This is what’s (still) wrong with the games industry today.

Three pages, generating over three hundred comments, about which console version of Crysis 2 has slightly better shadows. Good grief. The most telling line comes in the second to last paragraph:

The crucial thing is that both are phenomenally attractive games

:facepalm:

A couple of posts ago I mentioned that I was really getting in to playing Words With Friends on my iPhone. It’s an asynchronous version of Scrabble, an idea so perfectly suited that if someone hadn’t already made it you’d be suspicious of why not.

It’s already managing to annoy the crap out of me though. Which is a shame.

One thing that is particularly annoying is just how buggy it is. I mean, it’s Scrabble for flip’s sake, how can you put so many bugs in to it? And not just bugs in the mobile networky side of things – I could forgive moves occasionally not registering when people are playing on devices that will have intermittent signal – but bugs in the back end. Games sometimes just go missing and vanish from the current game lists of one or both players. There’s nothing you can do to recover it if that happens, just start again. And it’s not terribly uncommon.

Graphical bugs too. I once had a game display all of the letters tiles in the right places, but all completely blank. Or have had the tiles in my hand displayed at randomly scaled values with the letters at strangely offset positions. I have put tiles on the board, then thought better of it and moved them back to my hand, except copies have stayed in play.

It really is quite a mess.

Then there’s the random letter picker. I think this is an interesting situation, and no doubt someone with more psychological grounding than me could tell me exactly what it is. When I’m playing actual Scrabble, and put my hand into a bag to pick out some random letters, I will often end up with rubbish that can’t make a good word. In these cases I curse my luck (probably out loud) (and with quite a strong curse).

In Words With Friends if the random letter picker gives me a set of barely usable letters (for example the “aaaooiu” from a recent game) I think the computer is being shit at giving me letters, and should be made better.

Apparently the developers of Puzzle Quest had the same thing. Players thought that their own good moves were down to good luck and skill, whereas the computer was clearly cheating if it got a particularly good move. The devs swear that the same random generator is used for both. In the end they made sure the computer was unable to give itself randomly great chain moves.

I think Words With Friends needs something similar. Though obviously there is a limited pool of tiles available, where possible it should try and ensure at least a couple of consonants and vowels are in your hand.

There are a couple of other features that I think would be nice to include.

Having more than two players would be great, for a few reasons. It would cut down the number of simultaneous games I;m playing as I’d play against groups of friends together, rather than individually. It would increase the social aspect of the game, which I find quite compelling. And finally it would reduce the number of times you get the high scoring letters.

On average you’ll get the Q, Z, X and J every other game. Over enough games it’d eventually even out at having two of those letters in every single game. The first few times you place a Q on a triple letter score, or get Z on a triple word, you get a little endorphin rush. Yay, I did good! After doing this for the twentieth time, it’s dull.

An options screen would be nice too. Yeah, unbelievable, isn’t it? In this day and age I paid for a game that doesn’t even have an option to turn off its sound effects. Eurgh.

Now, I think the amount these things annoy me is partially my own fault. Over-exposure. The light that burns twice as bright lasts half as long, or something else equally dramatic and inappropriate. Well I’m sorry, but if the makers of Words WIth Friends hadn’t intended you to have ten games on the go at the same time, they shouldn’t have allowed it.

Oh yeah, and it’s also annoying me that the bus journeys I used to spend reading Sherlock Holmes on the Kindle app are now spent trying to work out where to get an extra couple of points out of that W tile.

So I think I am going to cut down on my habit. Accept fewer game requests, and not play the games I am in as often as I have been doing. It’s for me own good.

Today has brought some excellent news. Well I say news, but really it’s just confirmation of what I have known (and if you’re honest with yourselves, you have all suspected) for a long time.

Metacritic has started aggregating individual developers based on the scores of their credited titles. And as a result have said that I am awesome. Not just awesome, but officially awesome, with the cold hard numbers to back it up.

Look.

Let’s put this into a bit of context: I am better than Hideo Kojima; I am better than Will Wright; I am miles better than Shigeru Miyamoto.

Send your well-wishes, employment offers, cash monies, and virgins to the usual address.

(In case it isn’t clear, I am entirely joking here. I’m poking fun at Metacritic’s terrible idea of rating people based on the review scores of games that they worked on as part of a huge team of developers. I honestly don’t see the point in what they’ve done. It would be pointless even if their credits lists weren’t incomplete – no GTA: Stories games on my entry – or broken up – pity my alter ego. How can any system that says that I am a better developer than Shigeru Miyamoto be worth anything at all to anyone?

Though obviously I’m still going to put it on my CV.)

I’ve had quite a busy time of it recently in game-playing land. Possibly in an attempt to put off working on my next Flash masterpiece, or maybe because I have stumbled upon a selection of games across different formats that have kept me busy at all times of the day.

And what are those games?

Well, let’s start with the crappest. Starwars: Force Unleashed 2 on the 360. I had this on my rental queue, as I had sort of half enjoyed bits of the first one, and wanted to see if they’d improved it at all. And they kind of have. It’s still largely bound by the issue of being set in the Starwars universe, where Jedi and Sith are pretty much unstoppable by regular soldiers, resulting in an array of odd solider types that are either immune to your lightsabers or your force powers.

But they’ve generally glammed the whole thing up presentation-wise, and it rockets along at a blistering pace. So much so that even if you’re just average at it, like me, you’ll have finished the seven or eight short levels within a couple of sessions. And there really isn’t much reason to replay.

It also has a few shockingly poor boss encounters.

Next in order of budget is de Blob 2, also on the 360. If you don’t fall in love with this game’s style then there is something seriously wrong with your brain, and you’re probably going to end up being the sort of person that puts cats into bins.

It has some issues with the camera, and sometimes it doesn’t really explain what it wants you to do very well, but lovely cheerful music is playing, and you’re colouring in a grey world, so you don’t really mind so much. About as close to uppers as ames can get.

I’ve been spending my lunchtimes playing Torchlight. Again, 360. I bought this for my laptop on Steam bloody ages ago, and recently was pretty stoked to see that it had unlocked the Mac version at the same time. Giving it a quick blast on my new toy I thought “you know, I really should put some time in to this”. Then they released it on the 360, where I would say it controls even better.

It’s pretty much a perfect match. The only thing is I have to play it at work, as my home TV is too far away for the ridiculously small text to be anything like readable.

Finally, a couple of iPhone games have been filling in the gaps.

Steambirds is a game I only became aware of when its author wrote a few excellent blog posts about his methods for earning money from his work (it started out as a Flash game, and those tend to make very little money, you see). You know that game where you have to land planes at an airport by dragging flightpaths around for them? Well imagine that, but based around dogfighting, and you have a rough idea of what you’re getting. It really is very excellent.

Last, but not least (certainly not in terms of hours) is Words With Friends. I got in to this quite late, I think everyone else is already playing it, but asynchronous Scrabble playing on your phone is every bit as compelling as you could imagine.

There are a few areas I find it disappointing – you can only have two players in a game, for example, and I wish they had improved on the completely random letter selection by trying to make sure you always had a mix of vowels and consonants (and I don’t care if that offends some Scrabble-purist sensibilities you might have, a hand full of O and U when your score is rapidly slipping behind your opponent’s is no fun).

I’m FreakyZoid by the way, if you’d like a match. I seem to hit roughly 300 points a game, if that gives you any indication of skill level.

Anyway, there you go, a quick round up of what has been keeping me busy.

Making games isn’t all just just fun and games. We all know this to be true. Or at least I’m guessing you do – I have no idea why you’d be reading this blog if you don’t have at least a bit of interest in the games industry. I hardly ever write about anything else.

A few things have happened today that made me wonder if we need to do a better job of getting this information to the future generations of developers though.

Firstly, there’s this list of Bafta Young Game Designer nominations (and I apologise for linking you to that Electronic Theatre website, where good user experience goes to die. Their title bar is a fucking Flash animation, for Christ’s sake). This is not too bad, in fairness. The kids have to come up with a game design, and the best ones are picked out.

My problem with it is in the part that says one of the competition’s aims is to “help young people understand the different roles within video game design”. Look down at the list of roles that the kids gave themselves. There is a team of “Idea Generator”s. The best team by far though is the one that consists of a series of “executive” and “senior” this and thats.

I can understand the argument that hey, don’t be a Scrooge, they’re just kids let them give themselves all the stupid overblown job titles they want. But one of the aims of the competition is to help them understand the proper roles required to make a game. And these kids are mostly school-leaving age. The Executive Gameplay Designer could, in theory, go and work at a developer in the next year. I wonder if he would put that title on his CV?

(This is actually a bit of a pet hate of mine on CVs. People with little to no experience giving themselves over the top job titles to make themselves sound better. “CEO of AwesomeGames” is indeed an impressive achievement for a university graduate. I will definitely be less impressed when I look in to AwesomeGames and find out it it’s your blogspot site that exists purely to list what achievements you have unlocked. Just stop it, unless you’re Zuckerberg you’re not impressing anyone. And for some mysterious reason I never see his CV applying for junior design roles. Odd that.)

There’s also a video doing the rounds at the moment wherein a plucky young “ideas guy” is berated for wanting to work in the games industry by a grizzled veteran. Again, I apologise for the link, as it’s an Xtranormal generated thing and hence fairly rubbish. Lots of game developers are sharing it though, having experienced the situation it describes.

FInally there’s a charity auction underway to win a day’s work as a QA tester for EA. At the time of writing it’s just shy of £700. Obviously someone is very keen on having this experience, for whatever reason.

It all got me thinking about how we should be educating kids as to how to best approach the industry, as a lot of them obviously a very strong desire to be a part of it. My nephews love games. They play a lot of games. They think it’s ace that I make games for a living. They haven’t got the first clue about how they might make a game, though.

When I was their ages I was typing game listings in from a magazine or book, tweaking them, and learning how games were put together. I kept making my own games, and when I decided I wanted to do it as a job I already had a lot of knowledge of the fields involved. At the age of the kids in the first competition there, I wouldn’t have presented an idea with some good characters. I would have had a playable demo.

I think it’s our duty not to just brush off these “ideas guys”, but to show them where to focus their energies so they have real, employable skills.

I have two main rules when I’m writing an email. The first isn’t important right now*. The second is not to use capital letters, bolding, or coloured text.

There are two uses I’ve seen for those things. The first is to be an angry, shouty dickhead. Obviously it’s worth not being that guy. The other is to highlight the important bits of the email.

If your mail has so much information in it that people might miss “the important bit”, you’ve written it wrong. Perhaps consider that people don’t need all of the other padding. If you think the extra background info might come in handy, think about sending it in a separate mail afterwards, so that people who are interested in the whys can read it, and those that aren’t can file it under b.

The benefits of this are pretty clear to me. You get your point across clearly. You aren’t wasting people’s time reading stuff they don’t need to know and won’t find useful. And you don’t run the risk of coming across as a dickhead.

* Write emails as if you aren’t going to send them, then send them anyway. You will be more honest in your communication, and I think that’s a good thing.

Or “How Your Level Designers Ruined Your Game”.

(Though perhaps that’s not fair, since there is more wrong here than mere level design.)

I wanted to love Mini Ninjas. I’ve mentioned in the past that I like platform games, and the art style and combination of platforming & combat really appealed to me.

And first impressions are pretty good. But it all starts to fall apart as soon as you start to venture beyond the tutorial. There are a lot of little things that are wrong with Mini Ninjas that conspire to make it a less than fun experience, but the primary issue is scale.

It feels like the level designers never actually played the game. Your miniature ninja has a movement speed that fits his diminutive size, but the levels are huge. It takes so long to get anywhere that you get bored long before you get there. The design team obviously realised this, and gave you a “dash” ability, that gives you movement at a much less frustrating speed, but for whatever reason you can only do this for a short amount of time, before you must wait for your stamina to replenish.

Why?

It’s not even as if the huge levels are in the style of Ratchet & Clank, for example, and filled to the brim with interesting places to explore and things to do. The levels are sparsely filled. You will spend minutes at a time following a linear path through trees, fighting the odd group of half a dozen enemies that are half-heartedly patrolling, and occasionally spotting a hidden route off to the side to go and explore.

You’ll be put off from exploring though, because of the amount of time it takes and also the lack of excitement in the items you find. Rarely you will get a new spell, but most of the time you will find ingredients (that you can eventually use to create health potions and the like) or other TACOs.

The other great level design crime is the hideous spacing of checkpoints. They are rarely spaced around the level, and each can only be activated once. If you die most of the collectible items you found since the last checkpoint will be un-collected, so it becomes a rather strategic decision as to whether you use a checkpoint, or try and survive for a little while longer. Or indeed, if you should go ahead and try and collect some things, then come back to this checkpoint if the tiring movement speed doesn’t get to you.

As I said just before the start, it’s unfair to say that everything that is wrong with the game is in the level design (other horrible things include having to shake trees & bushes for a few seconds to get health pickups, which is fine in theory but utterly tiresome in practice, the inclusion of fishing with some utterly arbitrary rules as to where your character will deploy his fishing rod, and also having a tutorial item that says “switch to your bigger character to take out this large enemy” then having the large enemy be able to kill my bigger character in one hit), it’s just that that was the final straw that broke my “can I be bothered to keep playing?” back.

Still, I liked that the enemies were all animals under an evil spell that reverted back to wildlife afterwards. A nice Sonic touch.