I recently ran into an interesting article about the gaming skills of video game reviewers (detailed answers here). It’s certainly an interesting question, how good should reviewers be at games? Usually, to become a game reviewer, you’ll be required to have a pretty broad interest in games, which means you’ll already have a skill set required by most games — that is reflexes and hand-eye coordination.

Another important thing is, of course, experience and the knowledge of conventions. There are probably dozens (hundreds?) of things so conventional in games that most gamers (and thus reviewers) don’t even realize they exist. Or that someone new to games might struggle with such conventions. A simple example is saving. If the game permits saving anywhere, gamers are used to saving quite often, and they also recognize common level patterns, like when they’re approaching a boss and should save before it.

The good news is that conventions can be taught and they very well should be if the game is aimed at a mass market audience. The problem is it’s hard to recognize the conventions. As such, a game with unexplained conventions may have a very variable difficulty across the players depending on how savvy they are with its genre.

Difficulty In Rimelands

We did notice a lot of variance per person with difficulty in the Hammer of Thor. Partly it was due to some balance issues, especially with the hybrid characters, but there were also other reasons. For one, some people struggled a lot with some puzzles which in turn were too easy for others. Puzzles are problematic in the sense that you really can’t have adjustable difficulty levels for puzzles (though you can include hints), but on the other hand to solve a puzzle you’ll just need to google the solution. If you’re stuck with a jump in a platformer, you can’t really pass the level without acquiring the necessary skill in the game (or, sometimes, with luck), which leads to frustration very easily.

Even if the game is easily adjusted for difficulty (games with lot of numerical values, such as RPGs often are), there are still problems with difficulty settings. How normal is normal, in any case? It varies greatly from game to game, often based on how skilled the game’s developers and testers have been. Because of that, it’s a very bad idea to ask the difficulty beforehand and not let the player change it. Another problem is that games tend not to be simple enough to have single metric for balance. Someone might find the platforming in a game easy (reflexes) but shooting very difficult (coordination).

Alternative Difficulty Settings

My proposed solution is to not have single difficulty setting, but several, preferably all of which very straight-forward. Some examples what this could mean in Rimelands’ case:

• Permanent death. A very hardcore setting, common in roguelikes, but in general not very fit  for most players in Rimelands.
• No free regeneration. Usually you regenerate outside battle in Rimelands. This setting would heavily emphasize the importance of Healing Potions.
• Swift enemy regeneration. Enemies would regenerate quickly if you’re not close to them. This would make ’sniping’ impossible.
• Endless enemy mana. This would mean the enemies use a lot more talents, which would make defending against such talents more important.
• Timed turns. This would alter the game’s pacing dramatically, as you could’t think too long (maybe 30 seconds?) per a single turn. Having this kind of option would require the game’s interface to be fluent enough to use with timed turns.

There could be plenty of others, but too many options will make it too overwhelming. You could also combine this with the common difficulty levels, so it would resemble the quality levels used in many games. At least it would mean it’s more transparent what the difficulty settings mean.

To get back with the original topic, these kind of transparent difficulty settings could also help reviewers, as they could better judge how the difficulty varies between the settings. One could, in theory, write something along the lines of “the potions are abundant in the game, so for a good challenge turn on the ‘No free regeneration’ option.”

One problem with this is that many of the above options are still very much tied to the player’s knowledge about game and RPG conventions. For newcomer’s they’d probably seem way too unintelligible.

Could this solve (to some degree, at least) the problem with variable player skill? Also, the ‘permadeath’ difficulty setting is something that would work with a majority of games. Are there others? Or even ones that would work with majority of RPGs?

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!

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.