Japanese Players Enjoying SF HD Remix

Here's a video of Japanese Street Fighter players (including Otochun and Aniken) playing SF HD Remix. Skip to about 1:05:00 or so for when they finally get going.

They are having such a good time that it makes even more fun to watch. They all laugh (in happiness I think!) when Vega's wall dive doesn't knock down, and when someone lands a fake slide into throw with Bison. They also get excited that Ken can now do his super as a reversal.

With Daigo and Tokido both saying good things about the game, Muteki, Yuu Vega, and Jodim all playing on XBLA, and videos like this one, it seems they are pretty into it. Aniken said this (to Masa) in the comment thread about an HD Remix event there:

> Masa
I also think it would be interesting and fun to have HD at the game center
but we have to face reality, there's nothing we can do about it!

For Ken, Remix Ryu and Sagat are very difficult opponents, it's fun!♪
Looking forward to seeing you at Sunday's tourney!

Too bad the game isn't actually released in Japan, it seems like it would do really well.

Puzzle Strike and Dominion

Sometimes people ask me about the differences between Puzzle Strike and Dominion, so I'll put it all in one place for reference. Even though Dominion inspired Puzzle Strike, the games are quite different. Puzzle Strike fixes what, in my opinion, are numerous problems with Dominion. Now, before you get all bent out of shape, you are free to enjoy and love Dominion. I'm not stopping you or telling you that you didn't have fun playing it. I'm just saying there are several things I consider problems and that I thought I could turn all those things around with improvements on many fronts.

Form Factor

Both games involve a lot of shuffling, and I do mean a lot. Some people are really bad at shuffling and that slows the game down quite a bit. Even those who are good at it can feel bogged down. Changing the form factor to chips that you shake up in a bag makes this easier and faster. Some people tell me this is the most important difference between the two games, but I disagree. I think it's actually the least important difference of anything in this post.

Characters (aka Variable Player Powers)

Playing a symmetric game just feels flat and boring after having experienced so many asymmetric games. Street Fighter with only one character? Starcraft with only one race? Magic: the Gathering where we all start with the same deck? Yes, I'm aware that *during* a game, things can diverge even in a symmetric game, but really that's miles away from a true asymmetric experience. If a given pool of cards has a best strategy, then everyone should be going for that strategy. With different characters (who each have different gameplay), everyone has different strategies even within the same pool of chips.

It's also worth noting that there are more unique character abilities in Puzzle Strike than there are different chips in the bank! Or Kingdom cards in a Dominion set! The point is, there are a lot of them and they greatly expand the replayability. In a 2-player match, there are 45 different possible character matchups (or 55 if you count mirror matches). And 210 matchups in a 4-player game. Multiply that by the millions of starting conditions from the bank chips, and it's a crazy amount of gamespace to explore.

By contrast, Dominion has 0 characters (meaning no variable player powers) and zero different character matchups. Or you could say 1 character and 1 matchup, I guess. Now, balancing 45 (or 210) matchups is a hell of a lot harder than balancing 1 matchup, but we had months of tournaments to do so and I think the balance turned out great. Exploring the dozens of character matchups is one of the greatest features of the game.

Faster Start

In Puzzle Strike, you start with three character chips in your deck, while in Dominion, you start with three cards that do literally nothing during gameplay. I like getting to the fun stuff faster, and starting with 3 actions instead of 3 blanks really helps.

Interactivity!

Puzzle Strike increases the interactivity a ton over

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Yomi and Puzzle Strike (2nd Printing) Pre-orders

At long last, you can finally pre-order Yomi and the 2nd printing of Puzzle Strike. Both the games will be available in January. This is the first release ever of Yomi after 6 years of development. I already released Puzzle Strike, but this new version will finally allow the game to be available in large quantities and at a lower price (with cheaper shipping in the US, also).

I made a couple videos that show the components of the games. I don't go into the awesomeness of the gameplay in these videos, so you'll just have to take my word that they both have pretty awesome and balanced gameplay. Or you can play the early-in-development online versions for free at fantasystrike.com/dev and see for yourself. (Players there will be happy to teach you, I'm sure.)

Here's a video showing what's in the Yomi box:

And here's one showing what's inside the Puzzle Strike box:

This is the culmination of years of work of design, balancing, tournament playtesting, art creation, packaging design, and exacting manufacturing preparation. When I saw the finished product and how well it turned out, I was supposed to feel excited, but really I just felt relief. Now it's your turn to get excited though.

I hope you enjoy Yomi and Puzzle Strike.

Football Helmet Clown Shoes Guy

I was doing some consulting on a small game that I can't really talk about, but there's a lot of customization in the game. I was discussing with a friend (the mysterious Mr. G. Phantome) how we were going to balance this thing. He imagined a future player who works really hard to make his guy into a samurai. He has the samurai helmet and armor pieces, and a decent plasma sword and everything. And then he meets...

Football Helmet Clown Shoes Robot. The terror of the metagame, this guy destroys the samurai guy. Why? Because even though the samurai looks cool, he basically sucks. The mishmash, discordant eyesore of Football Helmet Clown Shoes guy is just way more powerful. We imagined that the forums are full of outraged players, complaining about this, but they don't really grasp the game system. They keep calling for the football helmet to be nerfed, but they don't understand that the clown shoes are what really powers the build, in fact, it's really just the left shoe.

A new player starts playing and asks what pieces he should be looking for. The experienced players tell him "Dude, you want Football Helmet and Clown Shoes, for sure." The sad new guy asks if he has any other choice. "Caveman is barely viable," says the expert. "Flower hands can win too, but loses to everything else so good luck with that."

The point of all this is just that a customizeable system can have aesthetics at odds with balance or power. You have to look out that for the problem that actual experience the player will have with the game is encountering absurdly bad-looking characters. Imagine a fighting game, for example, where one guy is wearing some ugly safari outfit and the other has a huge hat that covers half his character and some enormous robe that covers the rest, so you can hardly tell who anyone even is. Yeah it's fun to customize, but some careful art direction is in order.

Magic: the Gathering

Later, for reasons unrelated to the above, I was scrolling through some images of Magic: the Gathering cards. By chance, I happend to come across the card Donate. I asked Mr. G. Phantome if he knew about how Donate (a seemingly terrible card that gives the opponent one of your cards) was actually part of one of the most powerful and dominant decks ever. He said he was not aware. So then I showed him Illusions of Grandeur, the other part of the combo. I told him to just LOOK at the cards, not even really read what they do, but

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Inafune and Starcraft Genetic Algorithms (unrelated)

Inafune Leaves Capcom

Here's a long interview with Inafune about leaving Capcom. He was, until recently, their head of development. One of his main points is that having a huge burn rate is bad. A burn rate is the amount of money you must pay to keep paying your team. This is exactly the point I've made for years, and I've kept my own company at the smallest possible burn rate I can.

If you have a large payroll to meet every month, the good part is that you probably have a lot of great workers who can accomplish a lot of great things. But there is a real bad part too. It means you must have projects going all the time. If it would be better for a project to do a long planning phase of several months before going into production, you'll be wasting everyone's salary by having them sit around and wait for planning. If you are a company that sets up deals with other companies for development (for example, you are a developer who gets paid by a publisher to make a game, or you're a publisher who looks for developers to make games for you), then a high burn rate means you need to make those deals by a certain date or there is going to be a disaster. If you have a horrible deal on the table, you might be forced to take it because waiting 2 months might be astronomically expensive.

Also, a high burn rate means that a huge return is needed to break even. If you need to sell a huge number of copies to just break even, it means you're going to be more afraid to take risks. Even if you say otherwise as you sit in your comfortable arm chair right now, free from any actual responsibility, if you were in such a position, you can't help but think that a risk could destroy the whole company when the stakes are that high. And if you aren't thinking that, your executives are. Being forced into "hit or die" is not great for creativity, and we'd hope that our industry is about creativity. In short, I totally agree with Inafune on that particular point, that a high burn rate is a very dangerous.

Starcraft 2

I thought this use of genetic algorithms looking for build orders in Starcraft 2 was really interesting. It seems like a good area to apply genetic algorithms, and I've imagined such a thing for years, but I never heard of anyone actually doing it.

The idea is to have a computer try a whole bunch of build orders and rate them on "fitness" (how close they are to a desired outcome of like "build a lot of marines by time X" or something. The ones that are fit, the computer tends to keep; the ones that aren't, it tends to discard. There are mutations over time that test if this or that variation helps or hurts. There are also several "villages" of these algorithms that are running independently, so if one stagnates at some evolutionary dead end, the whole thing is replaced by a new village that's based on the most successful other village.

The algorithm found a new (or at least previously not popular) build order to create 7 Roach units very, very quickly. The build order is kind of unintuitive, so it's exactly the kind of thing that a genetic algorithm would be good at finding. Pretty cool!