I'm No Longer With Backbone Entertainment

I'm no longer with Backbone Entertainment.

If you're wondering whether I'm available to work on a patch or update that Street Fighter HD Remix might need, the answer is YES I'm available. No matter what project or company I am working with next, I will be available for anything Street Fighter needs, if Capcom asks (and pays). We all want Street Fighter to be as good as it can be and last as long as possible.

This would usually be a time for biting criticism, but I'll try taking the high road for a change. Let's see what new flowers bloom, and what new articles will show up here.

If you'd like my help with design or balance and you have a lot of money and you don't make me use an alarm clock, I might be available, but I'm honestly pretty busy. Contact me and see though!

I'll leave you with this wikipedia description of Backbone. No I didn't write it, but it's interesting that I'm the only person prominent enough in the entire company to be mentioned:

Backbone Entertainment is an independent video game development company with offices in Emeryville, California, Vancouver, British Columbia, and formerly Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.

Backbone Entertainment is the result of a merger between Digital Eclipse Software (which specializes in arcade game emulation), and ImaginEngine (which specializes in children's software). One of Backbone's prominent key members is David Sirlin, an arcade game enthusiast known for his involvement in fighting game tournaments, mostly the Super Street Fighter II titles.

--Sirlin

World of Warcraft Mouse (and multiboxer highlights)

This is the new World of Warcraft mouse developed by SteelSeries. I like idea of it a lot, and I would buy one instantly if it had Mac OS X support. Yeah I know you can use USB Overdrive to get things like this to work, but native drivers would be much better and they are supposedly coming out in a couple months.

I like mice with a lot of buttons. You, the person reading this who is about to post an annoying comment, do not like mice with a lot of buttons. But you, the other kind of reader who likes to submit my articles to social bookmarking sites--you know what I mean. In fact, when I look for a mouse, the number of buttons is the first thing I look at. If it doesn't have enough, I won't consider the mouse at all. Even Apple's Mighty Mouse--that lozenge-looking thing with apparently only one button--has 4 buttons: left, right, middle, and a 4th side button when you squeeze the sides.

But Seriously, How Many Buttons?

Does this World of Warcraft mouse have enough buttons though? It says it has 15, but let's look more closely.

Click to read more ...

Smash Bros. Brawl Tutorial Videos

Updated on Tuesday, November 18, 2008 at 11:39AM by Sirlin

Updated on Tuesday, November 25, 2008 at 8:02PM by Sirlin

Updated on Thursday, December 4, 2008 at 8:53PM by Sirlin

Updated on Thursday, December 18, 2008 at 11:22AM by Sirlin

I made this series of ten short tutorial videos for Super Smash Bros. Brawl. They appear on the official Nintendo Channel accessible through your Wii, on Nintendo's website, and below from YouTube. Nintendo asked me to explain the game to new players in a way that shows them there is more going on than they might think. Remember, these videos are for new players, not for tournament champions and they're intended to help the Smash scene grow.

Smash Bros. sells well in the US and in Japan, but struggles more in Europe. It sells more in both the US and Japan, while the perception in Eurpose is that it's "that kids game with the Mario Kart characters." A strange and ironic statement considering that the "Mario Kart characters" aren't even originally from Mario Kart, but that game sells well in Europe so it's a point of reference for many. Maybe my videos and the reputation of my name will help increase the scene in Europe. (Note to anrgy commenters: this information is from Nintendo, not from me. The idea that my name as an expert on competitive games might help in this situation is from Nintendo, not from me, and that's why they contacted me.)

Special thanks to David "Scamp" Cantrell and Cedric "Ceirnian" Qualls for gameplay advice, Rich "FMJaguar" DeLauder for editing and secretly keeping sirlin.net working, and Mike "Bocci" Boccieri for his technical wizardry with video capture.

As more of the videos become available on youtube, I'll post them all below. If you're interested in these videos, you might try that new "share article" link below, for digg or one of those new-fangled link-swapping sites.

--Sirlin

Part 1: The Two Games

Click to read more ...

Sirlin.net: HD Remix

Sirlin.net is all-new. Let's go over the changes.

More than Game Design

First, a change in theme. Game design is great and all, but it's not enough of a topic. There's more to say in life, and even if we stuck to game design, it necessarily branches out into other topics anyway. Games are for people, and so designing them requires some understanding of human psychology. Making games requires problem-solving and some knowledge of how other fields solve very complicated problems would help. Games are part of pop-culture and have the power to make statements--whether the creators intend those statements or not. Because of this power, we should be conscious of what our games are really about. I don't mean surface of a game--whether it's set it medieval times or World War 2--I mean the emergent properties of the rules. For an example, try this game about surviving in Hatai and notice how the experience created by the rules communicates a statement.

Because all my effort has gone into creating this new site, you'll have to wait for some articles that actually cover these topics, but they'll come.

New Content

I wrote about 13,000 words in a set of 4 new articles about balancing games: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4. That's about 25% the length of my book, Playing to Win, so I could definitely extend those articles into an entire book about game balancing. Unfortunately, the market for such a book is way too small, so I guess I won't. (Writing books is a lot of effort!)

I slightly revised my Yomi Layer 3 article, moderately revised my Rock, Paper, Scissors article, and completely rewrote my Slippery Slope article. I didn't transfer all my old articles over yet, but the best ones, the ones about multiplayer games, are here and polished up a little. I also didn't transfer over all my old blog posts, but the ones I felt are most important to look back on here, and many of them have several formatting fixes and broken links fixed.

The sidebar now has a section for games that I worked on. In it, you'll find an article on Kongai that previously appeared on gamasutra and a few pages about my Yomi card game, including an article on its design, now that the game is no longer secret. Incidentally, I'm still working on Yomi, and the art is the major thing holding it up, but artists are working on that right now. My article on balancing Puzzle Fighter is still pretty popular, so you'll find that in the sidebar, too. Finally, in the near future you'll find about 20 articles about Street Fighter HD Remix in the sidebar, in a handy collapsible menu. These will be similar to the articles you might have read on Capcom's website, but revised so that they are all written from the same point of view (after development is done) and also completely in my own words. Stay tuned for that.

99.98% Uptime

My last webhost (wingsix.com) was awful. Good riddance! They took my site down 3 times in one week without any notice, all for bogus reasons that were their fault. My site is now hosted on a sytem with grid architecture that can handle huge spikes of hits and not go down. My old site went down every single day twice a day, for 20 minutes at a time due to poor handling by the webhost. This should be a dramatic improvement in reliability with uptime % somewhere between 99.98% and 100%. If you are serious about getting that kind of uptime for your own site, as well as an awesome visual interface to build the site and a tons of features already built-in for you, sign up for squarespace.

Reader Comments

All the comments from my old site are gone. This half on purpose and I think it's a freeing move that lets us start anew. I really think I should only allow comments in the form of trackbacks or comments from registered users who donate to my site or something. I don't say that at all as an attempt to make money, but just as a barrier to keep out the various haters and clueless people who stop by. I think it would really increase the quality of discussions. Several people told me not to do that though, so all you miscreants are in luck.

Also, you can finally preview your comments before posting them and edit your comments for 15 minutes after you post them.

Recommended Books

I've been doing a lot of reading, so my recommended books page now has 13 new books. All these recent additions to the list are in the psychology section. There's almost 50 books on the list in total now, so you have some work to do. Or you could wait a few years and I'll write a book that summarizes many of the points from those psychology books for you.

Playing to Win Book

My own book is still free online, and now it should be a lot easier to find, with a link right there in the top navigation bar. You an also buy a physical copy from Lulu (recommended), Amazon, or Amazon Kindle, in addition to reading it for free.

RSS

I have a new RSS feed now, and it should be generally better than the old one. It's formatted better, and now incorporates better stat tracking on my end. Fyi, the RSS feed includes both my posts and articles together, and does not include comments. Also, you can subscribe via e-mail now if you type your e-mail address into the form in the sidebar. Google runs the service that takes your e-mail and sends my new posts, so you'll be safe from spam. It's a nice alternative if you're not into new-fangled technology like RSS.

TipJoy

There's a TipJoy link at the top right of my site. If you want to leave a tip, all you do is leave your e-mail address in the TipJoy field. The advantage is that it's literally one click, whereas PayPal takes more clicks and requires you have PayPal setup in the first place. TipJoy is an interesting company in that it might help spread the concept of paying for content that you appreciate on the web by making the process much easier for readers. Right now, if you appreciate my content, you could leave a PayPal donation (great!) or you could click on ads, but that's kind of strange for advertisers if you have no intent to buy their stuff (but hey, I'm not stopping you).

So what TipJoy does is automatically create an account for you if you leave your e-mail address as a tip somewhere. You can tip all day, as much as you want, on whatever sites you want. I'll receive no money, and you'll pay no money until you later decide to put actual cash into your account, presumably when you've tipped enough around the web that you feel a little guilty for not actually paying your tab. There's no point in putting a fake e-mail address because all that means is I get nothing and you typed a fake e-mail address for no reason. The huge downside to all this though, that content creators can't cash out with cash right now, only A bucks. If they catch on, that will change.

Sorry to go on and on about this tip thing, I'm mostly explaining it as possible interesting shift on the web in general. Also, it's funded by Y-Combinator, which is a VC firm that knows wtf they are doing.

Chat

There's a chat room in the sidebar now, and underneath it is a link to a bigger version of it so you have more room to chat (they are linked together). This will surely be a complete disaster of a feature that I'll have to remove, so get it while you can. You guys like to argue about everything, so I thought I'd try to integrate even more ways for you to go at it.

Draw My Thing

This Draw My Thing game is awesome. It's a shared whiteboard where players take turn trying to draw the given word or phrase. One player draws while the rest guess, and whoever types the exact correct text gets a point, then it's the next person's turn to draw. Casual and fun! I put it on my site for the hell of it.

Enjoy the new site. I plan to update it much more frequently now.

Magic: The Gathering Makes a Card for Me

Ken Nagle from Wizards of the Coast explains here how he designed a Magic: The Gathering card inspired by me. It's in the Shards of Alara set.

The first of many Sirlin-inspired Magic cards.

Hadouken!

David Sirlin is a world-class Street Fighter player and game designer. Whenever he talks about "the most balanced" games with "the best design," he inevitably sticks Magic: The Gathering at the top of his list. He obviously has great respect for the game design work we at Wizards of the Coast do on Magic.

A simple question arose in my mind: if David Sirlin were to design a Magic card, what would it be? I reached for the lowest-hanging fruit...

In Naya design, this card was upgraded to hit players, ending many a stalemate between Spearbreaker Behemoths and Feral Hydras. This card was cycled across Naya into Soul's Might, Soul's Fire, Soul's Grace, and embraced by the creative team as a chance to show Ajani on cards other than Ajani Vengeant. Development and templating dropped the "tap your guy as an additional cost" to remove text and combo better with attacking (via exalted and unearth).

Here's my Hadouken.

Thanks Ken, that's awesome that you made a hadouken card as a tribute to me. Though if I designed a card, it would have been something that captured the essense of the Shoryuken. The Shoryuken says, "I know what you were going to do, and I was ready for it." I would have looked for some way to make a counterspell that you play ahead of time, proving you know what's coming, rather than as a reaction. Meddling Mage comes to mind, the card that Chris Pikula got to design for winning the Sydney tournament in the year 2000.

This card requires knowing the opponent's deck.

To really get that "bam!" moment though, it would be better if you could bait the opponent into playing just the card you expected, then show right then that you expected it. It's pretty hard to capture that in Magic though, because there isn't really a clean way of naming a card, yet keeping it secret which card you named. If there were a way though, it's easy to imagine the cycle across the colors. The red version would deal damage when you Shoryuken them; blue would let you draw cards; green would put a token creature into play under your control; black would make them sacrifice permanents; white would do something boring.