As regular readers will know (because I mention it at every possible opportunity) I’m spending some of my spare time writing a game in XNA. As I’ve previously mentioned I’m not terribly bothered about selling this game – making money off it is not important to me – but I would like it to be able to reach a wider audience than this blog manages.

After looking at the options, putting it on the Xbox Live Indie Games channel seems the best bet. This does mean that I have to choose a price point for it, however.

Indie games are not allowed to be released for free. I can only assume Microsoft wishes to recoup at least some of the cost of producing the tools and hosting the files, and their cut of sales is to do this. The price points available to developers are 80, 240, and 400 MS points, with the top option only being available to games that have at least a 48Mb download (why file size is linked to worth isn’t really the point of this article, but is also bizarre, since a developer could just include a lot of data to reach that).

Now, for whatever reason most games are currently being released in the 80 point price bracket, and indeed the 240 price is seen as something of a millstone around a title’s neck.

In this regard the pricing “race to the bottom” appears to be mirroring Apple’s App store. What is interesting here is that it has been shown that psychologically consumers equate greater price with greater quality – ie if something if more expensive then it must be worth the extra cost.

It’s worth stopping at this point to make sure you have all read Tommy Refenes’ recent GDC rant about the bizarre pricing of iPhone Apps, and how his net profit was not hurt by increasing his game’s price considerably. Read it here.

How I see it is that the whole channel is being hurt by a) the enforcing of just three available price points (with only two available to most titles) not giving developers enough granularity to be able to realistically price titles relative to their peers, and b) developers vastly under-estimating the worth of their own work and driving for higher sales figures rather than looking at the bottom line.

It’s often stated that gamers already think of the Indie Games channel as being low quality (due in part to poor box art, and a heavy influx of ‘novelty’ titles such as back massagers early in the service’s life). Now they are being told that 80 points is the most they should pay for anything of quality they do find on there.

As a colleague recently said to me – the chances of someone finding your game are pretty slim anyway (given that sales drop off hugely after the titles leaves the “what’s new” list), so if they do find it and like it there is as much chance of them paying 240 points as paying 80 points.

So, with all of this in mind I have decided to treat Color Zap as something of an experiment (and one that will more than likely fall on its own arse) and price it at the 240 point mark. I’ll let you know how it works out for me.

And to other developers I would say – have confidence in your work, and don’t undersell yourself.

So, it seems that recently ITV aired a debate between Alan Titchmarsh (a gardener turned presenter), Julie Peasgood (an actress turned “sexpert”), Kelvin MacKenzie (an ex-newspaper editor), and Tim Ingham (an editor for Computer and Video Games) on the subject of violence in video games.

Quite what Tim thought the outcome of this was going to be I have no idea, but surely it was an obvious set-up of a witch-hunt piece?

Predictably it was ill-informed and quite embarrassing to watch, and has subsequently kicked up a little bit of a storm over on game-supporting areas of the internet.

You can see the whole segment here.

And while I agree with the general feeling at the clip, I can’t help but think that Tim could have represented us better.

Now, I don’t know exactly how these things work. Maybe he had been phoned up that morning and asked to appear, and had no idea who the other panelists would be. But they seemed to have done at least a passing bit of research (Peasgood knew of Modern Warfare 2′s airport level, for example, whereas MacKenzie knew the average age of gamers).

Ingram seemed to mainly cling to the single defence of games being rated as movies are. A solid argument against the “won’t someone think of the children” brigade, but surely we can come up with something better than that? Perhaps mentioning the BBFC’s research that suggests non-interactive violence is more upsetting to players would have been a start?

Or could it be that the naysayers have something of a point (only something, mind)? We can’t argue on the grounds of games looking less realistic than movies, as the constant march of technology means that will continue to be a flimsy defence, and probably no defence at all in a couple of decades’ time.

Tim argued that the thrill of games was not in the virtual killing, but in the story. Er, what? So Modern Warfare 2 had the largest entertainment launch in history because people wanted to experience the amazing story, did it? Nothing to do with the storyless multiplayer mode, or the bombastic action setpieces?

It’s times like that I wish they had got some loudmouthed self-sure videogame journalist on (like say Stuart Campbell) who could play the other pundits at their own shouty games, and use his objectionable arguing style for the benefit of the industry.

But instead games always seem to be represented they always get some normal journalist on who gets all flustered, and sticks to his single (albeit valid) point the whole way through, even when presented with better options.

At the point Peasgood said that all violence in entertainment was bad he should have asked her about the three year contract she had with Brookside, for example. Or the Shakespearian play she was in that contains incest, prostitution and murder. Or perhaps the survival horror game she put her voice to. Even with no prior knowledge of the other panelists, it wouldn’t be too much of a leap to think of classic literature, or mainstream entertainment that features violence. I hear boxing is still pretty big.

My final comment on the whole affair comes after reading the open letter to ITV that The Sixaxis have put together. It just illustrates how terrible and fractured our counter-arguments to these accusations are.

Most of that letter is a series of ad hominem attacks on the other panellists. Nobody’s doing themselves any favours by focussing on Peasgood being a “sex expert” and trying to suggest that this means she shouldn’t be allowed to air an opinion (even if it is mis-guided). Don’t gamers and our press regularly go on about how it’s odd that sex is held in greater contempt than violence by ratings boards? Sex should be more acceptable in society than violence, so to me that part of her career is not really an issue.

The letter makes little attempt to set the record straight with regards to the claims made on the show, or point out the numerous factual errors the host, Titchmarsh, made which should have been properly researched by the production team before recording.

I think it would be far better to forget the sorry affair happened. I suspect that the viewing figures for the show are pretty low, and the fuss kicked up by the gaming press has done nothing but to air the clip to a far wider audience. In future I hope gaming pundits will not allow themselves to be dragged into such a debate without being well prepared first.

I’m sure most readers don’t scroll down far enough to see it, but there is a blog roll on the right hand side of this page. Regardless, I’m not sure how many people click through, but I keep adding to it and pruning from it as I find new interesting sites or old ones are left without updates.

So to help highlight a few recent additions I think it’s time for another round-up of sites that I’ve been reading.

• AN_D_K’s blog is first up (alphabetical order, you see. Maybe I should have put “name your blog something beginning with A” as a blogging tip?) Though it has only recently started being updated again, the posts are long and well written. I particularly like and agree with his post on why pre-release DLC is not evil.
• DIY Gamer is next. A review and news site focussed mainly on indie games. Although no individual articles stand out as being particularly worth a read, their editorial is good and it’s always useful to have one place to go to find this news.
• Fun by Design is the blog of design student Corwyn Kalenda. Though I don’t often read many student blogs as I find their opinions to be a little too naive and “textbook”, this one is always interesting. In particular I would suggest reading the lengthy post-mortem on three recent projects, as it shows a fair amount of insight.
• I’ll Start Monday is a blog that I’ve been following for a year or so (since it was started), but has only recently been getting updated again (hey I know how that feels!) It’s written by a design colleague, and takes in a fair range of subjects. Check out his Heavy Rain vs Road Avenger article.
• And finally Two Fedoras is another news and review site that focusses heavily on indie games. The writing is particularly good, and it’s unusual but heartening to see a site give such in-depth reviews on Xbox Live Indie Games.

Well, there you have it. Hopefully you found something new to you and interesting in that list. If there are any other developer blogs you think are worth subscribing to why not add a comment below?

So, having already told you the rags to riches (riches pending) story of how I came to be a professional video game designer, I thought some readers may be interested in some tips on how they could do the same.

I mean, you could follow the same path that I did, but that would be a bit silly I think. For one thing, I didn’t even want to be a games designer until I was in my early twenties. Before that I wanted to be a doctor (before that I probably wanted to be The Doctor). And there are so many different ways you can improve your chances of getting hired.

So, in no particular order here are some things I think will help you get your very first job as a professional video game designer.

Generalise
There are a lot of different game designer roles in the industry right now. The common three (as far as I know) are

• Designer. The general dogsbody of the design world, as you can probably tell from the title. In this job you could be touching on lots of parts of the game, or focussed on one particular system or area.
• Scripter / Mission designer. Generally these two titles are for very similar jobs, and don’t be fooled into thinking of “script” in movie terms. You will be using whatever scripting language the toolset has to implement the flow through a section of gameplay – making sure that when the player hits a trigger the right thing happens, cutscenes and dialogue fire as appropriate, etc. Some systems may also be scripted, weapons or some higher AI functions, for example. This is the more programmer-side part of design.
• Level designer. Uses a 3d creation tool to block out areas of the game world for their gameplay requirements. Depending on the company this could also involve taking these levels right through to completion with full art, using textures and models provided by the art department. You could also be placing triggers, enemy spawns, pickup locations, etc. The more artist-side of design.

Now the general thinking behind any type of skill is “jack of all trades, master of none”. Which I get, if the two things you’re talking about aren’t that closely related. Thankfully there are a lot of aspects of game design (and design jobs) that overlap.

Obviously it’s good to be really good at something, so if you are naturally more inclined towards code or art then lean more heavily in that direction, but it will really help if you have at least a basic understanding of “the other side”, and you will also find more job listings that you have the applicable skills for.

Incidentally, if you’re neither good at code nor art, you will have a much harder time of things. Jobs for “pure” designers do exist, but they are harder to come by, and tend to attract more experienced candidates. As someone trying to get their first design gig, you will find it easier to land a scripting or level design job.

Make Stuff
No matter what area of design interests you most or you find yourself most skilled in, there’s not a company worth working for that will hire you without some proof of your skills.

And how do you prove that you can design something? By designing something. Duh.

There are so many free tools available to hobbyist designers these days that I’m not going to list them all, but it seems obvious to me that you should start building up a hefty portfolio of example work as soon as possible. So download something like XNA or Hammer, and start working your way through tutorials. Or even just fire up Word and get that design document flowing.

It’s a simple fact of life that the first times you try something, the results will be … interesting. Probably rubbish, in all honesty. Unless you’re naturally talented, in which case I hate you and what are you doing reading this anyway?

The process of just trying to create something will allow you to try out ideas, iterate on them, and hone your skills. As long as you seek out criticism and act on it you will end up with a great body of work to show potential employers. Note that you should never include your first few pieces of work in your portfolio. Chances are that even if you think they are good you’re looking upon them with rose-tinted “mother’s eyes”, and they are actually crap. Sorry.

De-construct
Part of being a good designer is knowing what works, without need to experiment or reinvent. In the same way that car manufacturers will always fall back on those tried and tested wheels, multiplayer level designers know that they can always fall back on a figure of eight pattern, for example.

There are, broadly speaking, just two ways of finding out what works in video game design…

The first is that you can read about what other people have already figured out. For example, you now know that a figure of eight is a good base layout for a multiplayer map because I just told you. The upside of this is that you will be learning from other people’s mistakes, their own iterations, and their own spent time. You are essentially stealing the knowledge gained from all of their wasted time, and can stand on their shoulders to start your own projects – good work, you’ll need that stolen youth for when you do land your games industry job.

The downside to all of this fancy book learnin’ is that they may be wrong. Unfortunately game design is still a relatively young and complicated beast, and there are few recognised “must use” techniques. There are also a number of people who will pimp their credentials as designers when selling their books or giving lectures, but haven’t actually designed anything that’s been described as fun in a very long time.

So it always pays to have your wits about you, and don’t just believe something will be fun because a big name designer has told you such.

The second way of finding out what works in games is, not surprisingly, to play a crapload of games. Hopefully if you want to be a professional game developer you will be doing this already – hell, it’s very probable that your passion for games led to your desired career, instead of the other way around.

So, rather than just playing games, start de-constructing them and the choices that designers have made in them. Start paying a lot more attention to what is going on. If you’re playing a first person shooter, how have the weapons been set apart from each other? How does the player’s health work, and how does this impact on the play experience? Generally I’ve found that recharging health causes players to be more reckless than the old medpack system, so if you were ever designing a survival or horror based game, you would probably not want to use a recharging system, for example.

In a multiplayer map is there a particular area that players gravitate towards? Why do they hang around there? Is it a flaw that play focuses on that area, or is it deliberate? How does the designer draw your attention to important locations or items?

Always be looking out for a) things that you think would improve the game or level you are playing, and b) things that the game or level does incredibly well that you can repurpose for your own designs later.

This skill will come in particularly handy if you are invited for an interview. Most design interviews I’ve heard of involve asking a candidate to explain what they thought were particularly strong and weak points of recent games they have played (or a game the company has released).

Socialise
As an eager game designer you really should be making full use of the fancy-pants new fangled social media tools that are available to you. Back in my day these didn’t exist, and so it was fairly difficult to get to know professional designers and engage them in any kind of dialogue. The best you could hope for was someone on the CounterStrike team commenting on your latest map on a forum.

Twitter is a great tool for getting in touch with a lot of professionals who are “in the trenches”. All you need is a starting point (and here I will offer my own account up as a suggestion), and look at the lists of people they follow. Mixed in with the TV and film celebrities and actual real life friends, you will usually find an abundance of game developers. Another good method is to look at what lists they are on – often there will be a “games developer” list, and then you’ve hit paydirt.

Games developers are people too, if slightly less socially capable than most, so there’s a good chance that many of them will not follow you in return. Bummer. But like any social tools, you will get out what you put in, so keep an eye on what they are talking about and if you have something interesting to say, reply to them. Believe me, nobody likes the warm glow of people communicating with them more than games designers – we’re a very needy bunch.

Twitter is also better for these kind of impromptu introductions than something like LinkedIn. Although there are many people out there who are happy to accept any invited contact, I know far more who will only connect themselves to people they know in real life.

It may also be a good idea to start a blog, especially since there are good free hosting options in Blogger and WordPress you are essentially not losing anything by trying. Your blog can serve as a single location to host your CV / resume, your portfolio of example work, and also any random musings you have had about games that you have played.

Remember that one of the core skills often desired in design positions is “good communicator”. A potential employer will be able to look over your blog and see how well you express yourself and your thoughts (or, more likely, make sure that you don’t entirely type in txt spk the whole time).

Don’t be afraid that the super-hot company you have applied to might see that you didn’t like the second dungeon design in their last game. As long as your argument as to why you thought it was bad was well thought out (and not just a long stream of “FUUUUUCCCCKKKKK YOOOOUUUUU” style posting) chances are that they will appreaciate the thought that you put in to their work – hell, they may even use it as a subject of conversation in the interview.

The flip side of this is that I would recommend you steer clear of openly criticising any company or individual, unless you are absolutely sure you will not want to work with them. And even then, the industry is a very small place, so such an entry may have unexpected effects at some later date.

I recently posted an article that mentioned a few tips that I have picked up in the few years I have been blogging, that apply specifically to games industry people. These might be things to keep in mind in case you decide to get set up (since you seem to be in the mood for reading my advice, you schmuck).

Finally, it is worth your time becoming an active member in some forums relating to game development and design. This is particularly applicable if you have taken the “make something” advice, as the forums related to your creation will likely be full of incredibly critical members.

This is good, as their criticism will both help you develop a thick skin towards having your work pulled apart (and believe me, you will need this if you get a job in the industry), and also help you improve your skills a lot.

You will be able to see what the current bar is in your chosen area, pick up tips and techniques from other people in a similar position to yourself (and don’t be a jerk – share your own cool discoveries, once you have used them yourself of course), and also see what mistakes other people are making and avoid them yourself.

Don’t Settle for “Good Enough”

Slightly controversial this one, as I know a fair number of people who have gone this route, and it’s often touted as a good way in, but I really don’t think that if you want to be a game designer you should be applying for QA positions.

Yes it will get you “inside the industry”, but not doing what you want to do. And if you end up in publisher QA or one of the developer QA departments that isn’t allowed to talk to the developers (and believe me they exist), you are no closer to getting to be a designer than you were before.

In fact, you may even harm your chances – if you start trying to design the game through bugs (i.e by putting in bugs that are suggestions for how you want things to be, rather than actual bugs) you may just annoy the designer who would interview you enough that your shot is blown.

This rule also applies to the example work you are making to show off your talents. Actually finishing a piece of work is a difficult thing to do – the further you get with it, the more it will become about bugfixing. But being able to show a potential employer that you have the self motivation to see a task through to completion is a huge bonus.

Remain critical of your work right up until the final stages of your project – it is these last bits of polishing that will help make your work stand out from other applicants, and will get you noticed.

Be Realistic

The final piece of advice I would give is to be honest with yourself – are you cut out for working in the games industry?

The step from enjoying playing games as a hobby to enjoying dabbling with creating them as a hobby is not such a big one, but the step to creating them professionally is huge.

You will spend all day at this, and it can put you off your home projects or playing games altogether. You will also most likely lose a lot of your creative freedom in the work you are creating for your job (not all, obviously, as that would be terrible for the game, but you won’t have free reign over what you want to create).

And also be brutally honest with regards to your own level of talent – try to avoid the Dunning-Kruger effect. It is always a hard pill to swallow, but it may be that if you are not receiving interviews or job offers, you are not performing to the same level as your contemporaries. Again, try to be critical of your own work.

So there you go, six general pieces of advice for anyone trying to get a job as a video game designer, or wondering how to start along that rocky road. I hope it helps.

It got a bit down towards the end there didn’t it? I didn’t mean for that to happen. You should understand that I love my job, love working in games, and wouldn’t trade it for anything (well, maybe for being The Doctor). I only want to help people get to that same position too.

I also have an article half typed up containing interview tips, based on the many interviews I’ve held. Hopefully I should have that up soon.

Do you have any advice I’ve not covered? Or perhaps you don’t agree with the advice I’ve given? Or even if you’ve just found this useful. Please, I’d welcome any comments.

One thing I have found particularly tough with writing an Xbox Live Indie Game has been the need to meet certain standards of functionality (in fact I recently wrote an article about how frustrating I find this).

The problem is that in the very first week of creating my game I got roughly 80% of the gameplay and feature implementation done. Even with gameplay changes after feedback and my own repeated play, I would say that the basics of how the game works are identical to how they were originally written.

In that same time, however, I got at most 10% of the background systems done. Things like the basic game flow (title screen -> gameplay -> end of game screen), and some high score handling.

In the months since then (though I must stress I haven’t been working on it constantly for months – I’m not that bad!) I have had the remaining 20% of gameplay to write, and 90% of the systems.

And unfortunately, the systems are not the fun bits to code.

This means that as the game progresses towards being finished, it becomes more and more of a chore to work on (adding a high score table means adding saving and loading. Adding that file I/O means adding a lot of checks and error handling for the player messing around, etc.) and so it becomes harder to motivate myself to work on completing the game.

When this title is eventually done, for my next project I intend to work more evenly on systems and gameplay throughout development. Obviously, the basics of gameplay must come first, as there’s little point in ensuring you have bug-free memory unit code for a game that’s no fun to play. But once that first concept is done I will switch to working on the menu system, for example, and alternate between the “fun” and “not fun” bits of coding as I progress.

Although this entry is mainly about coding, I suspect the graphics and audio will be a similar case. Thankfully I have only one sprite for Color Zap, and only a handful of sound effects.

Just a short note to say I’ve submitted Color Zap (yes, it has a space in the middle now) for playtest over on the XNA Creators Club. This is basically the step before submission to get it on the store (a pre-sub, you may have heard it called) and can be used to find out any crashes, and also get gameplay feedback.

If anyone reading has a premium Creators Club membership, Color Zap can be found here – I’d really appreciate any feedback.

Also on a personal note, I’ve now reached my New Year goal of “must write more blog updates this year than last year”, and only two and a bit months in. I’m sure all you fans of my inane wittering are very glad of that.

Oh, and while I’m making small updates – has anyone else in the UK noticed Heavy Rain’s lack of presence on store shelves? According to Game staff it sold out on the first weekend and they’ve had no further shipments. No wonder it dropped down the UK charts pretty sharply. Someone appears to have messed up.

I have recently spent two nights doing the most boring, soul crushing, coding since I started messing around with XNA.

The reason for these frustrating evenings is that they were not spent improving gameplay, and were instead fixing edge cases of interface use that most players would not experience.

A little background here, in case people are unaware. Before they will allow you to release your full price console game all console manufacturers have a checklist of requirements that they test your title against. These are generally to ensure a minimum level of quality and standardisation across titles (for example, that games use A as the select button in Xbox menu screens).

(As a side note here there is obviously some argument to be made for the effectiveness of these checks as some modern games are being released with game-ending bugs, but that’s a discussion for another time.)

Similarly, there is a list of around fourteen basic tests that a title must pass before it is allowed to be released on the Xbox Live Indie Games channel.

These checks are for things like allowing a player to use any connected controller, handling the player signing profiles out mid-game, handling memory units being removed, not doing odd things if a guitar controller is connected, etc.

Every game on XBLIG is also required to give an eight minute trial mode.

Now for me, this is where the crux of the problem lies – I feel that the Indie Games channel is being forced towards matching the Xbox Live Arcade too closely and has hit an odd state of attempted commercialisation.

For example in my game, ColorZap, an average play session will last somewhere around the four minute mark. There is no particular draw to the game other than the challenge of beating your previous high score against a rapidly increasing difficulty. This is how the game is designed to be – an incredibly simple score challenge.

The only restriction that fits a trial mode for this game is to disable the saving of the high score table. To cut anything else would give a false impression of the game’s difficulty.

But I did not get into XNA in order to make money. I want to put my game on the XBLIG channel to give it a wider audience than it will receive by being released on this blog (mainly because if I release the Xbox version here only people with premium XNA Creator accounts will be able to deploy it to their Xbox, and the PC version requires the installation of an extra XNA redistributable).

I want to release it for free, and “as is”, with the understanding that it won’t kill your system, but at the same time doing anything particularly untoward may cause very unusual side effects.

There is the argument that I could just price the game at the lowest available value of 80 Microsoft points (roughly a dollar in the US, or 68 pence in the UK) if I am not out for the dirty cash and just want wider distribution. And this is true.

But this brings up two issues to me: firstly, if I am spending money on a title I would expect it to meet certain requirements of not breaking, and also if I am pricing my game at an impulse price, I don’t particularly want to have to spend time on a trial mode.

Is it impulse buy or isn’t it? Surely an impulse does not require an eight minute trial run first? There are many impulse buy games on Apple’s App Store that give no trials, and also plenty of free full games. I don’t see that service being killed by this freedom of choice for the developers.

So that is it – as I want my game to be playable on my friends’ Xboxes I am forced to spend time working on the non-gameplay parts of the game.

I am forced to provide a free trial mode, however little sense that makes in the game’s design. And I am forced to not give the game away for free, even though I want to.

That doesn’t seem very Indie to me.

So, I’ve spent a bit of time off and on working some more on ColorZap. This has mostly been boring technical things, but there are some gameplay improvements and other general niceties as well.

For one, the graphic tiles that the game uses have been updated, following the very scientific poll that I recently conducted on this blog. The general consencus was that either option one or option three should win, so I have spent a fair amount of time playing the game myself with both.

The conclusion that I came to was that option one was actually slightly harder to play. I think it’s because the tile centers are darker in that option, so it takes slightly longer for your brain to process the colour information. Certainly I was finding myself able to play option three almost subconsciously, whereas option one took some time as each block appeared to work out what I wanted to do. It felt a lot more forced.

So, option three it is (though it isn’t really, as I’ve still modified it a bit since then).

While I have been tinkering in this area I have given the game’s presentation a spruce up in general, and also added a splash screen (this helps to fix a slightly annoying bug too!) The logo at the top of this post is now the official logo of games what I dun ritten. Is it a good logo? Not the best, but I think it’s quite clean and nice enough.

Another key change is the inclusion of a high score table, rather than just keeping the one highest score. This was something I was always intending to get around to, but has ended up being the biggest technical challenge in the game so far for someone as un-codey as I am.

To make an XNA game play nicely with allowing text entry, reading gamertags, and selecting which storage device you want the high scores saved on means being very friendly with the Guide and doing some asynchronous coding. Thankfully I’ve had experience of that in my job, or I would likely have been totally lost.

Control-wise I tried switching over to a system that did a single step per press. This addressed some feedback the first version had received on small movements sometimes being difficult to achieve. I did feel that it made moving the length of the board quite laborious, however, and even ended up hurting my fingers after extended play.

So in the end it has become a system that uses single steps, then goes into auto-repeat after a short timer. I think it is the best of both worlds.

Finally I found a bug in the block spawning code. I had always suspected this wasn’t working correctly as the blocks were taking a long time to appear in some cases. And I was right. Now that the spawning is working correctly the game is a much more challenging proposition. I’ve evened it out slightly by increasing the speed that the player’s attacks travel at, but I still think you will find it more difficult than before.

And both of those things address some other feedback I’d received.

Hopefully I should have another version available for people to play soon.

Until then I will leave you with this v1.1 video (recorded before the splash screen went in, logo fans).

Hope you enjoy it!

Loading screens provide a slight problem for developers. It’s inevitable that all but the simplest of modern games will end up having to load large amounts of data between levels, and this poses something of a problem.

There are a few solutions – many games go for static screens (though not too static, as that would fail certification requirements), others show movies that tie the two sections of gameplay together. Some have made the effort to ensure data is streamed at all times, and loading pauses are not required.

Bayonetta takes a leaf from Assassin’s Creed’s book, in that it provides a virtual “holding cell” that allows the player to move around in a featureless environment.

It goes one step further, however, and allows the player to practice their attack moves, while listing valid combos as they are performed.

This is a step above the simple tool tips many games display while loading – rather than just reminding the player what their available moves are, it gives you free reign to practice them to your heart’s content. Well, at least until the next bit has loaded in, anyway.