Well, things have been pretty quiet here on the blog over the last few weeks, but I assure you it’s been for a good reason; we’ve been working our tails off! Cody and I, along with Kat, John, and Josh, have been working feverishly over the last few weeks to not only prepare our role-playing game for demo at E3 but also to deliver the next creation from F5 Games, Incrediblox!
IncrediBlox is a falling block puzzle game where the goal is to match blocks of the same color into 2×2 squares and clear them from the screen. To liven things up we also have 4 IncrediBlox that each have a unique special power, when you active an IncrediBlox they will use their power to help you clear extra blocks from the screen and rack up huge point bonuses.
There are 33 levels that help you learn how to play the game and teach you a few tricks so that you’ll be ready for the real challenge; Infinite and Sequence Modes! Infinite mode is an endless game where the blocks are totally random, so you’ll never play the same game twice! Sequence mode is just the opposite, every time you play you’ll get the same order of blocks and so will everyone else in the world! That way you can easily compare scores with your friends and see who really is the best Incrediblox player!
IncrediBlox is a ton of fun, especially if you’re competing with your friends for a high score, and we really hope you’ll check it out. It is already being reviewed by Apple and we plan to launch it on the App Store on June 1st!
In the mean time you can check out our game page for Incrediblox right here. And make sure you check back soon for lots of additional details about IncrediBlox and our plans for E3 this year!
A couple months ago I posted about a weekend spent prototyping our upcoming RPG game. At that point all I was really focused on was building the initial technology platform that would power our RPG and all of that is coming along really well. Even more important than the technology, however, is the actual gameplay that it empowers, and our most recent prototyping weekend was all about the gameplay, specifically about our characters and seeing how much fun it was to go on a quest with them.
A Clean Slate
A few weeks ago Cody, Lucas, and myself got together to brainstorm what the characters would be like in our new game. We wanted to have some interesting styles and abilities that aren’t just copies of all the traditional fantasy characters, and we came up with some pretty fun stuff! Once we had our characters and abilities planned out we realized that we really needed to test them out in a game before we spent too much time fleshing them out, so it was time for some old-school role playing action. We set it up just like many of you probably used to do, with dice, graph paper, bitmap character printouts, iPads, 2D tilemaps powered by tiled, and a 6 foot projector image…. so maybe it wasn’t all that old-school.
New School RPG'n
The purpose of this gameplay session was to try out all of the totally awesome character classes that we had dreamt up the week before. We have dwarfs that use bio-weapons, warriors that command the elements, and mages that can drop the stars themselves on any monster foolish enough to get in their way. In a nutshell, Lucas made everyone really over-powered and it was my job to run around and use the Nerf gun on just about everything so that the players had a little bit of a challenge.
Brandon and Cody ponder the ramifications of allowing Lucas to generate power in an infinite loop....
As you can probably tell from the pictures we had a really great time and even in just a 2-3 hour play session we were able to answer a lot of questions we had about the game: such as how best to handle movement and actions for the characters and monsters, how to balance the level of the enemies vs the players, and most importantly was our game going to be any fun? Thankfully the game was a ton of fun and we can’t wait to translate what we had running on the wall with a projector, paper cutouts, and sticky tack into a real working prototype on our iPhones.
Cody and I are setting up another prototyping session for the coming days that will focus on technology once again. Look for an update on our progress in the near future!
Gizmodo has posted a great interview with Mark Rein and Tim Sweeny from Epic Games about the future of the Unreal Engine on mobile devices. It’s full of great info, especially the part where they say that in the next few years we’ll have an iPad that is as powerful as an Xbxo 360
The Near Future of Mobile Gaming is Going to be Pretty Epic
Lately I’ve been trying to absorb as much game design information as possible. My latest game project is one of those ‘pure fun’ concepts that has to have a killer game design to have any chance at success, so I’m pulling in all the advice and tips I can get my hands on.
Thankfully I’ve found some really great resources to help with your game design so I thought I would share them with you. Here is my March collection of Game Design links and resources.
Fun is the Future: Mastering Gamification – A Great presentation about gamifying your product. This Google Tech Talk is focused on ‘gamifying’ other applications or processes but the overall theme is all about how to create fun in your product, something we can all learn from.
The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses – by Jesse Schell This is a great book about Game Design. You’re not going to get any programming examples from this book as it’s all theory but it is a great read and is full of useful information.
The Game Design Canvas: The Game Prodigy is a great site that is packed full of interesting case studies and game design articles, but the Game Design Canvas is probably the best series on the site. It breaks up game design into base components and then walks you through each one and how to maximize it. Another great read.
There you have it, another month’s worth of reading! If you check out any of these resources, or have any of your own to share, let me know in the comments.
UPDATE
Travis mentioned in the comments that GDC posted a ton of free videos on their site this month. If you haven’t already taken a look at those be sure to check it out as well. Thanks Travis.
Today Firemint, the company behind Flight Control and the Real Racing series, announced that they are adding a video-out mode to their latest game Real Racing 2 HD. Unlike the standard video mirroring that the iPad 2 supports this mode will allow for full 1080p output at a 16:9 ratio so that the game can be played on your HDTV at a higher resolution than it plays on the iPad.
This new mode requires the new iPad 2 and its HDMI adapter but it’s very exciting as it is the same kind of mode that I described in my last post about the future of mobile gaming.
So, if any of you have the setup to take advantage of this new mode let me know what you think in the comments. Is this the future of mainstream gaming that I predicted? Or is it just a novelty? Only time will tell.
Welcome to Part 2 of my ‘future of mobile gaming’ series. Last week I laid out my argument for mobile phone gaming as the future of all mobile gaming, and hinted that in part 2 I was going to also tackle the home console market. If you didn’t read the first part you may want to check it out as I’m just going to dive right in.
Mobile Gaming at Home
In the first part of this piece I stated that the advantages of smartphone gaming; such as the rapid progress of mobile phone technology, the ‘good enough’ gaming of smartphones, and the exploding market size, have allowed smartphones to replace portable gaming devices as the future of mobile gaming. While that is perhaps heretical to some people it isn’t all that difficult of a determination to make. What is far more interesting, I believe, is the idea that the same advantages smartphones hold over portable gaming consoles could also lead to a future where the home console is rendered obsolete by the smartphone.
This view, that smartphones will replace home gaming consoles like the Xbox 360 and PS3, is not something you hear about very often and I think that stems from a couple of mental hurdles that people have to jump in order to accept the argument.
The Hardware Problem
The most obvious reason this is hard to believe is the current difference in processing and graphical power between smartphones and game consoles. It’s hard to imagine that your phone could deliver the same level of visceral game experience, running at 60 frames per second, on your 1080p HDTV that your Xbox can accomplish but it’s not as far off as you may think. We already discussed how the smartphone industry was on such a fast product refresh cycle that the hardware gap between phones and dedicated gaming devices is closing every month. So it’s easy to think that if you just wait long enough the graphical power of an Xbox or PS3 will shrink down and find it’s way into your phone, but that’s not the real story. The real reason that smartphones will quickly move up to fill the role of home gaming consoles is parallelization, or multi-core chips.
Recently, at Mobile World Congress 2011, Nvidia revealed their newest mobile chipset codenamed ‘Kal-El’. This mobile processor, designed for smartphones and tablets, is not only a technological monster, it’s a quad-core chip. This chip, which is planned to hit in products before the end of the year, enables not just 1080p video but 1440p, it has support for 3D video, and it has a 12 core Geforce GPU that will run circles around just about every existing mobile graphics chip on the market. Never content to rest on their heels, Nvidia also showed their roadmap for Tegra over the next few years which displays even larger performance enhancements coming on yearly cycles all the way through 2014.
And Nvidia isn’t the only game in town. The level of technological competition in the mobile processor and graphics space is amazing and it’s happening, in large part, due to the addition of multiple cores. By continuing to add multiple cores to mobile chips manufacturers like Nvidia can continue to radically increase the performance and capabilities of mobile devices, nearly every 12 months.
So, if you’ll accept that we will very quickly have mobile phones, and tablets, with graphical horsepower which comes close to the current crop of home consoles then we’re having the same argument we had last week; can a dedicated gaming device keep up with the rapid advancement of the mobile space when mobile devices will offer an experience that is nearly as good, at a lower price, which does far more than just play games, and that will be updated on a yearly basis? I say no.
The Power of the Dock
The second reason it’s hard to think of your smartphone as a home gaming console is precisely because we’re talking about a phone. A phone is something you take with you on the go, it’s something you keep in your pocket and a device that you have a very personal connection with. Game consoles, however, are something that you bring home from the store, stick under your TV, and then sit down in front of when you want to relax and escape into another world. For the last 25 years, even with all the technological advancement, game consoles have stayed the same in one very important way; they plug into your TV and collect dust for 80%-90% of the day.
One of the main reasons I was able to look past this ‘game console’ concept and see smartphones as the future of gaming was the reveal of the Motorola Atrix 4G. If you aren’t familiar with the Atrix check out the video below to see why, especially the last minute of the video.
The Atrix allows you to dock your smartphone with either a laptop dock or an HD dock and unlock additional features. For this example I’m mainly interested in the HD dock that was shown at the end of the video. When the Atrix is docked in the HD dock and connected to an HDTV it displays a media viewer that isn’t unlike the Sony XMB UI on the PSP and PS3. The dock stays connected to your HDTV at all times and when your phone is connected it offers a hassle free gateway to your home theatre, that is the future of smartphone gaming in the home. The ability to connect your device, either through a dock or wirelessly, with your home theatre and expand your gaming experience at home is what will bring ‘hardcore’ gamers over to smartphone gaming at the expense of the dedicated consoles.
And the Dock doesn’t just have to be a dumb hub waiting for it’s brain to be plugged in. All of the media streaming functionalities that home consoles provide could be included in the hub itself and used when there is no phone plugged in at all. You could still stream movies, and music, and pictures, still watch Netflix and listen to Internet Radio all without needing to dock anything. Then when you plug in your phone you can tap into all that extra power for gaming and 3D movies, and video conferencing, the list goes on and on. Anything that you can do with a current home console you’ll be able to do with a smartphone and an HD dock in the next couple years.
The Future
Imagine a near future where you bring home your new smartphone with 4, or maybe 8, processor cores and a multi-core graphics chip and you dock it with your HDTV. Beyond just providing a new media browsing interface the dock also connects your phone to a power source so it can really crank up the performance and not worry about battery life. That could mean that some of the cores on your phone only activate when docked, or just that the phone overclocks into a performance mode and offers better graphics, sound, and AI when it’s connected to your home system. The dock also acts as a hub for your wireless gamepads, so you can kick your feet up on the couch and start playing your favorite first person shooter, online with your friends. When a call comes in, or you get a text, you can see a little alert in the upper corner of the screen and either accept the call or ignore it until later. If you choose to take the call it could transmit it to your bluetooth headset while you continue to rack up kills in Call of Duty 6. When you’re done gaming you still have access to all of the features of your smartphone, just through a larger screen. You can watch movies, listen to music, check your email, send a tweet, etc. etc. And when you’re done you just pick up your phone and walk away, and you don’t have to leave $400 worth of gaming technology sitting on a shelf not being used 90% of the time.
So there it is, my vision of the future of mobile, and possibly all, gaming. This doesn’t mean that the dedicated home console will go away completely, just like PC gaming hasn’t gone away, but I believe the future of mainstream gaming will look something like this, with game studios developing games for smartphones that are played on the go and at home seamlessly, and I can’t wait to get my hands on it! Let me know what you think in the comments.
This post centers on a thought I’ve had for a while now, that mobile gaming could be the future of all gaming. I’ve really been impressed with the adoption rate of mobile gaming over the last few years, it’s one of the reasons F5 is focused on mobile games, but a few things have happened even in just the last month that, I believe, could show us how the future of gaming could play out.
Smartphone Gaming vs Dedicated Portable Gaming
Smartphone gaming has really taken off with the iPhone, and to a lesser extent Android, over the last couple years. This redirection of gamers time into smartphone gaming has been especially troubling for Nintendo and Sony as the more time people spend gaming on their phone the less time they spend using a DS or PSP.
That is one of the reasons we’re only a month away from a US launch of Nintendo’s new 3DS and why Sony recently announced their NGP, or PSP 2. Both of these gaming devices have advanced technology and features that Nintendo and Sony hope will convince gamers that they need to carry an extra device with them to satisfy their gaming needs. While I’m excited to see what both of these devices can do I’m starting to feel like the days of dedicated gaming handhelds are numbered, and I’m not alone.
Recently John Carmack, the father of the First Person Shooter, was asked about the impact of phone gaming on the overall market and he had this to say:
“The smart phone may turn out to be 80 percent as good at gaming as a dedicated gaming platform,” Carmack said.
“People are going to carry their smart phone, and if it’s an 80 percent gaming device, how many people in the gaming market will be satisfied with that? That’s the question that’s in everybody’s mind, and I really don’t know.” – Dallas News
Obviously, I don’t know either, but I think that as smartphone adoption continues to grow you’re going to see more and more people who were never interested in purchasing a DS or PSP become interested in gaming on their phone. For them an 80% gaming device is more than good enough and they’re going to be incredibly satisfied with that. So the question isn’t ‘how many people in the gaming market will want that’ it’s ‘how much larger is that 80% gaming market than the current one’. As a game developer, that means smartphone gaming could represent a massively larger market that is growing at an incredible rate and is going to have a wider range of players to create games for.
The other advantage that smartphones have over gaming portables is their lifecycle. Apple has basically put the industry on a 12 month product refresh cycle by continually updating the iPhone year after year. That means that every 12 months we’re seeing a pretty dramatic increase in the processing power and graphical capabilities of these phones and the cost stays steady at about $200 on contract. In fact it’s rumored that the jaw dropping chips that are powering the NGP are very similar to the chips that will ship in the iPhone 5 and iPad 2, 6 months before Sony ships the NGP. Developers, including Carmack, have said that even if the chips were exactly the same a dedicated gaming machine will have better performance because of the low-level tuning that can take place, but in the long run that doesn’t matter if smartphone hardware gets faster every 12 months.
The PSP was released in America on March 24, 2005 and it’s successor, the NGP, won’t be available in the US until most likely 2012; that’s almost a 7 year lifecycle. At the current rate of enhancement the mobile phones of 2013 will be more powerful than the NGP and will be able to play more graphically impressive games probably on 3D screens exactly like that of the Nintendo 3DS. There is just no way that the traditional style gaming handheld can compete with the run-away growth in smartphone processing power.
If these trends continue, I don’t see how it makes sense to bring another dedicated gaming handheld to market. I fully expect the 3DS and NGP to be the last generation of dedicated gaming handhelds, and that all mobile gaming will be replaced by phones over the next few years.
Sony’s Response
A few weeks ago when Sony announced the NGP they also announced the Playstation Suite, a software platform and gaming store for mobile phones. At first I was interested in the Playstation Suite because it could be a better way to sell games on Android, and a way to get our games onto the NGP in the future. After some more thought, however, I’m beginning to think it may be one of the smartest moves Sony has ever made in mobile gaming. They are basically betting on two horses; if I’m wrong and there is still a large market for a dedicated gaming portable then they have the NGP; but if I’m right and phones will overtake the NGP and 3DS in the next couple years then they have the Playstation Suite. They can divert resources over to developing for their ‘certified’ Playstation phones and have a foothold in the new, and much much larger, phone gaming market. It’s a brilliant strategy, and after the Xperia Play announcements at MWC this week it seems to be something they are taking very seriously.
While Sony seems well positioned to make the jump out of the dedicated handheld gaming space if the need arises, I’m not so sure about Nintendo. I haven’t seen anything from them that suggests they are interested in moving their operations to mobile phones, and honestly I don’t see how they would do it. They are an incredibly proud company, and I can’t see them just deciding to develop games for the iPhone or Android. It’s possible that they could continue to sell handhelds to younger players but the phone market is so much larger and more diverse that I can’t imagine them ignoring it. Perhaps they they will make a Nintendo phone? I’m sure they could find another Japanese phone manufacturer that would like a way to counter Sony in their gaming push.
Conclusions
So, we’ve covered the reasons smartphone gaming will replace dedicated gaming handhelds. The markets are much bigger, people don’t want to carry multiple devices, and phone hardware is increasing at such astonishing rates that a 5-7 year product lifecycle isn’t competitive. But, the title of this post wasn’t just about currently mobile games it was about all games, including home consoles. I also believe that we could be only a few years away from a huge shake-up in the home console space as smartphone gaming begins to intrude on their turf in many of the same ways that they are killing the dedicated gaming portable.
However, this post is already long enough, so you’re going to have to wait until part 2 to hear the rest of the argument. Let me know what you think in the comments and look for the second part of this post on Friday.
Last week Sony unveiled their long awaited PSP2, only they called it the NGP (for Next Generation Portable). All through their announcement all I could think of was the picture up above from the excellent iPhone game Game Dev Story (with a little text editing by yours truly).
The Device
If you haven’t been following the news then the easiest way to sum it up is that the NGP is a BEAST! It’s what you get if you asked 100 hardcore gamers what they most want in a handheld gaming console, and then you threw it ALL in there. It’s got twin thumbsticks, dual cameras, dual touchpads, quad cores, it’s insane. This thing has $399 written all over it, when it finally comes to the U.S. in 2012 (yeah next year, everyone seems to have mistaken that ‘Holiday 2011′ release date in Japan for an American one). If you’re really interested in the specs of this thing then check out this rundown from Engadget and for a longer write-up about all the different features for the NGP try this article from Venturebeat. Basically, it’s a portable PS3. With all that said, the gamer in me really wants one, you can’t put that much power in a device and not expect us to all swoon over it.
The Promise
The problem with all of this is that it’s very similar to the original PSP announcement. Sony trotted out this amazing powerful system that was going to bring the home console experience on the go and the world was amazed. Then it came out and we all bought it on launch day, played Lumines for 3 months, and then shelved it; at least that’s what I did. Unfortunately even with all that power there just weren’t enough quality games to really make it worth while. Hopefully that won’t happen with the NGP, and Sony seems to understand that they have to improve in the content area. Not only have they lined up a large group of 3rd party developers who are interested in releasing games on the device, they are also following Apple’s lead by introducing a game delivery service called Playstation Suite. Playstation Suite is a framework that Sony is using to certify Android handsets as ‘Playstation Ready’ and then ship them with a game store for PSOne era games as well as games from other developers. This part of the announcement was really exciting to the developer in me because it presents both a way to actually ‘sell’ games to Android users and, since the NGP will also have access to the Playstation Suite, it gives us a way create and sell games to the more Hardcode audience that is going to shell out for the NGP. I would love to see some of our upcoming games make it on to Sony’s crazy new handheld!
What does it all mean?
So, with the NGP announcement Sony has made the next 16 months even more interesting in the portable gaming market. Not only do we have the 3DS coming out in March but we’ll then have the iPhone 5 and iPad 2 (which are rumored to have similar hardware to the NGP although not quite as ludicrous) followed by Sony’s new entrant. It’s a really exciting time to be making games for people on the go.
This last weekend I decided to take a short break from our upcoming puzzle game to have a prototyping weekend and work on a new project. I mentioned in a previous post that we’re working on an RPG game for later this year and I felt it was time to start building out a prototype for that game so we could see it in a more real form as we continue to design it. In short, the ‘weekend’ was a great success; even if it did last until Wednesday morning.
Prototyping and Graphics
Cody and I have set up 5 builds for our RPG prototype that takes us through a large portion of the gameplay elements we need to really determine if the game will work like we hope it will. Each of these builds is small in size and so the expectation is that we can finish them in a week or so of work. With the work I did this weekend we’re more than halfway through the first build, and it is what you see in the picture below.
And no, before you ask, it’s not a Zelda clone. While I was looking around for some generic dungeon sprites to use in my tilemap I found this great site called The Spriter’s Resource. It is absolutely full of old-school sprite graphics from the NES, Genesis, and SNES eras and it’s awesome! So after looking around a little I came across some great sprites that were pulled from The Legend of Zelda, and in no time I had my development graphics. While it’s obviously not necessary to have polished graphics for the prototype stage I always enjoy it when my prototypes can look closer to the expected result. I don’t expect our game to look like Zelda, but this is MUCH better than the stick figures I was going to draw.
So far in the prototype we have a player (Link) who can move around the dungeon that we’ve created, he can run into walls and pillars, which means he’s confined to the dungeon and can’t wander off into the blackness outside. He’s also animated and changes his facing as you move him around. Currently for movement I’m capturing when the user taps on the screen and then determining which direction that tap represents. So if you tap above Link, he moves up. Tap to his left, and he moves left. This is the same style of movement used in one of my favorite iPhone games 100 Rogues, and I felt it made a lot of sense here as well. We also have a skeleton for Link to look at, because so far he doesn’t move and there is no attacking, but soon all that will change.
The only real problem I had in this build was a strange Cocos2D error that occurs when you move a tilemap around with a CCMoveTo action. In the simulator everything works perfectly but once I put the game on my iPhone there were all these tearing and flickering artifacts as I moved and it made everything look really awful. Thankfully a quick search brought me to the Cocos2D iPhone forums where I found a really quick and easy fix. Once again the Cocos community saves the day.
Now that my ‘weekend’ project is done I’m back to working on our upcoming puzzle game. If you’ve got any questions about the game feel free to leave a comment and I’ll do my best to answer it. I’m already planning another prototyping weekend around the Super Bowl so there should be another one of these posts pretty soon. Until then, happy gaming.
This is a post that has been rattling around in my head for the last week or so. Recently I ran across an article on Significant Bits that dissected the level design of Super Mario Bros 3 to show how Nintendo was able to convey so much instruction to the player without ever making it explicit. It’s really a great read and you should check it out.
The Potty Training
While thinking about the game design cues from Super Mario 3 I noticed an interesting parallel in my own home. My wife and I have been working to potty train our almost 2 year old son for the last few months and so far things have switched back and forth from great to not so good. Recently things have been working much better however, and one of the main reasons is because my wife had the brilliant idea to let my son put a sticker on the calendar at the end of any day in which he didn’t have an accident.
This may seem like a standard reward system but it’s new in that it is a more long term goal than any of the previous rewards we have tried. When our son makes it to the potty on time we congratulate him, give him a small sticker to place on the bathroom door, and sometimes give him M&Ms. Each of these small rewards has started out working really well but the novelty soon wears off and things begin to degrade again. However, with the new ‘end of the day’ reward it has given my son another reason to really work at not having accidents that goes beyond just right now, and it seems to be working.
The Game Design
Collecting coins has both immediate and long term rewards.
So how do potty training habits pertain to game design? In my mind it really laid out the need for multiple levels of rewards for players, something that you’ll see implemented in plenty of great games, including Super Mario Bros 3. Think about some of the immediate rewards in a Mario game.
You stomp on an enemy and he flattens out, you get points, and a cool sound effect plays.
You collect a coin and you hear a cool sound effect, get points, and the coin counter increases.
In later Mario games you collect other types of coins as well as star bits, etc. and they all offer similar immediate rewards through sound, graphical flourish, and counters increasing.
Collecting a Star results in the end of a level in Super Mario Galaxy 1 and 2 as well as celebration music and a cool Mario pose.
That’s all well and good but the immediate rewards quickly begin to lose their luster. When you collect your first coin or smash your first Goomba it might put a grin on your face but before too long you’re flying through the levels and grabbing things so quickly that you don’t even notice anymore. That is why each of these immediate rewards also feeds into a longer term goal/reward that keeps you working even after the initial shine has worn off. Let’s list some of the long term rewards that flow from the immediate ones.
Bouncing from one enemy head to another begins to alter the sound effect and give you more points each time, pushing you to try and line up more enemies. This culminates in the coveted 1UP.
Collecting coins continues to push the coin counter higher and higher until you reach 100 coins, at which time you receive a 1UP and the count starts over.
Blue Coins and Red Coins are newer medium-term rewards that ask you to collect a set number of coins in a contained area for a special reward.
In New Super Mario Bros Wii each level contains 3 Star Coins that are ultimately used to unlock an entire new World at the end of the game.
Mario Galaxy 1 and 2 have you collect multiple stars in each level so that you can unlock later levels. Each world culminates in the collection of a Grand Star that is even larger and more exciting to get.
From Stars back to Potty
All of this points to the clever use of layered rewards as a way to keep the player engaged in exploring and collecting new things in your game. This has made me realize that just having a high score probably isn’t enough, but by layering other rewards into the high score process, like granting a free life at 100,000 points or after 10 kills without taking damage, you can encourage the player to continue exploring your game mechanics to discover new rewards and hopefully keep them interested in completing your game. You also may find a great system for Potty Training a 2 year old.
