Lost Garden

My top secret reading list

noreply@blogger.com (Danc) — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 20:56:00 +0000

I figured that it was time to share with my secret stash. I've been using Google Reader to tag interesting articles and publish them all to a single location. Occasionally, I've added snarky comments. You can find the entire treasure trove here:

http://www.google.com/reader/shared/04653747362202207327

This list is updated a bit more regularly than my blog, but since I don't believe in covering Lost Garden with link fests, I'll keep it as a hidden secretive thing. So shh...tell only special people.

What a glorious summer day,

Danc.

Engineering Emotions: More predictions come to pass

noreply@blogger.com (Danc) — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 22:03:00 +0000

Back in 2007, I wrote about some hypothetical technologies like real time motion capture, voice recognition and biosensors that were on the horizon that would have a dramatic impact on how we design emotional games. Those technologies are now becoming mainstream with console accessories like Microsoft Natal and the Wii Vitality Sensor. Others techniques like feeding player's input into internet API's like search and social networks are already easily implemented using basic capabilities available to even the most limited game devices on the market.

In the essay Constructing Artificial Emotions, I described a 'crazy' futuristic game design called Bacchus:

"Bacchus is a multiplayer dancing game with a religious theme. The selling point is its ability to evoke intense emotions.

Imagine if you will, a decrepit theater filled with writhing, dancing people. The lights flare and swoop in time and the people chant in unison. A massive screen shows a mirror image of the hall like some surrealistic portal into an alternate universe. Instead of blokes and lasses in street clothes, the on screen spirits are clad in ornate ritualistic garb. The movements on each side of screen are eerily synchronized. The pitch of the chant rises.

The screen zooms in on a girl in the center of the room. The crowd, as one, turns and watches her figure on the screen. She begins to dance. At first her movement is controlled and intricate. The screen pulsates and she yells to its beat. The room takes up her words and amplifies them, giving them god-like resonance. Bass mixed with reverb mixed with primal, guttural passion. Her dance becomes wild. The pace increases and she begins to confess.

The theater reacts. Each word she utters shimmers on screen, merging with ghostly photos from her past. In a beat, the entire room witnesses her sorrow over the death of her mother, her time alone in an empty apartment, and her first kiss. An inhumanly beautiful electronic chorus rises, matches and turns her words into a song. Her movements become a blur. Her glowing eyes are ecstatic. At the peak, her spirit on the large screen explodes in light and the girl collapses to the floor in fervent religious swoon.

The crowd goes wild. The screen zooms out and the next god dancer is chosen.

Later, the girl writes to her online friends that the night she danced was the single most powerful spiritual and emotional experience in her entire life. It was the night she was touched by a higher power while playing a video game."
(http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1992/constructing_artificial_emotions_.php)

The original essay is an admittedly difficult read, but I recommend revisiting it. In short, psychological experiments show that by intentionally mixing physical states of excitement with the appropriate context a designer can concoct emotional responses that are indistinguishable from naturally occurring emotions. The design techniques described within are no longer futuristic daydreaming. A basic form of Bacchus could be made in the next few years.

In the past games have been limited in the types of responses they can evoke in players because the range of human activities that we could model and reward were limited. We've admittedly designed amazing experiences that only rely on the limited ability to press a button. However, a cursory inventory of the human body and mind is surprisingly more comprehensive than a twitching thumb. We can move our amazing and capable bodies, we can engage in complex social interactions, we can become excited or depressed. All these basic elements of our humanity have been outside the realm of game design because we could not track them, build models around them or reward desired behaviors.

Now we can.

With these new tools and a mass market that embraces them, we have a vast laboratory of millions of players. Early mini-games will act as experiments in the engineering of human emotions. Initially, we'll focus on found fun since that is what our audience is currently trained to consume. With time and enough experiments, we'll begin to notice that with the ability to manipulate body, mind, social context and excitement level, we gain the ability to evoke deeply meaningful emotions. Imagine visceral sorrow, lust, anger, happiness, cruelty, generosity, stress and contentedness. All the emotions reproducibly evoked in psychology lab experiments become our creative palette.

Every game becomes a reality television show starring the player.

Every game designers becomes pragmatic engineers of the player's emotional experience, dissecting and reconstructing the ephemeral moments of human nature. Our games turn into intricate systems of hardware and software that play players like a willful instrument.

Hardware like Natal, MotionPlus, Sony's wands and the Vitality Sensor are really just the beginning. There is an entirely new class of middleware that tracks the torrent of new sensor information and teases out useful patterns of human behavior. Fresh emotional game mechanics that are as new to the world as moving objects in Spacewar! must to be invented from whole cloth. There is great work to be done.

Once again, I'm reminded what an exciting time it is to be a game developer.

take care

Danc.

Bunni Sneak Peek

noreply@blogger.com (Danc) — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 21:59:00 +0000

I had an immensely good time collaborating with Andre on Fishing Girl earlier this year. He was looking for a new project and so we started idly chatting about random ideas. One thing led to another and he is now nearing the finish line on a new Flash game called Bunni. I thought Andre might enjoy a little bit of public encouragement as he enters the final stretch.

I've been wracking my brain and I don't know of another game out there that is quite like Bunni. Imagine if Animal Crossing had a long lost mutant sibling that coalesced out of a creative flurry in a mere four months. There is no clever twist on shooting, block stacking, or 2D platforming. It is not an innovative music game. Nor does it involve playing with time or bizarro spacial dimensions. If there are any puzzles, I apologize since they weren't intentional. In fact, it isn't a very hard game. I've yet to find a single hidden object, probably because there aren't any. Despite lacking all these critical things, play tests end up lasting for hours.

I don't want to give away too much about the game, but I can share a single, mildly cluttered screen shot. Yes, that is a pirate bunni. And no you can't have one unless you are very, very special.

Bunni: First Screenshot. Likely to change in inexplicable ways.

Oh, and as a bonus, here are some t-shirt designs. Let me know which ones you like the best. (I tossed together a storefront as well just for fun. The internet is so awesome.)

Broken Hearted

Bounce

In Love

Long road to love

take care

Danc.

Danc's Miraculously Flexible Game Prototyping Graphics for Small Worlds

noreply@blogger.com (Danc) — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 05:36:00 +0000

Don't you think it is time for some new free graphics?

The originals
The original set of miraculously flexible prototyping graphics have been out there for a couple of years now. In that time, they've been used in mini-MMO's, shooters, RPGs, platformers and dozens of various projects that lurk in the dark squishy nooks of the ever fermenting, communal indie mash.

However, they had some issues.

They were in a format that wasn't readily accessible to most users. In particular Flash games didn't make as wide a use of them as I would have liked.
They required a rather tricky placement system that most tile based engines had difficulty handling.
Very few games used the shadows system and without the shadows, they tend not to look very good.

There were also a couple other areas I wanted to explore.

HD pixel art: There is an emerging artistic style that showed you could keep the intricate iconic style found in pixel art, but modernize it in such a way to take advantage of the crispness found in modern high resolution displays. The result found in games like Pixel Junk Monsters, Patapon, and Loco Rocco is distinctly game art. It tends to be 2D and highly evocative. But is also is information dense and full of distinct iconic symbols that have meaning during game play. When there is a trade off between realism and functionality, functionality wins.
Vector art: I've done immense amounts of raster art over the years, but lately I've been playing with more vector art. The tools have gotten to the point where you can do some pretty nice stuff rather rapidly without needing to ever go to bitmaps. They are rendered natively in Flash or Silverlight and you can play with scaling without worrying about loss of detail.
Arbitrary placement: Once upon a time, you needed to use little square tiles for everything. Nowadays, there is no real need to make a tile based 2D engine. With arbitrary images with full alpha and lots of fill rate, you can put together a game like a sticker book. Drop down your graphics at arbitrary positions and layer like a madman. Games like Aquaria look great and tiles are nowhere to be seen. There's a good tutorial on the topic here: http://gametuto.com/in-game-c-map-editor-tutorial-with-indielib-engine-that-dosent-use-tiles-but-pieced-images-like-in-braid-or-aquaria-games/

Small World

So I started a new graphics set that took all these into account. The theme I chose was the 'Small World', an intimate place of green trees and blue ocean seen from above. For ages I've been fascinated by tiny worlds that you could imagine keeping like a bonsai garden on a table top.

What types of games can the Small World graphics be used for?

Turn-based strategy games
Real time strategy games
RPG's
God and Sim games
Tower defense (the original inspiration for this set was Pixel Junk Monsters)
Crazy innovative games that will shock and amaze the world.

What does the set include?

70 high quality sprites
The original Illustrator CS4 .AI file
The exported Flash CS4 .FLA file
The exported Flash CS3 .FLA file
The exported Flash 10 .SWF file (with linkages)
Land
Forests
Buildings
Dialogs and buttons

Having the source files allows you to easily manipulate and edit the graphics so you can make variations or combine pieces together. You should have enough pieces to easily prototype attractive little worlds full of forests, fields and cities.

What doesn't this set include?

I have some characters that fit this set, but those will be coming along at a later point.
I haven't had time to cut out all the bitmaps. This is coming shortly unless someone else cuts them out first.
Other formats: In general there are a billion minor formats that all have their passionate proponents. Convert at will. :-)

The License
Much of the email I get involves questions about how various graphics can be used. Though I love hearing from you, it has become apparent that the license needs to be clarified so that I can spend more time making stuff for you and less time writing back about the legal issues.

A second issue is that there have been some unfortunate incidents where players have taken talented developers publicy to task for 'stealing' my artwork or 'copying' game designs. 'Open source game designs' are admittedly a cutting edge concept in our IP-clutching world, so there is some education to be done.

As of today, I've created a separate Lost Garden Licensing page that outlines the license for these graphics. If you plan on using these graphics, be sure to read it. The basics are that they are free to use in both commercial and hobby projects under a standard Creative Commons Attribution license.

The goods
So what are you waiting for?

SmallWorld Graphics.zip
Lost Garden License: Read here for licensing details

I'll be releasing some prototyping challenges that make use of these graphics in the future, but for now just have fun and give them a shot. They were a blast to make.

take care
Danc.

PS: I also included graphics that allow you to make arbitrarily sized islands composed of splotches of land stuck together. This is a tricky technique that only advanced users will undertake. First lay down the water. Then lay down all the Land-Bottom graphics. Then lay down all the Land-Mid graphics. Finally draw all the Land-Top graphics. By layering the graphics in this order, you can create islands that merge together visually.

Game design in 2020

noreply@blogger.com (Danc) — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 20:41:00 +0000

My short essay on future games was selected to be part of the recent Gamasutra 'Games of 2020' feature. The treatment is tongue in cheek and I owe anyone I photoshopped a free beer.

You can read the whole thing here:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3957/games_of_2020__the_winners.php?page=5

The result of all this is that I am now able to attend this year's GDC. If anyone wants to meet up in San Franciso (March 23rd to March 27th), drop me a note at danc [at] lostgarden [dot] com.

take care

Danc.

What is your game design style?

noreply@blogger.com (Danc) — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 05:38:00 +0000

I was about to ask a friend what sort of games she liked to make and I realized that I didn't even know how to frame that question in an intelligent manner. I've noticed that games have distinct styles. These are not visual styles. Nor are they styles associated with prefered process of development. Instead, they are unique styles of game design, how you mix and match mechanics, story, player agency and feedback. What do you emphasize? What aspects of the the player's experience do you highlight with your design choices?

A spectrum of game design styles
It is a broad topic, so I'll just jump right in. Here are some styles that I've noticed. You can think of these categories as pieces of a spectrum that cover all major aspects of the final game design that the player experiences. Though they are all present, each style is emphasized to varying degrees in a particular title.

Copycat: make a game like another game that is interesting.
Experience: Make a distinct moment of game play that looks and feels interesting.
Narrative: Make a story that is interesting
World: Make a place or world that is interesting
Systems: Make systems and objects that are interesting.
Player Skills: Make verbs for the player that are interesting.

Let's give a brief description of each of these styles and how I've seen them work.

Copycat

A copycat designer takes an existing game genre and builds a new work within it. The term 'copycat' is descriptive and not derisive. I personally steal with great gusto from other games and consider an elegantly pulled off theft to be an essential skill for any practicing designer.

Copycats borrow liberally from the best elements of past works and mix them together with minor design innovations to create the new flavor of the month.
If design problems arise, a good solution is often readily available in a historical product in the same genre. The best copycat designers have encyclopedic knowledge of other games in their genre.
The goal is almost always to make something better or 'more correct' than what has been on the market previously.

Most working designers are copycat designers. On the supply side, there exists a natural urge for a player who deeply loves a particular genre to attempt to do a better job. This provides a constant wellspring of new copycat designers. On the demand side, the market's lust for sequels ensures a wide range of jobs that need good copycat designs. Helping this dynamic is the fact that it is quite easy to learn to be a copycat designer. Find a game you like and copy it. You don't need to know theory or have a strong philosophy of design. Over many years of labor you'll likely get quite good at making polished variations on the initial blueprint.

Limitations

Competition is intense. Most of the time you are fighting over market share in a crowded genre. You can avoid the competition by building a strong established brand (which costs lots of money) or you can be first to a popular new platform (which requires technical resources and the ability to predict future markets)
Costs are high. All the polish required results in long development cycles with large teams and large marketing budgets.
Risk aversion dominates: Both copycat players and developers are risk averse. Players want their comfortable fix and developers don't want to introduce undue design risk in an already financially risky project. This often leads to bigger titles that are not always better.

Experience

An experience designer has a vision in their head of how the game will eventually look, feel and sound. They seek to create an emotional moment for the player that matches their vision.

Experience designers start with a mental image of the game. It could be a still shot. It could be a scene. The scene is laden with strong emotional and evocative detail.
Everything in the game exists to serve and bring to life that vision.

When I think of games that demonstrate the Experience style, I immediately think of Flow and Flower. Graveyard is also a good example. Starting with a target experience has a lot of benefits. You can change your art, mechanics, story and other game elements to match the experience. Experience designs have the added benefit of making the original designer valuable and nearly irreplaceable. The vision resides primarily in their head and they can act as the final arbiter of whether or not the actual product meets their vision.

Limitations:

Designs based on a vision are difficult to communicate. On larger teams, communication mistakes can multiply and bog down the project.
Teams can wander down dozens of different paths and still not reach the ephemeral vision in the designer's noggin.
Occasionally other game play elements are poorly fleshed out. You can easily end up with something that is pretty, but isn't all that fun to play.

Narrative

A story designer has a tale, usually a linear sequence of evocative events (or graph of such events), that they wish to tell. Games are the stage upon which the story is performed.

The game is conceived as a narrative arc and gameplay is often relegated to mini-game set pieces strung together to support the creation of the arc.
Design efforts focus on the use of symbols and pacing to evoke emotion. When the designer kills or removes a character and there is nothing the player could have done, you know you are dealing with a Story Designer.
The game is a success if players react strongly to the story that has been woven for them over the course of their play.

Story designers are quite common in larger scale games. Many AAA titles sports a very specific 'roller coaster ride' structure that has narrative design at it's heart. Examples of games built by Story Designers are everywhere. Choose your own adventures are the classic case, but I'd be curious if even a game like Passage was ultimately conceived as a tale with fixed endings (albeit one where authorial intent was enforced by a predestined algorithm).

Limitations

Most story-based games can only be played once or twice before they are no longer interesting. They deliver their tale and then their value is spent.
Every little bit of must-see narrative steals a smidgen of agency away from the player. Instead of letting the player author their own story, the designer steps in and forces their own narrative upon the player. This limits the player's ability to try and learn new things.
Failure is rarely an option, or at least not a serious one. After all, there is a story that must be told. Many times players are shunted from plot point to plot point with minimal gaming fuss.

World

A world designer begins by envisioning an imaginary space. They picture how it might be if they escaped into it as a player.

Place is a critical organizing concept. Items, people, organizations lives in specific places and their spatial relationships give meaning to the world. It is quite common for world designers to think in terms of maps, architecture, towns, races, guilds, districts etc.
Much of the flavor of the place is created through the use of historical detail. The underlying assumption is that the world existed when the player was gone and it will exist when the player leaves.
World designer will often lean heavily on fresh content in the form of new vistas to create a sensation of being in the world. They will often use the same game mechanics throughout, but delight the player by varying the setting from location to location.

The classic example of a World Designer is found in the paper RPG world. A GM will start with a map of continents and flesh out civilizations, races and alliances. This creates a playground for imaginative adventures. Games like Ultima, Oblivion and World of Warcraft also have a strong World style.

Limitations

World designs can often result in bloated games. There is so much stuff in the ever evolving world in your head that it is hard to know when to stop adding. New systems and verbs are created to support the exploration of every nook and cranny and few mechanics interconnect in crisp manner.
World designs are usually an immense amount of work. It is far easier to make a single scene or a situation than it is to flesh out an entire world.
Designers can focus so much on building the space that they forget to fill it with interesting things for the player to do. The result is mechanical place that feels lifeless.

Systems

Systems designers begin with a curious and intriguing set of rules that interact in unexpected ways.

Designs often begin with a set of objects, properties and interesting ways that the objects interact.
Common sources of inspiration include probability, combinatorics, spacial relationships, physics, timing and economic game theory.
The goal is to create a challenge for the player, be it a short term challenge in the form of a puzzle or a long term challenge in the form of a deep possibility space.
Truly deep systems often lay bare their mechanics in order to provide advanced players with absolutely clarity on their inner workings. The result is less room for details like narrative or world building.

Many of the industry's most original forms of gameplay were conceived by people inspired by systems. With simpler rule sets, you find games like Tetris. Complex systems yield creations like SimCity or Populous.

Limitations

You'll often end up with a system that is fascinating to the designer, but not that enjoyable to the player.
Many systems oriented designs come across to players as overly abstract. There isn't a clear entry point into the design for new users in the form of a friendly metaphor or setting.
Systems can be quite difficult to balance due to all the various emergent interactions.

Player skills

Designers that focus on player skills create a set of actions (or 'verbs' in Chris Crawford lingo) for the player to perform. Then they create systems that help them learn those skills.

You start by writing out the type of verbs that you want the player to perform.
Then you figure out systems to go with those verbs
You figure out what additional skills are discovered when the systems are put in front of players.
Finally you figure out the right feedback systems to teach people those skills in an enjoyable manner.

Miyamoto is a good example of a designer inspired by player actions. When developing games he tends to focus on what the player is doing. Mario was originally named Jumpman after the key action you performed in the game. WiiFit came about by asking what sort of game could be built around the joy of weighing yourself. Mario 64 started as a playtest bed where all you could do is run around a small room and exercise the basic verbs of the game.

Limitations

Game play occasionally devolves into a series of disconnected mini-games when designers grab the easiest system available to represent a particular action. For example, in FishingGirl, I used a Frogger-style mechanic to represent fishing. As a simulation it was quite limited and was barely connected to the other mini-games associated with of casting and purchasing lures. In something like God of War, they turn the action "Kill boss monster" into the simplistic mini-game "Simon".
After coming up with a set of fun actions, narrative and world are applied as a skin to the results. The result are surreal worlds involving mushrooms, exploding barrel graphics and other videogame-isms.

Rising design styles
The following styles are starting to appear within a few pockets of game design community.

Social: Designers that focus on encouraging particular types of interactions between multiple people. They have skills of event coordinators or party planners and focus on atmosphere, breaking the ice, moving people from activity to activity as well as efficient build up and take down of the event. Important organizing concepts include 'Events' and 'Social spaces'. MMOs, Party games, and social networking games tend to attract Social designers. It is my believe that the next generation of great designers will be social designers.

Business: Design that focus on business try to squeeze as much money out of players as possible. I meet designers operating in online games and gambling games with this design slant. Typically, you encounter it in ex-designers who have moved onto publishing roles. It is an extremely powerful perspective that is unfortunately rather rare. As free-to-play becomes more popular, gameplay and business model will become even more interwoven.

Product Utility: Designers that focus on player value first identifies some form of utility that the product bring to the player. Product Utility designers often come from a more traditional product design background and focus on creating innovative solutions to observed problems. Yahoo, Amazon, Iminlikewithyou, and numerous web 2.0 companies a busy using the motivational aspects of games for utilitarian purposes. In short, this is social engineering with a purpose.

Pick your style!

Most designers tend to mix a couple major styles together. For example someone who enjoys working on licenses might start with a world style and do a deep dive to understand the world of the license. Then they augment that with a copycat design. Or someone who works on art games could mix a strong narrative with a systems oriented set of mechanics.

My suspicion is that most designers will have trouble applying all these styles to a game equally. First, each style can easily take years of intense labor to master. Secondly, games need focus in order to clearly convey their intended value. Too many dominant ingredients fighting for the player's time can weaken the end result. It is a bit like cooking. :-)

As an exercise, take a look at various games out on the market and see if you can figure out the handful of styles they've stirred together. Halo is classic Copycat with a heavy coating of Narrative to make it seem like something bigger than your typical game. Desktop Tower Defense a straight Verb and System game, barely seasoned with any other styles. Ian Bogost refers to Jason Rohrer's work at 'Proceduralism'. I see a fascinating mix of Narrative and System styles.

So pick two or three styles for each game you build. Prioritize one as primary and others as secondary (in case there is a conflict at some point later in the design.) Don't ignore the remaining styles since you'll certainly need dashes of them to make the game function. However, be conscious of the dominant style of game you are making and make the hard decisions on what to focus on up front.

Understanding design styles to reduce team conflict
Inevitably there will be people on your team or in your audience who are fans of the other styles of game design. I regularly run into good people working in the game industry who passionately want to tell the sort of emotional stories that they see in movies. Story and Experience are paramount to them. However, any sort of Systems conversation inevitably devolves into a muddled Copycat discussion.

You can use the game design styles above much like how personality tests are used to resolve conflicts between people with different work styles.

Identify your personal style. Which of those styles above do you love? Which ones do you find dull or unpleasant?
Identify the style of the game you are working on right now. It is very common for this to be something different than your personal style. Publicly declare the style of game you are making so the entire team can agree upon the game's direction.
See if you can understand the preferred style of other people around you that tend to hold forth passionately on game design.
Realize that having people on the team who are passionate about a variety of different styles is a good thing. Just because you occasionally feel the other person is coming from a bizarre and alien perspective doesn't mean that they don't have something valuable to contribute.
When the opportunity comes to up to add in a dash of 'spice' in an area outside your personal style, see if you can tap into the passion of someone who prefers that style. We can't lead all the time in all areas, nor is it a good idea to try.

My style
I almost always approach a new design from a Systems perspective. I find an interesting set of objects that interact with one another in interesting ways and then attempt to build a game around it. My typical process is to try lots and lots of systems, throw them at kleenex testers and see which ones are 'fun'. This is labor intensive, but you can keep the costs down by using small agile teams and simple prototypes. It yields games that are lower on the copycat factor. However, they also have a bit of a surreal aspect to them since experience, story and world tend to be re-imagined on the spot to fit the latest mechanics.

Lately, I've been moving more in the direction of a Verb style. With Systems, I'll often end up creating a game that is fun to design, but not fun to play. By focusing on the verbs and how the systems help the player learn to manipulate the system, my prototypes "find the fun" more often. If games create pleasure through exploratory learning, it makes sense that focusing on verbs and skills are one of the more direct paths towards creating engaging game play.

Narrative is my main weak point and something I should work on.

Conclusion
One thing I get out of this exercise is that there is not one True style of game design. For every Miyamoto and Will Wright creation there is a game like Monkey Island or Full Throttle pushing story and experience. People love all these games. Game design style, like style in almost any consumer market is a matter of taste. The good news is that now I can name the various styles and discuss them in a less vague fashion.

I also realize that I've been leaving certain powerful perspectives out of my palette of game design tools. When I was younger (and driven more strongly by raging hormones), experience-driven games mattered immensely. I vividly remember working on a game about sickness and trying to convince my fellow teammates that it was of utmost importance that black cancerous growths fall off the player and scuttle away on their own. As I aged, I've moved onto more intellectual and less emotional designs. It might be fun to bring that side of my design back one day.

Of course, this list of game design styles is a work in progress. So I'll end with some questions.

What style of game designer are you? Do you fit into one of these approaches?
Is there another design style that is missing from this list? Can it be expressed by a combination of the other styles?

Take care,

Danc.

Review of "The Art of Game Design" by Jesse Schell

noreply@blogger.com (Danc) — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 21:56:00 +0000

Recently I wrote a review for Jesse Schell's new game design book. You can read it up on Gamasutra.

Here's a brief except:

Though the elements of game design are well described, practicing designers won't find a lot of new insights that haven't been covered elsewhere. Luckily, the book also includes some more utilitarian tools in the form of 100 "lenses", or questions that help you iterate on your current design.

A designer's job often consists of asking questions. Almost as soon as you start building a game, you need to ask "what should be improved?" There are nearly an infinite number of questions one could ask and often finding the right question to ask is key to coming up with the right solution.

The 100 Lenses are a set of time-tested questions that you can ask about your game. Are you using your elements elegantly? Could your pacing be made a bit more interesting by using interest curves? What is the balance of long term and short term goals for the player? One of my favorites is Lens #69, The Lens of the Weirdest Thing:

"Having weird things in your story can help give meaning to unusual game mechanics -- it can capture the interest of the player, and it can make your world seem special. Too many things that are too weird, though, will render your story puzzling and inaccessible. To make sure your story is the good kind of weird, ask yourself these questions:

What's the weirdest thing in my story?
How can I make sure that the weirdest thing doesn't confuse or alienate the player?
If there are multiple weird things, should I maybe get rid of, or coalesce some of them?
If there is nothing weird in my story, is the story still interesting?"
These are the sort of questions that get me looking at my game designs from a new perspective and can really jolt the creative juices. Not all of the questions will be useful.
However, somewhere in the list are at least two or three questions that even the most experienced designer wished they had asked sooner. By having the questions at your fingertips, you can ask them earlier.

Thoughtful writing on game design always get my brain churning in interesting new directions. With Jesse's book, I was reminded what a broad ranges of disciplines that game design ultimately includes. I have taken a narrower route and spent the last couple of years focused on a rather specific set of tools related to rapid iteration and skill atoms. Yet there are dozens of fascinating nooks and crevices in our evolving craft that one could profitably invest their life exploring.

take care
Danc.

Project Horseshoe: Multiplayer Game Atoms

noreply@blogger.com (Danc) — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 22:54:00 +0000

The 2008 Project Horseshoe reports are up! We wrote about how to diagram multiplayer games using skill atoms. Truly a brilliant weekend. The discussion was quite wide ranging and as a result the write up became a bit...long. However, the results should spark a few brain cells. Let me know what you think! :-)

http://www.projecthorseshoe.com/ph08/ph08r5.htm

Best wishes,

Danc.

PS: There are some great reports up this year so be sure to browse around a bit.

Fishing Girl Prototype results

noreply@blogger.com (Danc) — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 03:22:00 +0000

Here is a story about a fellow named Andre, who created a Lostgarden game prototype, sold it for $4000 and started down the path to a new career in game development.

Andre lives down in a rural section of Australia. Due to the limited infrastructure in the region, he makes due with a gimpy modem that sputters along, randomly disconnecting at the worst possible moment. There aren’t very many tech jobs in the area, but he is unable to move due to family obligations.

Early on in life he dabbled with art, graphics programming and games, but there isn’t much call for such things locally. To make ends meet, he grinds away, year after year, developing website after website.

Andre is the sort of smart, industrious fellow that has immense potential. He dreams of creating amazing and wonderful games. Every email I receive from him is bursting with ideas and
snippets of working games that he jotted down in his spare time. Yet the ‘traditional’ path into games is closed to him.

When opportunities are limited, people often settle for limited opportunities. I grew up in a rural area and I’ve seen many bright wonderful people end up in dead end jobs due to the emptiness of their environment. It can be hard for people raised in areas of plenty to understand, but if no one else ever talks about what is possible or open a door to new ideas, you can go through life bound by invisible cultural blinders.

Prototyping challenges are opportunities
I created the prototyping challenges on Lostgarden.com as an onramp for new game developers. There are no excuses. The art is free. The design, though never perfect, is enough to get you moving in the right direction. There are dozens of free game engines for you to use. All this, combined with the internet (even accessed on a gimpy modem) opens all sorts of doors. All you need to do is make a game.

Over the past month or so, Andre built a version of Fishing Girl in Flash. He quickly built out the original design and then iterated upon it until he had something playable. A bit of data:

My wife played it and she likes it. It passed the Wife Test.
Played by about 280,000 people...100,000 in the last day.
Rating on New Grounds: 4.1 out of 5
JayIsGames has a review up at http://jayisgames.com/archives/2008/12/fishing_girl.php

The best bit of news is that Andre was able to sell the Fishing Girl game for $4000 + a performance bonus. Yes, you can sell Lostgarden prototyping challenges for cold cash. I highly encourage it since A) people should be paid for their hard work and B) the lessons you learn by finishing a game for the public are invaluable.

Now Andre has a little bit of income and a lot of validation to feed the development of his next game. These days when I talk to Andre, he has big plans for a whole career doing what he loves. That is pretty darned cool.

Gold medal (1st ever)

Andre gets my first gold prototyping award. He earned a score of 77% (103 out of 134 points). Here is what he did to earn it:

15 minutes of fun: The rule of thumb for a gold medal game is that you need to make about 15 minutes of fun. Most prototypes barely get to the 5 minute mark. Many people are playing through Andre’s FishingGirl twice and spending upwards of an hour on a single play through.
Found and extended the fun in the design: In order to build 15 minutes of fun, he iterated on the basic design and added his own touches like lure-seeking fish and wonderfully animated endings.He realized that a game design is not a blue print. It is a starting point for practicing the iterative process of design.
Made a complete experience: There is a strong narrative arc throughout Andre’s Fishing Girl. You fish, you advance, you discover something surprising and you save the little boy. It is a game you can start and then feel good about finishing. The vast majority of people who say they want to make games start building them but never finish them. The act of making a polished game that players can finish teaches you more about game design than any number of incomplete engines or piles of features.

Silver medals
Folks have been working away like busy bees on this design. I expected to give out mostly bronze medals, but there were three prototypes that were recently updated, each of which kept me interested for five minutes.

There is still opportunity for each of these to reach for a gold medal. I’d love to see some more variations on the Fishing Girl game. If Andre’s Fishing Girl is the equivalent of Asteroids, who is going to make Galaga?

Eric (65%): http://ericw.ca/files/FishingGirl/setup.exe. A great last minute entry that has delightful Fish AI and an innovative combo system for catching fish.
Ben (46%): http://sites.google.com/site/walkersoftwareprojects/files. Ben has a simple game here that still managed to get me to try to fish up all the little fishies. The mechanics are lacking a bit of juiciness, but basics are there.
Shade (41%): http://www.exodia.org/og/?p=24. Shade has some interesting line physics here. To riff a bit , with this type of system and line collision, you could do some wonderful things with obstacles in the sea. Players would need to drape the line perfectly over different objects to get to a particular spot in the ocean to catch a rare fish. This protoype has the ‘juiciest’ of the game mechanics, but it needs a bit of tuning so that it doesn’t feel quite so loose.

Bronze medals
There were also a couple of solid technology experiments.

Dale and Greg: http://beta.sharendipity.com/assets/1900/: The good folks over at Sharendipity put together the basic fishing mechanics and it is running on their new Flash client. (Woot!) They initially implemented casting and fish swimming as two separate apps. As a side note, this prototyping path can be tricky to gain useful feedback from since the most exciting gameplay opportunities often come from the interaction of the combined systems. It is often better to integrate early, but keep each system simple so that you don’t need to deal with undue complexity. You can always add complexity to a system if you identify enjoyable skills that are worth investing further in.
Pete: http://blois.us/FishingGirl/ Our first prototype in Silverlight. Sweetness. He has a tight casting mechanism.

Areas of improvement
Every time you build a game, you learn lessons that let you build it better the next time. If anyone wants to create a better version of Fishing Girl, here are a couple things you might be able to improve. These comments uses Andre’s game as a starting point.

Problems: The following are problems that kept users from enjoying the game fully.

The floating shops are a pain: You constantly end up hitting them with your lure. Having a single floating store that is inside the distance of your longest cast may help. The position prevents you from hitting it unless you try. Instead of selling one item, the store would have a rotating list of things that you can buy. Once you hit the store, it reappears elsewhere. The alternative is to let the player go to the store at any point, but this removes some of the fun of trying to cast at a specific distance.
It is hard to aim exactly with the rod: Slowing down the rod might be one way of improving accuracy. Speeding up the ‘boring’ parts of the swing the beginning and end might be another way of giving the casting a better feel.
Less repetitive music: People get bored of the music rather quickly.
The later portions of the game become boring: Try having fish reproduce at a certain rate if they get below a certain population threshold or make the larger fish more interesting to catch. I’d still like to keep the possibility of ‘fishing out’ the area so that an extinction ending is possible.

Opportunities: The following are glimmers of fun that could be accentuated in a future version.

There should be more things in the ocean: There is immense opportunity for bonus objects to be hidden in the ocean. For example: Treasure chests, Glowing orbs that spawn rare fish or deadly fish, Temporary lure or rod power ups that only last a certain amount of time
A fish collection: Imagine that every time you collected a new fish, you got a stamp for that fish in a collection album. It is a like butterfly collecting, except with fish. Some people would need to “catch ‘em all’ which would extend gameplay. With a bit of color cycling or special effects, you could easily create dozens of different fish with different costs and rarities.
More fish movement: The fish have generally simplistic movement. Fish that dart at a lure or that move very quickly or very slowly might add some interesting texture. It is worthwhile to see if the catching of a single large fish can be made more interesting.
More lure types: The types of lure could be expanded up on. For example: Lures that only work on fish of particular colors, Lures that are more or less bite resistant, Lures that attract some fish and repel others. , Lures that upgrade some fish into more valuable fish, Lures that allow you to capture multiple fish or a set of fish in a row.
More levels: There is a single level. It could be interesting to have the girl jump on a boat and travel to a new island with more fish. An alternative progression is for the sea to evolve over time. Once you collect certain fish or reach a certain amount of money, kelp can slide aside or a cave entrance can be blown up that introduces new fish and new treasure.
Fog of war: One of the exciting bits of fun that emerged from the prototyping was a sense of discovery as you are able to fish out further and further. A feature that should add even more mystery to game is fog of war system similar to those found in RTS games. The area around the lure could show you the fish nearby. Areas that you hadn’t explored would be opaque. Areas that you had explored would show markers or partially transparent versions of fish you had seen. Combined with ‘rare’ fish that could only be found in certain areas, this would give players a much stronger sense of ‘exploring’ the ocean.
Add a serious ending: One of the key endings in the original design is the ability to cause all the fish to become extinct. It adds an interesting twist to what would otherwise be a mindless game. The system is built so that users slowly fish out the small fish and eventually gain new technology that allows them to fish out the larger deeper fish. This systems-based narrative parallels the pattern of fishing in the real world and seeks to teach a small lesson. The dynamics could be augmented by systems that catch large numbers of fish at once so that it becomes quite easy to overfish. The addition of a ‘save’ system that lets you come back later to harvest fish (and score) for long periods of time would encourage manageable fishing tactics.

Conclusion
I hope everyone enjoyed this prototyping challenge. These challenges are evergreen, so just because I’ve given out the first round of awards doesn’t mean you should stop developing! Keep going. I would like nothing better than to give out another gold medal. If you update your project and want me to take a look, just drop me an email at danc[at]lostgarden.com. I can be a bit slow at responding, but I will write eventually.

As the years go past and my hairline continues to recede, I find that I have a debt that I am obligated to pay back. Very few of the current generation of game developers started from scratch. We’ve all looked at tutorials or snagged bits of free code. We’ve built upon tools like Flash or engines like Quake or Source. We’ve been inspired by existing designs or read books that have opened our eyes. Once upon a time, I too was in Andre’s shoes and it was only due to the opening of an unexpected opportunity that I’ve arrived at where I’m at today. If these prototype challenges ease another eager game developer’s path in even a small way then my time on this blog is well spent.

Happy holidays. Go make some great games!
Danc.

References and notes

The original FishingGirl challenge: http://lostgarden.com/2008/11/fishing-girl-game-prototyping-challenge.html
Percentage values: The percentage scores may come across as somewhat low, but try not to interpret them from perspective of the inflated grading system used in schools.
Notes on Awards: If you won an award, feel free to post the appropriate award image and link back to this post. You should be proud of your efforts!
Scoring spreadsheet: Fishing%20Girl%20Results.xlsx. Here is how entries were scored.

Post-it note design docs

noreply@blogger.com (Danc) — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 07:53:00 +0000

I happen to fall into the artist-designer skill set, so I often find myself trying to prototype ideas on teams rich with programmers. As such, I'm always looking for better game development techniques that work well for this particular team mix.

Here is a very lightweight prototyping process using Post-it notes that I quite enjoy.

Initial idea: I sit down with an available programmer (and artist/UI designer depending on the system) and we chat about how to test out a new bit of gameplay. Usually this is an idea that has been bubbling about since the night or week before.
Post-it note design: I jot down a quick bulleted list summarizing our discussion on a single post-it note. We go over it one last time so there everything is clear. The list isn't very detailed. Mostly it serves as something to jog our memories if we forget what we were talking about.
Build it: The programmer and artist go off and build the items on the list. It might take 2 hours or two days. They are encouraged to solve problems creatively and they can always just give me a shout if something doesn't make sense.
Play test: When most of the items on the Post-it note are playable, I get called over and we play test it the experiment together. If the results are comprehensible by mere humans, we pull in some play testers for 3-4 minutes to observe some real players interacting with the mechanic for the first time.
Review: Afterwards, we discuss our observations and write up another Post-it note worth of improvements.
Repeat or Stop?: The process repeats until we run out of time or give up. Sometimes we give ourselves a day per experiment, sometimes two days. In the land of Scrum, we treat the experiment like a time boxed task.
Rate: At the end, the gameplay experiment is rated according the scale below.
Save: The code is saved off, a few choice notes are recorded in a doc containing our 'list of experiments' and we move on. Bits of code, even from failed prototypes, are often reused in future gameplay experiments.

Rating system
The rating system is delightfully crude. The goal is to triage experiments quickly.

"A": These experiments were obviously fun. Players laughed, smiled and generally exhibited the emotions we were looking for. If in doubt, ask "Was this fun? How so?"
"B": These experiments showed a hint of fun if you knew what you were looking for. However, it is going to take more effort to expose the fun in a manner that is visible to the players.
"C": There wasn't any fun. The experiment fails.

A portfolio of fun
One of my favorite aspects of this method is that you end up with a mini-portfolio of game design ideas. Instead of putting all the design risk in a project on one or two unproven mechanic, the team now has a half dozen or more proven bits of fun to build upon. If some don't fit into the game or get abandoned for other reasons, that's alright. You can afford to lose a few and the end product will still be fun. Think of it as designing from a position of plenty.

Contrast this with a prescriptive 'design doc' approach where you are forced to pick, without much evidence, a main mechanics for production. Even for the most experienced designer, 50% to 80% of your 'educated' selections are going to be complete dogs. Every unproven mechanic you polish ends up being a massive drain on your budget and your reputation as a designer. You might hear gentle comments like, "We spent 3 months of dev time on this lump of an idea and it isn't fun?"

It doesn't take very many expensive failures for the project's perceived 'design risk' to blossom to the point where conservative minds seek to kill the project. I think of this as designing from a position of sudden death.

Some basic observations
Here's a quick list of things I've observed when prototyping.

Failed experiments happen a lot. Don't be surprised if C-rated experiments occur 50% to 80% of the time. Everyone on the team has to be aware that not every experiment is going to be a success, but the learning process is still worthwhile.
Designing on your feet is a critical skill: Each consultation and analysis might last only 10 to 20 minutes and you need to leave folks with that all important sticky note filled with impactful, yet inexpensive changes. It pays to have lots of ideas and a deep understanding of game mechanics so you can quickly pull together a list of incisive comments. If you can't, you likely are not suited to be performing the designer role.
Listening matters. The designer doesn't need to come up with all the solutions. Everyone on the team is bright and has great ideas. As a designer, your role is to herd all ideas (yours and others) into something that serves the next step in the prototype.
You need programmers: If there aren't programmers dedicated to prototyping, the prototyping isn't going to happen. You can drop down to paper prototyping, but it usually doesn't prove out many types of mechanics (especially ones involving timing and interfaces.)

Advanced observations
These are some notes that are a bit geekier, but can save you large amounts of pain.

Meta game mechanics are harder to prototype: The systems that link together the various gameplay experiments are harder to playtest. They operate on longer time spans (hours instead of minutes) and often require that the core gameplay is already fun.
Build a meta-game architecture that allows for loose coupling of gameplay experiments: Most successful games have an architecture that allows the team to plug in new bits of fun as they are found. The linear 'level-story-level' pattern used by most FPS is one example. The 'hub with many sub levels" used by Mario 64 is another. Any of these allow you to plug in a new experiment independently of the other gameplay experiments. If you don't have a modular architecture, you run into situations where a fun new system breaks many of the other bits of fun you've already discovered.
Integrating tightly coupled gameplay experiments is a pain: If I independently find a fun new type of weapon and an interesting enemy AI, the combination of the two is often a non-trivial issue. The new weapon many work with an old AI, but be completely useless with the new one. Integration yields a whole new set of experiments. Plan for time to rediscover the fun all over again.

Benefits
There are some interesting benefits to the Post-it note design method:

Scales nicely to large prototyping efforts: One designer can serve multiple programmers. This works nicely on teams where there are more programmers than designers and you need to get a lot of prototyping done quickly.
Failing quickly is fun and educational. You learn a lot with each failure and can move onto the next experiment with a much better idea of what doesn't work.
Provides a quick death for bad pet ideas. It is much harder to resurrect pet ideas when you have concrete, playable proof that it won't work. Finding out early which one of my favorite ideas is idiotic saves me a lot of political pain.
Fun prototypes are quite convincing: A fun, playable crazy idea works a lot better for winning over other team members than any amount of hand waving or documentation.
An easier team to assemble: Finding a competent game designer and a competent programmer can often be easier than finding a competent programmer-designer. Well developed hybrid skill sets are very valuable, but can be quite rare. A side benefit of having a team is that you end up cross training your designers and programmers. You create designers who can speak to programmers and programmers who can riff on some of the design.

The value of dime-a-dozen designs (A brief aside)
One often hears the negative comment that game designs are a dime-a-dozen. And in a waterfall design process, an incessant stream of ideas is indeed a problem. If you attempt to squeeze all those ideas into a typical waterfall development process, you end up with an immense amount of waste. Each designs need documentation, concepting, implementation, testing and bug fixes. In response, project owners will often ask for just one good idea.

There is another path. A lightweight prototyping method takes your flurry of crazy ideas and converts them at moderate cost into a well sorted portfolio of working designs. All those ideas are not, in fact, worthless or wasteful; they are the essential fuel that feeds a good prototyping process. Each idea either teaches you something or provides you with a success.

The way to make the process work without getting gunked up is to make prototyping incredibly lightweight. Other than our focused conversations, I spend my time on a total of two design docs: The first is the brief list of rated prototypes and the second is a set of discardable, temporary Post-it notes. Design waste in the form of unnecessary artifacts is minimal. Most of the 'programming waste' is better classified as low cost learning.

Those wild flocks of churning, swirling ideas end up not being worthless at all. They simply need to be funneled into the project with the right process for their value to be realized.

Conclusion
The "Post-it note design process" has likely been reinvented in one form or another hundreds of times across the history of game development. It is so basic that it feels odd to even write it up in any sort of formal fashion.

If you have a designer and a programmer, give it a shot. It is certainly a good functional alternative to the popular process of sticking a lone programmer-designer in a room and asking them to 'find the fun'. Both can produce great games. Pick the one that works best for your current team composition.

This process does have an cost since you need to devote at least two people to finding the fun instead of putting all decisions on the head of the designer. However, the end result is well worth it. After all, it is far smarter to spend team time uncovering a portfolio of the right mechanics than it is to 'save your programmers' so they can be off running really fast in the wrong direction.

In the end it really isn't about programmers, designers, design documents or features. It is about the team working together to make the right product. Everything else is just ego and waste. And for some reason, it is quite difficult to invest much ego or waste in a little disposable Post-it note.

take care
Danc,
Post-it note fanboy

Tidbits from the garden

noreply@blogger.com (Danc) — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 02:45:00 +0000

A few odds and ends have collected in my inbox lately.

Video of the Princess Saving Application is up!
All the videos from the night are posted up on OfficeLabs.com. My talk starts 10 minutes into the first video and lasts approximately 30 minutes. There’s also a bit of Q &A after all the talks finish up. You can get the original slides here.

&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:d0cabdcc-97bc-4799-a579-4da3b73f865b&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;showPlaylist=true&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;from=msnvideo" target="_new" title="Microsoft Office Labs &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp; Engineering Excellence IxDA Event Part I Daniel Cook"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Video: Microsoft Office Labs &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp; Engineering Excellence IxDA Event Part I Daniel Cook&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

FishingGirl update
I’ve seen some sneak peeks of the FishingGirl prototypes and people are making great progress. It will be possible for someone to win a gold medal this time around. If you’ve started a prototype, finish it! There is solid fun lurking in that design and you still have a couple of weeks left to build something wonderful.

Some observations:

The store and the acquisition of the various rods adds a great sense of exploration and progression to the game.
The gameplay improves substantially if you give your fish a small dash of intelligence so that they move towards your lure if it is in their sight.
Making the game winnable. There is a story arc to the game and it feels incomplete if you don't let the player finish.

Skill atoms in action
Tex, over at the delightfully titled Tin Man Tex’s Slap Dang Blog, put together skill chain describing his mod. I liked how he intuitively started writing down skill atoms and then only later began connecting them together in a skill chain. Analyzing a game using skill atoms has an element of mind mapping to it that is pleasantly organic. Check it out. I hope to see more such examples in the future.

http://tinmantex.blogspot.com/2008/11/ill-atomize-your-face.html

Other prototyping notes
BuschnicK created a nicely fleshed out version of Play with your Peas. It is a faithful implementation of the game and deserves a very solid silver reward. However, I still think the fun hasn't been completely uncovered.

At this point, we've had some reasonable implementations of the original concept. I suspect that the design may require some big changes to make it work. So here is a question: Why isn't Play with your Peas mind-thunderingly fun and what could be done to improve it?

http://www.buschnick.net/Personal/2008/09/ninja-peas.shtml

Best wishes and may you have a sinfully glorious Thanksgiving.
Danc.

Project Horseshoe 2008: There and back again

noreply@blogger.com (Danc) — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 02:40:00 +0000

I’m writing this on the long flight back from Project Horseshoe 2008. The last bittersweet night, we stayed up till five AM playing games and talking about games. The conversation shifted from the slow death of games as we knew them, to fresh games that will change the world, to the little tips we use to thrive each day. There is something distinctly surreal about chatting quietly with such an intimate knowledgeable group during the wee hours of the morning, there on a lonely porch in the uncharted depths of Texas. And yes, there were indeed baby racoons.

This year, I took a risk. If you’ve been following this blog for a bit, you know that I’ve been working on skill atom techniques for modeling gameplay. I’ve written about it. I’ve used it myself. There has even been a talk or two. Yet, aside from a few furtive emails with other happy heretics, I’ve never had a chance to do the following:

Explain the model to a crowd of natural skeptics, working designers who have been successfully building games for years.
Get them to tear it apart.

The cautionary tale of the secret paint formula
I’m reminded of a story that Norman Rockwell used to tell. He once became good friends with a fellow painter who was famous for his rendering of luminescent, sensual skin tones. The painter used a secret formula for his paint and he guarded it jealously from potential imitators. When the painter died, he willed his greatest gift, his secret paint formula to Rockwell.

Rockwell excitedly tried out the formula, but ultimately found it disappointing. The paint was too slick and difficult to control, so he gave up on it and instead fell back on his own preferred techniques. The real secret had never been the paint formula. It was just one little piece of the painter’s vast organic, highly individual process. The real secret was the intuitive wisdom that comes from making a thousand paintings. Sadly, such a thing is not transferable to others. When he died, his specific way of creating paintings died with him.

Are skill atoms the same thing as the secret paint formula? Are they a glossy coat of theoretical hand waving that only works for the people who invented it? Many people I’ve talked with see ‘game grammar’ as nothing more than a time wasting intellectualization of a fundamentally intuitive activity. I went into the weekend with this thought very much at the forefront of my mind.

Why stop there?
If all we had done was validate or invalidate the skill atom model for simple games, it would have been a useful weekend. But by god, this is Project Horseshoe and people are nothing if not psychotically ambitious. To up the ante, our group decided to apply skill atoms to multiplayer games. I’ve never done this.

How do you model a deeply psychological behavior like bluffing? Gifting? Competition? Collaboration? Goodness! I didn’t have a lot of answers prepared for this topic and honestly expected that the skill atom model would immediately collapse under the weight of all the crazy things that happen as soon as you add two or more players to a game design. All it would have taken is one smart designer to raise a single counter example and my fragile model would burst apart, defeated by reality.

Some questions that I had included:

Could we even begin to talk about multiplayer with skill atoms? The alternative is that this is a model that is limited to only single player experiences. That would be like coming up with a model of physics that worked for one ball in a vacuum, but wasn’t useful for something useful like say…building bridges.
Would the system scale to complex systems? Often when you use a diagramming technique (like UML or state diagrams) to understand real world projects, the resulting diagrams becomes so convoluted that the model does more to confuse than to illuminate.
Would the system be useful to designers during every day work? It is much easier to come up with a academic system of analyzing games that works best if you are an ivory tower dweller who can devote hundreds of hours to breaking down each interaction into pretty diagrams filled with obscure invented lingo. However, I’m looking for utilitarian tools that can be applied in that critical 10-minute gap between playing a prototype and deciding what to try next.
Can this system be taught to other designers? Like the secret paint formula, most game models I run across are only useful to their inventors. If I can’t observe other designers applying the model successfully without my intervention there is something horribly wrong with the approach.

We ripped the skill atoms apart. We analyzed multiplayer M.U.L.E. We looked at charades and then took on football and buffing in MMOs. We used skill atoms to prototype a new multiplayer game about gifting using a bag of plastic Indians. At some point, not so long from now, our group will come out with a report. In that report, we’ll be blunt about what we found. What worked? What was flawed? The results are fascinating.

Our team’s report will be one of several reports to come out of Project Horseshoe by groups of game designers just as crazy and inspired as we were. If any one of these reports starts gaining momentum, the world of gaming as we know will change. It turns out that moving our industry forward isn’t about complaining. It is about getting smart people together where they have the time and the space to think. Grab a beer (Aventinus Double Bock, no less), join the mind meld and use the vast pool of centuries (!) of game design experience to come up with real solutions. Then follow up again and again and again.

In that spirit, I can't wait to share our final report with everyone.

Time for some much needed sleep, chock full of dreams.
Danc.

PS: Warm kudos to George, Linda and Teresa for putting Project Horseshoe on. It is obviously a labor of love and is utterly unique compared to the other events and conferences I’ve attended. If you ever get an invite, don’t hesitate to go.

Fishing Girl: Game Prototyping Challenge

noreply@blogger.com (Danc) — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 01:09:00 +0000

Earlier this summer, I mentioned that I was starting up a Mystery Project for local Seattle weekend coders. Summer has turned into Fall and the Mystery Project is still going strong. So we decided to kick off a Winter session of the Mystery Project!

In this post, I wanted to do two things:

Extend an invitation to any Seattle developers who would like to participate directly in the Mystery Project.
Share some Mystery Project graphics that we’ve made this summer part of yet another delightful Prototyping Challenge.

Winter Mystery Project
The Mystery Project is an innovative small Flash MMO that experiments with many of the design concepts I’ve been writing about on this blog. We meet up every Sunday at a local coffee shop and share what we’ve done and what we’ve learned. The project is the main focus, but I put a big emphasis on helping everyone on the team develop new skills and explore exciting ideas. If you are in Seattle, our meet up has become a rather unique opportunity to explore true next generation game design.

The team is pretty solid, but I’m looking for at least one additional, talented programmer. The project is in Flash/Flex with the server-side game logic written in Java.

Being part of the team means a serious time commitment. Expect to put in at least 10-15 hours a week. Making games needs to be your hobby and your passion.

If you have solid Flash/Flex/Java programming skills and you live around Seattle, drop me a note at danc@lostgarden.com. Ze Mystery Project lives (at least for the winter)!

Fishing Girl Prototype Challenge!
Due to the ‘coffee-shop mentoring’ model I’ve got set up for the Mystery Project, there are dozens of talented programmers who live outside of Seattle who can’t participate in our weekly chats. This makes me sad. So I decided to share some of our graphics as part of a brand spanking new game prototyping challenge. Free graphics + new game prototyping challenge = Happiness.

Fishing Girl is a simple fishing game played with one button. It illustrates a design pattern called sequentially linked mechanics. Often when you try to simulate a complex exercise like fishing, you can’t easily create a single game mechanic that captures the entire experience. Instead, you string together a series of activities. Each activity is simplistic by itself, but in sequence yields a good approximation of the complex experience. The fishing game is split into the following activities:

Casting
Positioning the lure
Hooking a fish
Reeling in the fish
Scoring the fish
Buying new equipment.

Each section should take 1-3 evenings to prototype in Flash. String them all together and you have a fishing game. The nice thing about this challenge is that it is all about bite sized chunks that are easy to build and iterate on.

The Wife Test (How Prototypes are scored)
My wife, as I mentioned in previous posts, is quite ill and I’ve wanted to do something nice for her. She absolutely adores fishing games, so Fishing Girl is designed for her. Any prototypes that someone is kind enough to make will be played by my wife with me watching her reactions intently. Luckily, she doesn’t find this overly irritating. :-)

In order to capture her casual gamer feedback, I’ve added a simple scoring system for this challenge. Each section of the game is worth a number of points. 50% of the score for each section will be whether or not my Bejeweled/WiiFit-playing wife finds the prototype to be ‘fun’. This is Miyamoto’s “Wife Test” applied in a quite literal fashion.

I’ll still be giving out the LostGarden Medals and still, no one has won the epic Gold Medal. It sits out there, tempting and shiny, just waiting for the right prototype to provide 15 minutes of fun. This challenge will last two months. But if something comes in later, I’m always happy to take a look and offer comments. Just list a link to any prototype in the comments section of this post.

The setup (10 points)
The player is a small bear-like creature, the Fishing Girl who sits at the edge of the ocean. She has a fishing pole, a glowing lure on the end of the pole, a money count and that is about it. In the ocean are numerous fish of various sizes that swim back and forth, but we’ll get to those later.

Casting (10 points)
Casting the lure out into the ocean involves two clicks:

If you click your button once, the girl will pull back her pole to cast.
If you do nothing, the pole will return to the default position.
However, if you press a second time in the middle of her swing, she will cast the lure outward into the ocean.
The closer the second click is to the peak of the swing the further the lure travels.
When the lure hits, a number is placed at on spot on the ocean where it lands. This records the distance and lets you know exactly how far you cast.

Casting acts as a simple timing mini-game.

Help text (Bonus!)

Click to start casting
Cast!

Positioning the lure (20 points)

Positioning the lure in the water is the centerpiece of the game. You'll be spending a lot of your prototyping time here. :-)

When the lure hits the water, it starts to sink downward in an arc. When it starts out, it sinks almost straight downward. The tension on the rope pulls it inward towards the player, hence the arc. We don’t have time to model the complex line physics, so instead we say that the lure moves along an arc of a circle whose radius is defined by the distance from the tip of the pole to the point at which the lure hit the water.
Holding down the button reels in the lure. This changes the radius of our arc, but does not change rate at which the lure is moving along the arc.
The empty lure, unencumbered by fish reels in quite quickly. Using this system, we can now place the lure at any point within the sea.

Positioning the lure acts as a timing and spatial skill mini-game.

Hooking a Fish (25 points)
In the ocean there are fish. In order to hook a fish, you must place the lure in front of the fish’s mouth. The fish will lunge forward and become hooked. The entire time, you are carefully timing the slow downward arc of your lure. There are three pieces to this mini-game.

The Fish
The Lunge
The Lure

The Fish (10 points)
Fish are objects in the sea that move back and forth in predictable patterns. Fish come in different sizes, rarity and movement patterns.

Movement: Back and forth. There are others patterns such as circles or swarms, but that would be extra.
Size: Small, Medium, Large, Extra large.
Rarity: Common, uncommon, Rare, Very Rare. This is used during “Scoring the Fish”

Fish are spread throughout the water with more valuable fish located further from shore. Try to have a good mix of big fish and small fish. You can start testing with one fish, but ultimately, you should have 10 to 20 or else the game won’t be very interesting.

The Lunge (10 points)
Now that you have your fish floating about, you can implement catching them.

Each fish has a collision box in front of its mouth.
If the lure enters the collision box, the fish will move forward towards the lure and attempt to become hooked.

The Lure (5 points)
Lures come in different sizes: Small, Medium, Large. The size determines which size fish you can catch:

If the lure is too small, it will be snapped and the cast is over.
If the lure is too big, it will be ignored.
If the lure is just right, the fish will be automatically hooked.

Help Text (Bonus)
We display help text at the appropriate moments

Position lure in front of fish!
That fish was too big for this lure!
That fish was too small for this lure!
You hooked it!
Reel in!

Choosing which fish to hook acts as simple tactical choice where the player is asked to pick the most optimal outcome. The time pressure of the moving fish and lure makes this choice interesting.

Reeling in a fish (20 points)
Once you’ve caught the fish, you need to get it back to the surface. Reeling in the lure works the same as before but the larger the fish, the slower it comes back up. Reeling in the fish is an exercise in keeping your fish away from other, larger fish that will happily eat your fish if it comes their way.

Fish still go for your fish if it appears in front of their mouth.
If they latch on, they take a bite out of your fish.
Three bites and you lose your fish. Each bite also reduces the value of your fish.
If your fish makes it to the surface of the water, you’ve caught the fish!
Reeling in the fish successfully acts as a timing and spatial skill mini-game.

Everything up to this point has been training for the player. Expect to spend considerable time here balancing, iterating and making this section feel good.

Reward for catching the fish. (5 points)
When you catch the fish, a small celebration animation plays that shows you the fish that you caught. There are several pieces to this segment.

Revealing rarity
Awarding Money

Revealing rarity (2 points)
When the fish is held up by the fisherman, the fish that you’ve been reeling in is revealed to be either a common (1), uncommon (2), rare (3) or very rare fish (4). Each type of fish has a distinct image associated with it.

The rarer the fish the less likely it is to appear.
A text label appears that say the name of the fish and the rarity. For example “Ancient Shoefish (Uncommon)”
Bonus!: If you want to get really fancy, you can display a simple text modifier to each fish that also modifies it's value. For example "ancient" increases value by 50% while "skanky" reduces value by 20%.

Awarding money (3 points)

The value of the fish is also displayed. A simple scoring equation might be size * rarity * modifier * 10. Feel free to play with the values to get the right balance.
The amount of money the fish is worth is then added to the piggy bank counter that has been sitting on the screen this entire time.

The revealing of the modifier acts as a gambling element that keeps the outcome interesting of each cast exciting until the very last second.

The store (10 points)
Floating out in the sea are various markers that represent item upgrades. If you hit the marker exactly with your cast and you have enough money, you will purchase them. Otherwise, your lure will bounce off and sink as expected. These artifacts do the following:

Bronze rod: Your basic rod. It casts a short distance off shore.
Silver rod: Cast further
Gold rod: Cast even further
Legendary Rod: Cast far and reel in heavy fish quickly.
Small Lure: Catch small fish.
Medium Lure: Catch medium fish.
Large Lure: Catch large fish. Note that there is no extra large lure, so there are always larger fish that pose as obstacles.
Bomb lure: Explodes and kills the first fish that touches it. Even if it is a very large fish.
Boy: Far on the edge of ocean is a Boy. He is inordinately expensive. This is how you win the game. And for the record, he is indeed, quite the catch. (What happens when you use an explosive lure on the Boy is up to your discretion...perhaps this is another way of winning.)

Bonus: You start with three small lures. When a large fish breaks your line or steals your fish, the lure is lost. At this point, you need to either buy more lures (which are expensive) or stop playing for the day. If you want to get fancy, you have some method of switching between lures. Otherwise, you can simply replace your current item with the most recent acquisition.

The store acts as a simple meta-game that encourages you to keep fishing in order to advance.

Progression (Bonus!)
As you catch more fish, the ocean gets more and more empty. This adds to the difficulty of finding fish. Fish always stay in approximately the same area until caught. Players will note where fish are located and be able to maneuver into position on subsequent casts.

If you wait long enough, more will respawn. If you fish out all the fish, there are no more fish left and you get a simple message “There are no more fish left in the ocean. There will never be any ever again.”

Design notes
The game is about spotting a high value fish, maneuvering your lure into position while avoiding the bigger fish and finally maneuvering your fish back through the landmines of larger fish.

In essence, Fishing Girl is Frogger using a polar coordinate system, a frog that insists on drifting to the left and only the ability to move forward.

Conclusion

So those are the rules! I've created this graphics this time in Illustrator and I've taken pains to make them appealing to Flash developers. Let me know if I've got the formatting right. I'd love to see some Prototypes of Fishing Girl playing in a browser.

So download the graphics and have fun! As with all prototyping challenges, this is a grand exploration of a new play space and there will be all sorts of interesting surprises along the way.

Download Flash Project (.FLA CS3): This is an import from Illustrator into Flash. There are no animations, but this might be useful if you don't have access to Illustrator.
Download Adobe Illustrator (.AI CS3): This has the original artwork. From here you can go to .XAML for Silverlight or bitmap.
Download FishingGirlPNG.zip: Bitmaps versions of all the images used.
Download FishingGirl.swf: A swf export of all the vectors. This is good if you don't have CS3. You may have to dig a little to find what you need, but everything should be in there.

Best of luck! If you are intrigued by these graphics, you'll love what the Mystery Project is turning into.

take care
Danc.

Update 11/1/2008: Added bitmaps and swf of all images.

Lostgarden Podcasts

noreply@blogger.com (Danc) — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 06:50:00 +0000

Ryan Wiancko over at IndustryBroadcast.com has started recording selected Lostgarden essays. If you find yourself regularly sharing a few spare moments with your tank-like Zune, why not download an essay or two? Ryan's dulcet tones reading riveting game design minutia make for a perfect panacea to downtime boredom.

Or perhaps you know a friend. You know...the sort that never reads any of the mind-boggling important links that you send him (or her) on a Friday afternoon. Now he can put a pause on his 560th listen of Ride the Lightning and instead cultivate a more soothing, perhaps even 'intellectual' pastime. Gently remind him that the world is changing and that one day very soon, perhaps Tuesday, smart people will be again valued. Ryan's site is a magical auditory pill that can reduce his BrainAge to at least 31.

So what are you waiting for? Your iTouch, so jealous of your boss's glittering iPhone, is hungry.

http://industrybroadcast.com/tag/lostgardencom/

take care
Danc.

PS: I've also added a link on the side bar named "Podcasts" in case you need to find the Ryan's site later. He's got all sorts of tasty stuff there from Jamie Fristrom and others. More keeps coming every week. Ryan's on fire!

The Princess Rescuing Application: Slides

noreply@blogger.com (Danc) — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 05:11:00 +0000

Last Thursday, I gave a talk on game design to the local Seattle chapter of the IxDA, an interaction design group. About 100 folks were in attendance and the catered finger food was downright delicious. Other speakers included George Amaya, who spoke about recent research on social/party games, and Mark Long, CEO of Zombie. Mark gave a lovely presentation on how narrative and storytelling immerse players. His new game looks gorgeous.

My talk was on building an application that rescued princesses. The goal was to give interaction designers some insight into how game design might be applied to the domain of more utilitarian applications. The talk was recorded and should be up sometime this week. When it appears online, I'll link to the video from this post.

Here are my slides both in PDF format and as the original PowerPoint.

The notes fields are heavily annotated with more details about each visual. For those of you who attended, this deck also includes a third section on game design patterns that I didn't have time to cover in the time allotted.

take care
Danc.

Theme and game design

noreply@blogger.com (Danc) — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 18:24:00 +0000

Recently I was chatting with some friends about the role of 'theme' in game design. Theme, in this discussion, was the setting of the game, be it fantasy, sci-fi, military, etc. At first blush, the typical game designer's use of theme appears a bit primitive.

Limited range compared to the wide variety of themes in movies or books. Games recycle a half dozen major themes or in some cases invent their own surrealist themes that make little sense outside the context of the game. Books, despite being grouped into narrow genres, have explored many thousands of powerful, evocative settings. You have books about bored European manuscript editors exploring the bizarre world of the pseudo occult and you have books set inside the mind of a quadriplegic. The disparity in variety is intriguing.
Crudely applied. Theme is applied in broad strokes at the beginning of many games, but almost always plays second fiddle to interesting game mechanics. Goombas are mushrooms, but this matters little beyond the fact that they are squat, match the scale of the world and can be squashed. If a novelist lazily integrated a character into their book's theme the way that game developer do on a regular basis they would never be published.

The result is that theme is often seen as an interchangable 'skin' that can be applied after the fact to a set of working game mechanics. The task is typically left to marketers to round up a popular license so that it can be painted onto the latest hot collection of game mechanics. This attitude towards theme affects the very fabric of game development.

And yet, something interesting occurs when we work this way. Very few licensed games turn into major long term franchises. They often feel incomplete and the pieces ill matched. On the other hand, seminal 'grown from scratch' games like Bejeweled, Mario, Quake, GTA or Sims end up doing amazingly well. Despite their surreal and often disjointed themes, they are surprisingly fun. In these titles, the theme of the game mechanics and the theme evolved hand-in-hand, often undergoing major switches half way through before settling into a successful partnership.

The Sims was a game about architecture that morphed into a game about playing dollhouse.
Grand Theft Auto was a cops and robbers chase game where you were the cop. It evolved into a game about being a free roaming criminal.
Quake was an Aztec style world where you tossed about a giant Thor-like hammer. It evolved into a nameless soldier battling against the mutants in a series of brown dungeons.
Bioshock was originally about Nazi's on an island.

If you start to dig into how game generate 'fun', many of these thematic transformations are, if not inveitable, certainly commonplace. It turns out that most game designers are not complete idiots when it comes to integrating theme and setting into their game designs. Designers aren't ignoring theme. They are simply using theme in a manner appropriate to the medium in which they work.

Some logic behind the madness
If you look at games as being about exploratory learning, they tend to teach the player a series of skills. First the player learns basic skills (how to press a button) and overtime assemble a scaffold of skills that lets them engage in more complex scenarios like 'save the princess'. Each moment of learning gives a burst of pleasure.

These basic skills are utilized over and over again. If the player fails to learn them, the rest of the game is lost on them. Games reward involvement, yet there is a high cost the player must pay in terms of initial learning necessary to become involved.

"Theme" from this perspective, is shorthand for a collection of preexisting mental tools, skills and mental models. I think of it as a tool chest of chunked behaviors that the designer can rely upon to smooth out the initial learning curve.

The theme you select directly influences how you present your initial skills to the user. By saying "Pirates", I turn on a particular schema in the player's brain and a network of possible behaviors and likely outcomes instantaneously lights up. If they see a pirate with an impressive sword facing a small soldier, the goal of fighting the enemy is self evident. With a small visual cue, I've eliminated minutes of painful initial learning.

There is a fascinating moment in the sequence of exploratory learning where players say to themselves "Oh, I recognize and have mastered this situation already, so let me demonstrate my excellence." Because of the triggering of the theme, the challenge appears possible and
attainable. If on the other hand, I had substituted the pirates with gray blob A and orange blob B, the player might be quite confused and not even bother to pick up the controller.

Why so few themes?
To a certain degree this perspective on games explains the limited number of themes used in games compared to books or movies. A book uses theme as a hook to get people interested in plot and character dynamics. There are lots of potential hooks and the more unique they are, the more intrigued the reader is to find out more. This encourages a proliferation of fascinating settings.

On the other hand, a good theme in a game is one that triggers a number of clear mental models that are applicable to the game mechanics at hand. If you push too far outside the experience zone of potential players, you make them feel inadequate.

It also suggests that occasionally a literary theme simply is not needed. Sometimes it is better to just tell the player, "Hey, it is a game and like any game you've played, we'll educate you as you go." The same triggering of appropriate schema occurs. If it is enough to grease the wheels of learning, then our mission as a game designer is accomplished.

"Skinning" game designs is a bad practice
When you look at game design from the 'games as learning' perspective, the idea of creating an slap-on aesthetic skin for a set of game mechanics starts to break down. In the best games, mechanics and theme evolve in lockstep over the course of the many iterations. If a mechanic isn't working, you have a couple choices. You can adjust the rules or you can adjust the feedback that the player receives. The two act in concert to produce the player's learning experience.

A good portion of the time, it makes sense to adjust the feedback side of the equation. What if people don't understand that the pirate is their character? Maybe it makes sense to make the pirate wear a right red outfit and the enemy a bit more evil looking. When you do so, the theme of the game shifts ever so slightly. Over hundreds (or thousands) of tweaks, a theme for the game might emerge that is quite different than what you originally envisioned. This is often the case for the best game in the history of our industry.

In fact, the final theme may be semi-incoherent if you attempt to analyze it as a literary work. However, that doesn't matter because it provides the moment-by-moment scaffolding of feedback that helps the player learn their way through the game. As long as the game is fun and delivers value to the customer we can often toss the literary definition of theme out the window.

In fact, you start getting into trouble when you make the theme so rigidly defined that you can't adjust the feedback for specific game mechanics. What if you are dealing with a license where the pirate isn't allowed to wear a red outfit? That design option, which may have been the best one available, is taken off the table. The hundreds of little trade offs that occur when theme coherence wins and gameplay loses diminishes the effectiveness of the game.

So you can't just 'skin' a set of game mechanics. When you do makes the attempt, a well executed iterative process of game design will often result in a game that is quite different than its source material. A poorly executed process results in a game that plays poorly.

Conclusion
There are a couple lessons here.

The most effective game themes exist primarily to facilitate the learning process for the player. This may be a traditional narrative theme, but it doesn't need to be.
Theme evolves in lock step with the rules of the game over a process of many iterations. You might as well plan for it. Early on develop vertical slices of your game. This will help you converge on working combinations of theme and rules. As you go allow for iteration on production assets.
Locking in your theme too early and too rigidly can stunt the exploration of more effective feedback systems. A bit of flexibility often yields better gameplay.

take care
Danc.

Rules of Productivity Presentation

noreply@blogger.com (Danc) — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 18:03:00 +0000

How do we get more work done? It is a question that every manager and every passionate worker faces. Yet, for the most part, teams operate on gut instinct and habit. The results are less than optimal.

Over the years I've been collecting small pieces of research on various factors that actually seem to improve productivity. I've assembled eight of these experiments into a PowerPoint presentation. Feel free to use the graphs and data within to spread these practical ideas throughout your own teams.

Topics covered include:

The idiocy of prolonged overtime
The unintuitive connection between doing more and making better products.
Ideal team sizes and work environments

These lessons are particularly applicable to the game industry since it has some of the least educated management of any group in the software industry. In general, this is not their direct fault. We simply have a culture that tends to look inward (or at the movie industry) for solutions. A broader education on management and work practices, despite its ability to dramatically improve our games, typically takes a back seat to meeting the latest arbitrary, urgent deadline.

Download the presentation here:

Rules%20of%20Productivity.pdf
Rules%20of%20Productivity.pptx (Apologies for the pptx file)

take care,
Danc.

Shade: Prototyping Challenge results

noreply@blogger.com (Danc) — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 14:39:00 +0000

It is time to give out awards to the Shade Prototyping challenge!

Every prototyping challenge I release is a grand exploration of a particular gaming system. The concept often sounds coherent on paper, but in reality it is composed of a series of small experiments involving movement, pacing, emergence and more. After every prototype, it is worth sorting through the experiments and seeing which ones are worth investing in further and which ones should be left behind.

Game design is a process, not a bolt of lightening from the blue. You build an experiment, reinvest in the things that work and try to fix the things that are broken. After iteration upon iteration, the game emerges. In this spirit, these awards are not the end of the Shade project, but instead are an opportunity to identify the next steps.

Even in these simple prototypes, Shade shows promise as a game concept. It just needs pass upon pass of polish to turn into something glorious.

Bronze awards
First, the bronze awards. These go out to the wonderful souls that made a game.

Of great interest was the fact that most people attempted 2D implementations of the concept. This makes sense considering the wide availability of 2D tools and skills on the market. Now that I have a better understanding of the dynamics of the game, I may release an updated version of the challenge in the future that includes a set of 2D graphics and a tweaked design that allows for an easier 2D implementation.

Mobeamer: http://battleforcesonline.com/shrooms.php
Lubos: http://img110.imageshack.us/img110/7751/img0001ma5.jpg
Leonardo: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/apocalyx/MushRide-lua-0.9.3.zip?download
c berube: http://www.thewasabiproject.com/shade-and-shrooms/
ben: (I'm having difficulty with this one since it keeps telling me I have a corrupt zip) http://www.myfamilyline.info/programming/Shade.zip

Silver award
We had one Silver award this time around.

The silver goes to Aras Pranckevicius for his lovely 3D implementation of Shade using Unity. I got a solid 5 minutes of fun out of his prototype and lots of ideas on what to do next. You can play it here:

http://aras-p.info/projShaduShrooms.html

Without further ado, let's get into a critique of the game as it stands now. I'll be use Aras's prototype as the baseline since it include a large number of interesting experiments in action.

Moments of genuine fun
First we'll start with the elements that were distinctly enjoyable. These are seeds that can be extended much further. You always want to try to identify these dynamics early since they can act as a focal point that guides the project. When you start cutting experiments, knowing where the core fun lies can help prioritize your culling.

1) Searching for the perfect mushroom is exciting: I had a surprisingly enjoyable time finding a good sized mushroom to take back to the drop point. Scarcity emerged as a major theme of the game. Potential improvements that can focus in on this include:

Increase the types and varieties of mushrooms. The act of finding something valuable in the scarce wilderness has all the hallmarks of a hugely addicting activity.
Create different growing cycles: Have some rare ones grow slowly or only grow quickly in the presence of other plants. If the player harvests them all at once, they are gone. This adds a resource management element to the game the reinforces the sense of scarcity and value.

2) The dynamically changing world is exciting. I didn't know where a mushroom might appear. In an early prototype, mushrooms would grow in the shadow of other mushrooms. The fact that the world was living and growing was immensely satisfying.

Implement Munchers and Bushes: These will add immensely to the gameplay by creating a dynamic ecosystem.
AI Seed transporters: Add simple AI driven characters that pick up seeds and move them to new locations will very quickly create amazing patterns. For example, one type of seed transporter might move small mushrooms 2 feet away from any other mushroom. Another might move seeds into the shadow of a smaller object. These simple rules will create all sorts of interesting patterns.
Vary the sizes of elements: Have some objects the grow very large. These will dynamically change the landscape over time and in turn create a wildly varying shadowscape.
Add more elements that grow in the shadows: The patterns that came about from mushrooms growing in the shadow of mushrooms was one of the more interesting emergent properties of the simulation. It was cool! Combined with a moving sun, all sorts of interesting hedges should pop up.

Moments of potential fun
The following elements were intellectually interesting, but didn't quite leave me as entertained as I was hoping. This is quite common and just means that you need to invest a little further in the idea.

3) Jumping from shadow to shadow: It was interesting picking my way back through the 'shadowscape' of the level. A journey back to home base where I needed to precisely plan my movements gave the mushroom hunting experience a nice tension. However, in the prototype level there were a lot of sunlit areas and relatively small obstacles. As such the decisions made on the return journey weren't that interesting. Some improvements

Bigger, more maze like obstacles: I notice that when I'm walking around outside, I often have to make a distinct choice: should I got left around a large building sitting in my path or right? I rarely remember the future shadow terrain on each side of the building so I end up making a short term decision to reach the easiest shade. This often hurts me in the long run.

By adding bigger obstacles that take time to navigate and that block off other options, the player is asked to make movement decisions that have a cost. In the best of worlds, players will find themselves jumping from shadow to shadow only to end up further and further from their goal. Some will heroically find their way back. Others will remember their failure and carefully plot out the terrain the next time around. Either way, it creates more meaningful decisions.
More contiguous areas of shadow: Taller objects would help as would objects that are skinny at the base and bulbous on top like trees. The amount of shadows is something you'll need to balance for.
Hungry monsters: The tension can be ramped up by including shambling monsters that move towards you when you have a mushroom in tow. Normally, they can be quite docile and may not even move. But as soon as you get a mushroom, they turn red and make their way towards you. One touch and your mushroom loses extra power. This adds some tactical and time-based pressure to your shadow picking steps.

4) Mini Map
The minimap solves an important problem: How do I find my way back home. However, it also removes a bit of the tension that comes from wandering and finding new paths.

Use a beacon system instead: Instead of a mini-map, a directional highlight like the ones used in Shadow of the Colossus or Knytt would do the trick quite nicely. A little glow at the edge of the screen or a compass that always points towards home help orient the player, but don't give away the terrain.

Things that didn't quite pan out
The following are things that didn't quite work and I don't see useful ways of making them a key part of the experience.

5) Gathering long strings of mushrooms: Once you start gathering long strings of mushrooms it becomes hard to keep them out of the sunlight. I noticed that as soon as I gathered more than one mushroom, I would simply zip to the goal as fast as humanly possible and ignore all tactical decisions. This is an example of a fun idea that actually reduces the complexity of the rest of the game.

Conclusion
The prototyping challenge doesn't really end until someone creates a game worthy of a gold award. So far gold is still within reach. There are some extremely promising mechanics at play in the shade prototype and I'm open to discussing and iterating on further tweaks if anyone wants to take the design further. Feel free to post to this thread if you come up with something cool. Who is going to grab the first ever gold award in Lost Garden history?

For inspiration, I leave you with this simple game that also uses some of the growing ecosystem elements we see hints of in successful Shade prototypes. It was built in 48 hours and easily has more than 15 minutes of game play. If this fellow can find hours of fun in a short prototyping exercise, I'm convinced that you can take your existing Shade prototypes and turn them into something wonderful.

Breaking the Tower: http://www.mojang.com/notch/ld12/breaking/

Best wishes,
Danc.

Soul Bubbles: A classic game ill treated by expert reviewers

noreply@blogger.com (Danc) — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 06:12:00 +0000

I wanted to turn your attention to a delightful little title called Soul Bubbles. I had a chance to play an early version of the game and was impressed by its lead designer, Olivier Lejade, careful attention to the difficulty level of the game.

When it finally launched, I was intrigued to see its aggregate reviewer score hovering at 77%. That is a middling score, but I expected better. Yet when I glanced at the user rating, it was pegged at an impressive 92%. From the user's perspective, we are talking about an instant classic, with a higher aggregate user ratings than either press favorites Halo 2 (91%) or Halo 3 (89%).

Why the disparity? When I looked closer, the professional reviews with lower scores almost all commented on the difficulty level, the one area I knew for a fact that the developers spent months polishing. Alex Sassoon Coby over at Gamespot intones ominously,"The shallow difficulty curve and lack of challenge in the main goals are the only things that let Soul Bubbles down."

Yet, users have the opposite reaction to the same exact features. One fellow gushes "It's very easy to get into thanks to the excellent tutorials, which introduce you effortlessly to the physics-based gameplay as you go along. The game's 40 levels will keep you busy for some time, but chances are you'll play the missions back to back only to be left craving for more!"

There's something odd happening here. Is Soul Bubbles a simplistic, middle of the road experience or is it a classic new game that deserves to be promoted as one of the more playable and innovative games of the year?

The answer tells us a lot about what it takes to make a great game and also happens to highlight one of the grand philosophical flaws in modern game criticism.

Games are about learning skills
First, a bit of background. Games, particularly one built around exploring innovative new game systems like Soul Bubbles, are all about learning new skills. There is a lot written on the topic, there are some articles at the end of this essay for you to peruse. The short of it is that learning new skills yields fun.

You can think of a game like Soul Bubbles as a bit sheet of bubble wrap. Each challenge is a little bubble of fun waiting to be popped. Most games are like this. However, once you've learned a particular challenge, doing it again is usually less exciting. By playing, you've been changed. You've learned the challenge and you'll never be able to revisit that challenge and relive the same emotion that you felt the first time through. You can't re-pop the bubble.

People who play a large number of games tend to rapidly morph into expert gamers. Reviewers, specifically, are almost by definition experts. In order to multiply their meager paychecks, they train themselves to quickly plow through dozens of games. They've crunched through so many levels, powerups, puzzles and collectibles that they are walking encyclopedias of game design techniques.

Since the act of learning is where a large amount of single player fun arises from, many expert gamers find it more and more difficult to derive pleasure from each new title. Games often reuse mechanics and the even an innovative game like Soul Bubbles starts feeling the same. It's like handing the reviewer a sheet of bubble wrap with all the bubbles already popped.

The result is that an initial game activity, such as a tutorial, that would delight a new user instead appear at rote obstacles that need to be skipped past as quickly as possible. Reviewers will use their impressive pre-existing mastery to zip past carefully constructed levels in the hope of find a challenge that will teach them something new. For most, this is subconscious behavior. They just know that they are looking for the thrill that they once experienced as child playing games for the first time. Due to the fact that they have changed, that they are now experts, only the most refined and challenging games still give them a hint of that sweet learning delight. Everything else is labeled 'crap.'

The Expertise Bias
This phenomenon is well understood in the game development community. Game developers also suffer from being experts. Not only do they have encyclopedic knowledge of exist game mechanics, they also have an intimate understanding of how their game is supposed to operate. Surely with such vast expertise, they would be the ideal critics.

Yet, because games are a learning activity, expert game developers often have surprising difficulty understanding how new users will react to their creation. Things they feel are incredibly important end up not mattering. Elements they dismiss as trivial annoyances end up stopping players dead in their tracks. The very fact that designer knows their game intimately makes them a poor critic.

Observation is the solution
The well documented work around for the expertise bias is to observe other people, who aren't experts, play the game. The best designers follow a simple process:

Observe target players
Take notes on potential issues.
Leverage their intimate knowledge of the game to come up with elegant solutions.

Valve does it, Nintendo does it, Microsoft does it. Admittedly, the process is time consuming and not always the easiest path. However, testing with real users is the only proven way to accurately ascertain a game's difficulty and balance.

By observing real people in your target audience learning for the first time, you can realign your heavily biased perception of the game to be more in sync with reality. It becomes readily apparent that 'obvious decisions' do in fact need improved tutorials. Entire systems that you thought were essential are often ignored as players telegraph their delight in simple things like picking up shiny coins.

Game developers have learned the hard way what happens when you ignore the practice of observation. Periodically, schedules become tight and the expensive act of observing real users ends up on the chopping block. Someone with more ego than wisdom stands up and proclaims that they can use their infinite expertise to balance the game using brain power alone. Inevitably their products suffer.

They are fighting the fundamental physics of our medium. Experts, in the absence of observation, make for heavily biased critics.

A tale of Soul Bubbles
Mekensleep, the developers of Soul Bubble, are enlightened developers. They spent months polishing and balancing the difficulty of their game. They held playtests, they observed real users playing for the first time and they fixed the problems that they ran into. They knew that that Soul Bubbles featured some very unique movement and herding mechanics, so they were under no assumptions that they could use their expertise to predict a user's initial reactions.

In the process they learned a lot about how their customers wanted to play Soul Bubbles. Their target player picks up a few games a year and plays in short burst for a long period of time. Many are not looking for intense competition or a massive challenge. Instead, they want a way to relax and explore a delightful world.

As a result Soul Bubbles targets exploratory and easy fun play styles. These feel very different than the traditional hard fun that is the mainstay of many titles played by the core. Yet they are equally enjoyable and often more profitable. Much of the game is about peacefully exploring with the levels designed so that around every corners there is something new to learn or play with.

Through a rigorous and iterative process that involved going to real users, they nailed the difficulty level. That is why the aggregate user ratings are up at 92%.

The flaw of expert reviewers
The reviewers of Soul Bubbles didn't observe real users. Instead, they reacted to the game as expert gamers. The tutorials were a bore, the game could be 'beat' in a short amount of time and the number of times they were forced restart were low. So reviewers told their audience that they should not buy the game on the assumption that the player would likely feel the same thing that the reviewer felt. This represents a basic philosophical approach to game criticism.

I read a short essay by Andrew Doull that sums up this philosophy with the gem of a quote "Fundamentally, the process of being a game critic is the same as being a game designer (is the same as being a game player). That is, it involves the exploration of a possible game space, and trying to validate whether that game space is interesting."

To me, this represents a fallacy of epic proportions that results in badly designed games and inaccurate reviews.

Due to the fact that games are learning systems, good game critique requires two elements.

An expert understanding of the game: Playing the game, knowing mechanics, player psychology, design patterns gives the critic powerful tools for understanding and reacting to what they are witnessing.
Observation of representative users: Expert knowledge biases the priorities of most players, so it is critical to see how real users react to a title in order to get actual target audience data. Having sat through hundreds of hours of observing users, you don't actually know how the virgin value of an inactive system until you see others use it.

Game reviewers only follow one half of this unified process. Since most reviews eschew observation of others (often for timeliness), there is nothing to counter balance their expert bias.

Games are not movies. Please repeat...again and again and again.
There are good historical reasons why experts fail to incorporate player observation into their game reviews. The concept of a review comes from reviewing movies, books and plays. These are what I think of as 'empathetic media'. The process of enjoying these works follows a clear psychological pathway.

The viewer observes a universal stimuli, such as a pretty girl in a movie,
They empathize with her situation based off their extensive memories of related situations
Finally they recall and synthesize an emotional response.

The best works of linear media deal with broadly identifiable stimuli, archetypes of human experiences. Most people have experience with loneliness or the boy winning the lovely girl. Empathetic media gains its mass appeal by dealing in universal truths.

When a reviewer watches a movie, they are asking themselves the question "Do I, as a passable representative of humanity, react strongly to the stimuli in this movie? If so, there is a great chance that others will as well." There is very little expertise bias involved in this exercise. It asks the reviewer to empathize with the stimuli like any other person would.

There is a big question if games work well as empathic media. Their stories are weak, characters flimsy and their exploration of universal truths are usually laughable. Instead, games tend to be strongest when they focus on learning, exploration and first time experiences. Games, more than any other media, are less about reacting and more about changing who we are.

Because the deep, underlying theme of games is change and learning, you need to take into account your level of mastery and the level of mastery of the target audience in your criticism. Otherwise, you end up, like in the case of Soul Bubbles, being the PhD student claiming that Physics 101 is a waste of time because you've 'been and done that' already.

Traditional reviewing techniques taken from the world of empathic media are ill suited for critiquing games. They lack the essential observational techniques that working game designers have found to be so important.

Looking into the future
So, yes, the current game reviewing system is broken. As is often the case with games, we've adopted wholesale the techniques of movies and literature without asking if they even make sense in the context of our brilliantly vibrant new media. I'm certainly not the first to say this.

Yet with single player games, the hack still almost works. Single player games have generally followed a linear path padded with cutscenes, where a reviewer will typically have a similar experience to that of most other players. As such, the expertise bias usually only throws off scores by 10 to 20%. Long term, this practice shrinks the gaming community and it has certainly caused a few developers to miss out on royalty bonuses, but overall it clunks along.

Yet, the world is changing once more. As you introduce multiplayer games into the mix, social dynamics take over and who you play with has as much impact on the experience as which quests you take on. The types of learning and the experiential paths that each player takes are exploding. One player's experience playing with his new girlfriend will be radically different than that of a old school guild settling into the game as a respite from World of Warcraft. An empathetic expert reviewer will not be able to speak for everyone in a convincing fashion.

It is again instructive to observe how developers are using an observation-based understanding of the game to create a proper practice of game criticism. Right now there are hundreds of teams building complex metrics and logging systems that track their player's experiences on a minute level of detail. The best have psychographic and business dashboards that tell them how people are reacting and where problems are emerging. In the future, developers will be observing, tracking and improving the experience of individual guilds and social groups. Practical game criticism, the sort performed by actual game design teams, will be even futher fueled by deep observation and timely intervention.

Unfortunately, these tools are not available to most reviewers. In the coming years, developers will have a vastly superior understanding of how customers are reacting to their game than reviewers will. This is already the case for many titles, such as Soul Bubbles, and the trend will only continue.

What is the future role of professional reviewers?
What role does the expert reviewer have in this situation? As the audience for games broaden, as the benefits of a single expert judging an entire game diminish as their opinions become even more divorced from the actual experiences of real players. The air of objectivity dissipates and the reviewer becomes no more than yet another guy with an intricately detailed, heavily biased opinion.

This represents an intriguing crisis in game criticism. There are many paths for the ex-reviewer to wander down:

The news announcements: The factual (though still flavorful) announcements of new games, events and updates. The goals is to let people know that something is happening.
The analysts: The elitist community that uses their expertise to deconstruct games according to various theoretical frameworks. The goal is a deeper philosophical understanding of games (and strutting rights within their small incestuous circle.) This is my world. :-)
The tourists: Every Man players who approach writing about a game like a travel journalist on a safari. The goal is to evoke the emotions that the individual reporter experienced, not to predict what everyone's experience might be. They succeed if they provide simple entertainment.
The opinion mavens: The high energy personality who crystalize the trends and fashions of their target culture. The goal is to pick hits in a heavily biased but entertaining fashion and enhance the maven's personal brand.
Ranking sites: Sites like gamerankings are still of questionable value, but over time sites that use a broader range of data will emerge. The goal is to provide a public thermometer that, with reasonable accuracy, states if the game is worth trying.

I already see this evolution occurring. I've given up on reading reviews and instead find myself frequenting gaming blogs, the news portals of our age. Many traditional reviewers are popping up in more experientially-focused sites like The Escapist or Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Even next generation ranking sites are appearing in the form of portals like Kongregate. And what is Zero Punctuation if not our very own flavorful equivalent of Oprah the Opinion Maven?

Closing thoughts
Go out and try Soul Bubbles. It is a great example of what happens when a developer balances their title for their target audience and not the expert reviewer. If you are an expert reviewer, play it with an eye towards seeing how a first time user might experience it. It is an interesting and remarkably difficult exercise. Then give the game to someone who isn't an expert gamer and watch them play it. I suspect that they'll highlight elements that you didn't even realize were important.

If you are serious about providing objective insight into a game, either a title you are building or one your are reviewing, your expertise is not enough. In fact, your vast mastery of game related skills is mostly likely causing a giant bias in your judgments. You need to fight this bias by observing other players over and over again. They will do things with the game that are a source of wondrous insight. Your expertise becomes a tool for making great changes based off these insights, not one for predicting a priori exactly how all users will react to the game.

As for the current review industry, it is built on the unstable foundation of expert opinion in the absence of actual player observation. As games evolve and become ever more about first time learning experiences, the traditional game review will become increasingly irrelevant. It is arguable that they've already stopped informing most buying decisions and now serve as little more than entertainment for the hardcore niche. As the value proposition of reviews falter, the vast, churning, capitalist forces of creative destruction will replace them with a much richer set of game criticism that offers real value to its readers.

It's a beautiful day outside, so I'm off to pop a bit more bubble wrap,
Danc.

References

Soul Bubbles: http://www.soulbubblesgame.com/
Games as learning: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1524/the_chemistry_of_game_design.php?print=1
Hard and easy fun: http://www.xeodesign.com/whyweplaygames/xeodesign_whyweplaygames.pdf

Directory of Posts

noreply@blogger.com (Danc) — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 04:43:00 +0000

Lost Garden has turned into a rather substantial archive of game design thoughts. In order to help you find essays that you are interested in, I've finally performed a bit of house cleaning and tagged all 180+ posts. Go forth and explore!

Quest: Which essays are "Worth Reading"?
I'm looking for the essays that you found to be more influential on your thinking about games. I'd like to bubble those to the top of the site by marking a handful with the Worth Reading tag. I've tagged a few, but I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Popular

Worth Reading: <-This is a good starting place if you are new to the site
All Essays
Free Game Graphics
Game Prototyping Challenges
Science of game design

Game Design Science

Game Design Craft

Game Prototyping Challenges

Resources

Game Observations

Conferences and Articles

Personal

Feel free to send any comments or errors to danc [at] lostgarden [dot] com.

Shade: A game prototyping challenge

noreply@blogger.com (Danc) — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 18:24:00 +0000

As a redhead, there's a little game that I play every day in summertime called "Stay in the Shade". The rules are simple: make it to my destination as quickly as possible while avoiding all possible sunlight. This involves hopping from shade patch to shade patch. The cost of failure is the dread Irish Tan. These bizarre antics were inspiration for a game design called Shade.

As with any of the designs you find on this site, I heartily encourage you to prototype it and use it as a learning project. I know that there is a group of you itching to try out the latest 3D engines with sex-a-licious real-time shadows. This is your chance to finally use the technology in a way that produces meaningful game play.

I'll give out the much coveted Bronze, Silver, and Gold Lost Garden badges to anyone who creates a worthy prototype.

Basic gameplay
You play the part of a rugged mushroom rancher who must collect adorable sentient mushrooms living in the shade. All you need to do is run up to a planted mushroom and touch it. It will pop out of the ground and start following you around. Lead it back to the start location and you'll be awarded multiple point based off its size.

Unfortunately, it is a scorchingly hot day. You can meander about the landscape of giant grassy blocks with impunity due to your meglo-awesome wide brimmed hat, but the mushrooms wilt quickly in sunlight. To lead them back successfully, you'll need to keep to the shadows and plot the optimal path home.

Basic Elements

Player: The player can move about on a 2D plane using the arrow keys or a joystick.
Blocks: Strewn about the landscape are blocks that cast shadows.
Planted mushrooms: In the shadows of the blocks, planted mushrooms will slowly spawn over time. If left alone they will slowly grow in size.
Mushrooms: If the player runs into a Planted Mushroom, it will pop out of the ground and start following the player's motions exactly. If multiple mushrooms are collected, they will follow in a line behind the player. A mushroom can last in direct sunlight about a second before they expire. This amount of time is cumulative and is shown by slowly shrinking the mushroom as it is exposed to more sunlight.
Homebase: This is a spot on the ground that you need to lead the mushrooms back to in order for them to be counted.
Mushroom score: In the upper right hand corner of the screen is the HUD. The most important element is the Mushroom score that shows you how many mushrooms you've collected so far today.
Day timer: The day slowly progresses from morning to evening over 15 minutes. The shadows change position as the day progresses.

Winning the game
The game is over at the end of the day. Total mushrooms collected is entered into a highscore table.

Technology
We've had lovely real time shadows for quite some time, but very few designs take advantage of the technology. Luckily there are an immense number of cheap 3D engines that can pump out real-time shadows. Some options:

Not so long ago, this tech was the exclusive domain of techsperts like id and Epic. But now there are no excuses. And the very clever folks will figure that you can make this game in a 2D engine with a little finagling.

Art
Since this design is likely a 3D game, I'm not providing art assets. I recommend that you use cubes and other primitives for the various elements in the scene. They are inexpensive, highly effective and can always be replaced at a later point with more advanced models once you've proven out the gameplay.

With this type of game, a good amount of pleasure will come from the motion of the mushrooms following the player and the movement of the shadows over time. Slick graphics can enhance this, but they aren't necessary to find the fun. Again, no excuses.

Advanced gameplay
Once the basic gameplay is in place, there are immense opportunities for more interesting variations.

Movable blocks: Blocks that you can push around allow you to create optimal paths for harvesting mushrooms.
Muncher: Once a planted mushroom grows to a certain size and it is hit by the sun, it turns into an AI driven creature called a muncher. Munchers find a nearby green block (also known as a bush) and start munching on it. This reduces the size of the block and therefore the amount of shade it provides. Munchers can be stunned and killed by running into them repeatedly.
Bush seed: A dead muncher turns into a Bush seed. A bush seed is an object that can be collected by running over it with the character. If you press a button, the bush seed is planted on that location and begins to grow.
Multiple days in a row: What happens to the landscape if you let the world run for multiple days? With the inclusion of bushes and munchers, we have a self balancing ecosystem. As you plant more bushes, there is a greater chance that mushrooms will turn into munchers, which in turn reduce the bushes. Can you turn a simple landscape into a mushroom plantation?

Balancing
This is the sort of game that lives or dies based on balancing all the various elements. There are a number of variables that you'll need to mess about with

Size of the blocks
Number of blocks and shadow area
Spawning rate of mushrooms
Size of mushrooms
Amount of sunlight to kill a mushroom.
Speed of the character
Size of the map.
Size of the viewport onto the map.

I don't have the answers. You'll get the answers by iterating on the basic design dozens, if not hundreds of times. Keep me updated and I'm happy to provide feedback on works in progress.

The Lost Garden Awards
Once again I'm giving out the always desirable Lost Garden badges for any prototypes that result.

Bronze Medal: You built an interesting software toy. If you make an attempt at a design and it is interesting to futz about with, you get the Bronze Medal. Most people never get a Bronze medal due to the simple fact that they prefer to sit around and think rather than make something. Simply by doing (instead of not doing), you join an elite club.
Silver Medal: You found the fun. You've iterated on your design and have identified a few key elements that make the game enjoyable. There is at least 5 minutes of interesting play. It likely isn't polished and some of the higher order reward loops are broken, but the core is there. If past challenges are any indication, I'll give out only a handful of Silver Medals per challenge.
Gold Medal: You made the fun repeatable. The game that you've built is entertaining enough that I'm willing to play it for 15 to 20 minutes. This is a hard level to reach and it is only populated by the most elite cadre of weekend warriors. An entire production team could be seeded by your efforts. To reach this level, you've made some critical design steps beyond the initial concept and built unique and sustainable gameplay based off dozens of game play iterations. To this day, no one has won a Gold Medal. You could be the first.

You need to post a public, playable version in order to be eligible. I'll issue the rewards about one month after the initial challenge is posted. If something comes in after the original deadline has passed, I'll add it retroactively to the award post. If you win a Bronze or Silver, you can still come back later and make an attempt at the Gold. Anyone who gets a Gold medal is an automatic rock star in my book.

What do you get if you win? First off, you get the right to post a snazzy LostGarden medal on your website. Most importantly, you get that warm fuzzy feeling in your tippy-tip toes that stems from a job well done.

Conclusion
Shade is an interesting game design to me for the following reasons

Exploration-based play: The joy is in exploring the ever changing landscape and finding mushrooms and interesting paths back home. It is more strategic than action oriented.
Simple controls: All you need to play are directional controls and one button. It should be pretty easy to pickup.
Non-violent: In general there is very little combat. I like this. I can imagine the title having a very meditative feel.
Uses real-time shadows for some unique gameplay. Real-time shadows have been used for sneaking games, but little else. Surely it is time to expand the number of games that use this fascinating technology.

Enjoy! If anyone makes something and puts it online, I'm happy to discuss it on the website in a follow up post.

take care
Danc.

Past challenges

Mockup

Adobe Illustrator (CS3) Mockup file

What actitivies can be turned into games?

noreply@blogger.com (Danc) — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 17:57:00 +0000

Techniques for designing consumer scales

Recently, my amazing wife picked up a copy of Wii Fit. No, this is not a review.

Here is something you may not know about my wife. For the past year, she's been dealing with a rather serious, debilitating illness. One side effect is considerable and undesirable weight loss. On the positive side, she has enjoyed shopping for a new wardrobe to match her more petite frame. On the less positive side, many stores no longer carry clothes that are small enough to fit.

So when the Wii Fit first booted up and cheerily prompted her to set a goal, she decided to try to get her BMI back up to the 'normal level'. Every day or so, she's been exercising, weighing herself and doing yoga. So far she has found the game to be convenient and highly motivational tool for helping her to track her weight.

We've had other exercise equipment around the house before, as well as gym memberships, yoga classes, etc. None of them has been as motivating as a simple set of exercises wrapped in a system of game-like rewards. My wife's experience with Wii Fit speaks volumes about games potential to turn an often mundane activity into entertainment that is delightful, exploratory and highly meaningful.

Thinking beyond scales
Yet, who would have ever thought that weighing yourself could be turned into a game? Miyamoto did, but then again he is widely considered to be an uber genius. The skeptical observer might imagine that successful cross-over games like Wii Fit are one-in-a-million success stories. Suppose it works for Wii Fit, but nothing else.

However, if the lessons of Wii Fit were broadly applicable, entire industries could be transformed. Games are a competitive advantage that can turn a commodity scale into one of the hottest consumer products of the year. In highly competitive markets, that is the sort of product design super power that lets innovative companies walk away with market share.

As I contemplate my wife's success with the Wii Fit, I'm struck by a multi-billion dollar question: What other activities can you turn into a game?

Almost anything
First, though there is no doubt that Miyamoto is a genius, what he does is reproducible by mere mortals. He is able to apply his game design skill (or at least his greenlighting abilities) to non-traditional games like Wii Fit because he understands game design at a very atomic level. Here is another way of looking at it. A craftsman builds tables the same way he was taught by his father and his grandfather can only build tables. But someone trained in mechanical engineering can use the fundamentals to build chairs, bridges, cars or even cathedrals. Similarly, by understanding the fundamental science behind traditional games, you can apply the theoretical tools of game design to transform wildly divergent activities into games. I've written about some of this in the past with essays on skill atoms.

It turns out that most learnable skills can be turned into a game. However, there are constraints. A skill must meet the following criteria before it can be turned into a game:

Decomposable into simpler skills
Skills can be nested
Skills can be arranged in a smooth learning curve
Skills are measurable
Performance can be rewarded
Skills are locally useful.

Let's look at these one by one.

1. Decomposable into simpler skills
Complex learnable skills can be broken down into sets of easily acquired core skills. Players can only learn so much at once and overly complex skills overwhelm all but the most persistent players. By breaking skills up into digestible chunks, you are now able to apply many of the basic techniques of game design.

In Wii Fit, the complex activity of "Becoming fit" is broken down into skills associated with using the board, testing balance, endurance activities and more.

2. Skills can be nested
Complex skills should build upon and reuse earlier skills. Advanced skills are best taught by the extension of existing skills, not introducing new metaphors.

Game design is built around the idea of core mechanics, skills that are exercised over and over again throughout the game experience. If you can't find a set of basic reusable skills that can be incorporated as the foundational elements of more complex skills, players will deem the activity shallow and lose interest.

In Wii Fit, the act of balancing while following rote exercises is used repeatedly throughout. It is an activity that is easy to learn, hard to master and contributes nicely to a wide range more advanced activities.

3. Skills can be arranged in a smooth learning curve
There is a smooth ramp from learning easier skills to learning more complex skills. Initial skills should take only seconds since they leverage existing skills. Afterwards, learning activities should build in complexity until they take minutes, then hours. If the initial learning ramp takes too long, players will be confused or bored and stop playing.

In Wii Fit, you can learn to use the board in seconds. Just step on it. However, more advanced games are slowly introduced until must spend hours of your time to unlock that last activity.

4. Skills are measurable
The game can detect when a skill is used correctly or incorrectly. Without this the game cannot provide timely feedback that pushes the player in the right direction.

The fact that Wii Fit is a giant sensor is perhaps to be expected. Within limits, it knows exactly what you are doing and when you doing something incorrectly. This is a dramatic difference from most exercise equipment or a workout video.

5. Performance is rewardable
The game can provide the player with a timely feedback and rewards. If the game provides feedback too late or in a manner that is disconnected from the original action, the player won’t learn.

Unlike traditional exercise equipment, Wii Fit judges your performance. It lets you know when you are doing poorly and it praises you when you are doing well. It is not a passive tool, but one that seeks to mold you. This is how games work and is an integral part of their success as a teaching tool.

6. Skills are locally useful
The skill can be exercised in a useful manner by the player in a variety of meaningful local contexts. If the skill isn’t useful, the behavior will extinguish.

Local utility is a tricky concept for many, especially those trained to think in terms of filling measurable customer needs. It basically means that the player finds an activity useful in the short term within the local context of the game. Grabbing a coin in Wii Fit may accomplish absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of the player's week. However, it does let the player unlock a new exercise. So for the moment, the player considers frantically gathering coins to be a completely utilitarian activity.

Skills that are eliminated by these constraints
What skills are eliminated by these constraints? Surprisingly few.

The biggest sticking point often ends up deciding how to measure complex skills. With Wii Fit, they needed to engineer an entirely new device. It is not uncommon to invest substantial amounts of effort just gathering the right data so that you can reward the proper skills accurately and in timely manner.

Machines alone have a limited understanding of many cultural human activities. In these situations, you need to build your games to use other human beings as measurement instruments. The rating techniques of sites like Hot or Not or Amazon.com are widely applicable.

The other constraints end up being easily worked around with a little bit of thought and prototyping to find what works.

Conclusion
When I look at our list of six constraints, it is obvious to me that there are a plethora of skills that are just waiting to be turned into games. Games like Wii Fit or Brain Training may seem exceptional strokes of genius, but in reality they are merely the tiny tip of an immense iceberg. Almost any human skill, be it physical, cultural, political or economic can be turned into a game that enlightens and enables.

As more leisure games emerge that mediate and accelerate the acquisition of skills, there is going to be a economic incentive to spread the science and craft of game design far beyond our tiny game industry. Game design is not just about games. It is a transformational new product development technique that can turn historically commoditized activities into economic blockbusters.

This morning, my wife came back from her morning Wii Fit session and proudly announced to me that she just worked her way back to her normal weight range. She is still on the light side and this odd little game was by no means the only source of her success. But it had its place as a tool that measured, encouraged and rewarded progress. As such it was worth every single penny.

When I look at Wii Fit and I hear the delight in my wife's voice, it is apparent that game design is again breaking out into the broader market. Obviously it isn't happening quite in the way many have predicted. The harbinger of game's ascendancy to all aspect of the modern life is not some piece of evocative art or Citizen Kane-a-like. Instead, our future appears in the form of a glorified bathroom scale. Still, if we can improve people's lives with a bathroom scale, just imagine how games can transform the rest of our world.

take care
Danc.

Lostgarden looking for brilliant programmer in Seattle

noreply@blogger.com (Danc) — Wed, 28 May 2008 01:01:00 +0000

a mystery project

Summer project time! I've got an intriguing new design that is best explored by the sort of in-person rapid prototyping that I love. To that end, I'm looking to team up with a talented programmer or two from Seattle/Redmond. It's a bit like getting a band together.

My dream is to meet up every Sunday at a local coffee shop, riff about what we've done that week and come away energized and ready to build some more.

Location: Seattle/Puget Sound area is a must. (Otherwise, it is hard to do the coffee shop thing)
Skills: Solid Flash, Flex or Silverlight skills. Previous experience with Java, C++, or C# is great as long as you are willing to learn Flex. Back end skills are also helpful. The project is 'technically interesting' and is best tackled by someone who is more of a programmer than a scripter.
Time commitment: 10 hours a week for about three months. Anything less I've found doesn't make it worth your time.

I'd contribute art, design and Cheetos (organic or radioactive). If you are interested, drop me a note at Danc [at] Lostgarden [dot] com. Send along a portolio if you've got one and tell me a little bit about yourself.

Take care,
Danc.

Improving Bug Triage with User Pain

noreply@blogger.com (Danc) — Tue, 20 May 2008 04:47:00 +0000

The traditional bug triage process is miserably inefficient. Over my decade in this industry, I’ve spent months of my life sitting in windowless offices manually reviewing (and re-reviewing) thousands of bugs. Often times, there are three or four folks on the triage team, typically the most skilled people on the team, sitting about and bickering for hours over the finer points of obscure bugs. Politics, boredom and arbitrary decisions are unfortunately common. The result is wasted time and poorly managed bugs.

So we came up with a better way.

User Pain is a technique I’ve been using for many releases across multiple teams. It involves sorting bugs on a single unified scale called User Pain that takes into account common bug ranking criteria. I’ve found that it can reduce the cost of triage, help teams ship on time and greatly clarify which bugs you should be fixing right now. This essay describes how User Pain works and some best practices for implementing it on your team.

Problems with current bug triage
Traditional bug triaging is a time consuming and tedious process. Bugs come into a bug database with little prioritization, the team leads sort and rate each problem and then assign them to the appropriate members of the team. This process tends to run into several issues:

Lack of shared criteria: Different people often value different aspects of a bug, which leads to unhealthy disagreement. A designer might think a usability issue is a critical fix, while a programmer might be concerned about a crash. With no common criteria, it is hard to build consensus quickly.
Wasted time: Often the highest skilled team members are required to triage bugs. They spend hundreds of hours poring over mundane issues again and again. This is time that could be better spent improving the product.
Bottlenecks: Bugs are often required to go through a review process so that precious developer time isn’t spent on bugs that would have otherwise been punted. The loop from the submitter to the triage team to the developer can cause delays for critical bugs.
Big undifferentiated bins of bugs: Since the incoming rate of bugs is often higher than the fix rate, large piles of bugs will accumulate for each developer. If a developer has 50 bugs on their plate, they will fix them in a semi-random order or rely on micromanagement by the triage team. The first tactic means critical bugs are sometimes left to be fixed until the end. The second means more time is wasted on reviewing bugs.
Triage burn out: After reviewing thousands of bugs, many triage teams stop caring or become fixated on a few bugs at the cost of reviewing others. The result is that some bugs are poorly triaged and the quality of bug ranking in the database is low.

These are the problems we want to solve with User Pain.

The basic system
User Pain is yet another technique inspirted by the world of Lean Manufacturing, the ancient mother of so many Agile practices. The technique was original developed in the 80’s as a method of efficiently classifying product defects on manufacturing lines. While some of the ideas are new to software development, the core concepts have been tested in intense product development situations for decades.

At with many agile techniques, User Pain isn’t all the complicated.

Rank each bug on several criteria
Combine those criteria into a single score called User Pain
Sort all bugs by User Pain into a public list
Start fixing the most painful bugs at the top of the list.

There is a distinct philosophy at work here. First, empower bug submitters to easily create well formed, well classified bugs. Next, give the team the tools and information necessary to make smart decisions about what to work on first. Finally, encourage practices that make it easy to put quality first. Instead of relying on expert managers, you rely on a well informed, empowered team. As a result, the User Pain system removes most of the need for a triage middleman.

Let’s dig into each step and explore the devil in the details.

Step 1: Rank each bug on several criteria
Bug submitters use a simplified bug submission page that clearly lists three factors: Type, Likelihood and Priority. Each factor has multiple values, listed in order of impact. At submission time, the bug submitter rates the bug.

Three bug rating factors
Here are the three factors that I’ve been using.

Type: What type of bug is this? For example is it a crashing issue, a problem with localization or a matter of visual polish?
Likelihood: How likely are users to experience the bug? For example, does everyone run into the issue or do only a few users run into it?
Priority: Of the people who experience the bug, how badly does it affect their experience with the product?

These particular factors have been battle tested for many a release and were selected for the following reasons.

Good coverage: These cover the range of concerns expressed by most stakeholders. Type includes business priorities while Likelihood and Priority help classify user impact.
No overlap (aka orthogonal): A bug can be rated on one factor without affecting how you would rate the other factors. This allows you to rate each factor in isolation and greatly improves the objectivity of the results.
Small number: There are few enough of them that they don’t overload the bug submitter. It is easy to add more factors for various edge cases, but typically this results in a cluttered and confusing bug submission form.

Use anchored scales
Now that we have our factors, each one needs a rating scale. At this point, we do something slightly tricky. Each point on the three scales is anchored to an objective description. Here are the anchored scales I prefer:

Type (What type of bug is this?)

7: Crash: Bug causes crash or data loss. Asserts in the Debug release.
6: Major usability: Impairs usability in key scenarios.
5: Minor usability: Impairs usability in secondary scenarios.
4: Balancing: Enables degenerate usage strategies that harm the experience.
3: Visual and Sound Polish: Aesthetic issues
2: Localization:
1: Documentation: A documentation issue

Priority (How will those affected feel about the bug?)

5: Blocking further progress on the daily build.
4: A User would return the product. Cannot RTM. The Team would hold the release for this bug.
3: A User would likely not purchase the product. Will show up in review. Clearly a noticeable issue.
2: A Pain – users won’t like this once they notice it. A moderate number of users won’t buy.
1: Nuisance – not a big deal but noticeable. Extremely unlikely to affect sales.

Likelihood (Who will be affected by this bug)

5: Will affect all users.
4: Will affect most users.
3: Will affect average number of users.
2: Will only affect a few users.
1: Will affect almost no one.

An anchored scale describes each point on the scale with specific, objective criteria. As long as the item being rated meets the criteria, you know what value it should be assigned. An anchored scale is preferred over a relative scale (ex: Please rate this problem from 1 to 10) since there is less subjective judgment involved in assigning the value.

Display the anchored scales prominently on the UI where bugs are entered
Anchored scales are only useful if the team can see the descriptions.

On one team, we only displayed values 1 to 5 in a drop down list and asked submitters to remember what each value meant. This wasn’t very effective. People treated each factor as a relative scale and would rate items by ‘feel’ initially instead of referring to the definitions of each value. The end result was that bug ratings were heavily influenced by personal preference.

Instead, build a bug submission UI that lets the submitter read the descriptions as they rate the bug. Radio buttons work wonderfully since you can place all the descriptions right in front of the user. A drop down that contains the descriptions is also feasible.

This may seems like a minor issue, but people are usually in a hurry. If you don’t make the rating process painless, they’ll happily toss random data into your bug database. Improving the clarity of your bug submission UI is the single cheapest thing you can do to improve the quality of your bugs.

Who enters bugs
This system is intended to be used by members of the development team. Artists, testers, developers, designers, project managers and producers all should be able to understand the criteria and enter well rated bugs. They'll need an understanding of the core scenarios and the target user. The better that you educate the team on what you are doing and who you are doing it for, the better your bugs will be.

This system does not work well for bug submissions by external users. They don’t understand the terminology and tend to create bugs that are poorly formed. A good solution is for a tester to reenter the user bugs with the proper ratings and format. It is a form of triage, but is a relatively minor cost in the grand scheme of things.

Benefits
Using anchored scaled for rating bugs upon submission has the following benefits.

Less reliance on personal opinion: A tester who has some domain knowledge can quickly classify the bug into one of the buckets without relying overly much on their personal opinion. The result is that even when multiple people independently rate the same bug, the final user pain tends to cluster very tightly around the same values.
Harder to game the system: Anchored scales also make it harder to simply ‘bump the pain’ up for a bug that has become a hot topic. Due to the clarity of the rating categories, poorly rated bugs are usually flagged by the next person who looks at them.
Push triage to the submitter: When you can trust the ratings set by bug submitters, you can eliminate a large portion of the triage process. Provided that your submitters have basic domain expertise, 80-90% of the values that they set during the initial submission stay the same throughout the life of the bug. This means that there is less need for reviews to reset random values.

Step 2: Combine those criteria into a single score called user pain
Once a bug is ranked on all three factors, you multiply the numbers together to get the User Pain score. User Pain is a single value that can be used to compare widely divergent bugs. User pain deals with the gray area in which most bugs live.

Obvious fixes: A bug that the users hate, blocks major user scenarios and affects everyone causes a big hit to perceived product quality. So it receives a very high pain score.
Hard calls: A bug that occurs all the time, despite the fact that it blocks only minor scenarios, still receives a moderately high score.
Tricky punts: A crash that is never seen by anyone receives a low score.

The basic equation for calculating User Pain is as follows:

User Pain = Type * Likelihood * Priority / Max Possible Score

User pain is auto calculated when the bug is entered and whenever the bug changes. After you calculate user pain for a set of bugs, you’ll find that you have a smooth spectrum of bugs ranked from 1 to 100% Pain.

Benefits

One value for comparing different bugs: Instead of forcing users to juggle multiple different criteria when comparing bugs, they only need to look at one. This means quicker judgments and easier sorting.
Fewer big bug buckets: No longer do you need to deal with huge swathes of undifferentiated bugs. Instead of dealing with 300 priority 2 issues, you typically will see much more manageable clumps of 3 to 5 bugs with the same pain rating. Bug Maturity, as described in the Appendix also helps spread out the bugs.

Step 3: Sort all bugs by User Pain into a public list
Once you have your list of bugs complete with user pain, you need to display them to your team in an easy to understand manner. I’ve dabbled with custom queries inside bug tracking tools, but my favorite technique is to create the world’s simplest bug dashboard.

The Pain List
The Pain List is a webpage that lists all the active bugs in order of User Pain. You put the highest pain bugs at the top of the list and you make each bug a hyper link that takes you to the bug details in your bug database. Be sure to auto reload the list every 10 seconds or so the data is fresh and reliable.

The Pain List becomes your central dashboard for daily bug management. I’ve gone so far as to make it the homepage on my web browser.

Quality bars
The team can use the Pain List to set easy-to-understand quality bars as exit criteria for your milestones. For example, they can say “In order to release, we want no bugs greater than 30 pain.” At the 30 pain threshold on the Pain List, you draw a line. Anything above the line needs to be fixed. Anything below the line you can ship with.

Quality bars can be more meaningful than traditional bug counts since you are implicitly taking into account the final user experience. Meeting this bar means that you’ve fixed all crashing and unpleasant bugs and the only issues that are left are minor cosmetic ones that are rarely seen by users.

Since you have a finely incremented spectrum of bugs, you can also precisely adjust quality bars based on your place in the release cycle. You could set a high pain threshold if you are dealing with new features. You can tighten the quality bar further for subsequent releases.

Benefits

One view: One view shared by everyone, including both testers and developers. You don’t have to worry about juggling divergent database queries.
Simple to understand for all parties involved. There are no specialized tools or incomprehensible graphs. Even management can know where you are at just by glancing at the list.
Clear understanding of status: If there are bugs above the quality bar, you need to start fixing bugs.

Step 4: Start fixing the most painful bugs at the top of the list
Now that we have the Pain List, we can finally put it to use. Developers check the Pain List daily and fix the highest pain bugs on the list. If there are no bugs left above the current quality bar, they work on feature work. This basic heuristic is a surprisingly efficient method for managing quality.

Assigning bugs
All bugs are assigned to Active upon submission, not a particular developer. When a developer sees a high pain bug that they want to work on, they assign it to themselves. The bug then goes through the standard process of being fixed, tested, and closed by the submitter. In general, developers should have no more than a half dozen bugs assigned at once. They pop items off the list, fix them and go back for more. Hoarding is highly discouraged. So is assigning bugs based on feature area.

Fixing bugs before feature work
All bugs above the quality bar should be fixed before new feature work is started. If you follow this practice, you should exit each sprint with no more high pain bugs than you entered the sprint. Bug debt doesn’t accumulate.

This practice helps you build quality in as you develop. When this practice is paired with solid automated tests, you enter into a whole new world of high quality development.

My bugs
At the top of the Pain List is a section that lists the current user’s assigned bugs. This both helps devs treat the Pain List as their entry into the bug database and it reminds them that they should finish the items on their plate before taking on new work. Since this list is short, it rarely interferes with browsing the Pain List.

Benefits

Developers always know what to fix: All they need to do is look at the top of the list and there is almost always a bug waiting for them to grab. As a result, developers never need to juggle multiple criteria in their head when deciding what to work on next. Nor do they have to wait on leads or managers to assign them bugs.
Promotes shared code ownership: The rule ‘fix from the top’ rarely correspond with ‘fix the code that I developed’. Short term, this is less efficient since developers may need to ask questions of the original developer about an area of the code. Long term, the broad knowledge of the code base that comes from fixing bugs outside area of expertise results in higher overall productivity and team flexibility.
Bugs that prevent you from shipping don't accumulate: The benefits of fixing bugs before features are numerous. The pain of shipping is greatly reduced. Testing is more effective since they don’t need to constantly juggle workarounds to problems that won’t be fixed for months. Finally, the team feels better because they know they are always building a high quality product.

Pitfalls
There are a few pitfalls that emerge when you first try to implement a User Pain system.

Training the team
There are likely people on your team that have been dealing with bugs for decades. Changing the bug tracking system will require retraining before you see positive results.

In my experience, new teams initially rank 80% of the bugs incorrectly because they A) do not use the rating scale or B) do not understand the target user. To fix this issue, keep making the anchored scales highly visible and keep promoting the major scenarios and target user. After people get the chance to enter a few dozen bugs, their pain ratings will become far more reliable.

The temptation to assign ‘cost’
You’ll notice that there is no place for ‘cost’ or technical risk of fixing a bug anywhere in the pain score. This is one factor that most developers immediately request. Despite the temptation, I recommend leaving it out.

It requires extra effort: 8 times out of 10 the developer actually needs to dig into the code to figure out what is causing the bug before they know how much it will take to fix. If you require ‘cost’ to be figured into the User Pain calculation, you bog down the entire system.
99% of the time it doesn’t matter. The cost of fixing bugs tends to fall on an exponential distribution. Many bugs are one or two line fixes. Others rarely take more than a couple of days. Only a very few are truly killer bugs. Flag the exceptions and use a generic bug velocity to track the rest and your results will be just as predictable as if you had costed each and every bug.

The temptation to automate exceptions
The User Pain system is about automating triage. There is a temptation to attempt to automate everything. What about the 1% of the bugs that have the potential to push your release into the next century? When you do stumble upon a bug that will take more than a week to fix, flag it as a ‘killer’ bug. Killer bugs show up in red on the Pain List and an email is sent to the team.

It is now the responsibility of the team leaders to find a solution. They can design around it, postpone it, or even fix it. Now that they’ve been freed of the burden of triage, they have the time to attack the hard problems with great vigor.

The pain score helps keep killer bugs in perspective so that panic is kept to a minimum. There will be Killer issues that are very low pain. It probably isn’t worth delaying the product to fix these. On the other hand, a Killer issue that has high pain is likely to have a serious impact on schedule and should be addressed immediately.

There is a small lesson here. Never build a system, especially one involving people, that aims to handle every exception. You'll destroy what value the process adds by building in all the edge cases. Instead, allow people to raise an alarm so that smart minds can deal with the exception in a timely fashion.

Conclusion
User Pain remains simple despite all the detail I’ve tossed your way. The team submits and ranks bugs. The system calculates user pain and pumps out a fresh list of prioritized bugs for everyone to see. The team fixes the bugs from the top of the list. Those are the essentials.

Teams thrive under this bug process. There is less thrashing and ambiguity. There is a lot less need for micromanaging every single little bug (and every single developer). With User Pain, the responsibility for creating a quality product is placed clearly in the hands of the team. They triage the bugs. They fix the most important ones early. The process exists to give them all the tools they need to make the right decisions. Again, it is about empowering people, not managing them.

User Pain doesn’t work for every team. Nor does it completely eliminate triaging. Anyone who thinks process is a panacea hasn’t worked in this industry very long. However, with your heart in the right place, User Pain is a substantial improvement over sitting in a room and manually reviewing hundreds of bugs. It makes the team more efficient, helps people make better decisions and focuses the team on building quality into the product.

Take care,
Danc

Appendixes

Bug Maturity
Setting quality bar is great for fixing high pain bugs. However, over time you will build up hundreds of older low pain bugs. Since you are triaging less often, the quality of such bugs can be quite low.

You can alleviate this issue is to add a Bug Maturity factor to the pain score. For every day that passes once a bug is entered, you increment its user pain by .2 points. Over time, old bugs slowly rise to the top of the pain list. You can adjust the rate of bug maturation to match the needs of your particular project.

This has two effects

Old bugs are slowly removed from the system: Either you decide to never fix them or you fix them.
Small bugs are fixed slowly: Instead of indefinitely leaving small bugs in your product, you end up fixing them in order to meet your quality bars. This helps prevent the accumulation of code cruft.

Tracking Charts

A basic line chart that tracks the number of bugs above your various quality bars works well for tracking bugs. You can compare this to your total bug count as a reference. The ideal trend is that your high priority bugs drop quickly. Warning signs include the following:

Focusing too much on feature work: The bug count across the board keeps rising.
Poorly directed bug fixing: The overall bug count is dropping, but the high pain bugs stays relatively constant.

Other metrics of interest include:

Total Pain: This represents the accumulated impact on the user of all the bugs in the system. Some teams use this as an additional gate to determine if the product should be released or not. It is another way of ensuring that the team doesn't ship with hundreds of small issues that end up causing the user substantial grief. This value is far more meaningful than bug count, but serves a similar purpose.
Average Pain: You can get a sense of the general instability of your product simply by looking at the Average Pain across all bugs. A high average pain, especially one near your quality bar, means that you have a lot of work left to do.

The Scary List

noreply@blogger.com (Danc) — Sun, 11 May 2008 16:47:00 +0000

In every project, there are issues that that frighten the bejesus out of the team. They are so frightening that no one wants to talk about them publicly. The schedule might be impossible. There might be the lurking suspicion that Management does not believe in the project. More commonly, there is a major technical flaw that no one is handling.

Such problems linger over the team. A handful of people hold hushed conversations in hallways or behind closed doors. Secrecy reigns due to fear. There's fear of upsetting team morale. There's fear of losing face with management. There's fear of forcing the project to be killed.

Fear is contagious
Team members are not stupid. A good development team works hand in hand with one another 8 hours a day. People observe body language. They take note when conversation stops when someone walks in the room. They become suspicious and wary.

Fear becomes contagious. Lack of information breeds rumor mongering as others step up to fill in the blanks with conjecture, often wild, about imagined consequences. Blame is bandied about as frightened people attempt to find comforting answers to imaginary scenarios. All the while, the problems do not go away. Instead, they fester, turning healthy teams into a paranoid self destructive wrecks.

It doesn't have to be this way. Nine times out of ten, the scary issues that cause so much panic are completely solvable. They simply need the harsh bright light of public acknowledgment shone upon them.

The Scary List
Here's a technique that I've used on various agile teams to good effect. Every day, we have our team meeting and on one of the walls is a white board containing the heading 'Scary List'. When someone catches whiff of a problem or rumor that could potentially sink the projects, we jot it on the list.

Sometimes, this is enough. Just publicly acknowledging the issue and giving it a name can clear the air. It becomes okay to talk about it out loud. By naming your problem, it is no longer an amorphous mysterious rumor. Instead the team is faced with a defined problem. The ideas start flowing between team members. People discover the sort of solutions that only appear when everyone puts their heads together. Many times, individuals will quietly grok the issue and adjust course to correct it.

Other times, the problem is pressing and needs to be driven to a conclusion sooner, rather than later. At this point, someone volunteers to drive a solution for it. Every day, at the standup, the champion lets the team know how progress on the problem is coming along. In short order, most problems stop being quite so frightening.

Some problems are extra scary because the team feels like they are out of their control. For example, the team might get axed if some other group fails to deliver a particular component. Have a five minute discussion about what is under your control for a particular issue and what isn't. Again just making the assumptions public does wonders.

Next focus on those issues that you can control. Are there contingencies? Can the team flow like water around immovable obstacles? It's that crazy empowerment thang and it works.

When an issue is no longer scary, remove it from the list. It doesn't need to be complete. It doesn't need to be fully planned out. However, if the team no longer fears the problem, then it should be wiped away and converted into more mundane backlog items or tasks on the board. Otherwise, the list loses its impact. No one likes unnecessary fear mongering, even in the form of a process meant to manage fear.

The scary list is:

Simple: It is a hand written list. It takes five minutes to create and manage.
Public: The list is displayed in a large format in a public area frequented by the team. You can't miss it.
Fresh: Only currently scary items are on the list.
Actionable: You are either turning the scary items into less scary problems or you are removing items from the list.

Courage
In the very first Agile book I read, there was a large section on 'Courage'. I must admit that I didn't really understand why it was there. The word 'Courage' seemed like such a fluffy bit of New Age nonsense that didn't belong in the crisp world of software engineering.

The Scary List is a simple technique, but it only works on a team where people have the courage to talk about their fears. You need the right cultural environment for this to occur.

No retribution against the person who brings up a sensitive issue.
The problem, once raised, becomes the team's problem, not an individuals.
The exercise is about solving the problem, not placing blame.

This doesn't happen naturally for most teams. They need to practice. You need to lead by example. If blame starts being thrown about, redirect the conversation to the problem at hand. If people claim that they can't do anything, identify the pieces that they can change. Eventually, people will experience success by using the Scary List. With that success comes the confidence to face the problems that frighten them.

Courage, you see, is also contagious.

take care
Danc.