Ways to Categorize and Describe Rhythm Games

How sharp are the edges of the intervals you respond in?

• Do you need to hit the spot as it passes by you?
• Are there different degrees of success/failure for each button/cue? in Rock Band/Guitar Hero, you either hit the note or you don't. In DDR, you are graded on how close you came to perfectly timing it.

How wide are those intervals?

How unambiguous are the cues? How clearly does it tell you when and what to press?

• Rock Band/DDR give you scrolling symbols that pass through a timing line, indicating when you should press the button.
• Geometry Dash and other running games rely on you to know when to press to respond to an obstacle ("If I jump too early, I'll hit the end of that row of spikes...") but they are still clearly cued on the spot.
• Rock Band in performance mode (I have never played it. Why would I? But it exists.) doesn't give you any actual cues, it just relies on you to know when to hit the notes. 
• Crypt of the Necrodancer and Patapon don't tell you what buttons to press. You have to work it out for yourself.

How forgiving is it of mistakes?

• One mistake and you are forced to restart.
• More than X mistakes and you are forced to restart.
• If your score dips below X, you are forced to restart.
• You always play through to the end of the level.
• How much do you lose by missing a note?
• You'll spend the whole song recovering.
• You'll spend the next few phrases recovering.
• You'll immediately recover if you can hit the next few notes.

How does scoring work? Is it pass/fail, percentage of notes hit, or graded according to quality of hits? Or something else?

Is there a combo / multiplier system? How high does it go?

• In some games (Can't think of any examples!) you can basically do unlimited exponential score growth.
• In Rock Band your combo takes like 40 notes to get up to a 4x multiplier, plus you can use star power to double that.

I'm Going To Stop Revising This Post So That I Can Post It (Sorry If It's Scatterbrained, I Welcome Criticism)

I should be working on a thing for a potential employer so that I can get a job, but I'm not. Instead, I feel like talking about thematic consistency and enemy types. I've been playing Red Faction: Armageddon and I love the weapons and destruction in it but damn, if it isn't a terrible game in just about every other way.

Let's list off some enemy type tropes you can encounter in a video game, shall we?

• Snipers! (enemies who avoid you and attack from a great distance)
• Juggernauts! (slow and hard to kill)
• Turrets! (immobile enemies with a lot of health)
• Chargers! (move quickly towards you, melee attack, don't turn fast)
• Swarmers! (low health, low damage, attack in large groups)
• Small fry! (easy to defeat, medium health/damage, attack in small groups or individually)
• Teleport spammers! (enemies who spam teleports)

That's a lot of cool ideas! So when you're making a game, you should try to use a lot of those to make sure you've got variety, right?

If that sounded good, you need to take a deep breath and think about why you're making decisions. Why should the players fight juggernauts instead of snipers? Why put in a horde of swarmers? And should your decisions be influenced purely by an abstract desire for variety?

In Portal, there's only one kind of enemy - turrets! There are other obstacles as well, but all obstacles are  chosen because they're needed for whatever the puzzle in question is. In other words, you never see a situation where, purely to increase difficulty without changing the approach required, four turrets are used instead of three. Rather, four turrets are used because it makes it impossible to approach from the rear, requiring a different strategy. 

This quality - that obstacles are chosen based on the puzzle the designer is constructing, rather than simply how much effort it should take - is, in my opinion, desirable. It translates to non-puzzle games quite well, also: 

• Choosing what obstacles a player faces must be guided by what experience the player is supposed to have. This choice should never be solely based on how long the player should spend or how difficult it should be.

Of course, the exception is when the experience you're trying to build purely flows from the difficulty the player is overcoming.

In Red Faction: Armageddon, the variety of opponents feels totally forced. Enemies come in a wide variety of species (I think?) and as far as I can tell, the only reason for this is that they needed more difficult enemies so that battles could be longer without being boring as hell - which brings to our attention the fact that the battles aren't very fun to begin with.

It's really bothersome because I honestly have no clue what these aliens are supposed to be. Are they a covenant of different Martian races? If so, why are they working together (especially when they seem to be non-sentient)? Are they mutated humans? If so, why do they come in so many forms? Why do living beings have laser cannons and plasma bombs? Ultimately, the answer to all of these questions is the same as the answer to the question of why they've got Snipers, Juggernauts, Turrets, Small fry, and the rest:

• Because the game would be boring otherwise.

When the variety of the enemies you fight is the only thing keeping your combat from being boring, you're doing things very wrong unless that's a pretty major part of your game. Ultimately, Red Faction: Armageddon fails because even the variety of enemies doesn't make for interesting combat. 

Variety should be a secondary concern. It should flow from the other decisions you make.

---

I've included my thoughts on enemy variety in some games:

• When Halo did this they owned it and justified it in the backstory. It felt a little forced - "oh, now I'm fighting elites!" - but it was justified by the fact that the Covenant was literally stratified and composed of differing races with differing abilities. Still, feels like forced variety.
• In Red Faction: Armageddon, every battle is just about the same - there are a bunch of small fry, some heavier enemies, a sniper or two, and sometimes a support tower that buffs everyone. Battles feel formulaic and nothing about them is ever driven by the surrounding events in the game. The only effect on my experience of having different kinds of enemies is that in each battle, I have to take out the small fry with my assault rifle, medium enemies with my magic powers, snipers with my beam rifle, and heavier enemies with my heavier weapon. There's never a reason for them to be there. Such forced variety!
• Mirror's Edge had different types of enemies, but they felt like people employed by the same few organizations - the jump from cops to SWAT officers felt like I was stepping up to a harder difficulty, but when the cops started carrying shotguns instead of pistols it was just different people in the same organization - and I tried to avoid them either way. The step from cops to SWAT officers also made sense in the context of the story, as the police force started realizing I was a threat and as politics happened.
• In Valkyrie Chronicles, variety in types of soldiers is a central mechanic and part of the game, so it's totally justified and doesn't feel jarring - and it doesn't feel jarring because this kind of variety is used well. There's no unilaterally harder enemy type to fight, with the possible exception of tanks. Varying difficulty is provided by changing the size of the forces involved, and by changing the conditions and terrain you're fighting in.
• In Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, it absolutely feels like there's a sliding scale of difficulty and enemies are being picked from it purely according to how hard it should be. Forced variety!
• In Portal, there's only one kind of enemy - turrets! There are other obstacles as well, but all obstacles are  chosen because they're needed for whatever the puzzle in question is. In other words, you never see a situation where, purely to increase difficulty without changing the approach required, four turrets are used instead of three. Rather, four turrets are used because it makes it impossible to approach from the rear, requiring a different strategy. No forced variety, not even in numbers!
• Fighting games take extensive care to balance the available characters, so that - if you're controlling for personal skill - you don't choose a character simply because they're better or worse. There is variety, but never the feeling that you're facing an opponent purely because they're harder than the last.

Magical Overdoses or: Why Skyrim Sucks

I was thinking yesterday about the problem of magic in games. My biggest problem with Skyrim is that the whole game just feels like I'm clicking on enemies until they die, with occasional choices affecting how fast they do so. The graphics are the only thing differentiating a lightning bolt from a gun.

That doesn't really work for me. I want to live in a magic world for a while! Dammit, that's what I paid for. Now, in the case of magic, it's a little bit of an inherently intractable problem - the feeling of magicalness is inherently a feeling of otherworldliness, so it gets destroyed when we're constantly exposed to something.

Which leads to the first strategy for defeating magical overdosing: Spread it out. From a gameplay experience point of view, this is what mana bars, recharge times, and limited charges on magic items do for us. You can even see this in non-magic games - raise your hand if you've ever saved your shots from the aerial bombardment weapon "just in case", only to never actually use them.

[at this point I raised my hand]

That's probably the most powerful counter to magical overdosing, because it cuts right to the core - if you limit the player's chances to use it, the player will perceive that rarity as differentiating it from their other problem-solving options. Of course, everything is relative - if magic is rare but so are bullets, then it won't feel any more special. In my recent experiences playing D&D I've been struck by how effective magic is hard for me to find - but effective combat strategies are just as hard for me to find. (keep your comments about my sub-optimal character design to yourself - I don't care.)

Of course, the other popular strategy is simply to make magic feel different in the game, by clever asset work - if magic is the only thing that makes flashy particle and light effects, then baller for you. Magic feels flashy! Once that gets assimilated into the player's system, though, flashy just seems like another option. Magical overdose again, game over.

The strategy that I haven't seen tried as much, which (I theorize) has much better resistance to magical overdosing, is to change up how the player produces their magical effects. Maybe they shoot by clicking the mouse button or pulling the trigger, but they cast magic by actually speaking words into the microphone - or entering mouse gestures, or tracing out patterns in the game floor. Maybe they have to actually stand up and strike a pose for the camera!

You have to use these techniques sparingly, because if the player constantly casts magic in these ways, then it just becomes a mouse gesture game, or a pattern-walking game, or a silly kinect game. In order to stand out, magic can never become the norm. You're constantly fighting a battle to avoid the player getting used to the magic.

[also, shut up, I haven't actually played Skyrim.]

Video Game Genre Mixing

I really meant to write a more even mix of reviews and things that are not reviews. Unfortunately, since most of my posts are started by the thought "Oh no! It's been ___ amount of time since I last posted something! I better post something now!", and since reviews are somewhat simpler to plan and write, reviews have been pretty much all I've done. But now, for something that is not a review! Today, I'm going to talk about genres, and the mixing thereof.

Before going any farther with the mixing of genres, you should probably at least skim the Wikipedia article about video game genres, found here. The list covers all the major genres and sub-genres, and the broader genres have their own page detailing variations. Already on here you're going to see plenty of genre mixing, and it's nigh impossible to sort out any 'pure' genres. So in case I need it, I'm going to go with defining any 'mixing' as a relatively recent (definitely within the last decade or so) mixing of two or more other genres. This means genres like 'shooter-platformers', Metroidvanias, and action adventures don't count as mixed genres for the purpose of this discussion, since those have existed for a really long time already.

So now that you're hopefully familiar with any genres I might name, let's get to it! The first thing to consider when mixing genres is why mix them at all? For the most part, it comes down to one thing: selling more copies. The video game market is very heavily populated, and in order to be noticed you either need really high quality or originality (of course, having both only makes things better). Games like Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (added RPG elements to the multiplayer) and Portal (first person shooter puzzler) probably would not be as good without the mechanics that they mixed, while games like Puzzle Quest (RPG with Bejeweled gameplay) and countless indie puzzle platformers simply wouldn't exist.

Henry Hatsworth: Platforming on top, puzzling on bottom.

As an aspiring game dev, I've found that sometimes all you need for an interesting game concept is to pick a few genres that hadn't been mashed together yet and work out how they would mesh. It's also much easier to pick existing game mechanics and figure out how to mix them than it is to come up with entirely new game mechanics, plus there's a lot of room for variation. For example, consider Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure and Blocks That Matter. Both of these are puzzle platformers, and use similar puzzle mechanics (Henry Hatsworth uses Tetris Attack, whereas Blocks That Matter uses just Tetris), but the games are quite different. As another example, consider Braid and The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, both of which are platformers that use a time manipulation puzzle mechanic.

So what genres go well together? I think the one genre most suited for being mixed with others is the role playing game. Character progression can be added to virtually anything, and already has been added to many things. For example, most modern shooters now have character progression tied to the multiplayer suite. Puzzle Quest mixed RPG elements with Bejeweled gameplay, while Runespell: Overture did it with Poker. The entire Metroidvania genre is based around mixing platforming with character progression. Moving away from role playing elements, I personally really like puzzle platformers. Platformers are very versatile, and the puzzle genre captures a huge variety of gameplay mechanics, which means that puzzle platformers can be incredibly diverse and interesting. Moving other genres to first person perspective can also be done really well, as proven by the Metroid Prime trilogy. I wouldn't call cooperative play a genre by itself, but adding a co-op mode to other genres can often turn out well. As for other genres, they may work, I just don't have enough experience to say for certain.

Knights in the Nightmare: There is a such thing as too much

However, not every attempt at mixing genres is going to turn out that great. Some mechanics just don't work that well together. For example, slow paced mechanics like stealth don't tend to go with fast paced mechanics, like automatic machine guns. You could see the result of this in Splinter Cell Conviction, where the stealth focused sections were immensely superior to sections where the stealth mechanics were forced to mix with more shooter focused level segments. Problems also occur if you make things too complex, and end up trying to mix together too many things. For example, this is very definitely a problem in Knights in the Nightmare. In Knights in the Nightmare, gameplay is similar to turn based strategy, at least on the surface. You place soldiers, and have a certain number of turns in a battle to defeat all enemies. However, each turn takes place in real time, and your soldiers are immobile but have various attack radii, shifting the game closer to tower defense. You control the battle as the Wisp, and must direct the battle while avoiding enemy attacks. These attacks can only hit you, and their patterns are very definitely reminiscent of bullet hells. There are also role playing elements, and a few other miscellaneous mechanics, like a light/dark mechanic (some weapons and characters do better in the light phase and vice versa, the effectiveness of any phase diminishes the longer it's been in effect, and the Wisp can switch phases at any point), and a durability mechanic (characters have limited vitality, with which they use attacks, when vitality reaches 0 the character is gone for good, while weapons have standard durability). The gameplay is incredibly complex, and it gets to be a bit too much to handle. Complex gameplay certainly has its pros, but I believe that the best games are easy to learn and difficult to master, which clearly isn't happening here.

That's about all I really have to say for mixing genres. I personally think that mixing genres is a great thing for video games, I'm sure there are a lot of unique and interesting combinations that haven't been done yet. But as the previous paragraph has hopefully made clear, this doesn't mean that genres should be mixed haphazardly. When the proper care is taken, amazing things can happen, but there is always the possibility for things to go horribly wrong. That should probably be a lesson for life in general.

In Defense of the Narrative

I am a gamer, but I’m a lot of other things too. I’m an engineering student, a member of the marching band, a writer, a game artist/programmer, and a whole host of other things. My time is pretty well divided up. This is not a problem in and of itself, and I really enjoy the variety.

Here's the problem: my favorite genre of game is the RPG. I love them and I hate them. I love the immersive storylines, the gameplay I can tweak to my style, the branching dialogues. But I start to hate myself for spending so much time playing them. One of my housemates even started poking fun at me this weekend for playing video games all day. I start to feel lazy when I see the hours played ticking upwards every time I save.

Just one more conversation....

Choice Systems

Oh boy. This turned out to be a monster of a post. Please try to bear with us, and not posting tl;dr would also be appreciated.

Up until now, the three of us writing here have all been working and writing separately, but this time we’re working together. Today we want to talk about choice systems in video games, with a focus on the popular ‘moral choice’ systems. We chose this topic after playing through inFamous a little while back. I’ve beaten inFamous on the good path, Shoofle has beaten it on the evil path, and Maggie has finished the good path and is working through the evil path now. Also, since we’re working together on this, the use of “I” at any point in this article could be referring to any of us. So try not to get too confused.

A word of warning, there will be a few minor spoilers for some games. We avoided all the big spoilers, but just letting you know.