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I went through and upgraded the site and added a bunch of security features, but I didn’t have anything worth saying anyways. Also: still lazy.

I played around with Mr. Robot a few weeks ago. Initially, it was quite appealing even though I couldn’t quite explain why.

Mr. Robot is a pretty straightforward mix of SNES-era console-RPG style turn based battles and platforming that emphasizes box puzzles.  The sci-fi wrapper is probably the most appealing part, and it’s chock full of references. However, I haven’t felt compelled to finish the game even though it appears to be pretty short.

I had quite a bit of fun at the start of the game when I was sorely outmatched fighting battles that I was supposed to avoid before I had an actual party. Making progress took a lot of effort and I was constantly walking on the wire, always on the brink of death. Resource management was really important, because if I screwed up I was going to end up burning more heals than I could afford to purchase. The problem I ran into is that the level curve is too shallow. Once I got a party member (and a healer at that), the game became really easy. I found out I was one level away from max in one of the two types of levels that progress simultaneously.

As I progressed through the game, my party got stronger… but the fights really didn’t get harder. The “tough” guys that I was fighting alone at level 1 are the common guys for my full, high-level party. It’s only introduced a single tier of new enemies that entire time, and those aren’t that much stronger. This creates a dreary feeling of monotony, as every fight is the same (and trivially easy). If there was more variety and growth in the enemies then I’d probably have finished the game by now.

I’ve started messing around in Space Rangers 2 again. It’s a fun turn-based space game in the vein of Elite and Privateer. It has a mash up of all sorts of different types of gameplay, ranging from the traditional fighting and trading to RTS (not the game’s strength) and text-based adventures.

For example, my new, severely outmatched pirate had to land on a hostile planet to escape a pursuing bounty hunter. Once I landed, the authorities caught me and threw me in jail. I tried to make a break for it by starting a fight on the prison bus and overpowering a guard, but I only made it past a couple guards once I got my hands on a gun. I ended up in prison, where I spent time fighting, building up relations with different factions, conning people out of money and tricking the warden into thinking I was a rat. Ultimately, I used the equipment I conned out of the warden to escape from the prison after one month of my three month sentence.

I used my new found freedom to buy some new weapons for my ship, and head out searching for the bounty hunter that chased me into exile. Since I thought the weapons probably wouldn’t be enough, I assisted another pirate along the way by helping him fight off some patrolling ships. Once I did that, I used my new found favor to recruit him as my wingman at a reduced price, then I paid for information on where I could find that bounty hunter. My wingman and I chased him across three systems, took him out and sold off the parts from his wreckage.

That kind of interesting scenario is pretty common in Space Rangers 2. The prison scenario was a text-based adventure, and the rest came from the surrounding in-world events that got me caught in the first place.

Which is why I haven’t posted much this month. I really don’t have any time on a workday, as my typical day goes like this: wake up - jog - get ready for work - breakfast - drive to work - work - drive home - jog - dinner - miscellaneous task - sleep. Lately, that miscellaneous task is going over one section of my ION presentation a night. I have a long commute, leaving there’s no time left in the day. So, I need to queue up things I want to post in order to reliably get anything on the site during a the work week.

So, I’ll try to build up some stuff over the weekends.

When it comes to doing my job, there are really two things that I want. These are more logistical concerns, as opposed to the things I want in order for my job to be fulfilling.

#1: Iteration

Every design task should include a degree of iteration. Code shouldn’t get released without thorough testing and debugging. Design shouldn’t be any different, it just requires a different kind of testing. In some ways, design is like trying to predict the future, but with far fewer variables. While designers try to account for everything that’s going to happen with a system, it’s simply unfeasible to expect to get it perfect the first time. And that’s assuming that the system design can be implemented to the letter of the design - in reality, the design is likely to change as it gets implemented and it’ll need adjustments as a result.

#2: Tools

Given enough time, a skilled carpenter could build a house without any of his specialized tools. The finished product might be acceptable, but it’d be inferior to the alternative - and it’d cost more to build. Tools are a vital part of most game development jobs, and design is no exception. There should always be a robust process for creating and maintaining tools. While it’s possible to designers to build many of the tools they need on their own (albeit typically slower than with developer support), that requires allotting extra time for the creation of said tools. I’ve done some crazy stuff in Excel - Kevin teases me for building an artificial file diff in Excel, although that wasn’t very complex. Still, there are tons of cool things I could do with the resources that are already at my fingertips - Excel, SQL, etc - with sufficient staging time and no developer support. Most of my spreadsheets are hastily created to be functional, but not elegant. Tools should be elegant.

There was a time when I would have been willing to do that all in my free time. That time died a gruesome death after I got tired of working myself into the ground (~80hrs/wk avg for 3 years) and decided that had to stop. While I still spend a lot of my spare time researching design-related topics, I consider that more of a general-purpose study that’s pertinent to my career. Perhaps it’s a fine line, but the same doesn’t apply to learning how to do a particularly awkward function combination in Excel to target a specific math problem.

It’s all the same

It’s easy to succinctly summarize the preceding paragraphs: I want the time to do things right. Really, that’s all that my mini-list needs. And what’s the one thing you don’t have in game development? Sufficient time. This isn’t a knock against my employer or any of the companies I know, it’s just something that I consider to be an unpleasant reality in the games industry.

My lecture, Retention Mechanisms in MMORPGs, is scheduled for 9:00am - 10:00am on Tuesday, May 13.

That’s probably the first time slot of the conference. Will anyone be awake?

I haven’t felt like spending the time on any of the more substantial posts I have waiting on the backburner, so I’ll tackle another simple one: game commentary!

In my current quest to seek out more obscure (at least to me) games, Jets ‘n’ Guns is one of my most recent conquests. The title really says it all: it’s a side-scrolling game where you fly jets and you have lots of guns. Everything you destroy is worth points, which turns into money that you can use to buy and upgrade ships and guns. It’s a challenging game, and it’s simplistically absurd fun.

There’s a lot of content in for a small game, and it constantly compelled me to devour content to get new stuff.  Aside from solid side-scrolling shooter gameplay, it sure doesn’t hurt that Jets ‘n’ Guns has the coolest arsenal of guns this side of Ratchet & Clank. I was particularly fond of the gun that shoots a chessboard-like hexagon, the one that launches groups of flying, target-seeking zombie skulls and the one that creates a vortex on each side of you and pulls bullets towards you, so that it can hit enemies from behind.

It only played in 640×480 resolution, but it actually looked pretty good even though I had it stretched across my 1680×1050 widescreen. It’s a solid $20 purchase if you want some twitch-based gameplay.