Minmaxing Life

A couple of weeks ago, Daniel Cook over at Lost Garden was kind enough to write an article about game critics and Soul Bubbles. He is, as always, a lot more articulate than I could ever hope to be and I am very thankful for his kind words, thought I am not sure we deserve them.

I was tempted to react immediately after reading his article but - since I had already given a hot headed interview on this very subject to Brandon Sheffield - I figured it would be smarter to cool down a bit and take enough time to reflect and think it through.

Obviously, everything is still very fresh and I am deeply affected by Soul Bubbles’ fate - especially after witnessing how retailers are treating it (hint: badly). But I believe the dust has now settled enough in my mind that I can draw a few conclusions.

First and foremost, I would like to thank everyone who enjoyed the game, everyone who wrote in to say so and all those who praised it, on and off the internet. This includes anonymous gamers but also reviewers and professionals. Each time we read lines that made us believe someone really grokked our game, we felt relieved and grateful: our efforts have not been in vain. Your support came to us when we needed it most and it helped. A lot.

Now, I recognize Soul Bubbles is not without flaws. In fact, I don’t think I can play the game without seeing hundreds of areas for improvement and it pains me every time I have to confront something I know we could have done better. If only we’d had a little more time or a little more energy…

I also understand that reviews are very much subjective and that everyone is entitled to his own opinion. But then I’ve also always thought reviews should not end with a score. I think it doesn’t make much sense to condense the richness and complexity of the subjective experience a game can elicit down to something as short, dry and definitive as a percentage. It’s also demeaning to the people who have sometimes labored for years on a given project: we are not handing in homework to be graded. If you agree games are a form of art, then you should not agree to their ranking. Who would grade a Picasso? You either like it or you don’t but everyone can see how nonsensical it would be to give 76% to Guernica.

Unfortunately, the games industry largely disagrees with me (with a few notable exceptions). Grades are everywhere and not only do they heavily skew the reader’s opinion, their aggregated form apparently seems to be having a real effect on the industry. And if that’s true, then Soul Bubbles was hurt by the few reviewers that brought its average score just below 80%.

Of course I am flattered when Danc calls our game an “instant classic” but I’m not convinced we deserve it and I honestly think I can deal with criticisms when they are fair and valid. But I still feel I have to respectfully disagree with the two main ones that were thrown at our game and sometimes got us to be heavily marked down:

1- Soul Bubbles is too easy.

The perception of difficulty is so subjective, it is often hard to grasp. Sure, a given individual can find a given game too easy for his own taste but as Danc explained, game reviewers and expert gamers in general are heavily biased in this respect. A game or a puzzle that seems easy to them, might be incredibly difficult for an average player. In Soul Bubble’s case, we took great care in keeping the game accessible to casual gamers. Not because it’s the new buzzword of the industry but because we wanted our girlfriends and our not-so-much-into-gaming-anymore friends to enjoy themselves with it. And from the data from our internal testing as well as the general public reception, I know we at least got that curve right.

However, we did not forget the expert gamers! Difficulty is very much present in Soul Bubbles but it’s hidden away at the edges of the levels - in the form of calabashes. You have to go look for it and, unfortunately, I suspect some reviewers just made a bee line for the exit to get to the end of the game as fast as possible.

But here’s my main argument: it’s a game about bubbles, about finding serenity. It’s a peaceful and gentle experience. It’s just not meant to be too frustrating. I sincerely believe we would have missed the essence of the game if we had gone down this road. We chose to keep the player’s interest alive by focusing more on diversity than on challenge. And I very much stand by that choice. In that light, Soul Bubbles is a very rich game - an amazing feat for a tiny team like ours and something I think we can rightly be proud of.

2- Soul Bubbles is too short.

It’s true that Soul Bubbles is a short game. If you rush through it, you can get it done in 6 hours. On average, it will be completed in 12 hours. But in my opinion, this completely misses the point. First of all, Soul Bubbles is meant to be savored slowly. It’s a game about exploration and discovery: all about the journey, not the destination.  If you visit a country in three days, you won’t get the same impression you’d get if you had spent three months.

Most importantly, the real question, the only question in my view should be: were those hours worth it? Did you have a good time? I’d rather play 6 hours of unadulterated fun than 60 hours slogging through tedious gameplay. The Metacritic score for Zelda phantom hourglass is 90% but personally  I gave up the fourth time it asked me to go down the exact same dungeon… Like so many games, we could have artificially diluted the game experience to make it twice as long but instead we chose to respect gamers and their time. During production we always picked quality over quantity and I also stand firmly behind this choice.

So I’ll wrap everything up with a question: is Saint-Exupéry’s Night Flight a better literary piece than The Little Prince because it is longer and less accessible? Does it even make sense to compare them this way?

Whatever the answer, I personally really look forward to the day I’ll get to play the gaming equivalent of The Little Prince. Even if it is short and simple.

Ben Cousins: Executive Producer - Battlefield Franchise

Ben starts off with a short history of his professional life and how he spent most of it playing Battlefield until he went on at Dice to actually work on the series.

Shows a quite funny movie he used to internally promote the vision for Battlefield heroes. At the time the project was called Battlefield West.

The idea behind the game was:

- Play 4 Free Cartoon Shooter service
- PC only, low system specs
- Launches from the heroes website
- Create, customize and level-up your own unique war hero
- Classic Battlefield gameplay simplified for a broader audience

The idea came from South Korea where many games are free, for PC only, and users buy microtransaction items. The top South Korean Titles as of 10th June 08 are:

1- Sudden Attack (counter strike clone)
2- Starcraft
3- Lineage II
4- World of Warcraft
5- Special force (counter strike clone)
6- Lineage
7- Warcraft 2
8- Dungeon & fighter (side scrolling beat them up)
9- Twelve Sky 2
10- Audition (dancing game)

Were did we start? It all came down to money: ARPU. Madden has an ARPU of 59,99$ per year per user. But a Korean “Play 4 free game” is 3 to 6$ per year from each user. So to hit a smilar margin with “Play 4 free” you need to increase the number of users and cut costs. This reality had an effect on many areas:

- Art direction: Cartoony for low system specs, mainstream appeal and lower cost (reuse of BF 2142 engine technology). Simpler asset generation.

Ben then shows the evolution of concept art on character and backgrounds. They wanted to move away from the typical aesthetics of games about war which are mostly “brown”.

- Game Design: Battlefield has a very simple, fun, core gameplay derived from a physic-based sandbox. The question was how to make this more casual. And there were iron gates that needed to be overcome:

The iron gate -> How they solved it
High system specs -> Cartoony Graphics
First person -> Third Person
Skilled opponents -> Matchmaking based partly on number of hours played
Hard to find matches -> Make matchmaking easy
Hard to learn -> Tutorial, simplicity
Requires high skill -> Less “twitch”-based by including a layer of strategic decisions.

- Backend, Billing, Web, Meta Services:

Designing a Play 4 Free is fundamentally different.

The website is more the half of your user experience. The game is only 2 percent of the effort. You also have to rethink the whole distribution chain. Building the distribution chain is great because you control it but not so great, because it’s a lot of work.

- Deployment of a Product vs Service:
No “release date”, it trickles out over time.

Development impact, you don’t have to make all decisions up front. It’s all about responding to the desires of the community. You can fix things “on the go”. But you can’t bugger off on holiday after you release the game. Think of the hotel business: building the hotel is not the hardest part and it’s only the start.

- PR + Marketing impact:
No “Big splash” release. Who remembers the release date of Youtube or Myspace?

The state of play in the west:
There’s a package goods console market: publishers and press focus on this BUT the online delivered gaming market is NOT up and coming, NOT a future model, it’s HERE.

At this point he showed a slide comparing package good games to web games:

Then he made that slide into a very smart analogy simply by changing the tags at the top of the slide, replacing “Packaged goods” by “Cinema” and “Web games” by “Television”. Ben explained that back in the 1930’s the cinema industry insiders would never have believed television would have such an impact that it would eventually overtake their business as they felt TV was “less immersive”, “lower res” and “shorter”. He argued that we are now in a comparable situation with packaged goods games versus web games.

And I’m certainly not one to disagree…

Media Molecule Keynote - Alex Evans and Mark Healey:

Alex:”I am going to do a lot of rambling about User Generated Content”.

They made their presentation inside Little Big Planet with custom artwork for GDC Paris. They explain they wanted to make a game based on creativity. Show a short history of game plateforms. “The technology improves but one thing doesn’t change: development people.” At media molecule they wanted to have a team the old fashion way (i.e: small and having fun).
Even with two people who have known each other for as long as Mark and Alex (15 years), making a game creates tension. The more people the more fights you get so keep the team small. They decided early on not to have more than 30 people on the team.

Alex: “As an industry we have the opportunity to do more than mimic books. There is a slight misconception that you need teams of 200 people to make a successful game because of the power of the hardware. but in fact many very successful games in the recent past were made with teams of 4 or 5 people.”

Where did the idea come from? The only real answer is “History”.
Mark goes on and makes a commentary while showing a slideshow about UGC starting back from the arcade through to C64, the game maker games such as the “Shoot Them Up Construction Kit”, then Amiga generation and “God Games”, then from 1996 on: the web…

So Little Big Planet is the latest take on UGC.

Alex: “You give people an inch and they make a mile.”

They show an axis:
Easy & simple ———> Complex & flexible
Singstar -> Line Rider -> Echocrome ->Spore
Their background as game designer always tempted them to go for complex & flexible. But they lost users when the tools became too complex. “Every time we removed features, the quality improved.”

Early during development they had a huge argument about a full roaming 3D environment or 2D.
They showed a pre-rendered video that settled that argument in the direction of 2 & 1/2 D.

Second big fight around the tools. Settled it with a video made by Mark. The “doing more with less” meme is thrown in.

They will keep pushing content after release. Even non UGC games are moving to a “support” model. Originally there was a lot of talk about episodic content until people realized that making a small game took 80% of the effort of a final game.

Showing your game early is good because it gives you early user input.

The reviews for Soul Bubbles are rolling in:

“As beautiful as it is joyous to play, as charming as it is fun and as impressive as it is surprising, Soul Bubbles really deserves your attention. (…) It’s one of the purest gaming experiences we’ve had for a long while. (…) It’s beautiful, it’s elegant, it’s clever - if you don’t like this game, you’re dead inside.”
- The Official Nintendo Magazine.

“(…) now and again a developer comes along with a creation that is so well designed it makes everything else look a bit slapdash. Mekensleep is one such developer and its game, Soul Bubbles, is triumphantly good. (…) The design of the levels is bordering on genius. (…) If superb gameplay wasn’t enough, Soul Bubbles looks utterly enchanting too. (…) A game that in years to come will be looked back on as a classic.”
- NRevolution

“A simple and brilliantly executed idea. (…) This is quite simply one of the best games for DS we’ve played for ages.”
- Gamesmaster

“It’s quite amazing how inventive developer Mekensleep has managed to be with bubbles; they’re put to every use imaginable in the game, and new ideas are constantly introduced at just the right pace, all the way up to the final fiendish world. (…) More than anything, Soul Bubbles is just great fun to play with – blowing a bubble around has never been more fun. There is surprising depth to its puzzles, and it’s great to see the DS host such a great and intuitive idea again after months of copycat shelf-filler.
- IGN.com

And in French:

“Ce titre incroyable est un OVNI féérique (…) A la fois beau, intelligent et empreint d’une réelle poésie, Soul Bubbles est de ces titres exceptionnels qui séduisent toutes personnes qui s’y essaient.”
- Le Magazine Officiel Nintendo

“Rare sont les jeux qui m’ont autant emballé sur cette machine. Déplacer cette bulle dans ce labyrinthe est si simple et prenant ! Le titre fourmille de bonnes idées et l’envie de découvrir la suivante est plus grande à chaque fois. Les réactions physiques de la bulle surprennent tant elle paraissent réelles. J’ai été également charmé par la qualité des décors et l’atmosphère générale du titre. La console éteinte, on se sent aussi bien qu’après un week-end à la campagne, loin de la pollution les poumons bourrés d’air pur et frais. (…) Le pari est totalement réussi pour Mekensleep. L’OVNI du mois.
- Console+

And with that, I’m off to Japan…

A few quotes from the previews that are coming in for Soul Bubbles:

“(…) it’s a demanding little game that’s a lot tougher than it initially looks. (…) Soul Bubbles has taken us completely by surprise. The game is dripping with character and could end up being a cult favourite.”
- Nintendo Official magazine

“Soul Bubbles has a compulsive quality to it – no doubt exacerbated by its gorgeous aesthetic design and beautiful ambient score. (…) Mekensleep may well have hit upon the DS’s very own answer to LocoRoco.”
- Edge magazine

“Soul Bubbles is perfect for the DS and has a great sense of style, humour and accessibility for all gamers. This could definitely be a cult hit. (…) gorgeous graphics and a definite ‘aww’ factor.”
- Gamesmaster magazine

“Innovative, original and beautiful. Prepare to be blown away!”
- NRevolution magazine

“The level design and general polish is up there with Nintendo’s own products. (…) The art style is highly seductive. (…) Bitter experience often stops us from making early recommendations when it comes to third-party DS games, but with Soul Bubbles we have no hesitation”
- Games TM

Now this is exactly what I needed to justify my vacations… Thanks so much guys!

J’étais vendredi aux deuxièmes “assises du jeu vidéo” qui, comme l’année dernière, avaient lieu dans la salle Colbert du Palais Bourbon (l’assemblée nationale). Pour être honnête c’était assez déprimant. Malgré quelques interventions de qualité - comme celle de Laurent Michaud - analyste de l’IDATE - qui a donné un bon aperçu des lignes de force du secteur, le ton général était tout de même largement à côté de la plaque.

Entre les distributeurs qui s’imaginent que rien ne va changer avec l’avènement de la distribution online et la ministre de la culture dont le discours laissait entendre que le jeu vidéo allait devoir rentrer dans le costume vieillot et étriqué du droit d’auteur tel qu’on le conçoit en France, l’ambiance était un peu celle de Pompeii avant l’éruption du Vésuve.

Mais une fois de plus, la palme du burlesque est sans conteste revenue à Jean-Claude Larue - l’indéboulonnable délégué général du SELL (syndicat des éditeurs). Il n’a pas hésité à agresser Guillaume de Fondaumière - président de l’APOM (syndicat des développeurs) - en lui reprochant vertement de demander l’assistance financière des pouvoirs publiques. Il faut tout de même oser le faire, quand les membres de son propre syndicat - de l’américain Electronic Arts au français Ubisoft en passant par la britannique Eidos - font la course à celui qui délocalisera le plus vite et le plus fort au Canada où, comme est venu nous l’expliquer un entrepreneur local, les aides peuvent parfois atteindre 85% des budgets!

Je comprends bien que les éditeurs voient d’un mauvais oeil tout ce qui pourrait permettre aux studios de s’émanciper de leur tutelle financière mais tout de même : comment peuvent-ils espérer être crédibles dans leur critique des aides françaises aux développeurs alors qu’ils profitent eux-même de distortions de concurrence tellement plus graves au Canada ?

Ils ont beau jeu d’oublier que le crédit d’impôt récemment voté (jusqu’à 20% pour certaines productions) n’a pour effet que de compenser minimalement la concurrence déloyale dont ils profitent à l’étranger. C’est vraiment l’hopital qui se moque de la charité…

Back in Paris. Yesterday we passed Nintendo’s approval for the EU and today we passed US - both on first try.
This means Soul Bubbles is now Officially Done. Woohoo!

Time to relax… Has anyone heard of a good surfing spot in April? :)

I went to the panel discussion on the Future of MMOs (there’s a good writeup at Terra Nova) with pretty low expectations based on previous year’s experience. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be - mostly thanks to Min Kim from Nexon and because Ray Muzika is not only smart, he’s also a really nice person - but it was still really boring, full of obviousness and corporate non speech.

What I found most striking were the comments Cryptic Studio’s designer Jack Emmert made. Because he - as a developer - likes subscriptions, he went ballistic against microtransactions and made really strong comments against them - insisting that the model did not work outside of Asia (who’s supposedly “resisting subscriptions”).
But then he pretty much lost all credibility when he declared to Kim he was not familiar with Maple Story. I guess he’s also never heard of Habbo and its 8 million sessions per month and 60 MUSD annual revenue on virtual good. Talk about having a severe case of tunnel vision! Also, Jack did not seem to comprehend the crux of the problem is not wether to do microtransactions or subscriptions (heck, do both!) - the real question is about being free to play, giving free access to the game, or not. That is the inescapable trend he is going to have to fight against and it was quite shocking to see how blind he was to it. Interestingly, Min Kim mentioned that all of Nexon’s team are small: Kart Rider was developed by only 5 people and even now is no bigger than 20 people…

To me, the real future of MMOs is about in-browser, free to access and play experiences with a very strong identity (both in gameplay and visuals), developped by a low burn rate team.

At GDC, nothing illustrated this better than the session with Gene Endrody from Maid Marian. This incredible guy builds and runs in-browser, 3D MMOs with the help of his wife. And that’s it. He does everything, from programming and administrating the servers and the forums to modeling and animating. The result is nothing short of amazing: he has 1.8 million unique users every month (with big overlap between the games), the games uses Shockwave which is installed on 59% of PCs and he does monetization via advertising. His biggest constituency is Polish(!) at 19% followed by Americans at 13%.

He has two main products. His recently released Club Marian (a pure social hangout experience) and his better known Sherwood Dungeon (a casual fantasy MMO) and has about 6000 simultaneous players on the site at any time.
He makes heavy use of procedural construction approach (think nethack, rogue): all the environment is procedurally generated. He found out there was a similar power structure between the online and console industry: in the online world the gatekeepers are the web portals. He wanted to circumvent them so his strategy has been to build a network of affiliates with lots of smaller websites. There’s a minimum size for affiliates but he’s kept his linking rules very simple. Affiliates can in turn monetize by doing their own advertizing around sherwood dungeon’s.

All his 3D assets are created in maya or generated in lingo. Distribution model has been very important and procedural generation has been key (kept the download size low). Fraud detection is a huge issue for small companies.

What about customer support? The game is free so the expected level of support is low.

If you have registration, email confirmation and all that crap upfront, you immediately loose 90% of your players.

The other uber cool “future of MMOs” prototype I’ve seen at GDC was on a friend’s laptop right before this Maid Marian session. But shhh, this one is still in stealth mode…

One of my favorite session at GDC is the Experimental Gameplay Workshop, where a bunch of games that are “experimental” in nature are presented.

This year, a number of patterns emerged in what the judges have seen so games were presented in groups:

- Replay

This pattern was all about single player games that toyed with the idea of replaying over your previous “ghost” session.

Cursor*10: i had played this one before coming to GDC. It’s an interesting solitaire game where you use your cursor to solve puzzles and climb to the highest level. You have a fixed number of cursor each of limit use in time but you can play over your previous cursors’ actions. So you’re basically cooperating with yourself over time.

Timebot: same concept of playing with yourself but you control the spawn of your clones. Seems very hardcore once you reach high levels.

Jonathan Blow then made another demo of Braid his soon to be released XBLA game, showcasing the “repeat” mechanic.

The Misadventures of P.B Winterbottom: a flash game (made by Tracy Fullerton’s students) with the aesthetic of old silent films that also plays with the concept of clones.

- Obfuscation

This pattern was about making things hard to understand for the player.
According to Doug Church, it could be obfuscation in the presentation or obfuscation in the gameplay. Personally I’m not convinced by obfuscation as a specific gameplay mechanic. To me all games are more or less opaque and it’s only a question of where you want to stand on the accessibility curve. So all they’ve shown here are games that have crappy accessibility and - although it can be funny for about five seconds - I’m not sure how this pushes the envelope of game design.

Lost in the Static: is a windows game with a very simple (transparent) gameplay but the visuals are completely opaque. This was idea #56 out of Sean Howard’s 300 mechanics.

Wrath of Transperator: (made by the same team as P.B Winterbottom - unreleased?) Your avatar is invisible. You can only judge where you are by environmental clues. It’s a game where the player can be intensely captivated by the interaction but spectators have a hard time understanding what’s happening.

Jeff Minter’s Space Giraffe: (released on XBLA) Jon blow stepped up in defense of Space Giraffe and stated it’s a game that’s not so much about the immediate destruction of enemies and more about management, controlling the situation. Wich is very much opposite of what the visuals convey. The game fights you trying to understand what’s happening.

La La Land 4: A windows game. Totally cryptic. I have no idea what’s happened. Jon Blow said: “One of the delightful thing about this game is that you have no idea what’s going to happen next.” In this given case, I’m not sure if that’s delightful or terrifying…

- User-Generated content or levels.

Next pattern was about games that use content or levels generated by the user.

Line Golfer: A web game similar to Line Rider in that you can draw (and share) your own level and then go golfing in it. Simple and powerful.

Bernie the pyromancer: This was a weird one, down to the exploding cows… You play a fire wizard and you try to burn everything in a little village. I’m not sure I completely understood the gameplay but it looked like some kind of physics based solitaire. I also didn’t grok the relation with user created content/levels…

Crayon Physics Deluxe: This is the upcoming PC game that won the grand prize for this year’s Independent Games Festival. Its very cool looking but the gameplay seems very brittle: sometimes you spend a lot time designing a solution that could work but is broken by the physics’ precision. The nice touch IMO is that Petri Purho, the designer, made it all about finding creative solutions to the puzzles and not so much about finding the most “efficient” solution. So he didn’t include time or scores for example to avoid pushing players in that direction.

Audio Surf: This extremely cool looking game is all about uploading your music tracks and then actually playing a kind of racing/match three game on it. I had read about it before coming to GDC, now I have to play it…

- Two Levels at Once

The last pattern was about playing in two levels or game spaces at one. This is where I found the most exciting games.

Yin Yang: Extremely cute and cool web based plateformer with two avatars each “trapped” in a gameplay space but that can interact with each other through objects.

Shift: Same sort of concept: a puzzle platformer that allows your avatar to “shift” from one game space to another. The main difference is here you control a single avatar that freely moves from one game space to the other. Very nice minimalist aesthetics.

Shadow: A game that is still in development and is about moving between 3D and 2D spaces. The shadow space is in 2D and you need to reach the “green box” in the 3D space. Velocity is carried from 2D space to 3D space. Amazing concept, extremely impressive technologically and probably really hard to play.

Then there was a game standing on it’s own, out of any pattern:

Stars Over Half Moon Bay by Rod Humble - who previously did The Marriage and is also head of the Sims studio at Maxis on his spare time. After The Marriage he couldn’t come up with a new art game idea in 6 month. He thinks it’s because he didn’t care enough about what he was pursuing. Then he saw the stars in the night sky and that gave him inspiration as a methaphore for creativity. First part is on the “organic”, self feeding aspect of creativity and the second part is a lot more about the intellectual aspect of creation. My first impression is that it is much less interesting than “The marriage”: the metaphore does not seem to emerge naturally from the game as well as it did in his previous experiment. But I’ll have to play it to make up my own mind.

Anyone who’s been around me long enough has eventually had to suffer through one of my long winded tangent on the societal impact of technology and the probable advent of the Singularity. So, of course, Ray Kurzweil’s book’s “The Singularity Is Near” takes the place of the bible on my bed stand and it was with great anticipation I headed to South Hall yesterday morning to hear his keynote on “The next 20 years of gaming”.

However, it hasn’t been as exciting as I was hoping for since he basically gave the same speech I heard him give years ago at Siggraph. It’s a quick overview of his central idea - the law of accelerated returns - and its corollary that technological development follows an exponential growth curve. So the keynote went along these lines:

Exponential growth is very surprising and people usually don’t think that way: they make linear projections.

His interest in technology trends came from his desire of becoming an inventor. Timing is essential in building products so he makes mathematical models to project the evolution of trends.

It’s hard to predict the future on a specific project but much easier to do it on trends. He gives all his usual examples Arpanet, computer chess & Kasparov, etc… Then switches on to the democratizing effect of technology on tools of creativity, of production.

Technological trends are predictable, exponential in nature. An exponential trend is very powerful. There will be a billion fold increase in price/performance in the next 25 years. The effects go way beyond technology. It affects everything we care about: health and medicine (RNA interference allows to turn genes off), energy (solar energy efficiency is doubling every year).

He did throw into the mix a few interesting sound bites relevant to games:

- It’s unfortunate we use the name “game” because it makes it seem like it’s all pretend (oh, it’s just a game) when real things happen in game. Just like virtual reality or AI are unfortunate names.

- Play is the principal way in which we learn. We can learn real skills in games.

- Eventually “virtual reality” will be fully competitive with “real reality”.