Because I want to enjoy it.

I want to go into that world knowing only what I know from the first two games, and from what the next one tells me as I’m playing. If a character has a cameo appearance, I want that to be the surprise it was intended to be. I don’t need to be able to sit there, turn smugly to my cat, and say “I knew he was going to be in this because Kotaku reported that his voice actor was listed on IMDB”. My cat doesn’t give a shit.

I know that there are people whose jobs it is to make me excited about the game. I’m already excited about it, but I’m sure there are other people who aren’t. Maybe reading hundreds of pages of text, and seeing lots of screenshots about it will work these people into a frothing anticipation-high. Maybe this level of exposure will make every aspect of your game crushingly familiar months before it’s even released.

I know that there are plenty of people out there who lap this stuff up. But those are the same people who, rather than enjoying Fable for what it did contain, spent their entire playtime sad that they couldn’t watch a tree grown from a seed. As if that was an epoch-defining feature that was missing.

Look, we’re all adults here. We all know that things get cut from games. Sometimes early, sometimes very late. Sometimes they come back later as DLC, sometimes you will never see that feature. So I’d prefer to play the game I’m given, rather than whatever fantasyland version of it I have constructed in my head based on advertorial previews written by half-cut journalists.

Just as the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference, the opposite of having something interesting to say is “meh”. I think it’s a strange type of person who bothers to spend some time, even a tiny amount of time, clicking on a “leave a comment” box, in order to leave the comment “I have nothing in particular I wish to say about this. I neither wish to state why it excites me, or why it does not.” condensed down in to three letters.

If you say “meh” on the internet – or in real life – you are a twat.

Maybe it’s a reflection of the web 2.0 culture where idiots feel that every little brainfart they have is of cosmic importance and must be bestowed upon the world (and by god, the world should pay attention to such wit and wisdom). But I don’t understand it.

And yes, the irony of writing that on my own personal blog does not escape me.

One word: Character.

And now, a longer explanation. A discussion came up recently on a developer forum asking what could possibly be done by indie devs in the face of huge companies such as Zynga and Gameloft. These companies have massive resources at their disposal, and have shown in the past that they are not against the idea of being “heavily inspired” by other successful games. If your indie game was a success, what is to stop them from cloning it onto another platform?

The answer to that, for me, is character.

Take the case of this week’s iPhone sensation Tiny Wings. You should buy it, by the way, because it is charming and lovely and has nice simple gameplay that suits the platform. But already reports are coming out that it is based on another game, called Wavespark.

Why have people taken to Tiny Wings, when they didn’t flock (yes, that was a bird joke) to Wavespark? Perhaps you should read my quick review again. The game has character. The graphics are simple but well done, the landscapes are stylised without being offputting, the cheery relaxing music suits it perfectly, and the little chirps the bird makes put a smile on your face. The whole package is charming.

Yes, the gameplay is good, trying to get further each play is compelling, and the single control fits the iPhone to a tee. But people aren’t loving it purely for the gameplay, and that character is what would be difficult to clone.

See also mobile darling Angry Birds. Obviously it’s not the first game with that gameplay. There are tonnes of free Flash games that are essentially the same game. People keep mentioning that fact as if it changes anything. It won’t be the last game of its sort either. But can you buy plush toys of the stars of the other games? Do people make cakes in the image of the enemies? Do people love Angry Birds in part because the characters of these very annoyed avians, and the increasingly battled faces of their pig enemies are funny and charming? Of course.

Or how about Team 17′s classic Worms? Again, not the first or last of its genre. Possibly not even the best. But the game’s sense of humour keeps winning it fans on each platform it’s released on, over more than fifteen years.

And it’s not just small or indie games. Gears of War is often mocked for its ridiculously over the top machismo, but without larger than life characters like Cole Train you would have just had a grey cover shooter with a nice reloading mechanic.

The Fable series also has amazing character. It’s actually one of the few that feels to me like it has been made by the same country developers who made stuff like Head Over Heels and Skool Daze. Where others have run off and been happy to embrace Hollwoodisation, Fable is filled with every regional UK accent you can imagine. It has chicken kicking, blowing raspberries, sweary evil Gnomes, and dressing up in silly costumes. Not for any particular reason, but because those are funny things to do, that fit perfectly into the game’s universe.

The examples go on and on.

If your game has a strong sense of its own character, and players like that character, you will do well and people will not be able to clone your game successfully.

I have been struck recently by the realisation that a lot of game developers don’t like to use the stairs. This isn’t some whacky game design metaphor for increasing the breadth of feeling in your game by heightening the emotion in steps. I’m talking about walking up actual stairs instead of using the elevator.

I work on the fourth floor of an office block. That means eight flights of ten steps. Maybe four times a day, if you leave the building for lunch. It’s not much. But it is still good for you.

Your body probably needs it after all those days sat at a computer, and those evenings of staring into a monitor shovelling pizza and cola down your neck.

It’s been remarked before that you don’t really see many older game developers. Usually this is put down to people wising up and moving to other industries where they get some form of job stability, better pay, and a more favourable quality of life. I’m starting to wonder if it’s not also that a lot of them quit due to ill health.

Sorry, I’ll get off my high horse now (thankfully it has an elevator).

I finished Heavy Rain the other day. I can’t say it felt worth the time it took. I got a “good” ending, apparently. They still didn’t explain why Shaun had a French accent when neither of his parents did, and they lived in America. Maybe they’re saving that revelation for the sequel.

Without spoiling anything, there were just far too many sections that felt like non-sequiturs, and too many bits that in hindsight did not line up with the story properly at all.

At lunchtimes I am currently playing through Metro 2033, which has a nice atmosphere, but is crushingly boring in its first person shootery bits. It also seems to have far too many sections where I have very little control. At first I thought that was just early game stuff, but I’m on chapter four now (out of eight, I think) and it’s still locking me in place for minutes at a time.

Enough people have told me that it’s great that I feel I should press on, and it’s certainly not been a very long game so far – if it continues at this pace I could see myself finishing it, barring any unfortunate difficulty spikes involving hordes of melee-attacking enemies.

Please, developers, stop putting enemies in first person shooter games that charge at me with a low profile, and then melee attack me. They are frustrating and no fun to fight. I spend a lot of the time spinning around trying to work out where I am being clawed at from. Singularity had these sorts of enemies in them as well. They are horribly crap. Melee + fast + low = First Person Shitness.

I must admit, I’m going through a bit of a bit of a period of indifference when it comes to games. I want to find something that knocks my socks off and makes me love it. The sort of feeling I had when I first played Batman: Arkham Asylum, or when I got through the opening sections of Assassin’s Creed 2 and realised that yes – they understood what needed improving from the first and have done it.

I will keep an eye out.

I spent a few hours over the weekend hammering some of the things that I didn’t like out of the Mainly About Games WordPress theme. I’d grown to find it too fussy – too many colours and vertical bars and borders and yuck.

So I have simplified it down a bit. Two main colours – white and that lovely baby blue that I sort of fell in to but actually ended up being quite fond of – and making things line up properly.

You probably can’t even remember what it used to look like just a few days ago. Let alone the fairly awful dark blue look it had before that.

Other than that there is nothing much going on at MAG Towers. I have just this evening worked out how to write and compile Action Script 3 in Xcode, which is exciting for me as it means I can develop using just my lovely MacBook Air, and don’t have to break out the 17″ Dell whenever I want to quickly try something out.

Yes, I think I will tag this update as “stuff”. That is definitely the most fitting category.

(Hey, look what I found languishing in my drafts folder. The first half a sentence of this article is quite comical now. I really am quite shit at blogging! Anyway, here’s the post that for some reason I drafted up but never published.)

Continuing my series of shorter posts about games that I’ve been playing in the past few months, I also eventually got to the end of Darksiders. It’s a game I recommend picking up (especially now, months later, as it’s even cheaper!), as I get the feeling it’s been kind of overlooked. With more marketing push this could have been seen as a classic.

For a start, the storyline felt like something completely new to me. The tale of the fight between angels and demons, with a betrayed horseman of the apocalypse stuck in the middle trying to discover The Truth, was always interesting and kept me going. Even though in real terms it was always just an excuse to finding the next supernatural enemy to stab to death with my latest demonic trinket.

It’s a very ambitious game, with a wide variety of environments, a huge range traversal options that are steadily unlocked, and a massive range of items. Perhaps too wide, some aren’t very useful beyond a couple of obvious puzzles, and that the developers sprinkled those puzzles sparsely suggests that they realised this.

Still, there’s some great stuff here, and you’ll even find yourself solving a dungeon using a version of the Portal gun.

In structural terms, the game follows the strict Zelda theme of “enter dungeon, 1/3rd of the way through get rewarded with new toy. Spend the rest of the dungeon using new toy. Face down boss who can only be killed by using new toy.” It’s tried and tested pacing (especially by Nintendo who just won’t leave it alone!) but it does remove some of the sense of excitement – rather than entering a new dungeon and not knowing what to expect, you have a very good idea right from the off.

Another problem is that it’s just way too long not in terms of the number of locations, which feels just right, but in terms of how large each of those dungeons is. It keeps you in each environment to the point that the place, and the new toy you got there, become tiring. It could have done with knocking a third off each level.

Looking forward to the sequel, especially if the ending’s promise is delivered. (It seems, from what I read since writing this, that the obvious expectation from the ending isn’t what is going to be in the sequel. Shame.)

Almost every news story these days is of a big publisher closing down studios left & right, games with multi-million dollar budgets being cancelled all over the shop, or another safe sequel to a massive hit from last year.

How about you write an in-depth article championing the awesome free games being made on shoe-string budgets by individual developers, or micro-teams, in their spare time?

I know there are a lot of us out there who are trying hard to gain any kind of press at all for our games. We want exposure not because our titles have to sell millions just to break even, but because we love our games. Receiving comments from players who have enjoyed our labours of love makes us really happy and warm inside, and spurs us on to create more.

Everybody loves to cheer for the little guys. Everybody loves playing great free games. The developers will be incredibly stoked you care.

It would literally be an “everybody wins” situation.

If you’d like to read an article like the one I’m talking about here, please spread this post around. Tweet it. Facebook it. Mention it in your regular gaming forums. Send it to the guys who write for your favourite gaming website.

Have you played the new version of Tealy & Orangey yet?

The two main new features are:

• Advanced mode with ten new levels and the added twist of Tealy & Orangey moving in opposite directions.
• Practice mode allowing you to hone your skills on any already completed level. Ideal for perfecting your speed run techniques!

If you play on Kongregate your best times will be saved as well.

What are you waiting for? Go and play it now!

Towards the end of last year, EA Games’ label president Frank Gibeau announced that he thought games with just single player content were dead, and that all games from that point on would have some for of multiplayer connectivity (interestingly, he includes social aspects, such as level sharing, as a multiplayer activity).

There was something of an outcry of players dismissing this idea. Plenty of people still play single player only games, and the healthy sales of franchises such as Fallout add weight to the counterargument.

When you look at the sales of a critically acclaimed game like Enslaved (no matter what I thought of it)I can’t help but think he’s got a point, though possibly not in the way he expressed it.

I think the pricing structure of the games market today has sealed the nail in the coffin of short single-player-only games that offer no reason to replay them.

If I hear that a £40 game is going to last me a couple of evenings, I will either hold off from buying it until it is much cheaper, buy it and then feed my copy back into the dreaded second hand market, or rent it. None of these options is good for the developers, financially.

Compelling single player content takes longer to make than an extensive multiplayer mode. Even a long SP game, such as Fallout 3, eventually runs out of new experiences (it could be argued it runs out of “new stuff to see” quite quickly, and from that point all content variation is delivered in text form) for its players. A well design multiplayer game can offer effectively limitless new play, as the various play styles of players differ and interact in new ways, causing no two matches to be exactly the same. Combined with the player investment techniques that are de rigueur you have a game that can hold a playerbase’s attention for a year, on just a dozen maps.

The question is really one of how much value for their money you have provided a player before they reach the end of the content you’ve given them.

(There is a further point of how much additional content is available for them to buy later, in the form of DLC, but I don’t really want to get in to that, and besides – single player DLC suffers roughly the same time to create / time to play ratio as the main game. Possibly lower as you may be reusing a lot of existing assets.)

As an example, I recently bought Costume Quest, which is a rather charming single player RPG, that took me maybe around five hours to complete. Was I annoyed at its short play time? Not at all, since I’d paid roughly £10 for it. In fact, I went straight to buy the DLC which offered another four hours for something like £5.

Would all single player games sell better if they were split up into episodes like this? “Episodic gaming” was something off a buzzword half a decade ago, but very little came of it. Arguably because very few developers actually produced episodic content in the true definition of the phrase. Telltale is the only one that comes to mind, and they seem to have had some success in the field.

As an aside here, I’ll just define what I mean by “replay value” in a single player game. I’m not talking about “you can play exactly the same game again, but the enemies have more hit points and are more accurate, and you’ll get a new Achievement”. Anyone willing to do that obviously loves your game enough that they’re not trading it in anyway. Likewise, being able to play again to collect arbitrary tokens to unlock a piece of concept art is not a compelling task and reward (though you could at least tie to tokens in to providing further background to the game world, in the same way Bioshock et al do with audio logs).

But the solution is not just to hammer in a simple multiplayer mode. Without a community multiplayer is nothing – literally – and though you can rely on servers being populated early in a game’s life, a few months down the line the chances are they are going to be looking less healthy unless you offer something different from other titles.

In the work time it takes for your team to create a working multiplayer game, they could have been building more content into your single player. Because nobody is going to stick around for another straight deathmatch experience.

I will be interested to see how servers for games like Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood and Dead Space 2 are after half a year. They offer interesting multiplayer experiences which differ from those of the blockbuster FPS games. Is that enough to keep your audience happy and make them feel like they have got value for money from your game?

So yeah, I think there’s definitely an argument that a section of single player gaming is dead, at least at a premium price point.