Over the past six months we’ve been developing a brand new server. Our old one was slow and required sharding and made things such as the two-week timeout very difficult.
We moved to our new server shortly before the iPad launch, and have been working around the clock to fix issues which have arisen from that. I was hoping for our first launch with zero server issues but we didn’t achieve that, and I’m really sorry about that.
Every day we’ve put up patches which have improved things, and I’m hoping that by the end of this week you guys will not be having any problems at all.
We will then immediately activate the two-week timeout. I’m sorry that our communication hasn’t been better on this – problems with our servers has made it difficult for us to sort this out well enough in the past, and I’m aware that it’s a source of massive frustration for our most dedicated players. You have my word that we will be fixing this issue this month, and that we will continue to do our best to deal better with people who do not finish their games.
I had to put more “risk” into the decision to download a paid game than a free game. I will feel more stupid if I don’t enjoy it than if the only cost to me was some all-you-can-eat bandwidth on my wifi.
Basically, his point is that it’s harder (for him) to make the choice to try a paid game than it is to try a free game.
Now, everyone loves bullet points, so here are some:
It’s a personal article about someone’s own preference and how that relates to a wider theme; it’s hyperbolic…because it’s written by Nicholas Lovell! I’ll be responding in a similar way
This isn’t really about Frozen Synapse, as Nicholas told me.
We get on well and I’ve written for Gamesbrief before: this isn’t personal, so be nice if you comment or respond to him
Let’s talk about me now:
I find it harder to try a free-to-play game than I do to buy a paid one. Here’s why:
1. Most free-to-play games are still terrible
I constantly see free-to-play proponents claiming this isn’t the case (Nicholas is doing it on Twitter right now!) but it’s still true for a certain audience. And it’s not just the stereotypical “core” or “indie” audience who feel this way.
“No!” they will say. ”Have you tried [terrible core game]?” It’s always an embarrassing conversation.
This is changing, but very very slowly: the prejudices are still valid.
Back to me again. I like:
- Immersion which isn’t broken by payment prompts
- Thoughtful narrative (in single player)
- Exceptional aesthetics
- Skill-based gameplay and a complex multi-player meta-game (in multiplayer)
Many, many free-to-play games are designed for people who don’t give two hoots about all of that stuff and like putting things in lines, flicking little men inside buggies, or buying the shiniest gun with the best numbers next to it. I still expect most free-to-play games I try to be terrible and I’m not often wrong.
Of course, it’s fine for things to be terrible, and such things often do well commerically. Here’s Pitbull and Christina Aguilera to explain further:
Is this a snobby, elitist, smug opinion? Definitely. Show me a single person who isn’t smug, snobby and elitist about their own taste. I’m sure there are people who love that song, and that’s fine. I…kind of love it. Because it is terrible.
THIS IS DIGRESSION
2. The ones that are not terrible make me dread their monetisation, fear for their future or write them off as an anomaly
I think this is a more interesting point.
I’ve played some League of Legends: it’s definitely a fun game with a rich multiplayer meta-game, although it’s not really my thing. I don’t want to get to the point where I feel compelled to buy champions…that just doesn’t appeal to me. I want to pay and forget that I’ve paid, not keep reaching for my wallet from time to time. That, coupled with the crazy impenetrable maximalism of the rune system, and the fact that I don’t enjoy watching it streamed made me stop playing.
Obviously aesthetic-only microtransactions avoid this problem.
However, I don’t really think that small indie developers can take many meaningful lessons from either DOTA2 or Team Fortress 2…aside from “people actually do like aesthetic microtransactions in big communities”. I believe free-to-play in core games works at a massive scale with a well known franchise; if you’re at the stage where you can viably consider it you’re probably doing pretty well for yourself anyway. If we considered doing a free-to-play game in future, it’d probably be aesthetic-only and we’d be aiming for a huge audience.
So, I have “wallet dread”: I know that there will be some reason to keep me paying regularly while I’m playing and I just don’t want that. It makes me concerned about the design of the game and often not even bother to try it.
When a free-to-play game doesn’t induce that feeling in me, I have concerns about its future. There’s very little data available from devs about this still at the moment, so it’s hard to know whether that instinct is right or not.
By the way, if you’re a smaller developer making core F2P games, please release some data. You’ll get a massive amount of press and it will help a lot of us to understand these things more.
I don’t think I’m alone with my wallet dread: a lot of people value their time more than they value money. They want to pay to experience an unusual, unique game design that won’t harass them with tiny charges later on. The game is up now: people understand that “free” doesn’t really exist.
Here’s another thing: sometimes I don’t want to be “retained”. Designing for retention isn’t the Holy Grail: sometimes something is really fun for a short period of time, then not fun any more. I found this with Chivalry: I’m still glad I paid for it, but I probably won’t play it again. That sort of game is valid, both creatively and commercially: it can’t be free-to-play.
Frozen Synapse
Frozen Synapse is doing well on the App Store: it’s hit the benchmark that we wanted it to hit.
Nicholas said this wasn’t about Frozen Synapse but, of course, it sort of is. I’ve said this many times before: if there was a way of making Frozen Synapse F2P in a way which wouldn’t compromise its design, we would think seriously about doing it.
There genuinely isn’t: it’s not possible. It wouldn’t be Frozen Synapse if you started to do any of the things to it which would make for a successful free-to-play game.
For that reason, I’m glad Nicholas hasn’t bought it. If the relationship you want with creators is that of being gently cajoled into paying while maintaining the illusion that you’re getting something for free, we’re not going to do that for you. We’re going to say: “Look, here is something which we spent four years making that has a massive scope. You can read what people say about it, watch videos of it, read user reviews, talk to members of the community and make one decision about its worth to you.”
We are being straight-up with you; that allows us to be straight-up in our design. Frozen Synapse was supposed to be a clear, simple tactical game which allowed the user to do anything they wanted: that wasn’t perfectly achieved but that was the original motivation.
You don’t have to puzzle out just how we’re going to extract the next $2 from you: we made a deal and we’ll stick to it. This isn’t the way to make the most money possible from a game, but it’s what we wanted to do.
In addition, once you’ve bought the game, if you like it and you want to spend more money on it, you can! There’s a whole Red expansion pack to buy (coming soon to iPad by the way!). This is completely optional: there is a huge amount to enjoy in the game without it. I have no problem with games allowing their audience to pay more to get more stuff, by the way: I do think indies should take this into consideration more as well.
Finally, FS is a niche game, so it’s more expensive than some other games on the App Store: that’s how niches work, you often pay a little bit more for something that appeals more directly to you personally.
I’m sick of people telling me it “should” be free-to-play: I feel like this opinion is as daft as telling me to put a banging donk on it.
Where am I going with this?
We will never, ever make a game where the payment model constrains the design. If a design fits into free-to-play then we would definitely consider using it, but it’s not ever going to be an a priori creative limitation for us. There will be no donks.
Every payment model has its disadvantages: pay-once can put some people off. It’s hard to get the price right, and sometimes people aren’t able to try a game in a low-pressure way.
Design comes first for us: that’s why Frozen Synapse costs money.
As I write this, you can currently buy Frozen Synapse on the App Store in New Zealand. At midnight in every “territory”, the game will become available.
We can’t see any sales stats yet, so we’re in total limbo.
I’ve written about the process of getting FS onto the iPad at PocketGamer and Gamesindustry. I’ve also done an interview with Edge which will be published shortly.
We started making indie games in a bedroom with a volunteer team of comprised of our friends; now we’re taking a game multi-platform, working on a new title with ex-AAA artists and dealing with a sizeable community. We’ve swapped from full-on hapless underdogs to something of an established developer (in indie circles at least) almost overnight.
This transition is going to happen to a lot of people soon. It’s weird, difficult and it needs different skills from the semi-skills you started out with. I’m someone that wants to find the “right” way of doing everything, and get the maximum out of all of our efforts: both of those things are impossible, so I often don’t have a particularly easy time reconciling my motivations with reality. I’m trying to get better at that.
The iPad version of Frozen Synapse is a massive turning point for us. If our games work in different contexts, that means that we have access to a much greater scope than we ever imagined sitting in that bedroom.
I find launching things unbelievably stressful and difficult, so I am going to soothe myself with nostalgia. One of the main reasons I am doing this is to have weird experiences and share them with people I like.
I talked to Mike Bithell about this recently, as he is also having amazing experiences as his game becomes well-known. We thought that a lot of people wouldn’t necessarily get the significance of some of these personal moments (or might just consider them self-indulgent bollocks) but actually I think I’ll share some in case these are of interest to anyone.
So, with that in mind, here are a few highs and lows:
Meeting Kieron Gillen in a pub
Yes, I’m sure other journalists (and Kieron) will laugh about this one but this was one of the first significant things that happened to us which differentiated us from other people just sitting in a house making something. In what seems like a different era, Kieron wrote How to Use and Abuse the Games Press and we decided to call him on it by inviting him to meet up. Talking to someone whose writing you read a lot growing up about existentialist Manic Miner (I think) mods was an interesting experience! Kieron was awesome and prepared us for a life of meeting games journalists in pubs.
There was a nice synergy when, many years later, we showed Kieron the beta of Frozen Synapse, also in a pub. Themes develop.
Going to PC Gamer
Via Kieron, we ended up taking our first game Determinance to PC Gamer’s office in Bath. Then-editor Ross Atherton congratulated us on having “the balls to come down here” which, now I think about it, sounds immensely confrontational but was actually meant in a spirit of encouragement. We met a lot of other journalists and had a great time playing the game with them, even though there was clearly (and justifiably) some bemusement about the flying sword-fighting involved. It was a weird game…I still have a soft-spot for it.
I remember meeting the brilliant Richard Cobbett for the first time, who was roused by Ross from his hidey-hole somewhere in the depths of PC Plus and getting a brief chance to chat adventure games with him.
Not getting Steam distribution for Determinance
This was a turning point at the time because it was literally all we wanted, and we couldn’t have it. It was a big blow and difficult to deal with, but it really pushed us to try and make a good game next time. It was ultimately a good thing and we’re delighted to have a game on Steam plus the anticipation of bringing Frozen Endzone there.
Gamecity and Frozen Synapse
The first time I went to Gamecity we hadn’t even finished Determinance. I ended up speaking at their very first event and shouting at an inexplicably full room of people about La La Land 2, a game which still doesn’t get enough attention. I have no idea why anyone listened to me; I found it pretty bizarre that I ended up in a room with a BBFC examiner, Rob Yescombe, Margaret Robertson and a host of other games luminaries of the time. I’ve been to every Gamecity to date and I will continue to do this forever: it is amazing.
Another of my important Gamecity memories is drawing a willy on a pudding (context: we were supposed to draw things on our puddings), looking over and seeing that Andrew John Smith, who I had met about twenty minutes before, had also drawn a willy on his. I feel…somehow…that this is important.
Where was I going with this? Oh yes, we took Frozen Synapse to Gamecity and forced the general public to play it in a tent. Some of them stay for FOUR HOURS. My vestigial doubts about the game were completely destroyed by witnessing this. It was astonishing.
Frozen Synapse Launches
The various launches associated with Frozen Synapse were all gigantically stressful. It’s weird to say but getting something on sale that suddenly gets a huge amount of attention isn’t especially enjoyable at the time: of course it’s MUCH better in every way than dealing with a failure, but equally it’s like millions of people all looking through your window at the same time. The good stuff comes later.
I can only imagine what Notch felt when Minecraft started blowing up: I presume it’s the same careering-down-a-hill-on-a-unicycle sensation but multiplied many times.
When we realised that Frozen Synapse was doing well, when the reviews started coming in like the 9/10′s from Eurogamer and Edge, it changed everything. We had a future, we could make games for a living: suddenly everything made sense and we weren’t doing something that people thought was crazy any more. That’s incontrovertibly good, but obviously it was a big change, as I mentioned earlier.
Writing for Penny Arcade
Back even before Determinance, when my only interaction with the games industry was working in a shop, everyone there told me that I had to read Penny Arcade. I started, but I knew so little about games that I didn’t understand the jokes. I loved Tycho’s writing though, and so I stuck with the site.
I had a very difficult period in my life a few years later, and I remember reading PA a lot during that time and looking forward to every update as a distraction. I’ve always appreciated Tycho’s preposterous verbal gyrations that somehow are also simultaneously self-deprecating.
That’s why getting a mail from the man himself asking if I would like to write for the site was mindblowing. I covered that experience in the piece. Sitting in the sunshine in my garden working on drafts for that was totally thrilling.
Winning the IGF Audience Award
This was huge for us and I wanted everyone to experience what it was like, as this was a massive “thank you” from the community. I got to meet legendary game designers like Warren Spector, Mark Cerny, Ed Logg and Dave Theurer: it was unforgettable. Seeing Ian, who I obviously think is a phenomenal game designer, in that company as well was cool for me.
Every time someone says something nice about my music
I always thought that working with Ian would be more rewarding than working on my own: this is one of the things I’ve been most right about in my entire life. Before Mode 7, part of me wanted to go and be a musician on my own but ultimately I thought life would be better working in games and putting my music in the context of some of the awesome stuff that Ian can do. So, any time someone directly says, “The soundtrack was awesome” or anything along those lines, I feel completely happy with what I’ve done in my career so far. I love the fact that the most significant music I’ve made by a long way is ALSO part of this game we slaved over together, that people know and like; it’s so motivating to go on and do more things.
I’ve even been able to do some of my own musical projects under the Mode 7 banner (namely _ensnare_) and that is going to a continue for a long time. I want to do a standalone nervous_testpilot album at some point, but honestly there is so much music going into Endzone that I won’t have any left for that! I’m going to up my game next time and try and do justice to the number of amazing comments, tweets and emails I get every week about my music. Thank you.
The Future
We do try to keep up with things the community wants / needs and we sometimes haven’t done the right things. That’s basically caused by not being great at prioritising resources in a small team, something which I plan to improve as we go along. Every time someone has an issue with the game, I think about it a lot and try to get it fixed: that’s not hyperbole.
Frozen Endzone is a really exciting game to work on. We have just started playing the game in the office for the first time and I think Ian’s design is brilliant: it’s tactical and precise but creative and fun at the same time. There’s a lot of reading your opponent and a lot of puzzling out interesting situations. The artists we’re working with are very talented (and also happen to be my friends) so we have a strong team. We’ll be getting into fleshing out the game very soon – Ian is sitting behind me working on AI for the single player right now – this is always a meaty and satisfying stage of development where your input has real efficacy.
Advice?
We do get asked for advice a lot, as do other indie devs. I’ve written a massive post which I think has useful information for completely new people. We really honestly don’t know what we’re doing in the grand scheme of things, and I doubt anyone else does either, but in any case here are some general ideas:
- Make things you want to play; believe in your own instincts on this
- Learn how to make those things properly
- Be honest about how good you think your things are; compare them to other things in as brutally objective a way as you can manage
- Listen to what people say, but not too much and not at the expense of executing your ideas
- Try not to be a dick to anyone you work with; patch things up if you fail at this
- Talk to your friends and family a lot and don’t lose track of them when you’re working hard
- In fact, listen to a lot of people in general, learn how to filter what they say properly
- Talk about your own work a massive amount even if it bores people – it’s so incredibly hard to get attention now that talking a lot is pretty much the only way
- Definitelykeep going if you have a failure, even a big one
Mode 7 was always about trying to make interesting, unusual games and I think we’re sticking to our guns. If Frozen Synapse iPad, Android, Vita and PS3 do well, you can expect to see Endzone on a host of systems as well.
When we started, we used to be a lot more public about what we were doing. I want to bring that back a bit and make this interesting part of the dev process on Endzone a bit more open: we’ll see if I can achieve that.
I’m going to go back to waiting for the fallout from this launch now. Do pick up FS iPad if you want to make my day: I’ll see you on the other side.
Before you ask, the Android version is coming later this month.
For those who don’t know, I’m the designer and coder of the original PC Frozen Synapse. Frozen Synapse, and multiplayer especially, was my baby – although, as with most games, it was our fantastic team are who made it all possible.
I haven’t been all that involved in FS iPad. Paul, James Urquhart, James Hannett, and Bin (he of the beard, and of the achievement) have been largely responsible for it. I’m pretty stunned by how well it fits the device – the user interface which they’ve all spent so long working on just works. It feels native.
Anyway, back to me. I’ve been working on Frozen Endzone – as much a follow up to FS as it’s possible to be considering the men with guns have been swapped for robots with balls. I’ve been completely submerged in Endzone development for the last year and I’ve hardly played any FS at all.
But now I am again. I first envisioned FS as a game I would play on my DS while sitting on the sofa watching Diagnosis Murder. Well, the device has changed, but basically yesterday for the first time I did just that*.
This is not a blog post trying to sell you on FS. Honestly, I think everyone who visits this site already likes FS or is looking for SNES hacking advice and has already turned away disgusted. I want to write a bit about how it feels to have made a game and to come back to it after this time and actually like it.
Making games is difficult, and it’s often not very fun. You get so stressed during certain stages of development that you just can’t play the game you’ve spent the last 12 hours coding – you have to get away from it. Certainly when you design and code – as I and many others do – there is real separation between those two elements. I will playtest and design for a day, then I will spend the next day coding all the ideas I had. You can’t mix them easily – designing a game and programming are two very different states of mind. And you are never just playing your game like you would play someone else’s.
When you finish something – any creative endeavor really – you tend to be unhappy with it. It doesn’t matter how many accolades you get, or how many sales, the original creator tends to only see the things which didn’t work. The unfulfilled ideas and the bugs. I was able to play FS when it was originally released, but my mind was so full of all of the different feedback I was getting, and all the ways in which my life was changing, that I wasn’t able to just experience FS as a game. I’m not sure I’ve ever been able to just experience FS as a game.
Until yesterday.
Something about the time away, and the newness of playing it on this very different device, allowed me to actually experience FS. And it felt great. It felt like I always wanted it to feel, back when it was just a day-dream. Quick games with real decisions, different every time. I logged in and got a game against a stranger within ten seconds. He was nice and we chatted over IRC while we fought. And then when we’d finished I clicked on “Next Duplicate” and used a feature I’m still immensly proud of – randomly generated maps which are played by multiple people, and it being really easy to see how other people acted given the same decisions as you.
Tomorrow I’ll go and battle with coding the Frozen Endzone AI. I’ll go back to the fear and uncertainty of making something new, and dealing with budgets and deadlines and a commercial climate which is changing faster than I can even hope to keep track of.
But today I’m enjoying a game I already made.
Thanks for all the support guys,
Ian
*This is actually a heinous lie. I was watching Murder She Wrote, because there wasn’t any Diagnosis Murder on. Now I like MSW as much as the next guy, but compared to DM it’s like Corona without lime.
The Encounter With Dracula Is Terminated is a long running and sporadically deployed series of articles about the gaming universe by long time Mode 7 community person Alex ‘malakian’ Hayes. Follow him at www.twitter.com/inspectorvector
Forsooth? FORSOOTH! The Encounter With Dracula Is Terminated! Part 2 of the encounter with Baldur’s Gate, however, is yet to begin! Stumbling in over a week late, the journey continues unabashed. This time, we jump right into playing the game from the beginning, which you may find surprising seen as I’ve already written 2000 words of this blogging epic. If you’re not up to speed with my (lack of) adventure thus far, you can and should catch up right here. Obviously spoilers will scale as I level up, so expect some minor ones here at level 2.
After an ambiguous introduction movie in which a demonic Viking threw a cowering man off a building, I was looking at the character creation screen. I made a male half-elf fighter, with the alignment “neutral good”. Apparently this means I must pursue justice with no particular regard for societal structures. I felt this to be an apt choice, as it reflects what I am doing right now in lieu of lucrative employment. Interestingly, the game warned of ‘consequences’ should this chosen path be deviated from. Next was a choice of combat and weapon skills to invest in. One was KATANA. It’s description basically said you probably won’t find one so think very carefully about investing in this. Below this, a second caveat: “WARNING: Katanas are very rare!”. After investing the maximum points I could in the katana skill, I put the remaining points into two-weapon style. I will not accept anything less than two of the best. My character was ready, and I joined him outside quite a rowdy sounding pub. It was at this earliest of points that I noticed that what I had presumed a tunic was very much akin to a purple summer dress. As if that wasn’t enough, upon the instruction to move, he was responding with “I shall attend to it in a trice”. So, fearing for my unconventionally clothed Etonian, I decided it was time to get him a gin and tonic, and proudly strode to the public house. After trying to gauge the opinions of three nearby cows. They weren’t in the mood.
As I approached the door, a primitive but impressively functional weather system kicked in. Thunder rolled and showers fell. I had been hurriedly instructed to buy what I needed at the pub in preparation for a hasty and unexplained departure, but my elf’s tastes were clear, and this looked no place to purchase an ermine toque. What could be in store for our hero? Well, luckily, the inside of the tavern was far more congenial than it had appeared to be. More respectable sorts than I’d expected stood around, behaving themselves in an similarly-skirted manner to our protagonist. Firebead, the fellow I chose to strike up a conversation with, lamented in spoken dialogue simply that it was “so hard to find decent folk nowadays…”. Noblewoman, another patron, loudly proclaimed “what a pleasure it is to meet a socially acceptable person such as yourself!”. I was now certain my Etonian elf would be fine here; I was in a village pub like any in the English countryside. After quaffing a few ales, I must confess I got carried away, and in my Bullingdon-style excess, smashed a lock off a box and stole a man’s gold. When I was ready to head back downstairs, the town guard accosted me, saying he would only let me go if I handed over all my gold to be used to benefit the library. My riposte of “up yours, you uppity bald virgin” was sadly met with a sharper reply in the form of being stabbed repeatedly, and my character opted for a truly Shakespearian end, shouting “My spleen! My life’s blood seeps out!”. I had learnt a valuable lesson about stealing, and tried again. I learnt the same valuable lesson about stealing and, after the second reload, took my leave of the inn to find adventure.
On the road, our hero’s adoptive father was quickly killed by some ne’er-do-wells who were after me, and I was to continue the world’s least sociable pub crawl by escaping in search of the Friendly Arm Inn. Crossing a forest, I picked up some stragglers who wanted help investigating an iron shortage, and met a suspicious wizard in a pointy hat who quickly returned to the bushes. Our hero announced he “grew torpid and required slumber”, so after camping in the leafy forest, the Friendly Arm awaited. That’s not a euphemism for deviance in the shrubbery. Well, it might be – I’m not quite sure what torpid means. It was here in the Friendly Arm that a bounty hunter tried to accost me with his unfriendly arms, and thus began my first real scrap in the game, introducing me to its semi-familiar combat. It uses the dice roll combat of Advanced D&D 2, and similar systems still rule the roost in many RPGs nowadays. If your magic stick does 1d6 damage, this means it rolls one dice which can land between one and six. Quite straightforward. Shortly after, it seemed my die would need to roll once more as a big orc in the pub said he’d crush my neck with his bare hands if I kept pestering him. Despite my best efforts at further pestering, he remained stoic in his warning and I had to move on. In trolling the troll, I realised that I was being a lot more annoying in my short time in this world than I choose to be in KOTOR or Dragon Age. Why is this? Well, it could be partly due to the somewhat less subtle writing, but I think the isometric camera has a hand in it. Psychologically, viewing angles can be important in how we humans relate to things we experience via the medium of the balls in your face. Pray remain decent, for it is your eyes I talk of. The high up, looking-down-on-things angle has long been associated with the viewer feeling uninvolved and distant, giving an objective, rather than immersive, view of the situation. The subject becomes of reduced significance when compared with a view from the more natural and equalising “level angle” view, and as the unseen observer, you gain a sense of omniscience from being able to oversee the whole situation[1]. I certainly felt a greater disconnect between player and character than even the difference between first and behind-the-shoulder third person imparted. The upshot of this is that it was making me feel less personally responsible for my irritating actions. I had always found it easier to cause wanton destruction while playing GTA than during GTA IV, perhaps because I’m a coward who can’t stare into the pixely eyes of my victims. In fact, I gave up playing GTA IV upon realising that I was becoming bored during the third pub trip that I had attended to keep an uninteresting virtual man happy. If I’d kept on playing like that, the final mission would have probably been an gruelling shift selling low-res newspapers for an artificial news stand owner who felt under the computer-generated weather. Parents really should worry about a generation of children being trained to waste their lives attending boring social summons, emulating the politeness they’ve engaged in in violent video games. Anyway, back in the inn, I gathered the people I’d come to meet and pressed on to find out what was causing the iron shortage in a southern town. If my torpid half-elf is anything to go by, it’s probably vegetarianism.
Arriving at a town called Beregost, I agreed to protect a woman who was a self described ‘Thespian extraordinaire’ by attacking some thugs for her, but she had hoodwinked both them and us, and when confronted, attacked me. Our party mate Khalid got killed by a spider in a house, so we had to resurrect him at a temple. Tried to rest outside, got called a gutternapper, so headed out of town to become a leafygladenapper. It was about here that I died and restarted about 50 times. The first restarts were necessitated by a bug that, when I began to manage my inventory, caused the mouse cursor to irretrievably vanish and move invisibly in an unpredictable fashion. The large majority were due to my save file having stood my party right next to a Vampiric Wolf that was, to me at least, completely invulnerable. There clearly is some truth in the plots of all those trashy films and books that suggest the unholy hybrid of werewolf and vampire is a force to be reckoned with; as probably is the preceding coital dilemma. I dearly hope this is the only horror trope I encounter, for the sake of her majesty’s postal service. I finally got away, and after meeting a neurotic aristocrat in a large hat who deemed the air to be unpleasantly “THICK with manual labour”, headed back to Beregost town. A man in the pub blamed the bad influence of adventurers for his son’s untimely death, and I saved a wizard lady in distress. I now would head south to find the town of Nashkel as everyone in my merry band kept nagging me to do so. They were getting increasingly agitated about much-waffled about the iron shortage. My crustacean-based prediction had suddenly dovetailed together with this mysterious crisis – cast iron pillar boxes could indeed be being left at a perilously jaunty lean. I would need my wits about me. Also, hammers.
I’d looted a few things on the journey, so set about reordering the stuff Snow White and the Five Dwarves had equipped. Something immediately irritating was the absence of the party inventory, as would be found in a modern RPG. Each character instead has their own inventory and carrying capacity. This makes sharing potions a bit of a faff. It’s also problematic if you’re in public while playing, as whenever you select Xzar the wizard, he screams “STOP TOUCHING MEEEE”. Quickly finding the best gear you have acquired is also a dreary task, as each thing must bring up its details individually. The inexorable march towards simplification is often resisted by the stubbornly retro stalwarts whose long beards entangle forward looking developers, and although said beards can be a boon against…Well, Dragon Age 2′s development cycle, micromanagement is very boring in Baldur’s Gate and is something gamers are well rid of.
A dilemma faced me once more. I had made numerous promises to go to Nashkel immediately, and Nashkel was being impatiently waffled of ad infinitum, but once I’d journeyed south through the clearings, the map presented me with a choice between NASHKEL and CARNIVAL. I don’t enjoy letting people down but…carnival. After choosing to head to the carnival, I was given a cut scene with spoken rolling text talking about how I don’t yet understand how my destiny is linked to the iron shortage from the Nashkel mines. The game really, really doesn’t want you to forget your destiny in Nashkel, to the point of incessant annoyance. As much as I felt I could choose to go to the carnival, I had the uncomfortable feeling that Bobo the Clown would be seething, spitting through gritted, stained teeth, and making certain I won the toy bear that had been stuffed with his soggy cigarette butts, surplus prize goldfish and old Kleenex.
The carnival, as it turned out, was not as jolly as I’d hoped. First of all a man tried to sell me a woman encased in stone with the promise of a magic scroll that could let her out if I felt like it. After I declined (I’ve got too many already), Lord Binky the Bufffoon cantered past and announced how “unposh” we all were. He even mocked my pronunciation of “what a fabulous carnival!” I know I’d traded my finery for some modest armour, but really, doesn’t breeding tell? I am posh. I keep saying “trice” for goodness sake. After discussing the merits of the Great Gazib’s Exploding Ogre act with a passer-by, I went into a tent to try and find the party atmosphere, and lo and behold yet another man had a woman on hand to threaten. There is quite an apparent use of women as a fragile egg that assorted bad men may easily apply a speeding teaspoon to should things not go smoothly, so if you’re a feminist offended by such clichés, you’ll be offended lots of times. Though, if you’re a female feminist, you probably won’t play Baldur’s Gate[2].
Back in the pokey tent, Zordral insisted his busty captive was a witch who needed to die as she may seduce local men, and told me if I took one step more he’d kill her with a spell. I began to gesture at him with my sword in a repeated arc like fashion that made his numbers alter until he fell over because of all the maths. Brentha thanked me for saving her and said she had no intention of seducing anyone, so obviously this was a COMPLETE waste of time. She also told me I should probably go to Nashkel, something that I was so grateful to learn that I went outside and smashed a chicken to bits in a fit of enlightened joy. I did get to see the aforementioned Amazing Oopah, the world’s only exploding ogre. Unfortunately he refused to explode so I had to kill him. I think at that point I’d ruined the carnival. I decided to atone by agreeing to help a man who approached me as I entered Nashkel, which, he explained, curried the favour of “the realm’s only miniature giant space hamster”, which I’m sure will be useful. As I continued down the street, Oublek the Bounty Officer assumed I was a man named GREYWOLF and gave me a pile of gold for ridding the town of a bandit. I agreed that I, GREYWOLF, deserved this, and went on my way with heavier pockets. Could this dishonesty possibly lead to any repercussions? Well, I’m sure it’ll be nothing that GREYWOLF can’t handle.
Will I ever meet GREYWOLF? Will an iron shortage be at all interesting? HAMSTERS? The Encounter with Baldur’s Gate will be on hiatus next week, but will return unabashed for part 3, where you can expect the answers to these questions and less!
The Encounter With Dracula Is Terminated is a long running and sporadically deployed series of articles about the gaming universe by long time Mode 7 community person Alex ‘malakian’ Hayes. Follow him at www.twitter.com/inspectorvector
Lock up your daughters! Please; there’s no way I can get a voluntary female readership. Yes, unavoidably, inescapably, incorrigibly, The Encounter With Dracula is back, ready to take the Sledgehammer of Analysis (+7 analysing) to the Walnut of Isometric Gaming (weakness to analysing). So, with plenty of further ado, let me cordially invite you to join me on my greatest blogging odyssey yet, as I play through Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition with a hope to experience the ups and downs (while everything around me curiously remains the exact same size) of playing a classic fixed perspective RPG in the mobile generation.
As I was watching an episode of Michael Portillo’s ace railways programme, I had the idea of a sequel to my award-deserving sojourn through might and magic I-VI. Something in the bold, adventurous pastels of Portillo’s jackets stirred a sense of adventure in me. The thing is, like the union of a pressed salmon trouser and a sky blue blazer, the stars in the heavens seem to have aligned for this one. After already doing so for Wasteland 2, Inxile have run another speedily successful Kickstarter campaign for a spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment, an Infinity Engine-based cult classic that I’ve hitherto ignored. Similarly, Shroud of the Avatar: Something Something, a new IP by the Ultima guy who spent all the money he could have used to make it going to space, will have left the orbit of its Kickstarter goal by the time this is finished. Shadowrun Returns has shown off some alpha footage, and of course Project Eternity, which, until the aforementioned Torment sequel, had raised the most money by any game on Kickstarter. Personally, I’ve just finished my second play of Dragon Age: Origins and am well into my eighth (really) time through Star Wars: KOTOR, both being games with many of the genes of their isometric D&D predecessors still intact. More importantly, I’ve also been kindly gifted Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition[1], a re-release of the RPG classic that apparently saved computer RPGs from the clutches of fearsome dark lord Economically Unviable, the ultimate threat to the world of [insert your favourite fictional elf/pixie land in gaming's oeuvre]. He’s intangible, which makes him worse. This seems the ideal journey to take to continue my quest for existential enlightenment through dated CRPGs. So that’s the world we live in, and this is what we’re doing. To readers who are perhaps concerned about a change in the quality you’ve come to expect, I say simply this: The previous paragraph is not the only part you’ll read and be left thinking “this article is the product of a lot of colons”.
Long-time readers of The Encounter With Dracula – yes, all both of you[2] – will know that it is a reliable bet that each article will start from a position of total, unassailable knowledge on each and every subject discussed. What shut up it is, you’re remembering it improperly with your brain. So, you’ll be amazed to learn that, in a TEWDIT first, I start from a position of total ignorance. The first order of business is to own up and say it: I’ve never played an isometric RPG. With the exception of StarCraft, I’ve never played an isometric game. I thought to suppose my five minutes watching Diablo 2 at age 13 qualified me as a seasoned veteran, but further research has informed me that while it used a fixed isometric perspective, it had some sprite perspective scaling magic that might mean it doesn’t quite count. Discussing this recently, I was met with disbelieving surprise, and then was dished the question “so isometric isn’t as popular as I thought?”. I realised I was inadequately equipped to put forward an opinion, so immediately killed ten giant rats in a neighbouring peasant’s basement in order to develop as a person and hopefully loot an equippable opinion from a felled rat’s internal cavity in the process. Strange that, despite the rows of visible houses, hers was the only door that could open, but I did not dwell. After a fine rat vichyssoise, I realised that the question of isometric’s popularity and endurance is an interesting one, especially in light of Kickstarter’s inexorable rise. A cursory look at the gaming release landscape of the past few years might well indicate that mainstream gaming’s interest in isometry is now a rigid body[3]. Aside from the strategy genre, where a 3d semi-fixed perspective (the isometric view’s rotatable destiny) is a revered utilitarian ruler, I can really only think of Diablo 3 successfully championing the lofty angles of isometric gaming’s golden age. Titan Quest was similarly aerial in view but wasn’t really a huge hitter, and Dragon Age allowed players to pull the camera up to that position too, but…Well let’s be real, you just didn’t. I KNOW some goblins somewhere probably had to be heel-diggingly old school or found it tactically advantageous or something, so if you are thinking “I’m going to comment and say I did” then, as ever, you can send your comment right here: Yes that’s right. To your colon.[4] My dizzyingly digressed-from point is that it’s a sign of the times that even Syndicate and Shadowrun’s recent middling reboots deserted, abandoning the third person entirely. The iso perspective in RPG, action and adventure games has been largely forgotten as the technological situation that constrained developers to it has been left behind. That is, until the sands were shifted by the recent trend of vintage developers keen to re-energize the old shit they made that people liked more than the things they’ve gone on to do. Kickstarter certainly proved itself to have a secondary and more profitable function as Kickperpetuator, and many of these projects, including those already mentioned, are now coming to fruition. It seems that, at least for many pre-existing developers, isometric RPGs are still very much a going concern in financial terms.
Let’s have a brief, shallow and probably unnecessary explanation of isometric in gaming. While it is a specific type of parallel projection, it’s basically become a byword for the half way point between a side on view and a top down view to project an almost 3d look for the player. Like the cubes everyone drew at school, it’s obviously limited by the fact it is actually 2d – everything remains the same size while you shuffle about on a pre rendered backdrop, for instance – but it’s a pretty cool technique considering the tech it emerged on in the early 80s. More than many genres, the RPG requires a world with some immersive depth, so the isometric view became a huge boon for 90s CRPGs such as Fallout, Diablo and of course, Baldur’s Gate. So it’s obvious why then, but why now? When fantastically detailed full 3d worlds are possible, do people really want this? The huge amount of monetary backing would suggest so, but I decided to do a little digging beyond the dollar signs and set out googling for the opinions of the dribbling masses in the wider internet world. Predictably, there were plenty of forums with a back and forth on the subject of how disgusting it is when someone uses the term isometric when they mean dimetric projection and so forth, but I wanted to get to the crux of how much people actually want iso games now. I finally found a few topics that were useful. One on the escapist forums in particular had a well attended poll, in which just under 200 respondents voted “yes” by a 8:1 majority in response to the question “do you think that isometric games have a place in modern gaming?”. I’m not purporting to have drawn too much from this statistic, as those with an enchanted axe to grind about something are always keener to respond to internet polls like this, so people who don’t care may have largely passed over it. Still, it’s a resounding result in and of itself. I don’t usually resort to vox pops, but some choice opinions from said poll were enlightening as to the gamut of grammatically poor opinions on the subject:
A self-confessed fan of isometric RPGs lamented “If someone put the money into making these games, it’s likely it wouldn’t sell”, quite a reasonable conclusion I thought, showing that absence from mainstream gaming has made even the faithful doubt their viability prior to the crowd funding frenzy.
Someone by the username totallyheterosexual aptly refused to entertain grey areas in the debate. Not so placid about judgements of decline, they exclaimed “Jesus fuck. Do you people honestly think that the camera view of the games defines its gameplay?”, overlooking in his excited rhetoric that the answer is actually “yes, most of the time it really does loads”.
A personal favourite was also proffered:“You can change the camera angles in chess, but the most popular one is isometric. So yeah, I think isometric is here to stay.”. A truly incredible way to justify the place of something in modern gaming. If it were true; it sadly isn’t. As the slew of green-lit IPs all seem to be setting up new universes where sequels are almost inevitable, what he has got right is that it seems isometric is, for a while at least, here to stay.
So the signs point quite convincingly to a substantial niche very happy to pay for the isometric experience. The fact that a deep isometric RPG is going to be a lot cheaper to make than the next Elder Scrolls or Witcher game might go some way to explaining why this essentially regressive game design is desirable. When I read the reviews, it became clear that character interactions, moral choices and plot progression were pillars of the nostalgic feelings that these games inspire, and if more of this kind of content can be delivered without having to get a 120 person team to head for the new unreal or frostbite engine, it’s certainly a boon for players who are focussed on that side of things. That the successful projects are so often from veteran developers is both reassuring and potentially creatively stifling, as although these new games have what can be presumed to be a firm hand on the tiller[5], they are certainly far outperforming any funding drives by new independent developers in the field. It’ll remain to be seen whether they can deliver fresh and interesting writing or expansive exercises in laurel-resting, facilitated by more route-one lore for the player to try and parse about how you must rise from rags to assorted-barrel-and-sack-found riches to defeat the worst Gandalf to ever comminate the Outer Hebrides.
What’s to come from this new generation remains to be seen, but Baldur’s Gate has long since been judged, and is seen as an important classic quite unanimously. So, perhaps I should actually launch it, two thousand words later. Journalism! I’m doing it wrong.
Tune in next week for a psychological examination of why I’m an idiot, some reluctant cows, summer dresses, gutternapping and more!
[2] Just found out this joke happened in an episode of This Week in Politics. For people not from the UK: This programme doesn’t achieve any deliberate humour.
[3] Any physicist worth his salt will confirm this is in fact hilarious and you didn’t realise.
[4] As per the introduction’s colon profuseness alert. It all dovetails together. For pedants who are thinking “The joke doesn’t work as actually you put that punctuation there, so it’s your colon” let me stop you right there. You are reading a local copy downloaded to your computer, so it’s yours, and I forego all copyright on that sentence. Thus we see further elaboration has confirmed another joke to be funny. It definitely has.
[5] This short phrase is what I always put forward to describe Tory chancellor George Osborne in any conversation where he is mentioned. It receives mixed reactions.
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Super Hexagon is a brilliant game which is predicated on the relationship between persistence and mastery. It also might just be a maze having a grand mal seizure.
It’s been cast by some as a profound metaphor for the process of living life. I think there are problems with this reading and also that it’s far more interesting when viewed as both a riff on the idea of practice and a joke at the expense of our poor squishy brains.
Come Into My Lair
Like the most potent seducers, Super Hexagon’s weapon of choice is taunting. It says, “The only reason you can’t beat me is because you’re not trying hard enough.”
The most galling thing about this is that it is absolutely true: no game has ever epitomised the modern deprecation of talent more than this; it goes to bed reading Malcolm Gladwell. You don’t have to be good “at this sort of thing” (I’m definitely not – you should see me playing…any game…ever), you just have to put the time in. It knows that, you know that, and it knows that you know.
It got under my skin because I knew I could beat it, eventually. All barriers to practice (it’s a single player mobile game; it has instant restart; it has clearly demarcated goals; it’s rarely “unfair”) have been smashed. You just have to do it: there is no excuse once the compulsion has you.
Super Hexagon places memorisation in the background through a witty deployment of random pattern sequencing. It denies the pig-nosing-at-a-food-button stupidity of rhythm action games and instead focuses squarely on skill acquisition. Yes, you learn the patterns but that’s trivial: you are practising the art of practice.
I think it’s a specific kind of practice, though. Alexander mentions Jason Killingsworth’s assertion that this is like “the practice and performance of music” but – and this is the barrier I find myself confronting with a lot of difficult games – at the end of music practice, music comes out.
Music is a form that everyone, from a four-day-old baby to a 99-year-old great-grandmother, can appreciate. Even the most boring form of musicianship – playing other people’s music – puts sound into the air.
Gaming skill is not something that has a broad audience (outside the arenas of esports and Twitch streaming): it’s normally something you acquire for personal satisfaction alone. It can feel slightly solipsistic at best; at worst, you are not producing anything.
The only possible rewards are those that the game gives you. Well, maybe that and some minor bragging rights.
Apophenia
So, is there more to it?
I’ve read Jenn Frank’s extraordinary piece Allow Natural Death many times now.
It reminded me a lot of some of the work I heard read aloud at Gamecity’s “Reads Like a Seven”. We live at a time where writing about games can genuinely emotive, powerfully relevant and even elegiac: it makes me proud to play a part in making games.
I empathise strongly with the ache of small details, the frustration at the outside world’s failure and refusal to accurately represent the tragic. Her writing made me remember stupidly kicking and punching the walls of a hospital bathroom as hard as I could, failing to make a mark. I’m also jealous, because I’ve never felt brave enough to write with such deep, deep honesty.
I feel all of those things, but I couldn’t have responded more differently to Super Hexagon. Here is Jenn Frank’s take:
The first time I met Terry I made him stand there and listen to my ideas about that game, about how his game is about living life. I talked about stopping and waiting and then moving, about pivoting your cursor until you find your window of opportunity. I told him about luck and not-luck and memory and decisiveness.
“It sounds very nice when you put it that way,” Terry told me pleasantly.
I don’t feel that Super Hexagon has more to say about the process of life than other games. I stop, wait, move and pivot in every platformer, in every FPS.
If the “window of opportunity” is the gap in each pattern, and you are pivoting to try and find it, you are already dead. In life, you get more than microseconds to think about opportunities, even though it sometimes doesn’t feel that way; in Super Hexagon, the decision should have already been made. Hell, there is no decision.
There’s almost no luck in the game (possibly none – I really want to ask Terry if there is the possibility for unwinnable situations…I suspect there are a couple), so I don’t feel like it has much for us on the nature of luck, intention and determinism. Unless “luck and not-luck” is about this miniscule sliver of possible luck…in which case, sure, but that’s not a major thing I’d highlight. If I’m looking for a modern game to talk about luck and not-luck, I’m looking at FTL.
Unless your memories are comprised of discrete, identical repeating samples – mine are weird, fuzzy, diverse, non-specific and profoundly unreliable – I also don’t feel like the game is particularly eloquent on the nature of memory. Maybe this is about the kind of robo-memory that learns lines or music? If so, it doesn’t fit either: the non-linearity of the game defeats this.
Formally, it’s more like an architectural Burroughs cut-up poem than it is a treatise on the passage of life.
“I can’t speak of what an abstract game can do in terms of talking about subjects like death and love, but I think games can absolutely be personal, can be about the person who made it,” he adds. “This game… this is me.” (Terry Cavanagh)
Finally, the process of playing Super Hexagon correctly is (as Kieron Gillen pointed out) about flow. Flow is about exterminating contemplation: that’s why athletes are so boring in interviews. It couldn’t be further from how I think life should be lived: finding concurrent meaning in what you are doing is vital, to me at least. Taking time to step back and feel all the connections: that’s what I live for.
So, what do I think Super Hexagon is about? I think it’s a system that Terry made because he felt like it.
So, by implication, I think it’s about the relationship between the personal and the abstract. I think it’s about how those two unlikely bedfellows can only unify through submission, subjugation and the tiny chisel action of each repetitive failure. The system can only be defeated by moulding yourself to it. It’s also about apophenia.
Humans delight in picking patterns from random sequences and then attributing meaning to them. Evolutionary psychologists believe that being pattern fanatics is great for our survival: maybe once a couple of proto-humans have drunk from the hypothetical stagnant pool and died soon after, we should avoid it? It’s better for us to jump to conclusions when big obvious threats are involved.
Apophenia is the inflamed appendix of survival; strong emotion is our early warning system. They’re quite a double-act.
The joke, though, is that there are literal patterns to be spotted throughout the game. In fact, the game relies on the understanding and assimilation of very real patterns. To the uninitiated, it appears like a swirl of randomness. I think it’s mocking us: it’s, as the internet is fond of endlessly trumpeting, a trap.
The flashbacks, tunnels of light, changes of perspective, heartbeats and finality of the ending do suggest death, as Frank points out. However, I think this is effective because it’s a tonal shift from the preceding sections, the fearsomely dry greyness of Hyper Hexagonest.
Super Hexagon’s ambiguity allows it to facilitate a wealth of personal aesthetic responses, and maybe, like the literal patterns, the evidence is there for many of them. Both my reading and Jenn Frank’s can happily sit alongside each other. I think that’s how good art works.
I would suggest, though, that Super Hexagon thinks we’re both wasting our time, because what we should be doing is practising. “Tap to continue” it says at the end, right after giving us back the cursor. Even death is no excuse.
Wonderful
Simply thinking about this game can plunge you into another pseudo-random spiral: some players describe how, after looking at it for a long time, you start to see the geometry as a three-dimensional tunnel rather than a flat shmup-esque pathway. I feel like this when writing about it: I start making a point and then a new context flashes by and I eventually hit a wall.
Super Hexagon taught me agonising lessons about the nature of practice, not least when I fell 00:07 seconds short of my ultimate goal, then had to grind for a further three days to beat the final level. It made me think about the futility and joy of directionless skill, the meaning of games themselves.
It was hard work: now it’s over, I can go back to living my life.
