Blood, Sweat, and Pixels - Mini Review

So I did something I do less then I finish a game: I finished a book! I received this book from my wonderful wife for Christmas and 16 days into January I completed it with travels and all.

Who should read this book?

• Everyone considering going into the game industry before spending considerable time, energy, and money on that pursuit. You should know what you're getting into! 
• Anyone that has ever posted an angry complaint about a video game. Realize what went into the game before you rant. Chances are they are painfully aware of many more problems with the game than you are.
• Anyone who loves games and wants a better appreciation or idea of how they are made.
• Anyone already in the game industry could probably find something useful here. Either a pitfall to avoid, or just a realization that other studios have/are going though the same thing you are.

Jason seems to have a good grasp on the games industry. The introduction is about the most honest straight forward account I've read. Some of the chapters about larger studios are from an upper management point of view and so they glamorize and necessitate "crunch" as part of the process while talking only about high level issues, and filtering everything through their PR department. While these chapters are still interesting the best parts of the book are the less guarded chapters including examples of independent studios and a single developer telling his story.

From chapter 4 or 5 to the end the book shines with a "tell it how it is" feel. The book has an honest portrayal of what making a game alone or as a small team might be like. It shows how even "successful" studios are often only a single failure from closing their doors and some of the struggles and compromises they make to stay afloat. It looks at why some of the design choices may have been made and the struggle between developers and publishers that effect games more then most people realize.

It's a fairly short book at 279 pages with good sized print, but the thoughts are put together and presented well including footnotes. Many of the stories I knew something about, but each had more details than I knew before reading. If the studio has released multiple titles Jason also does a quick historical overview of relevant history to catch you up with the story he's telling. The games covered in this book are:

• Pillars of Eternity
• Uncharted 4
• Stardew Valley
• Diablo III
• Halo Wars
• Dragon Age: Inquisition
• Shovel Knight
• Destiny
• The Witcher 3
• Star Wars 1313

I have slight disagreements with his conclusions. I agree that it is a wonder any game ever gets made with everything that happens during the process, and crunch will always be a part of games, but i feel for another reason.

Games can and should be scheduled out to work within the studios budget and timeline, if crunch is required something went wrong and you need to hire for the work or move the date. It's illogical and probably illegal most of the crunch that happens in the industry. Planning for everything to take the maximum time you think it might seems to be working at studios I've worked for recently. This approach gives tasks that complete early to cover the ones that go long. At some point if you commit to a deadline you might need to put in a bit of extra time to make it, but there should never be long crunch phases, it's simply unsustainable.

So why did I say crunch will always be around? It is touched on a bit in this book. Game development attracts perfectionists and people will put in the time to do as good of a job as they can. If there is often "extra" time because of proper scheduling the level of polish will be higher with less bugs. If extra work is optional people will do it as passion project in a sustainable way.

Okay, sorry for the mini-tangent on the mini-review. Buy the book, it's a great read about the industry! If you're still on the fence Jason has posted a full chapter about Diablo III here:

How Blizzard Saved Diablo III From Disaster

Read it and pick up form favorite book store!

Life Before the Quest Journal or A Day in Zelda: Twilight Princess

First thing: There are spoilers from about 30 minutes into the game until about the hour, 1:15 mark. If you haven't played the game yet and don't want spoilers complete day 2 in the story and then read this.

This is mostly an observation post... Going back and playing games from years ago before we had what are now common game mechanics can be interesting! In this particular post it will be the Quest Journal. Modern games keep track for you: bullet point quest objectives, map way-points, etc, you don't have to even read the story text.

This was not always the case! As you can see in this example, to have any hope of progressing in a timely manner you have to read all the dialog and be a little bit lucky. It requires figuring out the order, how everything works together, and not forgetting about any of the parts while trying to solve the whole.

This is also an interesting consideration because a lot of times I ponder leaving popular mechanics out of some of my game ideas for a variety of reasons... but what impact would that really have?

So with no further adieu here is day 2 in the newly re-released The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess HD.

The only expectation I was given from the day before was one of the kids in the village was finishing a fishing pole and it would be ready for me today.

I climb down out of my house and find the kid that was suppose to give me the fishing pole, instead there are three kids and they are talking about a sling shot at one of their family's shops.

On the way into town I see a lady complaining she lost her baby cradle and expects it to be floating down the river? I get side tracked investigating this, but nothing really pops up... I do note a cat in the game because it looks a lot like my cat in real life. After a bit of searching I follow the river up stream and find a monkey and some land (visible on the map) I can't seem to get to. I try using adjacent zones, etc, nothing, so back looking for the sling shot.

I am able to find a shop, but the lady running it is so distraught about her cat she won't sell me anything... I wonder if it is the same cat I saw earlier. I go back and try to herd it back towards the shop. (The game has taught me this is a mechanic, but the cat doesn't cross the water well, it won't use the bridge, it will swim or get stuck under it, but that seems to be it.) After trying for a while I give up on the cat too and start looking around.

This guy sitting on top of whatever this is who wasn't saying anything before starts talking to me...

About the cat...

And then about grass I can use to call my eagle... funny thing is the eagle can't do anything from here... however if I jump a couple more platforms there is more grass and I can call my eagle from there, and I have a better view of the monkey that was upstream but blocked off. And it looks like he was holding a basket.

So I send the hawk out from this 2nd spot at the monkey and the hawk brings the basket back to me!

I take the cradle to the mom of the kid who was suppose to have the fishing pole for me and after walking her back to her house she gives me a fishing pole. At this point I do put together that the missing cat had to do with a fish and so I go out and catch a fish and then look for it in my inventory and try to lure the cat back to the shop again with no lock. After trying a couple times I give up.

I had talked to a guy earlier that wanted a bee hive knocked down, so I found a spot I could send my owl out and knock it down... this seems to be purely optional, but hey, I was able to progress something.

Since the fish wasn't usable after catching it, I had a thought... maybe if I catch a fish by the cat?!?

So I caught a fish!

The cat stole the fish... and ran home!

So I follow the cat inside and good news! She is now ready to sell things!

So I head outside and collect 30 Rupees to pay for the sling shot that are scattered around the village.

I purchase the sling shot!

And try to take it back to the children, but I'm stopped just before them and told by on of their fathers that he dropped off a package for me... Now how old am I suppose to be? I play with the children, but have a job, but everyone mostly treats me like a child, but the children all act like I'm older, but all the adults act like I'm younger? idk...

Anyway, I finally get to the children with the sling shot.

They make me show off my skills with a sling shot...

before flat out demanding I bring back whatever the delivery was.

So I go back into my house, find a big shiny blue box and find a wooden sword in it... wooden...

Of course the children want to see me skills with the wooden sword... as soon as I'm finished showing off a monkey comes out of the woods and all three children chase after it... because...

I mount my trusty steed who drives more like a garbage truck than a horse and head off into the woods... with only that wooden sword.

I come across two of the children along the side of the road abandoning the third and leave them out in the cold to thing about what they have done...

I run across a merchant who gives me a lantern so he can over-charge me every time I want to re-fill it. And he sends me on my way into a dark cave where my horse won't follow with only a wooden stick and a lantern that doesn't hold enough oil.

After a fair amount of time in the caves I finally find the 3rd child and the monkey that started this trip caged up between two bad guys... I bust them out and bring the girl home.

I run into the father on the way back home and he tells me I'm going to take a present from the village to the castle the next day... after a short dialog and thanks for saving his son I apparently head to bed... that was Link's day off of work!

It will be interesting to play through a game from a time with less hand-holding and more puzzles even in ways we now take for-granted! I'm looking forward to what I can re-learn!

Location in Video Games: inFAMOUS Second Son

Infamous is an interesting game for me it's the first game I remember buying just because of the location.

Currently I live in Seattle and Seattle is the most familiar I've been with a real world counter part to an in-game location. I've been through L.A., D.C., other major metropolitan areas, but not spend the time I have here in Seattle.

I've been to all the locations shown here and fighting in the Seattle Center, Pioneer Square, etc... is a lot of fun!

After playing for a bit I realized what was bothering me about the game. It is a compressed world of course so things aren't lined up like they are in the real city. The 520 bridge is located closer to the actual West Seattle Bridge location, but is by far the most hated bridge in the City. Not only does it congest with rush hour traffic, but it is also a tole bridge with a money sink of a replacement protruding out of the water next to it... so choosing this to be the bridge to blowing it up is a no brainer even though the location is wrong.

So I'm not a huge fan of the game... I received the first game from the infamous PlayStation Network outage of 2011 and picked up the 2nd in a bargain bin, playing both very minimally.  I'll probably put up a post on my thoughts about the game at some point, but this is for the environment art only that looks fantastic! If it wasn't for the slightly off locations I don't think I'd have anything to complain about and that is very minor indeed! I do wonder if Pike's Market is included or more of the waterfront, but I'm to low to venture into parts of the game at this point, so those are questions to be answered later. This is a very good job recreating Seattle in the confides of a game environment!

Genre Mashups in Video Games

I'm talking about genre mashups using Tomb Raider because I just finished the first one and am a few hours into the second so it is fresh on my mind, but this could be said about almost every game coming out. The Tomb Raider remakes are move of an answer to Uncharted than a throw back to the original, and this seems to dictate the genres they include.

The basic genres in Tomb Raider (broadly) are: Platformer/Collection, 3rd Person Shooter, and Quick-Time-Event. I haven't played the original Tomb Raider for many years, but I remember it being mostly an exploration/collection/platformer. The current Tomb Raider is fairly linear to be considered exploration and the puzzles are on the light side. As for collection, many of the collectibles are dropped in front of you and platforming is fairly light. I think you could say the game is trying primarily to be exploration and platforming, but it's linear enough you can't really miss much of the content and fail safes are put in for the platforming portions.


So where the game fails in my opinion is the other genres that are "forced" in. The first I will keep brief because I HATE quick-time events, so any inclusion is going to cause me grief and instantly be unhappy. The areas especially in the first game that included QTEs were the first road blocks I encountered. Luckily most of these were from the E3 Demo very early on and thinned out later in the game. Rise otTR did a better job, they are kinda there, but instead of true QTEs they are time slow downs requiring you to do normal gameplay operations... still annoying, but much better as knowing the controls are normally the worst part of QTEs.



The second mechanic kinda shoe-horned in is the forced 3rd person
shootouts. This won't be an issue for everyone, but I used the bow the rest of the game so when the sections they force you to do a shootout happens the bow isn't always viable and having no previous experience with the other weapons I got stuck on one of those sections for 2-3 play sessions trying to get past it. Forcing players to use one of your systems that has been optional for the majority of the game is okay, but then difficulty needs to be at a beginner level for it, not at a half way through the game expecting everyone to have been using it for hours of play.

Why this matters...
I don't have the time anymore to play games endlessly. Tomb Raider is a game I really like so I persisted, but any game that I'm borderline enjoying I won't pick back up if I hit a wall I can't complete in a few tries. Especially if it is because of a side game mechanic that I don't enjoy playing. I don't think I'm alone in my thinking at least in my demographic with a family and limited gaming time. I think meshing mechanics is possibly a good way to get people into a game, but if you use mechanics that don't mesh well together it was at least keep people from completing them.

Lastly I just want to reiterate that while I picked on Tomb Raider, it is a game I completed (though a little rushed at the end because Bloodborne was in the mail). That means a lot for me, I maybe only complete a dozen or so games a year, so holding my interest to the end is an accomplishment! And Rise of the Tomb Raider is my casual go-to-game right now when I don't want the difficulty of Bloodborne. So these are good games and the critique should in no way take away from that. With their faults they are still a worthy playthough!

Thanks for listening to my rambling.