Blog Title: Lost Garden

Tidbits from the garden

A few odds and ends have collected in my inbox lately.

Video of the Princess Saving Application is up!
All the videos from the night are posted up on OfficeLabs.com. My talk starts 10 minutes into the first video and lasts approximately 30 minutes. There’s also a bit of Q &A after all the talks finish up. You can get the original slides here.

• The store and the acquisition of the various rods adds a great sense of exploration and progression to the game.
• The gameplay improves substantially if you give your fish a small dash of intelligence so that they move towards your lure if it is in their sight.
• Making the game winnable. There is a story arc to the game and it feels incomplete if you don't let the player finish.

• http://tinmantex.blogspot.com/2008/11/ill-atomize-your-face.html

• http://www.buschnick.net/Personal/2008/09/ninja-peas.shtml

Project Horseshoe 2008: There and back again

I’m writing this on the long flight back from Project Horseshoe 2008. The last bittersweet night, we stayed up till five AM playing games and talking about games. The conversation shifted from the slow death of games as we knew them, to fresh games that will change the world, to the little tips we use to thrive each day. There is something distinctly surreal about chatting quietly with such an intimate knowledgeable group during the wee hours of the morning, there on a lonely porch in the uncharted depths of Texas. And yes, there were indeed baby racoons.

This year, I took a risk. If you’ve been following this blog for a bit, you know that I’ve been working on skill atom techniques for modeling gameplay. I’ve written about it. I’ve used it myself. There has even been a talk or two. Yet, aside from a few furtive emails with other happy heretics, I’ve never had a chance to do the following:

1. Explain the model to a crowd of natural skeptics, working designers who have been successfully building games for years.
2. Get them to tear it apart.

The cautionary tale of the secret paint formula
I’m reminded of a story that Norman Rockwell used to tell. He once became good friends with a fellow painter who was famous for his rendering of luminescent, sensual skin tones. The painter used a secret formula for his paint and he guarded it jealously from potential imitators. When the painter died, he willed his greatest gift, his secret paint formula to Rockwell.

Rockwell excitedly tried out the formula, but ultimately found it disappointing. The paint was too slick and difficult to control, so he gave up on it and instead fell back on his own preferred techniques. The real secret had never been the paint formula. It was just one little piece of the painter’s vast organic, highly individual process. The real secret was the intuitive wisdom that comes from making a thousand paintings. Sadly, such a thing is not transferable to others. When he died, his specific way of creating paintings died with him.

Are skill atoms the same thing as the secret paint formula? Are they a glossy coat of theoretical hand waving that only works for the people who invented it? Many people I’ve talked with see ‘game grammar’ as nothing more than a time wasting intellectualization of a fundamentally intuitive activity. I went into the weekend with this thought very much at the forefront of my mind.

Why stop there?
If all we had done was validate or invalidate the skill atom model for simple games, it would have been a useful weekend. But by god, this is Project Horseshoe and people are nothing if not psychotically ambitious. To up the ante, our group decided to apply skill atoms to multiplayer games. I’ve never done this.

How do you model a deeply psychological behavior like bluffing? Gifting? Competition? Collaboration? Goodness! I didn’t have a lot of answers prepared for this topic and honestly expected that the skill atom model would immediately collapse under the weight of all the crazy things that happen as soon as you add two or more players to a game design. All it would have taken is one smart designer to raise a single counter example and my fragile model would burst apart, defeated by reality.

Some questions that I had included:

• Could we even begin to talk about multiplayer with skill atoms? The alternative is that this is a model that is limited to only single player experiences. That would be like coming up with a model of physics that worked for one ball in a vacuum, but wasn’t useful for something useful like say…building bridges.
• Would the system scale to complex systems? Often when you use a diagramming technique (like UML or state diagrams) to understand real world projects, the resulting diagrams becomes so convoluted that the model does more to confuse than to illuminate.
• Would the system be useful to designers during every day work? It is much easier to come up with a academic system of analyzing games that works best if you are an ivory tower dweller who can devote hundreds of hours to breaking down each interaction into pretty diagrams filled with obscure invented lingo. However, I’m looking for utilitarian tools that can be applied in that critical 10-minute gap between playing a prototype and deciding what to try next.
• Can this system be taught to other designers? Like the secret paint formula, most game models I run across are only useful to their inventors. If I can’t observe other designers applying the model successfully without my intervention there is something horribly wrong with the approach.

We ripped the skill atoms apart. We analyzed multiplayer M.U.L.E. We looked at charades and then took on football and buffing in MMOs. We used skill atoms to prototype a new multiplayer game about gifting using a bag of plastic Indians. At some point, not so long from now, our group will come out with a report. In that report, we’ll be blunt about what we found. What worked? What was flawed? The results are fascinating.

Our team’s report will be one of several reports to come out of Project Horseshoe by groups of game designers just as crazy and inspired as we were. If any one of these reports starts gaining momentum, the world of gaming as we know will change. It turns out that moving our industry forward isn’t about complaining. It is about getting smart people together where they have the time and the space to think. Grab a beer (Aventinus Double Bock, no less), join the mind meld and use the vast pool of centuries (!) of game design experience to come up with real solutions. Then follow up again and again and again.

In that spirit, I can't wait to share our final report with everyone.

Time for some much needed sleep, chock full of dreams.
Danc.

PS: Warm kudos to George, Linda and Teresa for putting Project Horseshoe on. It is obviously a labor of love and is utterly unique compared to the other events and conferences I’ve attended. If you ever get an invite, don’t hesitate to go.

Fishing Girl: Game Prototyping Challenge

• Extend an invitation to any Seattle developers who would like to participate directly in the Mystery Project.
• Share some Mystery Project graphics that we’ve made this summer part of yet another delightful Prototyping Challenge.

Winter Mystery Project
The Mystery Project is an innovative small Flash MMO that experiments with many of the design concepts I’ve been writing about on this blog. We meet up every Sunday at a local coffee shop and share what we’ve done and what we’ve learned. The project is the main focus, but I put a big emphasis on helping everyone on the team develop new skills and explore exciting ideas. If you are in Seattle, our meet up has become a rather unique opportunity to explore true next generation game design.

The team is pretty solid, but I’m looking for at least one additional, talented programmer. The project is in Flash/Flex with the server-side game logic written in Java.

Being part of the team means a serious time commitment. Expect to put in at least 10-15 hours a week. Making games needs to be your hobby and your passion.

If you have solid Flash/Flex/Java programming skills and you live around Seattle, drop me a note at danc@lostgarden.com. Ze Mystery Project lives (at least for the winter)!

Fishing Girl Prototype Challenge!
Due to the ‘coffee-shop mentoring’ model I’ve got set up for the Mystery Project, there are dozens of talented programmers who live outside of Seattle who can’t participate in our weekly chats. This makes me sad. So I decided to share some of our graphics as part of a brand spanking new game prototyping challenge. Free graphics + new game prototyping challenge = Happiness.

Fishing Girl is a simple fishing game played with one button. It illustrates a design pattern called sequentially linked mechanics. Often when you try to simulate a complex exercise like fishing, you can’t easily create a single game mechanic that captures the entire experience. Instead, you string together a series of activities. Each activity is simplistic by itself, but in sequence yields a good approximation of the complex experience. The fishing game is split into the following activities:

1. Casting
2. Positioning the lure
3. Hooking a fish
4. Reeling in the fish
5. Scoring the fish
6. Buying new equipment.

Each section should take 1-3 evenings to prototype in Flash. String them all together and you have a fishing game. The nice thing about this challenge is that it is all about bite sized chunks that are easy to build and iterate on.

The Wife Test (How Prototypes are scored)
My wife, as I mentioned in previous posts, is quite ill and I’ve wanted to do something nice for her. She absolutely adores fishing games, so Fishing Girl is designed for her. Any prototypes that someone is kind enough to make will be played by my wife with me watching her reactions intently. Luckily, she doesn’t find this overly irritating. :-)

In order to capture her casual gamer feedback, I’ve added a simple scoring system for this challenge. Each section of the game is worth a number of points. 50% of the score for each section will be whether or not my Bejeweled/WiiFit-playing wife finds the prototype to be ‘fun’. This is Miyamoto’s “Wife Test” applied in a quite literal fashion.

I’ll still be giving out the LostGarden Medals and still, no one has won the epic Gold Medal. It sits out there, tempting and shiny, just waiting for the right prototype to provide 15 minutes of fun. This challenge will last two months. But if something comes in later, I’m always happy to take a look and offer comments. Just list a link to any prototype in the comments section of this post.

The setup (10 points)
The player is a small bear-like creature, the Fishing Girl who sits at the edge of the ocean. She has a fishing pole, a glowing lure on the end of the pole, a money count and that is about it. In the ocean are numerous fish of various sizes that swim back and forth, but we’ll get to those later.

Casting (10 points)
Casting the lure out into the ocean involves two clicks:

1. If you click your button once, the girl will pull back her pole to cast.
2. If you do nothing, the pole will return to the default position.
3. However, if you press a second time in the middle of her swing, she will cast the lure outward into the ocean.
4. The closer the second click is to the peak of the swing the further the lure travels.
5. When the lure hits, a number is placed at on spot on the ocean where it lands. This records the distance and lets you know exactly how far you cast.

Casting acts as a simple timing mini-game.

Help text (Bonus!)

• Click to start casting
• Cast!

Positioning the lure (20 points)


Positioning the lure in the water is the centerpiece of the game. You'll be spending a lot of your prototyping time here. :-)

• When the lure hits the water, it starts to sink downward in an arc. When it starts out, it sinks almost straight downward. The tension on the rope pulls it inward towards the player, hence the arc. We don’t have time to model the complex line physics, so instead we say that the lure moves along an arc of a circle whose radius is defined by the distance from the tip of the pole to the point at which the lure hit the water.
• Holding down the button reels in the lure. This changes the radius of our arc, but does not change rate at which the lure is moving along the arc.
• The empty lure, unencumbered by fish reels in quite quickly. Using this system, we can now place the lure at any point within the sea.

Positioning the lure acts as a timing and spatial skill mini-game.

Hooking a Fish (25 points)
In the ocean there are fish. In order to hook a fish, you must place the lure in front of the fish’s mouth. The fish will lunge forward and become hooked. The entire time, you are carefully timing the slow downward arc of your lure. There are three pieces to this mini-game.

1. The Fish
2. The Lunge
3. The Lure

The Fish (10 points)
Fish are objects in the sea that move back and forth in predictable patterns. Fish come in different sizes, rarity and movement patterns.

• Movement: Back and forth. There are others patterns such as circles or swarms, but that would be extra.
• Size: Small, Medium, Large, Extra large.
• Rarity: Common, uncommon, Rare, Very Rare. This is used during “Scoring the Fish”

Fish are spread throughout the water with more valuable fish located further from shore. Try to have a good mix of big fish and small fish. You can start testing with one fish, but ultimately, you should have 10 to 20 or else the game won’t be very interesting.

The Lunge (10 points)
Now that you have your fish floating about, you can implement catching them.

• Each fish has a collision box in front of its mouth.
• If the lure enters the collision box, the fish will move forward towards the lure and attempt to become hooked.

The Lure (5 points)
Lures come in different sizes: Small, Medium, Large. The size determines which size fish you can catch:

• If the lure is too small, it will be snapped and the cast is over.
• If the lure is too big, it will be ignored.
• If the lure is just right, the fish will be automatically hooked.

Help Text (Bonus)
We display help text at the appropriate moments

• Position lure in front of fish!
• That fish was too big for this lure!
• That fish was too small for this lure!
• You hooked it!
• Reel in!

Choosing which fish to hook acts as simple tactical choice where the player is asked to pick the most optimal outcome. The time pressure of the moving fish and lure makes this choice interesting.

Reeling in a fish (20 points)
Once you’ve caught the fish, you need to get it back to the surface. Reeling in the lure works the same as before but the larger the fish, the slower it comes back up. Reeling in the fish is an exercise in keeping your fish away from other, larger fish that will happily eat your fish if it comes their way.

• Fish still go for your fish if it appears in front of their mouth.
• If they latch on, they take a bite out of your fish.
• Three bites and you lose your fish. Each bite also reduces the value of your fish.
• If your fish makes it to the surface of the water, you’ve caught the fish!
• Reeling in the fish successfully acts as a timing and spatial skill mini-game.

Everything up to this point has been training for the player. Expect to spend considerable time here balancing, iterating and making this section feel good.

Reward for catching the fish. (5 points)
When you catch the fish, a small celebration animation plays that shows you the fish that you caught. There are several pieces to this segment.

• Revealing rarity
• Awarding Money

Revealing rarity (2 points)
When the fish is held up by the fisherman, the fish that you’ve been reeling in is revealed to be either a common (1), uncommon (2), rare (3) or very rare fish (4). Each type of fish has a distinct image associated with it.

• The rarer the fish the less likely it is to appear.
• A text label appears that say the name of the fish and the rarity. For example “Ancient Shoefish (Uncommon)”
• Bonus!: If you want to get really fancy, you can display a simple text modifier to each fish that also modifies it's value. For example "ancient" increases value by 50% while "skanky" reduces value by 20%.

Awarding money (3 points)

• The value of the fish is also displayed. A simple scoring equation might be size * rarity * modifier * 10. Feel free to play with the values to get the right balance.
• The amount of money the fish is worth is then added to the piggy bank counter that has been sitting on the screen this entire time.

The revealing of the modifier acts as a gambling element that keeps the outcome interesting of each cast exciting until the very last second.

The store (10 points)
Floating out in the sea are various markers that represent item upgrades. If you hit the marker exactly with your cast and you have enough money, you will purchase them. Otherwise, your lure will bounce off and sink as expected. These artifacts do the following:

• Bronze rod: Your basic rod. It casts a short distance off shore.
• Silver rod: Cast further
• Gold rod: Cast even further
• Legendary Rod: Cast far and reel in heavy fish quickly.
• Small Lure: Catch small fish.
• Medium Lure: Catch medium fish.
• Large Lure: Catch large fish. Note that there is no extra large lure, so there are always larger fish that pose as obstacles.
• Bomb lure: Explodes and kills the first fish that touches it. Even if it is a very large fish.
• Boy: Far on the edge of ocean is a Boy. He is inordinately expensive. This is how you win the game. And for the record, he is indeed, quite the catch. (What happens when you use an explosive lure on the Boy is up to your discretion...perhaps this is another way of winning.)

Bonus: You start with three small lures. When a large fish breaks your line or steals your fish, the lure is lost. At this point, you need to either buy more lures (which are expensive) or stop playing for the day. If you want to get fancy, you have some method of switching between lures. Otherwise, you can simply replace your current item with the most recent acquisition.

The store acts as a simple meta-game that encourages you to keep fishing in order to advance.

Progression (Bonus!)
As you catch more fish, the ocean gets more and more empty. This adds to the difficulty of finding fish. Fish always stay in approximately the same area until caught. Players will note where fish are located and be able to maneuver into position on subsequent casts.

If you wait long enough, more will respawn. If you fish out all the fish, there are no more fish left and you get a simple message “There are no more fish left in the ocean. There will never be any ever again.”

Design notes
The game is about spotting a high value fish, maneuvering your lure into position while avoiding the bigger fish and finally maneuvering your fish back through the landmines of larger fish.

In essence, Fishing Girl is Frogger using a polar coordinate system, a frog that insists on drifting to the left and only the ability to move forward.

Conclusion

So those are the rules! I've created this graphics this time in Illustrator and I've taken pains to make them appealing to Flash developers. Let me know if I've got the formatting right. I'd love to see some Prototypes of Fishing Girl playing in a browser.

So download the graphics and have fun! As with all prototyping challenges, this is a grand exploration of a new play space and there will be all sorts of interesting surprises along the way.

• Download Flash Project (.FLA CS3): This is an import from Illustrator into Flash. There are no animations, but this might be useful if you don't have access to Illustrator.
• Download Adobe Illustrator (.AI CS3): This has the original artwork. From here you can go to .XAML for Silverlight or bitmap.
• Download FishingGirlPNG.zip: Bitmaps versions of all the images used.
  
• Download FishingGirl.swf: A swf export of all the vectors. This is good if you don't have CS3. You may have to dig a little to find what you need, but everything should be in there.
  

Best of luck! If you are intrigued by these graphics, you'll love what the Mystery Project is turning into.

take care
Danc.

Update 11/1/2008: Added bitmaps and swf of all images.

Lostgarden Podcasts

• http://industrybroadcast.com/tag/lostgardencom/

take care
Danc.

PS: I've also added a link on the side bar named "Podcasts" in case you need to find the Ryan's site later. He's got all sorts of tasty stuff there from Jamie Fristrom and others. More keeps coming every week. Ryan's on fire!

The Princess Rescuing Application: Slides

Last Thursday, I gave a talk on game design to the local Seattle chapter of the IxDA, an interaction design group. About 100 folks were in attendance and the catered finger food was downright delicious. Other speakers included George Amaya, who spoke about recent research on social/party games, and Mark Long, CEO of Zombie. Mark gave a lovely presentation on how narrative and storytelling immerse players. His new game looks gorgeous.

My talk was on building an application that rescued princesses. The goal was to give interaction designers some insight into how game design might be applied to the domain of more utilitarian applications. The talk was recorded and should be up sometime this week. When it appears online, I'll link to the video from this post.

Here are my slides both in PDF format and as the original PowerPoint.

• Mixing_Games_and_Applications.pptx
• Mixing_Games_and_Applications.pdf

Theme and game design

Recently I was chatting with some friends about the role of 'theme' in game design. Theme, in this discussion, was the setting of the game, be it fantasy, sci-fi, military, etc. At first blush, the typical game designer's use of theme appears a bit primitive.

1. Limited range compared to the wide variety of themes in movies or books. Games recycle a half dozen major themes or in some cases invent their own surrealist themes that make little sense outside the context of the game. Books, despite being grouped into narrow genres, have explored many thousands of powerful, evocative settings. You have books about bored European manuscript editors exploring the bizarre world of the pseudo occult and you have books set inside the mind of a quadriplegic. The disparity in variety is intriguing.
   
2. Crudely applied. Theme is applied in broad strokes at the beginning of many games, but almost always plays second fiddle to interesting game mechanics. Goombas are mushrooms, but this matters little beyond the fact that they are squat, match the scale of the world and can be squashed. If a novelist lazily integrated a character into their book's theme the way that game developer do on a regular basis they would never be published.
   

Rules of Productivity Presentation

How do we get more work done? It is a question that every manager and every passionate worker faces. Yet, for the most part, teams operate on gut instinct and habit. The results are less than optimal.

Over the years I've been collecting small pieces of research on various factors that actually seem to improve productivity. I've assembled eight of these experiments into a PowerPoint presentation. Feel free to use the graphs and data within to spread these practical ideas throughout your own teams.

Topics covered include:

• The idiocy of prolonged overtime
• The unintuitive connection between doing more and making better products.
• Ideal team sizes and work environments

• Rules%20of%20Productivity.pdf
• Rules%20of%20Productivity.pptx (Apologies for the pptx file)

Shade: Prototyping Challenge results

It is time to give out awards to the Shade Prototyping challenge!

Every prototyping challenge I release is a grand exploration of a particular gaming system. The concept often sounds coherent on paper, but in reality it is composed of a series of small experiments involving movement, pacing, emergence and more. After every prototype, it is worth sorting through the experiments and seeing which ones are worth investing in further and which ones should be left behind.

Game design is a process, not a bolt of lightening from the blue. You build an experiment, reinvest in the things that work and try to fix the things that are broken. After iteration upon iteration, the game emerges. In this spirit, these awards are not the end of the Shade project, but instead are an opportunity to identify the next steps.

Even in these simple prototypes, Shade shows promise as a game concept. It just needs pass upon pass of polish to turn into something glorious.


Bronze awards
First, the bronze awards. These go out to the wonderful souls that made a game.

Of great interest was the fact that most people attempted 2D implementations of the concept. This makes sense considering the wide availability of 2D tools and skills on the market. Now that I have a better understanding of the dynamics of the game, I may release an updated version of the challenge in the future that includes a set of 2D graphics and a tweaked design that allows for an easier 2D implementation.

• Mobeamer: http://battleforcesonline.com/shrooms.php
• Lubos: http://img110.imageshack.us/img110/7751/img0001ma5.jpg
• Leonardo: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/apocalyx/MushRide-lua-0.9.3.zip?download
• c berube: http://www.thewasabiproject.com/shade-and-shrooms/
• ben: (I'm having difficulty with this one since it keeps telling me I have a corrupt zip) http://www.myfamilyline.info/programming/Shade.zip

• http://aras-p.info/projShaduShrooms.html

Soul Bubbles: A classic game ill treated by expert reviewers

I wanted to turn your attention to a delightful little title called Soul Bubbles. I had a chance to play an early version of the game and was impressed by its lead designer, Olivier Lejade, careful attention to the difficulty level of the game.

When it finally launched, I was intrigued to see its aggregate reviewer score hovering at 77%. That is a middling score, but I expected better. Yet when I glanced at the user rating, it was pegged at an impressive 92%. From the user's perspective, we are talking about an instant classic, with a higher aggregate user ratings than either press favorites Halo 2 (91%) or Halo 3 (89%).

Why the disparity? When I looked closer, the professional reviews with lower scores almost all commented on the difficulty level, the one area I knew for a fact that the developers spent months polishing. Alex Sassoon Coby over at Gamespot intones ominously,"The shallow difficulty curve and lack of challenge in the main goals are the only things that let Soul Bubbles down."

Yet, users have the opposite reaction to the same exact features. One fellow gushes "It's very easy to get into thanks to the excellent tutorials, which introduce you effortlessly to the physics-based gameplay as you go along. The game's 40 levels will keep you busy for some time, but chances are you'll play the missions back to back only to be left craving for more!"

There's something odd happening here. Is Soul Bubbles a simplistic, middle of the road experience or is it a classic new game that deserves to be promoted as one of the more playable and innovative games of the year?

The answer tells us a lot about what it takes to make a great game and also happens to highlight one of the grand philosophical flaws in modern game criticism.


Games are about learning skills
First, a bit of background. Games, particularly one built around exploring innovative new game systems like Soul Bubbles, are all about learning new skills. There is a lot written on the topic, there are some articles at the end of this essay for you to peruse. The short of it is that learning new skills yields fun.

You can think of a game like Soul Bubbles as a bit sheet of bubble wrap. Each challenge is a little bubble of fun waiting to be popped. Most games are like this. However, once you've learned a particular challenge, doing it again is usually less exciting. By playing, you've been changed. You've learned the challenge and you'll never be able to revisit that challenge and relive the same emotion that you felt the first time through. You can't re-pop the bubble.

People who play a large number of games tend to rapidly morph into expert gamers. Reviewers, specifically, are almost by definition experts. In order to multiply their meager paychecks, they train themselves to quickly plow through dozens of games. They've crunched through so many levels, powerups, puzzles and collectibles that they are walking encyclopedias of game design techniques.

Since the act of learning is where a large amount of single player fun arises from, many expert gamers find it more and more difficult to derive pleasure from each new title. Games often reuse mechanics and the even an innovative game like Soul Bubbles starts feeling the same. It's like handing the reviewer a sheet of bubble wrap with all the bubbles already popped.

The result is that an initial game activity, such as a tutorial, that would delight a new user instead appear at rote obstacles that need to be skipped past as quickly as possible. Reviewers will use their impressive pre-existing mastery to zip past carefully constructed levels in the hope of find a challenge that will teach them something new. For most, this is subconscious behavior. They just know that they are looking for the thrill that they once experienced as child playing games for the first time. Due to the fact that they have changed, that they are now experts, only the most refined and challenging games still give them a hint of that sweet learning delight. Everything else is labeled 'crap.'

The Expertise Bias
This phenomenon is well understood in the game development community. Game developers also suffer from being experts. Not only do they have encyclopedic knowledge of exist game mechanics, they also have an intimate understanding of how their game is supposed to operate. Surely with such vast expertise, they would be the ideal critics.

Yet, because games are a learning activity, expert game developers often have surprising difficulty understanding how new users will react to their creation. Things they feel are incredibly important end up not mattering. Elements they dismiss as trivial annoyances end up stopping players dead in their tracks. The very fact that designer knows their game intimately makes them a poor critic.

Observation is the solution
The well documented work around for the expertise bias is to observe other people, who aren't experts, play the game. The best designers follow a simple process:

• Observe target players
• Take notes on potential issues.
  
• Leverage their intimate knowledge of the game to come up with elegant solutions.
  

1. An expert understanding of the game: Playing the game, knowing mechanics, player psychology, design patterns gives the critic powerful tools for understanding and reacting to what they are witnessing.
   
2. Observation of representative users: Expert knowledge biases the priorities of most players, so it is critical to see how real users react to a title in order to get actual target audience data. Having sat through hundreds of hours of observing users, you don't actually know how the virgin value of an inactive system until you see others use it.
   

• The viewer observes a universal stimuli, such as a pretty girl in a movie,
  
• They empathize with her situation based off their extensive memories of related situations
• Finally they recall and synthesize an emotional response.

Directory of Posts

Lost Garden has turned into a rather substantial archive of game design thoughts. In order to help you find essays that you are interested in, I've finally performed a bit of house cleaning and tagged all 180+ posts. Go forth and explore!

Quest: Which essays are "Worth Reading"?
I'm looking for the essays that you found to be more influential on your thinking about games. I'd like to bubble those to the top of the site by marking a handful with the Worth Reading tag. I've tagged a few, but I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Popular

• Worth Reading: <-This is a good starting place if you are new to the site
  
• All Essays
• Free Game Graphics
• Game Prototyping Challenges
• Science of game design
  

• Science of game design
• Skill chains
  
• Game genres
• Artificial emotions
• Test driven design
  
• Magic paintbrush
• Play styles
  

• Business
• Game applications
  
• Cost effective game design
• Indie
• Localization
  
• Prototyping techniques
  
• User pain
• Online games
• Serious Games
• User generated content
• Work life balance
  
• Sharing game designs
  

• Shade
  
• Play with your Peas
• CuteGod
• Celestial Music
  
• SpaceCute
  
• Secret Life of Aliens
• SpaceCrack
• Tree Story
  
• Help Wanted
• Crazy ideas
  

• Free game graphics
• Links
• Silverlight
  

• Game design reviews
• Wii
• PSP
• DS
  

• GDC
• Project Horseshoe
• Gamaustra
  

• Personal posts
  
• Valentines
• Lost Garden

Shade: A game prototyping challenge

As a redhead, there's a little game that I play every day in summertime called "Stay in the Shade". The rules are simple: make it to my destination as quickly as possible while avoiding all possible sunlight. This involves hopping from shade patch to shade patch. The cost of failure is the dread Irish Tan. These bizarre antics were inspiration for a game design called Shade.

As with any of the designs you find on this site, I heartily encourage you to prototype it and use it as a learning project. I know that there is a group of you itching to try out the latest 3D engines with sex-a-licious real-time shadows. This is your chance to finally use the technology in a way that produces meaningful game play.

I'll give out the much coveted Bronze, Silver, and Gold Lost Garden badges to anyone who creates a worthy prototype.

Basic Elements

• Player: The player can move about on a 2D plane using the arrow keys or a joystick.
  
• Blocks: Strewn about the landscape are blocks that cast shadows.
  
• Planted mushrooms: In the shadows of the blocks, planted mushrooms will slowly spawn over time. If left alone they will slowly grow in size.
  
• Mushrooms: If the player runs into a Planted Mushroom, it will pop out of the ground and start following the player's motions exactly. If multiple mushrooms are collected, they will follow in a line behind the player. A mushroom can last in direct sunlight about a second before they expire. This amount of time is cumulative and is shown by slowly shrinking the mushroom as it is exposed to more sunlight.
  
• Homebase: This is a spot on the ground that you need to lead the mushrooms back to in order for them to be counted.
  
• Mushroom score: In the upper right hand corner of the screen is the HUD. The most important element is the Mushroom score that shows you how many mushrooms you've collected so far today.
  
• Day timer: The day slowly progresses from morning to evening over 15 minutes. The shadows change position as the day progresses.
  

Winning the game
The game is over at the end of the day. Total mushrooms collected is entered into a highscore table.

Technology
We've had lovely real time shadows for quite some time, but very few designs take advantage of the technology. Luckily there are an immense number of cheap 3D engines that can pump out real-time shadows. Some options:

• XNA: http://creators.xna.com/
  
• Unity: http://unity3d.com/unity/features/shadow-and-light

Not so long ago, this tech was the exclusive domain of techsperts like id and Epic. But now there are no excuses. And the very clever folks will figure that you can make this game in a 2D engine with a little finagling.

Art
Since this design is likely a 3D game, I'm not providing art assets. I recommend that you use cubes and other primitives for the various elements in the scene. They are inexpensive, highly effective and can always be replaced at a later point with more advanced models once you've proven out the gameplay.

With this type of game, a good amount of pleasure will come from the motion of the mushrooms following the player and the movement of the shadows over time. Slick graphics can enhance this, but they aren't necessary to find the fun. Again, no excuses.

Advanced gameplay
Once the basic gameplay is in place, there are immense opportunities for more interesting variations.

• Movable blocks: Blocks that you can push around allow you to create optimal paths for harvesting mushrooms.
  
• Muncher: Once a planted mushroom grows to a certain size and it is hit by the sun, it turns into an AI driven creature called a muncher. Munchers find a nearby green block (also known as a bush) and start munching on it. This reduces the size of the block and therefore the amount of shade it provides. Munchers can be stunned and killed by running into them repeatedly.
• Bush seed: A dead muncher turns into a Bush seed. A bush seed is an object that can be collected by running over it with the character. If you press a button, the bush seed is planted on that location and begins to grow.
• Multiple days in a row: What happens to the landscape if you let the world run for multiple days? With the inclusion of bushes and munchers, we have a self balancing ecosystem. As you plant more bushes, there is a greater chance that mushrooms will turn into munchers, which in turn reduce the bushes. Can you turn a simple landscape into a mushroom plantation?
  

Balancing
This is the sort of game that lives or dies based on balancing all the various elements. There are a number of variables that you'll need to mess about with

• Size of the blocks
• Number of blocks and shadow area
• Spawning rate of mushrooms
• Size of mushrooms
• Amount of sunlight to kill a mushroom.
  
• Speed of the character
• Size of the map.
  
• Size of the viewport onto the map.
  

I don't have the answers. You'll get the answers by iterating on the basic design dozens, if not hundreds of times. Keep me updated and I'm happy to provide feedback on works in progress.

The Lost Garden Awards
Once again I'm giving out the always desirable Lost Garden badges for any prototypes that result.

• Bronze Medal: You built an interesting software toy. If you make an attempt at a design and it is interesting to futz about with, you get the Bronze Medal. Most people never get a Bronze medal due to the simple fact that they prefer to sit around and think rather than make something. Simply by doing (instead of not doing), you join an elite club.
• Silver Medal: You found the fun. You've iterated on your design and have identified a few key elements that make the game enjoyable. There is at least 5 minutes of interesting play. It likely isn't polished and some of the higher order reward loops are broken, but the core is there. If past challenges are any indication, I'll give out only a handful of Silver Medals per challenge.
• Gold Medal: You made the fun repeatable. The game that you've built is entertaining enough that I'm willing to play it for 15 to 20 minutes. This is a hard level to reach and it is only populated by the most elite cadre of weekend warriors. An entire production team could be seeded by your efforts. To reach this level, you've made some critical design steps beyond the initial concept and built unique and sustainable gameplay based off dozens of game play iterations. To this day, no one has won a Gold Medal. You could be the first.

You need to post a public, playable version in order to be eligible. I'll issue the rewards about one month after the initial challenge is posted. If something comes in after the original deadline has passed, I'll add it retroactively to the award post. If you win a Bronze or Silver, you can still come back later and make an attempt at the Gold. Anyone who gets a Gold medal is an automatic rock star in my book.

What do you get if you win? First off, you get the right to post a snazzy LostGarden medal on your website. Most importantly, you get that warm fuzzy feeling in your tippy-tip toes that stems from a job well done.

Conclusion
Shade is an interesting game design to me for the following reasons

• Exploration-based play: The joy is in exploring the ever changing landscape and finding mushrooms and interesting paths back home. It is more strategic than action oriented.
  
• Simple controls: All you need to play are directional controls and one button. It should be pretty easy to pickup.
  
• Non-violent: In general there is very little combat. I like this. I can imagine the title having a very meditative feel.
  
• Uses real-time shadows for some unique gameplay. Real-time shadows have been used for sneaking games, but little else. Surely it is time to expand the number of games that use this fascinating technology.
  

Enjoy! If anyone makes something and puts it online, I'm happy to discuss it on the website in a follow up post.

take care
Danc.

Past challenges

• Play with your Peas
• CuteGod
• SpaceCute

Mockup

• Adobe Illustrator (CS3) Mockup file
  

What actitivies can be turned into games?

Techniques for designing consumer scales

Lostgarden looking for brilliant programmer in Seattle

a mystery project

• Location: Seattle/Puget Sound area is a must. (Otherwise, it is hard to do the coffee shop thing)
• Skills: Solid Flash, Flex or Silverlight skills. Previous experience with Java, C++, or C# is great as long as you are willing to learn Flex. Back end skills are also helpful. The project is 'technically interesting' and is best tackled by someone who is more of a programmer than a scripter.
• Time commitment: 10 hours a week for about three months. Anything less I've found doesn't make it worth your time.
  

Improving Bug Triage with User Pain