Here is one of the most amazing glimpses into the behind the scenes of video game development I’ve ever seen: deconstructulator

This NES emulator shows how Super Mario Bros. sprites and graphics are stored both on the cartridge and in active memory. It’s really cool.

As a bonus, you get to play the first level of Super Mario Bros. and be reminded of how it’s one of the finest examples of a tutorial level despite (maybe because of) having no text, videos or scripted events. Watch how everything you need to learn is carefully broken down into logical bits, each one building on the last section of the level.

So good.

David Edery on how hard (or easy) you should make your games:

Too many of us are still holding onto design philosophies that were born in the days of quarter-gobbling arcade games. Too many developers get most of their design feedback from QA teams made up of hardcore gamers who have played a game way more than most normal people ever will. Making a game “just hard enough” (be that very hard or very easy, depending on the person playing) is one of the primary keys to fun — and, I think, an under-appreciated way to significantly increase sales. It deserves more attention from our industry, even as we search for ways to incorporate meaningful, educational, and remarkable consequences back into our games.

I’ve long been a fan of the approach of having multiple difficulty levels at once in the same place, using things like optional badges, multiple levels of success and bonus objectives. The simplest form can be found in most racing games, which allow you to pass a race in 1st, 2nd or 3rd place.

Medals, optional missing objectives, secrets, collectibles, level (and game) completion percentages – all of these allow you to have more than one level of difficulty on the same map at the same time, which can substantially reduce QA time and other design problems that come from a situation where you need to run the same content more than once during testing because the rules have changed in some way. If advanced players have the same experience as regular players, except that they skip less, a lot less can go wrong.

David Sirlin’s excellent analysis of Donkey Kong Country 2’s secrets was the first writing that got me thinking this way. Time and time again, working on small games with tight deadlines and short QA cycles, we took advantage of this technique.

This is not to say that it’s impossible to do dynamic difficulty well. People smarter than me are already working on better automated ways of adjusting difficulty in real time and presumably, they’ve solved the QA problem. I wonder how they’ll solve the emotional problem. Some people love being frustrated by games and some people hate them. Until game systems can detect how mad you are, the system will have to err in one direction or the other.

A fixed difficulty with a range of levels of success is the best of both worlds. Instead of dynamically adjusting difficulty is that it allows the player to decide for themselves how difficult they want the game to be, in real time, in a highly contextualized way. If the one section is too frustrating, then they can ignore the side missions and just get things done. If another is going really well, they can reach for the gold. If it’s going poorly but they are still enjoying themselves, they can reach for the gold anyway.

Plus, it makes it easier to compare the size of your achievements.

When you work on a product for too long, you get used to all of the little workarounds you need to do in order to use your software. Part of you is aware that they need to be fixed at some point, but then deadlines loom and memory fades and bugs become features.

The best cure is external playtesters. Fresh eyes, attached to bodies that have never played your game before. People who are as new to the experience as the people who will pay money for your product. In a perfect world, this means having the resources to build a multi-million test centre like Microsoft did for Halo 3 or building it in to your design process like Valve does and running playtest sessions every week or two.

Failing that, it’s a good idea to have people in your company who are not part of the day to day production of your game try a build. An outsider to the project doesn’t know or care about WHY you made the compromises that you made, they only care about their experience of the product. You should be using the same techniques as you’d use if it were external playtesters. Valve has a good PDF that covers this.

What put me in mind of this was a rant by Bill Gates about his experience trying to download Moviemaker in 2003. Most commenters seem to be taking potshots at Microsoft or at Gates, but it’s actually a great example of why having outside eyes is so important. Without knowing them, I am pretty sure that the people who worked on Microsoft.com were all pretty intelligent. Having worked in the trenches of software development, I can only sympathize and cringe along with the poor developers when Gates says:

So I gave up and sent mail to Amir saying – where is this Moviemaker download? Does it exist?

So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated.

“What if we’re all just brains in a vat?”

Before becoming the premise of the (increasingly disappointing) Matrix Trilogy, this was one of the more popular Epistemological essay questions for undergrad Philsophy students the world over. “If we got ourselves put in a situation where all of our experiences were simulated, would they be real?” and then “If you could arrange to put yourself into such a simulation, would you want to?”

There is a lot of hand-wringing in Epistemological circles about whether or not certain experiences or knowledge are ‘genuine’. This involves a lot of strange thought experiments with painted albino zebras and twins sitting in front of complex arrangements of mirrors. Being a dedicated gamer by the time all of this came to my attention, I had a lot of trouble understanding what the fuss was about. There are already millions of humans choosing to spend a large chunk of their leisure time having crudely simulated experiences. The first company to patent the Holodeck is going to clean up.

The media and our disapproving parents and friends also already know the answer to the first question: No the simulated experiences are not real, get outside and read a book. The latest warrior to toss her hat in the ring on the side of all that is good and genuine is Susan Greenfield.

She sets out a catalogue of repercussions: the substitution of virtual experience for real encounters; the impact of spoon-fed menu options as opposed to free-ranging inquiry; a decline in linguistic and visual imagination; an atrophy of creativity; contracted, brutalised text-messaging, lacking the verbs and conditional structures essential for complex thinking. Her principal concern is how computer games could be emphasising what she calls “process” over “content” – method over meaning – in mental activity.

Greenfield is an actual scientist and so enlightened by her argument, I humbly apologize to all the world for the part that I played in the imagination holocaust that is game development. I promise to turn my back on the simple spoon-fed menu options of The Sims, Grand Theft Auto and Fallout and devote myself to the genuine free-ranging inquiry of Independence Day, Sex and the City and anything by Danielle Steele.

Falling behind on my completely arbitrary and non-enforced posting schedule. So here is a link to a classic Old Man Murray article. Who Killed Adventure Games.

Last month, James Portnow’s Game Design Challenge was about reinvigorating the WWII genre. In a nutshell, it was: make it a WWII shooter, make it exciting and new, and make it cheap. The results are quite good. I’m especially a big fan of the photographer game. I’ve wanted to play more games like that ever since I fell in love with Beyond Good and Evil.

My attempt stuck closer to it being a shooter than a lot of the winning entries. Mechanically, I think that you could run my idea as an expansion pack to just about any of the AAA WWII shooters. But where these other games emphasized the comraderie, glory and heroism of one of history’s greatest tragedies, I wanted to emphasize the absurdity and confusion of being on the ground.

ULTRA

In 1939, with the help of intelligence supplied from Poland, British Intelligence broke the ‘unbreakable’ Enigma code that the Germans used for almost all of their cryptographic communications. This was a goldmine of information, which carried with it one serious problem: it often couldn’t be used! If Allied forces acted on knowledge they could only have gained from the Enigma decrypts, the Germans would conclude that the code had been broken and change their system. If the new system was impossible to break, the Allies would be cut off from a vital source of intelligence. Before the stolen information could be used, cover stories needed to be constructed. A scout plane would be sent on an otherwise unplanned patrol and ‘happen’ to come across a German convoy. Congratulations messages would be sent to (fictional) informants, thanking them for passing information. Most of the time, these cover stories could be arranged remotely, but sometimes, they needed a more personal touch…

In ULTRA, the player takes control of a (probably) fictional squad of soldiers tasked with protecting the secret of Bletchley Park. Sent on extremely dangerous missions characterized by strange constraints and absurd orders, the squad of elite soldiers progresses through an action packed campaign across the secret battles of WWII.

Tone and Setting

The battles of ULTRA are behind the scenes events. Players will be the secret heroes of WWII, asked to take on crazy missions and perform covert operations that allow the newsreel heroes to look good. A kind of stoic British stiff-upper-lip sarcasm will pervade the characters and events. Mission debriefs will be period-piece newsreels of the official story which will be in sharp contrast to the true story that the players live out. ULTRA will be a sly-cynical counterpoint to the starry-eyed jingoism of Medal of Honor.

Sample Missions

The missions of ULTRA will be characterized by restrictions designed to maintain a cover story of one kind or another. Instead of kill-them-all run and gun, missions will be a mixture of combat and a kind of global puzzle-solving. We’re not talking ‘open the lock’ puzzles. We’re talking “how can I ensure the Germans identify me as an Italian informant and yet live to tell the tale”.

Pre-D-Day. Intelligence indicates that the Germans are beginning to suspect that we will be landing in Normandy. Take a team, armed as a scouting party to Pas de Calais and land covertly. Encounter German patrols, engage them, but don’t kill them all – they must live to tell their superiors that we were there.

The Listening Post. An allied commander got cocky and sunk too many convoys near the African coast. We need to make it look like we’ve had a listening post in the area for months. Get your team in to an abandoned church covertly, make it look like you’ve been living there for awhile and then have the Italians “discover” you. Your escape should be as spectacular and noisy as possible, but do try to make it out of there alive…

The Warning. A German speaking special operative will be assigned to you. Attack and secure a German radio post without any messages getting out. Then maintain control of the post while the operative delivers misinformation to the enemy. Be warned, there are regular German supply runs to the post. You’ll need to ambush them before they can discover the truth.

The Prisoner. A group of soldiers including an Allied commander with some knowledge of ULTRA has been captured. Disguised as French freedom fighters, mount a rescue operation, discover who he might have been interrogated by, find and kill them. Bring the commander back if possible, otherwise ensure that he’ll remain silent forever. Remember, the French resistance doesn’t have access to the greatest weapons and they don’t speak English…

The Submarine. A U-boat has shipwrecked off the U.K. coast. This is an opportunity to collect critical code books and other information. Capture and secure the sub from any Germans still on board, collect any information you can and then destroy any evidence that you were there. Before it finishes sinking.

Gameplay Mechanics

In support of the cover story missions of the game, missions will be characterized by critical objectives that constrain the player’s actions. Enemy awareness will be a critical factor in most missions. It’s no good dressing up as resistance fighters if none of your victims live to tell command who (they thought) you were. Players will operate on a constant knife edge, trying to keep their people alive and fight effectively while behaving in an authentic manner for the story they are trying to convey to the enemy.

To this end, mission planning will be a critical part of the game play. Players will be given options of different starting points and will have to balance squad load out and equipment between efficiency for the job and believability. If members of the squad are injured, they’ll need to be rescued or killed to prevent information falling in to enemy hands.

Keeping Costs Down

By combining this new awareness mechanic with scripted mission constraints, we will be able to have a wide variety of scenarios without too many different assets. Combat will be at a smaller more intimate scale than most WWII games, allowing us to have simpler AI and avoiding a lot of the costs of a larger scale game. The nice thing about the approach of using known mechanics with different rules of engagement means that a lot of the core gameplay will be a solved problem, minimizing iteration of fundamental gameplay elements.

Doomed to Failure?

The problem with attempting to make a subversive war game is that the people who showed up to play your game don’t want to be called jerks for wanting some escapist fantasy violence. Arguably, this is part of why Blacksite: Area 51 didn’t really work out. It was a middle of the road modern war shooter which seemed to be upset with you for wanting to pretend to be a heroic soldier. ULTRA might let you be a little more heroic, but in a lot of ways it risks making that same mistake.

First Person Shooter, might not be the right vehicle to get players to think about this particular story.

I don’t normally link to Dilbert, but this is a pretty much spot on explanation of the Developer / Publisher relationship.

I first learned about Harvey Smith years ago, when I was fanboying about Deus Ex and reading everything I could about how the game was put together. Smith went on to head the in-some-ways-better in-some-ways-worse sequel, Invisible War and then more recently and famously worked on BlackSite: Area 51, notable more for the “it was so fucked up” mini post mortem than anything else.

Years ago, before they were called blogs, Smith maintained a site at Planet Deus Ex (who remembers the “planet” brand”). It hasn’t been updated since 2004 (and before that, like 1998) but it contains a lot of gems about good design. Witchboy’s Cauldron.

In particular, Distinct Functions in Game Units and Features Without Interface are really worth reading. His Half-Life review is also really good and a blast from the past.

This speech by Clay Shirky is really, really good.

I was being interviewed by a TV producer to see whether I should be on their show, and she asked me, “What are you seeing out there that’s interesting?”

I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus–”How should we characterize this change in Pluto’s status?” And a little bit at a time they move the article–fighting offstage all the while–from, “Pluto is the ninth planet,” to “Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system.”

So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, “Okay, we’re going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever.” That wasn’t her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”

It seems like the key to being a tech columnist is having discussable opinions about things. Knowledge is for the sissies over in the reporting department. Making pronouncements of either Doom or Ultimate Glory for some new device is the kind of thing that puts (something I like to call “asses in the seats 2.O”) links in the blogs. It is in this spirit of prophecy for page views that Brian Caulfield of Forbes asks whether or not the Apple iPhone could kill the Nintendo DS. Showing the kind of visionary spunk that gets you employed at one of the top business magazines, Caulfield doesn’t let the fact that a clear answer, “no,” already exists.

It’s a good gambit. Like small town residents cheering whenever their name is mentioned on the Tee Vee, the industry, perpetually suffering from “hey we’re relevant too” syndrome, gets excited when one of the big players mentions us. Here is my prediction about Forbes’ prediction: lots of gaming sites will link to it and then it will turn out to be utterly wrong. Things start to go badly in the early paragraphs.

The Nintendo DS has had a good run, too, dominating the market for handheld gaming gizmos despite determined assaults by Sony and Nokia .

The DS didn’t HAVE a good run. It’s HAVING a good run. There are over 70 million of them out there right now. The PSP is doing well too, with over 30 million units sold. But to describe the sad joke that is the N-Gage – a failed Gameboy Advance competitor / phone that launched in 2003 and may not have even sold a million units – as a “determined assault” by Nokia is to severely misunderstand the market.

Apple is the first to master a pair of tricks that have made Nintendo’s latest products so compelling–a touch-screen interface and the ability to pick up on motion. The key difference: Unlike Nintendo, which has created a gaming console with a motion-sensitive controller and a touch-sensitive handheld gaming system, Apple has crammed both capabilities into its iPhone and iPod Touch.

Leaving aside motion sensing, which the DS doesn’t actually have, Caulfield’s argument is that the iPhone has a touch screen which the DS also has but you can download new software on to the iPhone, and he heard that some companies were making games for it, so it’s a DS killer.

Let’s compare them for real.

The DS is a rugged little single purpose gaming system that retails for $130 in Canada. It has two screens, including a dedicated touch screen and dedicated control buttons, plays GBA games as well as DS titles, has build in local wireless networking for multiplayer gaming as well as a connection to Nintendo’s ‘it just works’ worldwide multiplayer service. It is supported by brands such as Mario, Pokémon and Final Fantasy. You can find it at just about any department store in the world and it’s loved by kids, casual and core gamers.

The iPhone is a multi-purpose device which retails for $400 (minus contract subsidy). It has a single large screen (lord help you if you drop it), no local networking, no wireless gaming service and no library to speak of. In order to buy one, you need to sign up for cellphone service and in order to buy and download games you will need a credit card and an iTunes membership. It is not a device for grubby handed kids, Nintendo’s bread and butter.

If there is any direct competition to be had, it’s between the iPhone and Sony’s rumoured PSP phone. They’ll (probably) cost about the same, and both are convergence devices meaning that for a slight premium, you can get them do to several things that you don’t really want.

It’s too late to kill the DS. The DS is a runaway success. iPhone gaming might have a chance at killing some future Nintendo handheld, but I wouldn’t want to start mouthing off about it. Much as Sony learned when they went after portables, Nintendo is much, much smarter than you think and they know games very, very well.