I’ve often heard that for games to be properly accepted, we just have to wait a couple of years until those people who haven’t grown up with games are no longer in positions of power and then we’ll be fine.
I no longer believe that. I think that a large part of the current generation of young adults actually has a pretty bad opinion of games.
Spore did a neat thing where they stored the creature information in a .png file that was a picture taken of the creature. So to share the creature you had to share the image, which is pretty cool. And it turns out that it’s really easy to do. Well if you are already using libpng that is.
I implemented it for the game Leshy, but we only used the feature for the auto save functionality of the editor, because the game didn’t have loading and saving. (simply because it would have been too much effort to program a menu that allows you to load and save)
Auto save file for the Leshy editor. This is the actual save file. I could load the level from this image.
I wrote a serializer for my engine that is extremely convenient and generic.
A piece of serialization code in the engine looks something like this:
class PlaceMode
{
public:
// ...
SERIALIZE_FUNCTION(1)
{
SERIALIZE_START();
if (version < 1) SERIALIZE_BASE(State);
else SERIALIZE_BASE(EditorState);
SERIALIZE(archetypeNames);
SERIALIZE(lastPosition);
SERIALIZE_END();
}
private:
std::vector<std::string> archetypeNames;
Vector4 lastPosition;
};
So I’ve been thinking a lot about playtesting recently. Mainly triggered by Portal 2, my experience in making the game Leshy over the last semester, and also by lots of other stuff like this talk by Jonathan Blow.
I was showing the finished version of Leshy to our composer, Tyler and I was watching him play the game. He eventually got to an area where he got stuck. And I knew exactly that the reason why he was stuck was, that he had gotten to this area too early and that he didn’t yet know about a game mechanic that another area would have instructed him about.
If you have ever done a playtest, you know that this is a horrible situation. In playtesting you are not supposed to intervene. You don’t give hints, you just watch the player play and see if he figures it out or not. So I was sitting there watching this guy trying various different things, all of which were destined to fail. It was extremely frustrating to watch this. I knew that he couldn’t succeed because the game hadn’t instructed him yet, but yet he kept on trying. He got it almost right and failed. He got it very wrong and failed. He tried the very wrong thing again and failed. He failed, failed and failed again. And I’m sitting there just wanting to shout and scream and just tell him how to do this, and that this wasn’t his fault and that we’d fix this and oh why won’t you at least give up and go somewhere else first so that you may come across the training section that you missed.
Get the sphere up to those stairs. Shouldn't be that hard, right?
Anyway. That was my impression. He on the other hand was having a good time. For him this was a challenging puzzle that he was trying to figure out. It is totally OK for a player to be working on a puzzle for five minutes, at least as long as he can keep on trying new stuff and isn’t completely stuck. And he did eventually figure it out.
I don’t think he was frustrated at all. It was just me being frustrated. Below the jump I think about Valve in relationship to this experience:
Probably Dance 