1168: Dev Diary

I’ve been working a bit on my game over the weekend. And just to prove I’m not just all talk, I present to you two world exclusive screenshots.

oneyearlater — “The Strip”, the main shopping street in the capital city of Acathlata. That’s the department store Don Lewis on the left, and on the right is the Green Boar Inn. Further to the right out of shot are the Fighters’ and Mages’ Guilds and the pub The Tail of the Dog.

oneyearlater2 — Protagonist Amarysse (left) and her erstwhile companion Feena (right) shoot the breeze in The Tail of the Dog.

“Boy,” you’re probably thinking. “That sure looks like an RPG Maker game.” And, of course, you’d be absolutely right. The relatively generic appearance and use of stock assets is deliberate for several reasons, though: firstly, it allows me to concentrate on what I feel is the important part of the game, which is the writing and overall structure, and secondly, if you read my vaguely spoilerish post from a few days ago you’ll doubtless be familiar with why I’ve chosen to stick with the “default” aesthetic for the moment.

What these screenshots perhaps don’t clearly show is that I’ve built a little on the stock assets with some additional material from the RPG Maker community and beyond. The portraits you see in the second image, for example, were created by RPG Maker community members Archeia and Scinaya, who took the time to make some “emote” variations on the stock characters’ portraits. This means that I no longer have to have characters smiling even while they were being angry or upset, which was a little disconcerting.

What you really can’t tell from the screenshots is the fact that I’ve found some great royalty-free music to use for the game’s soundtrack. While I would absolutely love to compose the entire score to the whole game, again that’s something that would distract from the important part of things, which is actually writing and implementing the game’s story and structure. I’m not ruling out the possibility of composing a custom soundtrack in the near future, but for now I’m very happy with the high-quality stuff I’m presently using, as it suits the atmosphere I’m going for quite nicely.

Insofar as the story and scripting is going, it’s going slowly but well. I’m almost finished with the interactive introductory sequence, which is probably one of the more complicated parts of the game, as it will branch off into more linear “paths” shortly after all that concludes. I’ve been taking care to incorporate hooks for my intended game structure, which will help encourage people to replay with variations on scenes and alternative ways for events to unfold according to the player’s past actions and decisions. I’ve implemented these in such a way as to make them hopefully seem pretty “seamless” when playing the game for the first time, but those with a keen eye playing through again will notice the places where it diverges slightly. I believe doing this sort of thing is quite important, as no-one really wants to read through the exact same material several times just to see the whole game. Plus there are other rewards and incentives in place to explore all your available options, too, but I’ll refrain from discussing that side of things too much for now.

Perhaps most importantly, I’ve figured out my ending, or more accurately, my “true ending”. Again, no spoilers for now, but the structure of the game will be such that you’ll need to play through all the “normal” paths and meet a couple of other conditions (which I’m debating whether or not I should make explicit) in order to see the definitive conclusion to the game’s narrative. I can see how the ending will unfold in my mind’s eye, and it’s a good ‘un — in my humble opinion, anyway. I actively want to get the story to that point, to bring the characters to that finale. I’m half-tempted to make the finale events now while they’re fresh in my mind then go back and fill in the middle part of the game, in fact. But we’ll see.

So far as writing the rest of it goes, I have a vague idea of how each path is going to go, but not the specifics as yet. I have a firm idea of who all these characters “are” in my mind, though, which will make it easier to write scenes with them as I progress onwards. I like the characters, too, which is important, and the introductory scenes I’ve created so far hopefully help to establish their personalities and other character traits. The challenge from here is, of course, ensuring they remain believable and consistent as the rest of the story progresses, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.

Anyway. In summary, things are going slowly but well. I’m enjoying myself. And hopefully at some point in the next fifteen years I’ll have something more to show those of you who are interested.

1167: How NimbleBit Finally Nailed It

If you own a modern mobile phone or tablet, chances are you’ve encountered NimbleBit’s games at least once, most likely in the form of their runaway success Tiny Tower.

Lest you’re one of the few people out there who never played Tiny Tower, let me explain: you run a tower block, presented in Commodore 64-style low-resolution pixel art. In order to progress in the game, you must continue to purchase and build new floors onto your tower, which can be assigned as residential or commercial properties. Residential properties hold, well, residents, while commercial properties must be staffed with residents and can then generate money for you even when you’re not actively playing the game. However, there’s a limit to how much money they can make, since each commercial establishment only has a limited amount of stock for each of the three items they sell, and when it runs out, you need to manually restock it by tapping on it.

Essentially, that was pretty much all there was to the gameplay. You booted it up, you tapped on a few things, you marvelled at how much money you’d “earned,” you felt a bit depressed that the amount you’d earned was less than a tenth of what the next floor costs, you closed the app only to repeat the process a few hours later. In terms of complexity it was little more than FarmVille, and the early comparisons to SimTower it attracted were most certainly not justified in the slightest.

Tiny Tower was a free-to-play game. That means it was free to download but you could purchase things with real money. For the most part, this took the form of “Bux”, a premium currency that allowed you to bypass anything in the game that would normally take a long period of non-interactive real time to complete, such as building a new floor. The game was fairly generous about giving out Bux for free, but it was still essentially a “pay to win” experience, whereby the more money you paid in, the faster progress you made. Exactly the same was true for Tiny Tower’s follow-up Pocket Planes, which adopted the exact same faux-retro aesthetic and was just as devoid of meaningful decision-making as Tiny Tower was.

NimbleBit are back with a new game. It’s still self-consciously retro in terms of both gameplay and presentation, but in terms of being a quality experience it’s a huge jump over the company’s past work. Nimble Quest is a curious combination of Snake and Gauntlet, it’s free-to-play, and it’s fabulous.

In Nimble Quest, you select one of a number of unlockable heroes to start the game and then proceed to use that hero’s style of attacking to defeat enemies. Different heroes have different styles of attacking — some are melee, some are ranged, and within those groupings there are variations, too: some ranged heroes fire fast-moving arrows straight forwards, others throw short-range bombs at anything nearby and deal splash damage, for example. As you progress through the game, certain enemies will release additional heroes whom you can “collect” — these are then added to your “snake”, tagging along behind your lead hero and performing their own individual attacks when appropriate. Heroes other than the lead can be defeated without penalty (besides losing them, obviously) while if the lead hero either runs out of health or ploughs into a wall or enemy they die immediately and the game is over.

To progress through the game, you have to defeat a particular number of enemies on each level. This number increases with each subsequent level, but so too do the number of enemies on screen at once and the different types of assailant you’ll have to deal with. The further you manage to get in one playthrough, the more types of hero you’ll unlock and the longer your maximum “snake” length becomes in all subsequent games. Heroes also gain experience when they’re used as the lead, and level up through three distinct levels. They can also be levelled up early by paying with the gems you find scattered around the levels.

The “free to play” bit primarily comes in the form of “Tokens”, which are Nimble Quest’s equivalent of “Bux” from Tiny Tower and Pocket Planes. Here, though, they’re not used to bypass inconveniences; instead, they’re used for actually useful things. They can be spent on buffs before each level starts. They can be spent on continuing after death — and pleasingly, this prevents itself from becoming a “pay to win” scenario by forcing you to restart the level you’re on with your score and team as it was then rather than simply magically resurrecting without penalty — and they may also be spent on competing in the social “Arena” leaderboards in cooperation with friends. Like Bux, they’re awarded at a healthy rate through normal play, so there’s absolutely no obligation to pay for them unless you’re a bit spend-happy with them. Crucially, though, the game never stops you from playing if you don’t have any tokens — it never forces you to sit through long wait times or anything like that; it just means you need to earn some more before you can use what effectively amount to very slight “cheats”.

It’s this “monetising without inconveniencing the player” thing that makes me look very favourably upon Nimble Quest. At no point do I feel like I’m being punished for not purchasing currency — in fact, the game has more longevity if you don’t pay, because it’ll take you longer to level up all your heroes and get good enough at the game to survive the very challenging later levels. Nothing in the game feels like “pay to win” — even the continue feature is well-implemented so as to allow you the opportunity to correct a mistake while still running the risk of actually doing worse than you did on your previous attempt.

Most important, though, is the fact that Nimble Quest is actually a good game. No-one really wanted to admit that Tiny Tower and Pocket Planes just weren’t very interesting or fun once you got over the aesthetic and humour in them, but Nimble Quest has been designed as a fun game first and foremost rather than a monetisation vehicle, and it really shows. It’s a top-quality mobile game, and one which every iOS owner should have on their device. This is how you do free-to-play right… and this is how you do mobile gaming right, too. Please download and support it to send the right message to NimbleBit. More of this and less tap-tap-tap-snore nonsense, please.

1166: The Invader Comes from the Bottom of the Sea!

It’s been a while since I talked anime here, so I’m going to talk anime. Oh yes indeedy. Specifically, I’d like to talk about a bizarre little show I’ve just started watching called Squid Girl, also known as Ika Musume.

Squid Girl is a rather peculiar show in a number of ways. Firstly, it’s not quite “episodic” in the same manner as other anime series, though there is a sense of progression throughout. Instead of being a sequence of 20-minute episodes, each “episode” of Squid Girl is instead made up of three short self-contained mini-stories that tend not to have a great deal to do with each other besides having the same core cast. However, the whole thing does have a clear chronology, since characters, concepts and settings introduced in earlier episodes tend to show up again later rather than being “one-shots”. I haven’t watched far enough to know exactly how it all ties together — if at all — yet, but already in the four full episodes I have watched we’ve seen the introduction of certain characters and their subsequent return — and I’m sure there’ll be more to come.

Secondly is the concept, which anime pros probably won’t bat an eyelid at, but which those used to more… “conventional” Western entertainment might find a little bizarre. As you might expect from a show called Squid Girl, the main character is a girl who shares a number of characteristics with squid. Specifically, her blue hair is actually a set of ten tentacles which she can manipulate independently at will, her hat causes the shape of her head to resemble that of a squid (and removing it will apparently kill her) and she is able to spew squid ink from her mouth. She also has the abilities of various different types of squid, including luminescence, the ability to change her weight at will and flapping the… flappy bits on her hat. The English subtitles and dub also see her making frequent squid- and tentacle-themed puns in her dialogue, while in Japanese she tends to end her sentences with “de geso” (translated literally, something to do with squid legs) similar to how super-cute moe characters often deliberately overuse or exaggerate the “desu” or “desu no” final particle (see Compa and Gust from Hyperdimension Neptunia for good examples), and she also tends to emphasise the syllables “ika” (“squid”) in her speech whenever they come up, regardless of whether or not doing so would really make sense. (Aside: I love finding out about the equivalent of puns and the like in other languages, as I do often find myself wondering how non-English languages deal with jokes, slang, dialect and puns like this. It’s fascinating to learn this stuff through things I enjoy.)

The basic premise of the show sees Squid Girl coming ashore ostensibly to subjugate all of humanity in revenge for the shitty way they’ve treated the ocean, but she instead finds herself forced into working as a waitress at a beachfront restaurant when an outburst and demonstration of her “power” ends up smashing through the wall. The various mini-stories that make up the episodes depict Squid Girl learning more about human society and what a “normal” life is, and much of the humour comes from her complete unawareness of how to behave like a human despite resembling one for the most part. There’s also a huge amount of comedy value inherent in her interactions with the owners of the beachfront restaurant she damaged, who seem completely unperturbed by the fact that she is obviously not human and each have their own distinct characters and means of dealing with the girl-shaped hurricane that is Squid Girl. Eiko is slightly weary and a little tsundere but tolerates Squid Girl for the most part. Her sister Chizuru, meanwhile, initially appears to be the stereotypical quiet, demure and kind “older sister” type, but reveals herself very early on to have a distinctly dark side that utterly terrifies poor old Squid Girl. In actual fact, this “dark side” is not truly threatening or unpleasant — it’s simply the ability to perform a “withering look” that is the Holy Grail for parents and teachers alike, but which is often depicted as a horrifying dark aura from Squid Girl’s perspective. Even as Squid Girl tries to convince herself that she’s still going to subjugate humanity, she quickly learns not to step out of line when Chizuru is around.

For the most part, Squid Girl is thoroughly silly fun, and I frankly wasn’t expecting much more than something fairly throwaway to watch while I had breakfast and then forget about shortly afterwards. However, one of the mini-stories I watched earlier well and truly changed my mind and convinced me that this is actually a show doing some surprisingly clever things. I shan’t spoil it completely for those who are planning on watching the show, but I’ll just say that the “mini-Squid Girl” vignette — which was depicted almost completely wordlessly — was surprisingly heartfelt and touching, and I was very surprised to realise that even after just a few episodes, I already cared very much about these characters.

I shouldn’t have been surprised, really; one of the things that continually strikes me about Japanese media the more of it I consume — be it video game, anime or manga — is the deft skill with which creators are often able to weave their magic to create compelling characters and make you care about them remarkably quickly. Squid Girl, as ridiculous as it sounds on paper, is certainly no exception to that, and I look forward to seeing the rest of this surprisingly captivating nonsense.

1165: Endless Infinite Discussion

Around this time of year in 2011, one Mr Tom Ohle, a fine upstanding gentleman at the forefront of promoting games you might not have heard of quite so much as the games you have heard of a lot, wrote this post, named The Case of the Great Game Nobody Saw.

Lest you’re too lazy to follow the link, allow me to summarise: Tom works in PR for video games. The titles his company Evolve PR has represented over the years include things like CD Projekt Red’s The Witcher series, the deep strategy games of Paradox Interactive, TimeGate Studios’ Section 8 series, the Anomaly series and numerous others. As all good PR people should, Tom believes in the games he’s paid to promote — some more than others. Sometimes games come along that are genuinely excellent — games that, in Tom’s words, are “magical, revolutionary, disruptive or otherwise worthy of consumers’ awareness” — and, as you’d expect, Tom and co. would very much like to see these titles succeed, and they do their utmost to try and convince various outlets that these games are worthy of coverage and promotion. When these games don’t get the coverage they deserve — either because of “bigger” games monopolising the front page or simply through being rejected outright — it’s enormously disheartening, not only for Tom and co. but also for the makers of these games.

“At its core, this is an issue that pervades entertainment and consumerism as a whole,” writes Tom. “People stick with brands they know. Everyone craps all over themselves (myself included) when a new Rockstar game is announced. That’s fine; they make great games. But in an industry that so often complains about derivative sequels, soulless big-budget productions and a lack of risk-taking, isn’t it about time we started focusing on quality? Shouldn’t those companies looking to push the boundaries of the medium begin to reap the rewards? If things keep going the way they are, we’ll never shed the $60 price point, we’ll get sequels to major franchises every year, and we’ll all keep complaining and wishing things were different.”

Almost two whole years have passed since Tom wrote that post, and I don’t think things have improved at all since then. If anything, I think they’ve got worse. For all Polygon’s posturing about reinventing games journalism and for all Kotaku’s posting of random bullshit only tangentially related to games, we’re still in a situation where an alien visiting the games industry would believe there were only a few interesting games released every year, and that they’re often entries in the same series. Call of Duty. Battlefield. Assassin’s Creed. And so on.

Most recently, I’ve been becoming somewhat frustrated with Bioshock Infinite. I have no doubt whatsoever that it’s a fantastic game, and everything I’ve heard seems to indicate that it is, in the words of a friend of mine, “intelligent Hollywood… a ‘The Matrix of gaming'” and that is, on the whole, a good thing. We need creators like Ken Levine in the mainstream of the industry to push things forward and prove that there’s a market for intelligent experiences as well as Mildly-Racist Brown Michael Bay Manshoot #327. I am glad that Bioshock Infinite exists, that it is apparently living up to the hype and that, I imagine, it is probably selling quite well as a result of all that hype.

What I’m less thrilled about is the fact that it’s not really solving the problem Tom was talking about in his post. Bioshock Infinite may be “intelligent Hollywood”, but it’s still Hollywood. It’s still a single game from a high-profile creator monopolising press coverage and social media, completely dwarfing smaller-scale experiences that — shhh — might actually be more interesting. Do we need videos explaining “why you should play Bioshock Infinite on Hard mode”, articles about its ending, articles about why Ken Levine doesn’t believe in Utopias, articles about how to edit the INI files, tips articles, articles about why having it spoiled didn’t matter, articles about… have I made my point yet? This is a disproportionately large amount of coverage for one game — one very good game, admittedly, and one which has a lot of expectations to live up to, yes, but still just one game, and one game that people were already very much aware of in the run-up to its release. I’m already absolutely fucking sick of hearing about it, and the more I hear about it, the smaller the already-miniscule chance I will ever play it becomes — a phenomenon I discussed in this post.

The standard response to this is, of course, that this is what the greater audience is hungry for. Millions of people are going to buy, play and love Bioshock Infinite, and they should be catered to, as those millions of people are probably also going to want to read lots of things about Bioshock Infinite.

However, here’s my (slightly selfish) question. What about me? What about people like me? What about all of the people out there — I’m sure I’m not the only one in the world — who didn’t really like the first Bioshock all that much (I played System Shock 2 almost immediately beforehand, which just made the fact that Bioshock wasn’t System Shock 3 all the more painful and frustrating) and consequently are not all that interested in this new one? What about the people who are more interested in other types of games? Don’t we deserve some quality and wide-ranging coverage of the things that we’re interested in? (Where’s my “Tips for playing Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory“ post, hmmm?) We have fan communities and enthusiast blogs, sure, but where’s our high-profile professional outlet covering this stuff that’s a bit off the well-worn path? (Besides Games Are Evil, of course, which I’m not going to pretend is anywhere near as big as I would love it to be!)

The gaming medium has grown up enormously in the last few years. With constantly improving software and hardware technology providing more and more flexibility for interactive artists to realise their digital dreams, and the rise of the indie space and Kickstarter allowing game makers to break free of the shackles of corporate culture, we’re most definitely undergoing the “Cambrian explosion of possibilities” that SimCity, The Sims and Spore creator Will Wright talked about back in 2008. It’s a great time to be someone who enjoys playing games.

But the games press has not evolved alongside the medium as a whole. The medium as a whole is now, as I’ve said numerous times in the past, far too broad for one outlet to be able to do justice to all of. And yet pretty much all of the big outlets choose to focus on the same part of this massively diverse medium. It’s the part with the biggest audience, the biggest budgets and the biggest amount of money involved in it, yes, but it’s still just one part of a whole. Read the news pages of one big site and you’ve read them all. Read the reviews section of one site and you’ve read them all. The sheer volume of things on display at events like PAX East and GDC help a little, but more often than not you still just hear about the same things from slightly different perspectives. Or you hear about Battlefield 4.

Why haven’t we got to a stage where big outlets can feel confident enough to distinguish themselves from one another yet? Don’t give me a reason to stick with one outlet, give me a reason to read all of them because of their completely different content. (Right now, I don’t read any of them with any degree of loyalty, because very few of them provide coverage of the sort of thing I’m interested in any more!)

It’s massively frustrating, and I don’t even work in PR. I can bang my drum all I like about the types of game I’m interested in and want to experience more of… but is anyone really listening?

1164: Urgh

I’m exhausted. Mentally and physically. It’s one of those times of year where everything seems to be dull, grey and miserable, both literally and metaphorically. It’s cold outside, it’s often raining or snowing, everyone is getting pissy with everyone else and I’d just quite like Existence to be a bit nicer, please.

The thing I think I’m finding most tiresome and exhausting at the moment is how short everyone’s fuse on the Internet seems to be at the moment. I’m not even on Twitter any more and I’m still seeing stupid, ill-informed, pointless arguments erupting all the time. I’m deliberately avoiding all of them because I know from past experience attempting to provide some sort of rational viewpoint on any even vaguely “hot-button” issue will just get everyone yelling at you for no apparent reason. If they want to yell at each other, fine; it’s just frustrating to see it happening, and Facebook’s refusal to allow users to take control of their experience so they can insert advertising into mental orifices you didn’t know you had means that it’s all but unavoidable.

The current thing that seems to be getting everyone riled up is the current gay marriage Supreme Court thing that’s going on in the States. Not being American, I don’t know all the details of what’s happening but I know my feelings on gay marriage, which are as follows: if you love each other and would both like to get married, you should be able to get married, whoever you are. Simple as that.

But this isn’t about my views on gay marriage or indeed anyone else’s views on gay marriage; rather, it’s about one of those “Internet solidarity” things where everyone changes their avatar to the same thing to show support for a cause, “get people talking” and “raise awareness”. I personally think that this is an idea that never works properly (I wrote about it when it happened for a different issue here) and sparks more arguments than it raises awareness — particularly when people don’t explain what their sudden change to an abstract avatar is all about — but ultimately it’s something that people are going to do if they think it helps, and I’ve learned it’s really not worth arguing over.

Why? Because no-one on the Internet actually listens to anyone else. (That’s a generalisation. There are exceptions. But check out any comments thread on a hot-button issue like this and you’ll see.) People stick staunchly to their viewpoint and refuse to entertain the possibility of acknowledging (let alone embracing) an alternative outlook. And because people on both sides are so resolute that Their Way is the Right Way, tempers inevitably flare, people start calling each other hypocrites and trawling back over old social media posts to find that one post they know where their opponent did something that doesn’t match up with the viewpoint they’re advocating now.

I’m tired of it. Really tired. And I feel selfish saying that, but I’m saying it anyway. I’m tired of feeling like the exhausted teacher sitting at the front of the room powerless to do anything while a classroom full of children fight over silly “he said, she said” quarrels that aren’t really addressing anything at all. (I speak from experience.)

I remember in the early days of the Internet, when communication with like-minded strangers was exciting. I remember spending hours on CompuServe’s “CB Simulator” chat room talking to people — I even made some actual friends through it. I remember being polite and treating strangers with respect, and I remember them doing likewise. I remember being excited about this awesome-seeming future whereby anyone in the world could communicate with anyone else at the touch of a button.

Fast forward fifteen years or so and everyone is using this frankly amazing technology to call each other wankers. Good job, world.

1163: The Engine

[Sorry I’ve been lax with the cartoons recently — been blogging late and when I’m tired so haven’t felt inclined to do many. They’ll be back soon.]

As I’ve noted a couple of times recently, I’ve been beavering away at the game I’m making with RPG Maker VX Ace and trying to do a little bit each day. It’s slow progress at the rate I’m going, but it is satisfying to see things coming together piece by piece.

One thing that always impresses me with toolsets like RPG Maker is how active the community is, and how willing they are to help each other out. There’s relatively little in the way of insular thinking, with people wanting to keep all their trade secrets to themselves — quite the opposite, in fact. No, the RPG Maker community is filled with people who create graphical, musical, audible and script…able resources for public consumption and are more than happy to share them with other aspiring developers out there in exchange for nothing more than a wee credit in the finished game.

It’s a marked contrast to the ridiculous secrecy in other parts of the games industry, which is infested with embargoes and other bullshit to control the flow of information. I think that’s quite interesting. While I get why it happens, I think it’s starting to lose its impact. I’ve mentioned before on a number of occasions how all the reviews for a particular game hitting simultaneously makes me not want to read any of them (and, more often than not, not want to play the actual game ever) but this also goes for carefully-timed announcements and the like. The trouble is that a lot of these announcements are for things that people are expecting. A new Assassin’s Creed — surprise! A new Call of Duty — HOLY SHIT. A new Grand Theft Auto screenshot — STOP THE PRESSES.

Even the mobile sector has ridiculous embargoes in place. This always strikes me as weird given the sheer volume of mobile apps and games that are released every day. Companies are lucky to get their product covered at all in most cases, and enforcing arbitrary restrictions on said coverage can only be counter-productive, surely.

But I don’t want to get on an embargo rant. I just thought the openness of the amateur development community was an interesting contrast to the OMG TOP SEKRIT nature of mainstream game development.

I guess it’s largely to do with the fact that the majority of people tinkering around with stuff like RPG Maker and its ilk are amateur/bedroom developers putting stuff together in their own time rather than as their job. There are exceptions, of course, but the fact that RPG Maker is so easy to get up and running encourages people to give it a shot a lot more than the rather daunting task of learning a programming language and/or how to use an engine like Unreal Engine 3. The fact that there’s a sense of joyous discovery and entering a strange new world of wondrous creativity helps encourage a pleasing sense of camaraderie — plus the people who develop the more well-known scripts and resource banks become mini-celebrities in their own right, which must be nice for them. It’s also something they can potentially put on their CVs, I guess — saying that you’re the person behind one of the most widely-used battle system Ruby scripts for RPG Maker VX Ace may not have quite the same clout as saying you designed Unreal Engine 3, but it must count for something.

I can’t say I’ve gotten overly involved with the RPG Maker community as a whole yet since keeping up with forums always seems like a whole lot of hassle, but I’m certainly very grateful for the hard work of artists like “Archeia” and “Scinaya” and scripters like “Yanfly”, who are helping my game come together one piece at a time. If and when it ever gets finished, they’ll certainly be getting some love from me.

1162: Launch Lineup

I have a curious habit that I tend to fall into pretty much any time I purchase a new games system. Thinking about my recent purchasing habits and my ongoing desire to forgo the “triple-A” experience in favour of more interesting, distinctive titles from further down the “food chain” it’s actually entirely understandable in retrospect, but I always used to wonder why I did it.

It’s this: whenever I purchase a new games system, I will typically not buy the “system-seller” games, and instead buy something that looks interesting and quirky. I’ve been doing it for quite some time, as it happens, if my memory is to be believed, anyway.

When I bought a PS2, I picked up Shadow of Memories (aka Shadow of Destiny) instead of, uh, whatever was exciting in the PS2’s early days. When I bought an Xbox, one of the first titles I grabbed was Sudeki. When I bought a Gamecube… actually, I can’t remember what I bought with my Gamecube. Possibly that Sega volleyball game Beach Spikers. Anyway, you get the general idea.

When it came to the Nintendo DS, I forget exactly what the first games I bought were, but it was one or all of Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney, Trauma Center: Under the Knife and/or 42 All-Time Classics (aka Clubhouse Games in the States). All of them are still favourite games.

42 All-Time Classics is a particularly interesting one to me. I’m not entirely sure what inspired me to pick it up in the first place, as on paper it sounds like shovelware of the worst kind — 42 simple board, card and touchscreen games that you can play either against the computer, against other players in the same room with other DSes or via the Internet. It’s the sort of thing that these days you’d download for free on your mobile phone and then be expected to shell out in-app purchases for “energy” or extra games or game-breaking powerups or something.

But no. 42 All-Time Classics was a full-price game for the DS (and was subsequently split into a number of smaller individually-downloadable chunks on DSiWare) that offered everything you need for a virtual “game night”, so long as you had a few DSes to hand around. You only needed one copy of the game, though; thanks to DS Download Play, you could transmit a copy of the game you wanted to play with other people over Wi-Fi and play with a single cartridge. This is still one of my favourite things about the DS system.

42 All-Time Classics is such a great DS game because it doesn’t do things half-heartedly. There’s a hefty single-player mode that will keep you busy for a long time completing specific missions and unlocking new content through “stamp” mode. The multiplayer mode allows childish chatting through PictoChat during play, which is somewhat pointless when you’re in the same room as your fellow players, but I must applaud any game that practically encourages you to draw knobs at your friends while you’re playing multiplayer with them.

The presentation is pretty good, too. While there’s only so much you can do to visually represent various classic board and card games, 42 All-Time Classics supports its relatively simple visual aesthetic with pleasant little animations, catchy music and distinctly “gamey” sound effects. It doesn’t overdo any of these things, but they round the whole experience off nicely — and cute little touches like the music getting more “dramatic” when someone’s about to win a game add a bit of drama to the experience.

42 All-Time Classics is a great little diversion and pretty much the perfect handheld game. While a lot of people prefer playing this sort of thing on their phone these days, the simple knowledge that I can just open up 42 All-Time Classics on my DS and play without having to connect to the Internet, share to Facebook, make in-app purchases or wait for energy to restore makes it worth the price of admission all by itself. So if you own a DS… well, I strongly recommend grabbing a copy.

1161: Hospital Affairs

Continuing my trend of “playing games that reviews didn’t like much and ending up liking them a lot,” I picked up a copy of the Nintendo DS game Lifesigns: Hospital Affairs (also known as Lifesigns: Surgical Unit in the States) recently. And I’ve been loving it.

Lifesigns, or Resident Doctor Tendo 2: The Scales of Life as it was known in Japan, is actually a contemporary of the original Trauma Center: Under the Knife in Japan, but it didn’t come out until two years later in the West — nearly three years later for Europe. The reason I mention this is that the game suffered somewhat from comparisons to Trauma Center in reviews, when in fact this is a completely unfair comparison that has diverted attention away from what is actually a very interesting game.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Trauma Center. It does its own crazytown sci-fi medical horror thing and it’s fantastic for it. It remains, to date, one of the most genuinely nerve-wracking series of games I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing, and it always manages to spin an interesting story to couple with its action-packed gameplay. The latest installment Trauma Team, which you’ll recall I was babbling on about recently, refined that formula brilliantly by toning down somewhat on the sci-fi aspects and jacking up the feeling of “this is a team of doctors working together in the same place”. Ultimately, though, as good as the story was, Trauma Team was still just as much about performing the various operations as it was about the unfolding story.

Lifesigns, meanwhile, is actually a completely different beast. Sure, it’s set in a hospital and features a number of surgery sequences, but it is not Trauma Center. Instead, I was delighted to discover, it is rather more akin to the Ace Attorney games — longstanding favourites of mine — than anything else, placing a much stronger focus on well-written character development and unfolding narrative than on the “action” sequences. It’s for this reason that comparing it to Trauma Center and complaining about there being “too much talking” — a criticism also levelled at the Ace Attorney series by some — is utter nonsense. Without the talking… well, there would barely be anything left. The talking is sort of the point. Whether or not you like that is a matter of taste, of course, but given the continued existence of visual novels as a storytelling medium you better believe that there are plenty of people out there who are more than happy to play games that are about nothing more than people talking to each other.

As the Japanese title suggests, Lifesigns is actually the second game in the Resident Doctor Tendo series, though the first never made it to the West for reasons unknown. Ultimately this doesn’t matter too much, as like the Ace Attorney games, the overarching plotlines are completely self-contained and only occasionally make reference to the events and characters of the previous game. When they do, they take their time to explain who these random characters that the protagonist knows (and the player doesn’t) actually are, too, so it hasn’t been an issue.

Lifesigns casts the player in the role of the eponymous Dr Dokuta (yes, really) Tendo, a second-year intern at the fictional Seimei Medical University Hospital. We learn quickly that he had quite an eventful first year, with one of the major events seemingly being a misdiagnosis that nearly ruined his career. We also learn that he was partially inspired to get into medicine after his mother died of cancer, and partially by the fact that his father is a heroic firefighter. We also learn that the resident evil-looking dude Dr Sawai is Tendo’s biological father and that there’s some bad blood (no pun intended) there.

The game’s first episode introduces the major characters around the hospital — Tendo’s mentor Suzu-sensei, an attractive older woman whose trademark appears to be a large cat bell around her neck; head nurse Florence, who has an alarming talent for gossip; adorable nurse Hoshi, who is clearly carrying a rather large torch for Tendo; and Aoshima, the new first-year intern whom Suzu assigns Tendo to keep an eye on. There are also a selection of other incidental characters who put in occasional appearances such as the frankly terrifying surgical assistant nurse Kurai, the deadpan anaesthetist Masui and Tendo’s relatively normal-seeming friend in paediatrics Dr Ueto. All of them are fun, distinctive and, like the characters in Ace Attorney, just the right blend of believable and caricature to make them all memorable.

The majority of gameplay in Lifesigns requires the player to move from location to location in the hospital to advance the story. The location map shows which characters are hanging out where at any given moment, though there’s no indication given as to whether the conversation you’ll have in that location is an important one or not. (Important conversations advance the plot and tend to change around the arrangement of which other characters are hanging around where; non-important ones tend not to impart useful information for the most part but are usually entertaining or give a little further insight into the characters.)

When you reach a location, important conversations tend to unfold automatically and occasionally require some input from the player. This is accomplished in a similar manner to in Ace Attorney, whereby you open up your Court… sorry, Medical Record and present various objects, concepts and characters to the other person. Yes, much like in Ace Attorney, your inventory is not necessarily restricted to holding physical items; instead, as the plot unfolds, Tendo will take various notes, which he can then discuss with people. Usually if you’re stuck at some point, you simply have to present something to someone else to advance the plot along. Occasionally, there are sequences where you have to convince another character to do something — these unfold in much the same way, albeit with more dramatic music and visual effects and an on-screen meter depicting how close you are to successfully convincing them. Presenting the wrong piece of information in these scenarios can lead to a bad ending, so you have to be careful — though bad endings don’t necessarily mean the end of the game.

What with Tendo being a doctor, you’ll be unsurprised to note that you do actually get to do a bit of doctoring around the place, too — life in a hospital isn’t just flirting with the nurses and hanging out with the pervy old cancer patient who can’t resist pinching female doctors’ bottoms. No, at least once in each of the game’s five episodes, you’ll find yourself having to deal with realistic medical cases, beginning with an examination in which you must successfully diagnose their symptoms, and usually concluding with a surgery sequence in which you must treat their ailment accordingly.

The diagnosis sequences are like a simplified version of Dr Cunningham’s episodes in Trauma Team (or it’s perhaps more accurate to say that Dr Cunningham’s episodes are like expanded versions of Lifesigns’ diagnostic sequences) — after having an initial discussion with the patient, you’re presented with a view of them that you can look up and down and then interact with in several ways — inspecting areas visually, using a stethoscope to listen to the body’s sounds and palpating areas by rubbing the touchscreen. The patient will generally give you a few clues here and there (“ooh, it hurts more on the other side…”) but for the most part you’re expected to perform a thorough examination to find all the symptoms. Unlike in Trauma Team, there’s no chance of missing anything as you can’t proceed until you’ve made a successful diagnosis; and also unlike Trauma Team you don’t have to worry about eliminating possible candidates by matching symptoms to your database. Tendo knows his stuff — though often the visual examination is followed up by one or more “spot the difference” ultrasound/X-ray/CT/MRI scans in which you have to circle the abnormal areas on the touchscreen and pin down a final diagnosis.

The surgery sequences, meanwhile, are not very much like Trauma Center at all… aside from the fact that they’re incredibly tense and quite challenging. Rather than tending to follow the same format, requiring the player to remember the appropriate means to deal with “common” ailments such as lacerations, tumours and inflamed areas, each surgery sequence in Lifesigns is a unique procedure that doesn’t necessarily involve opening up the patient. For example, in the first episode, you’ll find yourself performing an appendectomy as your first operation, then later you’ll be navigating a catheter through someone’s blood vessels in an attempt to stop some internal bleeding.

The diversity of tasks in the operations means that rather than trusting the player to switch between tools as they need to, each surgery is split into a number of smaller objectives which must be achieved in linear sequence to progress. Making mistakes injures the patient and causes damage to their vitals bar, and there’s no convenient “cure all” stabiliser to inject here — though performing a task quickly and accurately has a chance of restoring the vital signs somewhat. There’s also a “concentrate” button that displays the areas on which you’re supposed to perform the current action along with the movements required, but all the time you’re holding down this button the operation’s time limit is zipping by five times faster than usual. Experienced surgeons will, of course, be able to complete the operations without having to rely on this at all, and in at least one situation the ending of an episode is determined by how quickly you complete an operation. (You can save beforehand… but as noted before, the “bad endings” to each episode aren’t game-ending, so it’s often worth continuing and perhaps replaying the game later to see the different possible conclusions.)

I’m only partway into the second episode so far so I’ll refrain from speaking further on the plot and whatnot, but so far it’s been pretty great. It successfully combines the character- and dialogue-driven narrative of the Ace Attorney series with the tension of Trauma Center and comes out feeling like its own distinctive experience. While, yes, there is a lot of talking, as I said earlier that’s sort of the whole damn point. This isn’t a kinetic novel with arcade sequences like Trauma Center was (that’s not a criticism, incidentally) — it’s a visual novel/adventure game in which performing surgery plays an occasional role, but in which the relationships between the hospital staff, the patients and the other people in their respective lives is brought to the forefront. It’s a really interesting game, and I strongly suggest you check it out if you’re a fan of games that are a little bit off the beaten track.

1160: Spoilers Ahead

After writing yesterday’s post and doing a little more work on it today, I’ve decided that I would actually quite like to talk about my RPG Maker project a little more rather than being unnecessarily vague and obtuse about it. Those of you reading who like the concept might be able to give me some motivation to continue with it in the long-term, then, which is probably going to be a valuable thing if (when, more likely) this initial burst of enthusiasm runs out.

However, I am also conscious that discussing some things about this project may constitute spoilers of various descriptions, so I am going to add a “read more” tag to this post so those who would like the finished product to remain a complete surprise can avoid it if they desire.

So, without further ado, click the link to continue reading if you want to… otherwise, I’ll see you tomorrow!

Continue reading “1160: Spoilers Ahead” →

1159: WAY More Than Seven Days

Back on Day 793, you may recall that I mentioned I was working on a game and that I was quite enthusiastic about it. Well, it stalled somewhat for various reasons — work, general lethargy, moving house, jury service, many other reasons that aren’t really excuses — but this week I’ve started working on it again, and it’s a good feeling.

To be honest, doing what I’m doing was partly spurred on by this painfully accurate article from The Onion. I figured that I’m in a relatively good position right now — financially secure, working in a job which is reasonably challenging at times but which leaves me with plenty of free time — so instead of sleeping until 10-11am (usually unintentionally) I should make use of some of that extra time. As such, I’ve been getting up a bit earlier and, well, making use of some of that extra time.

In the previous post I linked to, I talked about how much I enjoy the world-building aspect of creating a game. Today, I’ve been rediscovering the joy of populating those locales that I’ve created with people. Specifically, the stuff I’ve been working on over the last couple of days has been the first appearance of the story’s main characters, so it’s been an absolute pleasure to see these characters I’ve had in my head (and a Google document) finally appear on screen and act the way I’ve told them to.

I’m going to do that annoying developer thing and not talk in specifics about the project because I’d like some aspects of it to remain a surprise, but I will say a few things about what I’ve achieved so far.

Thus far I’ve got a controllable protagonist and an interactive introduction sequence that introduces her, the setting and the context of the story. I’ve got some sequences where the player is able to make choices and subtly change some of the things that occur next. I’ve laid a few “hooks” for future interactions between the protagonist and other characters, and I’ve put together the story up until the point where the protagonist meets up with the other main characters. And, as I type this, I’ve composed the initial conversations between the protagonist and the other characters — including, again, a few events that change a little bit according to choices that have been made.

I’m deliberately keeping things relatively unambitious with this project, as I would very much like to actually finish it at some point. It’s a concept that I really like and would very much like to carry through to completion, so I’m keen to try and devote some time to it. One thing that was stopping me was a lack of certain art assets that I needed to progress, but now I’ve found those (or at least got some solid placeholders put in) I have, as far as I can make out, everything I need to pick up this project and run with it, motivation and free time permitting. Aside from the art assets I was lacking, most of the other stuff I’m using is either RPG Maker’s built-in content or publicly-available/royalty-free stuff. The somewhat “generic” nature of using built-in and publicly-available assets is entirely deliberate — if and when it’s finished you’ll hopefully see why I chose to go that route. It wasn’t just laziness and/or a desire to get up and running without having to worry about creating custom content — though being able to work with pre-made character sprites and the like certainly makes working on this a bit easier.

I’ll leave it at that for now, and if I make any significant progress that I’m happy to share in the near future, I may drop in a few screenshots here and there. Suffice to say that for the moment, I’m happy with the way things are going and hopefully I’ll have something more to share soon.