Super Mario 3D Land: Observations

This post is a list of observations I made while playing through Super Mario 3D Land on the 3DS. It's part opinion, part design analysis, and all waffle.

• It is short and easy, but with reasons to come back. Completing the 8 worlds is not particularly difficult if you're vaguely familiar with Mario games. There is an abundance of 1-Ups if you take the time to search the nooks and crannies as well as a generous, widespread distribution of coins which seem to reward a vast array of actions in a way that is reminiscent of certain online FPSes. By the end of the game I had over 130 lives. But then you have the Star Coins to find (three giant coins hidden in each level, which usually require extra poking around) and completing the game unlocks a large number of 'special' levels. I have only played a couple of these so far, but they seem to mix up the standard formula with special twists to the usual rules like a 'Dark Mario' who chases you round and prevents you standing still.
• It shows off the 3DS' capabilities. There are few cases where stereoscopic 3D actually brings something worthwhile to the table (mainly depth perception which greatly helps with judging your position mid-jump). But beyond this, SM3DL is packed full of little moments that would simply not look/feel as cool in 2D. Some memorable highlights were the giant screws on the airship levels that come hurtling towards the camera in synchronised aggression, seeing Mario bounce up into your face in the top-down perspective levels, and the Piranha Plants that spit inky goo on to the screen.
• Mario loses his hat when he's small. Did this happen in other 3D (not stereoscopic) Mario games? I suspect it is because you no longer have the consistent sense of scale that you get in 2D ones, so this change was probably made to provide additional visual feedback.
• The Tanooki suit makes jumping easier. You just need to hold the jump button after lift-off and Mario will slowly glide back to the ground. This makes long-distance or precise jumps much easier to execute. I suspect this may be a response to both the inherent flaws of distance-gauging in 3D (although the 3DS should alleviate this) and an attempt to make the game 'more accessible'.
• The boss battles were repetitive. There were only 3 types of boss battle in the game, although each one changed the arena layout and added threats like fire pits in the floor. Figuring out and exploiting the attack patterns of the bosses is one of the things that makes them so rewarding to beat, so it was a shame to diminish this by making you fight the same boss with the same patterns several times (although the game pretty much redeems itself with the exhilarating final boss battle).
• The contraptions make you look before you leap. There are these platforms that flip between red and blue every time you jump, leaving a drop into oblivion wherever the other side of the platform was. It's very easy to jump about wildly when you play Mario games, but these really make you stop and think one step ahead to anticipate where the platforms will move to. They can, however, be somewhat undermined by the Tanooki suit as seen in the linked video.

Next stop on the 3DS Express: the special worlds, then Mario Kart 7!

Nuggets of Wisdom: Power vs Curiosity

The combined power of the nifty iPad app Instapaper and an hour-long commute has helped me catch up on some bookmarked game design articles I had been intending to read for a while.

As I consume them I tend to pick out little nuggets of wisdom which I feel compelled to share. This may or may not become a regular feature, who knows?

I'll let the nuggets speak for themselves (except my bold highlights) and simply provide a link to the full article for those interested in further reading.

The intrinsic motivators of power and curiosity are at odds with each other. The more you are motivated by curiosity, the stronger the desire to test your new understanding becomes. And against increasingly difficult challenges, the more you fail, the more motivated you become to switch over to an learning playstyle to build your skills up. As this pendulum of motivation swings back and forth, it can be very stressful and dangerous to fun if the user is significantly restricted from freely moving between these motivations. Being forced to learn when one expects to flex or being prevented from learning when one desires to understand can cause players to lose motivation and therefore lose play and fun.

Source: Critical-Gaming Network: The Zero-Sum Funomaly pt. 7
Part 1 in the Zero-Sum Funomaly series is here.

Nuggets of Wisdom: Game Development in a Bubble

An argument for why the industry needs to encourage fresh perspectives on the games we make:

I'm just saying my misunderstanding of the games industry, as a non-gamer, coming in making games -- I was taking the subject matter and the content in the cutscenes seriously. I was honestly looking for the stories that are on the back of the box, or the media, the propaganda, that they put out about the game. 

I was thinking, "Oh, all this content is in there somewhere, and I just have to find it and I'm missing it," whatever. When in actuality, no, they really want to make another fucking first-person shooter. That's amazing to me. Still, to this day, I'm amazed by that. 

Auriea Harvey (Tale Of Tales)

Full interview with Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn can be found on Gamasutra.

Cold Relief: a game made in 0 hours

As I was up late I decided to take part in the 0-hour game jam: a challenge to make a game in the hour gained when the clocks go back.

It was impromptu and entirely unplanned so the final game is a result of listening to Lustmord at 1:00am, combined with some floaty uncontrollability inspired by a dream I had. The original goal was to have an Antarctic environment based on the trek in At The Mountains of Madness, but this soon shifted to a more abstract dream world when it dawned on me just how quickly an hour passes.

I spent another half an hour or so polishing it off and fixing up the code a bit.

Play Cold Relief in Unity Webplayer ~ 22 MB

The audio was sourced from Freesound.org: here and here. The first-person character controller is the Unity prefab with tweaked jump and movement parameters.

Resurrected Post: Luminesca Evolved

I removed this post last year, and decided to re-post it for the sake of completeness. It has a new date stamp now, but you can see from the comments' date stamps that it's quite old! Ahh, those were the days.

Luminesca is now, of course, a fully-fledged project in development.

Original post:

I've been toying with the idea of an updated Luminesca game, and came up with this mock-up screenshot. All comments and criticism are more than welcome! 

The Binding of Isaac (demo deconstruction)

This small yet cloying sample of The Binding of Isaac is an admittedly incomplete experience of the game, but due to its procedurally-generated nature there is no such thing as a complete picture; only random cross sections cut at unpredictably obscure angles.

The game is reminiscent of the 8- and 16-bit Zeldas in its mechanics, enemy design and level design, although dungeons are made up of never-the-same-twice rooms and the whole thing is draped in a nightmarish basement aesthetic loosely inspired by an ancient story about child sacrifice.

The Binding of Isaac almost overcomes its lack of melee combat by compressing the ranged attacks to just the four cardinal directions, placing additional importance on aligning yourself with your targets either horizontally or vertically, and complicating this process using various static obstacles (such as piles of degrading faecal matter). When enemies close in on you it is possible to move and shoot in different directions, but I did encounter the odd occasion where the available space was too confined, the enemies advanced too quickly and my fire rate was simply too slow. Randomisation has its drawbacks.

Its fictional premise is unique compared to most games and the intro cinematic was certainly entertaining, if a little overt in its Biblical themes, but I sense that it takes the Shadow of the Colossus / Metroid approach of using cinematic sequences to merely bookend the lengthy action part of the story. That is to say it opens with a 'premise cinematic', lets you spend a very long time doing stuff in response to that premise and closes, when you reach your goal, with a 'job done cinematic'. I may well be wrong (please correct me if I am), but that's how it appears from the demo. It's an effective enough structure (and has been touched upon here) but does leave the bookends feeling like exposition overkill when the rest of the game's narrative is delivered so sparingly.

For all its flaws (which I tend to dwell on when I deconstruct a game) Isaac is a shining example of a top-end indie game which demonstrates a strong understanding of the challenges presented by overhead camera angles in 2D games.

It's dirt-cheap on Steam (with soundtrack available too) and the free demo is playable in your browser on Newgrounds.

Rocket Knight - Folded Level Design

I've been intending to play Rocket Knight for a long time and finally got round to it today. It's a solid game which knows what it's about. It clearly understands what makes a good 2D platformer and has some interesting level design in certain sections.

The Cyberswine Labs level provides a great example of folded level design. A 'fold' in the level occurs when the player has to backtrack through areas they have already visited. While backtracking can easily become tiresome if those areas are now empty and devoid of challenge, a folded level can retain interest by changing the way the player interacts with the environment the second time through and providing challenge variation. A folded level can be broken down into "the way there" and "the way back". The way back often provides the more difficult or complex gameplay.

In the example in the video above Rocket Knight has to ride the moving platforms down through a maze of dangerous energy beams. As the platforms lower the player must Rocket Burst between them to avoid the beams. On the way down gravity is on the player's side so they can simply fall down on to the next platform as they drop below.

The Rocket Burst ability forces the player to commit to moving in a fixed direction and is restricted by their fuel supply (which is limited in the ice level). But it doubles as a fast attack and is the strongest tool the player has to defy the platform game's most persistent obstacle: gravity.

However, when the level folds (when the player hits the switch at the bottom and reverses the direction in which the platforms move) the player has a new layer of difficulty added to the challenge. Because the platforms are now moving up, the player has to fight against gravity to keep up with them by jumping as well as Rocket Bursting in a test of precision timing at a fixed pace.

A second overarching fold occurs in full glory during the dramatic escape sequence at the end of the level. Rocket Knight destroys the laboratory core, setting off a massive explosion which constantly swells in size. The player must now backtrack through the entire level with the explosion hot on their tail (literally -- Rocket Knight is an opossum). So the way there features all the standard level design features and challenges the player is used to in the game, while the way back entails a test of speed and precision timing, as well as a slightly modified path to allow short-cuts and less stilted movement through the level. The whole thing now mostly takes place above a bottomless pit, meaning the constant force of gravity is always working against the player.

After the second fold, most players will probably race back through the aforementioned 'moving platform energy beam room' so quickly that they won't even realise they've passed through it twice before. Thankfully, the beams and platforms have now deactivated so Rocket Knight can burst freely and bounce off its walls at great speed.

Through this smart level design, Rocket Knight gets extra mileage out of its restricted space (as nearly all game spaces are restricted) without ever becoming repetitive or tedious.