it lives!

Tomorrow is the first public appearance of our (me and Daniel's) miniature game Shieldbreaker! We're doing beta testing at Linköping Gaming Convention, Lincon, the entire weekend.

Super psyched :D

"There is no try..." - Mr Miyagi

In game design there are few answers. There are however two very good questions:

Is it an excellent game?


Why not?

If you are unable to answer the question early, you are taking a huge risk. Risk in any business is exciting and can pay off immensely, but few afford to fail more than once.

Here comes the hard part; the question is not "Can it become... " or "Is it a good idea..." Is it a good game RIGHT NOW? If you keep on answering these two questions during development until the answer to the first question is "Yes", you barely need a game design document and more importantly, are not wasting a lot of energy due to speculation. Which, by the way, a game design document is. Speculation. Speculation is fun, but not very useful.

When the answer to the first question is answered with a great "YES!", ship the game, get fame, moniez and ladiez, repeat.




And so we can pretend this is an art related blog; here is a discarded sketch for the miniatures game:

quit norsing around

Mo' sketchin. Bit of anatomy study. Except the studying quickly deteriorated into sketching badassery.

one bling to foo ya'll

I made a sketch of the witch king.

being stylish

Been going back and forth about how to do interior art in the miniatures game. I think I'm on to something with this vignette. I'd like to try and push the proportions to something more cartoony.

It'll only be a set of rules, so there is no world building going on. But being an illustrator I must add pictures. Wouldn't want to go too generic even if it is a generic rules set. A few of my earlier attempts at miniatures games have been post-apocalyptic in setting. So if it was set in a world or back story it would be a fantasy version of Mad Max. A bit like me; Not sleek and neat, but fat and scruffy.

(Wow I just found out how to align pics right. Not to use the text alignment tool, but the obscured picture settings that appear IF you click the pic in the editor...)

project red pill - post mortem

January has ended. Project Red Pill has ended. (See previous post.) Sort of... Results were mixed, but mainly positive. The goal I set for myself was to to stop consuming content websites like reddit in order to increase my output of hobby projects. I did manage to increase the time I spent on projects which was great. I also increased the time watching TV and playing games. And cheated a tiny tiny bit a few times when motivation was low. Playing games is OK. It's excellent workout for the brain. TV not so much.

So what was I doing? I plowed through a few GameMaker tutorials in a misguided ambition to finally make a computer game. I learned that my game idea was a bad match to GameMaker. But more importantly I made a prototype for a beer'n'pretzel card game about a space empire. First and second play tests were extremely successful, so we've (my nerd-bro Daniel is on board) escalated plans and resources to publish it through Gamecrafter.com which is a print-on-demand service for card and board games. Finally I've also worked on the table top game, which I've posted about before.

Overall a raging success! I thoroughly recommend everyone to limit your media consumption in favor of creative endeavors. 1st of February I had  reddit binge, like a fat person ending a diet, but since then I'm trying to stay productive. I will continue to resist being a media drone!

project red pill

As of Januari 1st I'm officially enrolled in project Red Pill. Lately my brain has become fat and lazy. I've overindulged in passive internet use. Reddit (thanks Mojangsters for that timesink), Failblog, forums and so on. All these humor sites are a lot of fun, BUT they are nothing but a black hole of time. When you're done you have nothing to take away.  No new value has been added to your person. So just like I tend to feel disgusted with myself after cramming a whole bag of crisps, I have become disgusted by my uselessness. Usually, instead of productively pursuing one of many hobby project, I would excuse myself with being too tired for it. Light redditing however I could do for hours.

Change is paramount. Hence; Project Red Pill. There was this talk over at TED.com. A guy claimed that change can be hard to commit to, because we assume all self-improvement must be everlasting. So his advice was that you can do anything for a month. That is what I will do.

Project Red Pill:

* No browsing content sites or passive info consumption during Januari.

* If I'm to tired for productive work, I'll go to bed.

* Exception; we just got a new TV with lots of channels. Watching with family is considered socializing. Also twitter, because it is not really passive to me.

The name Red Pill is of course taken from "The Matrix," because as you know, it is an allegory of modern consumer society. If you're being fed ads on a content site, you are on the blue pill.

Also I want to show you this sketch of a llama-like alien:

the Kim is dead. long live the Kim

Hard to believe that such a sweet-looking happy little old man was a cummunist dictator.

sketchy

Inspired by the ever excellent Jim Murray after seeing this: http://www.dota2.com/comics/are_we_heroes_yet/

And a found older sketch of some postapo dude:

On another note; blogger (google?) seems to have employed the same interaction designers as microsoft. The current trend of hiding or removing useful features, while also obscuring any useful information and making everyone a "stupid user" regardless of competence, strikes again. It is no longer possible to add images as thumbnails. The fact that thumbnails are the best image-browsing method available since time immemorial, has somehow escaped the designers, who probably is more busy reading hipster magazines on their ipads than using their own shit. 

Now I can choose between small, medium, large, X-large and original. I tried large today. That is apparently an arbitrary percentage scaling of my image. WOW USEFUL!! This way I still have to do everything myself if I want a nice consistent look. Well F that. I'm just gonna choose a different layout every time.

Edit: wtf the pics are thumbs regardless of size UNLESS I choose the small size?? Either I really am a stupid user (quite possible) or I'm being trolled.

Edit2: Something wasn't working properly while I was still using the old post editor. Uploading the previously broken pics has made them clickable. So I guess I can live with this html5 house of cards piece of sh*t editor. Could I please get the pics aligned to the same margin as the text? Or have you decided it looks better like this? 

less pictures, more grumpy

Today before leaving work, we had a chaotic debate following the days' testing of our game "Scrolls." I love debating design. But... I tend to have better arguments and clearer thoughts AFTER the debate. Probably because at that point you don't have other people arguing against you.

Anyways... Part of the debate was about the inclusion vs. the exclusion of a certain feature. It doesn't matter which feature. The thing that bothers me is that after quite a few years of having similar debates, I can see a pattern. I seem to always find myself being alone in the corner wanting to EXCLUDE a feature.

It is probably natural to want more. More features equals more game, which equals better value, right? Wrong! (In enough cases to be held as a guiding principle.) I've actually had debates where it was unclear whether a feature was needed or not, and found myself arguing against the stakeholders to spend less of THEIR money.

Consider Hollywood movie studios. Their business is older and they seem to be able to hold on to their seniors, so chances are they have a better grasp of the creative process than the game biz. When they look at their product, and it is perceived as confusing - THEY CUT STUFF OUT OF IT. They don't add tutorials, tooltips, icons and buttons. They know that exposition is a bad thing and should be kept to a minimum.

I believe this to be true for game design and game production as well. I know it is true for illustration and visual arts. When a painting is unappealing, you should start by considering if you can remove something. A Mark Twain quote comes to mind; "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”

The people in the game dev business are generally not idiots. They usually don't want cluttered games, high learning thresholds and long tutorials. Still, being passionate specialists, they are reluctant to consider budgets. I don't blame them. Budgets are boring. Games are about fun, challenge, adventure, problem-solving bla bla bla.

Maybe true about GAMES in theory, but in practicality game DEVELOPMENT is another beast altogether. IT IS ALL ABOUT BUDGETS. There is the actual budget of course. Then there are budgets of calendar time, man hours, marketing, specialist knowledge and performance limits.

On top of that you have some less obvious. Your audience, although an endless source of joy, also have budgets. I'm not talking about their allowance. They have budgets of acceptance. Acceptance of cluttering, of unintuitive interaction, unpolished graphics, lack of interpolation. Their willingness to think hard about a puzzle is budgeted. Their tolerance of repeated failure is budgeted. A very scary fact is that YOU DON'T KNOW HOW BIG THESE BUDGETS ARE! Some games (hello Minecraft) have proven that these budgets can be greatly increased when the motivation is high enough. Unfortunately that is "the philosophers' stone" of game design. If you could be sure you've gotten enough motivation into your design, your problems are over. Humans are tricky buggers to understand...

Hold on for the big finale:

* Budgets have a very unforgiving internal logic. If you spend less, they will be easier to meet.

* Therefore the burden of evidence must lie with those who wish to spend.

I hope, if you've read this far and agree with the logic, maybe next time I won't be as lonely in the corner of reductionism.

I will now proceed to posting a link to this on twitter. If this means my colleagues (past and present) reads this and go "WTF it is us he's talking about! It's been (X hours, months, years), are you still arguing, moron?" - Then the answer is Yes. No. Actually I've been thinking to write this down for a long time, but just thought of the Hollywood analogy today. Also I tried using fewer parenthesis and more screaming.