Growing Games

Growing Games is a blog run by me, Michael Burnley, about the (awesome!) field of game design with posts ranging from philosophy to snippets of code. Besides that, this site will be a journal of sorts of my endeavors as a budding game designer.

[growinggames-blog]

"At the end of the day, I'm aiming for intermediately-skilled players to be able to properly enjoy the game."

[femfreq]

The production of a doll like this where players are encouraged to physically molest an already hyper-sexualized female game character’s breasts is gross, but should not be at all surprising, at least not to anyone who’s been paying attention to the Metal Gear Solid series, This doll is completely consistent with Kojima’s ongoing pattern of sexually objectifying the majority of his female characters. For just one of many examples, in Metal Gear Solid 4, during Snake’s therapy sessions, the developers built in a mechanic where the player is encouraged to shake the Sixaxis Playstation controller to jiggle the breasts of the protagonist’s PTSD counselor.

- Anita Sarkeesian speaking to Forbes about Kojima’s recent tweet showing off his Metal Gear Solid 5 Quiet doll

(via femfreq)

[metcalflovesyou]

Livestreaming animating of Garbodor vs. the World II over here. Like watching paint dry, only the paint’s ALIIIIIIIVE. This post comes down when I bail for lunch or whatever. 

[odditie-s]

[CLICK IMAGE]

So here it is: the pirate bay bundle. You can also watch the trailer if you haven’t seen it This has taken me so much longer than I ever anticipated. I’ve been stuck in the thick of this for so long that I thought I would never see the light and...

[studio630-deactivated20170709]

Fail Faster!

ExtraCreditz discusses one of the most fundamental principles of game design (and good design in general).

[overthinkingvideogames]

How game creators find the fun

The game, Austin announces, is not fun.

"The biggest thing, especially playing the early levels, is that I felt like I wasn’t doing anything," he says.

Daud nods, silently. He knows it’s not fun. He’s known it for weeks. What he hasn’t known is exactly how to fix it.

He’s about to find out.

This is game development.

[…]

The other front is more complicated. In spite of a year of development, the attention of two separate teams at Hidden Path and even a successful exhibition at the PAX Expo in September of 2013, Defense Grid 2's multiplayer still isn't working right. The PAX level was, by necessity, somewhat of a contrived experience. Players were playing head to head on a closed network using simplified code. After PAX, the challenge was to take that foundation and build on it and integrate it into Steam's matchmaking, which has not gone as smoothly as anyone had hoped. Players can find each other and start a game, but they can't play each other. Although the game will appear to be running, players can't even interact with it. It is, for all intents and purposes, broken.

For Daud, the multiplayer is his biggest headache. After over a year of planning and iterating on paper, he’s finally seen the planned multiplayer modes come together — but he can’t play them. He won’t know what works and what doesn’t until he can test, and he can’t test until he can play. Multiplayer has been the one great uncertainty for Daud since before I first spoke to him about Defense Grid 2 in April of 2013. Now, almost a year later, the ability to put his own mind at ease on the subject remains tantalizingly out of reach.

On fun. (And development.)

[michaelburnley]

The devs behind hit iOS and Android game Threes did a great job chronicling their process in this blog post. It’s long, but sucks you in and doesn’t let you go.

[growinggames-blog]

How Zynga went from social gaming powerhouse to has-been

Gaming giant has been on a wild ride in just 5 short years—while losing $600M.

[michaelburnley]

Great overview of the indie game design and release process. If you’re making games on your own, you’ll definitely be able to relate.

[famousfriendsfashiondrunks]

Everyone wants it to be art and wants it to be accepted, but they don’t want to share it

- Adam Sessler on videogame culture; comparing it to finding out your favourite band has a whole new set of fans and you don’t like em. (via famousfriendsfashiondrunks)

[growinggames-blog]

Rambling about E-sports for a bit

I was watching basketball with a couple of my family members and noticed something I hadn't before.

Teams don’t start on equal footing, ever. There are injuries to deal with, unfair referees, strained team dynamics, belligerent/motivational crowds and a whole wide list of variables that can alter the performance of the players and, ultimately, the outcome of the game. You never know what could happen.

I'd make the case that competitive gaming needs out-of-player-control variables. There's a reason Dota/League of Legends/Starcraft are usually so boring to watch in the first couple of minutes. There are "right" ways to start a match. There are "right" ways to control a champion. There are too many controlled variables.

Maybe more games need a Super Smash Bros. Brawl-like trip.

[oboewan42]

Tropes Are Not Bad

Tropes, themselves, are not inherently good or bad; they are tools.

[discovergames-blog]

I disagree. Tropes are, at best, lazy and/or uncreative. I personally prefer more originality in my media, and prefer storytelling that does its own thing, rather than rehashing something we’ve seen a million times before.

[growinggames-blog]

I do agree with oboewan42 that tropes are nothing too terrible, in and of themselves. They are tools of creativity. It's nigh impossible to create a piece (in whatever form of media) that is "trope-free." 

Tropes shouldn't be accepted at face-value, however. Their true value lies in showing the trends that encompass a certain group of media. Recognizing those trends and varying or subverting them creates new, interesting stories. Repeating them ad infinitum just gives you...bleh, nothing cool.

[polygondotcom]

Looking back, like last year, Journey got a lot of Game of the Year awards, competing against bigger titles like Call of Duty. So that tells something, that even smaller titles have similar, big impact to consumers. What we’re so excited about in the indie scene is the abundance of these potential, really creative people.

Shuhei Yosida (President of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios) from our report Yoshida wants to keep a ‘steady flow’ of post-launch PS4 games. (via polygondotcom)

[guilelessmonk]

Kill these guys to open that door

It is a very common thing in action games to block the player from progressing until they have defeated a room full of enemies (God of War, Devil May Cry..). Brawlers in particular love to do this, and they will do this through very artificial means such as an invisible wall or a door that magically unlocks when everyone dies (which is terrible security by the way, all the guards being dead is the exact moment you would want a magic wall to appear not disappear).

Now this isn’t going to be me talking about how terrible and lazy this is, this is a tool and regardless of how often I think it is misused there are times where it is a good tool to use. That aside I think the true point of failure this is often used to cover up needs to be talked about, or at least recognized.

The root problem is with the game’s enemies.

Read More

[growinggames-blog]

Great observation.

[growinggames-blog]

"Fun is fine. It’s what most games aspire to be, but I think fun is very fleeting. Because, as soon as you stop having it, you kind of forget about it." - Greg Kasavin

http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1kt0aa/fun_is_fine_its_what_most_games_aspire_to_be_but/

[guilelessmonk]

Today is a short one, in part because I wanted to get comfortable with the ability to do shorter articles like this and in part because this this is a point that is naturally short.

A game’s failure state, whether it be a “Game Over” or a “Continue” or what have you, it’s duration should scale...

[berfrois]

Shadow of the Colossus isn’t the first video game that begins with a maiden laid out on a stone altar, waiting for you to resurrect her. If you played Zelda II: The Adventure of Link on the NES, it should have been a familiar scene.

This is, of course, just the modern echo of a great many myths and fairy tales. Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, sleeping the slumber of death, both waited to be saved by a young prince. What’s strikingly different about Shadow of the Colossus is the eventual conclusion. For Wander and Mono, there is no salvation, no redemptive defeat of some wicked queen. Instead, there’s gradual corruption and a fall from grace, leading to the edge of a catastrophe, barely averted by the same forces of order that you, the player, have just spent fifteen hours trying to defy.

Read as a fairy tale, Shadow of the Colossus is a surreal revisionist clusterfuck, a wholesale rejection of the picturesque idealism that makes up that Disney fantasy. This is because mass-market fairy tales are pure Romantic ejaculate, unencumbered by historical consciousness or self-awareness. Shadow of the Colossus, on the other hand, is a hero story that’s been contextualized according to the lessons of history. It is not a naïve story of Romanticism’s triumph, but a savvy retelling of its rise and eventual collapse.

“The Death of Romance in the Shadow of the Colossus”, Jesse Miksic

[growinggames-blog]

Beautifully said.