I finally played Telltale’s The Walking Dead (yes, six years late on that one) and I was heavily impressed. Something I’ve heard from people who’ve played a lot of Telltale and Telltale-like games is that after a while, the illusion of the Telltale game wears off. The game promises you that the decisions you make effects the story, but how much of that is actually true can vary. Unfortunately, due to the nature of games and game development, this is very difficult to pull off as expected. If a story has a major branch, then you have to develop two stories, despite the player only seeing one. In a worst case scenario, you only get 1/n the amount of content seen by the player compared to a linear game of the same development cost.

There are ways to mitigate this, but the question always comes down to “how does a designer make choices matter?” Though I wouldn’t consider myself a connoisseur of Telltale’s and their competitors’ games, I have played them, listened to others discuss the issue, and even interviewed other designers who explained some of their process making these games, so I’d say I wasn’t exactly going in blind. But despite all this, I’d still say that, even though the story stayed roughly the same throughout the entire game, the choices I made in Telltale’s The Walking Dead did matter.

To explain, I figured I’d break up The Walking Dead’s choices into several categories, and explain how The Walking Dead uses them to great effect. Note that sometimes a choice can belong to multiple categories.

Continue reading “The Walking Dead: The Choices that Matter” →

While waiting for my 3DS to recharge (and not wanting to finish the essay for the game I was waiting on) I decided to finally check out Her Story. This game has always been on my To Do list since it won Excellence in Narrative and the Grand Prize in IGF’s 2016 awards. Being a small indie game it only takes about two hours to play, but of course I had to play it twice, since its one of those stories that you have to go through twice to catch everything.

In short Her Story is presented as a bunch of short video clips of a woman’s police interrogation about the murder of her husband. Due to the clunky interface, you have to uncover each of the couple hundred clips by searching for keywords used in the transcript. It’s made more difficult as only the first five video clips are shown so searching for a common keyword won’t get you very far on its own.

Obviously because clips are shown based on your search query, the entire narrative is presented non-linearly. Non-linear narratives are a personal interest of mine so it was interesting to see how Her Story approached the idea. Interestingly the game doesn’t gate off any of the video clips, meaning you can randomly guess the correct keyword to hear the end of the mystery if you’re unlucky enough. Thus Her Story doesn’t really focus on mystery by puzzle, rather mystery by intrigue. I uncovered “the ending” by around the two hour mark (a good pace for this game) but was able to figure out The Big Twist™ after only five minutes. Still, the game isn’t over until the player is satisfied with their understanding of the story (or until she runs out of movie clips) and given the kind of story this is, it’s hard to put down without knowing every juicy detail.

Anyway I could go on about things, like how the game subtly leads the player down a specific path by dropping a chain of keywords to latch onto, but it’s late and I have a different essay I’m in the middle of.

About a week ago I finished playing Persona 5 and I wanted to talk about it here, mostly because I started this blog to practice talking about games that not only I found interesting from a design perspective, but also talk about any game I played from a design perspective. At first I tried to write this out as a comprehensive analysis, but eventually scrapped that idea and just went with a more free floating thought session instead since it was easier to do in my lunch breaks. (No time at home, gotta start Zelda.)

Continue reading “Finally Finished Persona 5” →

A while ago I went out with some friends and we got to talking about video game controllers. And there I dropped a bit of a bombshell: I really hate Sony’s Dualshock controller for the Playstation anything. Like, I could write an essay about how much I dislike it.

Now full disclosure, I grew up playing Nintendo and Xbox consoles, having only just now adopted a PS4 as my first Playstation console. So I suppose I’m biased towards controllers that I’ve actually had a reasonable amount of time getting used to. But that doesn’t make for a fun opinion piece.

Continue reading “I Passionately Hate the Dualshock Controller” →

There will be a folder of funny sound effects. Things that are completely ridiculous. Cat meows, birthday jingles, a bad recording of someone saying “hummus” (which is one of Slack’s notification sound effects, by the way.) I will mandate that every button has one of these ridiculous sound effects at all times, until the sound engineer creates proper sound effects. Everything must have a sound effect. People will complain, they’ll say it doesn’t matter, that it wastes time, that it ruins the game. I won’t care. I’ll make posters and put them up on the wall. Everything must have a sound effect.

And no one will complain that a button doesn’t work ever again.

I’ve been doing a lot of user testing this week.

Next post is like, 80% written I just need to import some screenshots.

Got to love how all of my favorite Nintendo franchises are coming to mobile. First it was Pokemon Go, then Fire Emblem Heroes. I’ve pretty much been playing it nonstop for the past week and a half, which is pretty good, since I was worried the game would get a little grindy after a while. It does, but the core gameplay of moving your little mages and swordsmen around on a grid map is fun enough that I don’t mind.

Continue reading “Determining the Artificial Intelligence of Fire Emblem Heroes” →

So you’ve heard about this Pokemon phenomenon and want a slice of that pie. Easy right? Just make any old JRPG and put in a system where you can capture the monsters and done. No, wrong. Obviously. If it were that easy I wouldn’t be writing this.

Continue reading “The Monster Battler Sub-genre Pt 2: Not Everyone’s Your Friend” →

 

Pokemon. Just this past year it celebrated its 20^th anniversary since releasing the original Pokemon Red and Green games in Japan. Since then it’s become a huge multimedia and cultural phenomenon. It consistently releases best selling and highly reviewed games, not just in its mainline series but also in its numerous spinoffs as well. Just take a look at Pokemon Go. And it’s got a complete monopoly on the monster-capture-battle RPG sub-genre (sort of.) Try and release anything involving cute little creatures fighting for you and you’ll instantly be labeled a Pokemon clone.

And frankly it gets a huge snub by the design community.

Continue reading “The Monster Battler Sub-genre Pt 1: Pokemon” →

There’s this theory in game design called “Emergent Gameplay.” It’s basically our Holy Grail. Emergent gameplay is when players find ways to play your game that you, as the designer, did not intend. Some examples are Twitch Plays Pokemon, where two thousand players all tried to complete the same game of Pokemon Red, or anything you do in Minecraft. The great part about emergent gameplay is that it’s personalized to each player and you, the designer, didn’t have to lift a finger.

Continue reading “Emergent Narrative in Darkest Dungeon” →

I don’t play a lot of stealth games. Or at least, I didn’t think I played a lot of stealth games. I’ve only got three under my belt: Mark of the Ninja, Aragami, and Assassin’s Creed, and even then I feel like Assassin’s Creed is like Beyonce being nominated for best Rock Performance at the Grammy’s this year. But just as Don’t Hurt Yourself is actually pretty rockin’, the ability to walk up to a group of guards and spend five minutes performing the latest knife-through-neck dance routine doesn’t disqualify you from being considered a stealth game. Probably because if it did, the library of stealth games would be comprised of a half-eaten cracker and a shoelace.

Continue reading “Where is the Stealth Hiding?” →