Shadow of the Colossus is considered a landmark title that was developed by a highly disciplined and intelligent team. Released in 2005 for the Playstation 2, the critically acclaimed title featured incredibly expansive, vast worlds and even more vast enemies to scale and conquer. Set in a fictional world, the game follows the tale of a young warrior who is on a quest to slay all of the mystical massive creatures that exist in order to resurrect his fallen loved one. As the player goes to each location to slay each colossus, they become larger and more beautiful than the last. Between these epic battles are uneventful rides through breathtaking fields, mountains, and other terrain.
Shadow of the Colossus is useful as a smart game development model for several reasons. The cadence of the title is very different from most games; instead of a nice stroll or job through the excitement and action of the game, Shadow of the Colossus seems to be more like walk, sprint, walk, sprint, in the way that the player has massive “boss” fights bookended by serene horse rides. Why is that? Secondly, the game is one of the most beautiful ever developed for the Playstation 2. How does the world work together with the gameplay? And third, why is the game so limited in the abilities of the main character? Was that on purpose?
Let’s dive in to the practical development techniques that student and independent developers can learn from this title.
Learning from the Colossi: Focus
There is much to be learned from Shadow of the Colossus; the game speaks volumes about the development team that created it.
WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
In an older post on how I outgrew video games, one of the things I mentioned was how games have many substantial capabilities that other media do not. But what exactly are these capabilities? Can they be used for anything other than sniping n00bs and defeating winged lizards?
If we want to learn, many students and professors turn to textbooks and workbooks, time tested methods of conveying information for absorption. When the task is to teach, then we seek out the media that we suppose will serve us best.
But what if textbooks and lectures are no longer the most productive means of instruction? There are countless known (and still many unknown!) ways that games can improve our lives above and beyond the scope of other media.
Memorization versus mastery
Throughout our lives, we memorize material. From elementary school through graduate school, students are primarily professional memorizers. Their job is to take material, facts, and formulas, cram it into their minds until the exam, and then regurgitate it. Our society has deemed, through a long history with education, that this is the best and most efficient way to communicate information to students and hold them accountable for that information. Unfortunately, this often results in students seeking only a surface level understanding of a topic, and focusing more on learning the skill of test-taking itself, rather than the skill of understanding the material they’re covering. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
I’ve recently been playing through a classic RPG, Final Fantasy VI (Final Fantasy III when it came out in the U.S. for the Super Nintendo). Some readers may remember this game fondly from their childhood, while others may have never played it but would recognize some Base Mechanics as ancestors of their current day favorite games.
Many things could be said about FFVI; it was iconic for the SNES generation and revolutionary in terms of its use of cutscenes and beautiful 2D graphics. In many ways, the game, and many other Square RPG’s of the time, is the inspiration of many indie titles today like Independent Games Festival finalist Owlboy, which models its graphical style after games that were released around 1994-1996. That period of time was the height of big-budget 2D games; before then the resources weren’t available to make large, massive, epic titles, and afterwards those resources were spent on 3D titles on the Nintendo 64 and original Playstation. Truly this was an unusual window in time that resulted in some stunning games.
Final Fantasy VI is a great game to dissect and analyze, especially in terms of a useful game design concept that we haven’t discussed before on The Game Prodigy: Gameplay Clusters.
WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
“Blizzard and Nintendo don’t care about money; they only care about making fun games. Zynga just wants to turn a profit by making terrible games.”
Not exactly.
Video games, like painting, music, film, and theater, are a form of art. At the very least, they are a creative media that can be used to express any number of themes, ideas, fictional stories or worlds and convey experiences. For this reason, many players and developers have deep emotional attachments to the games that they play, games that touched their hearts and took them places they had never been before.
Companies that make these kinds of games are held in the highest esteem by players and fans. Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda games have always been known for their charm, easy-to-understand controls and challenges, and their flair for presentation and playability. Valve’s Half-Life and Portal games have many die hard fans who greatly respect the artistic integrity of the plot, storyline, and characters surrounding Gordon Freeman’s adventures. And Blizzard’s Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo franchises have given the company a seemingly unshakable reputation for high quality, polished experiences that are near-perfect. Each of these companies make the highest quality games in their own way, and saying that a game is “A Blizzard Game”, “A Valve Game”, or “A Nintendo Game” carries with it a mark of passion and dedication associated with those development teams.
However, other companies make games that are not as popular with the traditional gaming crowd. Currently the popular scapegoat is social networking companies, such as Zynga or Playdom. Games like Farmville or Sorority Life are wildly profitable, but they are often criticized for sacrificing fun and player entertainment in exchange for turning a buck. Clicking on crops day in and day out just doesn’t seem to have the same “labor of love” feel that went into a Zelda game. Rather, these games appear to some to be evil slot machines designed to maximize monetization.
This complaint is a serious misconception of the intentions of game companies. Those who voice this complaint believe that commercial games must be fun, that they must be of the highest quality, and that their number one, ultimate goal is to make a critically acclaimed product.
This is false.
WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
“I hate World of Warcraft.”
“What? Have you ever even played it?”
“Yes.”
“How far did you get?”
“I got to about level 60.”
“And you didn’t like it?”
“No. I hated it.”
I was amazed to find that a friend of mine had put in weeks of time into Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, and yet he felt like he didn’t have any fun. He described the experience as though he was being tricked into playing, that he was “grinding” all the time. He kept on playing, but for some reason, had an internal struggle that pulled him forward without providing excitement or enjoyment. He was miserable.
Most gamers know the term “grinding”. Grinding can and has been called many things, but generally it is defined as when the player needs to do the same thing over and over again in order to progress, seemingly for arbitrary reasons. Dragon Quest was one of the classic RPG’s that seemed to be defined by grinding. Enemies would suddenly appear that required the player be at Level 15 in order to beat, when currently the player was probably around Level 12. The result? In order to go further, the player needed to go back and fight the same old monsters over and over again, until their Level was high enough.
Grind is generally viewed as a bad thing. But rather than just complain about it, how can a grind be understood from a game developer’s perspective? Is there ever a time a grind should be used, and how can it be avoided? WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Adobe Flash is the best of the best. I almost always recommend it to students who ask me what they can do to start learning how to develop games.
It is one of the most popular forms of game development for students and indie developers on the web (and increasingly off the web as well). It’s easy to learn, highly flexible, and instantly deployable to many popular flash game sites, such as Kongregate or Newgrounds, where a one-man-game can be instantly seen by millions. It provides an easy to learn environment, but at the same time it’s deep enough to be worth of putting on a resume (unlike programs like Game Maker, which I don’t recommend for that very reason). Almost everyone has played some kind of game that runs in Flash, from action games like Canabalt to Facebook games like Farmville. The platform has done wonders to expand game development to many aspiring young game designers, engineers, and artists who before would have never had access.
Unfortunately, the development tools required to make Flash games definitely don’t come cheap. The most up to date version of Flash CS5 comes in at $699.00. Not exactly chump change, especially if you’re a student looking to sharpen your skills and break into the games industry on money from your summer job. I’ve met a lot of students who are interested in getting started in programming their own games, and I often mention Flash for the reasons listed above, but the cost is often prohibitive.
One site that I often recommend for students facing this dilemma is Studica
which is a great website that allows high school and college students to receive incredibly deep discounts on premium software. Adobe Flash CS5 is available on their site for only $176.95. These prices that students get often make them much more affordable for a game developer in-the-making. To qualify for the discount, all you need to do is prove that you are student by providing a photocopy of a student ID or other information. More info about qualifying can be found on their website. I’m glad I found it before I graduated college so that I could pick up some of their software.
If you’ve been using Game Maker to create your indie titles, have been doing downloadable games in C++ and want to take them to the web, or if you would just like to get started in indie game development, then Flash CS5 is the way to go. If you’re in college, be sure to pick up a copy before you graduate, because I doubt you’ll ever get a discount like this again.
How can a game feel like it was made by the developers “out of love”? How can a game seem like the developers implemented everything that they thought would be fun and interesting, lacking nothing? How can a game feel like it went 110% to provide a top-notch experience?
There are many components to making a game. There are the Base Mechanics, the rules of how the game works. There are the Punishment and Reward Systems and Long Term Incentive, which fuel why the player plays and for how long. And there is the Aesthetic Layout, the artwork, sounds, and polish layered on top of the rest of the game that help to fill out its Core Experience.
We’ve discussed before how the gameplay, what they player is actually doing, is more often than not the most important aspect of a game’s design. But left alone, the Base Mechanics of a game are just mathematical constructs. Without aesthetics, the game feels stale to most non-engineers. These rules and gameplay blocks must be built. However, once that has been taken care of, how can a developer get their game to be perceived as the highest quality? What are the indicators of a good versus a great game?
This final, key 10% of the game is what is referred to in the industry as “polish”. It is the time in development when the game could in fact be considered “done”, but just a few more features, tweaks, and sparkles will help it to shine through to players and stand out from the crowd and breathe life into it. Well polished games are described with words such as “charming”, “engrossing”, “fascinating”. Well polished games are loved by their players. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
“You should definitely check out the first game. But ignore all the ones after that. They’re all crap.”
“I enjoyed the first movie, but by the time they got to the second and third film, it was just more of the same, and I had already seen the same. Boring.”
“The first one had such soul, but the second was just an attempt at a cheap way to make more money.”
How often have you heard phrases like this? Welcome to the hazardous world of sequels.
Super Mario Galaxy 2, the latest massive title in the world’s most successful video game franchise, is currently on track to match the seemingly impossibly-high quality bar set by its predecessor. Reviewers are floored by the first ever 3D sequel to a Mario game on the same platform, calling it a “dazzling high water mark in Mario’s career”.
While making a game like Super Mario Galaxy is an incredible feat in itself, following a successful title up with a sequel or spin-off is often a far greater challenger for a game developer. Sequels are seldom seen from members of the student or independent game development community for several reasons. First and most distressing, many student game projects never get completed in the first place, much less built into a sequel or follow up title. There is less of a profit incentive for young game developers to create a sequel; it’s seemingly much more interesting to come up with an entirely new idea. Out with the old, in with the new.
Second, many independent developers have a bitter view of sequels. While original new titles are often viewed as artistic visionary products, sequels can be seen as money-grubbing attempts for a corporate machine to pump more dollars out of what used to be a piece of art, turning it into a soulless hunk of code. The marketplace is flooded with poorly executed sequels that not only fail to please their original fans, they tarnish the name of the original product that was once praised. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Great Dungeon in the Sky is a fun little indie game that made its rounds online a while back, “little” describing the size of the character on screen and not the depth of the game. If you haven’t played it, it’s a simple action sidescroller with an expansive world to explore and conquer in rapid fashion. But in addition to being an enjoyable indie title, Great Dungeon in the Sky stands out as a stellar example of one of the most important lessons in game design: how to cheaply extend game length.
By “cheap” we mean some design that doesn’t require a great deal of work on the part of the programmer or developer. And for student developers who are busy with school and other pursuits, cheap development is essential. Sure, you could make your game twice as long by putting twice as many hours into new features and artwork, but if you can get that same amount of length without the effort and without lowering the quality of the experience, that’s a big win. 20% more work for 80% more game? That’s a trade that every developer should be searching for.
Lengthening a game is an art, however. Stretch the features too thin and the game becomes stale and boring. A good developer will be able to pull the game’s design right up to the point of breaking; a fully realized and fully explored system that doesn’t overstay its welcome. Hours of fun for the player and hours of development time saved for the creator.
Great Dungeon could have easily been a game that took only 10 minutes to complete. You jump around attacking enemies and advancing through the levels, and you’re done. But the game doesn’t stop there. Many games have character select screens, but this game’s character select screen has something…unusual going on… WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Have you ever heard of an NES game called “Kickmaster”? It was an action sidescroller starring a dashing young hero, leveling up his magic and kicking his way to save a beautiful princess. Fighting monsters and knights and ogres, it was a harrowing tale of love, danger, and kicking. When I was a child, I was absolutely engrossed in this little title, playing all the way through and actually completing the game, which is a feat considering the unreasonable difficulty.
Kickmaster is, as it turns out, a horrible game.
How about “A Boy and His Blob”? No, not the recent, critically acclaimed Wii remake. I’m talking about the original Nintendo NES version. Many friends of mine are similarly in love with this game, going through insane hoops to make any substantial progress in the game. My only play session lasted about five minutes, after which I became thoroughly frustrated and gave up.
A Boy and His Blob is also a horrible game.
What do I mean when I say horrible? I mean that they just don’t stand up to common standards of quality. The controls don’t make sense. The artwork is poor compared to other games in that time period. The Core Experience is muddled and the goals confusing. In short, if you were to play the game for the first time right now, you wouldn’t give it a second thought. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
