I was imtimidated at first. “Oh man, what the hell does that function do?” “How do I do [stuff]?” Thanks to a few tips from some friends I got my bearings. (Having said friends work with you on another secret project in Flixel also helps) I was able to see just how easy it was to do simple things that would require many lines in straight-up AS3, such as collision detection and displaying text. Granted, collision detection is nothing to sneeze at (I had some issues with it as I’ll detail in an upcoming post) but I liked how my coding was more “focused.” More lines of code that had to do with my game and less lines of code that did mundane things, now hidden behind various Flixel functions. Quite the difference.

Flixel isn’t perfect, but I can definitely see the benefit in using it for getting a prototype up and running like that.

IGN Mockup - Animal Crossing on the App Store

A lot of talk has been thrown around recently by Nintendo’s investors due to poor 3DS sales that Nintendo should go 3rd party and pop their IPs on other devices. IGN even fired up the What If Machine and imagined what Animal Crossing would be like on the App Store. At first glance it seems like a hunky-dory situation, but as you pull back the curtain this wouldn’t be so fun. Let’s look into it.

Admittedly it’s been a long time since I played my share of Animal Crossing, which was way back when on the GameCube. I remember waking up one Sunday and playing it for nine hours straight. Good times. However, it was this amount of play (and other titles at the time) which swayed me to stay away from the DS and Wii iterations on this franchise. I’ll be coming back to AC when the 3DS iteration comes out due to StreetPass.

So why should Nintendo not go 3rd party? It’s quite simple.

Money. Power. Control.

Money

Anyone who’s been following for Nintendo for a certain amount of time will realize that Nintendo is a very cheap company but they pride themselves on certain qualities, one of which is affordable, well-built hardware. (I believe the 3DS tested the waters) In order to get devices in players’ hands they must be control freaks when it comes to designing a device. That way, they’re able to get the best deals on components, or use certain lower-end components to their advantage. (read: more money in their pockets)

Here’s an example of the torture some Nintendo hardware can go through:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

The moment Nintendo plays in someone else’s sandbox, it’s the sandbox owner’s rules and the owner gets a cut of all software sold through said device. (physical or digital) Nintendo also sells all of its devices at a profit from day one, something that Sony and Microsoft don’t do.

From hardware to software, Nintendo wants in as much as it can, especially when most of their market is overseas.

IGN posted this mockup in their article:

IGN Mockup - Animal Crossing on the App Store

Nintendo doesn’t want another party cutting into its profits. Hasn’t IGN seen this article? I can easily see little Billy spending $100 to add those additions to his house and both Nintendo and parents don’t need more headaches. Tom Nook just wants those damn Bells! Greedy bastard.

Power

Relating to money is power. Nintendo has some of the most recognizable characters in this industry. If Nintendo were to go 3rd party they would lose their iconic, unique dual-screened (or otherwise) devices to go along with said characters. You wouldn’t see the famed Nintendo racetrack logo on any phones or other devices. Less logos equals less branding and consumer mindshare. Nintendo wants to stay in your head…and in your pocket.

Relating to power in a different way, let’s say you play Animal Crossing on your phone. That means less power for GPS and other informational tools on the phone. Smartphone battery life is bad enough as it is.

Control

Being a manufacturer of a device, you know the device’s limits and capabilities. You also know when to prioritizes certain processes over others. If Nintendo had to play in Apple’s sandbox, it would get the same treatment as any other application on the App Store, making Nintendo bow to Apple’s limitations. For example, something like StreetPass may not be possible.

Why wouldn’t StreetPass be possible? Apple may deem the process too much of a battery hog and disable it at any time. Having this small network turned off leads Nintendo (and thus younger players) to turn on the unstoppable fire hose known as the Internet, and as some people will tell you, having trolls in your Animal Crossing town is bad news.

IGN Mockup - Animal Crossing on the App Store

That “LOLS!” in the above mockup may say it all.

The freedom of information and content may be fun at first since the gates are wide open, but do you really want everything at once? Wouldn’t that make the game boring sooner? I think it’s more fun to have a little surprise every now and then than to have everything up front. This is what keeps players coming back. The Internet is like the GameShark of gaming. (in a way)

Parents also may see more “trust” in a self-contained video game system (see Power/branding above) than a phone (where anyone could call/contact them) or they may feel that their child isn’t ready to have something expensive as a phone. (or even an iPod Touch) Nintendo also wants the experience to be a clean, cohesive experience, not one that is shoved onto a platform where it doesn’t belong.

Let’s not forget about buttons either. Buttons are good.

Power. Money. Control. A business wants all of these. Having Nintendo run their games on alternate platforms would take those away from the 100+ year-old company.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

The DICE interviewer said he would contact us when this video went live. Oh well. Good thing I found it. Shame I’m not wearing my FIEA shirt that day though.

“Make games!”

How does it fair for $10? Not that great. Let me explain.

Link to the Past

It’s been a long time since I’ve played something like Dizzy Bee so I decided to give this game a fair shake. “The 3DS is more powerful than my old iPhone 3G. (which I played Dizzy Bee on) Technology’s improved by now. Stuff’s gotta be better.”

Oh how wrong I was. Maybe it’s because of games like Dizzy Bee that the novelty of gyroscope play has worn thin, but upon further inspection it’s more than that.

Too Simple? Too Hard? Too Frustrating

I played and completed the first world of Cubic Ninja and played about halfway through the second. (if you beat level 2-14 without powers, let me know) Every level was about the same: get your ninja to the goal. I say “about” because there’s a boss “fight” at the end of the first world. (shocker)

Sometimes simple is good but the level design from what I played was very bland. Most of the time you can zip through levels while not really thinking too much about where you have to go or what you must do. Things are too straightforward. There’s no real interactivity with your character and other enemies. It’s mostly “you vs the world”…which sounds kind of familiar.

The game does actually try and get you to go off the beaten path by having you collect scrolls with can unlock ninja powers, but then the game will actually give you said scrolls or powers so there’s no real incentive to go and collect them.

When things do get hard, the game just screws with you. The in-game camera is not zoomed far out enough for you to see danger below you so it’s very easy to fall into a spiky block and because this is a gyroscopic game, player reaction time and system weight must be taken into account.

No Teacher = No Apple

The designers didn’t explain the control scheme or what things do. They assumed the player would look things up in the instruction booklet. Sometimes out of the blue I’ll get a useless help message in the form of “Get your ninja to the button.”

…Duh.

What’s An “Art Style?”

The first world is set in a gray area. There’s very little variation of color. Everything is made of cubes which is neat at first (you’ll even Megaman-explode into tiny cubes when you die) but nothing’s textured. It’s all just flat colors. When there is a diagonal edge here or there, it’s not polished up by anti-aliasing.

Sound exciting to you…? Yeah, me neither.

A silver lining in all of this would be the UI. Everything’s simple and focused. Like the ninja. Lines are clean and the interface is easy to navigate.

One other thing I do like is the interface for buttons and their corresponding objects. For example, let’s say you have to push a button and then go across a room to pass a wall that’s lowered by the button press. A dotted line connects the button visually to the wall, letting you know in advance what a button does. In some levels this is presented much better than others, but it is a neat effect as the dotted line is dim when the button is up but when it’s pressed, the dotted line lights up and the segments tick down towards the button. Neat.

Load Times

With a simple game like this, you’d think that there wouldn’t be any load times. Well unfortunately there are:

• Loading when the game first boots to the (unskippable) publisher/developer logos
• Loading after the logos are done to go to the title screen
• Loading after choosing a level
• Loading after choosing a character
• Loading after a death to reset a level

C’mon now. With all these load times Iwata’s going to get frustrated.

Seriously though, even though the load times are about 4-5 seconds, it is frustrating when you want to try playing a specific level (like 2-14) over and over again. It’s also tough just to get a game going. Think about it: after you’ve picked a level and a character, it takes about 30 seconds to get in and start playing from a game boot to you rolling around in a level. “30 seconds is nothing!” you may be saying, but it’s unacceptable based on the assets loaded.

The only reason I can think of why a level would need to be reloaded every time you die was to reset the 3DS’ gyroscopic sensor, but then why do they have a menu item specifically for that?

Tone Deaf

Besides artwork varying the world, music, voices and sound effects must also be memorable and fit the situation. Cubic Ninja has forgettable tunes, and the tune you hear on level 1-1 will be the same you hear on level 1-15 until you have a boss fight and then get to level 2-1. Boring.

When your ninja hits a wall he/she makes a sound, but the pool of sound effects and voices per character are both very limited and you’ll quickly grow tired of them.

The main beat in the title/menu screen doesn’t kick in until about 40 seconds in! 40 seconds! Don’t you want to catch your player’s attention right off the bat and excite them about this game? No? Who’s going to sit and wait for the good part of your song to kick in?

No wonder the default SFX and BGM values were not all the way up.

Aren’t You Forgetting Something?

Oh yeah! The controls! This is a gyroscopic game after all. How does it feel? Not that great.

I don’t believe things are as precise as they should be and as noted above the designers didn’t take into account player reaction time in regards to level design.

I talked about the lack of a tutorial above. You’re not told how and where to hold the 3DS. Should it be held upright or not? I found out the hard way that you have to hold it as if it’s on a table and go from there.

Another wonky thing about the controls is that in order to get your ninja to move “towards” the screen, you have to hold the 3DS above your head. This sounds neat, but an issue comes up when you have to stay in midair while towards the screen. You can’t really control your ninja when holding the 3DS above your head, and then if you need to quickly move to a back wall or something, it’s not possible without tumbling down since you must bring the 3DS down in the process.

Silver Lining – Accessibility?

One silver lining I found with this game is that it’s actually easier to control and play when you turn the gyroscopic setting off. For example, you can’t really play with the gyroscopic mode on when you’re lying on your side in bed. When it’s off you control your ninja with the Circle Pad and make him/her hover towards the screen with the Y Button. (not taught to you in-game) This style of control may be a boon to those with limited motion.

Closing Thoughts

So is Cubic Ninja worth your money? For $40: no way. If you can get it for $10 it may be a nice diversion on a train or subway, but I don’t see myself playing this game much longer. I really wonder what happened during development. Did Ubisoft kick AQ Interactive around? I feel this game fits into the “Art Style” series of DSiWare titles as those were hit-or-miss.

This is a miss. This was no BOXLIFE.

Think about that for just a moment: age 4 to age 10. That is QUITE the range. Going from not knowing how to read to wanting to play “cool” T-rated/”tween” games. I think I managed fairly well considering.

The game design is simple: you move a drop of insulin from one point to another in the human body. Once that point is reached, the player is taught something about diabetes.

I think the only thing that I wasn’t happy about after I finished this was that I forgot the explain the secondary purpose of the parent taking a picture of the child’s head. Besides being used in-game to describe to the player the concept of “you,” (remember, ages 4-10 here) and as a profile picture it would serve as a nice transition scene into their body. Imagine taking a picture of your head and then slowly zooming in on it until you’re inside your body. That seems like it would be fun/cool to me if I was 4 or so.

Download: Drop Herder GDD

Download: Junkyard Dogs GDD

“Mart Kart – Wudang Mountains” is just as it sounds: a Mario Kart racetrack set in the Wudang Mountains of China. It was my first time designing a racetrack. I think my only complaints with this design are:

• I didn’t pick a Nintendo character to theme this track with. (e.g., DK Summit as in Mario Kart Wii) I do have some ideas listed down at the bottom at the document, but I didn’t pick one and left it open to discussion.
• The track design is too simple. I thought the track design would be tough enough due to the obstacles I put in the way.

Download: Mario Kart – Wudang Mountains GDD

Download: Lunch King GDD

NestKins Logo

Philly Game Jam 2011 was my first game jam and it was a blast! If you search around here, you may find me. :-) Anyway, the game we made was NestKins and our theme was “Mothers”. Considering the game jam took place May 6th-8th which was Mother’s Day 2011 weekend, I was expecting theme to be a little less predictable. Oh well.

For the first two hours of development, I made sure everyone’s computer was ready to work with our Bazaar version control setup I made. We then went out to have a combo dinner/brainstorming session.

A few ideas were floating around our dinner table, but we didn’t nail anything down. I noticed this and tried to resolve it by setting some ground rules such as tone words, or the tone our game evoked. Even though some may not technically be labeled as tone words, we settled (quickly) on “nature”, “nurture”, and “cartoony.” We only had 43 hours of development time left!

My job on this particular team was Team Lead/Producer: I made sure everyone was on-task and had everything they needed to continue working. When they had issues with the Bazaar server, getting Internet access to work, needed critiques on audio/SFX, or a task list, I was there.

We ultimately needed to scope the project down to something more manageable. By the time audio and art were done, programming was only about 40% complete. We ended up not using a lot of art and audio assets that we had created. After the project was over, we all joked that it would be “DLC.”

What went Right:

The Bazaar server:

I normally don’t like to toot my own horn, but our team was thankful for the fact that I had setup a Bazaar file server for version control during our game jam. A member on our team early on had suggested Dropbox as our file management solution. However, since this was my first game jam, the state of the Internet was an unknown to me. I didn’t know how fast it would be nor how many people were using it. This ended up being a smart move as the Internet did go down every once in awhile during development.

A dedicated team:

I was proud of the amount of effort our team put into staying awake. One person on our team got as little as 4 hours of sleep. I had to order people to sleep. If you don’t sleep, you’ll start making mistakes.

What went Wrong:

Over-design/Scope issues:

Most of the people on our team had never been to a game jam before. We had no idea what could or could not be accomplished in a 45-hour period. We ended up wasting a lot of time on assets that were never used.

Nothing on-screen early:

During my time at FIEA, we were taught to get something up on the screen as quickly as possible. I hope my professors can forgive me for letting this slide this one time. :-) To be quite honest, I didn’t get to personally play the game until I got home at my own computer. This was bad.

Choosing Unity3D Free:

Unity3D isn’t a bad platform to develop on, it’s just that we had not anticipated issues with file management/version control software such as Bazaar. It seems the free version of Unity organizes things in such a way that it makes sharing projects with team members nigh impossible. Two people can’t work on the same scene at the same time. If we could go back in time, I would have gone with Flash.

Live and learn, right?

Anyway, I had a memorable time with my team and I’m glad we all made it through in one piece. There were 10 teams total and only 4 awards were given. At least our game didn’t win the “WTF?” Award.

To play NestKins, simply download the zip file below, unzip it, and double-click the “NestKins” file within.

Download NestKins

Team members: (Team “Running with Scizor”) Me, John Benge, Matt Findlater, Mike Hahn, Dan Jung, Stefan Lopuszanski, Du-Marc Mills

If you would like to read Matt’s opinion on our time at Philly Game Jam 2011, go here.

For our development methodology our team decided early on that pre-production would be run with a  modified version of SCRUM.

When everyone got back to FIEA, each team member worked on various things but our first task as a team was to decide on a fiction and our main characters. Since our core mechanic was so strong, Rick believed that we could get away with pitching just a mechanic and nail down something later. That later was now.

Chain Game Wallpaper

While our team was in Pre-Pro, the three other teams were also in Pre-Pro. There were also a few people from each team on a Central team that was working on a game engine that ran atop Gamebryo. The engine was dubbed Earth. As you’ll see in the wallpaper above, two characters are next to what appears to be a broken Earth.

After much debate and gnashing of teeth, our team fell in love with Sophie and Melvin. (shown above)

Melvin’s the Grim Reaper’s intern. He accidentally killed Sophie, our “valley girl.” The Grim Reaper chained Melvin to Sophie so Melvin wouldn’t screw up again. He now must lead her back up to Earth from the Underworld/Limbo.

Simple, right?

Macleod and I worked on nailing down what chain abilities would be feasible. We came up with a lot of ideas for moves. That’s always a good thing, but in order to make Chain Game feel cohesive and not weighed down by over-design, we decided on what moves would work for pre-pro vs production.

In order to help convey what certain moves would look like to the rest of the team, we drew up some diagrams in Adobe Flash. You can download them below.

Download: Chain Game Moves

During Pre-Pro we randomly shackled two team members together via our chain so they would get a feel for what life was really like chained to someone else. Luckily, I never succumbed to such a fate. …And yes to answer your question, they had to go into the bathroom together.

I also worked on organizing and fleshing out the design document. You can download our design doc here:

Download: Chain Game Design Doc

I also oversaw Super Mario 64 playtesting in which two players would man a Nintendo 64 controller and try and get the first star in Super Mario 64. The results were eye-opening.

As far as any actual game to show, unfortunately it’s not in a downloadable state.

Schedules for Sprints 3 & 4

Chain Game (or “Hellbound” as it was called during our Vertical Slice) was unfortunately cut on Monday, February 16th, 2009.

The game was cut due to technical reasons. Rick mentioned that in a real studio our team would have been scaled down instead in order for our programmers to figure out how to handle the chain adequately.

Besides Chain Game, another title called Delirium was also cut. People from both teams would be moved based on each game’s needs.

Now only two games remained: Drifters and Sultans of Scratch. (changed from Resonance) I cannot link to their website as it seems to have a new owner/content.