tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20751155949566001792024-03-13T15:29:36.361+01:00Games making noobA peek inside the gamedev industry.Wolandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12265068990487392793noreply@blogger.comBlogger66125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2075115594956600179.post-46364386208385809542017-06-14T12:11:00.003+02:002017-06-14T12:11:50.450+02:00Are you ready for this? - my speech on Digital Dragons 2017<div style="text-align: justify;">
A month ago, I've been a third-time speaker on Digital Dragons. The biggest game industry conference in Poland. For the first time I took the main stage solo, and whith a topic I've been dabbling in for years: art production, both inhouse and outsource.</div>
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For those who have a spare 45 minutes, here's me talking a lot this time instead of writing a long article. Enjoy!</div>
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Wolandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12265068990487392793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2075115594956600179.post-23433207646180523232016-05-26T18:42:00.001+02:002016-05-27T18:03:49.660+02:00Get paid thanks to games: A game developerThis one's been a long coming. Over a year, actually. I was putting it off because I didn't quite know how to put it together in one short article. I mean, studios can really vary among themselves. And the roles within the industry are very different as well. A blanket article on how to become a part of the game-making industry is likely to become either very general or very long and both these options will make it pretty useless. Finally, I've decided on a format that has a chance of making some sense. If it doesn't, at least I tried. Oh, and some of it might seem very obvious, but after talking to some high schoolers about game development, I feel that there's a lot of people that still require this kind of knowledge.<br />
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When you decide you want to make games, the <b>first thing you have to realize is how many options you have</b>. Game industry is very diverse and there are tons of doors and windows you can enter through. The biggest question though is what kind of games you want to make.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Inside of the Blizzard Entertainment studio.</td></tr>
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On one hand, you have games done by single people and very small teams (under 5 people), like Banished, Darkest Dungeon or Undertale. On the other - huge blockbusters like Assassin's Creed, GTA or Uncharted, with hundreds of people on board and hundreds of millions of dollars in the budget. The rule of thumb here is that <b>the smaller the team, the more skills you need. However, they don't have to be as highly developed as in the big teams. </b>What I'm saying is that in small teams, you will often have to wear several hats. When there's just two of you, one becomes (for example) a programmer and a designer, while the other one draws, animates, writes and takes care of the soundtrack. When you're trying to do so many things at once, nobody expects you to be the best at everything. You just make a game you can make. In the big teams, you don't have to be a few people in one. You get to specialize. If you want to be an animator there, you need to be a good one. That's not to say that a great game desiner can't make a smaller game. Or that there are no average people in bigger companies, but they seem to rather be an exception. It's quite logical, really - Blizzard won't hire guys that are mediocre but some small company with small budget and less applicants might.<br />
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Once you know what kind of game you want to make and how big the company you want to work for is, <b>there remains a question of what role you will play in it</b>. You see, there are many elements of games that need to be made while the game is being put together. To get a job in the industry, you need to have skills needed to make some portion of these elements. Also, these skills need to be in demand. Let me give you an example. A lot of people think they can write and could write for games or could come up with game ideas. Now let's put aside that it's actually not that easy and that at least 99% of those people are wrong. Let's assume you are indeed an excellent writer and would be perfect for games. Still, most studios don't need full-time writers and ones that do rarely look for them, because the job is taken. And with maybe 20 openings like that in the whole world, you can imagine how huge the competition is. On the other hand, in an average studio, there's around 10 times more 3D graphic artists than writers and many of these studios constantly recruit for the 3D art positions. That means it might be much easier to get a job in the art department rather than writing and the required skill level might also be a little bit lower. It's a simple function of supply and demand, really.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This graph might seem funny but it is actually very accurate. Thanks, SharkBomb!</td></tr>
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So what roles are there? Let me give you a very quick overview to help you decide what you might be best suitable for:<br />
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1) <b>Programmers</b>: need to be skilled in a programming language. Usually C++ or C# if the studio uses Unity Engine. The bigger the company, the higher the chance that programmers will specialize: engine / UI / AI, etc. Very high demand, companies are often willing to take juniors without much experience in the industry, but great programming skills are a must.<br />
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2) <b><a href="http://www.gamesmakingnoob.com/2013/11/jobs-in-gamedev-game-designer.html">Designers</a></b>: there's a lot of types of designers and not every type needs to exist in every studio. It highly depends on a game they are making. Free to play games will require Monetization Designers while RPG's will require Quest Designers. There are general Game Designers, story-focused Narrative Designers, self-explanatory Level Designers or Mission Designers. The role of designers is to come up with game systems and mechanics (or levels, missions, etc.), which is much harder than just coming up with ideas - you have to expand these ideas to cover every possible outcome in a balanced, logical and fun way that possibly helps tell the story and positively surprises the player. The demand for designers is quite high, but good designers are very hard to find. Also, everyone wants to be a designer (as it seems to be the "coolest" role), so the competition is very high as well.<br />
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3) <b><a href="http://www.gamesmakingnoob.com/2013/02/jobs-in-gamedev-concept-artist.html">Concept artists</a></b>: these 2D artists design the mood of the game, characters, locations and props that are used. Their concept art serves as a reference to the 3D art team. These people also often end up producing all the 2D elements that you find in the game, so if a game is in 2D, it means pretty much all graphical assets. The requirements are simple: you need to be skilled at drawing and Photoshop. The demand is high, but good artists that have a great sense of color, lighting and composition are very rare.<br />
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4) <b>UI artists</b>: these are 2D artists that specialize in the user interface. They don't draw characters. They draw health bars, icons, charts and menus, which is a lot harder than it seems. You need to be great with Photoshop and to have an eye for usability and clarity of visual communication. Studios don't usually need more than one person like that so the demand isn't that high, but the good ones are considerably hard to find.<br />
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5) <b>3D artists</b>: these are the guys who put together 3D models for the games. Everything from a simple stool to a huge monster. They usually specialize in either characters or pieces of environment. In bigger studios, they specialize even further: humans / monsters / buildings / rocks / vegetation. There's a lot of software that can be used for that, but the most popular programs are Zbrush for 3D sculpting and 3ds Max for blocking. There is a huge demand for these artists and there seems to be an everlasting shortage of really good ones.<br />
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6) <b>Animators</b>: whether it's in 2D or 3D, these are the guys that make things move. The true 2D animation is fundamentally different from 3D technology- and toolwise, but the common requirement is to have a sense of every detail of motion and what makes a movement natural. In 3D, you will likely have a chance to work with Motion Capture, which is a lot of fun. Popular tools for 3D animation are MotionBuilder and Maya. For 2D it's Adobe AfterEffects and Toon Boom. There is a huge demand for animators as the number of good ones in the world is very small and animations become a bottleneck in most of the studios sooner or later.<br />
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7) <b>Sound designers</b>: these people take care of the sound in our games. They don't compose the music, but make sure the ambient sound is the right volume, the sound effects are all in their places and that every single torch can't be heard from miles away. There's a lot of tools for that: Audition, Reaper, Cubase, Nuendo and if you're fluent in any of them, you should be ok. The demand isn't huge, as many studios don't even hire in-house sound designers, but there's still some possibility to do it in freelance for a number of studios at a time.<br />
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8) <b>Composers</b>: the folks that actually compose the game music. And music in general. They rarely focus only on games. Pretty much all you need here is to be able to actually write music and some basic knowledge how the game music loops. Studios don't hire full-time composers so it's purely a freelance job. One where it might be very hard to get noticed unless you've won some solid awards for your music.<br />
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9) <a href="http://www.gamesmakingnoob.com/2014/11/jobs-in-gamedev-writer-narrative.html"><b>Narrative designers / writers</b>:</a> Narrative designers put the story together and are the ones that make sure it goes well with gameplay. Writers are the ones that create all on-screen text. Very often, narrative designer is also a writer. Don't be fooled: it's not like these people write a script and then everyone follows it. Most often, they have to adjust the narrative to what's going on on the screen to give it at least some logical continuity. The requirements here seem to be very easy to meet - you need to be great at writing. Unfortunately, there are thousands of people who think they can write when they actually can't and they spam companies with their applications. The demand itself is pretty low as many studios don't even need a dedicated writer for their types of games.<br />
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10) <b><a href="http://www.gamesmakingnoob.com/2013/07/jobs-in-gamedev-tester-qa.html">QA testers</a></b>: one of the most crucial and underappreciated roles in the industry. Testers are the ones that play the game over and over and over while it's being made. It requires a lot of patience and eye for details. There are no hard skills required, but deep interest in games, displayed by messing around in game engines, learning to draw or code or at least making your own maps in popular editors is very welcome. The pay is the lowest in the industry, but so is the required skillset. There is a high demand for testers, but also a lot of people apply, so when you do, make sure to stand out somehow.<br />
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11) <b><a href="http://www.gamesmakingnoob.com/2013/04/jobs-in-gamedev-producer-part-1.html">Producers</a></b>: the "managers" that essentially take care of the schedules and budgets, but they are also responsible for making everyone's job as easy and smooth as possible, by solving problems, providing good communication and resolving any conflicts that might arise. The top producer is often the product owner and is personally responsible for delivering the game to the market. Producers need to be skilled in business, management and development methodologies and software, as well as have great communication skills, because they are the link between all the departments in the studio. The demand isn't too high, though good, experienced producers are hard to come by.<br />
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One thing to keep in mind when thinking about salaries in gamedev are usually lower than in other industries. An average business software programmer can earn even twice as much as a game programmer, even though their skills are comparable. That's, unfortunately, what you get for working your "dream job".<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Nowadays, even Barbie can develop games.</td></tr>
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<b>There are generally three ways of getting into the industry</b>. <b>First is assembling your own team and just starting to make games</b>. Nowadays, with digital distribution, it is relatively easy to publish your own game. And it doesn't even have to be very complex either. You are most probably just learning and you never know where it might lead you. You may continue to work on games on your own for years to come, eventually turning into your own business - your own studio. Getting better at what you do and working with more talented people. Even if your first 30 games were absolute crap, you will learn from them. And even if your team splits up before actually making money on your games, the games you did are now your portfolio. Portfolio that will help you a lot when applying to a gamedev studio as a programmer, designer, writer, artist, producer - whatever you learned to do while making those games. I can assure you that having finished some, even small projects, helps you land a job tremendously. Just remember to know where to aim. Making two small 2D games won't help you when applying for a Senior 3D Artist position.<br />
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<b>The second way is to become a QA tester.</b> Even if you want to write or code, there's nothing wrong with starting out as a tester. I know lots of testers that managed to move on to design, programming or production. Being a tester lets you get to know the industry from the inside. Watch closely how more senior positions work and what is really needed in your studio. Then, when the time is right, you might be able to move on. I believe it is actually the easiest way to get into the bigger companies. The biggest drawbacks are the low salary and often long working hours which is okay early on in your career, but won't let you support a family if you're planning on getting into the industry later in your life.<br />
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<b>The third way is the hardest</b>, but often the only way acceptable for people that already have a career and cannot afford being a tester or staying in their mother's basement figuring out how to make a game. It is using your current career to transition to games. If you are a really good programmer, you might be able to transition quite smoothly. If you're a writer, graphic artist or a project manager you'll have to make some adjustments to be suitable for games, but you still can land in the actual development as well. There are other professions, however, that let you work in gamedev studios, in roles supporting gamedev. If your skills and professional experience allow it, you might get into the marketing or PR team. Or become an in-house lawyer. Or an HR manager. Or a finance manager. It might not be that easy then to transition into development itself and you might discover you don't even want to (game marketing can be pretty awesome with all the travels and game fairs). If you show enough interest though and prove you can be a great addition to the team, you might be able to become a dev. Oh, and keep an open mind - being a manager in a gamedev studio can be quite different from your usual work at some bank or consulting firm and sadly, the salary will likely not be as high either.<br />
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You should also remember that <b>not only development studios are involved in making games</b>. And I am not talking about youtubers or journalists here. I mean companies that play a supporting role for game development studios. Backend solutions companies that maintain servers for online or mobile games. Motion capture studios. Motion capture actors. VoiceOver studios. VoiceOver actors. Orchestras that record game scores. All sorts of 2D and 3D outsourcing companies. Localization companies that translate mostly game texts. These are all highly involved in production of many great games and it might be a good idea to start in one of those if you can't find a place for yourself in a gamedev studio.<br />
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Whichever way you choose, the success will highly depend on your skill and <a href="http://www.gamesmakingnoob.com/p/extra-credits-pl.html">knowledge of the industry.</a> The more you know how it works, the better chance you have at learning the right skills and attitude. Then, with just a bit of luck, it's a matter of time before you are able to call yourself a game developer. Good luck!<br />
<br />Wolandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12265068990487392793noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2075115594956600179.post-86094319966541651742016-01-13T16:49:00.002+01:002016-01-13T16:49:45.620+01:00Hunie Pop: so bad yet so brilliant<div style="text-align: justify;">
I've played my fair share of the dating sims when I was a teenager. They were all roughly the same, but hey - boobs! And to be fair, some of them had really decent writing or even more interesting settings than "you're a transfer student, now go and hump everything that moves". When I was browsing the most recent Steam sale list, I came across Hunie Pop. Was only around 3 Euro and to be honest, looked pretty lame. What caught my eye was the "Overwhelmingly Positive" in user reviews. Could it be that the genre that used to be a one-trick-pony has something new to offer? Could it be that jRPG and Iron Maiden are the only ones still stuck in the 80's and the visual dating novel has left them behind?</div>
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Yeah, I bought it and I was astonished how bad it was. I mean... The assumption that if I'm playing it I must be a loser that could never get a girl was both funny and embarrassing. The dialog choices were always between "my nose is bleeding" and "my tongue is stuck between my teeth". The occasional "Hey, I'm not a total moron" options were always greeted with a "yeah, right... get real" kind of reply. Of course, not 30 minutes later, I'm a regular playboy that can ask any girl out and aks every chick their cup size and - what's even weirder - age and get a reply. With no magic involved, but just because the game wanted it that way.</div>
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The writing is so terrible that it walks this fine line between so bad I want to quit and so bad it's funny. Luckily, the Voice Acting is even worse, which pushes the whole thing to the definitely funny zone. The uninspired one-liners of stereotypical teachers, schoolgirls and gym bunnies are met with performances so dull that Siri sounds like a sex line operator in comparison. </div>
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Yet... the game is actually the best dating sim I've ever played. Before you ask the girls on dates, you get to ask the girls questions and buy them presents. At first it feels like mindless collectible unlocking. Soon enough though, between some relationship questions where you need to simply tell the girl what she wants to hear, she will check whether you've been paying attention and ask you what her weight or favourite color is. But that's just child's play. Where it gets really good is the dates themselves.</div>
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It's the first dating sim I've seen that actually uses its mechanics as a metaphor of dating instead of making me read through pages of dialogue and descriptions to chose an option every 15 minutes. Instead, it's a logical match 3 type of game. A surprisingly deep one with a decent amount of strategy in it. Additionally, every color you're matching corresponds with an emotion or a conversational topic. Every girl prefers certain topics, so you have to navigate through the board to focus on sexuality or flirtation, but it's not always possible, when all that's on the table is talent and romance. Every now and then you accidentally trigger a bad topic and the whole carefully built up mood goes to shit. And sometimes, when you are out of your game and the colors just don't seem to match, the date ends without really moving the relationship forward, leaving you both in that "meh" zone. </div>
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That's a pretty damn accurate mechanic to mimic the intricacy of dating. But wait, it gets better! When you finally manage to get into a girl's pants, the rules of the match 3 change. The board is now filled with easy matches. You're both in the mood. All you need to do is not to fuck it up now. You need to fill the rapidly depleting mood bar. At first, used to thinking things through, you're searching for good, strategic matches. You get some points, then a combo comes crashing down. You're already doing great. The bra is gone, but you have to act quick before the mood drops. You start getting a bit nervous. You just match whatever you find first. You're getting sloppy. You know you could probably be doing so much better, yet you keep plowing through and even though sometimes you ruin the mood a bit with your tempo, you finally get there, feeling like you've actually accomplished something. However silly that sounds. </div>
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I don't know about you guys, but I'd take this kind of experience over an overly long sexual act description. And while it might all sound really silly and while Hunie Pop might have an awfully candyish, dumb, primitive, sometimes straightforward racist and stereotypical skin, its gameplay is solid and an incredible example of using just the right mechanics to let the player experience the complexity of the dating game. In that regard, Hunie Pop is a game that beats all entries of The Witcher, Mass Effect and Persona series all together.</div>
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Wolandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12265068990487392793noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2075115594956600179.post-22099274609633142792015-12-11T23:11:00.005+01:002015-12-11T23:16:46.485+01:00Legacy of the Void - the worst Zelda game ever<div style="text-align: justify;">
Before we start, I'm a huge StarCraft fan. It was one of my first PC games. The franchise has been with me for over half of my life and what might be weird, I loved the game mostly for the story. Sure it wasn't the greatest thing ever written, but the execution was just so much better than all the mission briefings we were used to at that time in RTS. Jim was a cocky bastard, Mengsk was a major asshole and Fenix sacrificing himself was one of the most meaningful game deaths for me. And the soundtrack... Hell, I'm gonna listen to it while I'm writing this. Hey! You can listen to it while you read this, too! It'll be the soundtrack for this post, why not.</div>
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When Wings of Liberty came out, I played the crap out of it. Got all the achievements in the story mode. Even the Lost Viking ones, because I just wanted to show my respect to the guys at Blizzard that made it so beautiful. So what all characters had depth of a puddle, at least they were diverse and worked well together. The missions were diverse, the goal clear and Raynor relatable. It's been 5 years and I can still remember some of the maps.</div>
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Then Heart of the Swarm came, with its in-your-face romance and pink Kerrigan. Up until the end of Wings of Liberty, the word "love" has never appeared. The relationship between Jim and Sarah was hinted, but never explicitly shown or confirmed. The beginning of Heart of the Swarm could have easily featured them as good buddies, with Jim having hots for the HotS (sorry for the terrible pun, couldn't resist) and Kerrigan not really being that interested. Still it wasn't so bad after all. Seemingly faceless Zerg got amazing new representation in Zagara and Abathur. However, it's probably not the best thing that I don't know what the end goal was.</div>
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HEAVY SPOILERS FROM NOW ON - YOU'VE BEEN WARNED</div>
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Legacy of the Void has been so much worse though. The whole thing is a MacGuffin fest. Starting with the introduction of a "bad god" very originally named Amon. Although, if main characters have the most popular American names, Jim and Sarah, it's probably fitting that the bad god has the name out of top three popular god names. What's worse, is that the only purpose this Amon serves is for us to know what we want to hit in the face in the finale. The coolest Protoss alive, Zeratul, gets sacrificed to free the most boring of them, Artanis. "Screw Zeratul, I want to play as Artanis in the last part of StarCraft" said no one ever. It's as if the creative director played Metal Gear Solid 2 and thought "hey, this Raiden guy was so cool!" or something equally ridiculous.</div>
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What follows is resurrecting the one character that should have stayed heroically dead - Fenix. What's worse, he's resurrected, but not quite. He's now having existential problems and becomes a plot device in a story that keeps getting worse with every passing mission. Way to dig out a corpse of a beloved character and spit on it. Accompanying the bland Artanis are also a green-eyed female, a blue-eyed female that occasionally turns red, the only protoss with a beard and a red-eyed bad protoss that for a completely unexplainable reason manifests free will. Yes, I just finished the game yesterday and already cannot remember the names. The only good moments in the campaign cutscenes are when Kerrigan, Raynor and Swann appear. The rest is just one still face babbling to another still face.</div>
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Back to MacGuffins - almost every mission goes like this: "Hey, Artanis, I've discovered the xhtehyean... ah screw it, I discovered these magical thingies that you need to collect or destroy so you can advance." At some point you find yourself chasing 3 pieces of Triforce to be able to collect 5 gems to free 6 sages to find 7 crystals. Unfortunately, Artanis doesn't have a fun green hat and what's worst, he talks. Makes me wonder whether all the level designers were reassigned to Heroes of the Storm and Legacy of the Void was left with just a team of juniors.</div>
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The pinnacle of this is the final mission of the epilogue, where instead of an epic bossfight or commanding a massive final battle, you get to... You guessed it! Destroy 7 floating crystals! And as a reward, you get to see burning Kerrigan using a laser pointer attack on the forehead of Cthulu Amon. And don't even get me started on Kerrigan trying to rival Dragon Ball Z characters in the amount of transformations and how cliché her final form is.</div>
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When I finished the game yesterday I immediately googled whether they changed the person responsible for the story, but no. It's been Chris Metzen all this time, but apparently struck by some midlife dementia. You thought the ending of Mass Effect 3 was bad? Well, it must be some space opera curse, because Legacy of the Void manages to deliver an even worse ending to a much better franchise. After it's all over, you end up feeling like Blizzard has just taken a long, boring piss on your favourite characters.</div>
Wolandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12265068990487392793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2075115594956600179.post-77977624599278718082015-10-02T14:28:00.003+02:002020-04-26T14:01:17.395+02:00Sexualization in games? Why not!<div style="text-align: justify;">
I was sitting in the office, minding my own business and then my wife sent me a link to this picture:</div>
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It got me thinking... The artist here is right. <b>The nudity and sexualization of games or any other medium is only a problem for those who can't see through it. </b>Kinda obvious, right? Took me 30 years to realize that? Maybe. You can skip the rest if you want. I will continue though. Stop laughing, I'm dead serious.</div>
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I grew up in the 90's, with the games from the 80s and 90's and all the surrounding popculture. And with the 90's being the age of Lara Croft, Baywatch and Duke Nukem. <b>I confess to all the sins of a teenage gamer.</b> I did always have Tifa in my party in Final Fantasy VII (one of the reasons was because her limit break was the only skill-based one, but let's be honest, boobs were important too). I did play only female characters in Dead or Alive (because frankly, who choses the guys?). I did play Wet: The Sexy Empire as an underaged kid, along with several Japanese erotic game novels (and I frankly, I mostly enjoyed he writing - sex scenes got tedious and repetitive really quickly).<br />
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You now have every right to discard my opinion as biased, manipulative and sick to the bone, but... <b>All this was a natural part of growing up. </b>It allowed me to play BioShock: Infinite without staring at Elizabeth's boobs and instead focusing on her story. It allows me to look at Akiba's Trip not only as a fan service, but also a really fun game with decent story and really, really cleverly abstract mechanic. It allowed me to <a href="http://www.gamesmakingnoob.com/2013/10/catching-up-catherine-nerdy-guide-to.html">critically look at Catherine</a> and what choice I would make if I were in Vincent's shoes. And I did not base it at all on which pair of tits I liked better. I am able to look at Quiet as a tragic character, completely ignoring her appearance and not getting a boner during the water scenes. </div>
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<b>But I still want to be strong and fast like Solid Snake.</b> Be able to pull up myself and a busty gal with one hand like Cloud. And I wouldn't mind having muscles like Duke, because hell, who would? Apart from gymnasts, volleyball players, anyone who wants to fit in any door... But you get my point :) Does the fact that I'm physically inferior to the idea of these characters make me rage? No. They are representations of physical traits that many of us find attractive. I can either bitch about it or go to the gym.<br />
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<b>Sex and sexualization is a part of life and part of every medium</b> <b>and every art</b>. It makes perfect sense that in a fantasy world we want to see visually pleasing characters. Because I like Quiet as a character, I don't dress her in the baggy outfit just to prove some moot point, because I don't want her to feel uncomfortable. Even if mechanically she won't suffocate or anything. (explanation: the character is supposedly half-naked because she breathes with her whole body. Changing her clothes does nothing to her but it does to my immersion and suspension of my disbelief in that quirky world) And yes, sometimes the pervy stuff gets pretty ridiculous, but I love how games like Lollipop Chainsaw or Bayonetta grew so self aware that they are practically parodying themselves while still having lots of fun, innovative, amazing gameplay. </div>
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People are saying that sexualized characters in games promote impossible standards among the audience and that is partially true. Partially, because these standards aren't impossible and some fantastic proportions can be successfully translated (not transfered to real life. Just look at the professional cosplayers. Both male and female). Also, there is nothing wrong with the second part. <b>Is it bad that a medium makes people want to be more fit?</b> Can anyone tell me with a straight face that liking big boobs or cleavage is somehow wrong? I always wanted to be with a girl who isn't just smart, but also gorgeous. I married a girl who isn't just smart, but also gorgeous. Sweet and caring too. Did I hurt anyone? Did the world stop turning because somewhere out there there are women and men that actually fit those "impossible standards" bills? Or is it just the howls of the envious?</div>
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<b>The problem starts only when we can't look past the sometimes oversexualized coating.</b> When we automatically call the character a bimbo just because she shows some cleavage. When we deny the characters any personality they might have just because they have muscles bigger than ours. Ass rounder than ours. I can only hope that the ones that feel offended or endangered by more sexualized content will someday be able to clear their vision of their unfulfilled, perverted, juvenile thoughts and see the busty and muscular characters as virtual persons, not just pieces of virtual meat.</div>
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And seriously, go hit the gym, you lazy asses. Those <b>juicy chicks and hunky dudes won't just settle for any fat nerd ;)</b></div>
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Wolandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12265068990487392793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2075115594956600179.post-31619150047056564952015-08-30T11:44:00.000+02:002015-08-30T11:53:46.542+02:00Games and moralsVery recently, Steam held a quick sale on Darkest Dungeon. I have a huge line of games I own and still need to finish (or at least play), so even though I've been meaning to give DD a try for a while now, I was putting it off, because of this huge queque. Well, the sale won. I'm somewhere around 7 hours in the game at this point and getting a hang of it much more than I expected.<br />
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The game has a number of really simple, but interesting mechanics that nicely show, how you can reforge the limitations you face in development into beneficial design choices. However, there was one mechanic that really got me thinking. One I consider an excellent excuse to talk about moral choices in games. To simplify, I will break down how games approach the moral choices into 3 "levels". Level 1 being - in my highly subjective opinion - the lousiest and level 3 being the crowning achievement of how games approach morality. Let's get this over with.<br />
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<b>Level 1: Morality scales</b><br />
We all know those. Mass Effect's Renegade vs. Paragon. Catherine's Loyal vs. Cheating bastard. Fallout's karma. Elder Scrolls' popularity (or whatever it's called). Baldur's Gate's reputation. There's a lot of games that try to quantify the morality. To put everything on a single axis between good and evil and then make the game's world react to us accordingly, or in most cases, just giving us a few more dialogue options. Yes, I consider this the worst thing a game can do with morality. Because no matter how robust the system seems to be, it always boils down to where we are on a scale from 1 (bad) to 100 (good). It does pave the way for some interesting scenes sometimes, but <b>it rarely teaches the players anything about themselves.</b> How would they react in a certain situation? Who knows - the game only gives them a few predefined options, none of which usually gives the players the reaction they're after. Stack up enough of this communication bondage and the end result of the game will vary greatly from what the player was expecting. Not to mention how in your face most of these games are about these choices. Come on, BioWare - color coding?<br />
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<b>Level 2: Moral choices</b><br />
This is kinda the Telltale category. The game puts you in front of obvious choices. Be it dialogue choices or gameplay choices like in BioShock. There is always some build up for these moments. Whenever they arrive, you know the consequences of your action will affect the game, or at least you're to believe they will, because in most games they really don't (that's probably a topic for a whole other article, but to keep it short: even games that are "not linear" are often on rails anyway and the moments where you make a decision that splits the gameplay timeline are often kept as short as possible and the game gets back on track very shortly after while giving the player an illusion of actually changing the story). This kind of approach is in my opinion much better than morality scales. You make your decision and no statistic tells you what percentage of you is a good person. In many cases, these choices don't give us an obvious right or wrong answer, so you can feel like your decision is meaningful. Mass Effect did that on few occasions when they didn't scream red or blue to us. The Witcher series is doing pretty well in that department as well.<br />
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There's just one problem I have with those. In most cases, you can be at least 90% certain what the consequences of your choices will be. Gameplay consequences. Remember the choice in StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty campaign, when you had to choose whether you believe Nova or Tosh? What was the decission really about? Who you believed or whether you wanted Ghosts or Spectres in your campaign? <b>Way too often these choices end up not being about our morality</b> or what we'd do in a certain situation. <b>It's about what loot we get or what mission we unlock. </b>And even when the choice isn't tied to a gameplay reward, knowing the results of your decission is a complete game changer for making up your mind. With no risk factor involved, the moral choice turns into calculation and can quite easily remind you that you are only playing a game. That you can take a step back and just disconnect from this decision.<br />
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<b>Level 3: Gameplay</b><br />
Yes, this is the moment when I get back to Darkest Dungeon. It's a roguelike in which you explore a dungeon - nothing special so far. Unlike many roguelikes however, you don't have to play till you cannot reach further and die, but you can withdraw your party, failing the quest but keeping the little loot you collected. Like in roguelikes, dungeons are procedurally generated and you have no idea what you will find a step ahead of you.<br />
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The game tells you from the very beginning that the adventurers you hire will die. A lot. Still, I refused to treat them like cannon fodder, even though I was getting a handful of new ones after every quest - failed or not. You rarely know what lurks behind the next door when you're exploring the dungeon. <b>Merely telling your party to move forward can make the difference between life and death. </b>Every loot crate or book you encounter can give any of your party members a lasting disease or personality quirk. And if you want to progress in the game, eventually one of your party members will die. And when that first one died on me, I just replaced him with a new one. A bit less familiar face and skillset, but still quite useful. While some of the adventurers in my roster died, some eventually got stronger. When I mix them with noobs I get, I now focus on not getting the experienced ones killed, but sometimes the temptation to open just one more door is just too strong and one of these veterans of mine dies of heart attack anyway.<br />
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Darkest Dungeon never gave me any morality scale and never really told me that there's a choice ahead of me. A choice with consequences. Still, I was making such choices all the time. StarCraft II confirmed that I prefer blondes to dudes with dreadlocks and Mass Effect confirmed that a racist with boobs is still worth more to me than some random guy. That wasn't news to me. Darkest Dungeon however showed me how much my curiosity could make me devaluate human lives. How in just a few hours I could shift my focus from saving everyone to pushing forward, just to make these sacrifices worth it. I don't know where it puts me on the scale between an angel and an asshole, but I couldn't care less.<br />
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This is the type of moral choices I want to face in games. Ones that make me think, not calculate. Ones that make me invested in finishing the game for the sake of sacrifices I made. Ones that leave enough impression to write an article about them.Wolandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12265068990487392793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2075115594956600179.post-89725698464137097812015-07-09T13:06:00.001+02:002015-07-09T13:06:32.146+02:00Fallout Shelter vs. SJW<div style="text-align: justify;">
Let me tell you the story of my Vault 666. Room and resources were scarce. Everyone had to contribute. The expansion went fairly quick until we've hit the population of 14 or so. At this point, new dwellers did not appear and the growing production rooms needed manpower. In one of the lunchboxes my dwellers found a Medieval Ruler Outfit, adding to charisma among other stats. Quick check what charisma is for later, I've selected a man with the most charisma, added the Ruler outfit and that's how King Woland was born. His role - staying in the living quarters and impregnating all the women in my vault. This was the fastest and most efficient way, as everyone else needed to help with the respource production. Once all the ladies showed significant signs of pregnancy, King Woland, having the highest stats, went out to the wasteland, to find more weapons and outfits. In the meantime, it turned out that in case of any disaster, like fire or a raid, my pregnant dwellers run for their lives, leaving men to deal with the problem. This quickly taught me to give all the weapons I found to men, tasking them with defence. We are facing extinction - there's no point in arguing. Men get to defend the next generation with guns. Women with not endangering the fetus. Hard to imagine it the other way round.</div>
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A week later my Vault already has 120+ dwellers. Population is not an issue, I have more people than I need anyway. I keep training the dwellers to maximize production and caps income. Breeding is not necessary, since I have a fully upgraded radio station with six gorgeous girls in lingerie with their charisma maxed out. There's no reason not to give women weapons or education now. Some of them are as highly trained as men, some even explore the wasteland. Life is good. </div>
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Now let's imagine Bethesda wanting to suck up to Social Justice Warriors while designing the game. After reaching the 14 dwellers point I would probably find out that half of the population is homosexual. Keeping track of everyone's sexual preferences would be extremely annoying gameplaywise, but I would probably finally manage to get one or two women pregnant, after hour-long minigames that show how respectful the men are towards these women. In a few days, I'd crawl my way up to the 20 dwellers treshold to unlock the radio and right after that a Wasteland Adoption Agency to let all the gay couples in my vault have a baby. In the meantime, the only women that were willing to get pregnant a couple times with different partners would be slut-shamed into leaving the vault and pretty quickly the Wasteland League for Equality would enforce parity that would make me unable to accept any straight white males into the vault. Within a week my shelter would be abandoned by its Overseer, who got tired of micromanaging and women screaming "rape" each time the poor raiders just want to steal some water. All those poor dwellers would die, equally irradiated, starved or slain.</div>
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What a terrible game that would be! Not because there would be homosexuals in it. Because gameplaywise it would be tedious and most of all, it would be unfitting for the world of Fallout. I am extremely glad that Bethesda did not give in to the pressures of seasonal feminists and other groups that aggressively refuse to think outside their narrow agenda. Fallout Shelter's gameplay quite realistically shows how a vault dwelling society in nuked 50's USA would get organized. I'm actually quite surprised that there was no shitstorm here like with Kingdom Come: Deliverance for example. Maybe the internet finally got tired of trolls? Maybe we're finally growing up and people are starting to use their heads for something else than angrybanging their keyboards? Here's hoping we are finally starting to let people make games about fun again, not enforcing social concepts.</div>
Wolandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12265068990487392793noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2075115594956600179.post-91677719042165925812015-06-17T16:59:00.000+02:002015-06-17T16:59:26.452+02:00A few words on recycling in games<div style="text-align: justify;">
Me and my girl recently finished Child of Light (maxed it out actually, which is super easy when someone is sitting next to you and bugs you every time you go past a wall that you haven't licked yet). It got me thinking about recycling in games and how it works. It's been done for years now and the whole idea is pretty obvious, but I'll describe it a bit anyway.<br />
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Now the whole principle is... Making games is expensive. It's a lot of work too. And there's so many games that did things right. So many elements that would fit your game so well that you would just want to take these parts and put them in your game without really changing anything. Now imagine the situation where you actually own these elements, because the studio you work for owns them.<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VDwoyGucXVs/VYGHEYCQQKI/AAAAAAAABlU/Q6C1ylrwVL8/s1600/recycling-bins-south-africa.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="268" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VDwoyGucXVs/VYGHEYCQQKI/AAAAAAAABlU/Q6C1ylrwVL8/s320/recycling-bins-south-africa.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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The "recycling" can be done in a number of ways, as you can recycle pretty much everything from music through art assets to the technology. Recycling is basically the whole idea behind dedicated engines. The engine From Software uses is one of the best examples - they are repeatedly making new souls games using huge chunks of code from the previous installments. Of course they have to adjust quite a lot here and there, but they do have a solid base. Another good example is the id tech engine, that keeps us entertained since the first Doom and now, guess what - the newest Doom will be using its sixth version. I'm sure they had to rewrite the whole engine at least once on the way, but they reused it more than once too. The first one alone was a base for somewhere around a dozen of games. Look at me, basically expaining what an engine is... Moving on!</div>
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There's this general bias towards games that recycle assets, especially the graphical ones. A lot of people complained about Dragon Age 2 and BioShock 2. However, games recycling assets can be great. They just need special care. Portal is probably the best example. The core mechanic itself wouldn't be enough to make it a cult classic. They also had to execute it well, with decent puzzle design and brilliant tutorial and narrative.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-qHsBpqSW6p0/VYGHEZP6mpI/AAAAAAAABlg/sYYlcZBZhSU/s1600/recycling_basketball.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="239" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-qHsBpqSW6p0/VYGHEZP6mpI/AAAAAAAABlg/sYYlcZBZhSU/s320/recycling_basketball.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Now this has little to do with the article, <br />but damn, what a cool idea!</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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Smart management of assets lets the company give us more games more easily. Look at WB Games. They released Injustice: Gods Among Us almost simultaneously on both mobile and "big consoles". The models were super easy to transition, as both games used Unreal Engine 3 and it only required remembering to prepare lower LOD's (from "level of details", versions of the model with less polygons used for optimization, like viewing from afar). They obviously used a lot of tech from Mortal Kombat 9 for the console version, but had to redesign and redevelop the combat mechanics for the touch screen. When releasing MKX however, I'm sure they didn't even have that problem - they already had all the components. That's what smart asset management gives you.<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-sVTXYCwapR4/VYGHEa-jZWI/AAAAAAAABlo/X-QFJqCAJTE/s1600/child-of-light-.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="222" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-sVTXYCwapR4/VYGHEa-jZWI/AAAAAAAABlo/X-QFJqCAJTE/s400/child-of-light-.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Child of Light is another example of great asset management. A quite heavily "recycled" title that got nice reception. Let's face it, Ubisoft does have a whole stable of titles, bits, assets and features. They not only used the UbiArt Framework engine, but the whole game plays pretty much like the mosquito levels of Rayman Legends. The light dots fly around with a copy-pasted code of Rayman's lums and the bossfight camera zoom-ins probably didn't get a second look at either. The combat mechanics look way too close to those from South Park: The Stick of Truth that Ubisoft was helping Obsidian to close around the time of Child of Light's development. The circular menu and the two switchable characters system might not have been copy-pasted from one game engine to the other, but I'm willing to bet these fighting systems share their origin. And now, the new South Park game's been announced. With it being developed without Obsidian, there's a decent chance the new Cartman and friends game will be done using UbiArt Framework, that, thanks to Child of Light, now has turn-based battle mechanics!</div>
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If you look at it like that, Child of Light becomes a milestone in the development of the UbiArt Framework engine between Rayman and South Park. And how cool is it that this milestone also gives us a game! One with straightforward awful rhyming, but still a really decent game. That's what good planning gives you. And without it, I'm pretty sure a game like Child of Light would never see the... erm... light. Its costs would probably be way too high for Ubisoft to risk it.<br />
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Wolandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12265068990487392793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2075115594956600179.post-20522186241006588722015-05-25T21:13:00.001+02:002015-05-25T21:13:38.562+02:00About the #downgrade thingy...<div style="text-align: justify;">
Last week there were two major gaming events in Poland. First was the launch of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt on Tuesday. Second was <a href="http://www.digitaldragons.pl/en/">Digital Dragons</a> (a conference that's closest to a Polish GDC) on Thursday and Friday. Lots of developers and media people attended and there's been many topics on everyone's tongues, but this one I've actually debated during the afterparty and thought some of the facts are worth sharing.</div>
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Alright, so a lot of people, especially in the media, have been complaining about the graphic downgrade in The Witcher 3 and comparison compilations have been thrown back and forth to prove... something. Doesn't really matter. <b>The downgrade quite obviously happened. But so what?</b> It happens in most games.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Wvk6H1Ax26M/VWMycOvDeeI/AAAAAAAABkY/SQXWEigXo2k/s1600/7ySVyPz.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Wvk6H1Ax26M/VWMycOvDeeI/AAAAAAAABkY/SQXWEigXo2k/s400/7ySVyPz.jpg" width="280" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">What are these images trying to prove, with completely different lighting and scenes?</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
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What many people don't understand is that for a developer, every project brings new challenges and new experiences. Nobody ever makes the same game twice and really very few sequels are made with the "let's do a copy with just a few tweaks here and there" mindset. <b>When an AAA team is working on a game, they want it to be the best game they can make.</b> And almost always it turns out to be very hard to achieve, because no matter how experienced they are, they're doing something that's never been done before. I'm sure that if you asked the developers of even the highest-praised titles (like Ocarina of Time with its 99 metascore), they would tell you how the game could have been so much better if they hadn't cut some features or optimized some graphics.</div>
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I have experienced a downgrade of the game I was working on myself. To quote Tomek Gop from the speech we gave on Digital Dragons: <i>media demo from February 2014 was the best Lords of the Fallen has ever looked</i> (more or less, don't hold me to the exact wording). And that's true. I remember exactly all the work that we've put into achieving this visual benchmark. I also remember all the reasons for the rest of the game not living up to this benchmark. </div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1UnmhRV4_KE/VWMxtwU0ZTI/AAAAAAAABkQ/HOcD2rPj0Fo/s1600/e3_screen_01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="225" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1UnmhRV4_KE/VWMxtwU0ZTI/AAAAAAAABkQ/HOcD2rPj0Fo/s400/e3_screen_01.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Many people accused this screenshot of being overpainted, <br />
but at that point Lords of the Fallen really looked like this.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Does that mean that we lied in February 2014? That we deliberately misinformed the public? No. We worked hard towards achieving that level of graphics. <b>We really believed the whole game will look this good</b> (and it ended up looking not too shabby either, but that's not the point). Most probably, so did guys from Red when they were pitching W3 over the past years. So did From Software, when they were first showing Bloodborne. </div>
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<b>So... Why can the downgrade happen?</b> The most common reason is hardware's power. I know, yeah, consoles have fixed specs. Sounds like it's not rocket science. Well, it kinda is. There's dozens of parameters that can affect what you can show to the player at the same time. It's a function of particles, triangles, pixels, streaming, POV, horizon and a whole bunch of memory management elements I can't even list. With often hundreds of people creating assets, it's virtually impossible to accurately predict how advanced the graphics should be. And <b>in AAA everyone prefers to produce assets of higher quality, because it's easier and more efficient to cut down than to scale up. </b><br />
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You end up producing a virtual slice with these highest quality assets. A small piece of game that often has problems working properly on a console, so you take a PC with the best graphic card in the studio. Yes, the one worth your monthly salary. The one that nobody can yet afford. And it manages to run these 30-40 FPS, but you keep telling yourself it's allright, because it's not optimized yet. Because some of the LOD's are not loading properly yet. Because streaming isn't yet fully implemented. But you still believe it can be all crammed into the game, because you really want your game to look awesome.<br />
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And this is a build that you're showing to the media, explaining that it's a vertical slice or a work in progress or alpha or beta or whatever stage you're in and you hope they will understand. What you mean to say is: <i>this is how it looks now and we want it to look this good</i>, because <b>you wouldn't show something that looks like shit to the public, would you?</b> But what media people seem to undestand is <i>this is still an early version, so there's a lot of room for improvement and everything will look so much better on the release!</i> You can see some communication noise here, right? :)<br />
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Not without its impact is the fact that most of the recent games accused of graphic downgrade are being released on the newest generation of consoles. For the players, the consoles aren't new anymore. For developers, with three years of development cycle, the consoles are very new. <b>Many of these games released today were started before the specs of the new consoles were final and way before the teams got their devkits.</b><br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-_rydecr8PSU/VWMzBlILhnI/AAAAAAAABkg/KfLzw8ebr_4/s1600/math.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="212" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-_rydecr8PSU/VWMzBlILhnI/AAAAAAAABkg/KfLzw8ebr_4/s320/math.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">It would be awesome if game development was as predictable as math.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
And what about PC? Sure PC can be more powerful, but can your company spend resources to make a completely different build for a PC? Does it have a fanbase strong enough to wait for the PC version for up to a year and a half, like with GTA V? And lastly... How many PC players will actually own hardware strong enough to support your ultra-ultra settings? <b>Optimizing for one setting and fixed specs of consoles is a bitch. Optimizing for 3 or 5 or more setting levels for every variant of a PC is a burning whorehouse.</b> Most of the time the dev team doesn't have enough manpower to really handle that and with the PC market being considerably smaller than console markets, even in biggest companies nobody will invest enough manpower to do the PC version "right", unless it's a PC-centric game.</div>
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That brings us to another point - manpower and release dates. <b>Sometimes the dev team just can't deliver.</b> Again, there's lots of constraints here: availability of resources, deadlines, changing directions and a shitload of events or problems you couldn't possibly anticipate. Key person on your team might leave and the rest is struggling to cover for the loss. Or (sometimes even worse) someone else comes in his/her place, with a completely different vision. Two-three years is a lot of time and a lot can happen. That's why the best game producers aren't the ones that can plan the whole 3 years development from the beginning to the end, but those who can adjust the development to the current situation.</div>
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Reading all these accusations of ill will, where people compare two completely different screenshots to prove that they've been "lied to" makes me smile. And the most of this butthurt comes from people who have never been in development, but feel that they are extremely close to it - the gaming journalists. And yes, of course this scenario is possible: a company deliberately showing everyone pretty candies and then shoving shit into the Blu-ray boxes. But is it likely? From what I've seen, I doubt it. </div>
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Gamedev is pretty unique. People want to make great games. Designers want systems that are fun for them. Writers want characters they like. Programmers want code that just flows flawlessly. Artists want visuals they can be proud of. And <b>if for some reason this can't be delivered, they are always aiming for the second best thing. </b></div>
Wolandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12265068990487392793noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2075115594956600179.post-42616381271667693112015-03-11T15:37:00.000+01:002015-03-11T15:38:22.198+01:00How Blizzard tries to solve MOBA problems<div style="text-align: justify;">
I really didn't want to start playing Heroes of the Storm. For two reasons. One - I never had enough time to really enjoy playing any MOBA on a decent skill level. Two - whenever Blizzard releases a game there is a high chance it will be the only game I'll be playing for the next few months. I logged into the beta maybe a week ago and I'm amazed at what I've seen so far in terms of design.</div>
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Bear in mind that this article's purpose is to analyze how Blizzard has approached many problems that can be seen within MOBA games, especially on the entry level. For obvious reasons, I will be comparing it to the most popular two - LoL and DotA 2.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-5LXXRhBNti0/VQA1cjsBolI/AAAAAAAABhU/a2MCkCfl3KE/s1600/BritneyChristina.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-5LXXRhBNti0/VQA1cjsBolI/AAAAAAAABhU/a2MCkCfl3KE/s1600/BritneyChristina.jpg" height="213" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">If MTV's Celebrity Deathmatch was still on, <br />
I'm sure they would feature Drow Ranger vs. Ashe at some point.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
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<b>Problem #1: Copying</b></div>
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The situation of the most popular MOBAs on the market is pretty ridiculous. Everything started with a Warcraft III mod, then LoL pretty much copied it, then Valve copied it (or "further developed"), and now the company that did the base for original, but not the original stepped into the picture. </div>
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Battles between LoL and DotA 2 fans are almost equally amusing as the console fanboys throwing shit at each other while the "PC Master Race" is defending their 10% market share (mostly thanks to MOBAs). The differences between the two titles are cosmetic at best and are mostly on the visual side. Sure, the balancing is different, the difficulty is different, monetization is different, but the whole core design stayed untouched since what, 2003, when the first version of DotA saw the light?</div>
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Blizzard had to differentiate. Not only because the formula deserved a bit of a change, but mostly because with established fan bases of the 2 biggest titles, not even the legions of Blizzard fans would be interested in a third game that's exactly the same. What did they do?</div>
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They took the most static element of the puzzle - the map - and made a few variants of it, making the players not only push lanes and jungle, but also fight for the overpowered power-ups that can be complete game changers. From resurrecting bone golems through collecting doublons for a pirate to bomb enemy forts to letting players turn into a dragon. On top of that, the lanes are no longer defended by towers you can just walk by. They are fortified, with walls and gates. And lastly, the mobs in the jungle, instead of being just a source of experience, cash or buffs, became mercenaries that you can recruit once every 3 minutes if you defeat them first. This way, the map design alone is a very distinctive game changer. </div>
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Like with almost everything done by Blizzard - not really a revolution, but evolution comparable to dogs growing wings overnight.</div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UGze9BFgmP0/VQA0XYq90oI/AAAAAAAABhM/cCgiz3i1b4s/s1600/accessibility.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UGze9BFgmP0/VQA0XYq90oI/AAAAAAAABhM/cCgiz3i1b4s/s1600/accessibility.jpg" height="207" width="320" /></a></div>
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<b>Problem #2: Accessibility</b></div>
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I couldn't really get into DotA 2. The item icons were so small I could barely see anything, The AI of towers was just confusing in the first few matches and the overall difficulty at the lowest levels, the confusing plethora of characters to choose from... Lost two games, won three games, changed the character, lost again and that was more or less it.</div>
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LoL is correcting quite a lot of these. The free champion rotation is obviously there as a part of the more aggressive monetization plan, but it also narrows the initial choice of characters down, which is a very good thing for beginners. The item icons are bigger and the player can actually see what they depicts. The suggested items for each character are also a great idea for those who just want to try and play without reading through a number of guides first. On the other hand, the multitude of items later on did force you to put hours into investigating every single champion or at least copy-pasting a working build from some website. Not even then you have a chance for a relatively even fight, as LoL has a system of runes and sigils and whatnot that literally lets the higher level players who farmed more (or paid more) get significant bonuses that help them dominate lower level players. Mixed with uneven matching alghoritms it's far from a noob-friendly environment. </div>
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Heroes of the Storm eases us into it. There is only 5 heroes in the rotation at first and that's more than enough for new players. As you gain player levels, you unlock slots that give you some more heroes in the free rotation, but that happens after you are already familiar with the basics and are unlikely to get overwhelmed. The player level gives you no advantage in a single match. Learning your hero is also much more user-friendly. There's no items you have to worry about in the middle of the battle and all three basic skills are unlocked from the start. The only thing you have to manage is traits that you get every few levels. Traits give you additional skills or improve the existing ones. At level 10 you get the ultimate skill (R). Simple? Wait, it's been made even simpler! When you are starting with a new hero, you have only half of its traits unlocked, so you only have to choose between two each time something pops up. When you finish your match, your hero gets experience and levels up, which unlocks additional traits and an alternative ultimate skill. Sounds limiting at first, but as soon as you learn that in no more than 5 battles your hero gets all its traits unlocked, the limitation becomes nothing more than just a smoothened learning curve. Especially with dynamically adjusted difficulty level that seems to base on your player level. </div>
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What's also interesting is that for every hero you take to level 5, you get some ingame currency to buy new heroes, so it encourages you to try new heroes instead of sticking to one or two you know.</div>
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Some might argue that the trait system is an insufficient replacement for the skill upgrading and item buying system of DotA 2 and LoL, but nobody in their right mind can claim it's less user-friendly. And again, it helps HotS differentiate itself from the two.</div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-lAbhu_ElBuM/VQA4LcWJdUI/AAAAAAAABhg/im57EDU4GGI/s1600/community.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-lAbhu_ElBuM/VQA4LcWJdUI/AAAAAAAABhg/im57EDU4GGI/s1600/community.jpg" height="237" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">These guys are actually behaving better than DotA and LoL fanboys. <br />
They only attack the opposite "team".</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span id="goog_965011755"></span><span id="goog_965011756"></span><br />
<b>Problem #3: Community</b></div>
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It's no secret that the current MOBA communities (especially LoL) is full of harassment and misbehavior. Riot even introduced the Tribunal system to fight the offenders, but all this reporting and reviewing cases feels more like pitting the players against each other more than really solving the problem. </div>
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Blizzard tries to root out the causes of the problems. I'm sure they won't be able to succeed completely, but there are some ideas that certainly help fight some of the aggression.</div>
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First one they decided to tackle was the competition within the team. There is no such thing as individual hero level in a match. The whole team gets a level. You can't steal a kill, as everyone that does damage gets the kill and the experience goes to the mutual pool anyway. There's no coins to buy items, so players don't have to compete over that too. Still, there are statistics that show who did more siege damage or who participated in more takedowns, but nobody gets ahead of the team with the level and nobody lags behind. You'd be amazed how much it cuts down the shit flying on the allied chat. </div>
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Another common cause of rage is players quitting mid-game. LoL community even wrote an <a href="http://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/miscellaneous/bEhf1EPt-open-letter-to-parents-of-league-of-legends-players">open letter to parents</a> about that recently. Players quit, the rest of the team is doomed. How do you counteract that? It looks like there is a number of ways. First - if a player quits or has connection problems, the hero doesn't idle. Heroes of the Storm switches to a bot as a backup. When the player reconnects, he regains control of the hero. Sure, the bot might not be as good as the player, but at least is isn't just standing in the base. Second idea is the very length of the match. Many co-op vs. AI matches last between 10 and 15 minutes. PvP matches last around 30 minutes. That's approximately 50% of a standard LoL / DotA 2 match time. On top of that all, the matching system seems to be much more effective here than the team setups in LoL that can take half an hour.<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-DifgnEsCIYw/VQBH8ARi1aI/AAAAAAAABhw/7Tp6vS_Pzig/s1600/nova.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-DifgnEsCIYw/VQBH8ARi1aI/AAAAAAAABhw/7Tp6vS_Pzig/s1600/nova.gif" height="168" width="400" /></a></div>
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<b>Next step in MOBAs?</b></div>
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Since I've never played any of the titles on more professional level, it's hard for me to assess how much the simplification of gear/skill systems will affect the depth of gameplay, The matches do seem more varied when it comes to level-related tactics and it could actually be enough to make up for possible lacks in the character development depth. Not to mention the fact that number of systems or items doesn't necessarily increase depth.</div>
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From what I've seen so far, HotS is a much smoother experience for a starting player. Shorter matches, shorter setup times, more incentive to learn new heroes and much friendlier learning curve combined with more map variety can all be great attractors. It definitely does a great job standing out as a title without abandoning the 10-players-3-lanes core of the genre.<br />
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How successful will it prove to be? Time will tell. Right now, top 2 spots on Twitch don't seem to budge, but who knows? Maybe it's because more people are actually able to play HotS on a satisfactory level that they don't have to watch it.</div>
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Wolandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12265068990487392793noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2075115594956600179.post-74500262252011925592014-12-10T11:10:00.000+01:002014-12-10T11:11:58.611+01:00Quickie: Piracy and votingIt's been boiling in my mind for quite some time now and I couldn't decide how to take a bite of this topic. I still don't know if this is the right way, but... Here goes:<br />
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<b>Buying games is your voting right</b><br />
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Seriously. Not only the fact of buying it, but also the way you do it matters. You can preorder or buy a collector's edition, showing your strongest support. You can buy digital or day one version or any other full-price. You can also wait for a discount, buy it in a Humble Bundle, a used box or even get for free on some giveaway or from PlayStation Plus or XBL Gold. You can play a free-to-play title without spending a single dollar or you can finish the game and decide you want to pay - let's say $10 for it. What matters here is basically how much you spend on the game and how much of it returns to the developer.</div>
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You may not realize what great power we are all holding in our hands. <b>With our money, we are encouraging or disencouraging studios to do certain stuff</b>. When a studio plans a game, it always looks for references and it always looks at success stories. Whether you're an indie developer or a AAA company, you will always choose to go the way that made millions over the way that commercially failed. And that's actually the only sane business strategy, but it also smothers innovation.</div>
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Every E3 people are waiting for Sony to announce <i>The Last Guardian</i> will come out soon. We would all have <i>The Last Guardian</i> on our shelves for years now if <i>ICO</i> and <i>Shadow of the Colossus</i> sold a decent amount of copies. </div>
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Everyone keeps getting back to <i>Vampire: Bloodlines</i> and <i>Arcanum </i>and remembering, what great games they were. So what they were great? Bloodlines sold less than 100k units and there's no Troika Games anymore. Who knows how many great RPGs we could have had if they were kept afloat? Instead us, gamers, gave our money to BioWare to recycle Baldur's Gate into two mediocre Icewind Dales.<br />
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I see a lot of people complaining that all the games are the same, that the AAA industry is just copying the same ideas over and over. I am not gonna tell you how to spend your money, but if you want more innovative games, try buying games that are innovative. Not the same titles every year.</div>
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<b>Oh yeah, piracy. </b>Right. You, pirates, have no voice. Whatever you download, doesn't matter. Your choice doesn't matter. You're complaining the game isn't great? Who cares - it's not like you tried to support it in any way. You're complaining there's no game worth buying? Well who do you expect to develop it if nobody has your support?</div>
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<br />Wolandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12265068990487392793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2075115594956600179.post-62956613584996525522014-11-28T17:29:00.000+01:002014-11-28T17:29:01.879+01:00"What should I study to become a game designer?"<div style="text-align: justify;">
That's a question that popped up a lot recently, on various occasions. It comes in all forms and flavors, really. Every other week on LinkedIn someone asks how and where he/she should start to pursue their career in game development. We've lately even been asked that on twitch while we were presenting our game. Here's what the answer was:</div>
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And frankly... These 5% I mentioned were a big exaggeration. The real answer is "<b>You don't need a degree at all</b>". Let's even put aside the fact that a degree is pretty useless in most of the fields nowadays and that the education systems all over the world are so outdated it hurts. Think for a moment: how many great writers needed a degree in literature? How many rock stars have a solid musical education? A designer is more or less the same type of job. You learn it mostly by doing, not by attending lectures. You have to solve problems specific to your project and there's no universal solutions that could be just taught to a hundred students so that they can just go out and design. If these universal solutions existed, all games would be the same and that's exactly what the good designer is there to avoid.<br />
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Game industry is still young. So young that the people who started making the first commercial games are sometimes still in the business. And with the education lag we are facing nowadays, it takes long years until schools even realize they should teach something. That means only one thing - most of the people in the industry don't have the degree in anything game-related. So whenever you're applying for a job, the <b>person interviewing you most likely never had any formal game education and therefore will not care whether you do</b>.</div>
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When I met James Portnow on<a href="http://www.gamesmakingnoob.com/2014/09/pax-prime-2014-personal-highlights.html"> PAX Prime</a>, a guy ran up to us and after a quite embarrassing display of worship, he started a rant about how he wants to be a game designer and how he's always wanted it and how he has been now studying for 4 (!) years at some design school. I did my research on the schools with gaming programs and there is maybe one or two in the whole US that can actually teach something valuable. That leaves the guy from PAX with a very high chance of wasting these 4 years completely, along with the money burnt into getting this "education".<br />
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I don't know if you've noticed, but formal education in general is for people who are not sure what they want to do. I myself went to my schools purely because I had no idea what I want to do with my life. Even though they were all among best schools available, I can't help feeling I've wasted a lot of my time. Because if you really want to learn something, you always have to invest your time in learning it. Teachers can accelerate the process, but at least equally often they will slow you down. And nowadays, with all online tutorials, all tools freely available, there really is so many ways to learn whatever you want without leaving your bed... Including game design.<br />
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So instead of paying some shady school and wasting 4 years, what do you do? First, <a href="http://www.gamesmakingnoob.com/2013/11/jobs-in-gamedev-game-designer.html">check what a game designer really does</a> and decide, if it's really what you are after. If yes:<br />
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<b>Option one</b>, for lone wolves: you download any free basic game making tool and start designing. If you get stuck, you check out tutorials. If some mechanics don't work as you wish, seek references. Your games will be simple. Your games will be ugly. Your gained experience will be incredibly helpful. You will learn designing, scripting, balancing, maybe a bit of coding and graphics. If you really put some time and heart into it, within a year you will build a decent portfolio that will get you so much further than any game design degree.<br />
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<b>Option two</b>, for online socializers: you find a modding forums or community for your favourite game and start getting to know the people there. Get involved, show that you want to help. Really help by getting your hands dirty, not give ideas. Someone will definitely give you the tools. Someone might help tutor you. Someone might take you in for a tiny project, after which you might help tackle a bigger one. If you have talent and are really active, within a year you'll be helping other noobs and doing crazy stuff like Oblivion Zelda mods, or even remaking Vampire: Bloodlines, who knows. Still, you'll be way more valuable to any company than after 4 years of attending design lectures.<br />
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<b>Option three</b>, for explorers: Study something else! Seriously. As a designer, you can always benefit from vast knowledge. Take up various classes - art, history, anything you can get your hands on and that sounds even remotely interesting. It will pay off. And instead of partying every night, try to spend some afternoons every week on including some design learning mentioned in option one and two. Otherwise you are just learing without a goal, which can be fun, but certainly not the point here.<br />
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<b>Option four</b>, for those who want in: <a href="http://www.gamesmakingnoob.com/2013/07/jobs-in-gamedev-tester-qa.html">start in QA</a>! It's really not that hard to get in. It is hard to stay sane there, true, but you will learn a lot, being close to development. And testers get accepted as juniors for all other dev jobs, designers included. And you don't need to show anyone any degree, because they already know what you can do!<br />
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Oh, and for option one and two - prepare to get a job while you're learning. I know your parents would rather pay for your college instead of supporting you when you're "wasting your time on games". It might feel like it is slowing you down, but at least gives you some backup option in case you don't succeed as a designer of any kind. Play it smart - that's what designers do.<br />
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Of course, the designer is always on top of the list when people think of dream jobs in games. Let's not forget there are <b>other ways to make games than just being a designer</b>. If you'd like to check out the requirements for some of these jobs, just explore the <a href="http://www.gamesmakingnoob.com/search/label/jobs%20in%20gamedev">jobs in gamedev label</a>.</div>
Wolandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12265068990487392793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2075115594956600179.post-84258687733646411452014-11-12T22:09:00.000+01:002014-11-12T22:09:29.487+01:00Jobs in gamedev: writer / narrative designer<div style="text-align: justify;">
Having finished my first game and being heavily involved in the story production for it, I now have a general idea what the job of writing for games requires. What's more, I've been neglecting the "Jobs in gamedev" series, so all the more reasons to bring you guys this article.</div>
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<b>So you write stories...</b></div>
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Good for you! Unfortunately, it doesn't necessarily mean you will be able to write for games. There are hundreds of professional screenplay or novel writers that have failed miserably while trying to deliver a narrative for a game. And many of them weren't mediocre either. I'm talking awarded writers recognized for their achievements in movies or books. If they were so great, why did they fail in games? To explain that, I have to give you a brief tour, how the writing process for a game can turn into a nightmare, but first let's talk a bit how the narrative designer differs from a game writer.</div>
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<b>Not every writer is a designer... and that's fine.</b><br />
There is a huge difference between a writer and a narrative designer. Basically, a writer is the guy who deals with words. There are lots of game elements that require only that and the writer doesn't have to get concerned about how these words affect the game mechanics. These elements are the static pages in the menu, like bestiaries or equipment descriptions, stuff like that. Sure, the writer has to be careful to make sure they fit the general theme of the game, but these flavor texts won't really break the game or heavily interact with the gameplay. Dialogues and quest descriptions are a bit more complicated, as you have to know what's going on at a certain point of the game. What dialogue options need to be included and what information the dialogue or description needs to give to the player. That's still quite easily manageable if you are a writer, not a designer. As a writer, you have to be great with words. Your sentences have to be brilliant and snappy, your dialogues need great pacing.<br />
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The narrative designer kind of needs a higher awareness level than the writer. He has to take into account all these elements the writer doesn't worry about. He needs to make sure all the tools are being used, especially the gameplay, to tell a compelling story. The narrative designer needs to help guard the concept of the game, make sure all quests are in line with the story, all dialogues serve their purpose, all characters have their place. Paradoxically, the narrative designer doesn't necessarily have to be a brilliant writer when it comes to the use of words, although it is very often expected of him/her. Especially in smaller studios, the role of narrative designer is either held by the writer or by creative director or lead game designer. Also in bigger studios, there are many cases where the writer never designs a story, he/she just puts it into words. Let's get back to our story of a potential story development nightmare.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Image stolen from theiddm.wordpress.com</td></tr>
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<b>Step 1: World creation and preproduction.</b></div>
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This is the step where the general idea shapes up. Art style is chosen. The development team decides or learns whether they will be doing a game about pirates or ponies. Based on this, further decisions are rapidly being made - all the guys on the team have to start with their work. Concept artists are drawing characters and enemies, 3D artists are starting on the blocking of the locations, game designers are inventing game mechanics. And very often, they are doing it completely independently, exploring on their own based on their individual understanding of the theme. They do coordinate, but mostly on the most "gamey" things. For example, game design coordinates with level design on the metrics used in the game, but they do not talk about how the game mechanics work with the mood of the locations to deliver a story to the player. Of course, the "right way" to do it would be to have a creative director who would make sure every person does his/her work according to the same core esthetic and sometimes this "right way" actually occurs. Still, majority of creative directors focus more on the gameplay than on the story and we see results of that even in big titles.<br />
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At this stage, there's usually some kind of problem with a writer. In some cases there's no writer at all and all these assets are just being produced because the team knows the theme and knows there's supposed to be some enemies and some NPCs. In other cases, there is a designated writer, but he/she doesn't really deliver or delivers a first draft of the story that the dev team just keeps filed "for later" while doing their thing. In yet other cases, there are some guys on the dev team that have some story ideas put together in a more or less chaotic document. You as a writer, more often than not, are not present at this stage. </div>
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<b>Step 2: "But our story sucks!" also known as production.</b><br />
This is the moment when the prototype has been done and accepted. The gameplay is shaping up, the locations are being produced, there's a few characters implemented, maybe some dummy dialogues or even a prosthesis of a tutorial. It's the moment when the general player's path is being decided on and suddenly, the dev team wakes up. They either pull out the story document someone created and realize it has an army of holes and irrationalities in it, that the current gameplay ideas have evolved way beyond the script, that one of the locations has been cut. That a key NPC won't be produced. That there's been a side quest system implemented or that there will be no more side quests. If there was a writer that was hired from outside of the game industry, this is usually the moment he quits, because "the dev team is unable to execute his vision".<br />
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The prototype is approved, the deadline for alpha is not far away, and in most cases, the team has no writer and only some general premise of the story. This is the moment when the writer is hired. It might be a full-time position. It might be an oversea freelance. It might be some person within the team stepping up with hopes of doing a decent job.<br />
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Whatever your origins are, the writing task before you is not trivial. There's already a lot of things that have been decided without consulting them with you. If you got in early, it's just going to be about getting into the theme and getting around some things, like having a fixed moment when the peak happens or having to meet some character sooner or later. The longer the team waits with bringing you in however, the more things like that get included. Suddenly you have a character that's in a specified place, having to go the specified route and very soon, what could have been a straight walk in the park with going around some trees once in a while, becomes a crawl through a tropical jungle with a rusty machete. <b>Instead of creating a story, you end up creating justifications for what's happening on the screen. </b>And then, whenever you fix the problems of NPCs appearing out of nowhere and doing things that are completely out of of their character, the dev team just comes up with another idea for something that doesn't fit the story no matter how you slice it.<br />
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With a bit of persistence and luck, you end up with a satisfactory story that makes sense.<br />
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<b>Step 3: Story implementation.</b><br />
If you were hired as a freelance writer, this is very likely the step you won't be involved in. If you worked closer with the dev team, you are likely to stick around and be able to prevent a shitload of things that can go wrong at this point. Dialogues that you've written might not exhaust all the gameplay options and game designers will try to fill the holes with so-called "designer art". Some tired designers will implement the dialogue trees all wrong and suddenly they will make no sense at all. There will be another change in the game scope and a key character will be cut out, making the current story pointless. Casting for the VO (voice acting) will be done by a deaf person and every character in the game will sound the same or lines of an old man will be played by a young girl. The VO script will be poorly prepared and the actors will read their lines completely out of context. The cutscene that was supposed to deliver the backstory will never be produced. Someone will add equipment descriptions that do not match your story or your world. The letter that was supposed to give clarity after the story twist will be accessible way before it, spoiling everything. The character animations will break and in the middle of a serious, heartbreaking dialogue, one arm of an NPC will start a pop & lock dance. And these are just some of the possibilities.<br />
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If you are still with the project at this point, this is the moment where the real video game writing skills get tested. This is where you see how your story holds up its limbs get cut off. How well the rest of the team understands it and how much they feel and agree with your vision of the story. <b>This is where you find out whether you are able to solve the problems that pop out on the fly without generating too much additional cost and workload</b>. This is where you really see the difference between writing for games and for any other medium.<br />
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<b>"But I will do it right"</b><br />
Of course you will. What I described was an extreme case where everything gets out of control, but don't fool yourself - it's not a domain of small and inexperienced studios. If you take a closer look at the stories of big titles with 80+ metascore you will easily find story holes, ridiculous moments, terrible execution and many, many more. It ranges from high-level absurds like going hunting to enlarge your wallet instead of rushing to free your friends in Far Cry 3 to choices between "No", "Not now" and "Not really" in Mass Effect. Most of the games have their narrative sins and most of them aren't necessarily the writer's fault. No matter how good or bad the writer is, it's not the writer that makes all the decisions. A game can be still pretty decent with a crappy writer and it can be a disaster with even the greatest writer in the world.<br />
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<b>"So what do I do?"</b><br />
First of all, the poetic lone wolf writer approach will get you nowhere. You have to be a team player and accept the fact that the dev team is not there to execute your vision. <b>You are to support the vision of the team with your excellent storytelling skills.</b> You have to get invested in the project. You have to be as close to the development team as possible and support them as much as you can. There's no other way to see your script really come to life than to help implement it. Your job will never really be done until the game ships. You can't just assume what you have written is enough and leave it in the hands of others. You have to remember, that the game narrative is way more than words. Gameplay tells a lot of the story too. You can't just write the words completely independently from the rest of the team and then just hope the game mechanics will tell the same story as your words.<br />
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<b>Be prepared for changes.</b> Lots of them. Game production is iterative. That means your script will have iterations as well. It will have to be adjusted many, many times. Sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, but you will have to accept it. In the end, the gap between the early draft of the script and what gets shown in the game will be extreme. Way, way bigger than in any other medium. You have to know that from the very beginning.<br />
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Oh, and one more fun bonus: you will never be the author of the game, like you would be an author of the book. Your name won't be on the cover. It won't even be the first name in the long list of credits. You won't be able to say "this is my game". Or "this is a game I've written". Or even "I wrote the story for this game". A lot of people will chip in to the extent of making your story not yours. All you will be able to say is "I have worked on the story of this game". If that is not enough for you as a writer, I can't blame you. This is one of the reasons so many traditional writers don't write for games. This is also the reason why good game writers are so rare and so highly valued. If you are able to harness all the chaos that comes with making games to tell your story, the impact your game will have will leave millions of people on their knees. Even, if they don't even realize it was thanks to the writer.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Image stolen from writerscabal.wordpress.com</td></tr>
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<b>"So how do I get the job?"</b><br />
This is actually a very hard question, because writing for games is one of the most blurry areas of the industry. A lot of teams still live by the outdated story = words definition. In other teams, having someone hired as a writer seems like a waste of office space. Games that require vast amounts of words are actually in a minority and the narrative designers often derive from the team of game designers. So here's the first problem. <b>Writer or narrative designer is not a position like a coder or a concept artist: not every studio needs one.</b><br />
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Another thing I have mentioned before is that just being a good writer doesn't necessarily mean you will be a good games writer. There are some personal traits that might help you in succeeding. Like being a team player, being open to feedback and being able to scratch or tweak your ideas according to the requirements of the project. All the time you have to remember you are the writer or designer for the game, not its author.<br />
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As for how to break into the industry as a writer, keep a portfolio of your writings. Preferably short, brilliant stories that show off a lot of your skill in a short period of time. Get published in some literature magazines, win a contest or five. If you have already published a novel, that's all the better. In general - have some relatively objective proof that you're far from illiterate. When you have all that, start spamming the companies with your portfolio, but do it wisely. Studios like Telltale or Bethesda are way more likely to need writers than Riot Games.<br />
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There's of course a lot of different ways to get your hands dirty with game writing. I'm working as a producer, but still had my chance to work on the story a lot more than the producer's job description requires. Game or quest designers with a knack for storytelling can move to the narrative section of their team quite easily too. And as always, there's QA, from where you can jump to anywhere in the game industry, if you are good and persistent enough.<br />
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Wolandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12265068990487392793noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2075115594956600179.post-36839724078278919672014-10-27T10:59:00.000+01:002014-10-27T10:59:24.310+01:00Currency systems in RPGs<div style="text-align: justify;">
Whenever you hear "RPG" you instantly think of a handful of elements that are almost always present. Like a leveling system or a robust story. A character customization in western RPGs and turn-based combat in jRPGs. And a currency used to buy and sell stuff in the game. Especially the ability to buy stuff from shops seems to be present in every little subgenre of RPGs, but lately I'm observing that more and more games could easily be just as great without it.<br />
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I understand the compulsion the designers have when they are introducing the currency in their RPGs. The players expect it. That's great, but we should ask ourselves a question: why do we need it? Let me give you a few examples of good games where the currency makes little sense.<br />
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The Witcher series. I don't know about the third installment, but in first two games I went through the game saving up all my money to be able to buy something cool. Some endgame gear. I often saw a vendor that had a sword maybe 5-10% better than what I was currently having, but it did cost like 90% of my money, so I have always decided against buying it. Before I knew it, I either found a better sword, or the game ended. What made matters worse, the reward for most sub-quests was... money. Money that gave a short term feeling of accomplishment, but in the end, when I was finishing my game with a few thousand orens that I had nothing to do with, left me feeling tricked at best.<br />
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Allright, US. It's your turn. Diablo. In the first game, money was more or less useless, as you found the coolest stuff as drops anyway. The only thing the cash was good for was repairs (that's more of a pain than a gain for a player anyway). In the sequel, they introduced the gambling mechanics. What for? To finally give the player a way to get rid of all the useless coins... and get useless overpriced stuff that was still inferior to what dropped from the mobs. And in Diablo III the Auction House and coins pretty much broke the game, resulting in millions of Asians farming cash to sell it to thousands of Americans, Blizzard closing the AH and by doing so, openly admitting it was a really bad idea.<br />
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Let's get out of Europe and US and visit Japan. Zelda series. You find rupees everywhere. Literally everywhere. You always have enough of them. Finding blue, red, silver or golden rupees is fun, but in the end, they are nothing else than a shiny thing that you pick up. You never really have to manage your currency, as you will be able to buy everything you currently need as you discover it anyway. Rupees are so commonly useless, that Ocarina of Time had to introduce the bigger wallets to keep you from buying all the coolest stuff at the very start of the game. One has to sit down and think though... Maybe instead of having currency that's useless and wallet that has to keep you from becoming a billionaire just by cutting grass and breaking jars... Just give the player all the basic stuff as soon as he reaches some town and let the player find the rest in the dungeons.</div>
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There's definitely more examples of games that have greatly misused the idea of currency. Games with useless vendors that have nothing interesting to sell. Games, where the amount of gold can be translated to number of repairs or arrows. No wonder that the modern design is starting to look at the currency from a different perspective. Souls series have souls that act as both exp and currency - this way you always have something to do with your currency. In Lords of the Fallen, we've gone one step further. We simply didn't introduce currency at all. An RPG without currency and vendors? Every time a journalist asked me this, I just replied that we didn't need them. Because why would the player want to buy crappy stuff from vendors, when he/she can just get the cool stuff from enemies and bosses.</div>
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Currencies make much more sense in MMO games, where they have a similar purpose to real life - to give a common denominator for goods so that the players can trade them more easily. Here, what gives the currency the reason to exist is the economy. It isn't there to keep the player from getting some stuff too fast or to give him a dull reward for a quest or to create an illusion he gets something for all the loot he got rid of at the vendor.<br />
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To be honest, currency and ingame economy was the first thing that has drawn me to the RPG genre. It wasn't the story, because all the games were in English or Japanese back then and I was maybe 7 years old. It wasn't the gameplay or skill, as I couldn't really appreciate it either. It was the fact that a game did let me earn money and then buy a cool sword. I have spent hours in Oblivion just to make money to buy a house and a horse. I wasted hours in Gothic forging swords to sell them with some small profit. I have played Merchant/Blacksmith class in Ragnarok Online and a Dwarf Artisan in Lineage II. And the experience was extremely rewarding as long as the money was actually worth something (yeah, Gothic, I'm looking at you and your useless money).<br />
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So even though I love having the currency in my RPGs, I much less enjoy having money that is worthless. I really wish developers who start a new RPG took more than a minute to think whether they are introducing currency, because they need it or because it's the "genre must". Really, it is relatively easy (compared to other systems) to get it right. You just need to give the player something of value that can be bought with the money at every stage of the game - basic equipment, mid-game potions for stats boosts, endgame trinkets... If you can't think of a system like this, don't worry - there's dozens of ideas how to make a game without your standard currency. Don't put it in just for the sake of having it.</div>
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Wolandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12265068990487392793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2075115594956600179.post-87170772127128216362014-10-12T13:21:00.000+02:002014-10-12T13:21:16.917+02:00Narrowing your audience: Zelda vs. Ni no Kuni<div style="text-align: justify;">
Yeah, I know these two games don't have much in common at first glance, but bear with me, as these titles are excellent edge examples of a lot of elements can make or break the game for audiences. Especially for the kids.<br />
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<b>Ni no Kuni is just beautiful.</b> The world is perfectly crafted. The locations are breathtaking. The characters... well, all Ghibli characters look the same and Olivier (main character) is just a generic Ghibli boy, but that doesn't bother me. I just won't say they are as awesome as the rest of the world. The story, when you follow it, is also very nice. So what it's basically a Japanese version of Harry Potter. The world you get to explore is original, interesting and full of life.<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-_UK21rmkq94/VDpZMHZ6p2I/AAAAAAAABZs/DCSs2r_h0KI/s1600/nino-dragon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-_UK21rmkq94/VDpZMHZ6p2I/AAAAAAAABZs/DCSs2r_h0KI/s1600/nino-dragon.jpg" height="225" width="400" /></a></div>
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Zelda, on the other hand, recycles the same story for the… I think it’s 17th time or so. The whole environment is built with repetitive assets that look like stock mobile game models you can buy in packs for 5 bucks. To make sure that the player notices that, everything is placed on a square grid, because gods forbid any of these destructible jars was standing out of line. But all that is perfectly fine, because the grid-based world works perfectly for the gameplay. And in the end, the story is mostly about you figuring out how to use new tools to beat the new dungeons, not about Link rescuing Zelda for the hundredth time.<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-mWm5F9_7vQc/VDpY-ERgxDI/AAAAAAAABZk/MIioOBC_L90/s1600/ZeldaLinkBetweenWorlds03.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-mWm5F9_7vQc/VDpY-ERgxDI/AAAAAAAABZk/MIioOBC_L90/s1600/ZeldaLinkBetweenWorlds03.jpg" height="223" width="400" /></a></div>
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Both games theoretically have a huge potential to be titles for everyone. Not only graphics, but also themes are quite children-friendly. At the same time, there's enough depth to keep older audiences interested. And both titles had a great chance to reach a very wide demographic. Now let’s see how various tiny things drove the games apart in that regard.<br />
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<b>Intros</b><br />
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What makes or breaks these two games is how they are introduced to the player. In Ni no Kuni you start by watching a cutscene that is followed by a cutscene, that's followed by a dialogue, after which you get another dialogue and then you get to run down the street to watch another cutscene. In Zelda, Link wakes up and you're free to run around. Sure, you have to run to a few places close by, but by the time Olivier manages to get out of his house, Link already has a sword and is cutting grass and breaking jars! In the first moments of the game one of the games has already managed to filter out the short-tempered gamers from their audience.<br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Y3YSmNaw8lQ/VDpZmcXhc2I/AAAAAAAABZ0/ylELXVphz58/s1600/curtains.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Y3YSmNaw8lQ/VDpZmcXhc2I/AAAAAAAABZ0/ylELXVphz58/s1600/curtains.jpg" height="213" width="320" /></a></div>
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<b>Tutorials and Pacing</b><br />
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Three minutes into A Link Between Worlds I knew all the controls I needed, I had no problems going through the consecutive sections of the game. Whenever a new mechanic or new item was introduced, there was a whole dungeon designed to let me use it and learn all the possibilities that came with my new tool. Each of these items comes with an extremely short description. Bow: "Arrows fly straight to take down enemies! You can also move while aiming!" All I need to know in two sentences, followed by a dungeon letting me figure out all I can do with this bow. Six hours into the game and I still get new mechanics, still have fun experimenting with new things and haven't been confused or bored for a second. On my way to new dungeons I found mini-games, a collectable quest and a bunch of secret areas to keep my explorer and achiever sides happy. Every half an hour or so I feel rewarded with something: a piece of heart, a new secret, a new dungeon, a new quest item, a new mechanic...<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Even though Zelda series are famous for their nagging navi, Ni no Kuni has somehow <br />managed to make its sidekick, Drippy, even more annoying.</td></tr>
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Three hours into Ni no Kuni and I still felt I am in the tutorial. Still felt I didn't really know anything about this game. My weird sidekick still kept bugging me with long and overstylized dialogues explaining new mechanics, menus, options, equipment, spells. I have been fed at least a dozen tutorials and I have still been waiting to actually do something cool. Trying out new things limited itself to the sidekick telling you "Now, select the new spell you acquired". You then had to select it (and most of the time it is the only spell you can use anyway) and the game progressed to another dialogue. Sure, I levelled up a few times, I bought a sword for my Pokemon, err... Familiar and I met some fat cat, but somehow, three hours into it, I still felt like I haven't accomplished anything in this game.<br />
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<b>Narrative and language</b><br />
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Writers in Ni no Kuni had a lot of work. Dialogues are chasing dialogues, characters are very diverse and each has their own little way of speaking. We have a classic purry cat, we have an owl that’s having a hoot, our sidekick, our main hero, everyone is speaking just a little bit different. And they are all talking a lot. This attention to diversity and details is very pleasing to all the dialogue-driven game nerds (myself included), but what does that mean for the accessibility? The complexity of the dialogues makes them unsuitable for youngest children. Also, since the game only comes in Japanese and English, non-natives without at least upper intermediate knowledge of one of these languages, will have little idea what is going on in the game.<br />
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Zelda doesn’t bother much with the story. There’s a world, there’s another world, we play as Link and he’s the link between these worlds… Link is the link, get it? And there’s Zelda and she’s obviously to be rescued and there’s Ganon that’s obviously to be defeated. And there’s a Triforce and Seven Sages and all that stuff that we’ve seen already so many times. Dialogues and descriptions are short, simple and to the point and even without reading them we can figure out how to progress somehow. I am fairly certain I would have been able to beat the game if it was in some language that’s exotic for me. Swahili… or even worse, Hungarian ;) A Link Between Worlds manages to remain accessible to pretty much anyone with opposing thumbs, but of course, there’s a cost – it won’t really satisfy those in need of a deep, dialogue-driven story.<br />
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<b>Gameplay</b><br />
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The type of gameplay is very different in both games and the only comparable thing is the amount of pure gameplay. Ni no Kuni is much more dialogue-driven while Zelda is almost purely gameplay-driven. Obviously it’s a matter of preference here, so the gameplay section of this article is here mostly to tell the nitpickers I didn’t forget about it :)<br />
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<b>Who are these games for?</b><br />
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At this point I think I’m already able to answer that somewhat accurately. With Zelda: A Link Between Worlds I have no problems stating that the game can be for anyone that likes good gameplay and isn't repelled by cute, cartoony and well, straightforward childish graphics. The depth of mechanics paired with excellent tutorials make the game extremely easy to get a hang on and entertaining and engaging enough to stick with it till the end. Story geeks that are not Zelda fans will definitely not be satisfied here though.<br />
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Ni no Kuni has much more restrictions. People who didn’t accept Zelda for art direction, most probably won’t like Ni no Kuni either. Long and boring tutorials are definitely not suitable for anyone with short attention span. Sparsely distributed save points make it a game difficult to play when you might be yelled at by your parents to stop playing already. Tons of dialogues, written in a very stylized way, will make it hard to understand the game for children who are not Japanese or native English speakers. The topics in the story place the game in a very good position. There's both lots of joy and depth and even though it reeks of a Japanese Harry Potter, it is quite bearable even for adults. Unfortunately, with the dialogue chains going on and on with little interactive elements in between and then long dungeons with repetitive fights, the game feels very, very tedious pretty much all the time. So if we put together all these elements, we see that Ni no Kuni is actually suitable for a very narrow group of cartoony graphics-loving, native-speaker level people that have a lot of patience to go through a ridiculously boring tutorial and then several dozens of hours of similarly boring gameplay just to read/hear more of the story. But… Wouldn’t any Studio Ghibli anime be a more engaging pick for them?<br />
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Wolandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12265068990487392793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2075115594956600179.post-32146213550697786352014-09-08T16:43:00.001+02:002014-09-08T16:59:20.602+02:00PAX Prime 2014 - personal highlights<div style="text-align: justify;">
Hello guys and gals! With jetlag out of my way I can now focus enough to bring you some info on this year's PAX Prime. Being freshly after the <a href="http://www.gamesmakingnoob.com/2014/08/gamescom-in-eyes-of-gamedev.html">GamesCom 2014</a>, I can tell you - it is really different!</div>
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I guess a lot of these differences are because of the venue. Washington State Convention Center is both confusing and cosy. Confusing, as everything is happening on various floors and even hotels across the street. Still, getting from one place to another was way faster than drowning in the crowds that visit Cologne's Messe. Cosy, because there were no giant halls that overwhelm you. Companies didn't buy out spaces that could fit a football stadium. The floors of the corridors next to the escalators were littered with giant pillows for people to hang out on. The parties in the evenings take place in clubs and hotels around the place. Whichever hotel in the vincinity you entered, people were sitting around on the floors, playing their handhelds or board games and everything was just way more relaxed. If anyone tried to play a board game on the floor on GamesCom, he would catch a cold from the freezing surface at best, but most probably just get trampled by thousands of people trying to get from one hall to the other.</div>
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Just as on GamesCom, I didn't get to see much - I spent most of the time in our media suite in the hotel, showing off our game. We also had a booth in the public area, where we let people try their best against a boss, gave away t-shirts and showcased the incredibly cool hammer that was a prize in a facebook contest.<br />
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Highlights of Friday would involve the ScrewAttack live stream and Angry Joe so overwhelmed with our game that he forgot his wallet. On Saturday I had bit more time, so I went gift hunting. The selection was much smaller than on GamesCom, but it was somehow more attractive. Instead of studio-branded toys and tons of anime merchandise, there's way more custom t-shirts, jewelry and plushies. Also, lots of board games, retro video games like N64, NES and PS1 titles and tabletop game figures. I managed to find super cool earrings for my girl:</div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zr3HgFx7_3A/VAcBnOmY0HI/AAAAAAAABYA/bUhL19QrAtE/s1600/portal%2Bearrings.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zr3HgFx7_3A/VAcBnOmY0HI/AAAAAAAABYA/bUhL19QrAtE/s1600/portal%2Bearrings.jpg" height="200" width="165" /></a></div>
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Right after that we headed for the Twitch booth, where we hosted a spontaneous first ever streamed hands-on of our game, Lords of the Fallen. You can check it out <a href="http://www.twitch.tv/twitch/b/563473163?t=396m43s">here</a>. Overall, the reception of the game was really good and we were very happy with how things went. My job on PAX was done.</div>
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It was time for the party with the <a href="http://extra-credits.net/">Extra Credits</a> crew. It was way off-site, but it finally let us meet in person. We have exchanged so many e-mails that we found out gmail has a limited number of messages in a single conversation. Here is me and the boss of them all, the sweet Soraya.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">If anyone thinks James Portnow is the boss in Extra Credits, think again. It's thiss blue-haired girl! :P</td></tr>
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The party was quite intimate with maybe around 30-40 people. People played Portal 2 co-op and Divekick on the beamer while the rest scattered around the tables to have some board game fun or to just socialize. I had a lovely time chatting with Carrie, the clips editor, and then, if we're to believe the Cards Against Humanity game we played, me and Dan Floyd were the least funny guys at the table, scoring last with 0 points. Of course we don't believe the game. We're both hillarious.</div>
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Around midnight James and a bunch of other guys started a design analysis of the new Deus Ex. Since I personally find the Human Revolution <a href="http://www.gamesmakingnoob.com/2013/05/managing-expectations.html">incredibly boring</a>, I didn't want to be the asshole that just sits there, trolling, A bunch of us have left to get some sleep. A final photo got taken somewhere in the tunnel of the Washington State Convention Center:</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">From the left: Daniel Floyd (narrator), Carrie Floyd (editor), Games Making Noob (translator), Scott DeWitt (artist)</td></tr>
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The next day I took off before noon to get to the airport. Spent another 15 hours to get to my own bed, exhausted. It was all great fun. Many thanks to all Bandai Namco folks, to the Extra Credits crew, Twitch guys, everyone who visited the media room and the public booth to see Lords of the Fallen. Thanks for making it not just work, but a great experience!</div>
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Wolandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12265068990487392793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2075115594956600179.post-58065725893024381902014-08-25T14:15:00.002+02:002014-08-25T14:15:34.149+02:00Quickie #3: Attacks on PSN, Battle.net and others<div style="text-align: justify;">
My first thought when I heard that was "okay, but why do that?" Then, of course, my thoughts kept wandering. It didn't really make me all that angry or scared. If it's "just" DDoS, then my credit card info should be safe as far as I know and yes, it does suck that I can't purchase and download a new game online, but... But I immediately thought that it is just an opportunity to catch up with the dozens of games that I've already installed or have in boxes or clutter my Steam Library. Seriously, I could probably live and play happily for a year or two without really missing the online services.</div>
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But... That's just an approach of a guy who grew up without internet. For all the players that base their entertainment on online rivalry or developing their artificial life in WoW, attacks on such services are like a kick between their legs. Imagine what would happen if all these online junkies wouldn't get their fix for a month. Would gaming really have nothing to offer them? All these kids writing "multiplayer or gtfo" under every gameplay trailer would actually have to gtfo and play some football or chess or something.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-lYX04BTvhbU/U_soti1RO-I/AAAAAAAABXk/KN3UKIUg8Uk/s1600/Bioshock%2B2007-08-26%2B04-27-15-70.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-lYX04BTvhbU/U_soti1RO-I/AAAAAAAABXk/KN3UKIUg8Uk/s1600/Bioshock%2B2007-08-26%2B04-27-15-70.jpg" height="250" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The image barely makes sense here, but I couldn't resist anyway.</td></tr>
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I am far from justifying or giving meaning to what was most probably just an act of a group of extremely bored teenagers, but if there actually was a message behind this, what would it be? For me it would be something like this: "Play a game for the story once in a while. Instead of running, shooting and shouting in CoD, check out what happened in Dubai in Spec Ops: The Line. Instead of cheesing through a choke in Starcraft, check out how Kerrigan became what she became. Instead of spending 10 hours a day in WoW, well... Play just any other game that came out in the last 10 years."</div>
Wolandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12265068990487392793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2075115594956600179.post-6130541394052933852014-08-22T17:10:00.000+02:002014-08-22T17:10:42.870+02:00GamesCom in the eyes of a GameDev<div style="text-align: justify;">
Hey everyone! Last year I described <a href="http://www.gamesmakingnoob.com/2013/08/gmn-at-gamescom.html">my first GamesCom experience</a>. It was a... simpler time. Last year I've only been there over the weekend and my job was to do a stage show two times a day and look after the cosplayers my company hired. It has still left me plenty of time to look around and soak in all the stuff, even though getting from one hall to another took ages. </div>
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This year was different. Extremely different. I arrived in Cologne on Monday evening to help set everything up on Tuesday. We had 20 PC's in the public area and another 6 in the business area to show off our game, Lords of the Fallen. All of them were provided by our partner, so we had to check if our game works stable enough on those. Luckily there was no major issues and we were able to wrap it up within maybe four hours. Tuesday has passed relatively smoothly.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Media room ready for the visitors</td></tr>
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Wednesday. Media and development day, GamesCom is still closed to general public. Everything starts at 9:00 a.m., but we arrive at the venue around 7:30 a.m. to double-check everything and get ready. Even though general public theoretically can't enter the fair yet, the public area is already pretty lively. Some clearly underaged peeps are running around, amateur cosplayers have also most probably confused the dates, but oh well, who really cares, as long as they don't get their hands on the 18+ stuff, right?<br />
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The business area is getting crowded. Our BizDevs are having one meeting after another while my job is to help out the press representatives with the controls of our game. Repeating the same controls over and over every ten minutes I fail to notice that the last time I ate something was around 6:30 a.m. and it's almost noon. Luckily, our booth in the business area comes with catering, so I am able to grab a cheese and ham toast, wash it down with a glass of coke and get back to my controls mantra. Every other visitor needs some help with the game or asks some questions, so I end up going back and forth between them.<br />
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When they finish playing, they usually have questions and those questions take anywhere from three minutes to half an hour. Most of them walk out happy, complimenting our game - makes a gamedev happy. In the early afternoon someone wants to shoot a video interview - usually with our Executive Producer (EP). "Sorry, busy, you do it" I hear. Allright, let's pop a cherry, shall we? The first interview starts awful, but gets better with each question. It's time for another toast when it's over. They're out of toasts, so I grab some fruit snacks that I swallow together with another glass of coke and that's what keeps me going till 7 p.m. Our community manager comes back from the public area to share what was happening there and I realize I didn't even have time to check out the showfloor.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ty8_7GBtSkg/U_db0MtEraI/AAAAAAAABXE/--9H_Ebu4fk/s1600/IMG_20140816_135548.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ty8_7GBtSkg/U_db0MtEraI/AAAAAAAABXE/--9H_Ebu4fk/s1600/IMG_20140816_135548.jpg" height="295" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">20 stations occupied for 10 hour straight in the public area</td></tr>
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The next day, Thursday, turns out to be almost the exact copy of Wednesday for me. Luckily, this time we can arrive just before 9:00 a.m. Explaining controls, answering questions, guiding the guys who are playing, showing the advanced stuff in the game, answering more questions, giving interviews, grabbing two toasts before they disappear, sitting down to close my eyes in tiny breaks before someone new comes in. This time video interviews get a lot easier - there's no question that you haven't already answered a dozen times already. Thurday is the first day with general public on the showfloor. The line to play our game is between one and two hours long. We're closing the booth at 7 p.m. again. There's supposed to be a party tonight. None of us wants to go, everyone just wants some peace and quiet.<br />
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Friday, the same drill. At 9 a.m. we get first visitors, more controls explanation, more interviews of all kinds. There's a twist though - at 4 PM we're going on Twitch, yay. Somehow I managed not to die and the video is already roaming the web. People seem to like it, challenge Near the end of the day we gather the stuff we don't want thrown out, erase the game from the PC's and head to the hotel - the business area is going to be no more within hours.<br />
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We have our flight back on Saturday evening, so we have a whole day to finally attend GamesCom public area, check out what's going on, soak in all the gaming coolness. We arrive early again to take advantage of our exhibitor's passes. We get in 15 minutes before the general public is even let in to stand in line to check out Bloodborne. We're first in line. We get in exactly at 9:00 a.m. and after more or less 10 minutes it's over. We head towards our public booth, where we spend less than an hour checking out if everything is okay. After spending 10 hours a day for three days straight watching people play our game we don't really feel like doing the same on day four. We split to take a look around.<br />
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Thanks to a VIP pass I got to see Alien: Isolation. First five minutes left me unimpressed. Then I got a basic hang of the alien management mechanic and I have to say that even though the game is definitely not my cup of tea, I enjoyed it quite a lot and will gladly check it out once it releases. Then I took a walk around the shopping area, taking photos of merchandise and looking for a gift for the girl I left at home for almost a week. With the shopping done I looked at my watch... 11:00 a.m. I take a brief look at the Nintendo zone, get a glimpse of Final Fantasy IV, check out what Sony offers and get amazed how much free space EA has paid for and... And I didn't even feel like visiting all the halls. I just met up with our EP and around noon we both decided to just head for the airport.<br />
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Imagine how exhausted an avid gamer has to be to prefer sitting at the airport for a few hours instead of spending them on the biggest consumer gaming convention of the year. A week of rest and... already preparing to leave for PAX.<br />
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Wolandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12265068990487392793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2075115594956600179.post-19661621228739805332014-08-11T14:19:00.001+02:002014-08-20T22:09:34.445+02:00Get paid thanks to games: A game journalist<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
In the previous part of the series I wrote about game blogging and vlogging. Today I will be continuing on the subject, by moving on to game journalism. I believe many conservative guys who write about games for living will get a bito offended, but... a difference between a game journalist and a game blogger is getting more blurry with every passing year and both professions have a lot in common.<br />
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Let's face it, it's not the 90's anymore. Paper magazines are dying, the online gaming sites have become a much more successful substitute and with the embedded videos and hourly updates, there's no way in hell paper magazines will get back on that horse. Game journalism, that was once a profession of the selected few, has become a free for all job market. There's almost no entry barrier. You should know how to write, but we all read these online magazines and we all know that not everyone there meets this requirement.<br />
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With the entry barrier practically non-existent, you can guess - there's a lot of people who want in. And whenever the market gets saturated and the supply of work keeps growing, there's only one reaction you can expect: the labor becomes cheaper. So while inthe 90's these relatively few people who wrote about games were able to support themselves doing this, nowadays the vast majority of game journalists have to treat it like an additional (and usually poor) source of income.<br />
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There's a nice article on GamesRadar that gives a rough overview of how much the game journalists can actually earn. Please keep in mind that the article seems to only take into account the guys that have actually succeeded in networking and manage to publish quite a number of articles. When you start out, you'll be lucky to get one or two reviews published a month, and that won't give you anywhere near the tens of thousands of dollars a year.<br />
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How do you get into the zone and make it possible to live off the game journalism then? Here's ten steps that will help you get there. Of course the sooner you start, the better:<br />
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1) Learn to write. Write well. The fact that you grew up with your language and were taught it at school means nothing. Read a lot - not only gaming sites, but good, well-edited books. Analyze the language. Learn to use it, learn to write.<br />
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2) If you're not from an English-speaking country, learn English. Yes, you will probably be writing in your native tongue, but eventually you will want to do some research on the global level and most of the news and info is first available in English. Also, how do you expect to get an interview with a foreign game maker when you can't communicate?<br />
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3) You have to learn to play a variety of games. Having 15 max level characters in WoW or having a 1000 hours of playtime in Call of Duty won't get you far. You need variety. You need to derive pleasure from exploring and discovering new games. Versatility and being interested in the whole industry are the key to success.<br />
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4) When you finally learn to read and write and play something other than StarCraft 2, start a blog or a vlog. Here you can find some tips how to go about it. It's important that the blog doesn't only consist of classic reviews. Any form of originality is great - screenshot-based stories, essays, your own drawings to illustrate the text... Some of the big gaming sites let their users start blogs there. If your blog is supposed to be your foot in the door, why not place this foot closer to your target?<br />
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5) When your blog or vlog has enough entries to make it possible to assess your skill, attack the offices of the game magazines and portals, offering your services. If you skipped the blogging step, you will have to send them some examples of your writing via e-mail. Seriously, it's as easy as "Hey! I was wondering, maybe you guys need some more content for your website? Here's a taste of my writing". It's of course easier to start with smaller sites - most often they just require less experience.<br />
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6) If you've been successful in the previous step, don't pat yourself on the back just yet. Well... maybe a little pat won't hurt. Still, you're just getting started. A few bucks for your review is great when you're 16, but you won't support a family with it. Continue to learn more about the industry, about the process of making games. It's time for learning from your older journalist colleagues and polishing your writing skill. Don't get discouraged, if you don't get many assignments or they aren't overly ambitious. These can't be avoid even in the next steps.<br />
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7) When you'll gain some notable experience working with the editor-in-chief and quite a few published articles, you should repeat step 5. You should get out there and offer your services to as many magazines and portals as possible. This time, trying the biggest ones as well. In most cases, nobody minds if you work with more than one magazine.<br />
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8) In a bigger and more "professional" team, you have to be prepared to be a newbie for a while. Newbies don't attend international game conferences, don't interview the game making stars. They put together uninspired top tens, they write reviews of second-rate games and trash articles on the evolution of Lara's boobs or which DoA girl has a skimpier outfit. These articles generate pageviews. You still shouldn't expect to make any good money at this stage. If you're lucky, it'll be enough to get by during your college days.<br />
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9) When you finally manage to get past the newbie step, you get a shot at more serious reviews. Older colleagues might take you to watch and learn during some interviews. Because your goal here is still to learn. It's easy to end your career on step 8 or 9 - there's lots of journalists like that. These are the guys that keep writing stock reviews, mumbling something about engines and middleware they have no idea about. If you want to get to the top, you will need to show a lot of commitment: visiting all game-related events you possibly can, being active in your editorial office and constantly increasing your qualifications.<br />
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10) Congrats. If you managed to get to step 10, there's a big chance that the reviews of the top titles, interviews with game developers, stories from game events and game industry articles let you make enough money to support yourself. And it's a high time - most likely you're already too old to delay starting a family anymore.<br />
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It's very important to be original. Articles that stand out can easily end up for example on digg.com - writing articles with such potential is a desired skill. Of course, the center of attention will always be reviews and news and your editor-in-chief will not always give you complete creative freedom. If you can write and keep learning more about the industry, you don't have to finish your career as a journalist or editor. PR departments of game studios constantly need people who know the industry and write well. Working at a gamedev studio is a whole other topic though.<br />
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<b>Many thanks to Mielu from gram.pl for help and insight.</b><br />
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Wolandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12265068990487392793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2075115594956600179.post-738364878721849592014-07-16T16:33:00.000+02:002014-07-16T16:33:46.540+02:00Monster Hunter Freedom Unite - Controls design analysis<div style="text-align: justify;">
Hey guys and gals! Taking a break from the games for education topics, I wanted to perform an in-depth analysis of the control scheme of the Monster Hunter game I recently purchased and tried to get into. I haven't played any other MH games, I took on this one to feed my curiosity - everyone around kept telling me how good this franchise was, not many of them actually played it though.</div>
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For those of you who don't know, Monster Hunter games came out on a variety of platforms: PS2, PSP, PS Vita, Wii, Wii U, Xbox 360, 3DS, iOS and PC. I will be analyzing the Freedom Unite for PSP. </div>
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The game is <b>stunningly deep and immensely satisfying</b>. It took me several hours to get past the tutorial, a few next hours to get at least some decent skill to finish my first mission, but when I finally did slay that monster, wow. That's what I call satisfying. Then I get to upgrade my gears with the spoils from the hunted creature and it gives me a visible boost. Brilliant. Deep crafting and combining mechanics and this feeling of really going for a difficult hunt, preparing yourself, studying your target's habits... Even killing bosses in Dark Souls isn't this satisfying.</div>
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However, the game has one big flaw, and if you ask anyone who played MH, he/she will tell you the same: <b>"the camera is a bitch"</b>. No matter if who you ask is a seasoned MH veteran who loves every bit of the game or a noob that gets killed by everything there - the camera is a bitch for all of them and the number one reason for people ragequitting. There are some guys that try to argue that the camera is an element adding to the game's difficulty and that's by design. </div>
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Terrible camera as a difficulty element? Don't make me laugh. Camera can be used for showing off nice things (Final Fantasy XIII) or adding to the mystery (Resident Evil), but treating it as a factor of a difficulty setting is just straightforward bad design that frustrates the player and does nothing else. In a game as deep as Monster Hunter, if the designers wanted to make it more difficult, they would play around with dozens of other parameters that were a lot less frustrating. And I honestly don't think that was the reason for having the camera act the way it does.</div>
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But the <b>camera problem in MH is actually a part of something way bigger. It's the controls.</b> And the way they work on PSP is just some big misunderstanding. After an hour in the game or so I was able to design a much more user-friendly controls layout for the game. What is the control problem in MH all about?</div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Monster Hunter Freedom Unite controls.</td></tr>
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Take a close look at the controls and see if you can see what problems these controls bring. Done? Okay, let me list mine:</div>
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1) There is 4 buttons responsible for the camera (the whole D-pad) + L button that resets the camera to the direction our character is facing. With PSP having a limited number of buttons, wasting so many on the camera control is unforgivable.</div>
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2) The camera controls (D-pad) and the movement (Analog Stick) are all supposed to be controlled by the left thumb, which means you either look around or run, never both at the same time. </div>
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3) Having the select button for the kick action pretty much guarantees nobody will use it. </div>
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4) To select an item from a list you need to hold the L button then browse through the list using Square and Circle (why these?!) and release the L button when you are done, then press Square to use the item.</div>
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5) There are controls dedicated specifically to ranged weapon classes only, useless with well over a half of the weapons.</div>
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<b>Look how easy it would be to fix:</b></div>
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- assign camera control to L and R to make it possible to look around while running</div>
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- assign the camera zoom to select, as most of the time you just set a zoom level once per quest and you don't have to reach to that button too often.</div>
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This already makes us use 3 buttons instead of 5 for the camera movements. The two extra ones can be now assigned to something useful. For example we could assign "left" and "right" on the D-Pad to the item selection without the need to hold L button while doing the selection. This way the player player wouldn't use an item using Square when what he wanted was to select a different item with L+Square.<br />
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The only problem it would spawn would be the dash button, but that could easily be assigned to the Circle button. It could then retain its cancel selection function and the examine + climb ledges functions could be taken over by the X button as these are only contextual controls. The game already differentiates between weapon drawn and weapon sheathed states, so there wouldn't be a situation where you want to dash and instead start climbing or picking flowers. </div>
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This all lets us:</div>
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- select the items more easily</div>
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- move, run and look around simultaneously</div>
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- retain all functionalities of the previous control scheme</div>
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And we are still left with the "up" and "down" D-pad buttons to use for whatever the designers want to put there, like selecting the bottles and ammo for gunners or whatever.</div>
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<b>Would it make the game easier? No. Less frustrating? Yes. </b>Would they loose their fanbase if they introduced a new control scheme? No, the fanbase complains about the camera controls as much as anyone else. I am quite sure many of the designers that actually worked on Monster Hunter could have come up with a similar solution, probably even a better one. Why didn't they implement it then? Now what I will do here is just a wild guess, but lets me show you how a game studio works. What could have happened was:</div>
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1) The control scheme could have just been put there as a first draft and then the whole team got used to it and didn't see anyting unnatural about it for a few years and a few games (happens more often than you might think).</div>
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2) There might have been a lead designer with enough power to be able to push towards a control scheme that felt good to him and not let anyone change it.</div>
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3) The producers could have simply forgot to plan the task of revising the controls or assumed that the controls from the previous games are good enough since the games sold and established a fanbase. </div>
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4) The producers could have cut the controls tweaking out of the schedule when the delivery date was approaching way too soon.</div>
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Whatever was the real reason, <b>the end result is a great game with tons of depth and a control scheme that looks like it's been designed by some three-handed mutant design intern having a feud with logic.</b> I really hope that other platforms got much better controls than PSP. </div>
Wolandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12265068990487392793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2075115594956600179.post-77294989389353970262014-07-13T16:11:00.001+02:002014-07-13T16:11:43.479+02:00Get paid thanks to games: A game blogger / vloggerToday we're continuing with the second part of the last part of... Uhh, that got complicated, didn't it? So, this is the second part of the "Get paid thanks to games" series. "Get paid thanks to games" are actually the third and last part of bigger series, which is <a href="http://www.gamesmakingnoob.com/2014/05/stop-wasting-your-time-with-games-part-1.html">"Stop wasting your time with games"</a>. Now that this confusion is just a tad less confusing than before, let's proceed to the actual topic. Last time I've written a bit about <a href="http://www.gamesmakingnoob.com/2014/07/get-paid-thanks-to-games-pro-gamer.html">pro gamers</a>, and today it's time for...<br />
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<b>Game bloggers / vloggers </b><br />
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This is a career with an extremely low entry barrier. Practically everyone can do it and frankly, I would encourage everyone with sufficient skill to try it. YouTube channels are free. Blog hosting is free. Your only investment is your time. Here's some tips how to avoid most common mistakes:<br />
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<b>Generate your own content.</b> I cannot stress it enough. If you want to deliver game news, don't copy news from other sites, seek, rewrite and compile them with your own style. If you want to review games, give your opinion, not repeat after others. Original content is a beautiful thing. Uncredited copy-pasting is just stealing someone else's work and it should be punished with cutting off the thief’s hand.<br />
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Almost as important as the previous one. Seriously, <b>don't start writing if you don't know how</b>. Don't go making videos when all you do is mumble to yourself. Nobody will be able to read that. Nobody will be able to watch that. Spare everyone the time. Be a valuable voice in the discussion. If you have nothing to say, just don't write, don't make videos. The world will be better off without it. You will have more time to do something more productive. Win-win.<br />
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<b>Decide who your audience is</b>. Decide what you want to deliver. Do you want to be the number 1 source of knowledge about one specific game? Do you want to review racing games? Do you just want to play a bunch of games and talk about them? Whichever you decide on, it's best to stick to it until it succeeds or fails.</div>
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<b>Know, how to sell yourself</b>. Bloggers and vloggers are rarely successful without serious marketing skills. Network, share your link, comment on others, link others. Be visible in the community. Support it and make it fuller.<br />
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Also, mostly for vloggers - <b>please look decent</b>. Heal your acne before showing your face. Wear a clean t-shirt. Clean the part of your room that's going to be visible. You don't have to be pretty or handsome, you don't have to wear stylish clothes and horn-rimmed glasses. You don't need to shave and don't need to grow a beard. You don't need a ton of makeup. It might be a good idea to find a cool look for yourself, as people seem to respond to that, but above all, just look clean. And open your mouth while trying to speak and know what you want to say instead of umming and erming.<br />
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<b>Success is easily measured </b>- if your blog or channel gets enough followers, you can start trying to get in some revenue from the ads. If it is enough to put food on your table, congrats - you have succeeded. The most successful vloggers are currently earning serious cash and can set trends as successfully as the leading gaming sites. They no longer do simple videos. They're employing people to deliver well-developed entertainment. It's enough to check out the <a href="http://angryjoeshow.com/" style="font-weight: normal;">Angry Joe's website</a> to see what I mean. Lately, my studio invited the most popular game vlogger in my country to show him the game. He came with his team of 9 more people to check it out.<br />
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If, however, you weren't able to gather enough audience, your work wasn't necessarily all in vain. If it shows you can easily and fluently pass on your opinions that aren't a complete bullshit, your blog or vlog can easily be your portfolio for some other game-related project or job, like a journalist or a junior developer. For example, the blog of yours truly has a relatively low audience, but thanks to the content, I've already been asked to publish my articles in several places around the web. </div>
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Sometimes opportunities can present themselves quite unexpectedly. The most popular Dark Souls streamer – <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/EpicNameBro">EpicNameBro</a> - was asked to help prepare the Dark Souls 2 strategy guide and test DS2 way before beta tests were open. In the age where gaming communities are growing in power, being an active and outstanding member of your favourite game's community can lead to working with the developers. And then, beta testing and community management can open you even more doors.</div>
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<b>What do you need to become a decent blogger / vlogger?</b></div>
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-<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>an idea for your own, original content;</div>
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-<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>a lot of insight into whichever piece of the field you want to dig into;<br />
- patience, as you'll be doing a lot for free for an extended amount of time;</div>
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-<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>great writing and language skills;</div>
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-<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>great presentation skills (mostly for vloggers, but doesn’t hurt in a blog as well);<br />
- ability to network, if you want your online baby to reach a wide audience.</div>
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Wolandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12265068990487392793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2075115594956600179.post-13717615308163845752014-07-04T13:29:00.000+02:002014-07-04T13:29:33.550+02:00Get paid thanks to games: A Pro Gamer<div style="text-align: justify;">
I grew up in a relatively small town in Poland, in the 80's and 90's (they were pretty much like 70's and 80's in the US). Games were just something that we played and some companies in the far away USA and Japan were making. Sure, there was maybe one or two games developed in Poland, but it was still in a city far, far away. Careers I could think of were either being a writer with no guarantee of any real income or a lawyer, an economist or some other suit to be able to support my family.</div>
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It took me a while to realize that hundreds of hours I have spent on games can literally pay off. The passion for gaming, the titles I could reference, the conclusion I was able to draw from what I've seen in games landed me a job in the industry and are now paying my bills.<br />
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With this short introduction I welcome you to the third and the final part of my "stop wasting your time with games" games for education rant. In previous parts I've described how <a href="http://www.gamesmakingnoob.com/2014/05/stop-wasting-your-time-with-games-part-1.html">games can enrich our lives</a> and <a href="http://www.gamesmakingnoob.com/2014/06/stop-wasting-your-time-with-games-part-2.html">teach us skills useful in real life</a>. This time, I am going to get to the ultimate argument how games can be the very opposite of a waste of time - how they can turn into a career. Unlike in the first two parts, now I will be harsh. Skills can be learned pretty easily and widely applied to many situations. Career connected with games is far from a piece of cake though. Let's get started with...<br />
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Since a career in the gaming industry is an extremely broad topic, part three of the "stop wasting your time with games" gets to become 4 separate articles. Today it'll be about pro gaming. Next articles will touch game blogging and vlogging, game journalism and finally a broad description of game development career. Without further ado...<br />
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<b>A professional gamer</b><br />
Who doesn't dream about getting paid for just playing games? Lately, I have even seen news materials about "kids who earn lots of money for playing in tournaments". They vaguely mentioned the hard work required, they never really showed the scale of competition, they focused on hundreds of thousands of dollars these gamers earn. So... How do you become a pro gamer?<br />
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Above everything else, you have to find a game you are extremely good at. By extremely, I mean beating all your friends 100 to 0 in five minutes while blindfolded and hanging upside down. If anyone you know in real life can give you any kind of challenge, you are not good enough. You have to compete with the whole world. Struggling on the level of your neighborhood is just not gonna cut it.<br />
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What's more, the game of your choice needs to have a league. And games with worthwhile leagues are the biggest, most popular multiplayer titles: Starcraft 2, League of Legends, Counter Strike, FIFA, DOTA 2. Farmville, WoW and Minecraft might be the most popular games on the globe, but no matter how great you are, you won’t go pro there.<br />
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Pro gamers spend at least 8 to 10 hours a day on one and the same game over and over for... well, years. Top players are already adults. They started early, played since they can remember, but... they did finish schools. Being a pro gamer doesn't mean flushing your education down the toilet. It's a job like any other - sometimes monotonous and frustrating. It's important to invest in hardware as well. Good gaming PC with a gaming mouse and keyboard fit for professionals is needed. Obviously, good, communicative knowledge of English is a must as well. You also have to control your language and actions. No good team will invite a raging hater that risks being banned in every single match.<br />
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Pro gaming is a career in which your only kind of promotion is to get higher in rankings. That's pretty much the only ladder you are going to climb. Luckily, with e-sport becoming more and more popular, there are many options for the pro gamers that know when to quit. There are pro gamers like Fatal1ty, who design or at least promote lines of gaming hardware. There are pro gamers who get hired by gaming companies as representatives. Still, you have to be aware that the game you are so good at sooner or later will die. Some other game will take its place. Some other game you might be good at, but never good enough to go pro again.<br />
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While preparing for this job you have to focus on one specific game (or - only sometimes - on one type of a game). Research it, get in deep. Really deep. There will most probably be no time for any other games. Once you find a game you might go pro with, you will miss a lot of other titles over the course of a few years. If you get high enough in the leagues, if you manage to win some tournaments (not regional ones - we're talking nationals), make more friends than enemies, you might eventually get invited to go pro. Once you agree, you will start getting paid for exactly the same thing you've been doing for the past years. Playing the same game over and over for many hours every day.<br />
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And lastly, when choosing this path you have to always remember it's like playing in a band. Most of them bands never get out of their garage, very little become a one-hit wonders and pretty much one in a million really sells albums and tickets.<br />
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Summing up, you will need:<br />
-<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> an early start - trying to go pro when you're 40 and have never used a computer might be tricky;</span><br />
- extreme talent and knowledge in a game you want to go pro in;<br />
-<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>tons of determination and time spent on the the game;<br />
-<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>great communication skills and (if you are a foreigner) good knowledge of English language;<br />
-<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> decent gaming hardware to start with before you get better stuff from sponsors;</span><br />
- lots of tolerance and support from your family and friends, be it parents or life partners, as rarely anyone will take your career choice seriously.<br />
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Wolandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12265068990487392793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2075115594956600179.post-46282946530969750022014-06-06T11:42:00.000+02:002014-06-06T12:09:55.724+02:00"Stop wasting your time with games" - part 2<div style="text-align: justify;">
Back with the topic of what games can give the player other than just entertainment. Previous part was about how <a href="http://www.gamesmakingnoob.com/2014/05/stop-wasting-your-time-with-games-part-1.html">games can enrich our lives with new experiences</a>. Today, I will be touching the topic of skills acquired in the games.</div>
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It was back in the summer of 1998 when I think I have heard this sentence the most - "stop wasting your time with games". I have "wasted" over 80 hours of my life playing Final Fantasy VII. But you know what happened next? After a month of school, my parents got asked by my English teacher "Did he attend some intensive course over the summer?". And then it dawned on them. No, all their kid did was "waste time" over a video game. A video game that gave me way more vocabulary in 80 hours that I have learned at school over a few years.</div>
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Teaching a language is an obvious perk if you're not a native speaker, but there are tons of other skills that can be learnt through games. These <b>skills will be the main topic this time.</b> Not all of these skills are so obvious and not every game teaches them. Also, to really benefit from them, once again, while playing - you have to <b>pay attention</b>.</div>
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Here's a bunch of skills you can quite commonly learn in games:<br />
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<b>Communication </b></div>
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<span style="text-align: justify;">Learning a language is actually the tip of the iceberg. Single player games teach us, through predetermined responses from the NPC's, how various people might react to different situations and our dialogue choices, but it's multiplayer games where communication really can be learnt. From coordinating attacks with the rest of your squad, through bowing before a duel in Dark Souls to simple chirping in Journey - all of this increases our communication skills.</span></div>
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<b>Problem solving</b></div>
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Games have a unique way of putting us in abstract situations, giving us complex tasks and the tools to solve them. Even kids that don't consider themselves bright are able to find solutions to these problems. That's extremely valuable for personal development. Lets a person know that given some pieces of the puzzle, they can attempt to solve it. Every type of a game can teach problem solving - from extremely robust strategies to the simplest shooters. Where there's data, objective and obstacles, there's always a harder or easier problem to solve.</div>
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<b><b>Cooperation</b></b></div>
<span style="text-align: justify;">Strongly connected to communication. What you can achieve alone in most games is far from what you can do with a group. Many online games push you very strongly towards cooperation, making many tasks simply impossible to do when playing alone. Cooperation lurks in everything from setting up a balanced squad through battle tactics, to loot distribution. In many cases, when you can't be a team player, nobody will want to team up with you. Learning to cooperate is pretty much forced onto players in the online environment.</span><br />
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<b>Competition</b></div>
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Where there's a game, there's a competition. Many games show leaderboards and statistics, many encourage to post and compare them online. Even before the internet age video games thrived on competition. Who will get farther? Who will get there faster? Who will get somewhere on first try? Who will beat the game without dying? Possibilities are endless and if you take a look at the challenges people themselves force upon them, you would be amazed what amount of self-improvement and self-proving games can induce.</div>
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<b>Leadership and people management</b></div>
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This is mostly true for online games, but not only. In real life, we rarely get a chance to be a leader. At school, at work, most of us are just cogs in the machine. In online games, we get to lead squads to battle. Even if we are shy and feeling unimportant in real life, in online games we get a chance to manage the whole guilds of hundreds of people. To make the guild successful, leaders need to assemble a real management team - recruiters, event managers, battle advisors, finance managers... And before every battle, the leaders get to speak to all of the guild members to motivate them to victory. How often do you get to experience or practice something like that in the real world?</div>
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<b><b>Innovation and creativity</b></b></div>
<span style="text-align: justify;">Games are becoming more and more open, letting players explore their creativity. In the 90's many games included a map editor that let players create their own experiences in the games. Now games like Minecraft or Little Big Planet are all about creating your own worlds. As long as games have existed, players have used their mechanics to do things these games were never designed for. Playing with physics systems, "breaking" the game mechanics to create amusing situations - every game is a potential tool for exploring your creativity.</span><br />
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<b><b>Logical thinking</b></b></div>
<span style="text-align: justify;">Games are based on systems. Systems, in order to work, need to be based on logic. If the player wants to succeed in a game, he needs to at least instinctively follow this logic, as going against it will almost always mean failure. Whether you like it or not, every game, even the most abstract one, will force you to use logic to progress in it. Be it solving a complicated puzzle or just a simple task of ammo management, it's always based on logic.</span><br />
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<b><b>Planning and optimization</b></b></div>
<span style="text-align: justify;">This is actually something that I will probably write a whole separate article about, but the general idea goes like this: Every game has a goal. Even if it doesn't, like Minecraft, it lets us easily come up with a goal for ourselves. This goal is most of the time very specific and well-defined and we do get the right tools to reach it. Based on these tools, the player consciously and naturally optimizes the time spent in the game, planning his build, his next quest, how to spend his money or experience, in order to reach this goal. Now think how useful it would be to apply this skill to real life.</span><br />
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<b>Reflexes and precission</b></div>
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Majority of games includes a fast-paced action requiring incredible reflexes to master. Fighting games, sport games, platformers, racing games, strategy games... Even simplest games like Tetris or Pac-Man need extreme hand-to-eye coordination if you are to master them. Research has shown that "Action game players make more correct decisions per unit time. If you are a surgeon or you are in the middle of a battlefield, that can make all the difference." - Daphne Bavelier, cognitive researcher (<a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/14/action_games_make_you_a_finer_human_being/">source</a>).</div>
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<b><b>Art skills:</b></b></div>
<span style="text-align: justify;">Depending on the interests and perceptiveness of the player, games can teach incredibly many artistic things. They are a fast-developing visual medium, with often amazing art direction. They also focus more and more on story, creating compelling characters and interesting storylines. Many kids start drawing thanks to the games. Many kids try writing because of games. Many kids listen to game music. Of course not all of them will become world-class artists, but I personally know quite a few who got interested in various kinds of art this way and are now making their living thanks to that.</span><br />
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<b>This is by no means a complete list of skills the games can teach. </b>Every new game that comes out has a chance to have some new mechanics with a potential to teach something new. Also, I most probably forgot about many of them, quite possibly very obvious ones too. Purpose of this article was not to list them all though. It was to show you, how games can teach you things without you even knowing you are learning. There are two requirements for you to meet if you want to really benefit from games in such way.</div>
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First and I cannot stress enough how important, is <b>pay attention</b>. Yes, I know I am repeating myself. It's just that important. If you pay attention during your online sessions, you will learn how to effectively lead and communicate, how to apply correct tactics to every situation and solve new problems, how to improve yourself through competition. If you don't pay attention, you are just jumping around, shooting stuff and even if you happen to win a match or two, you are loosing a lot that the game has to offer.</div>
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Second is to realize how you can transition these skills to real life. All to often, we are unable to make the connection between what we learn in games and its applications outside of them. Have you ever realized that you can make tons of virtual money in an MMO, but for some reason you are not doing it in real world? I know that the real life is much more complex than any game can possibly be, but on the other hand, have you realized, that in games you are able to solve complicated problems and in your life you are struggling with the simple ones?</div>
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So once again - play games, pay attention, and once in a while stop and think how what you learned can help you make your life better. I guarantee it can. So far I've covered how the games can enrich your life as a medium and what skills they can teach you without you even realizing it. In the next and the final part of this article series I will touch the topic of how the games can actually become your career. And yes, you guessed it. A big part of it will be paying attention ;)</div>
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Polish version of the article available on <a href="http://zgranarodzina.edu.pl/2014/06/06/znowu-tracisz-czas-na-gierki-czesc-2/">zgranarodzina.edu.pl</a><br />
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<br />Wolandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12265068990487392793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2075115594956600179.post-38345185853708780322014-05-23T10:20:00.000+02:002014-05-30T20:01:55.113+02:00"Stop wasting your time with games" - part 1<div style="text-align: justify;">
That's a sentence I'm sure many of you have heard a lot. From your parents, partners, co-workers, friends - both gamers and non-gamers. I have, too, and most of the time I felt offended, but you know what? I've said it a few times in my life as well. Obviously, calling games a waste of time by default is an extremely biased thing to do, but it doesn't mean games always a valuable pastime.</div>
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Games can give us many wonderful things, but, like with every other activity, we need to know how to make the most of it. Like with a sport. You can do it purely for recreation, and that's fine. You can also try to get better at it - not necessarily to become a world champion, but just for the sake of being better than some of your friends. But ultimately, making the most of sports is letting it contribute to your own personal development. To apply lessons you've learned to other things, beyond sport. Games can be used in exactly same way.</div>
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Over the next three articles, I will be talking about three ways in which games can contribute to your life. I will start with the most obvious and the least measurable of the three. It seems to be the least convincing of the three, but I just can't ignore it and also, I like to save the big guns for later. I am very sorry if you are an attentive gamer - what I will write here will most probably be a parade of obvious arguments for you, but this article's goal is to clear it up for people who might not be into games too much or kids who would just swallow any game without thinking. I promise the next two articles will be less painfully obvious. </div>
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The first way in which games can contribute to your life is <b>enriching with new experiences</b>. This is actually something every piece of media does better or worse. As with any other media, you get a fair amount of crap - games, books, movies, plays, music - they can all be created purely for money without any potential for depth of any kind. And that's okay, I guess... If consumers want it, well, they vote with money, don't they? But, for the sake of our argument, let's focus on the games that actually have some real value.</div>
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Games tell stories. What's more, being interactive, they let the player be a part of the story. I have touched the topic of narrative in the article on <a href="http://www.gamesmakingnoob.com/2013/02/why-dark-souls-have-better-narrative.html">Dark Souls vs. Heavy Rain</a>, but to sum up quickly: The story in the game is not only what is seen in cutscenes and told in dialogues. It is also what the player does. Every won battle. Every solved puzzle. Every explored area. They are a crucial part of the story, told in most cases without a single word.<br />
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This means that games let us live through experiences like no other media ever before. They let us take actions and make decissions. When books teach us the value of friendship, they show us characters whose friendship lets them overcome hardships. When games teach us the value of friendship, they let the player become friends with game characters. An average player will always be closer to the main character than an average reader. An average player will much easier learn the value of friendship from Persona series than from Lord of the Rings. </div>
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Games put the players in situations they don't encounter so easily in real life. Players make relevant decissions that have often serious consequences for the further development of the game or at least one of its quests. Games let players save princesses or even worlds. Especially Japanese games start exploring the "difficult topics" like tolerance, fidelity, sexual orientation, religion or death. But... to really benefit from that, you actually have to pay attention.<br />
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The sad truth is, most of the players click through dialogues without reading them and skip cutscenes, to get to the "gameplay". In majority of games, gameplay without context of the backstory is deprived of meaning. When you pay attention in BioShock, you get a game about a failed utopia, about man's dream of greatness and where it might lead. When you don't pay attention in BioShock, you get a shooter with pretty clunky mechanics, where it's sometimes too dark to see the enemy. </div>
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Next time you are playing a game, ask yourself - are you just mindlessly killing mob after mob or actually benefitting from what the game offers your, well... soul, or any other equivalent you accept as a part of yourself. Next time your kid tells you about this awesome game he/she is playing, listen carefully. Is your kid talking about the journey he embarked on? A story of the characters he met in the game? A dilemma the game presented? A question it asked and now your kid is struggling with? All of these indicate, that your kid is an attentive and empathic human being. You should be happy and proud. You should encourage these kinds of observations in all media.</div>
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And if your kid just tells you about the number of guys he killed? About the raids he's been on? About the bases he built under opponent's nose or rushes he pushed back? It still doesn't mean your kid has necessarily wasted his/her time with a game. There are other ways to benefit from games, but that will be the topic of the next two parts of this topic. Stay tuned. :)</div>
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This article was also translated to Polish and published on <a href="http://zgranarodzina.edu.pl/2014/05/30/znowu-tracisz-czas-na-gierki-czesc-1/">zgranarodzina.edu.pl</a> </div>
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Wolandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12265068990487392793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2075115594956600179.post-83576859145960779342014-04-16T16:16:00.002+02:002014-04-16T16:16:35.130+02:00Comedic games<div style="text-align: justify;">
Hello everyone! I was recently translating the newest episode of Extra Credits for Polish audiences. Guys did a very good job at analyzing the pitfalls of creating an interactive comedy, but for some reason (most probably the length of the episode) didn't elaborate on the reason why we have so few comedy games in general. Here's the episode, freshly baked:</div>
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Now... As much as I agree that making interactive comedy is not a piece of cake, I also believe that it's not the reason of the diminishing number of comedy elements in games. In my opinion, the main reason is fear of the public opinion. </div>
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Let's face it. Every artist wants to get recognized for what he does. Every artist wants to be admired and benefit from his/her art. Every single garage, Metallica-bashing band wants to get discovered and "sell out". Every Coelho-hater would gladly write books making even less sense and sign them with his name as long as it gives them a decent income and recognized name. Now let's make short lists of "the greatest" rock bands, movie directors, writers, singers, actors... First three that come to your mind. How many of them were involved in comedy? Why did we list Iron Maiden not Tenacious D? Why almost none of us knows the director of any of the comedies released in the last decade, but everyone knows Spielberg? Why Stephen King and why do <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_comedy_writers">these names </a>not ring almost any bells? Why Sting, not Stephen Lynch? Why Anthony Hopkins, not Vince Vaughn?</div>
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Because comedy is silly. It doesn't matter that John Cleese is a brilliant philosopher. It doesn't matter Jim Carrey is an amazingly versatile actor. It doesn't matter Tim Minchin is an incredible musician. They are all comedians. They are silly. Human society has developed an unnatural harshness to everything that makes us laugh. We all love a good laugh, but within our four walls. When we choose a movie to relax with in the evening, we watch American Pie, but then we discuss the new Scorsese with our colleagues at work. We instinctively degrade our comedic experience to something irrelevant, a filler, a method to let the steam off in our otherwise boring, sad, mature lives. We feel somewhat ashamed and guilty to spend too much time with comedy. Comedy is this funny little brother of the mature, majestic art. Comedy episodes in TV series are 20 minutes and the "serious shows" are 40-60 minutes. And games... </div>
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We have all noticed that the game industry is no different. Comedy is becoming more and more scarce. Smaller games, like Plants vs. Zombies can still afford being humorous while titles with bigger budgets get even easter eggs removed, because it's "silly". We are somehow okay with "small games" being funny, because they are just "small, silly games". With bigger titles we expect depth and maturity.<br />
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There's another reason why games with bigger budgets have problems getting away with humor. Investors have hard enough time believing in the silly game industry. Believing in the silly game industry making straightforward silly games is even harder. Seeing what sells, I would rather put a million dollars into another Assasin's Creed rather than The Mighty Quest for an Epic Loot. Developers themselves also have a deep problem with the image of the industry they work with. They want to appear professional, they want to show the stuff they make is not just for kids, it's mature. And how can a comedy be mature, huh?</div>
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And if we want to make the comedy mature, we encounter another problem. Mature comedy is not about shallow tit jokes or hitting someone's face with a pie. It often needs to challenge the current status quo we live in. Society, religion, politics - no matter how silly or clever you go about them, majority of people will always feel like you are offending them. And in a way they will be right - many people really believe in their way of living. Games already don't have the best image. Adding bashing of religion to the list of game sins is not exactly what the developers are so eager to do. The heat Portal got for adoption jokes is a clear example of society not being ready to accept an above-PG comedy in games. Cartoonish explosion and stars circling above character's head - good. Jokes about euthanasia - very bad.</div>
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Let's sum it up: society looking down at comedy + lack of respect and recognition for comedians in general + developers wanting to show how mature they are + investors unlikely to support comedy games + risk of touching the touchy topics in a humorous way in games = shitload of reasons why as a developer, you would rather make another shooter than a decent comedy game.<br />
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So yeah, interactive comedy in games is widely underdeveloped. But it's no wonder not many people even want to try and change that. It would have to be a comedy genius. Also, a game designer with a fair amount of fourth-wall-breaking knack. On top of that, he/she needs to have a relatively high disregard for money and be immune to social heat that he/she is very likely to get. Not so high odds of that getting together, right? I'm sure someone like that will sooner or later come and revolutionize the way we think about game comedy. But while we are waiting for this savior to be born, let's do our part. Let's all have a laugh in public once in a while. Let's all admit we love comedy, and not only the half-too-boring, half-too-clever Woody Allen comedy. That will make it so much easier for everyone. And definitely more fun!<br />
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Wolandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12265068990487392793noreply@blogger.com0