Minmaxing Life

Jozani Forest: its red mahogany trees, its mangrove but mostly its endemic red colobus monkeys.

(Pics coming soon)

In truth, Stone Town should be called Fusion City. It’s a fascinating mix of cultures: African, Arab, Indian and European influences intertwined everywhere. From the rooftops you’ll realize that the mosque, the indian temple and the christian cathedral are no further than 200 meters apart. One day you could eat Swahili food, the next Indian curry and the day after, pizza. It was a real pleasure getting lost in the narrow streets, passing by beautiful Zanzibari doors only to find the open sea instead of the expected market. On the way, I crossed many locals playing bao, dominoes or checkers. I could see myself staying here for a while…

(pictures coming ASA I find bandwith)

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.

…I get to see the sun rising on the Eiffel tower. :)

Now all I need for a perfect day is to get a croissant on my way to GDC Paris!

Today I was in the city of Nara - about half an hour by train from Kyoto - where I visited the Todai-ji, a temple which is said to be the largest wooden building in the world and is home to a huge 15 meter bronze Buddha.

I also spent a little time at the local museum but mostly walked around Kasuga-Taisha, a Shinto shrine dedicated to a goddess who is said to have arrived riding a deer. Deers have therefore been declared sacred and roam the premises freely, in search of treats from the passerby. Also, lanterns can be seen everywhere as the shrine is host to Mantoro, a bi-yearly festival where three thousand lanterns are lit.

I think I’ve just had the ultimate Tokyo experience…

About half an hour ago, northern Japan was hit by a 7.0 magnitude earthquake. There were a few casualties. I was woken up by a loud squeaking noise coming from the windows. At first, I thought it was the window cleaning guys. But then the squeaking got even louder and the whole building started to sway gently. Then harder. I was on the 29th floor of the Southern Century tower in Shinjuku and it felt like I was on a rocking boat. The drawers were opening and stuff falling out of place in the room…

A-MA-ZING!

…can you have lunch at a “dog cafe”, were the owners have a small sandwich while their dogs feast on designer cookies while waiting for their beauty session at the dog grooming shop. I even saw an impeccably dressed guy spoon feed his (pictured below) chihuahua. Then he let the dog lick him on his open mouth. Then, before leaving, he placed it inside a huge Louis Vuitton bag apparently custom designed for this kind of usage.
I swear, it’s all true.

Only in Japan can you go to the Village Vanguard in Shimokitazawa and buy a whole picture book on sea slugs (umiushi as they are called here). And it’s a beautiful book, too!

Only in Japan can you have sushi like you’ll have at Kyubei.

Only in Japan do you see girls like those at the Harajuku bridge.

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…