Puzzle Strike Sale

In celebration of Puzzle Strike's 1.75th year anniversary, the base game + Upgrade Pack together are only $50 (wowow) for the next couple weeks, or while supplies last. If you've been waiting on trying out the game, here's your chance to get those playmats, screens with amusing 8-bit art, and extra puzzle chips, and rebalanced characters for FREE. And yes they fit in the box, by the way.

Also if any of you are going to PAX East in a couple weeks, note that there's an official Puzzle Strike tournament at noon on Friday, April 6th, as well as copies available to play on your own from the game library, and demos of the game at the Game Salute booth. There's an official Yomi tournament too at PAX East, at 5:30pm the same day.

If you'd like to volunteer to help out at PAX East or any other events, you can do so by signing up here. Game Salute gives you free stuff for helping out too. Thanks in advance for the help, and to the entire Puzzle Strike player community!

This Week in Sirlin Games

A lot of stuff has happened in the past week. First, there was the Game Developer's Conference, and you can read (a whole lot of words) about my personal experiences with it here:

• GDC 2012, Indie Game: The Movie
• GDC 2012, The Day Before Day 1
• GDC 2012, Day 1
• GDC 2012, Day 2
• GDC 2012, Day 3

Next, Yomi received a Best Card Game award from Bestcovery. Yomi stands among Dominion, King of Tokyo, Apples to Apples, and UNO on the Best Card Games list on Bestcovery.com.

Games With Two also reviewed both Yomi and Puzzle Strike in the last week:

• Games With Two Yomi Review
• Games With Two Puzzle Strike Review

And there's more! PAX East will have both an official Yomi tournament and an official Puzzle Strike tournament on the convention's tournament schedule. There will also be demos of Sirlin Games at the Game Salute booth. We could use your help in running those tournaments and in doing demos of Yomi, Puzzle Strike, and/or Flash Duel, too. If you're interested in helping out, please sign up at gamesalute.com/volunteer. You can also sign up to help out at other conventions such as GenCon and Origins at that same link. I think our whole community would be grateful to anyone willing to be an ambassador to introduce new players to our games, so thanks in advance.

And one more thing. Sirlin Games has had a distributor in Canada for some time now: Lion Rampant. And now we have a distributor in Germany, too: Brave New World. German stores (or stores anywhere in the world) can still order from Game Salute at gamestorelocator.com, but now German stores can go through the channels they're more used to going through, and they can probably save on shipping cost, too. If you're in Germany, now's your chance support your local stores, and tell them to sign up with Brave New World and carry Sirlin Games if they haven't already.

It was quite a week! And thanks to all of you for making Flash Duel our latest success!

GDC 2012, Day 3

The Last 10: Going From Good To Awesome

Benson Russel of Naughty Dog talked about how they polish their games. As he said this, everyone in the room thought to themselves "Blizzard...Blizzard..." But actually this was about Uncharted 3, and not Starcraft.

Benson explained that polish is not something you just hope happens, that it has to be scheduled and planned for. He showed a diagram of a normal company's production schedule. It has some pre-production, a very long production phase, then alpha, beta, and ship. Then he showed Naughty Dog's version of this, with the same total length because the point is the relative lenghts of each phase. They have a much shorter production phase and a longer alpha phase and beta phase. There is even an additional "hands off" phase after beta and before ship.

The shorter production phase ensures that any core mechanics are figured out even sooner than they sometimes are at other companies. He also said this kind of scheduling requires a "hard alpha," like you can't half-ass it. The alpha really does need to have everything there in a rough form and the entire game playable from beginning to end. Once it's all stitched together enough to play it all through, and everything in place (at least roughly), alpha becomes the polish phase and for them lasted 4 months on uncharted 3. He said they would like it to last a bit longer next time. I think beta also lasted 4 months, but I'm not sure on that. The "hands off" phase is actually after the polishing is done. At this point, it's only the QA department and programmers playing it, and the only purpose is to find major showstopping bugs. On Uncharted 3, during this period they actually did find a very difficult to detect loading bug that would have caused the game to crash on 25% of the Playstation 3s out there. 

To show us what "polish" means, he showed several example videos of Uncharted 3. He had videos showing a bug, and then showing the same scene when the bug was fixed. It was often small stuff, but that's his point, really. That you can't let a bunch of small bugs drag down the overall feeling of the game, it all adds up. He had to play most of these bug videos twice so we could even *see* what the bug was. In one, the main character is in a tunnel and sees rushing water coming, turns from it, and runs. As he turns, there is an animation glitch (over in a fraction of a second) before he runs. In another example, the scene starts with a stationary camera, then the camera moves in to show the action. The bug is that during the part where it's stationary, there is accidentally one frame (yeah, one frame) where the camera moves forward. In another example, an NPC throws an enemy to the ground, but the enemy is then right under his feet, which doesn't really look right or make any sense. The corrected version has the enemy fly a couple feet to the side, so he's not directly under the guy who threw him. Another example showed that one scene where the main character falls into a new environment has the background ambient lighting set to a wrong value during part of the fall. And yet another example showed a scene where for just one frame, the screen was pure white for no reason. 

So yeah, they fix all this stuff during alpha and beta. And they even have a person on the team, not the QA team but like the real team, whose job it is to look for these polish issues. They have a fairly high ranking person do this because it's not just about spotting the issues (though apparently he is great at that), it's about making a judgment call about how to fix or what to fix. There is often the issue that fixing something might be really easy or really hard (is it worth it?) and the other issue that fixing something might be low risk or high risk (is it worth the possibility that the fix could fuck up other parts of the game?). 

Benson also explained that as alpha and beta go on, it is (intentionally) harder and harder to get changes approved. At first, it's like a free-for-all. Everyone fix everything they can, go! They monitor bug counts and everyone does their best to keep their bug counts down to at most X bugs, set by their project managers. By looking at these bug counts, they can see if any particular team member is overwhelmed, and maybe needs help fixing stuff, and if another team member doesn't have many to work on. Also, seeing the rate of fixes helps them estimate if they are on track to ship on time or not.

So at some point in all that, they institute a rule that from then on, they have to be more careful about making lots of changes because ship date is getting closer. So you have to get the approval of one of three executives (including my friend, game director Justin Richmond, haha go Justin) to change something. A bit later on, you need two approvals. After that, you need all three of them to approve any change. This is just good sense, if you've ever been on a software project before. They are reducing their risk screwing things up at the last minute this way.

BURN THIS MOTHERFATHER! Game Dev Parents Rant 

In the annual rant session hosted by Eric Zimmerman, developer's break out of their prepared scripts to tell us passionately what's bothering them. I think this is an important part of the conference overall, because we get under the surface about what's really going on. Except...we totally didn't this time and it mostly sucked. I am more upset about three things before breakfast than half these people were about whatever they are supposedly "ranting" about.

Graeme Devine started us off just fine, at about 80% or so on the rant-scale. He is sad that

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GDC 2012, Day 2

Designing Games for Game Designers

Stone Librande is creative director at EA/Maxis, and on the weekends he teaches students game design. His talk was about how he uses board games, card games, and other non-digital elements to teach game design. He believes that no computers are needed to teach design, and that they actually get in the way. The fundamental concepts can be gotten to more quickly without the distraction and complication of software.

He was inspired by an article from Greg Costikyan (someone in comments will link that article?) but he said it was too hard to get students to read some long thing. Actually, he oftened mention things he's done that didn't engage students enough and how he changed things up to get them interested, and it often involves making a game out of things or tweaking the rules of things, so that's kind of meta-interesting, if you know what I mean. Anyway, he summarized the essay he liked with a very simple diagram. I don't have time to draw, but I can use some boring words for you.

A game is a START CONDITION with an arrow pointing to a GOAL. Inbetween those two things is one or more OBSTACLES. A dotted line around the entire thing represents the RULE SYSTEM that the player interacts with in order to change things in the system, and it lets them make moves from the start condition toward that goal.

I think he taught these concepts very well. By just telling you that, or showing you a digram, you might not fully and deeply understand it. A better way to understand it ("it" being the system described) is to...play a game about it. Playing a game is like the ideal way to understand a system. So has devised many simple games, like dozens and dozens that he uses for this stuff. I don't remember specifics here, but stuff about rolling dice and getting different colored poker chips that let you make different moves or something, and a goal about having X number of points. And the catch is, hey lets change things around now! But we'll only change the start conditions. Then you see how much effect start conditions really have. Ok now let's keep start conditions fixed, and change around the goal. Notice how it makes some of the rules extraneous, like they don't do anything interesting any more, but other rules still work fine. In each case here, we made a very differnet game.

One example of changing start conditions was Backgammon. There is historical evidence that a very long time ago (thousands of years I think), all the black player's pieces started on the black player's first space, while all the white player's pieces started on the white player's first space. So the start conditions were different. This is kind of boring though because it means there are several turns that are just filler, they don't have enough of an impact on the game to be interesting. (Note: this is exactly why I made Flash Duel's board 18 spaces rather than En Garde's 23 spaces.) Anyway, later on in history the start conditions of Backgammon changed and the pieces got to interact even on turn 1, so that's way more fun.

Another excercise he did is present students with a game where each player has a starship that has 4 slots on it where you can put dice. Each player gets two 4-sided dice, one 6 sided die, and one 10-sided die. Two slots are for weapons, one slot for shields, and one for engines. When two ships fight, first you each roll the engine dice. The player with the higher result gets to attack with both weapons, while the player with the lower result only gets to attack with one weapon. The shield roll subracts damage that weapons deal.

He had players configure their starships however they wanted, then they all played each other. This is actually an *excellent* lesson that is very relevant to what we do every single day in development of Sirlin Games, because the whole point of it is balance feedback the players give. Some players very strongly claim that some configuration is the best and "overpowered" or whatever. Why? Because they played like 2 games or something and this anecdotal evidence convinved them. So it's a lesson that if you're that sure about game balance from that little evidence, you just don't know what you're doing. When such a claim comes up, Stone then shows them how to use Excel or something to just compute the expected value of damage of one configuration compared to another. And of course this often shows that the "overpowered" ship is actually weaker than the other guy's. Stone said he didn't know if there is a single best ship, or if there is some rock, paper, scissors set of ships that counter each other, and left it as an exercise to the reader.

Just a quick note on that, it's hard to even type that last line without mentioning what I think is the key concept to both Poker and Yomi: Donkeyspace. Even if you knew how to play Poker or the Yomi card game optimally, playing optimally would not be the most successful strategy in a tournament or ladder. Playing optimally means you are playing in the least exploitable way, which is a pretty sweet. But imagine you played against someone who was playing really terribly, like RPS where they blatantly only ever play rock. You should not play "optimally," you should play to exploit their badness. So even if there was a single best ship in Stone's example, it's entirely possible that playing that ship would not win a tournament, and that someone exploiting other people's bad ships even more would win.

Oh I forgot to mention that from the very beginning, for all these games he says he encourages the students to really try to win. He taunts them and Stone himself plays and doesn't hold back, letting everyone know he will gloat if he wins. This is specifically because

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GDC 2012, Day 1

Today was the first day of the main conference.

To give you an idea of the pulse of the industry, here's my summary of the vibe in as few words as possible:

"Facebook, iOS, social, monetization, clones, and I thought I was going to die making this game."

Thinking you're going to die making a game has been mentioned a surprising number of times by different people, all independently, and in each case is not meant jokingly but rather to convey the physical and emotional distress that people are feeling. We heard about it in great detail from the Super Meat Boy and Fez teams. A guy who gave the cloning games lecture also said it. Today I talked with Steve Swink, indie superstar who was working on the awesome Shadow Physics, but he cancelled it due to difficulties in the relationship with his programmer partner. He explained to me he had ulcers and other stomach problems and felt like he was going to die. Later in the day, Portal 2 won best writing at the game awards thing. Imagine what an "indie game developer" actually looks like. This guy was like, the opposite. He was wearing a suit I think, and looked like a mature adult. Anyway he mentioned that he thought he was going to die making Portal 2. So this is a like a meme but at the stage where people don't realize everyone's saying it.

Speaking of the game awards, in the Independent Games Festival awards, best game design went to Spelunky. Shout outs and congratulations to Derek Yu, who is a cool guy. The award for best game overall went to Fez, and Phil Fish was so choked up that he couldn't even speak. This makes the Indie Game: The Movie especially poignant, given that we saw his torturous backstory.

Flash Forward

Today started with something the GDC hasn't done before. Every speaker of the entire 3-day conference presents all in a row, 45 seconds at a time, telling us what their upcoming sessions will be about. There was quite a diverse range of presentation styles, but I guess I don't have time to go into that. At the 45 second mark, the huge array of stage lights suddenly turn red and a very loud and unpleasant buzz sound goes off, so the speaker knows they went over and must stop. A few people incorporated the buzz into attempts at jokes, such as one guy pretending he was unsure what the buttons did on the podium. At the end, the organizer of the Flash Forward thanked everyone and said it reminded her of a story about her Grandfather who would always--BUZZ!!! *red lights*

Sid Meier

I sat by Soren Johnson, which was an interesting perspective, given that he worked with Sid Meier for 7 years. Anyway, Sid's talk was kind of surprisingly basic. Or maybe not that surprising because the last talk he gave at GDC was also basic. I don't think there's anything wrong with his points, and I know he's super smart, I just wish he kind of went past the elementary level.

He said he "googled himself on the internets" and found that the most common thing said about him is the quote that "games are a series of interesting decisions." He says he thinks this was from his 1989 GDC presentation. Wait, that can't be right, I think that's older than the conference? I don't know. Anyway his whole talk was about decisions that we present to players.

Interesting decisions are ones where players don't just choose the same thing every time (if that's the case, let the computer do it automatically) and they aren't ones where you choose randomly. It has to involve actual thinking. He explained many different sources of interest, such as choices that have differnet levels of risk. Or that are short term vs medium term vs long term. Or that are tradeoffs along some other dimension. Or that even involve non-gameplay customization, as that is very interesting to lots of players too.

Sid cautioned us that we aren't "paid by the decision," meaning that game designers sometime have a tendency to think more decisions is always better. This can lead to overwhelming the player though. I sure know about that from working on my customizable card game, btw. In an attempt to make the gameplay deep enough to last years without new sets of cards, one version of it involved so many decisions, than even I was fatigued and exhausted from playing it. There is a limit where it's just not fun anymore. Apparently Sid ran into this same limit a lot in developing Civilization, so he'd cut the number of technologies or whatever available at any one time down to like 3 to 5.

I thought was interesting that Sid also emphasized what's really the flipside of his point,

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