you’ve played an Assassin’s Creed game).

To continue the comparison, the climbing mechanics in Saboteur feel much slower than in Assassin’s Creed, and a lot of critics complained about that too. Assassin’s Creed does the work for you – hold the free run button and approach a climbable object to climb up. In Saboteur, you run up to an object, press the jump button, then press the grab button, and move the joystick around to select the next ledge you want to jump to. You then press the jump button and repeat for every subsequent ledge until you reach the top. It’s a lot more work and it doesn’t feel anywhere near as elegant as Assassin’s Creed, Prince of Persia or Uncharted.

I see this difference as being similar to the Metal Gear Solid / Splinter Cell alert-reset waiting period problem. Assassin’s Creed is much more fast-paced than Saboteur, so a fast climbing system makes sense for players who just want to get from mission to mission. In Saboteur, climbing up certain buildings are often missions in themselves for knocking out freeplay targets. The player has to think more, and in turn, prepare a strategy before attempting to scale it. Maybe it doesn’t feel as cool as Assassin’s Creed, but it isn’t necessarily a bad design. I think there’s room for both systems to work. In fact, I would argue that if Saboteur had put more of a focus on stealth (if even by lowering the player’s health), players would have been more open to the climbing system. It can feel more rewarding when the player does actual work to reach a goal. Unfortunately, the slow pace feels really out of place when the game is played as a run-n-gun, and that seems to be how most people played it.

The gameplay as a whole suffers from Steve Jobs syndrome: if you think it’s bad, you’re probably holding it wrong. That’s not the consumer’s fault – there’s no wrong way to hold a great game – but as curious developers, we should at least be able to impose artificial constraints on the way we play a game to have the best possible experience and learn from it.

Closing

At the end of the day, I want a stealth-action game to make me feel like a badass. Show me another game where I can climb up into an enemy watchtower, hop on an anti-air turret, shoot a zeppelin out of the sky, set a bomb, and make my escape before watching an oppressed people celebrate when they see the explosion. That was the vision of Saboteur, and you can still experience it if you give the game a try. It’s a prime example of good game design that could have been great, and it’s a real shame that Pandemic didn’t get extra time to figure those problems out.

But you might also remember a time when the game was the one of the most anticipated titles around – back when it was revealed at GDC 2008, in a presentation by GTA creator and RTW CEO Dave Jones. That presentation happened to be the first talk I ever attended at a GDC, and it left an impression on me. I remember the entire room erupting with applause and cheers every time they showed a new feature in the character customization system. I remember the people around me instantly calling it a “WoW killer.” Then it suddenly disappeared from the media, and we heard almost nothing about it in the two years between that talk and its release. I’m not an MMO fan, but I really looked forward to APB.

I was working at Visceral Games when it came out this summer, and everyone in the office was shocked by the beating it took on Metacritic. We all wanted to play it to see the damage for ourselves, but due to the reviews none of us wanted to actually buy it. The cycle of doubt fixed itself when my lead presented me with a copy of APB as a going away present on my last day of work. I played it, analyzed it, and tried to come up with some insights that can be gained from it.

APB: All Points Bulletin

Developer: Realtime Worlds
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Genre: Shooter / MMO
Metacritic: 58
Price: $49.99
Subscription: $7/20hrs or $10/month

Background
APB is the first (and last) MMO by Crackdown developer Realtime Worlds. It places players in the city of San Paro, a modern metropolis where criminals roam the streets and everyday citizens have been given the go to bring them to justice. Players can choose which side to align with – “enforcers” or “criminals” – and do their part to eliminate the other faction. The premise is simultaneously obvious, awesome, and vastly underdeveloped for the genre. Cops vs Robbers is fun, and you could say the theme has proven to be mildly successful in games, so why not make it into an MMO?

World
Remember the description above, where I said San Paro was a “modern metropolis?” APB only lets you visit three areas of it, none of which are terribly large. The game has two “action districts” (Financial and Waterfront) and one “social district.” The action districts are where you’ll find PvP gameplay, and the social district consists of very little socializing but is free to play and doesn’t eat up game time. It’s also where you go to buy items for your character. The district select menu comes up when you login to the game, and it pretty much sticks to expectations for the game’s overall lack of polish.

The social district looks fine, and has a few cool features to boot. It reminds me of the few things that don’t suck about Second Life in that players can buy ad space on billboards with in game currency, create content such as clothing designs and songs, and sell them in a marketplace. I found its layout to be somewhat annoying because it forces the player to run from one end to the other to go from customizing a car to customizing a shirt. If players actually spent time there talking or doing in-game activities, it might be different, but as it was, it was nothing more than silly filler. It spits in the face of the MMO’s fiction, claiming that “nobody knows how or why” there’s no fighting in it, but sure, let’s give them the benefit of the doubt.

The action districts are where actual gameplay happens, and where players spend their prepaid game time. I’ll elaborate more on the gameplay in a  bit, but the world’s themselves deserve a bit of attention here. Both action district maps are fairly small, but they’re very well designed. The layouts are intuitive and make for interesting fights and cover situations, with a focus on navigating both the interiors and exteriors of buildings, from the basements to the rooftops. They feel like the open worlds they need to be. Graphically, they leave a lot to be desired – they’re rather bland in comparison to the player-managed social district, and the environment looks particularly out of place when filled with player-created content like avatars and cars.

Customization
With its robust customization engine, players only have to take the APB as seriously as they want to. The character creator lets you be anyone from a jacked-up, tatted-out gang member to an overweight soccer mom, and the car editor lets you make a matching sportscar or minivan to boot. The game features multiple editors that can be accessed from different computer terminals in San Paro’s Social District. If you haven’t seen a demo of this customization engine before, you owe it to yourself to check it out:

APB puts every other game with a character editor to shame. I was previously enthralled by the editor in City of Heroes, and this makes it look like a piece of crap. It’s absolutely unbelievable how easy it is to make something awesome with the tools they give you. I spent over an hour creating my character before I even got into the game because the designer in me was having so much fun.

It’s even more unbelievable to me that this piece of the game is so polished and feature complete in the face of everything else. It feels like a completely different game.

Gameplay
At its core, APB is a driving and shooting game.  Reviewers complained that neither driving nor shooting controlled particularly well, and therefore it was broken. It’s true that the controls are a bit weird, but then again, it’s an MMO. I can live with a little bit of lag if everyone else is having it too. The controls aren’t too bad if you take the time to get used to them.

Perhaps the bigger problem is that there isn’t a lot of variety outside of driving and shooting. In the game’s tutorial, you run up to a fence and press the “F” key to vault over it with a fluid animation. Then you walk up to a door and press the same “F” key to diffuse a bomb – an animation so laughably bad that the character sometimes even faces the wrong way or doesn’t touch the bomb in question. I’m not knocking the game for using context sensitive actions, but when you find out that nearly every mission in APB is based on running up to doors and holding “F” or preventing someone else from holding “F,” all with terrible animation, the game’s world falls apart.

When inside an action district, you press a “ready” key to be able to receive missions. Sometimes it takes as long as five or ten minutes for a mission to be delivered to you, and there’s nothing to do in the interim apart from customizing your weapon loadout or exploring the environment. You’ll either be assigned to a group mission, start a new mission, or sent to prevent an enemy team (cops or robbers) from completing a mission. This is where the game shines.

Being sent out to prevent other players from completing objectives feels great. Players from all over the city are called to a central location via the GPS. You can hop in a car with another player or drive on your own. There’s a ton of strategy for players to use, and teams actually have to work together to accomplish anything. A team trying to complete an objective might send someone out on the rooftop of a building to scout for enemies, and a team trying to stop an objective might try to flank the target site from multiple angles to prevent access. APB delivered on its promise with that experience.

If you die, you respawn close to the action. Fail cases are objective-based in relation to targets on the map or in relation to what are essentially miniature team deathmatch games, such as a case where the first team to 10 kills wins. Respawning so quickly feels odd in an MMO setting, but reveals the game’s deathmatch roots. That’s really all APB’s gameplay boils down to – team deathmatch inside an MMO, but it brings out the best in team deathmatch.

The game’s brilliance fades as quickly as it comes. Once one team wins, all players become neutral again regardless of team affiliation. There are obvious gameplay implications for doing it this way, but if the fiction and the gameplay demand for me to arrest or eliminate criminals as an enforcer, it doesn’t make sense that I suddenly can’t hurt them at all and we go our separate ways. APB reveals itself as a buddy cop fantasy, where you and your friends can be Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, but then you have to turn around and let the bad guys get away just when things start to get tough.

Conclusion
Even though I was annoyed by quirks with the gameplay, I kept playing APB because of the customization engine. I always wanted to reach the next level to unlock the next car or the next cool piece of clothing for my avatar, and seeing other players running around with the best equipment served to reinforce that. Realtime Worlds wasn’t kidding when they said no two players will look the same in APB, and that’s the coolest part of it. It’s just a shame that there’s not much to do with your character or your car once you have everything customized the way you want.

I feel like this game would be more fun if it wasn’t an MMO – that feeling of emptiness after a mission wouldn’t happen if there was no persistent world. Toss 32 players (16 cops / robbers) into a huge map with the objective-based gameplay, but end it once one team wins and start a new round. Keep all of the customization options locked into a menu system outside of gameplay. It’s GTA meets Team Fortress, and the MMO part seems to get in the way.

The rights to APB have been purchased by a free-to-play game company, and it should be back online sometime early next year. I’ll write a little update when I have a chance to get back in the game and see what changes they’ve made.

]]> http://holdenlink.com/2010/11/game-deconstruction-apb/feed/ 1 http://holdenlink.com/2010/06/game-deconstruction-robot-unicorn-attack/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=game-deconstruction-robot-unicorn-attack http://holdenlink.com/2010/06/game-deconstruction-robot-unicorn-attack/#comments Tue, 29 Jun 2010 03:51:22 +0000 Holden http://holdenlink.com/?p=784 Open your eyes, I see. Your eyes are open.
Wear no disguise for me, come into the open.
When it’s cold (when it’s cold), outside (outside), am I here in vain?
Hold on, to the night, there will be no shame.

When I was trying to decide which game to deconstruct next, I listed the games I’ve been playing the most recently. Then I pulled out my phone to send a text message and Robot Unicorn Attack stared back at me. I stopped playing just long enough to write this article.

Robot Unicorn Attack

Developer: Adult Swim Games
Platform: Browser (link) / iPhone
Genre: Imaginary
Metacritic: N/A
Price: Free / $2.99 (iPhone)

Robot Unicorn Attack is a completely unoriginal game that managed to be better than its source material in just about every way. It clearly followed the example of indie darling Cannabalt, which is still a great game on its own. Whereas Cannabalt’s audience was limited to the hardcore gaming community, Robot Unicorn Attack made the gameplay more complex and found a much larger audience (over 27 million players according to the developer). It’s a rare failure of the K.I.S.S. principle. What’s so magical about this game?

Gameplay
The objective of Robot Unicorn Attack is to live as long as possible. The game instructs the player to “make your wishes come true” at the beginning of each round, with the subsequent reminder that “you will die.” The core gameplay consists of jumping, double jumping, and dashing from across floating platforms as the unicorn automatically runs to the right. The player’s score increases at a rate that grows every 5,000 points, and additional points can be earned by running into fairies or dashing through star-shaped rocks. The wish ends in a fiery explosion when the player runs into a wall, falls off the map, or hits a star without dashing.

The two button gameplay (jumping or dashing) is deceivingly deep. The player’s success or failure depends on the timing of each jump or knowing when to double jump over an obstacle versus dash under it. The game’s increasing speed makes reacting to each obstacle even more difficult. The camera can be problematic, and I still find myself occasionally blaming the game for randomly spawning a platform with an unfairly placed star on it when I crash, but I’m still steadily improving my scores.

Asthetics
IGN has praised Robot Unicorn Attack as “the best Erasure song you’ve ever played,”and it’s true that most of the game’s character comes from its soundtrack. The sci-fi sounds of jet boosters and explosions combined with the synthpop love ballad is extremely memorable in every way you don’t want it to be. Players find themselves humming the song for hours after they play.

The game’s art style mirrors the sound design with Michael Bay-worthy explosions set against platforms of purple grass and rainbows that could have come straight out of a My Little Pony cartoon. The ironic pairing of things that don’t belong together wouldn’t mean anything without the gameplay depth, but it makes the game a guilty pleasure to play.

The comparison to Cannabalt is a great reminder that game design only goes so far: production value and execution made this game the viral success that it is.

Replayability
Take away the music and there’s a key difference between Robot Unicorn Attack and it source material that makes it all that much more addictive: the combination of three wishes. If you have a great run in Cannabalt, you can share it and brag to your friends. If you have a great run in Robot Unicorn Attack, that’s nice, but it doesn’t matter unless your other two runs are just as good. The combined total of all three runs is the only score that gets recorded.

Players can find this annoying, but it actually serves as a way of making them come back to play more often. It eliminates blind luck from earning them high scores and rewards talent and practice. It effectively makes the game three times as challenging as it otherwise could be without changing the gameplay at all. The result is the most meaningful use of “submit a score to Facebook” that I know of.

Conclusion
A friend of mine referred to Robot Unicorn Attack as ”the perfect Flash game,” and I’m inclined to agree. It takes less than five minutes to play, but it rewards players who come back. The soundtrack gets stuck in players’ heads and lures them back to play more. Players aren’t afraid to share their scores over Facebook because high scores actually seem like an accomplishment instead of a cheap ploy to get more people playing.

This month I take a look at another downloadable title, this time for the PlayStation 3. I briefly played PixelJunk Shooter at E3, and although I was impressed with its visual style and ease of use, I didn’t know how long the game would be able to keep my attention with its simple mechanics. I picked it up based on the developer’s reputation for quality, and although it was a bit on the short side, it does a lot of things very well.

PixelJunk Shooter

Developer: Q Games
Genre: Shooter / Puzzle
Metacritic: 86
Price: $9.99
Length: 4-6 hours

Background
PixelJunk Shooter is the fourth entry in the Q Games’ PixelJunk series of PSN titles, following most recently the critically acclaimed PixelJunk Eden. It follows suit with the series’ reputation for high production value and polish. On the surface, the game isn’t very special – it’s a space-cavern exploration adventure along the lines of Subterrania for the Sega Genesis (I feel like this dates me), but its puzzle design is so innovative that it creates a very fresh experience. Its difficulty stems from its fluid-based physics puzzles, all of which force the player to think carefully about every move. The game isn’t particularly difficult, but it’s extremely clever.

Gameplay
Shooter consists of three worlds that have roughly five levels each. Each level is broken up into a handful of areas where  a handful of crew members from the ERS Piñita Colada have been stranded. The player is tasked with rescuing all of the survivors in each area, without letting more than five die during the course of a level. All survivors must be rescued or killed (no one gets left behind) before access to the next area until the the final area is reached, where an escape gate opens to leave the level. The player cannot backtrack to areas they have completed without replaying the entire level. In the final area of each world, the player encounters a boss that must be defeated to continue on to the next world.

The player’s health is displayed on a heat gauge at the bottom of the screen. As the ship takes damages or flies around magma, it gets warmer. If it gets too hot, it stalls out or explodes. The ship’s temperature gradually decreases when it is far away from hazards, and it cools off instantly when submersed in water.

The player’s deaths are not tracked – if you die at any time during a level, you start back at the beginning of the area. The only way to fail a level is to allow the lost survivor counter to reach five. The player can earn 1-UPs during the game that subtract one from that counter. If the player restarts an area after accidentally killing a survivor, the survivor will reappear in the level but the penalty for losing him does not reset.

The entire game is also playable in co-op mode. Playing with a friend almost completely eliminates the penalty for failure because it’s rare for both players to die at once. After dying in co-op mode, it only takes five seconds to respawn. The level only ends if both players die, meaning if one player can stay alive, it’s as if the death never happened.

The level select screen goes deeper and deeper into the cavern as you progress through the game.

Mechanics
Although rescuing survivors and collecting diamonds are the primary objectives, the meat of the game is found in manipulating various fluids. There are multiple kinds of fluids and gasses, and the player can move them around the level by blasting apart the rock that holds them back in each area’s caverns. As the game progresses, the player learns a system of rules for how fluids interact with each other that become the basis for most of the game’s puzzles:

• Water mixed with magma yields solid ground
• Water mixed with oil yields gas
• Water mixed with ice yields ice
• Magma ignites gas
• Magma melts ice
• Magma evaporates oil

Flying near magma or flying through gas slowly heats up the ship. Flying into magma or oil usually results in an instant death. The player must also consider how the fluids affect the survivors: they can survive forever in water or a short time in gas, but they instantly die in lava or oil. They can also get trapped in ice and freeze to death.

In some areas, the player will be able to use a dock to temporarily change the ship’s functionality via Metroid-esque “suits.” They might change the ship’s primary fire to shooting water or lava instead of missiles, or they might change how the suit interacts with the environment (i.e. reversing effects of water and lava). Each suit lends itself towards a particular type of puzzle, but they have downsides as well. The Water Suit is great for neutralizing lava or creating ice walls, but it takes away the player’s ability to attack most enemies because it can only shoot water or pull away chunks of ice with the grapple. The Magma Suit is powerful for melting ice and killing most enemies quickly, but it’s easy for players to accidentally shoot themselves with magma that gets deflected from walls and it can make navigating through gas very dangerous. One exception is the “Anti-Magnet” suit that repels the magnetic oil substance found in the later levels – allowing the player to guide the fluid around simply by flying near or through it. It’s a lot of fun to use, but it’s overpowered compared to the other suits because there isn’t a downside to using it since the ship retains all of its normal abilities. I felt like the second world was harder than the final one as a result.

Once a suit is equipped, there is no way to discard it until the area is completed. Suits reset at the beginning of each area, and there is never more than one suit available in any given area. Part of me feels like this is an obvious missed opportunity, but I also realize that it keeps thing simple. As it stands, the player can never get stuck to a point where the level must be reset, and it would likely be easier to reach a dead end when combining the abilities of each suit. That’s a good thing, but I still wish the game had more puzzles that played on the weaknesses of each suit. I found that I had to think the hardest when I was worried about dying more than when I was trying to get to an exit, and most of the suit puzzles minimize those situations.

Sometimes, the grapple is used to open doors like this one.

Aesthetics
The game uses a simplistic cel-shaded style similar to the other titles in the PixelJunk series. It lends itself particularly well to the fluid animations. At first I was a little bit confused about which kinds of surfaces I could shoot through because there isn’t much difference in their appearances aside from shading, but I quickly adapted to the game’s world and didn’t have any trouble after the first couple of levels. Then again, I was lucky enough to be playing on a massive HDTV in 1080p, so it might be a bit more difficult to see with a poor contrast ratio on a standard tube TV. The characters (enemies, ships, bosses) have minimal animation, but they still manage to feel alive in the context of the game. The style is nothing revolutionary, but it works well and I have a hard time picturing this game without it.

The game’s soundtrack is made up of the series’ trademark smooth electronic beats. There’s some subtle procedural music alteration during particular events in the game. When the player is engaged in combat, the percussion track goes from ambient to driving. It helps create a sense of urgency for dealing with enemies without being intrusive or jarring like a flashy graphical effect could be.

If you’ve played other PixelJunk games, Shooter’s aesthetics will be instantly familiar but they come across as far more polished than its predecessors.

This gas was ignited by lava, and it will blow up the pillars of ice trapping the survivors on the left.

Controls
The player moves his spaceship around with the left stick and changes its orientation with the right stick. Spinning the right stick performs a spin-attack that can dig away soil or deflect enemy fire. Either of the right triggers can be used to fire the currently equipped weapon, and holding down one of the right triggers operates as a secondary fire. The left triggers fire the grapple used to pick up items or survivors. None of the face buttons are used during gameplay.

Without its simple controls, the game would quickly over-complicate itself. The ship’s movement is just floaty enough to match the game’s outer-space setting, but it’s tight enough so that the player doesn’t blame the game for running into hazards. There is a very slight auto-aim correction on the primary fire, but I was only frustrated with myself (not the game) when stray bullets hit survivors.

The biggest gripe I have with the controls is the lack of a good tutorial. There are “how to play” slides available for viewing before the game, but like most players, I jumped in and figured I’d learn as I go. As a result, I was stuck for about 30 minutes on one level trying to figure out how to pass an obstacle when the solution was to spin-attack through it. I had never needed it before, and I was well past halfway through the game, so I simply didn’t know about the spin-attack ability. A playable tutorial of some sort is a necessity in almost any game when the controls aren’t self-explanatory – even overlays that explain the controls during the main game would have been sufficient, but it’s not right to assume the player will read a boring set of slides before jumping into the action.

Another frustration is the lack of a decent camera for the co-op mode. If one player moves off the screen into a secret area or proceeds to the exit, the other player is instantly transported there. Similarly, player two will die  via a Sonic the Hedgehog 2 drowning-style countdown timer if player one goes too far away. Perhaps a dynamic splitscreen system could have solved the problem?

Where’s the Fun?
This is the classic example of a game being better than the sum of all its parts. The gameplay is simple enough to be easy to pick up and play with a friend, but complex enough to avoid turning into a collect-a-thon. There’s very little change in difficulty, but there’s a lot of depth to the game’s puzzles (pun intended) and it makes you feel clever every step of the way even if there isn’t any sort of real penalty for failure. That lack of a fail state allows the game to offer a large variety of puzzles without getting too frustrating.

Watching the fluids interact with the world is a treat in itself.

The game also does an excellent job of giving the player feedback for every action. I  think it’s what made Uncharted 2 such a success, but on a smaller scale: even if the player is on a linear path, the game can fabricate an exhilarating experience by making players feel like they have a tangible impact on everything in the world. Shooter gets away with it by maximizing the use of its fluid animations. The player has minimal control over the fluids, but that limited influence has massive amounts of feedback because of the various ways the fluids can interact. The player feels directly responsible for every cool chemical reaction and every pretty visual effect.

Similar to PixelJunk Eden, the game displays the number of remaining collectibles in each level to encourage completionism. Survivors re-appear on each playthrough, but the diamonds do not. At first I was aggravated that I was going to have to redo all the puzzles and get each survivor all over again if I wanted to find every diamond I missed on my first playthrough, but then I realized that collecting every diamond would be a boring challenge if the game was stripped of its puzzles. Then I found out that on subsequent playthroughs, the game also enables a time-trial challenge with an online leaderboard. On paper, these features are obvious and certainly nothing innovative, but they add a good deal of replayability to an otherwise short game.

What’s Next?
Q Games has already announced that they’re working on PixelJunk Shooter 2, a very uncharacteristic move for a team that hasn’t made a sequel before. The EP, Dylan Cuthbert, says that the team was able to get all their big ideas into the first game during development, but there were still a lot left on the drawing board. I’m looking forward to see where they take it – PixelJunk Shooter is a lot of fun, but there’s also a lot of untapped potential.

When I decided I was going to do these deconstructions, Facebook games were the last thing on my mind. This time last month, I had never even played a Facebook game. I thought the very concept of Facebook games was backwards – I have Steam to play games on my computer, after all. Facebook should be strictly for staying in touch with friends. But after hearing that FarmVille has over 11 million active users on a daily basis – even more than World of Warcraft - I figured that there must be something about the game that the average Facebook user finds attractive. And in always trying to expand my knowledge of games, I finally gave in and started playing.

FarmVille

Developer: Zynga
Genre: Simulation
Metacritic: N/A
Price: Free / Optional Microtransactions
Length: Indeterminate

Background
FarmVille is Zynga’s answer to Farmtown, another popular farm simulator for social networks.

Gameplay
FarmVille is designed to be played in short segments of five to ten minutes every day. It’s a never-ending cycle of planting crops, waiting for crops to grow in real-time overnight or throughout the day, and then harvesting the crops before they whither. The objective of the game is highly open-ended, but players can progress by gaining experience points and “leveling up.” Each level unlocks a new set of crops for players to plant worth more than the previous ones.

The game uses two types of currency: “coins” and “farm cash.” Players earn coins by planting and harvesting crops, but farm cash is much harder to come by. To get more than one farm dollar per day, a player has to spend real money through Zynga’s payment system. In the in-game marketplace, some things can only be bought with coins, some things can only be bought with farm cash, and others can be bought with either.

Players can also earn “ribbons” (achievements) that reward them with coins, experience points, and gifts. There are four tiers for each ribbon, each more demanding than the previous. For example, the criteria for one ribbon might be “earn 10,000 coins.” The next tier for that ribbon could be “earn 100,000 coins.” The game keeps track of the player’s progress by offering helpful counters such as “only 2,460 coins to go.”

Being on Facebook, FarmVille taps into the social networking bug and lets players send gifts to each other for free and “help” each others’ farms by visiting and clicking a button to scare away crows or rake up leaves that litter the fields. The game tries to make players invite more friends to join at every turn, whether it’s through publishing updates to the Facebook news feed or sending explicit invites through Facebook’s notification system. As players make “neighbors” (or FarmVille friends) with their Facebook friends, they are able to build bigger farms. It’s worth noting that players cannot see anyone on FarmVille who isn’t already one of their Facebook friends, so it does not act as a tool to meet new people like many other online games.

Where’s the fun?
There is nothing particularly innovative about FarmVille‘s gameplay, but it still manages to attract millions of players. Obviously, then,  there has to be something more going on here than just a stripped-down copy of Harvest Moon. What keeps players coming back? I think we can learn the most from FarmVille from breaking down how users interact with the game.

I can think of a couple possible answers. For me, a competitive Counter-Strike, Starcraft, and Rock Band player, I felt the need to level up faster than my friends to illustrate my farm’s superiority. I also fell into the achievement-whore mentality, playing just one more day to earn the next ribbon and see what I would unlock. I consider this to be the traditional or “hardcore” gamer’s approach to FarmVille.

The other answer, which I witnessed on some of my friends’ farms, is to play the game more like the decoration-centric approach to The Sims. Whereas my farm was almost entirely filled with plowed land and rows of trees, some farms I viewed were full of animals, ponds, houses, and haystacks.

Example of what I call a "casual" farm

Example of what I call a "hardcore" farm.

For someone playing the unwinnable game to win, wasting space like this is absurd. To gain the most experience points and the most coins, the farm should be full of top-grossing crops, save for a little bit of room for trees and animals to work towards the ribbons you can earn for harvesting them. For someone who isn’t a traditional or hardcore gamer, though, the game takes on a different goal where experience points are merely a byproduct of enjoying the game at a slower pace. This is a “casual” approach to FarmVille, where players have fun by exploring what the game has to offer – as a sandbox of sorts, not by working towards arbitrary goals in hopes of being rewarded.

Lasting Appeal
I played FarmVille for almost four weeks before quitting. I am a level 23 farmer with just over 100,000 coins in the bank. I can buy just about anything in the game’s virtual store. But I noticed that most of my friends’ stopped playing after a while, and as a result, the challenge of leveling up the fastest sort of fell apart. The game caps at level 70, but I don’t have any desire to go any further.

12 million players does not make a game an MMO, yet many of FarmVille‘s hardcore players seem to treat it as such. Leveling up in an MMO is fun because of the social interaction with other players. That social aspect is so limited in FarmVille that it cannot sustain gameplay, so while MMO players can look back on their hours of gaming with fond memories, FarmVille players are left with a bad aftertaste. The variation of gameplay is somewhat greater than FarmVille‘s offerings in even the most vanilla of MMOs. As farms get larger, the game degrades to clicking every single patch of land on the screen three times: once to harvest a crop, once to plow the fallow land the crop leaves behind, and once to plant the seeds of a new crop in its place. When I quit playing, my farm was 18×18 tiles large, meaning I found myself clicking around the screen a total of 972 times in a period of 10 minutes to complete a day’s worth of farming – not including time spent to collect eggs from chickens or fruit from trees, or to re-arrange animals and fences to get ribbons. It’s not fun, but it’s the fastest way to level up.

Is this really fun?

In the Gamasutra article I linked to at the top of this post, one of the commenters quipped “It seems you win Zynga games when you realize they aren’t really games and quit. the lower level you are, the better you did.” I think this was true for me, and possibly for many hardcore or traditional gamers, but it’s wrong to assume it’s always the case:  some of my friends who I grouped into the “casual” category are still playing almost daily. They aren’t leveling up as quickly, but they seem to be re-arranging their farms a few times per week, exchanging gifts with friends, and rescuing lost sheep to their hearts’ content. If these types of players are still farming, then the game is a success for them.

Building a Better Farm
Being a “free Facebook app” is an excuse to some extent, but if a game that relies on a “five minutes per day” play attraction fails to keep a significant part of its audience interested after a few weeks of play, there’s a design failure happening somewhere. FarmVille is still in beta, and towards the end of my time playing the game, Zynga added a new RPG-element in allowing each individual crop to “level up” in terms of proficiency. I think this seems like a move geared towards the hardcore audience, but I’m not convinced it addresses the issue. FarmVille could benefit from more social elements, such as cooperative farming or teams working towards a goal. Players should be able to buy and sell crops from each other to earn high-grossing crops before their levels unlock them.

These types social elements in browser-based games are already a proven success. Cybernations, for example, has minimal graphical elements and shares FarmVille’s philosophy of gaming in five-minutes-a-day. Some people play it as such. The game’s “hardcore” audience, however, spends hours a week in the game’s forums engaged in foreign relations issues with other teams or alliances. Cybernations‘ ultimate failure is in allowing this battle of alliances take over the game – unaligned players are always at risk being attacked because no one will step up to defend them, and being a member of an alliance is demanding of much more time than many players are willing to invest. In terms of FarmVille, the game needs to offer hardcore gamers a way of playing for more than five minutes a day while still giving them a purpose. The most compelling reason to play these games, at least as far as I have seen, is to be a part of a team working towards a goal that players cannot attain by themselves.

Finding an Audience
Facebook has over 300 million users worldwide. 12 million of those users are playing FarmVille. It’s a big number, but it’s only 4%. By contrast, there have been about 32 million Xbox 360s sold worldwide. 8 million of those Xbox 360 owners, or about 25%, own Call of Duty 4. It’s clear that Facebook games have a long way to go before they reach the relative appeal of the most popular console games.  Not everyone on Facebook plays games, but not everyone who plays FarmVille is a gamer. Many gamers on Facebook won’t play games on Facebook. Why?

I realize that Facebook and the Xbox 360 don’t exactly have the same target audience, and Xbox 360 owners are more likely to play games even though they have to pay money for them. But look at the iPhone – a device for a broad audience where games have consistently topped the list of most-downloaded applications. There’s something that FarmVille or Facebook itself is doing wrong where a barrier to entry is being created.

For me, the barrier was installing the app to my profile. When apps were first introduced, they were intrusive and annoying. I hate having my news feed overwhelmed by silly apps my friends are using that I don’t care about. As a result, I always deny apps access to my profile when they ask. My decision to start playing FarmVille changed that habbit a bit, but I’m still more hesitant about installing an app to Facebook than I am to installing an app to my iPhone, despite the former being a much easier process overall.

Summary
The Good: Extremely easy to learn, fully playable with minimal time investment, free.

The Bad: Sometimes too simplistic for hardcore audiences, limited social interaction.

I realize this decon was probably a lot longer than it needed to be. Hopefully you can learn from it. I would advise any developers out there who haven’t tried FarmVille to give it a shot – everything points to these types of games playing a bigger role in the future of our medium. If you’ve already played it, please share your thoughts with me in the comments below – there’s only so much I can deconstruct on my own!

]]> http://holdenlink.com/2009/10/game-deconstruction-farmville/feed/ 8 http://holdenlink.com/2009/09/game-deconstruction-splosion-man/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=game-deconstruction-splosion-man http://holdenlink.com/2009/09/game-deconstruction-splosion-man/#comments Sat, 05 Sep 2009 06:55:03 +0000 Holden http://holdenlink.com/?p=430 Here’s a concept I picked up from my room mates over the summer who interned at Pandemic Studios. Every week, one member of the team would pick a game and give a presentation on its strengths and weaknesses. There’s a lot to be learned about design by paying attention to the details that many players may overlook at first glance.

As a personal experiment, I’m challenging myself to do one “game decon” every month for the next year. It’s one way I think I can work to make myself a better designer while providing some interesting reading material. I’ll try to not just pick “good” games, but this week I’ll start with one of my recent favorites…

‘Splosion Man

Developer: Twisted Pixel
Genre: Platformer
Metacritic: 85
Price: 800 Microsoft Moon Dollars ($10 USD)
Length: 4-10 hours

Background
‘Splosion Man was conceived by Twisted Pixel’s lead designer, Sean Riley, as a game about “a guy who splodes in a world only made of glass.” The team started production in the middle of developing The Maw, their first original title. The game puts the player in control of a strange man-creature who “splodes” all the time without explanation. The game is controlled with the joystick and one button (which makes the character explode). The game’s plot is nearly non-existent, but the little story it offers is derived from its setting in the labs of the evil “Big Science” corporation.

I’ve always been a sucker for good XBLA games, but ‘Splosion Man might be the best yet. I’ve told a few people that I think it’s the best game since Portal. After finishing up the single player game and getting about halfway through the co-op, I still feel like it’s at least the most satisfying gameplay experience since exploring Aperture Science. Both games take place in laboratories, and both games showcase cake as the ultimate object of desire. Twisted Pixel makes the homage obvious.

Gameplay
‘Splosion Man features 50 single player levels, 50 co-op levels, and 3 boss battles. The core goal of the game is to use timing and skill to cross obstacles and reach the safe room at the end of each level. Puzzle elements rely almost exclusively on wall jumping and using exploding barrels for propulsion, but it’s the player’s timing of those elements that adds complexity to the game as it progresses.

The puzzle design in ‘Splosion Man is significantly better than any platformer I’ve played in the past decade and every bit as good as the test chambers of Portal. Solutions are creative and often brilliant, yet  usually obvious. I never found myself blaming the game when I failed a level – I always knew exactly what I did wrong, and although it was occasionally frustrating, the sense of accomplishment when I finally had a successful attempt was well worth it.

The co-op gameplay in particular is wonderfully fresh. It’s impossible to progress through a level without working with your teammate(s), and there’s no advantage to doing “better” than the other players. For the most part, it’s easy to pick up and play with a friend because of the intuitive one button mechanic, but the complexity of the puzzles begins to rivals those in the single player version towards the end.

The boss battles are a nice change of pace, but unlike the rest of the game, they are beaten largely by trial-and-error. I felt like I had to die before I even had a chance at getting it right, and as a result they were my least favorite part of the experience. Fortunately, though, there are only three of them!

Accessibility
Especially after listening to accessibility complaints about my games, I have a great deal of respect for developers who make intuitive tutorials. My respect for Twisted Pixel is even greater, because they managed to make a game that doesn’t need a tutorial. As shown in this video of the first level, they throw the player into the action with no backstory and no explanation whatsoever.

How did they do this? The intro cutscene is just 11 seconds long, yet it explains everything you need to know about the game. You are a crazy man who explodes. Scientists are scared of you. When you splode out of your cell, you kill a scientist and look happily onward at the other one who runs for his life. Then you have control. Because it’s funny to see yourself explode, you do it. And pressing any of the face buttons will do just that. Twisted Pixel assumes that the player has a brain – after all, they were able to purchase the game off Xbox Live Arcade – and therefore makes the assumption that they will be willing to experiment with the gameplay rather than forcing a step-by-step tutorial.

Affordances of the 2.5D Camera
‘Splosion Man is controlled entirely in a 2D plane, but the developer’s use of unconventional camera angles captured my interest. Playing the game with co-workers at EA, I noticed some players were annoyed with the camera and blamed it for their deaths. Others didn’t mention it, but talked about how the game made them feel awesome.

There are some areas where the camera goes a little bit crazy and that can be annoying – particularly when you backtrack and the game doesn’t expect it. At the same time, it creates immersion in a 2D world. Subtle tilts that focus on the character’s expressions are common and feel so natural that they go unnoticed after a while, but the camera quickly pans around while zooming in and out during certain sequences to create a layer of chaos on top of the exploding man. Leaving the camera with a pure 2D view simply wouldn’t have been as effective in supporting the game’s mood.

Sense of Humor
‘Splosion Man’s charm is also rather Portal-esque. Scientists explode into steaks, shattering glass creates heavenly bell tones, and  a finding the hidden cake in every level results in a triumph of childish joy. There’s something inherently funny about a character who runs around and explodes “just because,” but Twisted Pixel’s ability to express so much emotion through him in absence of plot is remarkable. Destructoid’s Ashley Davis wrote a great article about game’s use of idle animations – a touch that is often overlooked in modern games. ‘Splosion Man will run around with his arms stretched out making airplane noises, giggle and laugh at every turn, make pop culture references without being cheesy, and use fat donut-eating scientists as shields for laser turrets along his way out of the Big Science facility.

The game’s marketing campaign further illustrates the developer’s excellent sense of humor. Check out this viral video in the style of a really bad 80′s inspirational ballad, featuring a live-action rendition of the character:

When you ‘splode it lifts me higher
as I soar on wings on fire
You’re the bro that I have chosen
’cause you’re the ‘splode beneath my ‘splosion

Sound Design
‘Splosion Man‘s music is jazzy and upbeat all the way through. The developer has released the entire soundtrack for free on their website if you care to give it a listen. It suits the mood of the game quite well. In-game, it makes subtle use of procedural music alteration. When you’re running around at a leisurely pace, you hear trumpets and pianos twiddling along with the melody. When you’re exploding, they change into a grungy electric guitar. It’s something most players probably won’t even notice, but it added another layer of depth to the game for me. The change in music makes the game feel more intense while you fly through the air, timing jumps from wall to wall and barrel to barrel. But when you’re standing around or running and laughing at the character’s animations, the music goes right back to being happy. It serves to reinforce the other aspect’s of the game’s presentation.

What’s Next?
Twisted Pixel just announced their third original title, “Comic Jumper,” at the Penny Arcade Expo. It appears to be a side scrolling platformer/shooter and maintains the comedic tone of The Maw and ‘Splosion Man.

Summary
The Good: Easy to learn, hard to master. Hilariously wacky. Great value for ten bucks. Decent replayability. High production values. Excellent music.

The Bad: Occasionally frustrating levels. Huge difficulty spikes. Questionable UI design.

That’s it for this decon. I hope you enjoyed it, and please share your thoughts on the game below!