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Rumour has it there may be a few more posts about to surface on Psyncinteractive.com… Though purely because I said that there will never be another post again!

So with that in mind, I’m here to list what seem to be the winning elements required to make an iPhone game popular.

Toilet Factor
iPhone games are made for toilets - they just are. What’s nicer than doing your business and playing a level of your favourite game? I recently downloaded 2 games: Monkey Island 2 and a game called Slice It (as I write this, Slice It currently sits at the top of the iPhone charts). Now arguably, MI2 is a superior game by far. It’s clearly had a massive team of artists, actors, programmers, etc behind it, yet it fails to make an impression. This is because the creators have failed to address the toilet factor. When you go to the loo you turn off, well I do anyway, the John that sits on the John is not the John you all know, he is a relaxed John, a switched off John, a John that cannot remember his previous toilet trip and frankly doesn’t care. This John certainly cannot remember what he was doing with that wood polish the last time he played monkey island.

Slice it on the other hand is made up of very short puzzles involving slicing geometry into equal parts (if there was ever a reason for Viz to get an iPhone then this is it). Once you’ve solved the puzzle, the game saves and you can tackle the next one. It really wouldn’t matter if you had been constipated for several days you could open that game and carry straight on without worrying about anything you’d done previously. It and other popular games have (it’s got to be done) sh*t loads of the Toilet Factor!

Stars
Stars have become quite popular recently in iPhone games. They let you know how well you have done on a level. If you just scrape through then one star is most likely heading your way out of a potential 3 or 5. It’s an odd thing, but there is definitely some sense of pride that will egg you on to have another go and try and work out the best solution to get those priceless extra stars!

Single Finger Fun
These new fangled touch screen smart phones are pretty sweet. One reason being that the input method can now be anything you can draw on a screen, be it qwerty keyboard, D-Pad, analogue-stick. Though obviously the more buttons and pads you have on screen, the less and less you can see.

Chillax
On the same note as too many fingers spoil the iPhone game - games that let the player lift there finger or thumb every now and then to allow them to decide what to do next, tend to also do very well for themselves. I’m sure this is down to the Toilet Factor. The thing is that for alot of people, a smart phone game is going to be something to play when they have nothing better to do, possibly on the bus, while waiting for someone, when work gets so monotonous that they just need to escape for a few minutes, etc. They want to be able to pick up a game and be able to play it under their rules (this is completely a casual gaming thing, I would presume any hardcore gamer couldn’t care less about such things). So, if they can start a level of something and then go back to doing work, before finishing the level as soon as no-ones looking, it’s going to bode well. I’m not proposing that time-limits need to be abolished, but might help matters!

Hide and find (better than hide and seek)
People like finding hidden things. Angry birds employs a system of hiding golden eggs throughout it’s levels and you find a golden egg then a new bonus level (remember those?) will be opened to reward you for finding that ruddy egg! Also anything with the word “mystery or manor” in the title does very well! People like a mystery!

If we do go down the path of hand-held erm phone games for a while in order to fund our bigger ambitions (apologies for that terribly constructed sentence) then these are some rules I hope we can abide by.

Resident evil 1 was good for many reasons, but dialogue wasn’t one of them (or possibly was, as you’ll find out). Somehow, someone was paid to write the script and someone got paid to act it out. For a game that was trying to take itself seriously, it’s mental that the producers let it out the door with dialogue like this. Obviously, in this area, Dino Crisis is still far better than any others. It’s genuinely funny and sets out to not take itself too seriously, which is something that other such games could learn from.

Unfortunately I could not find a suitable video of good lines from Dino Crisis, however I did manage to find the top 10 worst conversations in the incredibly scary Resident Evil 1.

Other games with damned awful dialogue and voice acting include Deep Fear and of course, the king, House of the Dead 2.

I’ve tried to write these posts about 4 times now and I literally can’t do it in a cohesive manor, not without being massively biased towards Dino Crisis. So, being the resourceful chap I am, I’ll use that as a vehicle to get me through these posts.

Heres a list of “horror” games that I remember playing:

D, D2, Enermy Zero, Parasite Eve II, Resident Evil 1 – 5 + code veronica, Dino Crisis 1-2, Deep Fear, Silent Hill 1, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, Fear Effect 1 – 2, Alone in the Dark 1,2 + 4, Monster Manor, Dead Space, Eternal Darkness…. and there is no Dino Crisis 3, that was everybody’s crap imagination!

This week kids, I’m going to talk about the good and the awful plots of horror games.

I’ll begin by saying Dino Crisis has a terrible central plot. The government invents a new energy that happens to open a portal back in time to some magical place where every famous type of dinosaur is some how standing together and then they all get dragged through to an island where the energy research is being conducted, madness! If you’re going to make jurassic park the game, you might as well steal the more realistic plot (it does sort itself out, mind, as I’ll explain).

The Survival Horror requires a plot, it’s one of the few genres that needs a story to drive the game along. The first Resident Evil was pretty damned good for reasons I’ll go into later, but the plot wasn’t one of them. Outside of the central plot of, “team investigate zombie infested haunted house”, the story was pretty thin, no real unforseen twists and characters I couldn’t care less about. However, it was the first go and this could be rectified in the sequels. The problem (with the Resident Evil series especially) is that it has never been fixed. Even the rather brilliant Resident Evil 4 suffered from this. I’ve played through that game twice and I still couldn’t tell you anything other than the president’s daughter is kidnapped by a load of virus infected inbreds.

I truly believe that our potential Survival horror trounces every horror game plot I’ve seen (even the good ones!). Yes it’s silly, but it exists on the same level as the Resident Evils and Dino Crisis of the world and they are popular enough! I’ve noticed all of these games keep a detachment from real life, I’m not sure if thats intentional or if it just makes for better enemies? Surely a plot that revolved around something that might actually happen would be somewhat scarier, but I’ll talk about scary another time. That being said I find the best plots of these games take place in completely unrealistic universes.

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories was great, the plot, like the first, centres around a chap looking for his daughter in a deranged and weird world that was like our own, but has been skewed so it’s obviously not the real world. I know that makes no sense, but the developers had made a point to detach their world from ours and so anything they threw at the player was fine because it wasn’t supposed to be real. It’s like how dragons are acceptable in fantasy films I suppose, it’s just the universe it’s set in.

I think Dino Crisis 2 recognized this and played up to the time travel thing that it had so quickly thrown away after getting dinosaurs into the first game. Using that as a central plot device the creators were able to build an enjoyable plot complete with the holy grail of plots everywhere: Twists! That should be a Psync mission statement, “We will never build a plot driven game without a twist”.

The late WARP creators of D, D2 and Enemy Zero, must have had a very similar mission. Regardless of every game getting panned by critics, I see them as genius. I mean yes the game-play in almost all was rubbish, but the stories always kept you guessing. Psync should learn by their mistakes though and again I’ll discuss the game play thing next time.

A plot should be very important to a horror game, however it’s not everything and that shouldn’t be forgotten!

I mentioned that I thought Dino crisis 1 sorted itself out in the plot department even though it was ludicrous. The awesomeness of the plot (aside from the fact there are dinosaurs) is the interaction of the 3 characters. They are all quite stereotyped, but they play off each other brilliantly. You are made to side with one of the 2 non playable characters throughout the game, but I found it generally difficult to work out who to go with, I didn’t want to disappoint the other character, which is pretty impressive from such an old game. It’s testament to the decent script work and acting which I will gush over next time!

As a child I had many hobbies, countless attempts to make boats out of Lego that didn’t sink, building dens and making films with my dad’s camcorder to name but a few. I think it’s fair to say I’ve always enjoyed the creative side of everything.

I was fascinated by all things interactive. Literally anything, Bamboozle on teletext was as good as it got! Until I got a second hand Commadore 16 then Rolf Harris’s animator, the amazing 2 frame animation application that took 20 odd minuets to load, was spectacular. I remember designing games for the Atari 2600 on sheets of lined paper with the intention of posting them off to Atari HQ because of course that’s how games get made. Eventually someone explained that I wasn’t going to get any response from such company and so the quest to make things interactive began.

The first attempt came in the form of a terribly spelt, barely legible adventure book, you remember those? “The lord of the frogs stands in front of you, you think to yourself how odd it is his breath smells of tic-tac’s.
To swing your massive fist at it’s minty face turn to page 17
To french the rubbery sod turn to page 8
To walk past it turn to page 11″, you know, those sort of books.
I never read any myself, they didn’t sound much cop and nor was mine, made absolutely no sense, though was full of dinosaurs! I don’t recommend any budding game designer try this, it’s not the most rewarding thing in the world…

The next low tech approach I remember trying was to invent new rules for old board games (these too featured mostly dinosaurs) which were a little more exciting, but still very much not worth the hassle! Eventually computers came along that had MS Paint and so some real designing could take place, kinda. Using techniques previously learnt from making bad book games it was obvious the way to make a real computer game would be to get rid of those silly pages and replace them with bitmaps. This time the games featured less dinosaurs and mostly kids that got bullied at school (amazingly non of whome were myself!). With a badly drawn nasty picture of one of the poor chaps and pixely text at the bottom of the picture the new inspiring game play went something like this:

“the lord of the nob-ends stands in front of you. You think to yourself how odd it is his breath smells of cat-balls.
To swing your massive fist at it’s pussy face open 2.BMP
To french the rubbery sod open GAY.BMP
To walk past it open 3.BMP”

True, it wasn’t the most innovative or mature content, but it was a nice introduction into the creative thinking necessary to make a computer game with no technical knowledge. There was also the slight disadvantage that you could only fit 4-5 bitmaps on a floppy disk, so not the most economical thing either.

When school eventually taught us about Microsoft Access, it was obvious the database driven wonder could be used for slightly less cruder gaming, which meant using real buttons to navigate (all of which were totally visible as there was no opacity control) and every time a sound played it had to open up in a separate window. It was a big load of rubbish, but it did have clip art which meant you could fit more than 4 pictures on a floppy disk! Eventually Power Point came along and Jim will take it from there.

This is all well and good and it turned out ok for me the lonely designer with no code skills, but had the events Jim described not happened, how could one go about making a game without a programmer?

Back in the day this was, to my knowledge, basically impossible. There are now a number of tools and even games for you to get creative with. Little Big Planet for example is a game I’d have loved to get my hands on back in the days of Rolf Harris’s animation studio. There are also a range of tools from the game makers that allow you with no knowledge of such things to put games together.

game making tools

2D and retro yoyo  game  maker
3D Game maker
3D First person Shooter creator

So, it is absolutely possible to go about this madness with only ideas and an ability to make pictures, but personally I have no interest in these any more. Once you’ve been lucky enough to find people that can program and you have put together a game from scratch, I guarantee you’ll never want to try and make a game using someone else’s tools. A game needs 2 half’s, one creative and one technical, but until you’ve been lucky enough to find someone to fill the other half you’ve no excuses to not be making cracking games!

That’s not the kind of destruction I’m talking about here though. I’m talking about the various game engines, and I use the term very loosely (as you’ll know doubt have seen in other articles), that have been unable to cope with the stresses we’ve placed on the poor souls and as they’ve failed, in turn our hopes and dreams have failed too. Oh yes, an awful lot of things have fallen to pieces just as they began to look like they could be our saviour.

The first time I can really recall this happening was during the first attempted development of Zip n’ West, when we were using Flash MX as a game engine. It all began so well, John was more than happy working out key frame animation and the like. I’d discovered that actionscript was essentially javascript and therefore very easy to code. There were also massive amounts of tutorials and forums that we could turn to if we ran into difficulties. I’d started producing a working prototype of the game and as time passed I coded more and more features to accompany the wonderful imagery that was coming my way from the other lads. We had a grand plan in place of how the game would play out from start to finish, that was admittedly probably far too grand for us to achieve at the time, but that was pretty standard so we weren’t worried about that at all.

During the development we found ourselves repeatedly asking the same question, “Why, if there are all these articles showing you how to do brilliant things in flash, hadn’t the people who wrote them made a game like we were instead of phaffing around on forums?”. Well, soon enough the answer became all too apparent. Whilst flash was wonderful at all the little features we wanted to use in our game, when you tried to put them all together it failed miserably.

Essentially flash was not designed to be used to create the kind of game that we wanted to. Our plan was quite simply far too grand for it. We’d pushed flash further than it should ever have been pushed at that time, and it had broken. It was the most productive we’d ever been at that point and although we’d learned a valuable lesson, it had been a painful way to do it. It left us with no choice but to abandon the game without really having anything to move on to, which was the first time we’d found ourselves in that situation.

My advice to you is the same advice that’s lead us to where we are now, there’s a reason people all over the world are out there making games the hard way, that reason is simple, because it’s the best way.

We’ve essentially covered this topic without spelling it out as I’m about to. After Jim’s very lovely powerpoint article, I got to thinking about the ill fated Hydris and it’s sequels and came to the conclusion that it’s all the fault of bloody ambition! It has genuinely killed many, many projects. I attributed the death of untitled “Space Horror” to the dreaded 60% in an earlier article, though in retrospect it never even got that far, it never got beyond concept art and a few 3D models. The ambition had utterly creamed that project before it had a chance. At the time, our greatest achievement was a slideshow, but Johnny Ambition had visions of Resident Evil bettering gaming! How was this going to be made? I’ve no idea, but Hydris was definitely worth jilting for it.

One of the few images from Untitled Space Horror

It’s a relative of the same beast that climbs lamp posts shouting “sequel!”, the ambition either outgrows the current project or guts it before it reaches the starting blocks. The Space Horror game is a good example of this. Our untitled survival horror game (set in space, if you hadn’t guessed) began with a prison riot… there it is, the first two words, the first two dominos falling in a very short line of domino shaped dreams, killing the game to bits.

I think this is definitely something that comes with experience. During the dark days of the even darker basic, I remember countless forum posts from people saying, “I’m making a massive multiplayer online game”… no you’re not, you’ve got an idea for something and probably some mad computer skills, but that is still a little unrealistic. Don’t stop thinking about it though! Ambition is a great, great thing, if you have an idea for something mental and completely unachievable, write it the hell down! The more you understand what you’re capable of achieving in any given time frame, the more your original grand idea will evolve to fit and become workable. Zip n’ West for example is still evolving years after it was first conceived.

I like to try and offer some sort of solution to these things, Dome is a good case study. Again the ambition monster was out in force with that one and the game ended with a stand off between Race and a massive Dragon in some sort of cathedral, I believe it was. At about a tenth of the way through, with a deadline rapidly approaching, the painful decision was made to chop the epic in two and finish it at the half-way stage boss. I think it’s human nature to always want what could have been. For me, it was like finding out the original planned ending to Jurassic park 2 and wanting to know what the film would have been like had they never left the damn island!! I too wonder how awesome Dome would have been, had it ended like we planned. At the same time I know if we’d have tried that, the project would never have been finished and so it’s all the better for cutting it in half.

Be ambitious, be damned ambitious! But be preprepared to scale that ambition down to a manageable size and maybe whip a non-alcoholic beverage or 2 in after that 9th pint… yeah as if! (the ambition thing still stands though).

However, this time, I’m afraid I will lose the fight despite my best efforts. The beast that is the subject of this article is one of my least favourite things and my feelings will flow throughout the next few paragraphs. For that reason I strongly advise anyone of a nervous disposition to use your back button and find a less aggressive article for your reading pleasure. Thank you.

Theories! I hate the (insert your own expletives here) things! The amount of times I’ve had to stop coding to listen to someone’s (yes, that’s you John) brand new idea that’s going to require you to re-do the whole engine just to find out that it didn’t work after all. They’re just stupid! Stupid, stupid, stupid!!! What a waste of time. Yes, they sound sensible first time out, yes, it’s all plausible and like it might well work when you first hear it, but invariably they don’t.

The time when they usually first rear their ugly heads is when you’ve been busily working your way through coding each and every feature required by your latest creation, only to find yourself stuck on one particular thing. It’s usually nothing major, just a little snag that’s going to slow you down a bit, but because you’ve got a headache and haven’t slept for a while, you try airing your concerns out loud. It’s not that you’re after reply as such, the question “How the bloody hell am I going to do this?”, is usually more rhetorical than anything, but once you’ve said it, it’s out there and you can’t take it back. Whoever’s sat nearby realises you’ve got a problem and they want to help you get through it in order to get the game back on track. They’ve got the best of intentions, this is true, but the problem is that they haven’t got much of a grasp on how you’ve done everything up to that point and as a result, they don’t realise how much they are asking of you when they say, “Why don’t you do it like this…?”.

Suddenly your brain is clouded. Maybe everything you’ve done up to this point has been in vain, maybe it’s all been one massive mistake from start to finish. What were you thinking?! You’ll have to start over, but you can’t, you’ll just have to dive in and try and ressurrect the poor creature. So, you start coding whilst half listening to the latest theory that’s going to solve the problem and then the cloud lifts and you realise all too quickly that it’s bollocks. It’s never going to work, you’ve just reworked half your code for nothing and you’re now pretty much lost, with code that’s half of one thing and half of another. You’re even more tired and your head is burning. Panic sets in just in time for you to hear the immortal words, “Ooh, I’ve had another idea, how about this?!”.

Once coding has begun on a particular feature, it should not be interrupted by anyone’s latest theory, no matter how wonderful it seems to be at first glance. Mark my words, it will only lead to misery, headaches and alcoholism. The worst offender of our back catalogue occurred during the development of Zip n’ West in Flash MX. Some features had more theories than I’d had hours sleep the night before, some went well in to double figures. At home I have folders full of scraps of paper with titles along the lines of “Collision theory #27″. I’m not sure we ever did come up with one that worked as well as we’d have liked.

It wasn’t all bad though, in amongst the hundreds of theories were some elements that would become invaluable and when viewed with a clear head could have directed us towards a very well made game, but unfortunately something else got in our way. That’s for another article though. For now, just heed my words, theories should be resigned to the time prior to coding, once you’ve started try and stick to your own tried and tested techniques.

There you go, I feel much better now.

It occurs to me that my childhood of climbing trees and playing computer games may not have been a complete loss. It’s somehow brilliant that I can be whisked back to a period in my life by just listening to a soundtrack from a game of that time. It hasn’t escaped my attention that this is pretty much what I said last time regarding Shenmue and how that experience was so easily accessed when I heard the theme. With that in mind I think I may have to cut this series of articles short, as all I really have to say is, “remember how good this was”, which is no help to anyone. Alternatively, I could just post soundtracks that I genuinely deem to be good, but it would only be opinion pieces and you’re not that bothered about my biased opinions on things. If I have anything constructive to bang on about, regarding game soundtracks in the future, I will. For now though, I’m calling an end to this filler provoking series and I’ll leave you back in the 90’s with some Mega Drive classics!

Playlist

1] Sonic 1 – Green Hill Zone
2] Streets of Rage – Level 1
3] Columns – Main Game
4] Xenon 2 – Main Game
5] Space Harrier – Main Game

Although I think that this pair of articles clearly say something about how important a game soundtrack is, most indie games I’ve played never give much consideration to it, they are usually just some tunes lifted from another soundtrack. It’s a great opportunity to leave a lasting impression with the player and even our own Dome and Hydris themes (yes I am blowing my own trumpet) still take me back to the time when they were being made. It might just be that I am extra sensitive to the old sensory triggered memories (smell gets me to those places quite rapidly too), but don’t pass up the opportunity to create something unique that could possibly stay with the player for a long time. It might even bring them back for another go! If, unlike us, you have no aspiring musicians to create wonderfully catchy tunes, look online and there will be thousands of budding musicians looking for projects to work on, get to it!

Now go and play Dome.

Back in the day, when our combined knowledge of programming consisted of something done a long time ago on ZX Spectrum, the thing we were making the most of, was PowerPoint. We were big fans of Myst and Riven, which had come out for the Sega Saturn a year or two earlier. Now to most people, PowerPoint doesn’t exactly connect with the world of games development, unless you’re thinking of those high powered meetings where men in suits try to convince other men in t-shirts that making a game for their latest blockbuster movie is a really good idea…

However, fortunately for us, one young lad saw another use altogether. He realised that a PowerPoint presentation wasn’t a million miles away from a point and click adventure game, like Myst, and once he found out you could save a presentation as an exe… well, he was half way there. I mean, think about it, isn’t it obvious? Put some pictures in a slideshow with buttons for left and right and you can be walking around anywhere you like in no time. How long would it take someone to make something that could do that with any amount of programming knowledge? The fundamentals are already there for you.

Admittedly, we never actually finished a game using PowerPoint, we always moved on to something else before we really got going, but that’s not to say it couldn’t be done. I’d say that even now, it’s not only distinctly possible, but it wouldn’t be half bad either. Some of our versions included in-game video to show moving doors and the like, as well as audio. We’d even got as far as implementing a few puzzles to give the player something to think about.

What makes a game good isn’t all about the fancy effects you can put in anyway. A gripping storyline can draw you through anything, even if the surroundings are a bit low res and there’s no ‘jump’ button. Can’t exactly remember if we’d worked out a way to save your progress though, but then who needs that anyway? I’m pretty sure there would also have been issues with lag when there was a lot on screen and I’ve no idea how it would’ve coped when the levels got really big, but should you really be thinking that big when you’re using PowerPoint as game engine for goodness sake?

Yep, if we’d had the time and the inclination to finish development, we’d have had a PowerPoint based version of Hydris that would have worked, and we’d have been bloody happy with it too.

So, there you go, however ridiculous something might sound, it’s usually worth having a proper look at. You never know where it might lead…