In the Inbox of the latest issue of Edge, a reader contemplates on the difficulty of translating literary classic into a game medium. Lately, at least two games, Dante’s Inferno and Rise of the Argonauts, have tried to bring into our screens works literature not usually associated with game fiction. It is in this association of the original work that the problem lies, since some classics have already been made into games (Lord of the Rings a common example), if not with quality then at least with such a vigorous quantities that they have been accepted as an ordinary source for game worlds.

It is the content and theme of Dante’s Inferno that raises suspicion of fitting into a game that looks a lot more like God of War than a disguised discourse into the values of medieval Church. Although fighting your way into Hell and back is nothing new in the fiction of games, one wonders if there would be other depictions of the eternal damnation than the one Divine Comedy, more suitable for an action game.

The  façade of the game’s subject matter does little to conceal the true nature of the game, another third person action extravanza that seems to all but rule the console game market in these days. Is the true motivation for using an unconventional fiction for its basis just a gimmick to overcome the fact that the genre’s usual subjects are well covered and nothing truly new can’t actually be conceived anymore? And that given the raising costs of developing AAA titles, there is no option of making a game in a genre less stagnant and overpopulated?

If one sees games as a medium that desperately needs action and violence in it’s fiction to function, I’m glad to point way into still blossoming adventure game genre, that’s distinctive in it’s wide variety of themes and genres of fiction. Adventure puzzle games are nothing new to incorporating works of literature, since the early beginnings of text adventures like The Hitchhiker’s Guide and The Hobbit.

A natural choice for the adventure games to draw inspiration from is the genre of detective fiction. There are games of Sherlock Holmes, Nancy Drew and even a Film Noir Discworld game. The content of detective novels is often the solving of puzzles, which translates easily into a game  structure. That said, if I were to make a game based on a classic book, my choice would be to make an adventure game out of The Name of the Rose.

The biggest problem in adapting a classic novel is to make the game loyal enough to the original work to respect its fans, and yet at the same time make a game decent enough to respect its players. Also, a detective fiction is easily spoiled if you already know the murderer, which leads to problems if you try to accomodate players already famialiar with the book.

One way to solve this would be to make the game resemble the board game Mystery of the Abbey, which borrows its location and themes from the book, but not its actual plot. You could, in my opinion, make a good digital version of the game, even though it centers around interaction and conversation between the players, by using common adventure game elements. That would result as something truly unprecendented: a replayable adventure puzzle game (although I think adventure games are actually replayable in the same sense as you can re-read a book are watch a movie several times).

In conclusion, I think that games do well to adapt and use classic literature as a source of fiction, as long as it’s not just a thematic gimmick to guise a game that has already been done dozens of times before.

Roleplaying games are, more or less, my favourite genre of games. That’s regardless of whether they’re digital or not, but in this post, due to the nature of this blog, which, due to the nature of this site, which, of course, taking into account the nature of this company, I could actually be discussing either (there’s nothing to stop us doing pen and paper or board games, even if we find it currently in our best interest to develop digital games), yet I’m referring to digital games.

I’ve played a lot of roleplaying games on computers, consoles and lately on iPod touch. They have a lot of good features and I think some elements that are natural to the genre have universal appeal to gamers, like leveling structures. I’ve also always felt attracted to their epic themes and fantastic landscapes, even if I don’t see that a roleplaying game requires a fantasy or scifi setting. They’re just something developers do because they’ve always done so.

Elements that are part of rpgs by tradition rather than real gameplay value are also the bane of the genre. There’s a lot of stuff that most games do, without really thinking how it suits the rest of the game, or the platform the game is developed on, or, indeed, the actual player demographic. Some of them are as old as Yoda’s diapers, some of them quite new.

Well, actually, there’s one new thing and that’s imitating the 16-bit Japanese RPG look in (mostly) mobile games. Yes, I know it’s a style that fits well on small screens. But that means the game is going to be associated with the genre of JRPG, which frankly differs quite much from a western RPG. Your choice of art direction is tied inextricably to the expectations the players have for the game. And if the actual game doesn’t meet those expectations, the players are going to be disappointed, no matter how good your game actually is.

The first legacy element that plagues most of the western roleplaying games, but seems quite non-existent on Japanese ones, is the character creation. Yes, I know, it’s often an important part of the pen and paper roleplaying process, but the whole process differs greatly from the lean learning curve contemporary players of digital games are used to. If you have a character creation prior to the actual gameplay, your player has no way of knowing how the mechanics actually work. And, to be honest, personalizing the character’s stats makes a little difference in a digital game. Many MMORPGs do this well, having the player choose just the class, name and the visuals of the character. Others elements can be decided later, via level progression.

The second thing, a bit related the previous one, is the slow start. This can mean introductory cut-scenes that last for ten minutes, or wandering around in a village or another secluded place before getting to the real action. Often the player character is also given a little bit of money and told to buy something useful. As with the ability points, the player has no idea what actually is useful before getting into the real action. Additionally, too much of dialogue or cut-scenes in the beginning is a good way to get the player fed up with the story. Contrary to the previous point, this problem is more common in Japanese games.

In western games, the equivalent problem is often the rat-killing quests. Yes, you do get quickly to the beef of the game, but killing rats is hardly epic and underlines the fact how helpless your character is in the beginning. Frodo or Luke weren’t exactly kiling machines in the beginning of their respective sagas, but they nonetheless survived odds that felt much more formidable – even in the early stages of the story you could see they were heroes, not some glorified rodent exterminators.

This concludes the first part of our roleplaying game design series, more to come later!

The page for our first game, Diceworks Puzzle, is now up. To celebrate this event, here’s a little story about how Diceworks came to be and how the company became Dicework Games.

The concept for the game came up pretty quickly after me and Peter decided to go and form a company of our own. I played around with ideas for a simple puzzle game and, although the company wasn’t meant to do simple puzzle games, we decided that something that could be wrapped up fast would be ideal first project for the company. We had a new platform to work with and a more complex project would have soon ran into big trouble if developed while still trying to get the gist of all the quirks of both iPhone and the Unity3D.

First there were dice. I though having a grid of dice would be a nice basis for a puzzle game. Then, after going through different mechanics (switching two adjacent dice, rerolling them and so on), I felt like the best way would be to just find the combinations that are already on the grid, without actually manipulating the grid itself. It felt solid enough to begin prototyping.

It took me less than a day to come up with a working prototype, which I then showed to Peter (and to my beloved girlfriend, who liked the game enormously), and it seemed to work well. Even though there were little bits and pieces to be ironed out, the central mechanics of the game have stayed the same. You find a combination of dice (pair, threes, fours, straights and so on) from the grid and select them. Proper combinations disappear and new dice drop down from the top of the grid. And that’s about it, plain and simple.

In my books, the game falls to the same category as most of the casual puzzles out there: it’s a perception game. You have a bunch of symbols, and have to find certain combinations of those symbols, just like in any match-3 game. The spiritual predecessors of the game, however, are not Bejeweled and its kin, but word games like Bookworm.

Most of the perception games are timed challenges, where you have a limited time to find as many proper or possible (in game where you can manipulate the board) combinations as you can. We decided not to go into that direction. In part, it’s my personal dislike for games that have time limits, in part it’s because we felt it would hurt the feel of the game. Diceworks is not a game about anxiety of beating a challenge, it’s a game about having something fun to do for a while. That doesn’t mean the game can’t challenge you – try beating the best score anyone has had this far, somewhere over 11 000 points – it means it doesn’t lay the challenge on you if don’t want it to.

The fun thing about game in which you seek combinations on a grid design-wise is entropy. When fed with random tokens, the grid slowly and unavoidably descends into a state where no new matches can be found. This will happen sooner or later, depending on both the far-sightedness of the player and luck. This is to say, even if the game feels 100% luck, it’s not. There’s quite a bit of strategy involved.

Yes, it’s a topical subject. And since it’s a sensitive subject, please bear in mind that these are my personal opinions.

With the recent Pirate Bay sentences, there’s a lot of talk and even rejoicing about it. But, in my opinion, the rejoicing is in vain, even if the Pirate Bay is closed (which I seriously doubt), there will be other sites. The sentences will not generate a single sale for anyone, and the only people making even a penny out of it will be the lawyers and – maybe a bit surprisingly – the Swedish Pirate Party, which saw a great elevation in the number of supporters within the last few days.

It should already be clear to anyone that DRM has close to no effect on piratism, although it does piss off legitimate  customers to a great degree. I’ve opted not to buy some games due to the nasty pieces of DRM they include (although I’ve not pirated the games either, but the effect is the same: a lost sale). The only really effective way is online authentication, but that is mostly applicable for online multiplayer games. Every method of DRM can and will be cracked, so piratism is unavoidable and we just need to learn to live with it.

Since the piratism is pretty much a lost cause, some companies have begun to attack perfectly legit forms of business, such as rentals and used games sales. That’s, if anything, a good way to show how desperate you are.

But, for any pirate who seems himself (or herself) as a glimmer pillar of virtue, or a Robin Hood fighting against the oppression of Great Evil Media Mega Corporations, you’re kidding yourself. While pirates are the reason DRM exists, every pirated copy of a game without a DRM scheme is a shot in your own leg. It’s proving them right.

And, as a possible consequence, you’re killing the open source community.

Does that sound strange? Well, think about it. If no one pirated Photoshop, how many users of Gimp would there be? Or Blender, or Open Office? If there were no pirated copies of Windows, what would the Windows/Linux ratio look like? Yes, the usual reason for not choosing Linux is that there aren’t many games or [the software of your choice] for it, but if everyone who can’t afford or chooses not to pay for a legitimate copy of Windows, how many Linux PCs would there be? And with that ratio, how many ports of software that are currently available only for Windows or Mac?

Think about it.

And as for company policy, we believe that the best way to sell our games is to respect our customers. Even though we’re aware that piracy does exist on iPhone, it’s still much easier to pay for a product than to jailbreak the device and find the cracked versions. Also, we will have free demo versions (that are not time limited or show an annoying “Buy this game” pop up every ten seconds) available on this website, so anyone in doubt whether our games are worth your hard earned dollars, euros, or gold coins can freely try them out.

Up next, some info on our first game, so stay tuned :)

Probably the first question on any newcomer’s mind is something along the lines of “what is this company”. This post is the answer to that question. The short answer can be found here, this is the long answer.

To be honest, the company was born out of necessity. In the late winter we found ourselves laid off due to company negotiations in our previous workplace and, not wanting to move out of Tampere,  decided this would be a good opportunity to form something new. Putting up a game development studio had crossed my mind several times before, but earlier I had lacked both the right people and the industry experience. Now, the time was right.

It would be fair to say that the current economic climate is not very hospitable to new ventures, but I heartily disagree. The economic climate is actually quite good for a small agile company, free from the whims of the venture capital. We don’t have to sell hundreds of thousand of games to be successful, we don’t even need to sell many hundred to survive. We can start out slow, and concentrate on making games that are good, and of value.

To me, games of value are ones that respect the player. They are bug-free, smooth experiences that bring something valuable to the player. Be that a nifty game mechanic, alluring visuals or a captivating story. Something to be remembered by.

But so many games these days seem to lack that graceful elegance; they’re bulky collections of tried and true mechanics, often ill-fitting with each other. Sudden death action sequences in a puzzle game? That’s not smooth, that’s plain stupid.

I don’t have anything against tried and true mechanics per se, many of the most successful games rely all but exclusively on tried and true. They’re mechanics that work, but to use a mechanic “because it worked in that game” is short sighted. For a game to work and to be enjoyable, the elements must be in perfect balance. You can’t take a cuckoo clock and a digital watch and build a pocket watch. The cogs have to fit.

A good game is a game that has all right and fitting cogs, oiled and ready. No matter where the parts originate.

So, to recap, our vision is to make games that tick. More than that, games that tick because they are neat little things that one enjoys to spend time with, not because we have “250 mind-boggling spells” or the latest in HDR technology. Our games are limited in scope due to our small size, but I like to believe it makes them better rather than worse.