The Fridge Door
April 12th, 2011
So in case you’ve been longing for the days when I regularly posted humor items, I’ve started the practice up again - but at a slightly different location: my house church’s website! My big idea was to try to get our church website to have more than just basic marketing info on it, but interesting content that people might keep checking back to see. My friend Meghan is also contributing webcomics, so make sure to check out the Fridge Door :D Not all the stuff is church-related, by the way, but a good chunk of it is.
How I Would Redesign Epic Mickey
January 23rd, 2011
I’ve been playing Epic Mickey off and on for the last month - mostly off, because I think my disc is defective. It keeps freezing at inopportune moments. But I’ve played it enough to find the game frustrating in how awesome it could have been, and unfortunately isn’t. It’s not necessarily a bad game, just a hugely problematic game. If I had my way, here’s how I’d redo it:
1. Eliminate the Side Scrolling Segments
The twisted (and often very cool) 3D worlds that Mickey inhabits are connected by “projector screens” that allow Mickey to travel from place to place by going through 2D side scrolling platformer levels based on his old cartoons. It’s a cute idea. I guess. Mostly it’s irritating and pointless. The side scrolling levels are little more than loving, almost exact recreations of the cartoon itself - there’s no twist or darkness added to them, so beyond a moment of “Hey! I remember that cartoon,” there’s not a lot to love about these levels. The awkward mix of 3D graphics sometimes makes it hard to judge what’s a platform and what’s not - which is the only real challenge. They’re not generally difficult, which is nice since you have to cross some of these multiple times as you go back and forth between places - but if they’re not a challenge, why have them at all? Platformers aren’t much fun in and of themselves.
The worst crime of these levels, however, is that they break the “worldiness” of Wasteland. The game feels a lot more linear - like a series of discrete fishbowls to play around in - rather than a theme park, totally open for exploration. It’s sort of sad that the creator, who is a huge Disney fan, didn’t recognize this aspect of a theme park’s appeal - the appeal of choice and freedom, and of an obvious, intuitive layout that allows you to know exactly where you are at any given moment (”The castle’s over there!”). I’d have replaced the cartoon worlds with a warped version of the Tomorrowland Skyway, connecting these precarious, warped islands of former theme park glory. That way, you could get a feel for the place you were going in its totality as the vehicle approached its destination - giving you the dramatic, panoramic view, building anticipation (also the purpose of the Magic Kingdom Monorail).
2. Give Mickey a Minimap
I have no earthly idea why there’s no minimap in this game. True platformers like Mario 64 and Mario Galaxy didn’t need a minimap because the levels were arranged in a generally linear fashion (with a few exceptions). The level design of those was broad and obvious enough to where you didn’t need much help figuring out where you were. Epic Mickey is more exploratory, with lots of darkness and nonsensical world placement (necessarily, as its part of the Wasteland’s theming) - worlds are chock full of secrets and hidden doors and platforms. The camera system could certainly be improved, but people are wrong to think the game’s awkward play is the camera’s fault - for the camera to be positioned more “intelligently,” there has to be an intelligent place to put the camera. In Mario Galaxy, this is easy, as the camera can always position itself such that you can see where the “next” platform is. In Epic Mickey, there’s not always a “next” platform, because you could be coming, going, turning around, leaping off to the side, or whatever. This puts Epic Mickey far more in the camp of Zelda-type games than Mario, and it should embrace this distinction. Zelda has a minimap. Metroid has a minimap. So should Epic Mickey. This would help give the player a sense of positioning that even the best camera can’t afford, because there’s simply no real convenient way to simulate quickly turning your head around at will to get a lay of the land. A minimap would fill in those gaps.
3. Change the Camera System
The camera movement system certainly needs to be changed to (1) be faster, (2) lock onto enemies you are fighting, (3) move in the same direction as cameras in every other 3D platformer game, and (4) stay behind Mickey much more often. This would bring the game more in line with most players’ expectations, I expect.
4. Make Paint/Thinner Changes Permanent
When Mickey revisits a world, if he’s thinned or painted something - it should still be that way. That could go a long way towards giving the game a sense of consequences, making the game, dare I say it, more “epic.”
5. Reorganize the Game Structure
Although I have not finished the game yet, there are definitely ways the opening few hours could be improved. As it stands, Mickey starts in Dark Beauty Castle, and proceeds to go through a lengthy and pointless twisted version of Fantasyland/it’s a small world before coming to Mean Street, which actually serves as home base for Mickey’s later explorations. This has several negative consequences: (1) the game takes too long to feel like it’s started, thanks to long-winded tutorials and no real sense of choice or worldiness, (2) Mickey has no real sense of an important goal. He’s simply moving from level to level. Mickey’s gremlin helper asks him, “You ready to face the Clock Tower?” Your options are “Yes” and “No,” rather than “Why the crap am I facing the Clock Tower in the first place?!”
The backbone of the characters, story, and setting are very strong, so I imagine I’ll have better ideas after I’ve finished the game. But for now, I know that, as soon as Mickey steps out of Dark Beauty Castle, he needs to land in Mean Street. Then, I would open all the main lands from the hub from the get-go, or else allow Mickey to open them at his leisure, in no particular order. There might not be a point to visiting Ventureland before the story takes him there, but if he wants to go exploring, he can. The Fantasyland portion is still pretty cool (there’s something about the creepified “small world” theme that gives me major willies), so there ought to be a way to work it in as a fifth spoke from the hub.
Ultimately, the game needs to find a way to leverage its awesome setup and plotline more effectively in creating quests for Mickey. Mickey’s actions need to involve less “go here” and “find three of these” and more moral actions that affect Wasteland in dramatic and permanent ways.
6. Ramp up the Darkness
The original concept art for Epic Mickey was jaw-droppingly cool stuff - the rotting husk of Epcot’s Spaceship Earth, twisted zombie-looking Donalds and Goofys, etc. The juxtaposition of the happy, cartoony world of Mickey Mouse and the twisted Wasteland had a lot of promise, some of which is still fulfilled. However, in the game as it stands, the balance is tipped WAY too much towards the cartoony world. Removing the 2D platformer sections would be a big step in the right direction, but there are other things that might be done. The title screen, for example, has a happy trumpet fanfare whose melody is no more threatening than the very-similar Simpson’s theme. The colors are bright and cheerful. This should be thrown out and redone as though we were about to play Resident Evil: Mickey Mouse Edition. This can be done very effectively without any kind of blood and gore - simply as a matter of unsettling music, color, and a sense of decay.
The monsters Mickey faces should get far creepier sound effects (horrifying screams!), and their appearance should be accompanied by more unsettling music (Resident Evil 4 did an excellent job with this). The monsters shaped like brooms from Fantasia should be rebuilt from the ground up as something less cartoony. Good theming can make the monsters feel more threatening than they are (and better camera control would make them feel threatening for the right reasons!).
“Batman Begins” Syndrome
December 19th, 2010
So I’ve just started playing Dragon Age: Origins (now that my computer is actually fast enough to play it properly), and my initial reaction after the first five hours or so is “Meh.” It’s not an unenjoyable game, but it’s missing anything that makes me really want to keep playing, and I’ve got enough other things to deal with than play games that are only somewhat enjoyable.
Dragon Age: Origins has a bad case of “Batman Begins” syndrome. Batman Begins, in case you never saw it, was an attempt a number of year ago to “reboot” the Batman franchise, but without all the goofy camp and absurdity that had plagued the franchise up until then. And it did a very good job. The characters’ motivations are much stronger, the villains are more complex and believable, the dialog is never goofy or cringe-inducing, the world is more professional, more credible, and more tasteful. But…
There’s very little about Batman Begins to fall in love with. In point of fact, the goofiness and camp that had become inseparable from the franchise was actually something to latch onto and love about Batman, which, like most comic book fantasies, is fundamentally goofy and absurd. It’s a fantasy. That’s what makes it fun. The thing is, people don’t want their fantasies dried up to be more palatable to people who don’t share those fantasies. We want our fantasies bigger and better! That’s the part we fall in love with. We suspend disbelief to get past the absurdity, and then we enjoy the results. Shaving off the fantasy so that people don’t have to suspend disbelief results in a movie that more people can watch and enjoy, but few are going to fall in love with.
A friend of mine pointed out last night that there’s a parallel to human relationships. Batman Begins is sort of like the cool kid at the swanky party who never makes a misstep - says all the right things, makes all the right jokes, talks to all the right people, never says anything offensive, dorky, or weird. You like talking to him, but you never actually feel like there’s a “him” there to get to know. You’ve had a party experience, but you haven’t made a friend. Making friends requires being vulnerable - letting the other guy see you be dorky or eccentric or in any way real. If you’re not willing to vulnerable, you get no love. And the same applies for entertainment as well. Batman Begins made Batman as classy and credible as it will likely ever be, but that’s not why we love Batman.
This is how I feel playing Dragon Age: Origins. It does everything right. The world is deep and sophisticated. The characters are well-defined and well-acted. Their plights are sympathetic and interesting (kind of). It lives in the Tolkein-style fantasy universe, but does enough things differently to keep things surprising. You can read books upon books of entires about this fantasy world - religious sects (with elements of Catholicism and Greek mythology, etc), wizard power struggles, etc etc., and nothing seems forced or childish or absurd, as Tolkein-esque fantasy often does. But…
What’s there to fall in love with? I like stories about wizards because having magic powers is an awesome fantasy. Harry Potter, Chronicles of Narnia, and Star Wars work as well as they do because they follow the story of an initiate into those worlds - someone who goes from ordinary (like your typical audience member), and winds up slicing bad guys apart with a lightsaber (cool!). In the opening story for the wizard class in DAO, magic is just a regular, accepted part of your life already (and your spells aren’t terribly interesting in and of themselves). Although you are an apprentice in a wizard tower, the story immediately launches into the emotions of being an initiate during a wizard hazing ritual, and whether the obligatory evil authority figures will get away with their obligatory totally unmotivated oppression of people. It’s not interesting enough as a story by itself, and the fact that it’s attached to a generic wizard world without any sense of wonder, power, or awesomeness doesn’t make the story any more interesting. The game has not yet made itself vulnerable, and therefore I have had no opportunity to fall in love with it. The boring, generic music is also a problem (as it is with the vast majority of games nowadays).
(Of course, the game might just take ten hours to get started. It shouldn’t, but it might. Consider the contrast with Final Fantasy VII - from the opening seconds of the game, you are slapped in the face with emotional value - a dark, dystopian city-on-a-plate being walked through by an out-of-place flower girl with enormous Disney eyes, accompanied by dark, dramatic music. You might turn away folks who can’t handle the grunge (and I admit I was turned away myself at first), but that vulnerability is key to the pungency that makes the game world something to be fallen in love with.)
This is why I’ve decided I actually have a certain respect for otherwise absurd stories like Twilight. They may have a rash of problems that turn folks like me off, but they unquestionably deliver something to their audience that they can fall in love with. We play games, watch movies, and go to the theater not so we can watch intelligent people carefully and tastefully apologize for the absurdities inherent in their art form and pussy-foot around anything that might wind up being awesome.
Less professionalism, more awesome, please.
Game Design Principles from Super Mario Bros.
December 11th, 2010
The original Super Mario Bros. is not the easiest game in the world, but it is strangely compelling even now. Perhaps there is an element of nostalgia, but there are plenty of games that I loved as a kid that I don’t enjoy as much now - fighting games like Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat, tier 2 RPGs like Super Mario RPG. But Super Mario Bros just never seems to get old.
My sister-in-law remarked last night that she loved the game because you can just sit and fly through it. This is, as far as I can tell, as untrue a statement as there ever was, and yet I agree with the feeling she expressed. It feels like you should be able to just sit and fly through the game, when in fact you have to concentrate pretty hard and pretty constantly. This is the mark of good game design, I think - it feels easy and fun even when it’s difficult and frustrating.
So after thinking a little bit about why Super Mario Bros should still be so satisfying to play after all this time (and why other games aren’t as enjoyable), I came up with these possibilities:
1) Crisp play control - Mario is the definition of crisp play control. In defiance of all the laws of physics, you are given an extreme degree of immediately responsive control over Mario. He can change direction in mid-air while jumping. He can decide how high his jump is during the middle of a jump (by continuing to hold A). He can accelerate almost instantly. He stops quickly. His collisions with bricks and enemies are (almost) always predictable and clean. Nothing about Mario feels “mushy.” Contrast this with, say, the original Star Fox, where collisions appear to happen at random, or Castlevania, where once you’ve jumped, you’re done controlling your character until you land (Realistic ? Yes! Fun? No!). The play control is crisp enough that you always feel that Mario is where he ought to be. If Mario dies, it’s your fault for putting him somewhere he shouldn’t go, not the game’s fault for failing to put Mario where you want him. That’s what makes it feel easy even the game is quite challenging.
2) Simplicity - I used to snort derisively at the folks who couldn’t handle the 4 main buttons of the Super Nintendo controller. But as I think about it, I realize they were right to be turned off by the multitude of buttons. The more things a game player can do, the more difficult and annoying the game becomes to control. Come to think of it, I never really got the hang of the two different kinds of jumping in Super Mario World. It’s not so much about button count as it is about focused game design. The original Star Fox uses every Super Nintendo button with no intuitive rationale behind the choices, and the result is a mess - one button to fire lasers, one to shoot bombs, one to brake, and one to speed up. Mario only needs the two buttons, because he can only do a limited number of things. The result is a game that seems like the sort of thing you can sit down to play any old time, right up until you get nailed by a Buzzy Beetle hurtling down the stairs at you.
3) Clean graphics - The low quality 8-bit graphics may not seem like a turn-on exactly, but the side effect is very important to me - a lack of “graphical noise.” Because graphic power is so cheap these days, a lot of games pile on the glitz and flash. The result is a lot of sparkly nonsense, and not a terribly clean, satisfying gaming experience. Super Mario Galaxy, for example, seems to be unable to put any model on the screen without having it spew a continue spray of sparkly particles. It’s like trying to read a website with animated GIFs dancing at you from the sidelines. Games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band are the worst in this regard. Eventually you learn to ignore the color spew, but it’s still always there, oppressing you just a little bit, forcing you to focus more of your attention on playing the game than you should have to. Super Mario Bros. takes clean graphics to an extreme - the sky is a field of solid color. There are decorations here and there, but these only serve to add a feeling of “worldiness” to the game without sacrificing the simplicity of the view. Almost everything you see in the game is something that can be interacted with as part of the game.
4) Fairness - There’s something deeply unsatisfying about games that expect you to get hit by an enemy every once in a while. There are several situations in games like Castlevania and Mega Man 2 where your only real strategy is just to take the punishment - keep shooting the bad guy and hope he runs out of health before you do. Attrition wasn’t much fun in World War I and it’s not much fun in games, either (not that it ruins a game, necessarily). It feels like a mark of poor game design when you put the player in situations where damage can’t be avoided with skill. Giving the player a “health bar” seems like mercy to the player, but it’s actually mercy to the level designer, who can now rely on a player taking a hit or two to make up for an unfair game layout. Because Mario can only take one or two hits before dying, the level designers were forced to make sure that everything was reasonable and possible with Mario’s skill set. The result is a more enjoyable game.
How to apply these principles to RiftMaker? Hmm…
Tell Me a Beautiful Lie Website
July 27th, 2010
So it’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything here, but on the off chance someone happens by, I thought I’d let everyone know what I’ve been up to. The website for my musical Tell Me a Beautiful Lie is up at http://tellmeabeautifullie.com - you can see the YouTube of the staged reading, read the latest (and much improved, IMO) script, or download mp3s of the score.
Currently I’m working on getting things ready to send off to theaters and contests and the like. You can “Like” my Facebook page if you want to stay posted.
Musical Staged Reading
February 6th, 2010
In case you’ve been wondering what I’ve been up to, I’ve been busy putting the score and script together for an actual staged reading of Tell Me a Beautiful Lie - you can check out details at the updated website: http://www.tellmeabeautifullie.com.
It’s both exciting and intimidating all at the same time - auditions are next week at the Cambridge Public Library. It’ll be the first time I’ll have heard the show performed by actual actors/singers and a real pianist. There’s still plenty of details that have to come together for this to work, but we have a venue, an accompanist, and an audition space, so who knows? Maybe it’ll be as awesome as I think it’ll be!
The process has kind of devoured my free time, however, so I haven’t been blogging much or working much on RiftMaker. I know I still owe Z from It’s the Thought That Counts a response to her two postings to me - not sure when I’ll get to it, but I haven’t completely forgotten.
My friend who is helping me direct is moving to Texas in April, so it’s kind of now or never, as it stands.
Current projects: (1) proofreading the score/script, and (2) getting things organized for the auditions Thursday.
Hooray!
Nyx
November 16th, 2009
On a whim, I downloaded a demo (free!) for a WiiWare title called Nyx - it’s a basic platformer starring a winged goddess from a world out of Greek mythology. You fly with her by pushing the jump button repeatedly (to a limit of 5 jumps), and use the “hand of Zeus” (the Wiimote pointer) to drag objects around to solve puzzles. I played it for a bit - the graphics were pretty, and the music was evocative and beautiful (if not especially memorable, tuneful, or energetic) and then became overwhelmed with boredom. I remember having felt this way with another WiiWare title whose name I can’t remember - a platformer where you had to use the Wiimote pointer to generate wind to blow your character around and solve puzzles.
The game is clearly high quality, but it wasn’t… any fun. I’m trying to figure out why. After all, I still enjoy side scrolling platform games from the NES, even games I haven’t played before - so the “seen it before” aspect isn’t really at fault. There was a bit of a “storyline” introduction at the beginning of the game, but it wasn’t as bad as, say, Okami or Paper Mario. You got to the game itself pretty quickly. It introduced itself and its mechanics gradually, bit by bit - it felt rather like a neverending tutorial, but it didn’t say “tutorial,” so I had no expectation that I was about to get to the “real game.”
I think the real problem is the fact that your character, Nyx, has no weapon, and there are only a few little bad guys every so often - and the only thing you can do about them is to avoid them. I’m beginning to think that’s why the game was no fun. Mario, Mega Man, Simon Belmont, and Link all have ways of exerting power over their environment in a crisp and immediate fashion. Gracefully flying and laboriously dragging blocks around with your Wiimote are not crisp exertions of power. Tearing through limitless alien soldiers with an endless stream of bullets (Contra) is a crisp exertion of power - and therefore fun.
Now, perhaps this is a male thing - I couldn’t say. But the more I think about it, the more I think that a game has to have a real understanding of what its appeal is and make that available from the get-go. They say that a musical has to establish all its themes, its tone, and the fact that its a musical within 10 minutes or the audience zones out or gets confused. I think video games ought to be treated the same way. If the appeal of a game is exploration, then you better give the player freedom to explore within minutes of sticking that game in the machine and pushing Start. If the appeal of a game involves exerting power over enemies or objects, then give the player that power as quickly as you possibly can and get out of the way. If the appeal is solving puzzles, then don’t wait 10 levels in to add challenge and the need for thought - make the first puzzle interesting. Make it require as much thought as you can get away with, and don’t hold the player’s hand. If the appeal is the ability to collect things or customize a world, then give them that capability early without forcing them to go through a lengthy “tutorial land” or what not. Let your RPG hero buy whatever weapons or armor he/she wants in the very first town, at the very first available time - and give the player a choice. Figure out why people would ever want to play your game, and then focus on that.
A Willy Wonka Opera? Really?
November 1st, 2009
Is this cool? Or just really really strange? I can’t tell.
New Lyrics for “Harbor from the Storm”
October 31st, 2009
It has been a long, nagging thing for me - I love the song “Harbor from the Storm.” It’s been in Tell Me a Beautiful Lie since very early drafts, and I feel like the story has always needed a big romantic number to let the audience understand Roman and Katya’s relationship, make Roman more human, etc. The trouble is that, since I’ve changed the show’s timeline, “Harbor from the Storm” no longer works dramatically in the place I’ve got it - the idea of promising to protect Katya from coming troubles (that he’s also excited about) just isn’t that pertinent to what’s going on at that point - which is, Katya is distraught that her worldview is no longer so simple as it was, and Roman has just rebuffed advances from another girl, and is fuming that the world doesn’t seem to share the ideals that he and Katya do.
So I’m brainstorming new titles for the song - I feel like a big romantic number is still required, and the tune works well enough, but maybe a new set of lyrics would do a world of good toward helping us feel Roman’s faithfulness to Katya, and perhaps set up a useful dramatic contrast with Katya’s newfound doubt. That is to say - Roman is principally convinced that he and Katya are soulmates because of their shared worldview. Her doubt, as such, is a little like cheating on him. That conflict could be mined I think.
I’ll keep you posted. (I say that a lot - but do I?)
The Lord Has a Will
October 25th, 2009
I threw together a little (but melancholy) arrangement of one of my favorite devo songs, as I feel like I need a little discernment of God’s will at the moment: