The eighth episode is ready for your viewing pleasure, and the crossbow war against chicken bastards has begun!
Let’s Play Minecraft Blightfall: Episodes 6 and 7
It seems I neglected to post my 6th LP episode here! So here it is, along with the 7th, which has just been released.
Let’s Play Minecraft Blightfall: Episode Five
The fifth installment in my Minecraft Blightfall series is up and ready to be watched, on YouTube or right here!
Aira Plays Blightfall: Part Four
You can now watch the fourth part of my Minecraft Blightfall Let’s Play on Youtube!
Graph Paper
There is a box somewhere in the attic of my mother’s house filled with binders. I moved away – to another country, in fact – over seven years ago, and she has donated, sold, or simply thrown away many of my old things. But I have always made it clear that she is not to discard those binders. They contain all my old maps.
I was part of the first generation to grow up with video games. I have a lifetime of fond memories of the NES, SNES, Game Boy, and N64. We were always a Nintendo family, and loyal Nintendo Power subscribers right up until they got rid of the Epic Center. That section of the magazine contained the RPGs and sims, which, aside from puzzle games and the occasional racer, were the only types of games I was really interested in. I didn’t take an interest in action, strategy, or platformers until many years later, though I did watch my mother and sisters play theirs (the idea that games were “for boys” was something that was never even suggested to me until I was well into adulthood). It was the RPGs and sims that stuck in my mind long after mom made us turn off the console and go to bed. They were the ones I daydreamed about in the back of the classroom.
At some point in middle school I was also introduced to Dungeons and Dragons. I joined a small club at my school. Truth be told, though, the time spent actually playing DnD (and later Star Wars and other paper-and-dice RPGs) was little more than a minor diversion. My real passion was for the books, the charts, and the maps.
I could never persuade the boys at school to let me be the Dungeon Master, so I started trying to get my sisters to try it out. Of the three of them, not a single one took even the slightest interest. Still, I didn’t see any harm in preparing. I spent hours and hours of my spare time drawing maps and planning adventures. I sat in my room drawing maps in the evenings. I drew maps on my notebooks at school. I started buying thick three-ring binders to store my designs in.
It wasn’t long before I started stealing graph paper from the math teachers at school. There were several varieties. The most common had uniform squares a quarter inch on a side. Another style had tiny squares, maybe half the size of the larger ones. But my favorite type was very fancy-looking. It had the tiny squares in light blue, as well as darker blue lines every ten squares. Naturally, this was the most expensive type, as well, and the one teacher who stocked it quickly started setting limits on how much I could take.
These maps weren’t just lines and squares. I put a lot of love into them. I drew the enemies in their rooms along with images of the treasure they were guarding. I decorated the borders. I joined many sheets of paper together to map out the whole world.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but my style of maps was heavily influenced by the video games I was playing. At that age it was up to the adults in my life to decide which video games I could play. Now and then we’d go down to the video store and rent a game for a night or two, but the games we had at home, the ones we could spend dozens of hours playing, were the ones our relatives bought us. They were expensive, so we never had very many. Most of them were Mario, Tetris, and Donkey Kong Country titles. We had a few in the Zelda series. But the first game that was really mine was Earthbound for the SNES.
For some reason, we never had Final Fantasy or any other RPG with an overworld. The idea of having one map of “the world” and other, more detailed maps for specific locations just never even entered my mind. And so I built my fantasy world one sheet of graph paper at a time. Some pages contained dungeons, towers, and towns. Many were just wilderness. But each and every page had something interesting on it. Why fill a whole page with nothing to do on it?
I also used my graph paper to plan out my activities in video games. Harvest Moon was a big one: I loved sketching out plans for my farm. I even planned out farm plots with different vegetables that would create pictures when everything was ripe. It was a form of pixel art, though I didn’t realize it then. All I knew was I loved planning things out on a grid. It was all about those little squares. And everything went into those binders.
Truth be told, my maps were never really designed for a paper-and-dice RPG. They were too detailed, too precise. The one and only time I managed to persuade a few family members to play with me, the session ended in great fun for them… and great frustration for me. They hadn’t found any of the secrets. They hadn’t followed my plans. They made it their primary goal to derail my story in any way they could. I had to make things up as I went along. I was a born video game designer, but a rubbish GM.
I was a teenager when we got our first computer, and our first computer games: SimTower and SimAnt. Both lent themselves well to graph-paper plans. Eventually we got an internet connection and I discovered other types of games. Text-based MUDs just cried out for detailed maps. When I learned how to use a spreadsheet program, I started meticulously entering my maps into the computer using the digital grid. It was much easier (and cheaper) to find new games for the PC than it had been on the consoles, and I quickly got into the Ultima series and eventually online games like Graal Online and Dransik. There was a pattern here, of course: the grid. I naturally gravitated towards games I could map out on graph paper. And all those maps went straight into those binders.
I never even used most of them. I never even finished most of the games I was mapping. But I felt a need to get it all down on paper. Map out every square of those worlds. It seemed important to do so. It seemed like it would help somehow, make it easier to play. The game itself became secondary to the process of mapping it.
Eventually I stopped trying to map everything out, finally having discovered that computers had already done it all, and moved on with my life. I got over the need to put everything down on graph paper and started to focus on actually playing the games. But I still tended towards 2D grid-based games. Eventually I went back and tried out Final Fantasy. The games were excellent, which came as no surprise, as by then I had heard all the rave reviews. But the overworld map always felt like a bit of a waste to me. Why make the world so big, and yet so empty?
Looking back, I remember very clearly getting the N64 and eagerly looking forward to my first 3D RPG. At last, it came: Quest 64. My mother insisted on renting it first before I bought it, so I could make sure I liked it before spending all that money. The game was, like Final Fantasy, big and empty – but there was no overworld map. You had to actually cross all that empty space, and no one had taken the trouble to put anything interesting there. The disappointment with that took root in my mind, and it’s something I still consider when looking at new games. Game worlds can be vast and still be interesting, but this is rarely achieved. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why I prefer smaller games with small, detailed worlds. Large or infinite worlds are only acceptable to me when there’s a reason for them to be that way and there’s always something new to discover.
It’s amazing how the types of games we play growing up can shape our worldview. The generation growing up now is already surrounded with touch screens, realistic 3D graphics, online multiplayer with voice chat, and instant gratification. To them, 2D pixel art seems “lazy” or “cheap”. They love games like Minecraft because they have unlimited control to do or build whatever they want. But me? I love it because it gives me an excuse to buy more graph paper.
This post was written for the Critical Distance September theme “maps”.
Aira’s Playing: Super Puzzle Platformer Deluxe
I reviewed this game recently and thought I’d make a video review as well. Here’s a quick look at the game and my clumsy attempts to play it! Watch it on YouTube or play below:
Aira Plays Blightfall: Episode 3
The third installment of my Minecraft Blightfall Let’s Play is finally ready! I’m eager for feedback – what do you want to see more of? How long should the episodes be? Should I show you everything, or skip to the interesting parts? Watch the video below or on YouTube, and leave a comment to tell me what you’d like to see next.
Morphopolis: Design vs. Design
Morphopolis, a combination hidden object and point-and-click adventure game made by Dan Walters and Ceri Williams and published by Hidden Gems Games, is beautiful. The images in it are beautiful. The music is also beautiful. The things that happen in the game? Beautiful. Even the puzzles are beautiful. I mean, just look at this scene:
The game was clearly made by some very talented artists. The visual design is just stunning. The flow and balance of the images and sound is just masterfully done.
So why am I going on at such length about how pretty Morphopolis is? Because once I’m finished praising its aesthetics, I have to tear it apart in terms of game design.
The troubles begin immediately on the main menu.
The text of the name of the game and the “buttons” for the various levels holds still in the center of the screen while the plants and insects are moving past at a moderate speed. There is no time when you can even see all the text. Again, it makes for an impressive visual effect – but I just want to click the start button.
You’ll also notice the absence of any kind of options button. There are no options. No sound options, no graphics options, nothing. Just the numbers of the levels, and a big X (cropped out of the above image) to close the game.
When you finally manage to get the first level open, there is a short “tutorial” that takes the form of a ghost pointer moving around the screen. What it’s trying to tell you, as I eventually figured out, is that you need to click and drag and hold the mouse down to get your little bug to move. It took me ages to figure this out, because when you put your mouse pointer exactly where it tells you to and hold down the button, your little caterpillar doesn’t quite go where you want it to. You have to keep trying different pixels until it finally works.
The frustration only increases the more you play. Movement is slow (a common issue in point-and-click adventure games), and loads of backtracking is required (more on this in a minute). If you don’t get your mouse in precisely the right spot, your little bug will start to spazz out, spinning in circles instead of moving. And if you’re too close to the edge of the screen and make one of these slight mis-clicks, you’ll find yourself transported to the next screen – a slow, uninterruptable experience which you have to endure a second time as you try to get back where you were trying to go in the first place.
To make matters worse, there is no clear path through the game. As lovely as the visuals are, they do nothing to guide you in the right direction. At one point I was ready to punch my monitor when I couldn’t find the last item I needed to gather. It turns out it was on another screen. A screen I had to reach by taking a completely different path which was in no way indicated to even exist.
Perhaps the biggest frustration was the backtracking. When you start a new level, you can see various objects sprinkled around that you will clearly need to gather. You’ve had to pick up those little orange orbs before. You will clearly need them again. Yet you’re not allowed to get them until you unlock the “quest” for them. Slowly crawling from screen to screen again and back and forth and back again, the beautiful visuals lose their appeal very quickly as you get tired of holding down the mouse button and watching your bug inch its way across a leaf, spinning in circles now and then when you don’t manage to guess the right pixel to click on.
Then there are the puzzles.
When you finish a find-the-object collection quest, sometimes you will be taken to a mini-puzzle screen. No instructions are ever given for what you’re expected to do, no hints, and there isn’t even a way to exit the puzzle and come back later.
Some of the puzzles seem almost purposefully obtuse. Take the above image of the “seed puzzle” for example: When you click and drag around the screen, absolutely nothing happens. There’s an entire forum thread on the Morphopolis Community Hub on Steam devoted to trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with the game. Most people assume there is a bug preventing you from interacting with it. Then, at long last, one person figured it out: this is a peg-solitaire puzzle. You have to “jump” the blue-purple clusters of seeds into empty sections, removing the jumped piece, until there is only one piece left.
This seems like one of those situations where the game devs knew what they expected players to do, and never considered for a moment the fact that a new player wouldn’t be able to read their minds. This is especially surprising given how many names are listed under the “alpha testers” section of their credits (which scroll along the bottom of the main menu while you wait). You’d have thought at least one of them would have pointed out some of these massive, glaring problems during testing.
So what’s the problem? There are loads of poorly-designed games these days. Steam is flooded with them. On the other hand, they don’t all have this on their Steam Store pages:
Now, that award is for visual design, but the distinction isn’t made there on the page. And it’s an important distinction to make. There are many different types of design, and someone who is good at one, no matter how brilliantly good they are at it, does not necessarily have any talent or ability whatsoever in another type.
In a summary on the award site, the game creator, Ceri Williams, who won this award, said he was trying to draw in an audience to games who might not otherwise be interested in them. And this is were the danger lies: an artist who can create beautiful visual artwork still needs to get an actual game designer in order to make a good game. He didn’t. The result? If he succeeds in drawing in an audience that doesn’t normally play games, their first experience with games will be bad. Their first impression will be that games are obtuse, difficult, confusing, and not worth the effort. And then we’ve lost another potential player.
Morphopolis is available on Steam for 4.99€ at full price (see the Store Page for the price in your local currency), but it regularly goes on sale for as low as 0.19€. This is the price at which I bought it, and honestly, I think that’s all its worth. The images in the game would have been much more valuable as a short film or a printed book than as a game.
Designing a game isn’t something as simple as having an idea and writing some code. You have to think about how your players will experience it. How do you want them to spend most of their time playing? Your answer should never be, “holding down the mouse button and impatiently waiting for their character to crawl across the screen” or “desperately hunting for the correct way to progress”. If you want them to spend more time looking at your beautiful visuals, make them worth stopping play in order to enjoy, or else make so much of it that the player can enjoy it for hours without forcing them to slow their gameplay to a crawl. Beautiful visual design in a game will always come second to good game design.
Aira Plays Blightfall: Episode 2
Episode 2 of my Minecraft Blightfall Let’s Play series on YouTube is up! Watch below or on YouTube.
New YouTube Series: Aira Plays Minecraft Blightfall
The first episode of my new YouTube series, Aira Plays Minecraft Blightfall, is now live. I know the world is saturated with “let’s play” videos, but I hope this one will offer something unique. It includes custom lighting and shader packs as well as custom music which I have composed myself. I hope you’ll enjoy it!
You can view the videos on my YouTube channel, Aira Plays Games, or simply click play below:
Ari Plays Games 