Wednesday, 15 April 2015
Friday, 12 September 2014
A Game Is Born: My Final Products
My Final Game
http://gamejolt.com/games/platformer/dr-squishe-phd/18044/
My Final Games Packaging
Making My Game: Design Stage
My Final Magazine Advert
Making My Game: Design Stage
This is the start phase that can make or break a game. A bad idea may not be saved by great play.
So using data that I collated from my survey I started to work on my story and I knew that I needed to do two things with my story: Make it simple and make it very subtle. The reason for this? Because I want to recreate the feel of an NES game, A game that (Due to massive data constraints) had little in the way of being able to tell any complex story and in the case of Mario and the like would
be subtle and heavily implied.
So as a result the story is the simple "You are a blob." and while just like in NES games there is more in a manual this is all you get in the game, the story is only fully seen in the description on the developer page, a simple reference to the days of the NES and SNES.
Pre-Alpha
Alpha
Beta
The Five Pointed Star Of Game Development
Me a large group of friends in the game developer community have decided on the 5 points that are important to game creation.
1. Sound design
As a game developer whenever I mention that sound desighn is important I always get the same response "Music in a game is just an after though." and not telling a lie this actually annoys me to no end, for a few reasons:
Reason 1. Sound desighn is not just music.
Reason 2. MUSIC IS TOTAL IMPORTANT.
so let me explain my points.
When i use the term sound design I am also making reference to literally every sound in the game and while this includes music, this also incorporates everything. Using the well Mario games as a reference sound design includes: The Music, that sound when you press a button to enter the game, the jump sound, the sounds of you hitting a question block, even the back gfround ambiance you dont even notice while you play.
now to my second point. Music is an integral part of a game. music has a way of churning up emotions and a particularly good piece of music mixed with a little level design can even change the way you play the game, a great example of this is in the game "Hotline Miami" to which Ben "Yahtzee" croshaw so eloquently explains as "changeling the rage that comes with living in the 1980s". with a combination of level design and music it turns what could be a thoughtful game if tactics in to a rage fulled, lethargic melee, showing the magic that music can bring.
As a side note if i where ever to be asked to give an award for "Number one game that would be awful without any music at all" I would have to say the indie game "Keyboard Werewolf Fucking Drumset" a game that has playable mini game styled game play but is given all of its charm by the music played in the background adding to the strange and random nature of the game, you can find the song here alongside game-play: HERE
2. Art
in a short phrase this can be described as "EVERYTHING YOU CAN SEE". The art work is an integral part of the game and just like the music has a way of steering up emotions in the player of the game.
an amazing example of art work in side of a game is in fact one of my favorite games of all times "The Binding of Issac" and its remake "binding of Issac: Rebirth". The art work in these games are basically the same and has a way of forcing a guttural response from the player from as you traverse the disgusting, terrifying and at times down right scary basement of Issac's home.
Despite the two games being the same the remake adds so much to the game-play using nothing more than the art work, Like for real this is the only difference between the two games and yet ,the second feels so much better to play.
What the second game does to change it up is that the second game actually changes the graphics to a more "low res" style harkening to the era of the SNES and if I had to put a style model to it it would have to be that of the SNES castlevania mixed with the bold look of the "Super Mario world" game also on the SNES.
What can just graphics add?
Well i am glad you asked hypothetical man who likes to ask me questions. In the example of the binding of Issac it adds two main things to the game. Number one being that it makes it easier to play the game, for a start your character actually stands out more from the backfround and so does his outline meaning that his hit box is also easier to spot, and so are the enimies hit boxes (A hit box is the area of a sprite that has physical qualities, sometimes it is the whole image or sometimes just some of it :see "Castlevania Dracula fight")
the second thing that an update in graphics does is add the the game feel. you can't feel scared if you are walking around a field with "My Little Pony" in the background. Infact if I had to narrow game design to just two catagories it would be gameplay and game feel.
Here is a playlist from the game grumps that shows the game-play of the game "Binding Of Issac Rebirth".
3. Coding
A word that makes me flinch as well as smile. As far as building a game goes this is the most time consuming part of the creation of any game and unlike any other part of the game is something that is worked on for the whole time the game is being developed, let me explain.
A game in pre-alpha has the basics of the game with only basic graphics and the games basic physics and mechanics coded, also the story will have been done before all of this.
Alpha then has the graphics and even more coding to see what works and is where you choose the mechanics.
The Beta is where all the graphics have been finished and this is where the sound effects and the music is added in to the game to match the graphics, gameplay and everything else.
the final product is a few months later and is worked on by coders even after it is released, as they still need to address any glitches in the game they may have missed without an arduous beta testing cycle.
4. Story
This in many ways is more difficult than writing a story for any other form of media as you need to work out how the story fits in with a difficulty curve. you can't just have the main character fighting super death beasts on the first level and them just normal soldiers the next with the soldiers being inexplicably more difficult that the aforementioned super death beasts.
when it comes to story you need to be able to do three things:
1. Make it orientated to the game-play.
2. Do everything a normal story would do and do it a bit better.
3. Finally you need to make the story worth making a game about.
Story also involves the dialogue with characters and not just the main ones that move the plot. I mean as an example look at the dragon age games that have a ludicrous amount of side missions as well as just random NPC's that will talk to you just to add more life in to the game. as well as dialogue many games will have codex pages so you can learn more about the world that you inhabit.
the actually brings me on to one of the most difficult parts of story in a game and that is Lore. While in a story you can make things go as you pleases with little to no issue as everything you read is the lore but in a game everything is the lore of the game. From the back-story of every character all the way up to the large castle in the distance that you occasionally hear about, this is all the lore and is something that is very difficult to construct.
5. Cohesiveness
If all that alone feels difficult then I may have some shocking new to tell you as this is the section that makes literally everything to do with making a game so much more difficult and that is cohesiveness. You need all of these aspects to work together and while in a good game they work together and you find it difficult to find any contradiction, in a truly great game they work with each other and compliment each other so that sometimes it is difficult to find where one aspect ends and the other begins.
A beautiful example of this is in the game "dragon age: inquisition" (there I go talking about that game again) when you enter the tavern in the main hub of the game and you meet a character who is a bard in the pub and just plays music. The lyrics she sings are all relevant to the game lore and she even tell tales of legends that you can investigate within the game world. and this is an amazing way to bind, music, game-play and story in to one single package, that while very subtle is exceptionally well worked.
When you have no cohesion with a game you end up with with a game that is odd and just frankly bad. One issue is called pseudo-narrative dissonance, when the story doesn't match with an area of the game. a perfect example is the game "Nack" a PS4 exclusive launch title that was a mess in my opinion. SO what is the issue? Well the issue is that in story cut scenes your player character is invincible and is unable to be destroyed but while outside of the cut scene you are clunky and can have large chunks of your health taken from you from just a standard attack by an enemy. This makes the game feel strange and a little bit off when you see yourself as an invincible beast in one scene but in the game you are easily killed.
1ne Game 5ive Points
So (It honestly feels that I use so as an opener way to often) I am going to look at one game and briefly talk about the five points that this game encompasses.
The game? Oh yeah, been pretty vague. The game is one of my favourite games I've under mentioned and that is "Five Nights at Freddy's 3", a game that made me literally jump out of my clothes to reveal every hair on my body had been scared white.
First lets look at the sound design of the game, its funking good.
The sound design of this game is amazing as it is designed to disorient the player of the game by creating false positives for hazards while at the same time it is a vital part of the game as it is almost impossible to play the game through without the audio without a lot of luck and guess work.
As well as this the sound design of this game adds a new angle of fear to the jump scares as the sounds the hazards in this game make are not only inhuman but also distorted to a good effect.
Secondly lets have a peak at the art for this game. So every FNAF game is nothing more than a series of still images and a small handful of animations to go around however the graphics look fantastic for a game that is so easy on your processor, it's little more than a powerpoint thats only dream is for you to wet yourself.
the textures in this game are exclusively grimy medium to high polly areas and eery black spaces and shading. This makes the game crazy atmospheric as nothing within your vision seems safe it is either hidden in shadow or is textured in a way that it seems distrustful.
Next is the coding. As I said before the game is little more than a slide show at the Lecter house hold and yet is effective. In this game think of every area as little more than a curved picture you can't see past the edge and what you see seems to be 3D, but it isn't. The game is exceedingly simple making three things happen, number one all PCs can run it, Number two you can have as high a frame rate as you want and finally 3 it must be more innovative to succeed.
1. Sound design
As a game developer whenever I mention that sound desighn is important I always get the same response "Music in a game is just an after though." and not telling a lie this actually annoys me to no end, for a few reasons:
Reason 1. Sound desighn is not just music.
Reason 2. MUSIC IS TOTAL IMPORTANT.
so let me explain my points.
When i use the term sound design I am also making reference to literally every sound in the game and while this includes music, this also incorporates everything. Using the well Mario games as a reference sound design includes: The Music, that sound when you press a button to enter the game, the jump sound, the sounds of you hitting a question block, even the back gfround ambiance you dont even notice while you play.
now to my second point. Music is an integral part of a game. music has a way of churning up emotions and a particularly good piece of music mixed with a little level design can even change the way you play the game, a great example of this is in the game "Hotline Miami" to which Ben "Yahtzee" croshaw so eloquently explains as "changeling the rage that comes with living in the 1980s". with a combination of level design and music it turns what could be a thoughtful game if tactics in to a rage fulled, lethargic melee, showing the magic that music can bring.
As a side note if i where ever to be asked to give an award for "Number one game that would be awful without any music at all" I would have to say the indie game "Keyboard Werewolf Fucking Drumset" a game that has playable mini game styled game play but is given all of its charm by the music played in the background adding to the strange and random nature of the game, you can find the song here alongside game-play: HERE
2. Art
in a short phrase this can be described as "EVERYTHING YOU CAN SEE". The art work is an integral part of the game and just like the music has a way of steering up emotions in the player of the game.
an amazing example of art work in side of a game is in fact one of my favorite games of all times "The Binding of Issac" and its remake "binding of Issac: Rebirth". The art work in these games are basically the same and has a way of forcing a guttural response from the player from as you traverse the disgusting, terrifying and at times down right scary basement of Issac's home.
Despite the two games being the same the remake adds so much to the game-play using nothing more than the art work, Like for real this is the only difference between the two games and yet ,the second feels so much better to play.
What the second game does to change it up is that the second game actually changes the graphics to a more "low res" style harkening to the era of the SNES and if I had to put a style model to it it would have to be that of the SNES castlevania mixed with the bold look of the "Super Mario world" game also on the SNES.
What can just graphics add?
Well i am glad you asked hypothetical man who likes to ask me questions. In the example of the binding of Issac it adds two main things to the game. Number one being that it makes it easier to play the game, for a start your character actually stands out more from the backfround and so does his outline meaning that his hit box is also easier to spot, and so are the enimies hit boxes (A hit box is the area of a sprite that has physical qualities, sometimes it is the whole image or sometimes just some of it :see "Castlevania Dracula fight")
the second thing that an update in graphics does is add the the game feel. you can't feel scared if you are walking around a field with "My Little Pony" in the background. Infact if I had to narrow game design to just two catagories it would be gameplay and game feel.
Here is a playlist from the game grumps that shows the game-play of the game "Binding Of Issac Rebirth".
3. Coding
A word that makes me flinch as well as smile. As far as building a game goes this is the most time consuming part of the creation of any game and unlike any other part of the game is something that is worked on for the whole time the game is being developed, let me explain.
A game in pre-alpha has the basics of the game with only basic graphics and the games basic physics and mechanics coded, also the story will have been done before all of this.
Alpha then has the graphics and even more coding to see what works and is where you choose the mechanics.
The Beta is where all the graphics have been finished and this is where the sound effects and the music is added in to the game to match the graphics, gameplay and everything else.
the final product is a few months later and is worked on by coders even after it is released, as they still need to address any glitches in the game they may have missed without an arduous beta testing cycle.
4. Story
This in many ways is more difficult than writing a story for any other form of media as you need to work out how the story fits in with a difficulty curve. you can't just have the main character fighting super death beasts on the first level and them just normal soldiers the next with the soldiers being inexplicably more difficult that the aforementioned super death beasts.
when it comes to story you need to be able to do three things:
1. Make it orientated to the game-play.
2. Do everything a normal story would do and do it a bit better.
3. Finally you need to make the story worth making a game about.
Story also involves the dialogue with characters and not just the main ones that move the plot. I mean as an example look at the dragon age games that have a ludicrous amount of side missions as well as just random NPC's that will talk to you just to add more life in to the game. as well as dialogue many games will have codex pages so you can learn more about the world that you inhabit.
the actually brings me on to one of the most difficult parts of story in a game and that is Lore. While in a story you can make things go as you pleases with little to no issue as everything you read is the lore but in a game everything is the lore of the game. From the back-story of every character all the way up to the large castle in the distance that you occasionally hear about, this is all the lore and is something that is very difficult to construct.
5. Cohesiveness
If all that alone feels difficult then I may have some shocking new to tell you as this is the section that makes literally everything to do with making a game so much more difficult and that is cohesiveness. You need all of these aspects to work together and while in a good game they work together and you find it difficult to find any contradiction, in a truly great game they work with each other and compliment each other so that sometimes it is difficult to find where one aspect ends and the other begins.
A beautiful example of this is in the game "dragon age: inquisition" (there I go talking about that game again) when you enter the tavern in the main hub of the game and you meet a character who is a bard in the pub and just plays music. The lyrics she sings are all relevant to the game lore and she even tell tales of legends that you can investigate within the game world. and this is an amazing way to bind, music, game-play and story in to one single package, that while very subtle is exceptionally well worked.
When you have no cohesion with a game you end up with with a game that is odd and just frankly bad. One issue is called pseudo-narrative dissonance, when the story doesn't match with an area of the game. a perfect example is the game "Nack" a PS4 exclusive launch title that was a mess in my opinion. SO what is the issue? Well the issue is that in story cut scenes your player character is invincible and is unable to be destroyed but while outside of the cut scene you are clunky and can have large chunks of your health taken from you from just a standard attack by an enemy. This makes the game feel strange and a little bit off when you see yourself as an invincible beast in one scene but in the game you are easily killed.
1ne Game 5ive Points
So (It honestly feels that I use so as an opener way to often) I am going to look at one game and briefly talk about the five points that this game encompasses.
The game? Oh yeah, been pretty vague. The game is one of my favourite games I've under mentioned and that is "Five Nights at Freddy's 3", a game that made me literally jump out of my clothes to reveal every hair on my body had been scared white.
First lets look at the sound design of the game, its funking good.
The sound design of this game is amazing as it is designed to disorient the player of the game by creating false positives for hazards while at the same time it is a vital part of the game as it is almost impossible to play the game through without the audio without a lot of luck and guess work.
As well as this the sound design of this game adds a new angle of fear to the jump scares as the sounds the hazards in this game make are not only inhuman but also distorted to a good effect.
Secondly lets have a peak at the art for this game. So every FNAF game is nothing more than a series of still images and a small handful of animations to go around however the graphics look fantastic for a game that is so easy on your processor, it's little more than a powerpoint thats only dream is for you to wet yourself.
the textures in this game are exclusively grimy medium to high polly areas and eery black spaces and shading. This makes the game crazy atmospheric as nothing within your vision seems safe it is either hidden in shadow or is textured in a way that it seems distrustful.
Next is the coding. As I said before the game is little more than a slide show at the Lecter house hold and yet is effective. In this game think of every area as little more than a curved picture you can't see past the edge and what you see seems to be 3D, but it isn't. The game is exceedingly simple making three things happen, number one all PCs can run it, Number two you can have as high a frame rate as you want and finally 3 it must be more innovative to succeed.
Game Cover Art And Magazine Adverts
Firstly, while looking at old NES covers for dimensions, I used my Wacom Drawing Tablet on a basic Photoshop file (Depicted Bellow the Cover photo). After cleaning it up a little I used the pen tool to create the shape for the top section and used the right click function on it to create a work area and chose the fill shape option. I did this because it is not only easier saving me a large amount of time but also it is more accurate and easier to correct if you make a mistake.Next with feathering and bi-linear resizing disabled to create a slightly more sifter look to the main character, this is a style choice by my decision however is something that the NES covers did not originally do. The reason I had to change so many settings is due to the size of the original image coming in at only 32 pixels tall due to the fact that this is an image from the game made using Pickle.
To create the speed effect to the main character all I did was create a duped layer from the layer with the character and I placed it below the original and used the motion blur tool to create this dashing effect.
Then I added all of the main text on the cover, I chose which font would look the best and in then end decided on a font that when altered looks the most like the classic NES font. The altering of the font was just to use the skew tool in conjunction with the rotation and the perspective tool on Photoshop.
Next what I did was that I created the hand drawn logo for my game company in Photoshop using my drawing tablet and two brushes, one a pencil styled one and the other just a good brush for filling colour with some blending.
The ratting on the bottom-left of the image is from the website that the game was originally published as getting an indie game to get an ESRB or equivalent rating can be a little bit difficult and frankly often is pointless unless you intend on physical distribution over or in conjunction with digital distribution.
Old Games? I Fudging Love Old Games!
Or more specifically I am looking at NES, SNES, Sega Genesis and Sega jaguar (Indirectly also looking at GameBoy and GameBoy colour games) styled Platformers as in its own it is its own genre as they did many things that aren't done in modern games or done before this time in gaming.
I want to talk about one thing that is in the standard platformer of that era that I am not willing to include in to my game and that is the lives system. In the day of arcades the lives system was used to get more money from the player as when they die so many times they would have no lives, to get more, put in more money in to the arcade cabinet.
This was carried on to the NES and is so ingrained it is still used. I wish to allow people to see how many times they have died but I also wish people to not get frustrated at the game itself due to an arbitrary number of deaths setting them back to the beginning of the level.
This was completely removed from all games when hell froze over. I mean you would never look at "New Super Mario Bros. Wii U" or even at games like "Scott Pilgrim" to use such an awful system that is so outdated and rubbish (can you tell I'm being sarcastic?)
Okay so games that use this system add nothing but cheap challenge. Now on to the next thing that actually explains what I bloody mean.
In video games there are four types of difficulty and only one is good. Honest Difficulty, Cheap Difficulty, Trick Difficulty and Gross Difficulty. While these are not officially recognized by basically anyone, they are recognized by me and a few people on game Dev forums. Well? What do they mean?
Honest Difficulty: This is the sort of difficulty that comes from the last stage of "Mario Bros" or from all but one level of "Super Meat Boy". This difficulty comes from you needing to master the games mechanics, knowing how the games works and being able to actually play the game. This is the type of difficulty that is based on nothing less than skill and makes you feel super rewarded when you finish it.
Cheap Difficulty: Oh god I hate this but I need to talk about this. This is a type of difficulty that is the kind of difficulty you can get pissed off about. It is the difficulty that stunts you getting forwards by using cheap tricks like a lives system. Other cheap tricks in this difficulty is that of paths that set you back, luck based progression and God Damn CHOICE SYSTEMS THAT IF YOU MAKE A WRONG CHOICE YOU ARE BACK TO THE START AND GOD DAMN IT.
Trick Difficulty: Luck and Remembering. That is this. If you want to know the definition of this and to know how it feels then follow this link. But in short this is the difficulty that forces you to remember every detail of the level and then it be pure luck weather you get through. GOD DAMN.
Gross Difficulty: You must win, but not only that but you must win at a game that has no curve in difficulty, It starts as it means to go on. WITH A BRICK ON THE ACCELERATION, A HOSE ON THE EXHAUST PIPE AND A BOMB FOR AN AIR BAG. You must learn to play a game that kills you for one mistake or that just has bad mechanics or game-play.
Nostalgia Vs Good But Retro
Oh how I uh-ed, oh how I ah-ed over where to put this but this is something I feel justified placing here because it is a large part of why old games are just so loved by so many people. This is also a little look at indie conventions however it is better to talk about nostalgia as a whole compared to just putting it in several segments.
Despite what many may say Nostalgia is not necessarily a bad thing. Nostalgia is just the idea you perceiving childhood memories with rosy retrospection. it isn't a bad emotion but it most defiantly is a very exploitable emotion. Just like 90% of the articles from Cracked.com, the majority of retro-Games are designed around exploiting the innate nostalgia creates by their product.
There are two games here that fit in to either side of the Vs in the title and those games are "Shovel Knight" an amazing game that uses the retro styled graphics to enhance the game and "Kid Icarus: Uprising" a game that's only two unique qualities are It is the only Icarus game yoy can play on a new console and the fact that it physically assaults you, I'm not joking, I have this game and because of the aweful controlls it comes with a little stand that you rest the 3DS on and it flipping hurts.
Shovel knight uses the purposely low res' graphics as a way to make the game more fun and also more accurate.
I want to talk about one thing that is in the standard platformer of that era that I am not willing to include in to my game and that is the lives system. In the day of arcades the lives system was used to get more money from the player as when they die so many times they would have no lives, to get more, put in more money in to the arcade cabinet.
This was carried on to the NES and is so ingrained it is still used. I wish to allow people to see how many times they have died but I also wish people to not get frustrated at the game itself due to an arbitrary number of deaths setting them back to the beginning of the level.
This was completely removed from all games when hell froze over. I mean you would never look at "New Super Mario Bros. Wii U" or even at games like "Scott Pilgrim" to use such an awful system that is so outdated and rubbish (can you tell I'm being sarcastic?)
Okay so games that use this system add nothing but cheap challenge. Now on to the next thing that actually explains what I bloody mean.
In video games there are four types of difficulty and only one is good. Honest Difficulty, Cheap Difficulty, Trick Difficulty and Gross Difficulty. While these are not officially recognized by basically anyone, they are recognized by me and a few people on game Dev forums. Well? What do they mean?
Honest Difficulty: This is the sort of difficulty that comes from the last stage of "Mario Bros" or from all but one level of "Super Meat Boy". This difficulty comes from you needing to master the games mechanics, knowing how the games works and being able to actually play the game. This is the type of difficulty that is based on nothing less than skill and makes you feel super rewarded when you finish it.
Cheap Difficulty: Oh god I hate this but I need to talk about this. This is a type of difficulty that is the kind of difficulty you can get pissed off about. It is the difficulty that stunts you getting forwards by using cheap tricks like a lives system. Other cheap tricks in this difficulty is that of paths that set you back, luck based progression and God Damn CHOICE SYSTEMS THAT IF YOU MAKE A WRONG CHOICE YOU ARE BACK TO THE START AND GOD DAMN IT.
Trick Difficulty: Luck and Remembering. That is this. If you want to know the definition of this and to know how it feels then follow this link. But in short this is the difficulty that forces you to remember every detail of the level and then it be pure luck weather you get through. GOD DAMN.
Gross Difficulty: You must win, but not only that but you must win at a game that has no curve in difficulty, It starts as it means to go on. WITH A BRICK ON THE ACCELERATION, A HOSE ON THE EXHAUST PIPE AND A BOMB FOR AN AIR BAG. You must learn to play a game that kills you for one mistake or that just has bad mechanics or game-play.
Nostalgia Vs Good But Retro
Oh how I uh-ed, oh how I ah-ed over where to put this but this is something I feel justified placing here because it is a large part of why old games are just so loved by so many people. This is also a little look at indie conventions however it is better to talk about nostalgia as a whole compared to just putting it in several segments.
Despite what many may say Nostalgia is not necessarily a bad thing. Nostalgia is just the idea you perceiving childhood memories with rosy retrospection. it isn't a bad emotion but it most defiantly is a very exploitable emotion. Just like 90% of the articles from Cracked.com, the majority of retro-Games are designed around exploiting the innate nostalgia creates by their product.
There are two games here that fit in to either side of the Vs in the title and those games are "Shovel Knight" an amazing game that uses the retro styled graphics to enhance the game and "Kid Icarus: Uprising" a game that's only two unique qualities are It is the only Icarus game yoy can play on a new console and the fact that it physically assaults you, I'm not joking, I have this game and because of the aweful controlls it comes with a little stand that you rest the 3DS on and it flipping hurts.
Shovel knight uses the purposely low res' graphics as a way to make the game more fun and also more accurate.
The Story Of The Game
It will be a retro styled platformer with standard mechanics including:
Running
Jumping
flying
shooting
in built puzzles
subtle mechanics alongside all of it.
But what about the story?
Well in Mario all we know is save the princess and often she is in another castle. In mega-man Willey is a jerk and you must take him and his robots down. In Castlvania you are killing spooky monsters (Maybe due to an experience at a Halloween dance). And in... well okay you get the idea.
Without the whole booklet in a game you have little bloody clue as to what is going on so here is my story:
"You are a blob. Go blob around."
Well while that maybe the story inside the game is a wee bit anemic when you open the booklet (A little booklet that is found in many older games that seems to have disappeared and makes me sad) you get the whole story, and god they are glorious.
Mario, you are an italian american plumber after to save princess toadstool after the great king koopa (Bowser to you and I) kidnapped her and took her away so she can't reverse his black magic to turn all of the mushroom people back in to mushroom people.
Mega-Man, You are mega-man one of the first fully robotic humans ever created by the great Dr light but after Dr Willey gets super jelly he steels the tech and turns the robots that Light created who was originally created to help against the very people they surve.
Castlevania, you are the member of a great line of hunters and it is the curse of your family so that every member of this line must fight and be the one to kill Dracula every time he is reincarnated, battling your way through Knights, Medusa head (Honestly I hate them so much) and eventually Dracula himself.
IT WAS SO GOOD. Okay now that is out of my system lets talk about the hidden plot of my game.
"You are Professor I. Squishe PHD and you are working on a formula to dehydrate everything meaning that food, furniture and maybe even animals can be transported in to space. However you soon discover the plot of Dr. A. Bigglsworth B.A. to take over the company you are in shock but are quickly discovered and forced to drink your imperfect formula and as a result are dehidrated in to a block that is only 1cm by 1cm and thrown in to the freezer.
Years later a drop of water falls on you and you are revived but only now the size of a cigarette box. The evil Dr A. Bigglsworth B.A. has taken over the facility and the world but during the take over the freezer units are damaged leading you in to small vent."
In my game I am purposely avoiding anything that has to do with Gender, Age, Race, Sexuality and anything that could cause any sort of "Flame War" surrounding the game. I am not representing any individuals by making the character as blank as possible even the characters gender is just an assumption the player makes.
This is something that Nintendo does that Nintend... Sega don't...
Nintendo has this amazing way of making the character you play as blank as possible. Look at the original "legend of zelda" your character says nothing and has no emotions so when you start you could make any assumption, Maybe you are just some normal bloke who stumbles upon it, or you lived your life knowing you were different ,or maybe you where a poor moisture farmer living with your aunt and uncle on some distant planet until you find out your father was Darth Vader... That's the plot to the original trilogy to Star Wars wasn't it? But you get the point, and that is what I want to achieve in my game, complete ambiguity.
Running
Jumping
flying
shooting
in built puzzles
subtle mechanics alongside all of it.
But what about the story?
Well in Mario all we know is save the princess and often she is in another castle. In mega-man Willey is a jerk and you must take him and his robots down. In Castlvania you are killing spooky monsters (Maybe due to an experience at a Halloween dance). And in... well okay you get the idea.
Without the whole booklet in a game you have little bloody clue as to what is going on so here is my story:
"You are a blob. Go blob around."
Well while that maybe the story inside the game is a wee bit anemic when you open the booklet (A little booklet that is found in many older games that seems to have disappeared and makes me sad) you get the whole story, and god they are glorious.
Mario, you are an italian american plumber after to save princess toadstool after the great king koopa (Bowser to you and I) kidnapped her and took her away so she can't reverse his black magic to turn all of the mushroom people back in to mushroom people.
Mega-Man, You are mega-man one of the first fully robotic humans ever created by the great Dr light but after Dr Willey gets super jelly he steels the tech and turns the robots that Light created who was originally created to help against the very people they surve.
Castlevania, you are the member of a great line of hunters and it is the curse of your family so that every member of this line must fight and be the one to kill Dracula every time he is reincarnated, battling your way through Knights, Medusa head (Honestly I hate them so much) and eventually Dracula himself.
IT WAS SO GOOD. Okay now that is out of my system lets talk about the hidden plot of my game.
"You are Professor I. Squishe PHD and you are working on a formula to dehydrate everything meaning that food, furniture and maybe even animals can be transported in to space. However you soon discover the plot of Dr. A. Bigglsworth B.A. to take over the company you are in shock but are quickly discovered and forced to drink your imperfect formula and as a result are dehidrated in to a block that is only 1cm by 1cm and thrown in to the freezer.
Years later a drop of water falls on you and you are revived but only now the size of a cigarette box. The evil Dr A. Bigglsworth B.A. has taken over the facility and the world but during the take over the freezer units are damaged leading you in to small vent."
In my game I am purposely avoiding anything that has to do with Gender, Age, Race, Sexuality and anything that could cause any sort of "Flame War" surrounding the game. I am not representing any individuals by making the character as blank as possible even the characters gender is just an assumption the player makes.
This is something that Nintendo does that Nintend... Sega don't...
Nintendo has this amazing way of making the character you play as blank as possible. Look at the original "legend of zelda" your character says nothing and has no emotions so when you start you could make any assumption, Maybe you are just some normal bloke who stumbles upon it, or you lived your life knowing you were different ,or maybe you where a poor moisture farmer living with your aunt and uncle on some distant planet until you find out your father was Darth Vader... That's the plot to the original trilogy to Star Wars wasn't it? But you get the point, and that is what I want to achieve in my game, complete ambiguity.
Gamers and My Gamers
My key audience is the indie game crowd from the ages of 17 to 35 and this is for a very specific reason.
The reason for my age range is because of the fact that my game plays off the nostalgia factor that a game that has intentionally pixelated graphics preys upon. and as a 1998 titled "Feelings, Fantasies, and Memories: An Examination of the Emotional Components of Nostalgia" and many others find that when you look at things from your past you tend to see things through the proverbial "rose tinted glasses".
How the Media Portrays My Audience
So there are two forms of media and each views my specific audience differently.
Firstly how they are seen in old media such as the TV or News or something like that. In old media all video gamers are seen as lazy, aggressive and Not getting sex. Also watch this this is funny (Kinda Linked in). This perspective is more perpetuated by White, Corporate run news organisations such as Fox News, The sun and The daily mail. However due the fact that they don't understand the nuances of video games and gamers they have only one stereotype for gamers in general.
New media Is different however as new media is in essence built buy people who are more likely to play videogames. So what is the new media stereo type for Retro gamers... Here I'll use a quote:
"Fat, nerdy, neck beards who cry in to their Japanese love pillows at night." - Ben "Yahtzee" Crowshaw. So this may not seem to different but... it kinda is.
They are seen as Men in their mid to late 30's, they still live with there parents, they don't have sex, they are still obsessed with anime and manga, and they are super nostalgia blind to anything they loved as a kid, essentially in a state of arrested development.
But that is just the stereo type so what are they? Just like many groups that have a stereo type they are essentially everyone. Statistical more likely to be men, Aged between 12 to 60, and they just love games that take them to an place where they where younger.
THEM 0.0
to optimize the number of people who download this game I need to go for as broad an audience within my niche market as possible and to do this i need to go off and do some research of my own with a survey on people within it, so I shall go off and write my survey and post it among forums that cater my key demographic.
And here it is
So here ar ethe important results and one buy one i will talk about what it actually meas for me and my project.
So considering the common way that retro gamers are seen the first one really surprised me as you see that they actually don't mind modern mechanics in a retro game. this maybe due to the fact that many have actually realized that old games had things that new games don't have. I mean if you look at some of the stupid games in the early area of gaming you see they had some not so good ideas, one that both me and many others including Ben "Yahtzee" crowshaw have raged against is the lives system, a mechanic that was designed to take as much money as possible from children at early arcades, but in modern games it is useless.
When you look at number two you get somewhat of an odd reading as you get a large number of people liking the idea of purposefully retro decisions however they don't wish to keep the frustrating or inaccurate game-play of retro games. This is actually what I thought would happen with the crowd this survey was aimed at is, they are the sort of people who enjoy the nostagia and simpleness of old games however they don't wish to relive the game-play of old games that was often as hard as Eminem claims to be.
Number 3 is something that shocked me but also made my job somewhat easier. Mario topped out easily but that game is just a simple "Jump Man Platformer" so I need to incorporate something from the runner up that is megaman X. This game was thrown in to the questions despite being a SNES game rather than NES like all the others on the list. This game is one of the most innovative games in history as it manages to refresh an old idea in a way that still has yet to be replicated in my opinion.
What I am going to do is build a standard platformer that incorporates the three main bits of megaman X that people love:
1. No handholding
2.Introduce things in an organic way
3. Interesting platforming.
The fourth question restores my faith in humanity as it proves not every gamer is obsessed with graphics and actually would rather time spent on building interesting levels meaning that i am going to have to allocate a larger amount of time to coding and less time to art and sprite design.
This isn't uncommon in gaming. Any game jam you see where there is only one individual building the game in 48 hour. You will see that only about 4 hours or even less is spent on the art so as to build a game that is interesting or fun rather than just pretty.
The fifth one is just so I can get an idea of what they prefer in the story and despite the idea of robot being popular among many games in the past it seems that people like the idea of an experiment in better.
FA☆☆OT
Yeah... I want to talk about a huge issue in online video games and in all honesty this is the best place to put it, and that is the other F word.
Most see this as being anti-Gay and I can see the reasoning but as it stands it isn't really about being Anti-LGBT... Yet.
I played Call Of Duty For this and this is an honest quote from someone who sounded about 13 over the group chat and i am going to quote it probatum because I was honestly shocked at this I wrote it down at the time and I want you to have a good feel,
"Fuck you, you fucking faggot, I will fucking swat you and they will come over your house and fuck your fucking faggot face up you fag."
I am a pansexual male and in all honesty I have an idea about how this occurs and I call it the School ground Theory.
As a child you would go out with friends and go over there house, chill in the living room or just be at school and during all of these activities you were almost always in ear shot of your parents, or maybe your friend may be the sort that would tell. The only swears you hear is from carefuller parents or the brother of a friend.
Now swap playground with in your room all on your own, swap the friend that may tell with a complete stranger, the adult that may hear you with no one and what do you get? A child who grows up not truly understanding what you should and shouldn't say, learning wrong and right from random adults and teens on the internet, this is why video games have and ESRB ratting to stop children playing on a game ratted 18, or at the very least with supervision.
The reason for my age range is because of the fact that my game plays off the nostalgia factor that a game that has intentionally pixelated graphics preys upon. and as a 1998 titled "Feelings, Fantasies, and Memories: An Examination of the Emotional Components of Nostalgia" and many others find that when you look at things from your past you tend to see things through the proverbial "rose tinted glasses".
How the Media Portrays My Audience
So there are two forms of media and each views my specific audience differently.
Firstly how they are seen in old media such as the TV or News or something like that. In old media all video gamers are seen as lazy, aggressive and Not getting sex. Also watch this this is funny (Kinda Linked in). This perspective is more perpetuated by White, Corporate run news organisations such as Fox News, The sun and The daily mail. However due the fact that they don't understand the nuances of video games and gamers they have only one stereotype for gamers in general.
New media Is different however as new media is in essence built buy people who are more likely to play videogames. So what is the new media stereo type for Retro gamers... Here I'll use a quote:
"Fat, nerdy, neck beards who cry in to their Japanese love pillows at night." - Ben "Yahtzee" Crowshaw. So this may not seem to different but... it kinda is.
They are seen as Men in their mid to late 30's, they still live with there parents, they don't have sex, they are still obsessed with anime and manga, and they are super nostalgia blind to anything they loved as a kid, essentially in a state of arrested development.
But that is just the stereo type so what are they? Just like many groups that have a stereo type they are essentially everyone. Statistical more likely to be men, Aged between 12 to 60, and they just love games that take them to an place where they where younger.
THEM 0.0
to optimize the number of people who download this game I need to go for as broad an audience within my niche market as possible and to do this i need to go off and do some research of my own with a survey on people within it, so I shall go off and write my survey and post it among forums that cater my key demographic.
And here it is
So considering the common way that retro gamers are seen the first one really surprised me as you see that they actually don't mind modern mechanics in a retro game. this maybe due to the fact that many have actually realized that old games had things that new games don't have. I mean if you look at some of the stupid games in the early area of gaming you see they had some not so good ideas, one that both me and many others including Ben "Yahtzee" crowshaw have raged against is the lives system, a mechanic that was designed to take as much money as possible from children at early arcades, but in modern games it is useless.
When you look at number two you get somewhat of an odd reading as you get a large number of people liking the idea of purposefully retro decisions however they don't wish to keep the frustrating or inaccurate game-play of retro games. This is actually what I thought would happen with the crowd this survey was aimed at is, they are the sort of people who enjoy the nostagia and simpleness of old games however they don't wish to relive the game-play of old games that was often as hard as Eminem claims to be.
Number 3 is something that shocked me but also made my job somewhat easier. Mario topped out easily but that game is just a simple "Jump Man Platformer" so I need to incorporate something from the runner up that is megaman X. This game was thrown in to the questions despite being a SNES game rather than NES like all the others on the list. This game is one of the most innovative games in history as it manages to refresh an old idea in a way that still has yet to be replicated in my opinion.
What I am going to do is build a standard platformer that incorporates the three main bits of megaman X that people love:
1. No handholding
2.Introduce things in an organic way
3. Interesting platforming.
The fourth question restores my faith in humanity as it proves not every gamer is obsessed with graphics and actually would rather time spent on building interesting levels meaning that i am going to have to allocate a larger amount of time to coding and less time to art and sprite design.
This isn't uncommon in gaming. Any game jam you see where there is only one individual building the game in 48 hour. You will see that only about 4 hours or even less is spent on the art so as to build a game that is interesting or fun rather than just pretty.
The fifth one is just so I can get an idea of what they prefer in the story and despite the idea of robot being popular among many games in the past it seems that people like the idea of an experiment in better.
FA☆☆OT
Yeah... I want to talk about a huge issue in online video games and in all honesty this is the best place to put it, and that is the other F word.
Most see this as being anti-Gay and I can see the reasoning but as it stands it isn't really about being Anti-LGBT... Yet.
I played Call Of Duty For this and this is an honest quote from someone who sounded about 13 over the group chat and i am going to quote it probatum because I was honestly shocked at this I wrote it down at the time and I want you to have a good feel,
"Fuck you, you fucking faggot, I will fucking swat you and they will come over your house and fuck your fucking faggot face up you fag."
I am a pansexual male and in all honesty I have an idea about how this occurs and I call it the School ground Theory.
As a child you would go out with friends and go over there house, chill in the living room or just be at school and during all of these activities you were almost always in ear shot of your parents, or maybe your friend may be the sort that would tell. The only swears you hear is from carefuller parents or the brother of a friend.
Now swap playground with in your room all on your own, swap the friend that may tell with a complete stranger, the adult that may hear you with no one and what do you get? A child who grows up not truly understanding what you should and shouldn't say, learning wrong and right from random adults and teens on the internet, this is why video games have and ESRB ratting to stop children playing on a game ratted 18, or at the very least with supervision.
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