That is a whole lot of missiles!

I can’t think of any more appropriate back-of-the-box quote than that for Itano Alpha Flight, my latest game on Xbox Live Indie Games. This game is all about missiles, yours and your enemies. It’s a little bit of Afterburner, a little bit of Macross, and a whole lot of action.

You can see screenshots of the game below:

Grab the game here or on your Xbox 360 for 80 Microsoft Points ($1 US).

Lately, my plate (from both a professional and a personal perspective) has been particularly full and I’ve been finding it hard to muster the energy necessary to research and write my weekly post. While time is a factor, I think this is more about having sufficient emotional energy left over after everything else going on in my life. Therefore, I’ve decided to take a break from my regularly scheduled blog posts while I sort things out.

I don’t think I’ll stop posting on Game Dev Without a Cause entirely. I will probably still post occasionally just not at the original once-a-week schedule. I hope I’ll get back to regularly writing blog posts soon. And I hope you’ll be here to read what I have to say. Most of all, I hope that you’ll forgive the cliche of using a hammock in the sunset as the cover picture for this post.

See you soon,
Rob

So, yeah.
The last few months have been pretty darn busy. Hobby-life, work-life, personal-life, everything seemed to peak right about the end of February. I’ll be honest. I’m feeling pretty tired. I may even be feeling, dare I say it: burned-out.

Well, not full-on “burned-out” I don’t think. That’s actually a pretty major state of affairs. Still, I’m starting to notice some warning signs and I’ve had trouble bringing 100% of my power to bear on any task lately, be it was work or at home.

Now, the advice I’m about to give is not based on any particular professional expertise. Indeed, I’m about as layman as they come. But, I am someone who has worked himself to the point where I had to take a stress-induced leave from work so I thought I’d share some of the signs I watch for with regards to my emotional health.

Know Your Symptoms, Know Yourself
While there are commonly accepted symptoms of burnout, I find it important to be aware of my personal quirks and behaviors and to specifically recognize certain behaviors as warning signs.

Since a lot of my job is about problem-solving (both after-the-fact and preemptively), I’m used to having lots of ideas for how I can solve a problem. When I’m at my best, I can usually come up with several potential solutions to problems at work after brief reflection. When I’m starting to burnout, that flow of ideas slows to a trickle, if not stopping all together. I don’t seem to have trouble identifying problems at that stage however. So, if I find myself identifying lots of problems without being able to provide potential solutions along with them, I have a strong sign that I’m beginning to fray.

Usually, I really like working on games. I find it energizing. Sure, there are times when the work is just tiring, but that’s the exception, not the rule. And it never happens for extended periods of time. Unless I’m starting to burn-out. If I look back over the last week of game dev and can’t think of a single instance in which I had fun while working, then I know it’s time to give myself some extra care.

One corollary to the above is that, even when I’m overall exhausted with work, crises are still “fun”, or at least temporarily energizing. Even if work is a slog and I’m running on emotional fumes, I still find it easy to gear up to deal with a sudden crisis (ex. The publisher’s build is broken! We need a bugfix quick!) But, that crisis-time energy boost is quick to dissipate and can leave me feeling just as empty, if not more so, afterwards. I generally don’t count these crisis moments as being satisfied with work since they are effectively emotional junk-food for me.

On a more physical level, I try to stay aware of signs that my body is reacting to emotional exhaustion. If I start putting on weight and developing acne, chances are I’m starting to react negatively to the current stress levels in my life. Like many, I find that my sleeping habits tend to change once I become overwhelmed. For me, my warning sign isn’t sleeplessness. I tend to sleep MORE as I become stressed but I find myself feeling LESS rested in the morning despite the extra time spent in bed.

While all of this may not pertain directly to game development per se, I think it is worthwhile to keep one’s own emotional and physical well-being in mind while engaging in an activity as engrossing as game development. People who tend towards game dev are a peculiar breed, we are truly passionate about what we do and we are prone to overdoing it if left unchecked. Being aware of how you personally react to stress and knowing when you’re getting overwhelmed are your first line of defense against burning out.

Okay, okay. I’m about two weeks late but I finally finished up my February #OneGameAMonth entry. In my defense, I did have a confluence of life and work events knock into my schedule. But, that’s neither here nor there. I said One Game a Month.

As I mentioned previously, my goal for February’s game was to capture some of that Itano Circus feel. With that in mind, I even went so far as to name the game “Itano Alpha Flight”. And now the game is available for you to play.

Itano Alpha Flight is an action game written in XNA and running on Windows. The goal of the game is to destroy enemies in rapid succession with your lock-on missiles while avoiding their projectiles. You can control the game with either the keyboard or with an Xbox Controller.

To play, you just need to download this file, unzip it, and run Itano.exe.
I’m just one guy, so I can’t really make an guarantees about the suitability of this game for any purpose but I expect it should run reasonably well on most Windows machines.

You can also see how the game turned out in these screenshots:

So, if you have a chance, give Itano Alpha Flight a try and let me know what you think. In the meantime, I’ll be plugging away on my next project.

While this sort of escalation is the kind of situation you want to avoid in real life, it is a powerful tool in game design. As a matter of fact, you can find some element of escalation in almost any game worth playing.

At its most basic level, escalation in games is about raising stakes. This is distinct from a game’s difficulty rising simply from, say increasing numbers of stronger and stronger enemies though that is a part of a game’s escalation. It’s usually as it progresses that a game gives the player the opportunity to use the biggest, most gratifying tools it has to offer while presenting the player with the largest, most impressive challenges it can muster. Thus, the game escalates as everything gets bigger and louder. Similarly, while a player’s ability to avoid damage may improve as they become more skilled, enemy attacks may become more instantly lethal as a game progresses thus rendering each dodge the player executes more significant, escalating the stakes of the game’s risk-reward equation.

Escalation can also work wonders in player versus player scenarios. One of my favorite examples of a clear escalation mechanic is the mana system from Magic: The Gathering. In Magic, each player can lay one Land card per turn. These lands can then be used (called being “tapped”) once a turn to produce a point of mana needed for casting spells. At the beginning of each turn, the player can refresh their previously tapped lands as well as lay another land card. In this way, each players’ available bank of mana increases by a point every turn with every point of mana widening the range of spell combinations the player can execute.

This slow build-up of power is key to how Magic is able to function so well as a game. By starting the power scale low and then slowly building it up, the game creates an ecosystem where low-cost cards are more valuable than higher-cost cards at the beginning of a match but where the relative value of low-cost versus high-cost cards reverses as the match progresses. This ensures that a wider range of cards are relevant to the game than would have been the case if players started each match with a full store of mana.

Mana escalation in Magic is also useful in keeping matches exciting. Higher mana pools allow players to play high-cost combinations of cards that are more likely to be game changers allowing a losing player to turn-the-tables of a match. This makes it less likely for one player to dominate a match from beginning to end, allowing both players to be fully engaged in the game. In essence, moves made at the end of a match matter more than the moves made earlier in a match by the nature of the sheer power level of the abilities available towards the end of a match.

For more escalation in practice, you can read this article on the design of the Penny Arcade collectible ping-pong card game Paint the Line. This game actually has a literal Escalation Deck that the designers used to provide their game with forward momentum.

So, that’s escalation in a nutshell. As a game progresses, player stakes go up, lending greater importance to their actions. This can help players stay engaged with a game by allowing for comebacks at later stages of play. It can also serve as a throttle to allow for a wider range of abilities to be relevant to the way the game as played.

Okay, enough being coy. Money talk.
Since Robot Legion’s November 28, 2012 release on Xbox Live Indie Games, I’ve had 2824 downloads of the trial with 751 purchases. At 70 cents a pop (the purchase price is $1 of which 30% goes to Microsoft), that comes out to $525.70 to date. That amount I then split with the original creator of Robot Legions.

Broken down by month, the numbers come out as follows:

So, that’s not a lot of money, but then again I wasn’t really expecting that much. Of course, I wouldn’t mind making more money but I’m mostly thankful to have a hobby that doesn’t cost me money and allows me to keep my gamedev skills sharp.

Still, it is worth noting that the conversion rate (purchase over trials) for the game comes out to 26.59%. Compared to old-school shareware numbers (which generally had a conversion rate of < 10%) that number is pretty good. For Xbox Live Indie Games however, that’s a fairly average number (and low compared to successful XBLIG titles.) The Xbox Live Indie Games market may be small but it is abnormally focused. The people who actually go there are primed to buy games and it shows in the conversion rates.

As a side note, my 2010 Xbox Live Indie Games release Legend of the Rune Lords is pulling in around 25 purchases a month. Since December 2011, it’s managed to total about 376 purchases. So, the long tail is there on XBLIG, it’s just really, really thin.

I think one of the definitions offered by the Merriam-Webster dictionary provides a clear picture of how this word applies to game design:

a balance maintained in an artistic work between opposing forces or elements

Civilization and Pirates! creator Sid Meier famously stated that “games are a series of interesting decisions.” To me, “interesting” is a particularly important word in that phrase. Any choice presented to the player can be considered a decision, but unless that decision is actually “interesting”, the decision does nothing to actually make the game more fun. Tension is a useful tool for making sure that the choices in your game are actually interesting.

In the context of games, you can create tension by giving the player multiple opposing goals. Successfully implemented, this will mean that your player will have to continuously choose between two or more actions each in service to a different goal. Pulling an example from Super Mario Bros., consider the interplay between the jumping obstacle-avoidance gameplay versus the time-limit applied to each stage. These systems represent two separate goals that encourage different behavior: moving carefully to avoid obstacles & moving quickly to reach the stage’s end before time runs out.

It’s important to note how the time-limit is balanced so as not to be overwhelmingly severe. At the start of a stage, the player rarely has to pay attention to the time-limit because there’s usually more than enough time to complete a stage if they proceed at a reasonable rate. This is good because the player often needs to concentrate on understanding whatever unique challenges or gimmicks the stage is presenting. That being said, the time-limit is not set so high so as to be irrelevant. It is set to be enough to enforce a certain level of risk-taking by the player and prevent too-slow, overly conservative gameplay (which will probably be dull for the player.) The time-limit later becomes a factor towards the end of a level with a chime and sped-up music informing the player that they need to hustle. At this point, the player has acclimated to the stage’s particular challenges so they are able to make an informed choice regarding how much faster they can go without taking on too much additional risk.

Similarly, I intentionally use this sort of tension in my February #OneGameAMonth entry. While the player must keep their ship out of the line-of-fire of their enemies, the only way to target the enemies is to pass through their firing lines. This way, the player can’t win by simply avoiding fire, they must gauge when it’s safe to expose themselves to enemy attack in order to get their own attacks in. Even Robot Legions uses the tried-and-true system of having defeated enemies drop collectibles. While defeating an enemy and moving on is the safest strategy, the collectibles tempt the player to linger in a spot where other enemies are likely to converge.

Tension is about the energy that results from pulling something in opposite directions. This energy is part of what makes a lot of games fun. If there is only one optimal choice or if all player choices are complimentary this reduces the tension of that decision. Tension is about making sure a player’s choices matter so the resulting game matters to the player.

Before that though, a few words about why I’m doing #OneGameAMonth (#1GAM for short) in the first place. Here is the mission statement from my #OneGameAMonth profile page:

My biggest hope in joining #OneGameAMonth is to use it as a chance to challenge all my assumptions about how games should be made. By holding to the seemingly impossible goal of One Game a Month, I hope to find what I need to change (and what I’m unwilling to sacrifice) in order to make more, better games. Also, making friends and becoming AWESOME!

My main goal is to challenge myself to approach game development in ways that I haven’t before. So, this is how am I doing so far:

For my first #OneGameAMonth project, I decided to start with an easy warm-up: an update of an existing game. In this case, an update for my latest XBLIG game, Robot Legions. Be sure to check it out to see how it went.

For my next trick, I’m going to try for a real challenge and make a new game.

Naturally, making a new game from scratch takes time so I’m leveraging as much of my previous projects as possible. I’m even going so far as copying my last released game’s code wholesale and then replacing the parts I need to make my new game. While I am spending some time cleaning up and excising code I don’t need, I expect this approach to pay dividends once I start having to implement menus and such. If I can get away with just re-skinning and adjusting the flow of my previous title’s menu code, I can spend that much more time focused on the gameplay itself.

The other weapon in my time-saving arsenal is an almost single-minded focus on the game’s concept. I want to do ONE THING with this game and that is replicate the feeling of an Itano Circus. The Itano Circus (or “Macross Missile Massacre”) refers to the wild flurries of missiles that occur in anime dogfights like those in Macross. Check out the video below if you want to see what I mean:

While making a game, it’s easy to have feature creep set in and blow the scope of the project. As much as possible, I’m trying to stay aware of that phenomenon and stop myself went it starts to take place. Whenever I have a new idea for the game, I ask myself: “Does this help the Itano Circus feel?” If not, I cut it. Then and there.

Here are screenshots of what I have so far.

(It’s probably not coincidental that every choice I make to bring out the Itano Circus-ness of the game seems to take it closer to Afterburner II. I imagine the creators of that game drew inspiration from many of the same sources I’m now using.)

So far, I’m managing to keep focused on my goal. Hopefully I can keep it up and finish this game this month. After all, I have a new project waiting for me next month because, well you know, #OneGameAMonth.

The basic principle here is that, in games, the level of reward provided by an action should match the level of risk it entails. Low-risk behavior should generally provide low rewards. A highly rewarding action (say a high-damage attack or a high-value treasure) should require a commiserate level of risk otherwise players will never have a reason to choose a lower-reward alternative.

Using Risk-Reward as a lens, you can see this relationship at various levels of game design, from weapon balance to level design. Consider the classic relationship between light attacks and fierce attacks in the Street Fighter series. Fierce attacks do significantly more damage on a hit but, due to their long recovery animations, leave the player vulnerable if they miss. On the other hand, light attacks do little damage on a successful hit but provide a nearly non-existent window for counter-attack should they miss.

You can also see Risk-Reward at work in level design in the Mario series. A particularly clear example of this how red coins are used in Super Mario 64. In every level, there are 8 red coins that the player could collect for an extra star (the reach goal of the game being to collect all 120 stars). Red coins are often placed near the main course of a stage but in locations that are harder to reach than normal, say a small platform that the player would need to jump carefully in order to reach. Here, the player is presented with a choice: risk losing a life to get the red coin or play it safe and give up on collecting all 8 red coins and earning an extra star.

A key in the red coin example is that the reward has to be significant enough to justify the risk while not being absolutely vital to proceeding in the game. Had the red coins been required to finish the game, precariously placed red coins would have gone from being an optional risk to being a difficulty spike that could cause players to quit the game out of frustration. Nowadays, it’s almost a given that players expect to be able to finish any game they play. This doesn’t mean that they expect to clear every possible challenge a game presents, just that they can beat it at a “normal” level of difficulty. What this implies that clearing a game does not present a significant enough of a reward to justify higher-than-normal risk. This isn’t to say that a game has to be easy, it’s that the difficulty of required actions shouldn’t deviate too far from the average difficulty of the game at that point. Applied to Risk-Reward this suggests that risk of a particular action should be calculated relative to the risk of other actions available at the same time.

Risk-Reward is a powerful tool for evaluating game design and can be useful when trying to balance various game features. When considering a new feature for a game, I’ve found it useful analyze it from the perspective of Risk-Reward to determine how best to use the feature (or if I should even use it at all.)

This update improves upon the original with new graphical effects and an added ability for the player to toggle their firing modes. Now you can switch between synced and alternating fire modes allowing you to choose between accuracy and rate-of-fire as best fits the situation.

New visual effects in this version are bullet trails, smoke from explosions and a new vignette shader effect. These new effects can be toggled on or off in the options menu for people who prefer the original look of the game.

Check out these screenshots for a taste of what the new Robot Legions has to offer:

Robot Legions, available now on Xbox Live Indie Games.