Puzzle Quest Postmortem: Required Reading

Puzzle Quest developer, Infinite Interactive, posted a postmortem for their surprise hit in the September issue of Game Developer magazine. Of all the postmortems that I have read in this magazine, I was most impressed, and inspired, with the philosophy and wisdom the developers shared in the article. While many postmortems seem to spout the same "what went wrong" and "what went right" issues while creating a game, Infinite Interactive touched on many things that I have seen, and have been bothered by, during my short time in the industry. I have yet to play the game, but now that it is out on Xbox Live Arcade, that will be remedied soon.

This is the first postmortem that I can remember that stated that taking their time to finish the game was one of the things that went right. The game may have only been released on the DS and PSP, but polish is what seems to separate the quality titles of the current generation from those that are hoping to make a quick buck. I know that most publishers have quarterly goals to meet and that developers are usually working on tight deadlines and even tighter budgets. The problem is that it shows in the number of quality titles that are released throughout the year. Infinite Interactive spent nearly two and a half years making the game the best it could possibly be. They were rewarded by not being able to keep the game stocked on shelves.

Of the things that went wrong, "underestimation" is something that is not exclusive to Infinite. Every new developer we work with, and even ones that we've worked with a lot, seem to make the same mistakes. Something that I have suggested and pushed at work is echoed in the sentiment of Puzzle Quest's lead designer, Steve Fawkner.

My advice to any teams just getting into Xbox Live Arcade development is to read the TCRs over and over until you have them committed to memory. You may even want to run your design documents (especially the UI designs) past an Xbox Live Arcade Q/A team before implementing anything.

He talks about Live Arcade but I think that would be useful for anyone developing on the DS all the way up to PS3. It never fails that a game will come into test with only about two months till submission, but every Guideline fails. It then becomes a test of wills on whether or not to fix the issues or wait to see if they're found in submission. I can only imagine the time that would be saved if games were built around the guidelines for a particular system as opposed to throwing it together on one system and then attempting to shoehorn it onto another.

Lastly, he gives props to his "two excellent test teams." Being the lowest rung on the pole is not easy. At the best of times we can feel under appreciated and at the worst, seemingly blamed for everything. There is no glory to be had in Q/A and even the best teams are fallible as Fawkner points out that a heinous, if not serious, bug made it into the release version. It makes me happy to see developers chalk it up to an enormously complex game and not lazy testing.

Developers like Infinite Interactive seem to be few and far between. They have tremendous passion and the will to succeed, and it shows in their success.

Fun Friday: Hollywood Ax Edition

Today is a sad day for fans of video game movie adaptations, with the plug being pulled on both the Halo and the Gears of War movies. But then again, there aren't many of you out there, are there? Games are interactive and have yet to translate well into a move. The best fit for games and cinema is when it is created by the gamers. Hence the following two videos. Enjoy!

Teachers Encouraging Teachers to Use Games

My wife is a teacher and belongs to the National Education Association. Each month they send out a magazine covering topics of interest for teachers. Sounds intriguing, I know, but the October issue's cover caught my attention as I was about to throw it out. "Game On!" appeared in large, bold characters and caused me to double take. Although I was a little discouraged when the subtitle suggested that kids could learn a lot from their "Xboxes," I was inclined to give the article a read.

Surprisingly, the article was not only well researched, but highly in favor of using games as teaching aides in the classroom. The author, Cindy Long, points out the educational value of simulation games that encourage the students to problem solve and think strategically. Games she points out specifically for the classroom include Civilization and SimCity, where the focus is on creating situations that allow the students to interact with the subject instead of passively engaging the material. And not only does the lesson encourage more active learning, it is also a lot more fun. As one teacher, Mr. Brock Dubbels of Minneapolis, puts it, "'We’re going to play a game’ sounds a lot more appealing to a class than, ‘We’re going to summarize a story and analyze a plot diagram.'" While I'm inclined to think that the author thought high school kids would benefit the most based on the game selections, I think that this would benefit all students, including elementary. Additionally, it is very encouraging to see a national organization in our corner.

The article even quickly touches on the inevitable topic of violence by disseminating some common sense, at least among gamers.

Games like Grand Theft Auto are popular with kids, but are “spectacularly inappropriate for the classroom,” MacKenty says. Look for games with age-rating labels and do your research to weed out the violent titles.

One point that really hit home for me was about clearly defining objectives for the lesson. By creating a discussion before hand and then following up after game play allows for extensive critical thinking regarding what the students have learned. As a gamer, I am not used to playing games in a way that encourages this level of thinking. In my defense, games have not traditionally been very deep, but as our industry matures, more games like Bioshock will attempt to stretch our mental muscles. Gamers need to be ready to meet those challenges, seeing the game on it's many levels, or we may be doomed to mindless shooters and football games.

Fun Friday: Halo 3 Edition

Halo 3 came out this week so needless to say, posting has been a little thin. Bungie has put together an amazing package with this game. In addition to standard campaign and multiplayer, the theater and forge elements are well above and beyond what anyone could have expected from this game. I believe it is safe to say that I will play this game for months to come. Inspired by N'gai Croal's posting earlier this week, above is my first multiplayer kill. That's me in the background and a very unlucky HARASSMENT OWNS getting splattered.

Ready to Finish the Fight!

It took almost three years, but I finally played all the way through Halo 2. I spent the last couple of nights playing through the original two games to refresh myself on the story and actually complete the second game. I did it on easy, which many may feel was cheating, but I wanted to get through the games quickly and it made me feel like the bad ass that Master Chief is as I stormed my way though waver after wave of the Covenant and the Flood.

Many people seemed to dislike the end of Halo 2 for it's abruptness, but I liked it. The game did a good job of setting up the third and the alliances between the Master Chief, the humans and the Elites, with converging story lines on multiple battlefronts. It's kind of like Empire Strikes Back in that sense. Although, I may not have liked it as much if I had to wait three years to find out what is going to happen. However, I think it's clear that the human race survives due to the museum and the "Believe" commercials, the questions remaining seem to be who will survive.

Fun Friday: Want to Get Away?

Resident Evil 5 Rumored to Resides in Haiti

Kotoku is reporting that a very reliable source from within Capcom is confirming that Resident Evil 5 takes place in Haiti, the supposed birthplace of voodoo and zombies. That's what I said.

Lesson Learned: Motion Control's Big Assumption

The summer before second grade, I fell out of a tree on a camping trip and broke both bones in my left forearm, the ulna and radius. Ever since them my left arm has been slightly more "bowed" than my right. It's nothing crazy. I'm not a mutant or anything, but if you compared my two arms side by side, they would look a little different. However, it wasn't until very recently that I realized that my left arm has a minor limitation as well.

We have a racing title on the Wii in test now that switched up the controls from last year's version. Last year we went with holding the Wii Remote horizontally and steering like a real steering wheel. It seemed to work fine, but in this year's version, that's a secondary control scheme. The new default scheme has the player holding the Wii Remote in one hand and the Nunchuk in the other. So far, there are no problems. However, while racing, if the player wants to powerslide around a sharp corner (which is somewhat necessary throughout the game) they have to twist the Nunchuck from left to right, or vice versa, to powerslide in that direction while turning with the Control Stick. For most people this would probably be no problem, except it has been for me.

Due to my injury sustained about twenty years ago, I have trouble twisting my left arm outwards, away from my body, making left turns while powersliding nearly impossible. Since it is not a motion I do very often with my left arm (even my right for that matter), I never really put much thought into my own limitations. And my own issues are not even a real problem, as there are people out there with far more severe limitations.

As motion controls become more and more the norm and game designers look to eagerly implement them into their games, this is hopefully something that they take into consideration more often than not or risk alienating a segment of our gaming brethren. Not to say that all motion controls are bad, I just hope that they aren't shoehorned into games and then forced upon the player.

Goose Bumps

I'm a sucker for stark, moving music and movies that evoke emotions of honor and duty, movies like Saving Private Ryan, even Armageddon (I know it was cheesy). The new Halo 3 ad "Believe" gave me the same chills. Very nicely done.

I Needed More Motivation To Be Bad

Bioshock has succeeded. It has already garnered the level of cult status and it is a classic experience that all gamers should enjoy. Still, I have a tiny, tiny bit of a problem with the game that in no way hindered my original experience but I think could have given much more weight to the dilemma that the player is faced with early in the game. I hadn't even really thought about it too much until reading N'gai Croal and Stephen Totilo's face off. Croal writes:

My finger was hovering over the X button, ready to harvest...and all of a sudden, I couldn't do it. There was a little girl, albeit virtual, cowering in front of my avatar, and I couldn't bring myself to harvest her, as she'd been presented far too sympathetically. At the same time, I couldn't bring myself to rescue her either, because I wanted that Adam. Yet there was another complicating factor, one which is the true mark of the brilliance of BioShock's fiendish conundrum: the promise of an unspecified reward from Tenenbaum for rescuing the Little Sister.

What was puzzling me was the nature of Levine's game. He was pitting my basic humanity against my greedy self-interest and against my curiosity--a cruel hybrid of a moral dilemma fused with the Trust Game. This was a far more devilish problem than had it been a simple binary either/or, and it had completely paralyzed me. Should I treat this game as a Rorschach blot and do what I would do in real life: rescue the Little Sister? Or should I treat it solely as a fantasy and do precisely the opposite, explore the road I'd never take in the real world. I didn't know what to do.

While I totally hesitated in that moment over whether to save her for the promised reward or to put her out of her misery, the ADAM was never really a major draw at this point in the game. The game offers that if you do harvest the little sister, you will gain more ADAM for spending on plasmids, but does the player actually understand at this point what that means?

Our only experience up until this point in the game with plasmids in the electricity plasmid. It is very useful and fun but there is no hint at what comes with enhanced powers. You could use your imagination but it's easiest to see this power only becoming stronger. So what's the draw for more ADAM? Is it the desire to become as powerful as possible? Curiosity? I felt more sorry for her than anything, so I chose to save her.

Now, let's suppose that the game does something a little different the first time you inject yourself with a plasmid. You body has no idea how to react to this genetic mutation and you suddenly have a vast array of powers at your fingertips that is unstable (very similar to a sequence later in the game when you have an adverse reaction to an antidote). After experiencing all that ADAM can offer and its power, it is taken away from you only to be offered a way to get back by taking it from the little sisters. Like a drug, it has been taken from you and you now have a way to get back but at a terrible moral cost. Now here's a dilemma!

Now, while this borrows heavily from the Metroid formula, as well as adjusting the a bit of the story line, I think it would have added a lot more weight to the harvest/save problem. Now I wasn't the game designer and maybe they thought of this and thought the game was better their way. Either way, it is still an experience that transcends the norm.