Mind the game

I´ve been thinking for a while about the correlations between how we play our games and how we live our lives. I´ve known lazy people who would spend 8 hours trying to find a serial or crack for a game, or somebody with the shortest span of attention imaginable that can play a shooter for 20 straight hours without loosing a point of concentration.
I have rather basic theories about it, but I would like to go on and try to make a game that helps me find the answer to it.
Maybe collecting data about how the players interacts with the game for a few minutes, I´m still thinking about this whole thing.

Financial Crash – Game Over

In 2008, with de9a18studio, we made Financial Crash- Game Over, a small strategy game. We were in a time when games seem to pour out of ourselves like sweat. Characters, gameplay, story, gags, voices, music, everything seemed to find it´s way in our non stop production line. This one was born, as I recall it, from an impulse. I thought of making a game in 3 days and that was all we need to get started.
I started drawing and animating while Matias typed away the code. The idea and gameplay evolved at the same time. The gameplay was simple, nothing very original really. What was special about the project was it´s mood. The background music was an important ingredient, the mellow melody combined with the fast paced action and the topic of the story, as I see it, made a beautiful mix.
We signed up the game for the “CODEAR – Single Boss” competition in ADVA, and got a good deal of interesting comments about it. We came out in 4th place, which was a unexpected, but the best thing by far was the discussion that the game generated among the users of the forum.

If you have 5 minutes to spare, here is ” Financial Crash- Game Over.”

Understanding Tower Defence

I´m designing a tower defence game, so yesterday I played some of the more popular ones:
“Onslaught”
“Turret Wars”
“Bloons Tower Defense 2″
“Desktop Defense”

By far, for me, the most addictive one was “Desktop Defence”, I got really hooked the first time I played it long time ago, and now the same thing happened, I couldn´t leave it. Wave after wave I saw how the enemy units got blasted by bullets, laser beams and all sorts of things, how my army got bigger and stronger, adding units and upgrading them.

And now I´m trying to understand why it´s so addictive, such a simple gameplay.
As I see it, the main reason is that we just love to see things grow. The other thing that we love is discover.
(Statement power ENGAGED)
“Grow and discover are the two main forces behind every game ever made.”

Tower Defence just cut off the remaining skin and give us an overdose of growing. Yet another example of game-drugs.

Game Design Secrets – Part 1

When designing a level, for a platformer for example. I just start drawing, most of the times the first sketch with just a few modifications is the one that ends up in the final game.
And you do too! There´s no point in lying.

I have yet more awful and shocking trues about game design in the vault!.
Stay tuned.

Money vs Everything else

We have a limited amount of time on our hands, it forces us to make constant decisions about how to use it.  Sometimes we need to decide whether to spend time making money or learning, and that is one of the most problematic situations I find every day.

Everyone wants to improve himself in a certain area (game design in my case, but that´s irrelevant to the point), and it involves a lot of experimenting, reading, constant learning that takes time and effort. From time to time a client will approach me with a specific job that requires a particular skill, maybe illustration or animation. If I take on the offer, I´m spending time doing something that adds nothing to the improvement of my game design skills, but gives me money.

Is a never ending story, and I haven´t found the solution yet.

Jack of all trades

What do you do when you want to do many things? You want to design commercial games, and learn from it, You want to make small flash games, You want to experiment with Unity, You want to do some 3d modelling and animation, You want to write idea pitches and game design documents of all sorts.

You write design documents for your small flash games, you do a project in Unity modelling yout own assets, you continue your day job designing commercial games and in the mean time try to pitch something new to start developing it the same day you ship your current project.

Then you go to sleep and get some rest, because all that work is nothing compared with trying to balance it with a personal life. That takes real energy! And that is the most importat part of all, to know when to stop and think about what you are doing.

Can I make a game?

Some time ago I tried to make a game from nothing, without a concept or idea Just opened flash and started working, it was a great experiment and I discovered many things on the process. This is the outcome.

Lots of questions.

Addiction-Based Game Design by Jeff Vogel

A quote from Jeff Vogel´s recent article about Addiction-Based game design:

“If a game doesn’t need to save your progress or scores to be fun, it’s fun isn’t addiction based. It might be addictive, but it is that way simply because it’s fun.”

It´s worth a good reading.

Energy rush

When you abandon a project, you get your “energy boost”, the one that comes with starting something new. For some people it´s a drug, they start projects all the time and never finish anything because they need the rush of starting something, feeling full of energy, ideas, everything is a potential hit. Until they start actually working on it, that´s when they came up with yet another genial idea! Thinking that “this is the one”. Over and over again.

Basically it´s about the learning curve. When you start investigating a new field or idea, everything moves really fast, you feel like you are some kind of genius cracking every code here and there, understanding the theory and applying it like no one before you has, the universe is the limit, you will be the best in the field! “How did I waited so long to start doing this?!” Until you hit the first bump, maybe some little problem that slows you down. But you need to move forward, it can´t wait!, “I´m stuck”, “I can´t do this!”, “How is this possible?!”, “I was going to be the best in the field!”, “Such a promising beginning!”, “It´s impossible!”, “Damn this thing! Why me?! Oh God! Why me?!”.

The learning curve has become a little flatter, and so it does the enthusiasm in most cases. The “energy boost” that propelled the fast paced movement in the early stage of the project empties, and if you don´t have a back up energy tank, you´re doomed.

I use to be an addict to the energy bust. I´ve been clean for the last year, five months and fifteen days… one day at a time.

Make an idea work in a real world

It´s hard enough to come up with an original idea, try to put it into words and make it work. But that´s nothing compared with trying to pitch it to the people with the means to make it a real project.

You´ll have to water it down, change it, twist it, fire it up and blow it in parts, reconstruct it, paint it in other colors, pait in back to it´s original ones, expand it, condense it, make a businessman like it, make an ordinary man like it, make the wife of a farmer like it, etc.

I´m living that right now. An idea that was born from emotion it being changed and twisted constantly to adapt to a market that works on tight formulas. At first, I was annoyed but it. Now I know, sometimes, being able to know the heart of the idea and keep it alive throughout a long process of modifications is the most important thing when trying to do something new. If we can do that, half the way is done.

It´s about bringing an idea to the real world. Everybody can have brilliant ideas that they alone comprehend, the magic resides on knowing how to traduce it to a language that everybody understand and can relate to.