#LoveIndies week starts on Monday! It’s being organized by a couple of lovely folks from over at Failbetter Games (whose work I happen to be a huge fan of).

I’m participating in a few ways, as both developer and gamer.

As a dev, I’m:

1. Discounting Destination Ares. It will be 30% off on Itch and GameJolt, and 29% off on Steam (wtf, 29%?).
2. Running a competition for swag and keys. More about that below.
3. Hanging out in streams. If you’re gonna stream any of my work (doesn’t have to be DA), let me know! I’d love to stop in and kick it with you and your viewers, talk secrets, and spit strategy.

As a gamer, I’m:

1. Playing only indie games. Heh, who am I kidding? That’s always what I play.
   
2. Rating, Reviewing, and Recommending some of my favorite indie titles. I’ll be posting those periodically on my twitter.
   

What’s this about a… Competition

I’VE GOT STICKERS WITH YOUR NAME ON THEM

( and keys you can win to gift a friend <3 )

— How to participate —

Build a custom ship

Play the custom ship

Share your high score (screenshot the game over screen as proof, or, even better, share the VOD!)

Share the ship (screenshots OK, but posting the .ship file is awesome!)

Finally, let me know where to find all of it! I’m lots of places, but I’m easiest to reach on twitter.

— How to win —

Assuming enough entries, there’ll be (up to) three prizes — a couple stickers and a key each:

1. Highest Score (ties broken by fastest run in-game time)
   
2. Community Favorite Ship — I’ll post a poll Wednesday night, if we have enough entries
   
3. My Favorite Ship
   

I’ll be announcing the winner(s) on Thursday, July 19th!

Please note: this competition isn’t only open to players who own Destination Ares, but you do need access to it — go ahead and play on a friend’s computer!

See you on Monday!

Destination Ares has taken me three years of development, and today it leaves Early Access!

You can buy it on @itchio (or Steam, I suppose).

https://stralor.itch.io/destination-ares

store.steampowered.com/app/553470

Reblogs are <3

I had the opportunity to play through The Witness some time back, and I was both impressed by the experience and occasionally frustrated by some decisions. Today, in true Design Spotlight tradition, let’s focus on one aspect of the design that resonated with me.

Certainly, there are tons of pieces talking about The Witness’s puzzles, narrative structure, or audio design, so, I’d like to pivot and talk about the game’s spatial flow.

We’re gonna babble light-heartedly about level design for a bit.

Well crafted level design often curves in on itself. New paths with open up and new perspectives in the same space are gained after some progression. Early Skyward Sword levels were strong in this regard. So was, famously, Dark Souls.

The trick: surprise the player without confusing them. Getting truly lost is rarely the point. Yet, being temporarily blinded to the larger context is great for inspiring wonder by opening new perspectives.

The Witness excels at this.

Turn a corner and you’re in a new biome with a spectacular view. Follow a path, stumble onto new places to explore. Explore a place and find yourself spat out somewhere familiar, with a new shortcut unlocked.

The game starts with a somewhat linear play space and turns it into a well-connected web. And the layout should be web-like; the game features regular backtracking (and the tone is antithetical to fast travel).

(Fast travel sucks anyway… another topic for another time)

What’s brilliant about it is how it mimics our unconscious spatial learning. When we enter a new space, whether virtually or IRL, a tunnel vision of orienteering occurs. We focus on the general feel and major landmarks as we build out our core understanding. This core understanding is rudimentary, even linear. It’s also often accompanied with a sense of wonder.

It’s once we’ve gained a familiarity with a space that we notice the finer, subtler details. Our awareness expands; we see new interconnections between areas, and, I suggest, we’re more open to unexpected stimuli. The Witness’s level design mimics this with its explicitly expanding spaces: initial areas are contained, understandable, and linear; later progress in the game opens up alternate routes, new methods of travel (the boat, underground tunnels), and expansive, winding spaces with hidden details, all while encouraging re-exploration of past zones. The game encourages our natural spatial learning, and progresses with it.

There’s something “fun” here. Well, it certainly stuck with me, an admitted explorer type. The thing is, it doesn’t often show more than the player is comfortable exploring at once. And the deeper aspects sprinkled everywhere are left for organic player discovery: there’s a definite “WHOA” moment when the player discovers the hidden environmental “puzzles”.

Other people have talked about how the game’s puzzle progression usually does a good job of teaching the player. I’d argue the spatial design does an even better job of informing player expectations than the puzzles do. There’s something to take away from that.

Thanks for reading, chums

A few years ago, we heard a lot of talk about “gamification”. It’s pretty intuitive: real life is boring and frustrating -> games are engaging -> make products/ services/ etc. more like games.

Since then, gamification hasn’t seen as much publicity.

However, you can see its influence in many industries: it’s hiding behind improved customer loyalty programs, social media experiences, and even Unicorn-fucking-fraps.

This makes sense. Much of game development is user experience (UX) development. Games are (interactive) user experience variously in the forms of narratives, spreadsheets, art, and entertainment.

So, naturally, game designers tend to make pretty great UX designers.

What fascinates me, however, is how so many industries have missed the point or failed completely to jump on the bandwagon. What follows is a couple of US-centric examples.

Monopolistic Papercutting Dingleberries

Take, for instance, Albertsons/ Safeway and their million brands. At the moment they’re running a “Monopoly”-branded sweepstakes. Basically: buy shit, get tickets, win shit.

Now, the choice of “Monopoly” is, of course, hilarious. The obvious reason I’m amused is because Albertsons was recently under some heat for having too much control over the market (aka, monopolistic powers). Also, Monopoly is a terrible game by contemporary design standards. No doubt, they picked it for brand recognition: it’s perhaps the best known board game of the 20th century. But all of this is beside the point.

From a single consumer’s POV in the trenches (checkout lanes), I can only imagine that they’re losing participants and sales boosts year-over-year; churn is high and replacement rate is nonexistent. Surely the paltry $0.50 coupons aren’t seeing redemption beyond dedicated couponers.

I’d love to see the numbers behind the Monopoly sweeps to prove me wrong.

It seems to me to have been designed by some idiotic suits in corporate marketing high-rises who know nothing about actual player engagement. They must have researched as far as an article about how larger prizes create greater sweepstakes player engagement and said, “Fuck it, making a game is easy.”

What they’ve got is painfully menial (not unheard of in games…) while lacking sufficient, regular rewards (whoops, that’s the trip; you’ve gotta do at least one or the other). It suffers from arcane rules like hidden, tiered rarities, and online second-chance sweeps. And it fails to account for human fallibility: even if an active player got that one rare piece they need, will they notice in the monotony of flipping through their collection?

I’m sure someone somewhere thought lower redemption rates were a good thing. In fact, they are not. If no one ever won the prizes on lotto and scratcher tickets, no one would play. Likewise, if no one claims your prizes, you’re not gaining customers who will come back to buy more of your crap.

To Albertsons: Might I point you to the gambling industry and the brilliance of slot machine design? Or perhaps you’ll be interested in talking to the mobile F2P giants about Skinner boxes? If you’re going to go full skeezy money-grab, you should actually study how to be a piece of shit and do it well.

Of course, maybe I’m wrong. That’s certainly my opinion and observations as someone dedicated to honing my corner of the craft. Still, I’d be impressed if it weren’t floundering this year.

Missed Connection

You know what other experience without a doubt needs a UX overhaul?

Airports and airlines.

Talk about missing the gamification bandwagon. From customer acquisition & retention, ticket purchases, obscene post-purchase legal agreements, TSA checkpoints, the in-flight experience, baggage claim, and customs, it’s a shitshow.

I love to travel. I’m one of those rare people that even enjoys the monotonous moments.

I hate everything about having to take a flight.

Airlines feel like they’re stuck in 1950s, despite the fact that flying was supposedly more pleasant back then. Cookie-cutter marketing, bland presentation, and peaks of stress in-between a general sense of arduousness:

It’s got more rough spots than a sun-blasted hobo sleeping on granite.

• No user reward cycle in the short loop
  
• Everything feels like a punishment, without regard to user input or choice
  
• Corporate interests > the service provided
  
• Little to no user agency or engagement
  
• Worse latency than Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars (heh, sorry Psyonix — that game was actually a gem… for local splitscreen)
  
• And the only interesting aesthetics are: other travelers, clouds as-seen-through-tiny-ass-windows, advertisement posters selling more garbage, various hues of biege or gray decor, and the rare piece of architectural art
  

Need I continue?

Here’s the point, folks

Gamification is here and it makes life pleasant. It’s a tool, it’s fucking effective, and it’s here to stay.

Like any tool: it can be used for evil and it can be used like a dolphin with a pickaxe (poorly). None of that stops it from being effective or being wielded for perfectly good reasons by everyone else.

At least take the time to get a feel for its heft and balance.

Pat out.

A pitfall of games-as-a-service: updating the dev environment alongside the game’s own patches can lead to serious consequences.

Story time.

Yesterday, I discovered Unity 5.6 has a UI bug that breaks a specific menu in DA.

Unfortunately, I discovered this while testing the newest build that I was hours from pushing to the public. Updating to 5.6 was one of the first things I did in this patch.

I almost didn’t test that menu, since I hadn’t made direct changes to it myself.

This means a bunch of the changes are tied directly to compatibility with 5.6. Some are fixes that I’d been eagerly awaiting, some are features that used new tools, some are simply casualties of chronology. Rollback to 5.5 would break half the patch. Roll-forward to beta didn’t fix the issue.

So here I am, sitting on a patch that I can’t release.

The current version of the game has a rage-inducing bug (the minigame clock blares a constant tone instead of beeping once a second). I’m troubleshooting how to fix that without sending along everything else that changed. I suspect it will involve a Unity rollback and a git repo fork.

In the meantime, I’m going to build some more tools. I have some ideas on how to streamline the home stretch as we approach full release. The ideas might take weeks to implement. However, I may have some unexpected weeks at my disposal.

File under “The Adventures of Solo Dev”

ttyl mfers

A couple weekends ago, I attended another university gaming convention. This time I was off to CSU Fullerton’s inaugural “SIEGE” event.

Like last time at UCSD’s Winter GameFest, I brought my A-game. Two stations, candy, the banner, info sheets, and one overly-caffeinated superdev. Bonus: I had buttons!

Unlike WGF, I spoke on a panel. It was a small, fairly intimate Q&A.

Sadly, the event as a whole was a bit sparse on traffic. Which happens when it’s the first weekend of spring break, at the end of finals week… Combo that sparseness with the game demos room being down the hall from the main event and a gaping hole of unused floor in the middle of the room that made the space feel boring. The table outside with volunteers looked like guards. No doubt more people walked past than walked in.

Despite those issues, I felt good about the event.

The teams in the room did a good job keeping the energy high and the players flowing between stations. I managed to have one or both of my stations running the most of the time. Most players were receptive to the game, and a few truly enjoyed it (every fan is a win).

The university volunteers were awesome, friendly, and relaxed (a huge plus). Also, SIEGE was thankfully only one day, so it was a nice 16-hour day (with the drive) rather than a whole weekend. That felt like the right length. And the organizers awesomely came through and provided parking passes for the closest lot — this attention to detail for an exhibitor was clutch.

All in all, SIEGE was worthwhile. I’m glad to be back to work on the game, though; nothing in the world beats a long day of development and progress.

Speaking of development… Thanks for reading!