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.

Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney – Capcom, Nintendo DS
I was hesitant about the series ditching Phoenix, but in the end, I still got to yell “OBJECTION” at my handheld and that makes everything in the world OK. The updated investigation phase mechanics weren’t all that compelling even though they made good use of the DS. Maybe I was burnt out from the previous three games, but this one couldn’t keep my attention long enough to make it past the third case. Finished: NO

Auditorium – EA, iPhone
I played it first on PC, so buying the iPhone version was a no-brainer for me. It’s a great mobile game. The puzzles lend themselves well to the touchscreen, and levels can played in two or three minutes while waiting for a bus. I found the gameplay to be addicting enough that I finished it before I had the opportunity to play while waiting for a bus, opting to play it over Thanksgiving when I should have been socializing with family. EA offers more levels, but you have to feed the microtransaction monster to get to them. Finished: YES

Batman: Arkham Asylum – Rocksteady, PS3
As most of the mainstream reviews have already noted, this one was a pleasant surprise. It’s one of the best stealth action games out there, even if the AI is fairly predictable. The combat system was intuitive and fun despite being so repetitive. None of the mechanics would have meant  anything if Rocksteady hadn’t done such an amazing job with the game’s presentation. It truly makes the player feel like Batman, and even the collect-a-thon elements (Riddler trophies) were rewarding with Bioshock-esque tape recordings and backstory that went far beyond the genre’s usual offering. It’s a licensed game, but it’s also fun and innovative. What a concept! Finished: YES

Boom Blox Bash Party – EA, Wii
I’m clearly not biased at all when I say that every Wii owner should drop everything and buy this game right now. It’s a great puzzle game, and even now that I’m home without any obligation to play it daily, I occasionally find myself breaking it out to play around in the level editor or see what other users have created online. Finished: YES

Borderlands - Gearbox Software, PC
I was never much of a Diablo fan, but I loved the mission system in Borderlands. You can take on multiple missions at once and work on them in whatever order you choose, even stopping mid-mission to complete objectives from other ones. It’s one of the few open-world games that truly feels free. It’s also remarkably huge. I mostly played it alone, but my bad experience with multiplayer (on public servers) seems to have been one of the few bad ones. I’m looking forward to giving it a try with some friends. Still playing it now.  Finished: NO

Brutal Legend - Double Fine, Xbox 360
I thought this would be one of the year’s best releases, and it let me down. It’s still a great experience. The first third of the game is a blast, filled with excellent writing and creative gameplay with lots of variation. The rest of it, though, falls short of the quality I expected from Tim Schafer and Double Fine. The RTS segments (“stage battles”) are extremely lengthy, and they happen in rapid succession. It also didn’t seem to scale well in terms of difficulty – there was precisely one strategy for beating each of the stage battles, and although I was laughing throughout, it was more fun to watch than to play. The side quests were extremely repetitive as well. I understand it was originally designed as a multiplayer-only game, but the single-player experience is what was talked up during development, and it didn’t deliver. Finished: YES

Burnout Paradise – Criterion/EA, PS3
I’m late to the party on this one. I downloaded the game when it was released over PlayStation Network, and then slowly played through all the events over the course of a few months. At first I didn’t like the series’ change to open-world gameplay, but  now I can’t go back. Even though all of the events took place in the same world, it didn’t feel repetitive. I actually enjoyed learning the map and remembering landmarks to find shortcuts in each race. Speeding through the streets or across a narrow mountain path is exhilarating, but the crashes are absolutely beautiful too. It’s one of the few games I’ve played where failure is equally as rewarding as success – it’s just fun all around. My biggest complaint would have to be the lack of customization on the vehicles – there’s little reason to return to old cars once you unlock new ones, so the garage gets unnecessarily cluttered by the end.  Finished: YES

Chrono Trigger DS - SquareEnix, Nintendo DS
I own this game on Super Nintendo and PS1. It’s my favorite game of all time. I picked up the DS version after seeing one of my friends play it (on my recommendation). I couldn’t resist giving it another go and I have no regrets. There aren’t any graphical upgrades, but it’s a very sleek port. The new translation bothered me a bit, and then I was more upset that I’m enough of a nerd to notice the differences. The stylus controls leave a lot to be desired, but they didn’t mess up the standard controls. Can you ask for much more on a game that’s already great? Finished: YES

Command & Conquer Red Alert 3 – EA, PC
My roommates and I played some skirmishes this summer and it played just like I would expect an RTS to play. The single player campaigns weren’t particularly fun in terms of gameplay – for me, at least, removing the social element of online play kills the genre – but I loved the cutscenes in all their cheesy glory. You can’t go wrong with Tim Curry. It’s a fun game, but every RTS is doomed to being released in the shadow of StarCraft 2. Finished: NO

Critter Crunch – Capybara Games, iPhone
If Katamari was crazy for instructing players to roll up the world with a giant snowball, then Critter Crunch deserves equal recognition for featuring a mechanic that equates to eating and vomiting cute little creatures. Feeding little critters to bigger ones is such a simple concept, but the addition of chaining (or “food chaining”) adds a level of strategy just thick enough to make it interesting without overcomplicating the brilliance of its simplicity. The presentation is top-notch, both of the gameplay modes are fun, and there’s enough content to last a good while. Finished: NO

DJ Hero – Neversoft/Activision, Xbox 360
At the very least, Neversoft deserves credit for not making this as a complete Guitar Hero clone. The controller is well-made and there isn’t as much carry-over from the guitar as you’d expect. My biggest criticism is the design of the note charts. Whereas Guitar Hero’s notes are placed on a vertical fret board that moves towards the player, DJ Hero uses a circular turntable. The notes come in from the side and curve down to eventually straighten out. Unfortunately, this makes it very difficult to play the game with muscle memory because it means the horizontal positions of the notes are changing as they get closer to the target zone. The game also doesn’t provide enough feedback when the player misses a note – I was often left wondering why my combo broke, and when you don’t know what you did wrong, it’s easy to blame the game and get frustrated. Design issues aside, only a few of the mixes are worth listening to more than once and many of them reuse the same songs. If you can get past that, it’s the most original music game in quite some time and it’s every bit as innovative as the original Guitar Hero. Finished: NO

FarmVille – Zynga, Facebook
Check out my decon if you haven’t already. Millions and millions of users can’t be wrong, right? Finished: N/A

Flight Control – Firemint, iPhone
Another great example of a simple concept made into a fantastic product thanks to high production value. The basic concept is to use your finger to draw paths guiding planes to landing strips without letting them crash into each other. It’s surprisingly difficult, but the player can’t blame the game because it provides such excellent feedback. That makes it challenging and addictive rather than frustrating and passable. Flight Control is the new Snake. Finished: N/A

Flower - ThatGameCompany, PS3
I generally aligned with the critics on this one too. It’s the best implementation of motion controls I’ve experienced thus far on any console. When I say “experienced,” I also intend to imply that Flower is more of an “experience” than it is a “game.”  Rather than putting you in the role of a character or the pedals that you ultimately move around, the game puts you in the role of the wind. It’s oddly empowering and creates a sensation of flying unmatched by any other game. I don’t think I can categorize it as “casual” or “hardcore.” That said, it’s not for everyone – there isn’t much in the way of difficulty, and it’s very short-lived. Finished: YES

Geometry Wars Retro Evolved 2 - Bizarre Creations, Xbox 360
As much as I like Everyday Shooter, I could never get into Geometry Wars. My roommates bought this through my Xbox Live account and it became their nightly addiction for a good while. We have a 60″ DLP 1080p HDTV, a 7.1 surround sound system, and somehow game gets more play time than anything else. I think I enjoy watching people play it more than playing it myself. I’m not particularly bad at it or anything, it’s just that I find playing it to be frustrating in the wrong ways. Losing in the game is an even split between knowing exactly what I did wrong and blaming the game for being cheap with its enemy spawn locations. Finished: N/A

Ghostbusters: The Videogame - Terminal Reality, Xbox 360
I found Ghostbusters to be an enjoyable one-time-playthrough sort of game despite its repetitive gameplay mechanics because it does such a good job of making you feel like you’re in one of the movies – sort of like Arkham Asylum. Without the nostalgia, it might have seemed like a rather mediocre Gears of War clone. I got very far in the game but didn’t have the desire to finish after I got distracted by work and other new releases. Terminal Reality shows a lot of promise with this game’s polish and presentation, though – much more than in their previous titles – so I’m actually hoping for a proper sequel. Finished: NO

Henry Hatsworth and the Puzzling Adventure – EA, Nintendo DS
On paper, Hatsworth shouldn’t work. It asks you to constantly switch screens between a platformer and a puzzle game – neither of which are remarkably innovative or compelling – but somehow, the combination of the two makes it seem like a fresh experience. I had a blast in the game’s first set of levels, but then the difficulty curve went out of control. It was frustrating because it would take 10 or 15 minutes to play through a level and reach a boss, but after running out of lives at the boss, you have to repeat the entire level again. Sometimes that can be a good punishment – take a look at Mega Man for example. But the puzzle aspect of Hatsworth makes it unreasonable because it’s nearly impossible to get the Mega Man focus of precision platforming when your attention is split between two screens. Finished: NO

Hook Champ - RocketCat, iPhone
I fell in love with Hook Champ after grabbing it on sale shortly after its launch thanks to a nod from users over at CheapAssGamer. It’s a swinging-adventure game where the goal is to use a grappling hook to swing through underground caves as quickly as possible. The controls are masterfully executed for the touch screen – touching on either side next to the  character makes him move in that direction, and touching on either side above the character makes him fire his hook towards your finger. The developers add a couple twists to the formula like one-time-use rockets that give you an extra boost if you miss a swing and need to try again. There’s a lot of content for the asking price, and everything is extremely polished. It’s everything a good indie game should be. Finished: YES

I Love Katamari – Namco, iPhone
The reviews said this was a decent port, but it had a really sluggish framerate on the iPhone 3G that ruined the experience. I have a 3GS, so I thought I’d give it a try because it’s supposed to be a lot faster. It was still  far too slow to be enjoyable after playing through the PS2 and Xbox 360 incarnations of the series once you get past the first level. The tilt controls are a bit awkward as well, making it the only time I’ve found myself cursing while listening to the game’s trademark happy music. Finished: NO

iBlast Moki - Godzilab, iPhone
I picked this up when it was free during the Appvent Calendar promotion, and it ended up being one of the better puzzle games I’ve played for the iPhone. The core mechanic consists of setting time bombs around a level to propel the cute, round little Rolandos Mokis from the start to the goal. The formula gets interesting in each new set of levels where new features are introduced. One world’s levels take place underwater, so bombs also be set to prevent the Mokis from rising to the surface. There isn’t a lot of replay value aside from a basic gold/silver/bronze medal system, but it’s fun while it lasts. Finished: YES

Left 4 Dead 2 - Valve, PC
Although it’s not typical for Valve to release a quick sequel, you’d think they do it all the time by looking at Left 4 Dead 2. It’s an improvement over the first game in every way, and there’s more than enough content to warrant the price tag. Scavenge mode has all the fun of the original game’s Versus mode without asking for the huge investment of time to play through a whole campaign. Valve is just one of those companies that doesn’t make bad games even when they set themselves up for high expectations. Finished: N/A

Madden 10 – EA, Xbox 360
The last Madden game I purchased was Madden 93 for the Sega Genesis. I’ve stuck to the NCAA series since then, but my EA employee discount over the summer tempted me to pick this one up. I ended up playing it a lot more than NCAA 10. It’s extremely polished, the graphics and animations are stunning, and the presentation is unmatched. But that’s why the annual entries of Madden always sell so well, right? Finished: N/A

MadWorld - Platinum Games, Wii
It’s really gory, it’s really stylized, and it’s really repetitive. Most of the time, it fires infinite waves of enemies at  you and lets you kill them with standard attacks or quicktime-event based special attacks. Fun for a few hours, but I lost interest fast. For what it’s worth, it is one of the most graphically impressive games on the Wii. Finished: NO

Mercenaries 2: World in Flames - Pandemic/EA , Xbox 360
Mercenaries 2 is one of the few games that delivers on the promise of destructible environments, and it does destruction very well. The first two hours are a blast because the game gives you all the toys at the beginning, but then it gets stuck in the fetch or kill quests that most mission-based games succumb to. Blowing stuff up is so awesome that it makes everything else less interesting in context. Finished: NO

NCAA 10 – EA, Xbox 360
It’s always fun to create a player and rise to lead my own school’s team to a national championship, but after playing Madden 10 it’s hard to go back. I can understand that the presentation can’t be as sleek when there are hundreds of teams to worry about as opposed to the 32 NFL franchises, but it’s one of the few games where graphics make a huge difference in the gameplay. Madden’s animation engine is better too – it’s almost as if the NCAA series’ tech is a year behind. Despite my insane levels of school spirit, I see little reason to own both games. Finished: N/A

Need for Speed Underground – EA, iPhone
When I got my iPhone, I heard that this was the best racing game on the platform. It sports great graphics, fully rendered cutscenes, and intuitive controls. In terms of gameplay, it feels stripped down from what I’ve come to expect out of the Need for Speed name, likely due to the smaller screen. It’s still a competent racer, but it lacks all the adrenaline of its console counterpart – and that’s a huge part of the genre for me. Finished: NO

Noby Noby Boy – Namco, PS3
It’s even stranger than Katamari, which I suppose is an achievement. There isn’t really any “game” here, it’s just a playground. I ended up wasting enough time with it to justify the $5 price tag. Finished: N/A

PixelJunk Eden – Q Games, PS3
I became bored with this game because I didn’t really understand how to play it. One of my roommates fooled around with it, and after hours of watching him play through it I wanted to pick it up and try again. It has a great visual style and the sound design is absolutely fantastic. I don’t like how the game makes you re-play each level multiple times without changing the scenarios – imagine being forced to re-earn each star in Super Mario 64 before getting the next – but it’s a great overall experience that’s worth checking out. Finished: NO

Plants vs. Zombies - PopCap Games, PC
My first day at EA, my co-workers told me to go home and buy this game. I obliged, and I wasn’t disappointed. It’s a great spin on the tower defense formula with tons of character. The Zen Garden was an awesome idea that encouraged me to finish the extra challenges after completing the adventure mode. Once I finally finished everything the game had to offer, I cleared my profile and started all over again to see if I could do it faster. I’ll probably do it again when it comes out for iPhone later this month. Finished: YES

Prince of Persia – Ubisoft, Xbox 360
I was a fan of the last generation’s Prince of Persia games, but this entry was a massive disappointment. The art style and presentation were great, but taking away the ability to die totally ruins the series’ formula of adventure. There’s never any danger or sense of urgency because you can die as many times as necessary to complete an area. There’s no reward for doing something correctly on the first try. For me, this meant progressing in the game wasn’t rewarding either, which translated to it not being fun. Finished: NO

Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time – Insomniac, PS3
I’ve been loyal to the Ratchet series since the second game hit the PS2. Tools of Destruction was its enjoyable next-gen debut, and Quest for Booty was a decent downloadable distraction. A Crack in Time is a fairly standard sequel. The best thing it brings to the series is the moon exploration system. I went through the entire game and found every last collectible item because I actually enjoyed doing it – each sidequest is on a different moon, so it always feels fresh. Aside from that, I actually missed not having Clank for the majority of the game. The constant banter between the two protagonists gives the series a lot of character, and this game felt a little empty without it. Finished: YES

Rhythm Heaven – Nintendo, Nintendo DS
Everyone who attended Iwata’s keynote at GDC 2009 received a copy of this game for free. I played it on the trip home and long after. Unlike Rock Band which tests muscle memory, Rhythm Heaven actually challenges players with real rhythm puzzles. The controls are limited to tapping or swiping the stylus across the screen. It’s frustrating at times because it seems like it should be simple, but it’s quite difficult and the game isn’t very kind with its feedback – about as different as you can get from other recent Nintendo games – but it’s designed in a way that makes it hard to “blame the game.” It does allow the player to skip levels and come back later after failing three or four times. The amount of content they packed into the cartridge was a lot more than standard Nintendo fare as well. I still haven’t unlocked a handful of the mini games because I’m trying to get perfect scores on some of the other ones first. Finished: NO

Scramble 2 – Zynga, iPhone
Scramble is available for just about every social networking platform, and the free iPhone version is everything it should be. Online multiplayer, easy touch screen controls, accelerometer support, and slick Facebook integration make it a no-brainer for the low, low price of free. It might not have the fancy 3D graphics of EA’s Boggle, but the gameplay is identical between the two. Finished: N/A

Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood – Bioware/Sega, Nintendo DS
At a recruiting event, I joked with a Bioware rep that this could be the worst game they ever made but it would still be the best Sonic game in at least a decade. It’s not terrible, but it’s a letdown for anyone who expected a Paper Mario quality adventure. The plot is weak, the graphics look rushed (it sparingly uses 3D models on a pre-rendered 2D environment, Final Fantasy VII style), and the gameplay is extremely repetitive. The Elite Beat Agents-inspired battle system is decent, but it takes too long to get through each fight. That problem is maximized by the game’s affinity for backtracking. Every part of the game shows promise, but no single piece is polished enough to warrant a recommendation. I invested about 7 hours into it before getting out the old Mario & Luigi game for GBA for a second playthrough instead. Finished: NO

South Park Let’s Go Tower Defense Play! – Microsoft, Xbox 360
2009 was the year of the tower defense game. While Plants vs Zombies dominated the PC, South Park dominated Xbox Live. I bought it and played through the entire campaign with my roommates in a single night. Without the multiplayer component, it probably wouldn’t have been anywhere near as much fun. It features everything you’d expect from an honest tower defense game – mazing, upgrading, selling, etc. The South Park franchise adds a layer of charm to the formula, but it doesn’t really bring anything new to the genre. It simply does everything well. Finished: YES

‘Splosion Man – Twisted Pixel, Xbox 360
Check out my decon for a detailed breakdown of the game. Easily one of my favorite games from 2009. Finished: YES

Sudoku – EA, iPhone
Sudoku puzzles are a great way to pass the time while waiting for the bus or sitting in an office. EA’s offering can be as simple or fancy as you want it to be. It can fill in all the possible numbers for each square, highlight specific numbers on the board to make it easier to find sequences, or pull in puzzles from the newspaper and solve them instantly. My complaint is that the options to get help – hints or fill ins – are on the main game screen. This means it’s really easy to accidentally hit them from time to time, and there is no “undo” button. I don’t regret picking it up, but it could be better. Finished: N/A

Tales of Vesperia - Namco, Xbox 360
It’s doesn’t say much to call it the definitive JRPG for the Xbox 360, but Vesperia is my personal favorite of the Tales series. The characters are likable, the plot is decent, the graphics are beautiful, and the battle system is fantastic. The main story is also remarkably long with numerous sidequests to spare. I’ve invested about 35 hours into Vesperia, and I still don’t think I’m near the end. I typically can’t sit and play it for long periods of time, but it offers a detailed summary of the plot so far from the pause menu to refresh my memory when I need it. Hopefully I’ll get around to finishing it soon. Finished: NO

The Beatles: Rock Band - Harmonix, Xbox 360
It’s an understatement to say that The Beatles: Rock Band is the best version of Rock Band available anywhere. In addition to all the features of Rock Band 2, it offers harmonization support for three vocalists, unique dreamscapes (trippy backgrounds and venues) for most of the 40+ songs, and truly meaningful unlockables. It won’t make anyone like The Beatles’ music, but it’s gaming nirvana for anyone who does. Finished: YES

The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition – LucasArts, PC
Apart from graphical upgrades and a new hint system, there isn’t anything Monkey Island fans haven’t seen before. I was disappointed that the “HD upgrade” simply replaced art assets. It looks great in screenshots, but the animations are still just as choppy as in the original. This made sense for something like Street Fighter 2’s HD version, where framecounts matter to players for strategical purposes, but it seemed sloppy in Monkey Island. Still, I can’t complain too much because it gave me an excuse to revisit an excellent game. Finished: YES

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves – Naughty Dog, PS3
The first Uncharted was a mystery – it was Prince of Persia with gunplay and a decent plot until the last hour or so, when it became Gears of War with zombies and monsters. The sequel outdoes the original in every way. It’s like a Michael Bay movie, except it’s enjoyable. The combat hasn’t changed much, but there’s a bigger emphasis on mixing combat with parkour and acrobatics. Between a lengthy single player campaign and a thriving online multiplayer mode, there isn’t any reason to pass it up if you have a PS3. As a designer, I found myself creating save checkpoints so I could go back and try to figure out how they made certain areas of the levels. For example, one fight takes place in a building that is literally falling over while you’re still inside it. Everything is sliding towards one side of the room, and the outside world is visible through the windows. It turns out they built a physics engine that allows them to do it without any tricks. Hats off, Naughty Dog. Finished: YES

Valkyria Chronicles – Sega, PS3
Another game I’m late to the party on, Valkyria Chronicles is an innovative strategy RPG that turned heads last summer. I was addicted to the game for the first seven or eight battles, but when they take over an hour each, it starts to feel more like work than play. It has a great cast of characters, but the developers seem to think the numerous cutscenes are a lot better than they actually are. There are at least six or seven of them between every battle. The difficulty curve is all over the place – each battle is harder than the last, and the game suggests that you re-play older battles to level up. The problem is that replaying the older battles are extremely easy because of the amount of experience you gain for completing them the first time. The battle system doesn’t lend itself well to grinding, and the game wants way too much of it. Finished: NO

…

That’s it! Keep in mind that these are merely my opinions, and I’m not claiming to be any sort of an expert critic. Looking back is a useful exercise for me to identify trends and mechanics that are working across the entire industry, and hopefully I’ll be able to implement some of them in my own projects.

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/ http://holdenlink.com/2009/09/game-deconstruction-splosion-man/#comments Sat, 05 Sep 2009 06:55:03 +0000 Holden http://holdenlink.com/?p=430 More >]]> 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!

I’ve wanted to write a proper postmortem for Audiball for some time now and I’ve been putting it off for far too long. Below, I try to summarize six months of my life into a few pages of text. Audiball was not a commercial success, nor was it groundbreaking in any way, but it was my experience with game development and I’ll always be proud of it. Read on if you’re interested in the game’s original vision, what sacrifices were made, what unexpected events changed development, how the game’s soundtrack was composed, how you can learn from my mistakes, and how an announcement trailer can be the longest fifty seconds of your life.

Background

Before starting development on Audiball, I was hooked on Jonathan Mak’s Everyday Shooter. Of course he’s already credited in the game for inspiration. It did a great job of using non-traditional sound effects in each level to blend with the game’s soundtrack. Each level used a different set of sound effects for shooting, explosions, combos, and just about everything else. It’s really what made the game exceptional as opposed to, well, your everyday shooter.

Everyday Shooter

At the same time, I was playing quite a bit of Rock Band with my roommates. The speakers on our TV blew out while we were in the middle of a difficult song, and while the guitarists and drummer were able to continue without a problem until it came back on, the singer promptly failed out. I guess I had never really considered that Rock Band is just a test of muscle memory. It’s why Guitar Hero is able to take away all the colors of the frets and players still know which buttons to push: the colors are irrelevant once you know where they are, it’s only the positions that matter.

It was then that I got curious about the idea of focusing on the colors of the frets rather than their positions. It would be a completely different way of using the guitar controller. Of course, that also meant that no skills would carry over from any other guitar game. Playing Audiball for the first time would be similar to playing Guitar Hero for the first time; the guitar controller would be a new controller all over again. Then came the challenge of trying to make it “fun” as opposed to “unintuitive.”

Rock Band doesn’t lets you play music much in the way that you play a game, but you don’t produce music or influence it in any way other than “off’ or “on” when you miss or hit notes. I wanted to explore making something that was “the opposite of Guitar Hero” in that multiple aspects of the player’s performance would determine what they heard coming out of the speakers. I didn’t want to try to make a music composition program for a guitar controller because I didn’t see how that could be fun – of course, Guitar Hero World Tour ended up doing it later that year anyways. Instead, I tried to let the player work towards a visible goal (the gameplay) while using the sound intensity to reflect their progress towards that goal (the  reward).

Initial Design (March-April 2008)

The game was initially drafted on a giant whiteboard in our residence hall in spring of 2008 – one of the few resources we actually did use from Georgia Tech. We had just gotten back from the Game Developer’s Conference and were itching to get to work. We dubbed it “SoundOff” as a production name. The idea was to create a game where the player had to get a number of balls from one side of a level to another. Every time the player strummed, a ball would launch from a cannon. It would collide with different colored “enviromods” (environment modifiers) that would do various things to change its trajectory.

Original Logo

Sound was only played when the player successfully activated an enviromod. I thought that I would be able to compose sound clips that could play concurrently and design levels that made sure these clips were played in a particular order. This was a mistake for a number of reasons, the biggest one being that designing the level to sound a certain way completely defeated the point of procedural music.

Early Screenshot (Build 34)

The HUD changed quite a bit throughout development. The first design for the game called for a Guitar Hero-esque panel that would show the balls as they approached the circles on the screen. Before it was even coded, I realized that although it would make it easier for people to play, they would completely ignore the rest of the game and it would be reduced to a fancy visualization. It was decided that the entire screen would be the game’s main area, and we would try to stay as far away from Guitar Hero references as possible so as to avoid the notion that we were “competing” with it. Suddenly, the game itself was a lot more difficult to grasp because the player no longer had anything familiar to ease them into playing.

Final Design (September-October 2008)

In its most basic form, we realized that the game was nearly impossible to play when the user had to keep track of multiple balls at once. Even when the user only had to press frets to activate them (with no strumming involved) there were balls flying out of control everywhere with no method to the madness other than mashing buttons. It certainly wasn’t fun. So we had to figure out a way of controlling the gameplay without necessarily slowing it down. I came up with the idea of using timers to pause between collisions, and once it was prototyped in a few different ways we settled on each ball having its own timer rather than the enviromods having a limit for all the balls inside them at once.

This ended up being one of the core elements of how the game plays. The timers give the player between three and five seconds to (1) notice that an enviromod needs to be activated, (2) find the corresponding fret on the neck of the guitar, and (3) strum to launch the ball in their desired direction. This sequence is the best representation of what I intended Audiball to do as a rhythm game. No matter how a level was designed, every solution resulted in a rhythm created by the player, and players had to keep that rhythm constant to successfully pass a level within the time limits.

2nd HUD Design (Media Player)

After the Guitar Hero HUD with the sidebar came a design styled after a media player. The pause menu was designed around this time too. Although the pause menu’s look in this stage remained intact in the final version, the rest of the HUD changed dramatically. There were far too many numbers on the screen at any given time, and it was too distracting for a game that plays as frantically as it does.  One thing that did stick from this iteration of the HUD, however, is the word “audiball.”

Early "Enviromod"

For the Independent Games Festival we had hoped to submit a 10 level demo. We ended up with four, two of which were scrapped from the final game. There was only one audio track finished at that point too, and it was set to all four levels. Obviously we didn’t get anywhere in IGF – our judges summary a few months later revealed that we were praised for innovation and docked for audio, consistent with our opinion of what we submitted.

The other 13 levels in the game came together over the next three weeks. Two levels were completed two days before release. We worked right up until the wire to get it out. When we weren’t working, we were watching people playtest. I loved watching people playing the game because everyone approached it in a different way. Players being confused and not knowing how to play was the game’s biggest problem (one that could have been solved with the inclusion of a tutorial) but at the same time it was refreshing to see experienced gamers pick it up as if it was the first game they had ever played. Everyone was on equal ground. I recall my roommate’s girlfriend passing a set of levels only for him to fail miserably minutes later – my roommate being the hardcore gamer of the two. Feedback showed that the game was fresh and fun to play, and we couldn’t have hoped for more in our first project.

Music Composition (October-November 2008)

Audiball was my first experience with program music. I had written things for fun before, but giving it a purpose turned out to be a compeltely different challenge. More challenging was that it was my first attempt at procedural music. The final soundtrack ended up being more “guided” than procedural due to a combination of technical limitations and lack of compositional skill, but nonetheless I enjoyed writing it.

Each song was made up of a series of sound clips that were played on top of each other. Some songs had as few as 6 different clips, others had as many as 20. Getting it composed and split up was only part of the battle: getting it into Microsoft’s less-than-perfect XACT architecture was agonizingly difficult. I created target renders of what I thought the tracks should sound like, and then we tried to mix and match them in the game to make them sound similar. For example, here’s what the flow sheet looked like for the “Fast Techno” track:

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU......

You can download the entire soundtrack on my Audiball page if you care to give it a listen.

The game’s official trailer was made in two days – one day of music composition, and a second day of recording and putting the video together. When I say two days, I actually mean the full 48 hours. It’s a lot of work to make a game look good. The trailer ended its run with a 6 / 10 score on GameTrailers with most people criticizing the graphics, but intrigued by the concept. We were happy about the intrigue, and tolerant of the criticism. The game’s visual style just didn’t come across as well as we had hoped.

Conclusion

Audiball was a fun first project that had a lot of promise in concept but was seriously flawed in execution. Fortunately, the flaws weren’t enough to prevent it from being a fun game. Anyone who played it for more than 10 minutes could figure it out, and most of those who did enjoyed it. We didn’t anticipate players to give up after failing just once and putting it down in two or three minutes. The game’s concept was probably far too unique and challenging for us to tackle as our first project, but I’m still happy with how it turned out.

So many of the problems with the game could have been fixed with just a little more development time. It’s aggravating to see how we spent months working on a game and just fell short of creating a complete package. Better production values would have gone a long way to make it an exceptional game for what it is. It may not have sold significantly better, but it would have felt much more professional as a whole. As an indie company, we had no reason to give ourselves an arbitrary deadline. We’ve learned to never compromise the quality of a product for the sake of getting it released. It’s better to take an extra five months than to have regrets.

I hope this write-up adequately illustrates the game’s design process for all who have interest, and I sincerely hope that other bedroom developers out there can benefit from it. Feel free to shoot me an email if you have any more questions about the game, and check it out on Xbox Live Indie Games if you haven’t already – it’s still available for download, and should be as long as the service is running.